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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

triplebyte.com

271–280 of 408 posts

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#271
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…

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Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#272
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This makes a lot of sense but goes against the article. Making more doesn't always give you more freedom. If you want power you have to pay for it. In your case why would you push for a higher role knowing the tradeoffs?

Because the money is worth the loss of flexibility, for me, under certain circumstances (envision a yield curve of salary vs. some proxy of work-life balance). Specifically I think the tradeoffs are worth it up to staff/senior staff and first rung of management, depending on the team.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#273
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…

Creator of levels.fyi here - a big part of making the site was to highlight the economic impact of working a technical job and the exponential growth it comes with as you progress in your career (Glassdoor sucked at showing this). There are just more & better opportunities the farther you go!

Hey, thanks for the site - it's pretty cool.

I was curious what made you pick your cities, though. Data availability? Boulder and not Boston surprised me.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#274
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…

> 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.

Only if you are not good at process. If you have solid practices, documentation and system design skills you can make yourself removable, then you can go on leave whenever and things will be fine.

A good way to measure this is look at how long it takes to do handover when someone leaves a project. If it is more than half an hour of showing someone where the repo is and a brief explanation then you have a problem that can be fixed with better processes. Ideally, someone should be able to pick up a project or a product very quickly as all the information they need should be in a simple, easily navigable format that they can consume and understand. I realise that is an ideal case but if you are senior enough to lead you can be senior enough to never make yourself a dependency and that callback never comes because it is never required. Ensuring management above you understands your value is another problem (anyone who can code themselves out of a job is worth keeping around and giving harder jobs to and good managers will understand that).

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#275
post #263

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.

Maybe I don't understand your situation, but screening your calls and staying in airplane mode while you're on-call doesn't seem to be appropriate.

It wasn't on purpose; that particular weekend we were going somewhere my phone didn't get any reception, but my wife's did. So, not exactly the same situation as OP.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#276
post #91

Again, with the demonizing PHP as a staid old language to stick with. So silly, and completely incorrect, as PHP frameworks and the language itself continue to innovate and keep Up and in some cases are cutting edge.

Don’t worry. Give it a few years. The reason php has such a bad rap is that it was so important for low-skill web-devs, so there’s a lot of bad php out there. In 10 years, React will have the same reputation. Again, not because it’s bad, but because it’s usefulness is so high that all the worst devs will be using it.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#277

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?

Where (else) should someone(they) have gone to get an entry-level job that starts them on the desired career path?

That's a question that I don't think has been explored.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#280

Want to hire the best programmers? Good luck. Same as "want to pick the best stocks", "want to win the lottery", "want to marry the best person", "want to get the best price", ...

We rather look for nice, pleasant people. When I get excited to be around them, I do better job. I believe it works for others too.
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