91–100 of 341 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> almost get no credit Delivered four senior developers in order to accelerate our team's velocity... that's what my resume says.
I never even considered that. Thank you. I'm going to have to remember to add more "soft skills" and accomplishments to my resume.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There is no trap in working to increase an employee's skills. There's absolutely a trap if the now bigger fish stays in your pond for a while and the even bigger management shark decides you can be replaced by him for much less money. As I detail in another subthread in this discussion. Given the near absolute absence, at least in the US, of rewarding employees who have become much more valuable because of the expe…
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…
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…
I've worked for enough crappy managers that I know how much that affects my job satisfaction and work-life balance. I'm at a point where I'd probably (and, currently do) sacrifice 10-15% of my salary just to work for someone who is respectful and interested in my development and wellbeing. I'd bet others are like me, and if you truly mentor and develop someone, you won't need to pay Netflix-level salaries to retain t…
At what size of company does this pay off? My experience of hiring juniors is generally that they are net negatives to productivity for quite a while, and the smaller the company, the more significant the impact of that is. How do people here go about mitigating that?
Don't have proven techniques, but have been toying with an idea I'd like to try the next time I have the chance. Have been thinking of starting a "farm team" to develop green programmers. Have a meetup once or twice a week, work on a focused project together, do mutual code review. Read the classics (e.g. the MMM) as homework. Perhaps give out some Amazon gift cards for good work. When a participant levels up, move t…
I had the pleasure to meet him when he came to Mexico and he talked about the idea of "pairing" a very junior Engineer (from Mexico) with a very senior one from top companies in the USA to grow them, even covering the English language teaching.
The theory sounds very good but man, at least I was afraid that he was overestimating what "Junior dev" means down here in Mexico (from my experience hiring in MX and US, MX-Senior = US-Mid-Level, MX-Mid-Level = US-Junior).
Still, it is a good project if done successfully.
> Your mentees will support you and promote you for the rest of your life. The problem I've seen is that this is rarely true. We've had a big set of grads we've trained that quit for a 20% pay rise, or a project that they happen to like better. Many regretted it but it didnt stop the next guys from doing the same. I'm really burnt out over teaching green newbies again and again.
There also might be some relevant variations in corporate cultures around the world, what you say rings true for the US, but the author is in Estonia.
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…
I've worked for enough crappy managers that I know how much that affects my job satisfaction and work-life balance. I'm at a point where I'd probably (and, currently do) sacrifice 10-15% of my salary just to work for someone who is respectful and interested in my development and wellbeing. I'd bet others are like me, and if you truly mentor and develop someone, you won't need to pay Netflix-level salaries to retain t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently switching jobs for a personal record 57% increase in total compensation. And I was NOT poorly compensated before. I was already in the 99th percentile for individual income. The harder I push on comp the more I get each time. I am not going to lie and say that it didn't take years to build to this point in terms of skill, work record, professional network, and interview ability. It took three FAANG companie…
Off topic - but your username and the vast majority of your commenting history is primarily on salaries. Curious - is there some backstory to it? Feel you got severely underpaid? To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together.…
I'm not speaking toward your argument of a bubble bursting, but engineering isn't going anywhere. And where else would an entry level engineer start than at the bottom, npm installing the package that solves their problem? It's using these concepts every day that builds good engineers who think of tomorrow's solutions, and can architect it both technically and socially. That is the line between software development and computer science.
Engineers paid under 120k that whine aren't doing anything beyond their immediate usefulness, i.e. 'just doing their jobs.' The engineers that get paid 300k are usually the ones running the show, and writing significantly less / no code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> almost get no credit Delivered four senior developers in order to accelerate our team's velocity... that's what my resume says.
> that's what my resume says. Which implies it was only valuable to future companies you worked for. Those that actually believe in mentoring, which seems to be rare based on what others are saying and my own experiences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh. I swear it was "parity" in my head. I have no idea how I managed to mis-type that. Wow.
I keep looking back on past comments and finding stuff like that. I wonder if someone has come up with a homophone/typo mistake filter? Being able to turn that on for opponents one would like to discredit would be really insidious and evil. What if some evil genius at Google has come up with a hidden way to do this in Chrome? Would we ever know? Maybe not, if the frequency was kept low enough.