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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

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Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#81

Post by PopeDotNinja »

ravenstine wrote: post #55
trilila wrote: post #10

Don’t treat developers like bricklayers. Sack any product manager or manager that does it. This is the root of all evil, radical as it may sound. There needs to be a balance between engineering and product delivery, but too much emphasis on product delivery leads to tech debt, cutting too many corners and poor tech choices. Not to mention stress and little to no job satisfaction. Give devs some time to build somethin…

But that's exactly the kind of employee that most businesses want: interchangeable bricklayers . I get that getting good developers and facilitating good code requires incentives, but this is usually at odds with the perspective of business owners, which is that employees are both a liability and an asset. Lousy developers are (seemingly) low-liability and good assets because they can make it work for cheap and, if s…

> But that's exactly the kind of employee that most businesses want: interchangeable bricklayers.

That's what they want... until their needs change.

I did a contract at a company where I was the test automation guy. The dev team didn't want to right tests, and they were happy to convert requirements thrown over wall A into the code the threw over wall B. The QA team caught the wall B code, and threw their results over wall D. Things took forever, but everyone was happy... until pressure to ship faster started to come down from the top.

To speed things up, they hired me to automate all the things. Well, the dev team weren't interested in helping me learn anything, and the dev manager even told me to my face that he wouldn't ass test coverage unless management asked him to & gave him extra time to make that happen. The QA team weren't coders, and they didn't really have any incentive to help me make things go faster. The build & release guy wasn't interested in getting tests integrated into the Rube Goldberg of a process that he managed.

They were all great bricklayers who told themselves they were agile because they had 1 week sprints, daily stand ups, and a all sorts of other processes. But when taking forever was no longer good enough, instead of trying to grow with it, they resisted & fought it. My role was pretty miserable, and I quit after a few months. On my way out the door, I learned that I was like the 5th person to walk, and they were planning on seeking interchangeable bricklayer #6.

In my experience, companies want interchangeable bricklayers, but they usually don't usually like the results of what they asked for.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#82

Post by artsyca »

trilila wrote: post #10

Don’t treat developers like bricklayers. Sack any product manager or manager that does it. This is the root of all evil, radical as it may sound. There needs to be a balance between engineering and product delivery, but too much emphasis on product delivery leads to tech debt, cutting too many corners and poor tech choices. Not to mention stress and little to no job satisfaction. Give devs some time to build somethin…

I've had some conversations with managers and everyone agrees it's `employee mentality` that kills it for everyone; devs are a fickle bunch and although we all may agree in spirit to the words above, I doubt you'd actually gain any consensus as to what the words mean per se

I'd say the weak link across the board is the notion of corporacy and what it means, as well as what professional work ought to look like

fresh-faced devs straight out of university or college believe it's similar to their academic life, you get an assignment, you turn it in, you get graded cue morpheus meme: what if I told you professional life is nothing like university life?

similarly, we can't discount the international landscape of contractors and jumped-up leadership types we have to deal with, once again everyone has different ideas about what work looks like and it ranges from factory work to academic research to everything in between

A while back a bunch of consummate craftsmen worth very little in practice ruined the party for everyone with their pedantry in terms of technical concerns and set off a series of chain reactions that has quite disempowered all technology professionals

unless you're willing to revisit all your assumptions from the ground up, you'll be having this conversation again and again until you're an old coder in diapers tethered to a laptop on a walker

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#83

Post by stakhanov »

wolco wrote: post #65
stakhanov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That equation is a theoretical one. On the whole, jobs that offer high $/hr will mandate crazy hours. Jobs that will allow you to go 20 hr/wk, or 10 hr/wk will usually not pay you well on a per-hour basis either. -- I predict that in response to what I just wrote, there will be people showing off about how they managed to make a consulting lifestyle business like that actually work because of how awesome they are. --…

I find 10 hours at high cost easier to sell than 80 hours at a high cost most want to pay for 25 of thoses hours.

I agree. There's probably a dead zone somewhere in the middle. One side of the deadzone there's an equilibrium doing fulltime at a mediocre hourly rate. The other side of the deadzone there's an equilbrium doing a very small number of hours at an exorbitant rate. But for that latter model, I would expect a significant number of non-billable hours for project acquisition. (Maintaining client relationships outside of paying projects, doing sales work around new leads, doing stuff like PR and writing articles and whatever else you do to be recognized as an expert/authority in some field, etc. etc.) so that the billable and non-billable hours probably also average out towards a mediocre effective hourly-rate. Early in your career, that probably means you have to do crazy hours there too. Later on, you might get dividends in the form of not having to work so hard on sales any more.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#84

Post by richardwhiuk »

conanbatt wrote: post #70
XMPPwocky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a more effective tactic, in expectation, than working a well-paid job at an established company and then going to Vegas every year to bet a decent chunk of your salary?

Well, Sam Altman & Andressen have strong opinion on it: join rocket ships. You can also get a much higher position at a well paid job if one of the bets pays off, or if you find growth opportunities. While getting a promotion at google might take you 4 years, in a high growth startup you might jump 2 steps in 6 months.

You might, or you might go nowhere if the rocket ship falls over, which is much more likely.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#86

Post by logifail »

chadash wrote: post #76
nscalf wrote: post #5

I'm a software engineer with ~3 years of experience. I also want professional growth. Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it. levels.fyi sort of convinced me that being a good engineer is a life changing event for more than 1 genera…

> "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it." And it's one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k/year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior…

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more

The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#87

Post by triceratops »

asdfman123 wrote: post #78
triceratops wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New programming languages, libraries, and frameworks often tend to go in lockstep with semi-conductor and hardware advances.

Advancements in semiconductor research have led to wonderfully inefficient front end frameworks.

That too :-) But front-end frameworks don't constitute the entirety of new language and framework developments.

For instance, having cycles and memory to spare made using fun languages such as Python and Ruby practical.

Advances in hardware let (and force) us (to) write applications of far greater complexity. Writing a mobile game is way more involved than a payroll application on big iron.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#88

Post by aczerepinski »

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.

I’m 80-90% remote, and it’s such a huge lifestyle perk that I’d need at least a 50% pay bump to even consider anything in the city. I hope this becomes more and more the norm for tech jobs because everyone deserves ample time with their family and friends.

For me now the baseline is remote + good work life balance and vacation package.

If we can throw exciting tech, more money, etc on top of that, great.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#89

Post by stakhanov »

Retric wrote: post #74
stakhanov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That equation is a theoretical one. On the whole, jobs that offer high $/hr will mandate crazy hours. Jobs that will allow you to go 20 hr/wk, or 10 hr/wk will usually not pay you well on a per-hour basis either. -- I predict that in response to what I just wrote, there will be people showing off about how they managed to make a consulting lifestyle business like that actually work because of how awesome they are. --…

Taking time off between jobs is a real option for most programmers. Depending on how long you stay at each company it can even add up to a few years of time off without having obvious gaps on the resume.

You have to have the stomach for that... Personally, I couldn't get any real enjoyment out of a time period where I didn't know when/where/whether I have another job lined up, and opportunities to get truly trustworthy commitments on start dates that are a significant period of time in the future are rare.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#90

Post by diminoten »

dpeck wrote: post #50
trilila wrote: post #10

Don’t treat developers like bricklayers. Sack any product manager or manager that does it. This is the root of all evil, radical as it may sound. There needs to be a balance between engineering and product delivery, but too much emphasis on product delivery leads to tech debt, cutting too many corners and poor tech choices. Not to mention stress and little to no job satisfaction. Give devs some time to build somethin…

in my experience many developers want to be bricklayers (not to discount bricklaying, there's an art to it, but they're focused on the individual bricks, not the other aspects of the building). They get annoyed when they're asked to think about the bigger picture and just want to focus on the code, the architecture, and whatever is new and shiny. It is largely due to these sorts of developers that we've developed all…

This is both true and hard to deal with, because sometimes these bricklayers will a) assume everyone is trying to be a bricklayer, and b) will actively attack non-bricklayers because of the perception that they're being made to look bad.

I honestly don't yet know how to fit everyone together.

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