I don't disagree, but growth does get old. At a certain point you just want to do your job and be good at it, or at least for some of us that ends up being the case eventually.
Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
161–170 of 408 posts
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This sounds like a disorganized workplace to me. The standard thought experiment is: what happens if gets hit by a bus and dies? What if they're just in a coma for a few weeks? The response to the first satisfies a sudden "I'm quitting" and the response to the second satisfies a sudden "I'm going on vacation". Business is more forgiving of course, since both quitting and vacation planning typically have a time delay.
The simplest response for both is to delegate: " now has temporary or permanent authority in the decisions used to have". That means you need to have a person y for each person x and there needs to be enough trust that person y will make decisions that x would approve of (even if sometimes different). If you're a single-person startup, there is no person y, but then these questions aren't really relevant. As the Pinboard FAQ says, the answer to what happens is the bus will be fine.
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#163The vast majority of programming jobs, like the vast majority of ordinary jobs, are not going to be able to offer growth potential, at least, not growth potential that would actually look appealing to anyone posting here. If the only incentive on the company's part is increased retention, that's just not a good-enough reason to spend time on more than lip service.
My company is a weirdly-effective consulting firm with a staff-augmentation business model. I chalk their success up to two factors. One, there's no middle management, only team leads reporting to a cadre of developer-owners. Second, they've been really good at landing the right kind of clients.
It's rather funny watching them try to figure out how to engage their workforce, but with a staff-aug model, devs feel more like employees of the client rather than of the consultant. So everyone's just kind of meh. It feels a little The Office-ish.
The other consequence is that there is practically zero real growth potential, and no incentive to do anything other than keep butts in chairs. Nobody's going to let me jump from the consultant to the client, the only path up is out.
I hope this business model dies. It feels distinctly evil.
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ove…
> but they usually don't usually like the results of what they asked for.
We're not allowed to say it work because someone thought it was a race thing but... 'pay peanuts, get monkeys'
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#165TBH I would settle for working on a sane codebase. Almost every codebase I have worked on except for my own are a complete mess. Basic things aren't done right e.g. Reproducible builds, source control, code review etc.
It blows my mind that there are still projects managed without git. I've seen entire production projects in a shared network drive with
appname_april_3_2014
appname_april_4_2014
appname_april_4_2014_new_order_schema
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ove…
Their problems sound a lot bigger than "too many bricklayers".
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#167Earlier 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.
I give my boss/coworkers my wife's phone number when I go on vacation. I tell them you have to talk to her to get to me. I then put my phone in airplane mode 95% of the time and use it as a camera. I'll occasionally undo airplane mode to upload photos or check the internets for something, but vacation for me is usually unplugging as well. I've yet to be called with this strategy.
Is giving them your wife's phone simply to discourage them from calling for non-emergency situations? Because in an emergency I highly doubt it would prevent my employer from getting in contact.
I do agree about unplugging, but I've never had a vacation ruined by having a work-related text or call steal my attention for 5 minutes. If me being reachable (not necessarily _available_) puts my employer at ease then it makes it easier for me to take the vacations I want to take because they're more likely to be flexible with my schedule during busy times.
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#168Earlier 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.
Aren't they in the business of funding rocket ships, though?
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#169Fuck that, I've been doing this for 25 years and what I want in order of importance is: 1) Pay me 2) Autonomy
I was surprised that autonomy came in at only 11%, although they only allowed 3 answers...
I'm all for growth myself, but I've always found that people who have some confidence in what they're doing also want autonomy.
Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth
#170Offer 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.
I can't imagine not having any remote days in the week. Unfortunately, many enterprise jobs in my area expect people in their seat 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
I'm hoping to polish my skills and eventually find something 100% remote even if its less thank $100k. I want to buy a lake front house, and get on a jetski/boat during my lunch break.