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Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

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Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#231

Post by omgwtfbbq »

jameshart wrote: post #52
junon wrote: post #33

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…

Even at places that "do it well" it usually ends up being a massive time sink. 30 Minute daily standups, hour long sprint plannings and retros. Its hours of time lost each week.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#232

Post by jrockway »

myfavoritedog wrote: post #84

I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :) I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc. Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-o…

> They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out.

That is a very inaccurate retelling of the story: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#234

Post by junon »

g051051 wrote: post #109
junon wrote: post #33

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…

> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm…

Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team.

Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#235

Post by herlitzj »

I think you're asking the wrong question. Which is probably part of the problem. I know it is at most of the places I've ever had anything to do with.

No block of people is homogeneous, but a lot of the time companies think they can just have some kind of blanket policy and make everyone happy. In reality, especially if you're a smaller company, I think what you need to have is empathy and flexibility.

Everyone you want to hire is different. Some are loners that want to travel, some have families, some want to go back to school while they work, some want to grow their wealth. Some just want to be around cool people and build interesting projects. But what none of them will ever be is the same.

If you want to attract and retain top talent then you need to have a conversation with that talent that includes questions like "What will make you happy here?" "What can we do to accommodate your needs day-to-day and long-term?". And then actually help realize those needs.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#236

Post by junon »

jameshart wrote: post #52
junon wrote: post #33

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…

I disagree. The only shooting-myself-in-the-foot I've done is to accept positions at companies with agile.

It just doesn't work.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#237

Post by chartpath »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #87

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me. 1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating. 2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figur…

18 years experience here. I have recently converted to startup employee (again), giving up a lot of money in the contract market exclusively because I am motivated by the business case and have a deep respect for one of the founders, who is an actual domain expert and proven leader from the industry our customers are in.

What I find the most difficult, by far, is "coaching up". Coaching down and motivating junior and intermediate developers comes easy by leveraging the inherent mutual respect that craftspeople have for expert colleagues who are fair and supportive. But coaching up is really hard. Because it often requires convincing superiors with less technical understanding and experience in building teams.

In contract world, it is easier to be accountable for the Whole Project™ because that's how liability works and we have full power to get it done. As an employee who might have to report to nascent technical and product managers, that initiative can be perceived as stepping on toes, and can invite being thrown under the bus for their mistakes. I don't have a solution, but any company that can solve this issue and is good on the other material benefits should have no problem retaining talent IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#238

Post by ericbarrett »

jameshart wrote: post #184
ericbarrett wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly n…

Why do I 'defend' agile? I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change. And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work…

Thanks for the detailed reply!

I have to say, everything you wrote sounds great. We'd probably agree on more than we'd disagree. That said...

> But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them

It's not that I've been subject to "a bad implementation." It's been multiple, across a decade, ever since Scrum became a thing, really. Disaster after disaster.

I'd also add that most of the effective engineering I've seen (aside from the occasional uber-productive solo code artist) had clear priorities, effective intra- and inter-team communication, and certainly a disciplined retrospective process, all without Agile or Scrum. In the best cases it was self-organized, because we wanted to do good things for the sake of doing good things, and management understood we were trying to do the right thing, and got out of our way when we were being effective. When we weren't, it was a conversation, not school-time lockdown. I don't think that environment can be replicated by process or fiat, which is what the formalized Agile/Scrum of today seems to try (leaving aside the more cynical cases).

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#239

Post by junon »

jameshart wrote: post #184
ericbarrett wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly n…

Why do I 'defend' agile? I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change. And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work…

This reads exactly like someone who's never been on the development-end of an agile team. You could have said you copied this from some promotional material for an Agile consultant and I'd believe it.

Really your only argument is "those companies didn't do it right", but the problem is that if agile is so hard to do correctly then doesn't that mean there's a problem with it?

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#240

Post by raverbashing »

learc83 wrote: post #201

One reason for a senior engineer to move to consulting is that they are tired of being forced to prove that they know how to program every time they switch jobs. Companies are far too risk averse when hiring, and the amount of hoops you have to jump through is getting more onerous every year. I'm currently a full-time employee, but I've consulted for about a decade in total. Convincing someone to pay you 2 weeks up f…

Yeah I really don't get this. I know, depending on the country the barrier for hiring is higher, still, you do have an experience period where you can assess the abilities of the candidate.

Maybe that's the real advantage of contracting, not having to do a dog-and-pony show every time?

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