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Great developers are raised, not hired

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Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#31

Post by techcode »

Fordec wrote: post #25
msluyter wrote: post #20

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 someon…

"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power.

Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#33

Post by JustSomeNobody »

ohaideredevs wrote: post #27

I have found the premise of the title to be completely false in real life. Not much else to say to this - I haven't seen too many people grow, and when we hire someone great, they are great.

> I haven't seen too many people grow...

Are they allowed to? Are they mentored? It's not just one sided.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#34

Post by EliRivers »

maxxxxx wrote: post #29
EliRivers wrote: post #24

I have, to some degree, given up trying to hire senior developers. Instead, I'm doubling down on the internal training programme (and have hired extra juniors). 5% of time is set aside for training. Works out a little over a half-day every fortnight - every fortnight, after lunch on Friday, drop the code and hit the books, pet projects, videos, experiments, whatever clearly makes you a better software engineer. If yo…

"The last senior dev who got internally promoted currently has an allowance of 50% of his time for helping more junior devs understand things. Fifty percent! The intention is to get his senior dev knowledge and experience out of his head and into the heads of five other people; growing ourselves five more senior devs." I am pretty senior and I like mentoring people. But the incentives are generally the other way: If…

I certainly sympathise. In a strong culture, when you mentored someone, their achievements and success would reflect on you. The boss would see your cohort doing well, and give you a pay rise for your fantastically valuable contribution to the company. "Thank you, maxxxxx, for making these junior software engineers 50% more effective," the boss would say. "Why, you've had the same effect as hiring two or three more people!"

But if your culture involves ranking and paying people only relative to each other, I can understand the need to protect yourself. And everybody loses :( The company loses, you lose, the potential mentees lose :(

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#35

Post by luckylion »

cimmanom wrote: post #6
kgraves wrote: post #4

I have never seen a single company/startup place a job posting for a junior position, (lucky if they even say training) Last time I checked, everyone wants to look for a senior developer with 5+ years of experience. It's some sort of hidden bonus if you're from a FAANG company as well. I'm guessing everyone wants to be the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Uber.

so they do want junior developers. They’re just giving them the “senior” title ridiculously early in their careers. What no one REALLY wants are ENTRY LEVEL developers, who tend to be a net negative to productivity for roughly the first year or two.

Meh, in pretty much every company I've seen there are lots of entry level jobs to be done. Sure, you can ask an experienced developer to take care of them, and they will, but they'd rather apply their skills to more challenging tasks, or you could give them to a beginner, let them figure it out and run it by a more experienced dev to review.

We've done that with a guy that had been out of programming for half a decade but wanted back in. Within half a year he was a great asset. I believe it's more about whether the person is happy to learn something new, not so much what they already know.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#36

Post by gorpomon »

msluyter wrote: post #20

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 someon…

IMO that devil's advocate argument is incorrect. There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills.

If you train someone at work and level them up-- they're not in class 8 hours a day not contributing. They are working on a project.

All software mentorship is based around the idea of growing skills while meaningfully contributing to a project. Actually it's much harder to train someone without a project. I have never once in my career seen a scenario where a person isn't contributing and just learning skills.

After said project is done a trained person might leave. But an untrained employee might leave as well-- for a place that offers meaningful mentorship.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#37

Post by dfrage »

eduardsi wrote: post #21
dfrage wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

Good point, "career security" is definitely more appropriate term.

And you should expand on this with situation and timing details. In a talent starved startup like the one I was in, mentoring a nearly fresh out of college entry level employee was the only way to get the project completed in the available time ... except that very directly sowed the seeds of the destruction of both the project and the company.

Most US companies' management of software developers is horrible, see open offices, Agile as its actually practiced, etc. So I would expect the outcome of this process getting you replaced by your mentee to be common.

In that light, consider timing your mentoring period, which as I note can intrinsically be very rewarding, and I'd argue is vital as paying forward for the mentoring you yourself received, for when you want to leave your current company.

And since getting fired for doing a really good job is psychologically devastating for most if not nearly all people, and at least in the US makes it significantly harder to get a new job, don't wait to get pushed out, start your job search at an appropriate time. Especially since it's really unlikely you can't continue your mentoring after you leave the company, I certainly didn't, to this day. Although by now we're both so experienced, in somewhat divergent sub-fields, that the continued learning goes both ways.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#38

Post by EliRivers »

cimmanom wrote: post #6
kgraves wrote: post #4

I have never seen a single company/startup place a job posting for a junior position, (lucky if they even say training) Last time I checked, everyone wants to look for a senior developer with 5+ years of experience. It's some sort of hidden bonus if you're from a FAANG company as well. I'm guessing everyone wants to be the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Uber.

so they do want junior developers. They’re just giving them the “senior” title ridiculously early in their careers. What no one REALLY wants are ENTRY LEVEL developers, who tend to be a net negative to productivity for roughly the first year or two.

Had someone respond to a job ad for a senior dev last week with 18 months experience. I was skeptical. I've never seen anyone develop senior level soft skills in that timeframe, and skill with requirements and design and so on seem to take a lot more time than 18 months.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#39

Post by scaryclam »

EliRivers wrote: post #24

I have, to some degree, given up trying to hire senior developers. Instead, I'm doubling down on the internal training programme (and have hired extra juniors). 5% of time is set aside for training. Works out a little over a half-day every fortnight - every fortnight, after lunch on Friday, drop the code and hit the books, pet projects, videos, experiments, whatever clearly makes you a better software engineer. If yo…

This is great, but only when you've already got enough knowledge and experience within the organisation to enable it. That's where you really need to hire senior developers. Trying to grow a team of juniors into a team of seniors without enough guidance, grows teams of expert beginners, which is way worse for both the team and the organisation in the long run. You won't be able to hire or retain seniors in that sort of environment as they'll see it for what it is and leave.

However, that's not to say training people up shouldn't be done! I've seen some wonderful developers grow from junior to senior and it's always great to see it happen. Just make sure the organisation is in a position to do it well, otherwise you're doing both them and the juniors a disservice.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#40

Post by Roritharr »

techcode wrote: post #31
Fordec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power. Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.

This the technically true, but also a very tough starting position.

If my six person startup has issues squeezing as much value out of my Dev than FANG companies with all their support structure and research into this, this is only to be expected, imo.

So yeah, it's a problem, one on the list of many problems most companies have though, so it's oversimplified to simply say:"Let's just pay for expensive training and hope they stay."

Yes, you can foster a culture, build a sense of loyalty etc. but at some point in time even the most loyal employee feels underpaid if he's paid below market because the company can't afford someone at the stage they've reached by working there. I've seen this play out too often to ignore the counter argument.

The incentives of the company and the worker often simply don't align when it comes to career growth.

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