91–100 of 290 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.
But lawyers don't normally work in a management hierarchy, do they? And I'm pretty sure hospital administrators hate physicians just as much as managers hate programmers. (Not all of them do, of course, but I'm guessing it's similar.)
You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.
As for incentives, there are lots of posts on HN about incentives that work, like time out for pet projects, like telecommuting, like 2-3 month holidays, like no drone work, like excellent tools, LCDs, chairs, perks.
And ... the best of them all .... NO PHB's !!!
The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.
How exactly does offering a higher salary prevent hordes of unqualified candidates from applying?
But paying the good programmers you already have a much higher salary and looking after them well will deter them from jumping ship.
If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…
Unadulterated nonsense. On the one hand, I recall a cartoon-drawing presentation about school contests and the like. On the other hand, there are these centuries and centuries of evidence that PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES, PERIOD.
If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both.
If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…
Hey, you rationalize your pay grade anyway you want buddy, but speak for yourself. I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I never take my eye off the bottom line - and either should you.
There are 2 problems with your proposed solution. a) Salary is rarely disclosed in a job posting. Salary negotiations usually happen after a candidate was interviewed and deemed worth hiring. b) Even if you were to disclose a salary in a job post, an unusually high salary might make it easier to find a qualified programmer (because more people will apply) but it is not likely to increase an average quality of submitt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Company I work for issues a basic data structures test to be completed in 1 hour for all resumes worth their paper (about 10 to 15 out of 100 candidates). The test boils down to 'fill in these two functions'. About 20% finish both functions correctly in an hour (I still had an infinite recursion at the 1 hour mark and submitted a correct entry 10 minutes later). In conjunction with a phone interview we typically only…
Upvote for being very honest. Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions). This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else. People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guy…
Given that, I wouldn't expect '50% of any companies' to be good. "If it ain't broke..." is really good advice about 95% of the time. If you're 50-100% overbooked, you don't screw with other peoples' code just to try to make things better around the office.
A relative of mine works as a database administrator making $120k/year and lacks fluency in HTML/CSS. By contrast, Google regularly comes under fire for underpaying their employees, and their average employees are more talented than those of perhaps any other large corporation in the world. It's not about money.
I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660 ). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.