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Great developers are raised, not hired

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Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#251

Post by dba7dba »

wccrawford wrote: post #47
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…

>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…

> 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.

From what I've noticed, companies really want to avoid raising salary of an employee in a meaningful way, because it means they will have to increase pay of others also

So 10% increase of salary of 1 employee would eventually equal 10% in crease for the whole team or company, which gets expensive.

This seems to be why they really really hate giving out meaningful raise. They'd rather lose an employee and suffer the consequences, than give 10% raise to one and inevitably end up raising salary for the entire team/company.

And yet, they want to higher senior devs, who obviously left old company to seek higher pay.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#252

Post by [deleted] »

vetinari wrote: post #224
freyir wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

[deleted]

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#253

Post by azangru »

shoes_for_thee wrote: post #247
azangru wrote: post #207

As 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.

> As a developer, I want to work with people who are at least as knowledgeable as me, and preferably much more so. If they embraced the same sentiment, people who you prefer to work with (eg, those who are much more knowledgable) would prefer to not work with you.

That’s totally fair (and there indeed was a time when the typical response to my resume was, "we are not looking for juniors") :-)

But this argument makes sense only from the collective standpoint (as in, the industry in general). Of course developers have to be trained by someone, because otherwise there will be no dissemination of knowledge, no passing down of experience, and no qualified workforce. So of course that should be done.

The question is, whether you (as a programmer on a team looking for new members, or as a company looking for new employers) need to be doing this, or whether it's all right to let someone else do this while you look for already well-trained and experienced professionals.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#254

Post by vharuck »

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…

"What if I train them, and they leave?"

"What if you don't, and they stay?"

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#255

Post by freyir »

vetinari wrote: post #224
freyir wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

Ok. Keep blaming the employees for your retention problems. It's definitely not your fault. I'm sure it will work out.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#256

Post by hello_moto »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #245
hello_moto wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Of course the market deserves to pay accordingly but I think it's just a big bubble that's going to crash soon - since there is a huge mismatch between demand and supply of CRUD glue programmers (w…

Excuse me, but define a CRUD developer. I know what CRUD is but what exactly are they doing?

Building simple tools to assist the whole SDLC?

Building web-app to map network/machines?

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#257

Post by hello_moto »

scarface74 wrote: post #230
hello_moto wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

But you're assuming with 10-15 years of experience you're stuck at 250-300k.

People who advanced in their career at Bay Area can make 500k or more (IC, not management), solving challenges that did not exist in the first place too (that alone might potentially put you in top 1-5%?). There are more startup opportunities (whether IPO or just the technical challenges, that's up to you) with higher chances of success.

Different people have different goals.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#258

Post by chillacy »

TheHegemon wrote: post #198
chillacy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except the fact that higher paid CEOs actually perform worse [0]. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highe...

> the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers

By that metric isn't Amazon the worst company there is?

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#259

Post by chillacy »

learc83 wrote: post #133
chillacy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess that would be a problem if board members were willing to take a hit on profitability to load up their pal. Maybe shareholders don't notice, or while the market is doing well they don't question it.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#260

Post by megablast »

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…

That is why you don’t mentor someone.

You provide the tools for everyone to improve.

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