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Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

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Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#51

Post by Jacqued »

rsp1984 wrote: post #44
curiouscat321 wrote: post #3

People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it’s the end-all way to work. I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.

My opinion as an employer: Sure, feel free to take your work hours as you like and WFH every once in a while. Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract.

It's probably different where you're located, but around here it's pretty much a given that an engineer will work more hours than what is written in the employment contract, even if they regularly come in late / leave early / WFH.

Imho flexible hours are a good thing as they remove the pressure to stay around doing nothing until late because you can't be seen leaving before 7pm.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#53

Post by matwood »

madamelic wrote: post #19

Are people really making these salaries? I mean like mid-level, not god-tier type people. I don't know if I am stupid or just don't say the right things but are there really mid-level devs not at huge companies making $160k a year? I mostly hang out at startups and it is normally around like 130k for a senior dev.

Depends on the location, and not just because COLA. If you live in a big gov contracting area or somewhere with a lot of company offices (not necessarily tech), they will push up the salaries.

I met a guy once who worked as a programmer at a local plant (steel or something), and between his high base salary and bonuses he made more than anyone else I had ever talked to in the area.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#54

Post by humanrebar »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #12
curiouscat321 wrote: post #3

People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it’s the end-all way to work. I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.

Remote work is the only way I'd go now. Having had twins in the last year it's been vital. It doesn't work for everyone, but a way I've seen remote-first companies get around that is to offer to rent a desk in somewhere like WeWork, so you can choose to be around other working people, away from home and then look to hire others in the same city who might opt for a desk there too, at least some of the time. If the art…

> Having had twins in the last year it's been vital.

Employers that actually want workplace diversity should really consider how many lifestyles their work culture can accommodate. Some people adopt lots of kids and need more room. Some people love their families and won't move more than a few hours from them.

Nearly everybody needs flexible work arrangements from time to time: health problems, ailing family members, young children, everyone's-getting-married-this-summer, etc. Talking to your employer about a different pattern of availability is professional. But having to ask permission with forms and HR people in the room is not decent or necessary. If someone isn't earning their paycheck, that's a reasonable conversation to have. But assuming that's not the issue, let's just be decent human beings.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#55

Post by user5994461 »

pleasecalllater wrote: post #33
weeksie wrote: post #27

I really wish we'd start using a term like journeyman to talk about what people insist on calling "senior developers". A person with 3-6 years of experience isn't senior. That's preposterous on its face. Nor is a 3-6 year developer a junior, but we are woefully inept at using meaningful terms for developers.

This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience. A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you c…

The surgeon only did his first operation 3 years ago and started studying medicine a few years earlier.

The developer did his first program a decade ago when he was around 12 and he's been studying and practicing ever since.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#56

Post by jrs235 »

pleasecalllater wrote: post #33
weeksie wrote: post #27

I really wish we'd start using a term like journeyman to talk about what people insist on calling "senior developers". A person with 3-6 years of experience isn't senior. That's preposterous on its face. Nor is a 3-6 year developer a junior, but we are woefully inept at using meaningful terms for developers.

This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience. A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you c…

Because you might not fit in "culturally". Which is BS. I've noticed that going to work for many, primarily younger, people is more a social thing than a professional one. I see lots of time spent talking about and focusing on what people did in the 16 or so hours since they last saw each other at work. Mondays are the worst as sometimes an hour or more is blown catching up on what everyone did over the weekend. People and teams are lacking direction and focus. These younger teams need stronger leaders able to focus and re focus the culture and discussions on achieving organizational goals. These "work is social" folks fear those who might make them look bad by focusing on Getting Shit Done rather than focusing on people's personal lives. This isn't to say we shouldn't care about people and their lives outside of work, we should be empathetic, but it shouldn't be what the team gels around.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#57

Post by ivrrimum »

neebz wrote: post #26

I loved remote work and did a lot of effort to ensure that we adopt a remote-friendly culture. However I will never get over the fact that we found some of our engineers ended up doing freelancing work, over-estimating work and basically just slacking around in the freedom of their homes. I would love to hear if anyone had similar experiences or how they prevent such in remote environments.

Hourly timmers completly removes this problem.

For example in upwork, when you activate desktop app's hourly timer it takes screenshots at random times and sends them to upwork server(so client can review your work).

That way freelancer will stick to work.

This has really boosted my own performance

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#58

Post by delinka »

user5994461 wrote: post #55
pleasecalllater wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience. A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you c…

The surgeon only did his first operation 3 years ago and started studying medicine a few years earlier. The developer did his first program a decade ago when he was around 12 and he's been studying and practicing ever since.

“A decade ago” is more than “3-6 years” of experience - is that your argument? Because he doesn’t have 3-6 years experience working woth others, or realizing that the problems he’s solved were solved decades ago and those solutions can be found in the right places, or living with the reality that out in the workforce he’s most likely not the brilliant unique snowflake his family thinks he is.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#59

Post by humanrebar »

kreetx wrote: post #22
adjkant wrote: post #2

I usually hate posts about top job, top tech talent, etc. This post was a lot of great stuff. The idea of pairing talented people of different levels is crucial. A senior lead with shit backup can only do so much. The right balance I think can turn two mythical 10x devs into 100x total instead of 20x. Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and…

Agreed, this post gets a lot of things right IMO. An idea I've had on 10x developers (or whatever the multiplier..) is not that they can code and solve problems this much faster, but in the long term they steer the code base as a whole in a direction such that the impact is that large. (But of course recognizing this, or being able to compare it to the other would-be ways the code could have gone, is a non-trivial ma…

> An idea I've had on 10x developers... in the long term they steer the code base...

Agreed. And on the flip side, you can have -10x developers that make all the wrong choices, like inventing and entrenching their own language or crappy framework for reasons of boredom or ego.

I suspect that junior developers are less likely to be net-negative to that degree. Perhaps it's one unarticulated reason employers tend to prefer inexperienced engineers. If the employer can't tell the difference between a 10X and a -10X developer (the guy pitching the UML-based python code generator or the guy who really likes cucumber?), it's typically easier to hire smart people who are still learning and trust your existing technical leaders can get value out of them.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#60

Post by user5994461 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #37
Nursie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK mostly pays developers a derisory salary. Australia seems to pay roughly on a par with the US, or did when I lived there. But most of the UK is dreadful - software folks are paid poorly and treated like drones. Unfortunately there are enough people that will take the bad salary, have mediocre performance and deliver mediocre software slowly, that a lot of British companies now expect to pay peanuts and get mon…

The contractor premium will get dragged down in a year or two as well - the Tories are planning on kicking up taxes for them in order to bring in an extra £200 mil. That will probably lead to an exodus of the experienced developers from the UK. This will not only have a negative effect on UK software houses it will also exacerbate the existing problems with UK government IT projects, which have already have a multibi…

Not so sure. People who've been living here often can't just go back to where they come from. They wouldn't have moved to the UK if the situation in their countries was better.

The effect so far of Brexit is to stop the flood of newcomers, not making establishing people leave. It's good as a developer, less competitors for the same amount of jobs.

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