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Great developers are raised, not hired

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Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#131

Post by vetinari »

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?

Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either.

So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1.

The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them.

Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else benefits.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#132

Post by didibus »

This seems to strike a chicken and egg problem. Who will grow the talent? It seems you'll need to hire the mentors for that. And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs?

As far as I know, most interview processes are designed to hire potential. For example, if you can't learn fundamental algorithms in a reasonable amount of prep time to prepare for the interview, but someone else could... Which talent has the most likely potential?

I'd even go and claim that the current interview processes are biased against senior talent. Someone who already knows they are qualified won't be motivated to go and practice fundamental algos that they haven't needed for real work in years. They'll expect their own track record and knowledge to be recognized on it's own. But, the interviews won't care about that. And they might instead hire a junior with more time and motivation on their hand, which decided to spend all evenings for the last two months doing leet code questions.

Similarly, many companies seem to favor new grads, which they can quickly brain wash into their existing engineering culture. They think, these new grads really strive, instead of challenging the status quo, they internalize our processes and work hard to deliver, even if we're being unreasonable. Eventually, this creates a lack of perspective in the entire company. Hiring more external senior talent would help get more perspectives, and prevent this silo of opinion that hurts innovation over time.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#133

Post by learc83 »

chillacy wrote: post #124
madrix999 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant lower the CEO's paycheck 8) (mostly serious sarcasm)

Put yourself in the shoes of the board of directors and you'll find they too don't want to overpay for CEOs. But paychecks are market driven, and lowering the pay means you'll end up with a less experienced or worse CEO.

Executive pay hasn't been shown to correlate strongly with performance, and the board members and CEOs tend to have somewhat incestuous relationships.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#134

Post by astura »

ok_coo wrote: post #69
astura wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, as a mentor: Quite a lot of people are certainly capable of growing, but many (most?) aren't. Either they aren't capable, or they don't feel like it. Luckily you can almost always tell from the get-go who will grow and who will stagnate.

Are they given time during normal work hours to grow? Are they given adequate assistance and resources? Is training a priority? I've run into two different situations in my work life: a) You should learn new tech and keep up, but it's all on you, your own time and discretion (outside of work). It was expected to do project work 100% of the time on the job. b) It's expected for you to learn and grow and we will help y…

>Are they given time during normal work hours to grow?

Yes! Absolutely!

>Are they given adequate assistance and resources?

Yes! 100%!

>Is training a priority?

Its our #1 priority (for new devs).

Still got people refusing to grow. Ive been a very successful mentor to some people, but I've gotten some real duds too.

I agree with the sibling comment that says 4 weeks is the sweet spot.

>You should learn new tech and keep up, but it's all on you, your own time and discretion (outside of work).

That's ridiculous. I've never worked anywhere where you are expected to work outside of work and, frankly, I just wouldn't.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#135

Post by novok »

Roritharr wrote: post #40
techcode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#136

Post by SamuelAdams »

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?"

> CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

It's quite simple, you lay them off. I've seen it happen more than once.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#137

Post by maxxxxx »

EliRivers wrote: post #87
maxxxxx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% is pretty low to basically nothing. I agree.

It's very low and, from my own experience, significantly higher than average. My experiences are almost entirely UK based, outside big name or hip companies.

True. Usually training is 0%.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#138

Post by 0xDEFC0DE »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #41
amarkman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in tech companies is arrogant and clueless management that treats developers like dirt and blames them for everything.

Trust me, there are arrogant developers out there and they suck to work with. They treat code and design reviews as chest beating exercises. They refuse to work on anything remotely legacy. If their idea or design gets questioned in any way they get loud and obnoxious. You can't mentor these devs at all.

>They refuse to work on anything remotely legacy.

You have to be careful what you're good at. If senior devs/management sees you're good at legacy, they might task you with that as a majority of your time. Then your career plans get sidetracked because you won't have as much time working on the stuff that you want to work on.

Some developers are okay with legacy, but if they aren't, it's not surprising. Some legacy stuff is absolutely horrible to work with - it devolves into "get-in-get-out" fix mentality (and security issues usually get swept under the rug). Some legacy products are good though and require minimal tribal knowledge to actually work on.

This has happened to me twice at two separate positions: bait-and-switches about what I'll be working on because more senior members wanted to offload the legacy work themselves.

The general arrogance is really a separate trait from willingness to work on legacy IMHO and I agree on those points.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#139

Post by squallleonhart »

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…

#2 doesn't work if the company can't get anywhere close to #1.

With no work experience, I was hired as a junior dev with a $40k salary, which I gladly accepted. A senior dev mentored me throughout the year and it was fantastic.

Coming up on my 1-year anniversary with the company, I was thoroughly enjoying my job, the people, and the culture. I was hoping to get a raise up to at least $60k, though, since I was significantly more valuable to the company than I was when I first joined. They offered me $50k.

I started applying for other jobs and got an offer for $90k and I accepted it. I still talk with my mentor from my previous job. He's pissed that his company won't pay enough to keep the developers he mentors.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#140

Post by IndrekR »

chillacy wrote: post #124
madrix999 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant lower the CEO's paycheck 8) (mostly serious sarcasm)

Put yourself in the shoes of the board of directors and you'll find they too don't want to overpay for CEOs. But paychecks are market driven, and lowering the pay means you'll end up with a less experienced or worse CEO.

I do not have statistics to back it, just my meandering experience, but could it not be that great CEOs are raised, not hired?
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