Great developers are raised, not hired • Hacker News Board

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#11

Post by xar11 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 9:42 AM UTC

eduardsi wrote: post #10

cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

How can you mentor people if you are afraid of being fired or replaced by a "cheaper" mentee? To mentor people, you have to be a professional developer, at the first place. Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable. Mediocre developers – by building knowledge silos.

Professional developers don't write "at the first place".

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#12

Post by teh_klev » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

xar11 wrote: post #11

eduardsi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you mentor people if you are afraid of being fired or replaced by a "cheaper" mentee? To mentor people, you have to be a professional developer, at the first place. Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable. Mediocre developers – by building knowledge silos.

Professional developers don't write "at the first place".

Good citizens on HN don't throw snarky comments around.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#13

Post by aNoob7000 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

arvinsim wrote: post #9

alecmg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get the first dibs, don't you? If you need a diamond level dev, you must provide diamond level compensation. The article just points out that it is simpler to get that level from other sources than filtering what is on the market.

> If you need a diamond level dev, you must provide diamond level compensation. It is baffling when companies resist against giving great developers a good raise. If they leave, the lost productivity and onboarding will cost them more. Sometimes, they end up having to hire 2 people to replace that 1 person.

Companies want talent for cheap. Every time I see in the news companies complaining that they can't find employees, I think to myself, why don't you pay more?

Add to that, if you start at a company and become a rockstar developer, admin, or QA guy chances are they will not value you as much as if you came in as the rockstar developer, admin, or QA guy.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#14

Post by dfrage » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

teh_klev wrote: post #12

xar11 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional developers don't write "at the first place".

Good citizens on HN don't throw snarky comments around.

Especially when 30 seconds of following links shows the author is almost certainly not a native speaker of English. That the only problem was substituting "at" for "in" should have been a clue.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#15

Post by dfrage » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

> In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring.

In my experience, it can result in a life long friendship, and getting the project to alpha level in time.

> Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

Strangely enough, that too happened. While it was cold comfort to me, it did kill the company because the mentee hadn't yet learned enough to cover all the areas I was expert in, and he didn't want to work in a place like that.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#16

Post by dfrage » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 12:48 PM UTC

eduardsi wrote: post #10

cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

How can you mentor people if you are afraid of being fired or replaced by a "cheaper" mentee? To mentor people, you have to be a professional developer, at the first place. Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable. Mediocre developers – by building knowledge silos.

> Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable.

Wouldn't that be "achieve career security"? Because as I attest upstream in this subthread, in my most notable example of being a mentor, I was indeed fired as soon as my non-technical salesman background CEO decided I was replaceable. Although he didn't realize that wasn't quite yet true, and the mentee decided to leave instead of working in such a place.

I don't know about Estonia, but in the US conventional careers as a software developer start ending when you're in your 30s, with 40 being a hard limit in finding a new conventional job because that's when our national age discrimination law kicks in.

That fresh out of college except for one short job mentee? The only reason he's still a programmer a quarter century later is that within a decade he got a high level security clearance, which is sufficiently onerous for the company that pushes through that process, they have to "bench" or otherwise have the employee work on non-classified stuff for many months, that after getting it you're in a small pool that companies vastly prefer to recruit from.

This is intimately connected to being a good mentor since a fair amount of experience is required to do a good job of it.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#17

Post by zamalek » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

yzfr12006 wrote: post #2

The article is not only on point but it reflects a big problem in the tech companies. Businesses loose millions and they just burn cash because of toxic and arrogant developments teams. I can quadruple the sales of the company that I work for but you cannot push any change through the arrogant development team who don't give a chance to other people, it is so pathetic.

> you cannot push any change through the arrogant development team

I worked at a company that did this. Eventually customers start demanding stability as a feature. There is a huge difference between arrogance and wisdom.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#18

Post by kristianc » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

> Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective.

> Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business.

Can we not do this? By all means, respond to the article and the points he is making (which in my mind are good ones), but dumping on the industry the OP is in contributes nothing.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#19

Post by adestefan » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

eduardsi wrote: post #10

cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

How can you mentor people if you are afraid of being fired or replaced by a "cheaper" mentee? To mentor people, you have to be a professional developer, at the first place. Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable. Mediocre developers – by building knowledge silos.

I mentor people for the same reason I automate things; at the end of the day I'm lazy and I'd rather concentrate more on the things that matter to me. It that means I can teach someone else how to do the work that I don't want to do but they'd love to do, then more power to everyone.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#20

Post by msluyter » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding.

But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. One might argue that if everyone put more fish in the pond, then we'd all be better off (true), but we have a standard collective action problem where the free riders benefit at the expense of the fish growers.

I see two (partial) ways out of this trap.

1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.)

2. Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow.

I'd be curious to hear other possibilities.