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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

#141

Post by komali2 »

hoov wrote: post #100
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.

Or even nothing goes wrong suddenly. Once, I had a vacation planned for six months and had to spend the long weekend cooped up in my hotel room overseeing a complicated migration.

To play devil's advocate, why was a migration so complicated that your engineers couldn't do it without you if it failed, being done on a vacation that everyone knew about for six months?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#142

Post by childintime »

johnsimer wrote: post #80
wolco wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is spaghetti works better for the ever changing requirement. After awhile the product gets rewritten.

IMO this is extremely false Clean code is most valuable in the fact that you can add new features without old ones breaking You should be able to write clean code from the start without it ever being classified as spaghetti as long as you stick to principles like Law of Demeter, SOLID, etc

I deal (and compete) with smart but professionally mediocre programmers (and hardware designers). Their knowledge is usually limited, but they get 80% of the job done and the customer need is addressed.

Only when the product gets used in a non-typical way or in non-typical circumstances, do the (inevitable) bugs appear. They didn't think their design choices through or they didn't know the limitations of the tool used.

So bugs are considered a known risk, and are managed. Hardware, for example, is swapped under guarantee. The most ugly bugs are fixed, and others are too costly and wait until a redesign.

But the employer likes their qualities: - he gets a mostly rapid schedule, - he gets an employee that doesn't get lost in abstractions, and - he gets to charge the customer again for the next major iteration

Basically they get him an MVP, and the customer keeps paying for each design iteration. We all know how important that is to the bottom line. To him Quality is optional, like benefits are to a job: they end up being important, but the salary usually comes first.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#143

Post by jshowa3 »

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…

This rarely has anything to do with salary and more so to do with what your company can afford.

I've made 60k/yr at jobs where I've had awesome equipment and flexible hours.

People respect you more if you get things done and solve problems. Not because you have a big salary. How often do you think people respect management?

Just geography alone determines salary. I could make double if I simply moved to San Francisco for the same job. Doesn't mean I'm "more respected".

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#144

Post by badpun »

stakhanov wrote: post #89
Retric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do that all the time - like literally my CV has probably 5 or 6 gaps of varying duration (between 3 months and two years). Often, during those gaps I spend some time working on something tech related, so I put that into the gap in the CV.

Even with those gaps, I'm having zero problem finding well-paying jobs. I think it's because, despite those gaps, I represent good value to the employer - I know the latest tech, have done good work in the past, can present coherent and mature opinions during the interview etc. Also, I only do long-term contracts where they explicitly don't care that I'm a job-hopping mercenary that is not ever going to believe the "company mission", because the assumption is that the whole arrangement is temporary anyway. In practice, they always want to retain me and I end up quitting out of boredom after a year of two.

To summarize, the gaps are probably important only when you're in close competition with lots of folks similar to you. But, if you're a bit of an expert in a specific niche (mine is Big Data - Hadoop and related crap, applied in enterprise IT context) and there aren't that many competent candidates around, the gaps suddenly don't matter.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#145

Post by jonny_eh »

cheeky78 wrote: post #119
dpeck wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The opportunity to contribute more than just lines of code should be offered and encouraged, but don't be surprised at how few will be interested." I learned a long ago: 1) I can offer the best ideas that go beyond lines of code, but it usually comes down to the decision of someone in a higher position than me (manager, sales, the CEO, etc) and if they just don't feel like utilizing your ideas, they won't. Fighting…

There's no shortage of ideas, especially within a company. If you want your ideas to win out, you should take advantage of what you do best… making things.

If you combine your idea pitch with a working prototype (doesn't need to be polished), it's odds of getting adopted will be far more likely.

If your idea isn't one that can be prototyped, e.g. "Ask Microsoft for a billion dollars", then you may as well just pitch it, just like anyone else.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#146

Post by taurath »

joshuamorton wrote: post #130
bcyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Delegation of authority is key here. If not for the commander in chief role of the president it’s conceivable they could just delegate decision making to the cabinet.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#147

Post by opportune »

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.

You can absolutely do that, but then you will not get promoted past a certain stage at most companies. I do this because I'm not yet in a very senior position but if I were managing 100 people and in charge of an entire product I doubt I could do that

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#148

Post by notyourday »

I love these kind of surveys. They just demonstrate time and time again how gullible people are, especially those that hire companies like TB to help with hiring.

Want to hire best programmers? Pay. Them. More. Money.

"I want to grow" is a polite way of saying "I want my compensation to grow".

P.S. Do you know why people bend over backwards at interviews for Google/Netflix/Facebook and do not for a Domino's? It is because if they do well on interview at FAANG they would be making mid to high six figures while they would be making sixties as managers at Domino

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#149

Post by yazan94 »

watwut wrote: post #108
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 is more of mark of desorganized workplace then something inherent to senior role.

I disagree. For reference, I work in a big bank and all the high level people are always on call when fecal matter hits the rotating turbines. Often times, theres an issue with this or that feature in production or we are having an issue with a release and we need an emergency signoff. The process stipulates that a high level person is required to give this emergency signoff, and they often want to know what happened, what are our options, which one we chose so there's usually a lot of time spent chasing down answers or people who can answer those questions.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#150

Post by standardUser »

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…

I strongly agree - to me the term "professional growth" is synonymous with higher income and greater future employment opportunities. Not with learning a new framework or language.
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