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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

triplebyte.com

201–210 of 408 posts

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#201
post #122

> 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 wh…

true story: sister was hired at a big company as a tester with degrees in bio and comp sci. The manager had her doing manual testing for a year. She aspired to be a developer. Even offered to automate testing on her own time after work. The manager told her if she has extra time, she should do more manual testing instead. When a dev position opened up on the team, he just hired some coop guy instead for it without ev…

Why did she take a job as a tester if she was a CS grad with developer aspirations?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#202

I don’t think hiring managers really want to hire the best programmers. They want people they feel comfortable managing, someone who isn’t going to be challenging them. There is no risk in leaving roles open, in fact it contributes to their job security as long as there is VC money to burn. That is why the coding challenges are so popular, it communicates “here, do what I say.”

I have been freelance for years, recently I did some interviews for full time positions and I can't agree with you more. Companies that need freelancers are primarily concerned with can you do the job, there's a deadline, there's a contract, there's some urgency.

Most companies I have interviewed with for full time roles advertise that they are a hiring for several roles but often are just hoping that someone who speaks at a lot of conferences or is a ex-FANG higher up will apply (I've heard this from friends on the inside).

I have been very open about what my experience is and what I'm looking for. Somehow every full time job interview feels like getting picked apart to pieces while most freelance interviews feel like someone genuinely trying to assess if you can be useful to them.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I tried this once when I was on call and I still got called. And for a while after that, whenever someone couldn't reach me on my phone, they would call my wife. So really, it was a lose-lose.

That strikes me as wildly out of bounds. I imagine your wife has a job too, and her own work issues to deal with. I'd be very upset with the individual bothering my spouse because I hadn't returned their call fast enough for their tastes.

People in desperation tend not to think things through, especially when customers are the ones telling them that there's an issue. After the second occurrence, I explained to the relevant parties that my wife's phone cannot be used as a secondary contact for myself, and it didn't happen again after that, so I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. It was annoying, yes, but no one was pestering my wife on purpose.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#204

Don't give coding quizzes if they can provide better evidence of their ability. It's unfair in the least, rude at the worst to pigeon-hole "senior" programmers into scenarios / pop quizzes. Let them show off recent personal projects. They'll probably have no problem spending a weekend hacking on something they're passionate about. Be a serious employer: Convince the best programmers (whatever that means) why they sho…

There is a big difference between joining a startup in growth phases vs an existing player.

* Startups have less with financials, but more with growth. Stock options are a big deal, as you are betting on that growing. It is a gamble, but it can pay off...or go no where. * Existing players need the 401k with matching and other incentives. There is often very little growth there, you need the long term investments.

But I really have no idea why I need a union contract. Dealing with HR is bad enough, now we have to throw in another dump-ass manager into the mix?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#205
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I am going to hazard a guess: you have not been exposed to some of the nuttier regulations within this space.

The regulatory demands in financial technology, and especially in those industries where both the regulators as well as majority of the players may not be technically literate, are effectively the anti-thesis of robust and reliable engineering. When the industry regulations demand that for every potentially disruptive action (recovering from an outage is very much potentially disruptive) there has to be a named individual - not even a role, but an individual - to sign off on every single release step... This is why an outage can last for hours. An engineer, or even a lead, is with high probability not allowed to sign off on an out-of-hours deployment. The fix might take 20 minutes to identify, 5 minutes to implement, 15 minutes to test, and 10 minutes to roll out. But until the organisation can get the named [supposedly responsible] person online, the fix must wait, unreleased.

And the irony? The wider dysfunction may be imposed by the regulations, but it has been requested by the industry at large. It is the result of the industry players, majority of whom are incapable (read: technologically illiterate) of interpreting prescriptive regulations. So instead of figuring out how to meet expectations and adapt their processes, they have been lobbying for the regulators to come up with highly descriptive playbooks and step-by-step instructions. These sequences then specify rules and requirements that allow technologically incompetent players to comply, even if they do not understand why they are doing the things.

And then these regulatory playbooks become the One True Way[tm], effectively forcing dysfunctional practices, but also actively preventing any process improvements.

It's cargo-culting taken to the extreme: "do this and you will not be found to be non-compliant, even if the quality is utter shite". The worst part of this all is that the descriptive regulations make every effort to strip engineers of their agency or decision power. Every "modern" best practice is explicitly ruled as non-compliant and hence effectively illegal. I use scare quotes around modern to highlight that these practices are by no means modern and have been known since ancient times. There are research papers from 1950's that explicitly endorse [rapid] iterative bottom-up approach as the only sensible way forward.

The finance industry regulations explicitly reject them because these studies assume that engineers can be trusted to know what they are doing.

So... to anyone wondering why finance industry jobs are generally thought of as soul-sucking: that's why. They are subject to regulations, expressly designed to deprive individuals of their agency.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true story: sister was hired at a big company as a tester with degrees in bio and comp sci. The manager had her doing manual testing for a year. She aspired to be a developer. Even offered to automate testing on her own time after work. The manager told her if she has extra time, she should do more manual testing instead. When a dev position opened up on the team, he just hired some coop guy instead for it without ev…

Why did she take a job as a tester if she was a CS grad with developer aspirations?

Why not? I do contract work for a big, public company, they have dozens of QA testers and every path is available for them (becoming a dev, analyst, manager, ... I've seen all). It's not even just an entry job for CS grads, many become senior testers as well and don't want to move to a dev position.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, when would you think these prototypes should be best built? Surely not on my free time, right? If the company is not interested on listening to new ideas, and you're keen on participating in something you would like to help build, then perhaps this is not the right company for you.

I have a project right now that I am thinking of building a prototype for on my own time and pitching to my company, because the company will basically have to sell the idea to another business. Why would I do this? Because then I can say how much I want to be compensated for my idea getting the company new business.

I honestly wish you all the best, and hope that works for you.

Just please be aware that after you've delivered, you loose power for negotiation. Therefore I would probably rethink the timeline choosen for agreeing on a reward "then I can say how much I want to be compensated for..".

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#208

I don’t think hiring managers really want to hire the best programmers. They want people they feel comfortable managing, someone who isn’t going to be challenging them. There is no risk in leaving roles open, in fact it contributes to their job security as long as there is VC money to burn. That is why the coding challenges are so popular, it communicates “here, do what I say.”

I have been freelance for years, recently I did some interviews for full time positions and I can't agree with you more. Companies that need freelancers are primarily concerned with can you do the job, there's a deadline, there's a contract, there's some urgency. Most companies I have interviewed with for full time roles advertise that they are a hiring for several roles but often are just hoping that someone who spe…

You and me both. I just went through the Triplebyte process after my last contract wrapped up. Passed their exam and interview and went on-site at multiple companies. In the end it was a total waste of time and very stressful. I would go so far as to say that if you have been successful with startups and equity that it would be a net negative for you because the 5 peers you will be interviewing with will feel threatened as well. Rinky-dink organizations really don’t want very good people, they want people they feel comfortable with. Luckily I have a network which allows me to bypass all this.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? That's not what the person you replied to is saying. The above person is saying that companies which pay well also tend to respect their employees more, so seek out a higher salary because those companies also tend to offer better benefits/culture.

That isn't necessarily true. There's a difference between respect and benefits/culture.

Some would say that Google, in all its free lunch glory, doesn't respect its employees that well consider they've had employees go on strike due to their policies.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#210
Is it just me, or did they twist the data in order to put "inclusive workplace" at the first place in the rating? Even the adjusted table shows that only 15% of women care enough about inclusivity at work, but the summary puts a lot of emphasis on how women prioritize it...
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