Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Hire That Developer

itmanagement.earthweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#61

Post by Tamerlin »

mgkimsal wrote: post #45
sethg wrote: post #40

The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience, which, as I understand, is not atypical for a developer working at a startup. I worked for five years for MetaCarta, which sold geographic search technology, primarily to government agencies and oil companies. In April we were aquired by Nokia, which runs its own search eng…

Some companies do, some don't. Glad you were in a camp that does. I've known people who were at companies which didn't value that knowledge and would just cut cut cut.

I worked for one, but rather than constantly cutting, they have high turnover and rely on golden handcuffs to keep people -- that they treat like slaves. Their average turnover was 18 months, though in the seniors it was more like a year (long enough to not have to pay back the signing bonus and relocation if applicable).

And the management didn't seem to care; they would just hire more interns... who they treated better than the seniors anyway.

And honestly, the work sucked. It was almost entirely a crapware maintenance job, no engineering, and a staunch resistance to changing anything at all, even the clumsy, buggy, and inefficient Perl-based "solution" that the company relied on for around 70% of its catalog data.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#62

Post by Tamerlin »

Tichy wrote: post #27
donaq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"They know they'll be leaving, whereas employees can count on being around."

I don't agree with that. A lot of employees don't expect to be around that long, because they know that they can get better raises by leaving than by staying.

Also, as the employee's institutional knowledge rises, that employee has a higher likelihood of getting shunted onto "critical" maintenance projects and support, which tends to make them dissatisfied with their work and therefore prefer to leave.

I've run into that one very often.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#63

Post by farmerbuzz »

farmerbuzz wrote: post #51
msy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anything that can be learned via talking to people can be learned via Stack Overflow assuming you can communicate well using text (although it may get tagged with the feared Subjective tag).

Why is this comment not welcome here? I would like not to repeat my mistake in the future but I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#64

Post by pubbins »

alanstorm wrote: post #50
alttab wrote: post #44

Do not get distracted by the 2X+ times money he makes. Everyone has made the point: no 401k, no health insurance. What everyone seems to forget is you also have to pay a 15% self-employment tax at the end of the year out of your pocket because you do not have a W-2. The tax liability is higher as well. So not only do you have to get independent insurance (which is very expensive), you have no 401k or match and probab…

Good points for anyone if they're weighing the fulltime gig vs. contracting vs. consulting. However 1. The "Self Employment Tax" (in other words, FICA and Medicare) is closer to 7.5% extra for the self-employed. When you're an employee you pay 7.5% of this, and your employer matches that. When you're self employed you pay the entire thing. 2. The FICA and medicare tax can be avoided if you're contracting through a th…

About 1 - This is why you pay yourself 40k and take the rest as profit distributions. As long as your salary stays above 25% of total income you're fine.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#65

Post by sdh »

Revisor wrote: post #33

Let me turn that around: What is a better course for an employer, say an internet startup or a small software / webdesign company? To hire contractors or employees? My first thought would since software/web is the core activity, employ them (bind them closer). What do you think?

Binding a 120k software developer to a desk is expensive when you only need them for a few months out of the year. The rest of the time a 50k developer would do just fine.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#66

Post by ora600 »

llimllib wrote: post #47

> If management builds a network of contractors, who are the best in the business, you bring on these true professionals who have one purpose – to get the job done. They will do it well because they want more work and a good reference. Not necessarily true. A contractor's incentive is to work as much as possible, and often she can find ways to increase the amount of work necessary. An extreme example is that of Oracl…

Speaking as Oracle consultant, very often you have no clue how much work is going to be there until you are there. We are very lucky if management actually listens to what you need. Which is often very simple things such as fix reoccuring errors, upgrade components that keep crashing, put decent monitoring in place, make sure the backup strategy makes sense and test the backups.

I've been in situations where I was contracted for 30 hours to "just help us deploy X", discovered what the database looks like and have been able to upgrade my contract to 300 hours of upgrades, monitors, automation, backup verifications, etc.

I can see how this looks like a contractor trying to create lots of work, but all this work did have good reasons behind it.

I have to sell my rationale for extra work to the customer and it is not always trivial. Often it is easier to say "well, its your data, its not like its my problem that your backups are untested", but I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't care about data being safe.

I completely agree that contractors are more focused than employees on getting the job done well.

Once I've overheard two developers talk about me: "Well, of course Gwen is always cheerful and always happily does what we ask, she's a contractor - thats how they do their marketing.". I'm proud of cheerfully and competently doing my job. I'm always wondering why many full-time DBAs act like they are doing you a favor when they create indexes, clone production to development and generally do what they were hired to do.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#67

Post by mistermann »

sethg wrote: post #40

The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience, which, as I understand, is not atypical for a developer working at a startup. I worked for five years for MetaCarta, which sold geographic search technology, primarily to government agencies and oil companies. In April we were aquired by Nokia, which runs its own search eng…

"The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience"

And I can confirm from my direct experience that institutions don't respect institutional knowledge, but I am coming from the angle of a major corporation, not a startup.

But as I've found, its not the interest of the corporation you have to worry about, its the career aspiration of that corporations representative.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#68

Post by mistermann »

alttab wrote: post #44

Do not get distracted by the 2X+ times money he makes. Everyone has made the point: no 401k, no health insurance. What everyone seems to forget is you also have to pay a 15% self-employment tax at the end of the year out of your pocket because you do not have a W-2. The tax liability is higher as well. So not only do you have to get independent insurance (which is very expensive), you have no 401k or match and probab…

I think it entirely depends upon the country in which you're operating. In Canada, I can be a 40 year old man with a wife and child and think contracting is reasonable, but I don't have to worry about a 400,000 bill for a stubbed toe on my daughter.

That being said, it still costs me $4000 to get one tooth fixed in my wife's mouth, and I have 3 in mine that have been waiting for over 5 years, so Canada is not perfect by any means.

Reminder to self in next life: If you want to make the most money with the least amount of work, in the field with the slowest slowest advancement of technology, and have your monopoly enforced, for free, by the government...go into dentistry.

Maybe I'm bitter, and I'm certainly uninformed, but I would absolutely love to hear to hear someone in the know defend the dental industry.

$3000 to fix one broken tooth (if you're lucky), it takes 15 minutes, tops. Thats $12,000 / hour. At what point do people start asking questions?

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#69

Post by muriithi »

mistermann wrote: post #68
alttab wrote: post #44

Do not get distracted by the 2X+ times money he makes. Everyone has made the point: no 401k, no health insurance. What everyone seems to forget is you also have to pay a 15% self-employment tax at the end of the year out of your pocket because you do not have a W-2. The tax liability is higher as well. So not only do you have to get independent insurance (which is very expensive), you have no 401k or match and probab…

I think it entirely depends upon the country in which you're operating. In Canada, I can be a 40 year old man with a wife and child and think contracting is reasonable, but I don't have to worry about a 400,000 bill for a stubbed toe on my daughter. That being said, it still costs me $4000 to get one tooth fixed in my wife's mouth, and I have 3 in mine that have been waiting for over 5 years, so Canada is not perfect…

I wish you could tell us what "fixing" costs 4 grand?
Post reply on HN