[deleted]
Don't Hire That Developer
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#22I am not sure why this is not self-evident.
Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant.
A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's position is strengthened by managing ever larger(read costlier) projects , it is in the manager's interest to have more resources(read contractors). End Definitions.
Contractors by their very nature have no say in the corporate political power game thereby not threatening a manager's position. If something doesn't work out and its time for a scape-goat , contractors can very easily be dismissed , letting go of an employee is a much more onerous task.Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash.
Why would one want to be an employee in any large corporate entity ?
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I hated about contracting was not working with other people. I wasn't afforded opportunities to learnbfrom senior people like some of my peers were. When I did decide to get a "9-5" I was a bit behind everyone else,
With stack overflow, blogs, irc, message boards, etc I think the idea of a live expert is face to face is overrated. Rather than going to the guru and eating his words as gospel, I can go on the internet and get 10 different opinions on a problem I am having. Then I can critically evaluate those different viewpoints and pick the one that is right for the way I work.
Technical skills are only one small part of the skill set of a modern technical worker. You can learn a hell of a lot about people-management from the right mentor, and that's going to make a whole lot more difference to your career than learning to solve technical problems.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I hated about contracting was not working with other people. I wasn't afforded opportunities to learnbfrom senior people like some of my peers were. When I did decide to get a "9-5" I was a bit behind everyone else,
With stack overflow, blogs, irc, message boards, etc I think the idea of a live expert is face to face is overrated. Rather than going to the guru and eating his words as gospel, I can go on the internet and get 10 different opinions on a problem I am having. Then I can critically evaluate those different viewpoints and pick the one that is right for the way I work.
Finding the best way of solving problem X isn't what you learn by being under/around good senior developers, what you learn is a set of mental tools and approaches for solving problems & your ethos as a developer. You can't learn that stuff on Stack Overflow.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#25Speaking as someone who is currently a contractor dealing with arcane legacy code without documentation (as is usually the case in my experience), institutional knowledge matters.
Because employees never have to work on arcane legacy code?
My point was what MJR said. Employees who understand said arcane legacy code are important. Do you disagree with that or did you misunderstand the point of my reply?
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#26As someone who has been working as a contractor for the past two years, the big thing I see missing from that list is 'the ability to say no'. That is my primary motivator for staying independent, I get to pick the problems I work on. That is the deciding factor when switching clients or picking up a new task with an existing client, which one of them has the most interesting problem. The big negative that the articl…
I suppose you could split those 60 hours between 3 projects making it 20 hours a piece which won't be as tragic for accounting.
Or just do 40 hours of work every week. If you cut out some of the time-wasting employees have to endure you might be able to get the work done in that amount of time anyway.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because employees never have to work on arcane legacy code?
My point was what MJR said. Employees who understand said arcane legacy code are important. Do you disagree with that or did you misunderstand the point of my reply?
I agree, but on the other hand I don't think it is a viable long-term strategy to rely on irreplaceable employees.
Not that contractors don't create arcane code, but at least they should feel professionally obliged to leave understandable code behind. They know they'll be leaving, whereas employees can count on being around.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#28I am not sure why this is not self-evident. Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant. A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's pos…
"Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash."
This hasn't been my experience at real-world medium-size companies around here. I have friends in several, but almost everyone's IT department has a VP or director that has a policy of "absolutely no contractors", so I can't get a foot in the door at any of these places. If they want something done, they _only_ do it internally. They will buy outside products, but they will not outsource development work.
The other medium-big companies in the area have contracts with big groups like RHT or EDS, which is really frustrating and annoying.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#29Looks like a rehash of "The Nature of the Firm"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
That's the theory underlying the differences between the two.
Re: Don't Hire That Developer
#30I am not sure why this is not self-evident. Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant. A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's pos…
"Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash." This hasn't been my experience at real-world medium-size companies around here. I have friends in several, but almost everyone's IT department has a VP or director that has a policy of "absolutely no contractors", so I can't get a foot in the door at any of these places. If they want something done, the…
Well, the reasoning behind this is obvious. What is the value of a high tech company? It's not "the brand", it's not that it owns a pile of servers in a datacentre somewhere, it's not even in the code in its version control. It's that it is a group of people able to identify and solve new and commercially relevant problems, and that that group possesses a great deal of institutional knowledge. A contractor has self-consciously decided to discount that kind of knowledge; therefore what they can contribute in such an environment is only what could be automated anyway.