Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#121

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

elindbe2 wrote: post #73

lotsofpulp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "$X to cover all expenses in lifetime" figure is impossible to calculate, and is not under your control at all. It will be inflated away without your consent, and requires constant evaluation and re-evaluation. My philosophy is to always be investing in capital, whether it be equity, political (relationships with people), or resources.

My spending is not impossible to estimate and for the most part it is very much under my control. If what you said is true then no one could ever reasonably retire at any age.

The relative security afforded by various factors in developed countries (especially USA) since after WW2 up to now may not be available going forward. The biggest challenge is the increasing proportion of non-working people to working people, at least partly due to aging and fewer children.

The part of spending you can't control and which happens to be the largest expense is medical care, which is not a problem right now due to Medicare, but it's already stressing the system and we have quite a ways to go before the aging population maxes out. Retirement ages are already going up and up, and I can definitely foresee rationing of medical care as we push the system to its limits.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#122

Post by cbanek » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

> Second, women engineers prioritize growth to an even greater extent than men, and they place particular secondary emphasis on inclusivity and comfort with their work and environment.

Woman in tech here. I agree completely, and I'd almost say that saying you want to grow your career in an inclusive environment is saying "I want to grow in a place that will actually value me and promote me." Been in so many places where talented women are just not promoted, and it can be so demoralizing.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#123

Post by itronitron » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

bozoUser wrote: post #22

> “Opportunities for professional growth” is the clear winner, appearing 13 percentage points above even “salary”. Ofcourse professional growth is the winner as more often than not is directly proportional to one`s salary. As a s/w engg. "professional growth" is a hybrid of bunch of things - learning new tech, Cloud knowledge(k8s, docker etc.), and well summarized in the lines below by the author: > In short, softwar…

'opportunities for professional growth' is also a signal for 'growing company' and 'lower risk of layoffs' which helps explain why it is a winner

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#124

Post by aczerepinski » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

maltalex wrote: post #25

asdfman123 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Why are we as professionals (myself included, I'm not immune) so obsessed with shiny new things? Updating a product's tech stack just to attract new talent and not because the product needs it is objectively strange. Imagine if roa…

Roads need to be redone all the time either way so presumably if there’s new tech in the road business they do in fact put it to use.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#125

Post by chrissnell » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

It's a little peculiar how this blog post really pushes the inclusiveness angle despite the numbers showing clearly that it is not a big priority for prospective employees. They even go as far as highlighting that the sampled women want inclusiveness 171% more than the sampled men, which sounds pretty strong, but hides the real story when you look at the _actual numbers_. Only 15% of women ranked inclusion as a top priority, which is telling.

It seems pretty apparent to me that most employees (and that includes all genders, races, etc.) don't care nearly as much about inclusiveness as their leadership seems to. After reading this post, it seems to confirm what I've suspected all long: people mostly want money and the potential to make more money in the future.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#126

Post by puranjay » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

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

I can't stress this enough. The more I charged as a consultant, the more my clients would shut up and heed my advice.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#127

Post by the-dude » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #48

typon wrote: post #18

Women value good code-bases more than men. Very interesting.

Of course they do... whose house do you expect to be tidier, an average woman's or an average man's?

Have you ever seen a women's frat house?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#128

Post by artsyca » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #101

chadash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

A nice side effect of this is, if you're making multiple six figures, your chances of being asked to work on bullshit projects that don't matter is much lower, and you can basically pick and choose what to do, and _tell your boss_ what to do as well. Money is not just compensation, it's also a powerful signaling mechanism. People just assume that if your time costs a lot, you must be super good. This is _mostly_ true…

There's another thread that recently rose to prominence about ascertaining the quality of clothing and something along the same lines popped up: expensive clothes are not always high quality, but high quality clothes are generally more expensive -- the cost is a signalling mechanism aka heuristic and like any heuristic it can be gamed

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#129

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #29

logfromblammo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't need classes. I'd like learning new (to me) things to be part of my job , and not tacked on after the fact with third-party seminars and after-hours classes. I can already do that, regardless of my job, and I won't owe my employer anything for it. If I can explore and experiment while working , the work feels less like work .

Yeah, they were wrong there. It should be "Cool, you're an awesome C++ dev. Want to write Node for us?" Most recruiters don't realize how easy it is to change gears like that. I wouldn't be interested in taking outside classes, either. I can already do that for free online.

Q: Can you solve a problem by deconstructing it into smaller, easier problems and solving them?

A: Yes.

Q: Cool. Coolcoolcool. Now... can you do that without violating a bunch of arbitrary constraints?

A: ...As long as they don't restrict Turing-completeness.

Q: I didn't hear a "yes" there.

A: Yes.

Q: So how much experience do you have with our specific set of arbitrary constraints?

A: Uhhh... I never worked here before, so none?

Q: Oof. Well, thanks for coming in. We'll be in touch. Or not. Sometimes we just ghost people. Not to be dicks or anything, it's just that they're no longer worth acknowledging their existence to us.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#130

Post by joshuamorton » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

bcyn wrote: post #104

logifail wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That has nothing to do with seniority, it's 100% about how you draw personal boundaries between work hours and personal hours. You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation.

Once you are an executive, you often have contractual obligations. You are the key decision maker people escalate to. If time sensitive things that need a decision to be made the buck stops with you, no matter where you are.

To give an extreme example, the President (of the US) is never truly unplugged. In the cases where the president is truly unplugged, SoP is for that person to temporarily stop being the President.