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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

#241

Post by ghostpepper »

davidw wrote: post #231
enraged_camel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life. Okay, it is time for some harsh love. You won't like it, and I'll get downvotes, but whatever. It needs to be said. My parents are both doctors, and they are in their 60s now. And you know what? They still work their asses off, on many evenings and weekends, trying…

Do hospitals expect doctors to work on some patients for free over the weekend to see if they're worth hiring? I'm guessing no.

Hospitals expect doctors to have up to date skills, whether they learned them on the job or in their "free time". Doing medicine on a person and writing some code that will never be used in production are not really comparable.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#242

Post by matt-snider »

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…

20 days is the legal minimum in Germany. I think a lot of other countries have similar rules.

It's kind of sad that in the US and Canada, 4 weeks vacation is special, and 2 weeks vacation is legal.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#243

Post by ghostpepper »

lobotryas wrote: post #234
git-pull wrote: post #183

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…

Except the “have them show off personal projects” route can be discriminatory. At least by giving people standard questions/puzzles your team (hopefully) determined as being relevant you are giving everyone the same chance at success.

I think it's important to clarify what you mean by "discriminatory". I think many people equate that term with "criminal" and I'm not sure if that's what you meant to imply.

After all, to discriminate can also mean to accurately select the good programmers from among the bad.

The law (which varies by country) says which things you are not allowed to discriminate based on, but after that it's up to the employer, is it not?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#244

Post by mjevans »

remote_phone wrote: post #224
mjevans wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the OLD days that's how things worked. You got in to a company through the mail room or some other 'get to know the staff' position, then applied for better jobs in the company. Internal hires would typically be tried before looking outside since they'd have a track record that someone wasn't a flake.

I’m an old guy. That’s almost never how it worked. QA was always pigeon holed as QA and rarely considered dev material.

I'm speaking generally, about large companies in the 80s and before (though I'm thinking of a film that 'documented' it and I saw on TV when younger... "The Secret of My Success" (1987)).

The outsourced / pigeonholed employee pattern you're speaking of is something that I recall learning about more in the early 2000s; so it's been around for a while but not widely known outside of the industry.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#245

Post by CompanionCuuube »

themarkn wrote: post #228
enraged_camel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life. Okay, it is time for some harsh love. You won't like it, and I'll get downvotes, but whatever. It needs to be said. My parents are both doctors, and they are in their 60s now. And you know what? They still work their asses off, on many evenings and weekends, trying…

I’m not sure that the lesson to be learned from the medical profession’s overburdening of its professionals is that other well paid industries should follow suit and overburden their own professionals.

Is the medical profession unique in that way? Do lawyers not need to keep up with existing legislation and case law? I know research scientists that use alerting tools for getting notified about publications covering their subject.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#247

Post by davidw »

ghostpepper wrote: post #241
davidw wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do hospitals expect doctors to work on some patients for free over the weekend to see if they're worth hiring? I'm guessing no.

Hospitals expect doctors to have up to date skills, whether they learned them on the job or in their "free time". Doing medicine on a person and writing some code that will never be used in production are not really comparable.

To me there's a difference between

* Keeping skills up to date and occasionally spending a bit of my own time on it. And I mean legit new and interesting things, not just some BS rehashing of an old idea or other churn.

* An emergency situation at work where some extra time and dedication are required. I'm not going to tell the company that I couldn't be bothered to fix the web site that's down because it's 1715 and I'm heading home.

* Professional conferences or learning that might take up some extra time outside of work.

* Doing some random BS over the weekend.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#248

Post by travbrack »

matt-snider wrote: post #242
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…

20 days is the legal minimum in Germany. I think a lot of other countries have similar rules. It's kind of sad that in the US and Canada, 4 weeks vacation is special, and 2 weeks vacation is legal.

There's no minimum in the US

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#249

Post by OJFord »

meowface wrote: post #219
dillonmckay wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am willing to forgo #2 if #1 is high enough.

I'm the opposite. If my living and food expenses are covered, I'll prefer full autonomy over no or minimal autonomy. You can only spend so many years doing things you're asked to do which you don't really want to do before the value added by the extra money is outweighed by the value lost from life in general becoming more depressing and less inspiring.

> If my living and food expenses are covered, I'll prefer full autonomy over no or minimal autonomy.

Where are you living and what will you eat?

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#250

Post by shawnz »

themarkn wrote: post #228
enraged_camel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life. Okay, it is time for some harsh love. You won't like it, and I'll get downvotes, but whatever. It needs to be said. My parents are both doctors, and they are in their 60s now. And you know what? They still work their asses off, on many evenings and weekends, trying…

I’m not sure that the lesson to be learned from the medical profession’s overburdening of its professionals is that other well paid industries should follow suit and overburden their own professionals.

Then salaries in our industry need to decrease if we don't want to be held to a standard of overburdening ourselves.

The salaries in our industry have a precedent which was set by individuals that overburdened themselves. That might have been irrational, but if we want to change that, then we need to accept less pay. We can't have the same rewards as they did while doing less work, even if the amount of work they did was unreasonable.

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