I don't think someone necessarily has to live and breathe code to be good at their job. That kind of focus is hard to maintain forever. When I was new I was constantly reading programming books and now, like, I'm still interested, but other things are going on in my life that also need my attention, you know?
Yes, for me it's up and down. I do side projects a lot more when I'm sick of the company I'm at. Trying to get out of the grind.
I love that you pointed out the need for political strength within organizations. I agree, and I think it directly conflicts with this line from the post: Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay. Having the admiration and respect of the ne…
Wait until you get old (past 35), I'm a woman (ex web deck "ninja/rockstar/etc") and I can safely say the ageist comments are far worse. No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.
We kinda did. This is because we like to hire interns. Usually intern in our area: * studies programming at a university * costs around a 1/2 of a junior * is part-time with really erratic schedule * work output still on on par with few juniors we hired I suspect this is mostly because there isn't as much of a difference between what can one work in 8h compared to 4h (I spend 2h out of those on meetings an email anyw…
> I suspect this is mostly because there isn't as much of a difference between what can one work in 8h compared to 4h This is so true. I don't really understand why 8h workdays are the standard for "creative" jobs. Most people can't fully focus for that long. Tbh I personally just spread out 3-4 hours of proper work time to just fill the 8 hours. Otherwise I'd just run out of power / focus in the early afternoon.
In my case, I work 8 hours because I still get pay by hour :)
If, one day I would manage to get into consulting, I probably would work less on average work-day.
Then you will need two senior devs. This is because rockstar devs rarely want to mentor junior devs nor attend meetings. Most inventors are not professors.
Then they aren't a rockstar. And frankly, I've spent my career cleaning up the obfuscated, badly documented, untested code of "rockstar" devs. The idea of a "rockstar" you seem to be referring to has, in my experience, been a dev who can go into a corner and pump out high volumes of code with little supervision or collaboration. That's great, except no one else can make sense of the code they pump out, so when it com…
The whole "rockstar dev" branding has always made me cringe, but my opinion is software should be made by rock bands. Sometimes you have to play bass and not get laid.
Which is offset by the fact that you're paid significantly more
The point you keep missing is that the amount I'm paid more isn't equivalent to the amount more I can do than a junior dev. I perform at some X more than the junior dev, but I'm not paid X more.
It's good to know you have such a high view of yourself in comparison to others
is 50k really such a bad starting salary or is there such a big difference between US and EU?
Depends what caliber person you want. Highly educated, motivated, top 10%, maybe even 20% should be able to earn almost $100k upon earning a Masters, maybe even engineering/science degree. In the bigger cities in the US, I would expect most technical/finance/medical professionals to be making six figures easily by the time they are mid to upper 20s.
Anecdotally, I didn't factor in internships at all when I was last hiring for a jr. I didn't interview a single person who didn't have a public code repo.
You don't consider real world work experience relevant when hiring? Just side projects or contributions to open source projects? That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?
I don't consider work experience relevant at all unless I can verify the work done or hold a particular recommendation in high esteem. Not getting fired for a length of time, while a skill, is not often what I care most about. Without knowing a company's policies, culture, and tech leads I cannot accurately judge whether someone spent 3 years playing ping pong with the CEO or was responsible for programming a successfully delivered system. In a perfect world, I might try to suss out each candidate's strength and then decide based on the totality of data, but I don't often have that kind of time. I look for public or provided code first, and if it's reasonable, will use that to begin a pointed conversation on our trade.
In my current job, for a tech company with less than 12 people, at least 5 are interns. Two of them were recent hires (January) and before they were onboarded, i had a meeting with my boss and the other senior developer regarding the new interns and my boss stated he didn’t want me and other senior dev spending too much time mentoring the interns and that if they couldn’t manage by themselves, he would just let them…
The Netherlands is a special place in Software Hell. Where the non-suits are only a cost. "Devs can't be cheap enough! We can't find decent devs!"
There were never any junior dev jobs. You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field. I have a buddy who legit cheated his way to the top Magento certification and now cycles through $150k+ jobs where they keep him on long enough to realize he doesn't have any coding skills then they fire him. Reason is software is always an ancillary concern to the business. You see this in other fields, like s…
> You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field. This terrifies me in terms of my rewriting my resume for my next job cycle. Is any minuscule semblance of honesty on a resume completely dead as a zombie shot through the brain? I'm serious here. If I have never used XYZ tech, should I list that as a matter of course now should the position require it, and then fudge the results with a few search…
"Fake it 'till you make it," is a statement of pure wisdom, at least with regards to success in America. Especially in IT.
None of that has anything to do with the original blanket assertion of "good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!".
Aye, but you probably can't code faster if you have to read a manual first? It is easy to construct scenarios where someone from a bootcamp could code "faster" than a principal, senior lead, or CTO of all things. It's just a matter of picking the problem. A better point is that this drought of new talent is just the other side of the pendulum. In the odd years, the problem is layoffs and difficulty finding work witho…
The general point he makes is that "if I define what speed means, I always code faster", so yeah, he's right. Sort of :)