Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Great developers are raised, not hired

sizovs.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 341 posts

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#111

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dfrage wrote: post #16
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 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…

> 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.

In the US, I found a new developer job at 43, and another at 47. Haven't looked in a decade, so I don't know how it goes at 57.

Caveat: I'm in embedded systems, which is a much more senior-friendly world than web apps.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#112

Post by wincy »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #54

This discussion reminds me of the fixed vs. growth mindset, in the book Mindsets: "In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that thei…

I started in IT. I very quickly realized I could do a lot of tasks the other support staff weren’t willing/able to do, like learning regex and database normalization. Kept getting more dev related tasks since my boss was the only software engineer at the small startup.

Rather than get rewarded or hired as a developer by the company, as the support team grew I was headed toward being promoted to the support manager. They brought on someone else as a dev and that really made me realize I’d never be a dev in the CEO’s eyes. Bosses daughter did an internship so she got the coding tasks I would have gotten before. I was taking more phone calls with idiots from places like The Federal Reserve who didn’t know how to Google “hoe to format a hard drive”. So I left and doubled my pay.

Some managers just believe what you know is set in stone and you can’t progress or learn anything new. It’s a really bizarre mindset to have when a devs most important skill needs to be the ability to learn. Didn’t all these same people go to school?

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#113

Post by austincheney »

The best developer thing is really frustrating and ultimately a failure. Companies always claim to want the best during hiring, but once hired that completely goes away. What they really want are a couple good developers and rest somewhere between mediocre to brand new.

To really see the paradox ask extremely controversial questions during the interview. As a frontend developer ask about process efficiency or interacting with the DOM without a bunch of framework bullshit.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#114

Post by theothermelissa »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #66
thom wrote: post #52

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…

This sounds like such a great idea! I saw in a sibling comment that you might lean towards doing these in person, but I could see it working well remotely also.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#115

Post by dfrage »

gorpomon wrote: post #63
dfrage wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It sounds like we've just had really different workplace experiences in software. I've never seen a scenario where a trained employee replaces a more senior one. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's just not something I've seen in my career (e-commerce, a food delivery startup gone global and now a consultancy). Also, I've seen people take jobs that promise mentorship multiple times. I've seen multiple people t…

Maybe you're lucky, or very good a picking companies and having the luxury of doing so, or maybe you just haven't worked in the field long enough, through multiple nasty downturns in the market. I started my career four decades ago, for "big ones", rode down one metro area's effective end as a high tech region, and lived through the dot com bubble and bust.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#116

Post by sandGorgon »

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…

We are trying to build our own internal training program. Beyond the language-specific training, what books/courses have you found that are super useful. For example, would you ask someone to learn design patterns or something like that ?

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#117

Post by dfrage »

wincy wrote: post #112
mixmastamyk wrote: post #54

This discussion reminds me of the fixed vs. growth mindset, in the book Mindsets: "In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that thei…

I started in IT. I very quickly realized I could do a lot of tasks the other support staff weren’t willing/able to do, like learning regex and database normalization. Kept getting more dev related tasks since my boss was the only software engineer at the small startup. Rather than get rewarded or hired as a developer by the company, as the support team grew I was headed toward being promoted to the support manager. T…

> Bosses daughter did an internship so she got the coding tasks I would have gotten before.

In my experience at a couple of places, the moment you learn its a nepotistic environment you should leave as soon as you reasonably manage. As you saw, it's a sign of very bad management, the sort that can easily kill a company, see Wang Laboratories for perhaps the most famous example in the US.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#118

Post by chillacy »

chrisseaton wrote: post #80
rb808 wrote: post #79

> 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.

Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?

Assuming a perfect market (or good enough market), you could just raise the pay for the position and hire someone experienced enough to justify that price rather than grow someone into that role.

Otherwise said, at-will employment doesn't incentivize intensely investing in growing people.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#119

Post by cookiecaper »

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.

> They’re just giving them the “senior” title ridiculously early in their careers.

Yes, companies are usually more eager to throw out titles than they are to throw out dollars. True seniors need to push much harder on the compensation aspect to give these companies a sense of scale, and ideally, start pushing back on working with 23 yr old "Sr Directors".

It's a substantial failure of the field that for most people, there isn't a lifelong career trajectory that doesn't require moving into management.

Post reply on HN