This article assumes that the person you are mentoring is open to being mentored. I’ve worked with some engineers who were definitely junior despite having years of experience and very opposed to even a slight suggestion on how to improve their thinking process or implementation process.
Great developers are raised, not hired
221–230 of 341 posts
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#222> 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.
The issue here is that they should got that raise in company. It happened to me and I did stay long in that place.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. Even more curious is that IT culture is basically that if you want to get paid what you're worth, you have to quit and go to another company. So these companies put all this effort into raising a better developer, and then refuse to pay them what…
I think the problem is largely isolated to companies in decline or stagnant -- which unfortunately is most companies. At a growing company, if you're a growing individual, there's room for you to rise. At a stagnant or declining company, if you're outperforming your boss, there's a strong incentive for your boss to want to keep you down to keep his/her job. In a growing company, your boss might be happy to get your p…
Allies versus competitors. I just made the same observation up thread.
Only once has this gone badly for me, but it went really bad. Tried to mentor a guy, two years later he’s our boss and everybody hates him. Like we go out for coffee to talk about how much we hate him.
Ladder climber extraordinaire. Gotta learn to watch out for those, but in this case he only connived in private and nobody caught on but one and he left.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end result is hiring trained developers for the price of trained developers, and sending the inexperienced developers to be trained somewhere else. Where? That's their problem. See? Looking just for one's interests works both ways.
You act like you’re doing them a favor by hiring them. You’re not. You’re trying to get cheap labor, and expecting them to feel indebted to you and work at below market rate. It’s not going to happen. Pay them cheap during training. After they’re trained, pay a premium to the ones you want to keep. Let the rest go to a competitor. It’s simple. If you can’t afford that, that’s a problem with your business, not the emp…
You have it backwards.
We are not trying to have cheap labor. We are trying to have more labor. However, the experienced people are limited resource, so the next step is to find inexperienced ones and train them.
However, that doesn't work that way so easily. If you train someone for 6-12 months (during that time the trainee not only isn't making you any money, but other people, who otherwise would, are not either), you are investing into these people. If they leave before you break even, you are at loss. If you would pay them market rate as soon as they finish training, you would never break even.
That's why some companies insist on contract, that the trainee will stay with the company for specified time, if they take the training.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#225Earlier 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.
[deleted]
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end result is hiring trained developers for the price of trained developers, and sending the inexperienced developers to be trained somewhere else. Where? That's their problem. See? Looking just for one's interests works both ways.
Do you not see how there is value in having someone who is trained to your specifications? You're still getting labor out of someone but when they move to being a proper dev you don't have to worry about any training issues because you trained them. I truly doubt you hire developers who are productive from day one, when your mentees will be productive from day one as a real dev AND will probably have less growing pai…
> Do you not see how there is value in having someone who is trained to your specifications?
You don't, if they leave too early. That's the point.
> hire developers who are productive from day one
That's very rare, true. It was meant to illustrate one extreme. But there is still a huge difference between both ends of the market.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ben…
This is simple - pay people by the value they bring to the company upon every annual compensation review. Yes, it costs money to train people. Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that.
> Consequently they get paid less during that period. But once they can fly on their own, treat them as if you hired them like that.
That's too early. You made an investment, that investment has to break even. With your suggestion, it would never break even.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. If you give your current salary during a negotiation, the other end is going to come right back with that salary +5% (at best). Hidden information is your friend in any negotiation, but especially here, since the hiring folks also know how variable industry salary ranges are. You want to put the first move in their court - decline to give your current salary at all costs, and ideally also avoid offering up your p…
This advice functionally doesn’t work. They’ll just intentionally lowball the first offer and then say well they can’t read your mind so you need to tell them what you want. A better strategy is to really research competitive wages and anchor high by honestly saying what you want. If they can’t come close, then walk away. If they ask you to compromise, tell them you’re not going to negotiate against yourself by stati…
If you want to know what I have in spending money, I expect the other party to show me what they have as well. It's not a fair negotiation if you play with lopsided rules.
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#229As a developer, I want to work with people who are at least as knowledgeable as me, and preferably much more so. I want to spend my time learning what I do not know, not teaching what I do.
You must be a junior with a few years of experience. Even so, you should discover that teaching will boost your knowledge a lot. Being surrounded by more experienced people may give you a short term boost, but teaching what you already know will deepen your knowledge in what you only think you know, which is way more important to improve.
> You must be a junior with a few years of experience.
You may say that, although that would stretch the word junior to the point where it is hardly meaningful anymore. Judging by Twitter threads and Medium posts that have become so very inclusive and protective of juniors, a junior (usually discussed as applied to web development) is someone who has hard time configuring build tools, is still uncertain about syntax of their primary programming language, and is easily scared by a smidgen of functional programming (such as the reduce function). I wonder where they would fit in your classification :-)
Re: Great developers are raised, not hired
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are perhaps too focused on the immediate salary, and not thinking long-term. Yeah, $300k in the Bay Area isn’t that much. But if you work for a Tier 1/2 company for a few years, it can have a drastic impact on your future employment prospects and salary levels. Furthermore, the street cred can open many doors that otherwise would remain closed to you.
DING DING DING. I've seen quite a few people only focus on the $300k aspect in HackerNews (and made negative remarks) without thinking about the trajectory.
Anyone who is making $135K+ in any city that is not on the west coast or NYC, is probably 10 years into their career and may already have a family. In that case, they probably don’t want to make the sacrifices needed to go from making enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle - ie the nice house in the burbs to downgrading to a small apartment.
In my case, I’m 45, why would I move to the west coast for $300K when I can just stay in $major_city and work for a consulting when my younger son graduates and can make $180K-200K+ and still have the same lifestyle?
And then go back to being just a developer anytime I wanted to and still live comfortably?