21–30 of 396 posts
This was back when I was a junior dev, but I had to demo how an unprivileged user could delete every user in our system before I could work fix that section of code without getting fussed at for trying to discuss something unimportant. Even then the immediate response was, well we have a nightly backup so we're fine.
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
We already do that all over. It's called consulting. The outcome isn't higher quality or better work, just capture of perceived value. The super productive developer has a risk/reward ratio. When you get a little older, stability has a value of its own.
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
> I sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results. I've always heard this is the Netflix model. > difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. I like your thought process but do you really believe this is possible? There are few fields whe…
Promoting technical people with no management experience into management jobs, without providing them with any training or guidance. (Happened to me.) Writing code and managing people require very different sets of skills, and just because you're good at the former doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any good at the latter (or that you'll enjoy doing it). (Similar problems can happen when a bunch of people with no man…
What kind of things did you do to self educate, given you lacked formal training or guidance?
There were some mistakes that I was never able to recover from, like being too friendly with the people who reported to me - that makes you really dread the prospect of having to lay someone off, makes it hard to give difficult feedback, etc.
Eventually, after being a manager for several years, I decided to go back to being a developer, and now I'm much happier.
The first chapter says: "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." Sorry Google Memo Dude. DeMarco and Lister called it in the 80s.
Speaking of DeMarco, he also wrote a book about controlling software projects before Peopleware. Then in 2009 he denounced it. [1]
To understand control’s real role, you need to
distinguish between two drastically different kinds
of projects:
* Project A will eventually cost about a million
dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.
* Project B will eventually cost about a million
dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.
What’s immediately apparent is that control is really
important for Project A but almost not at all important
for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that
strict control is something that matters a lot on
relatively useless projects and much less on useful
projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control,
the more likely you’re working on a project that’s
striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
[1]: https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033386
Seems like management is damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they reward high performers in proportion to the value they generate, they kill the culture of the company. If they reward everyone fairly & equally, then all the high performers quit.
Full employment theorem for entrepreneurs, I guess. If management is rational, they'll never put the whims of one high-performing employee over the culture of the company as a whole. If that employee is rational, he'll quit and take his work directly to the market. This creates a fresh stream of new startups, each of which either has to be bought back for their true market value, or else becomes the new hot company that hires the masses and hemorrhages its high performers.
Estimates get shortened. Technical decisions are overruled for business or political reason. Warnings about undesirable outcomes are ignored. Sheer impossibility deemed surmountable.
I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it. Overtime, inferior software, frustration, technical debt, lack of quality, are all things management doesn't really care about because they can always just push people harder to get what they want.
There are some very common ones; * Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new). * Rewarding productivity over quality. * Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to…