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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

triplebyte.com

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Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#31

Post by [deleted] »

eropple wrote: post #26
elindbe2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like tricky wording used by businesses to pay people less. Tell people in your job description that you offer "opportunities for career growth" and they hear "opportunities to get rich". Then when they're actually working there you just change the meaning to some kind of title inflation or meaningless training or additional responsibilities for the same pay.

> even worse, additional responsibilities for the same pay FWIW, and I say this acutely aware that I'm of the "don't give them what you don't owe them" tribe, additional responsibilities for the same pay are how I got the broad skillset that got me to the point where I'm a principal developer with a hand in every part of our project--which is, in addition to no-complaints compensated, genuinely a lot of fun. I took o…

[deleted]

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#33

Post by [deleted] »

hidden_arachnid wrote: post #2

Author of this article here. As long as this initial data-dive came out, there are still a bunch of things we’d like to look at. Does location (say, NYC vs Silicon Valley vs affect these preferences? Does which track (generalist, front-end, mobile) a candidate takes through our process? How does this link with how candidates actually behave when given an offer? Our data set has enough information that we can investig…

[deleted]

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#34

Post by jodrellblank »

Engineers Want To Learn, Even If They’re Very Senior

But /what/ do they want to learn? Something about this bit is rubbing me the wrong way:

> "In 2002, a very good COBOL or Fortran engineer was probably in a good place as far as their job search was concerned, but today they're unlikely to get much attention from companies that have moved on to more modern languages. Had that engineer focused on growth to keep up with changes in the industry, they might have learned Python or JavaScript and been able to keep up with the market."

Is .. reinventing the wheel, or learning the same thing in a new language, really the same as "growth"?

Is it even "learning" in any way more than "memorization"?

Since when is "keeping up with the Joneses" the same as "(personal) growth"? Had that engineer focused on growth and learning, perhaps they'd now be a High Performance Computing specialist in Fortran, or a business analyst with an MBA overseeing a COBOL team's migration, or a founder of a COBOL codebase analysis tool company, or a bi-lingual contractor traveling to help foreign companies move away from COBOL, or .. anything, growing and changing instead of writing a database report in COBOL then in Java then C# then in JavaScript.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#36

Post by holy_city »

ConcernedCoder wrote: post #13
RNeff wrote: post #6

Offer a quiet, private office. Two or more monitors. Free snacks and free lunches. Modern software stack (whatever that is). Or full-time remote.

+ for full time remote ( I can deal with everything else, but commuting just feels so antiquated now... we ARE living in the digital age right? )

I'm holding out for cities on the carbon neutral push to offer subsidies for full remote work. Cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to get cars off the road, cheapest way to do that is to remove the need to travel.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#37

Post by 52-6F-62 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #3
hidden_arachnid wrote: post #2

Author of this article here. As long as this initial data-dive came out, there are still a bunch of things we’d like to look at. Does location (say, NYC vs Silicon Valley vs affect these preferences? Does which track (generalist, front-end, mobile) a candidate takes through our process? How does this link with how candidates actually behave when given an offer? Our data set has enough information that we can investig…

As a Houston developer, that chart of motivating factors describes exactly what I'm looking for. I won't work on an ancient Java codebase that has no tests or no deployment pipeline, because doing that is death. Gotta keep moving forward or find yourself sliding backwards. I would say your analysis is spot on and I could have written the same article myself. Companies should realize doing things that seem "fluffy" an…

> Companies should realize doing things that seem "fluffy" and not entirely necessary, like moving to a newer tech stack, might be worth it as it will make it easier to attract new talent. And if they stay behind, they might encounter the famous "dead sea effect" and wonder why things break, and every new feature takes forever -- the best technically minded people have left for greener pastures.

I think when they get to this stage they outsource to small dev mills. I don't know about Houston, but here in Toronto there are plenty of those who do "enterprise" work that consists of writing something once and walking away leaving any leftover internal developers to manage it. I've worked in ecosystems where that kind of stuff will stick around for 10+ years, broken and bandaged with no documentation. Sometimes even more.

Many companies that operate that way don't want to pay for a development team. They just want it working. Hell, sometimes they can't justify the headcount of having a few developers on board but can easily get away with dropping $250 - 500k a year to outsource the work.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#38

Post by wsc981 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #7

At the risk of sounding cynical, this is really the standard drive in all jobs: money and opportunity for more money and higher status.

Personally I couldn’t care less about status, but money is very important to me, because I want to “retire” (work on my own stuff and by my own schedule) by the time I’m 45.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#39

Post by elindbe2 »

conanbatt wrote: post #30
elindbe2 wrote: post #8

I wonder how many people in the survey interpret "opportunities for professional growth" as "opportunities to get rich". To me that makes the survey data more understandable. People, myself included, basically want more money for less hours (AKA work/life balance).

Thats one way to look at it, but to get rich you want to join companies that are growing like crazy. A company that grows 20% like google offers high cash low stock. But a company that grows 100% every year can make you a millionaire in a couple of years. Its true startups lotteries are not great for employees in general, but who would have bet that UBER wouldn't IPO in 2014? or some other companies like Airbnb, etc.

There are ways to get rich inside the career world. For example, become a managing director at a big bank.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#40

Post by dang »

bluedino wrote: post #16

Is Triplebyte paying for product placement here now? They've taken over Reddit.

Nobody pays for or gets product placement on HN. You have to make something readers find interesting. I assume that's the case with the current submission, since it hasn't been affected by moderators or by any of the below.

We do sometimes place stories that we or a small number of story reviewers think the community might like. That program is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there. Such stories get lobbed by software randomly onto the bottom half of the front page, whence they fall off in a few minutes unless people upvote them. The purpose is to make HN more interesting (because https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Many good submissions fall through the cracks and this is a way to give some a second crack.

Anyone who knows of a story that deserves a second chance like this should email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider throwing it in that pool. It's ok to ask this for one of your own stories, but it's better if you just ran across something and think it's cool.

By the way, you can see a partial list of these at https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are the ones that were too old to be lobbed directly when we saw them, so we emailed the submitter and invited them to repost it instead. It's on my list to publish a more comprehensive set of lobbed stories.

There are two other types of placed submission that HN does as a way to give back to YC for funding this place: job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs) and Launch HNs for startups (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).

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