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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

#331

Post by dkersten »

badpun wrote: post #144
stakhanov wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I’m similar. I have one multi year gap and a number of smaller gaps. Nobody has ever commented on or asked me about them. I do put any relevant projects I’ve done in that time on my CV, if I have any, but I done’t always have much technical stuff to show for the time. I have started startups though and run a programming meet-up, in mostly asked about those.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#332

Post by ramblerman »

sgift wrote: post #330
chrissnell wrote: post #125

It's a little peculiar how this blog post really pushes the inclusiveness angle despite the numbers showing clearly that it is not a big priority for prospective employees. They even go as far as highlighting that the sampled women want inclusiveness 171% more than the sampled men, which sounds pretty strong, but hides the real story when you look at the _actual numbers_. Only 15% of women ranked inclusion as a top p…

> Only 15% of women ranked inclusion as a top priority, which is telling. The problem with top rank only is that the top spot is basically a dice roll between various things which are important for people. A "top 3" (or another number significantly smaller than all categories asked, but more than 1) is usually far more interesting and less driven by chance. That doesn't invalidate what you wrote - maybe it is unimpor…

Top rank is a random dice roll but the things that were voted by less people are less so?

I’m not sure what argument you are making.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#333

Post by sgift »

ramblerman wrote: post #332
sgift wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only 15% of women ranked inclusion as a top priority, which is telling. The problem with top rank only is that the top spot is basically a dice roll between various things which are important for people. A "top 3" (or another number significantly smaller than all categories asked, but more than 1) is usually far more interesting and less driven by chance. That doesn't invalidate what you wrote - maybe it is unimpor…

Top rank is a random dice roll but the things that were voted by less people are less so? I’m not sure what argument you are making.

The point is that it's usually pretty easy to say "here, I give you 15 categories, tell me 3 which are important to you" while "find the one most important" is not. The order between top picks is mostly arbitrary.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#334

Post by eropple »

shawnz wrote: post #250
themarkn wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nonsense and worse words. It's a market. Undervaluing ourselves only hurts ourselves.

The net revenue per software developer at any even moderately successful tech company is so eye-poppingly high that demanding a solid cut of it is still a bargain.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#335

Post by eropple »

AznHisoka wrote: post #20
umvi wrote: post #14

Am I the only one here that likes growth because I like learning? I try and grow all the time in non-professional areas of my life even though there is no direct monetary compensation for doing so (such as learning new languages, instruments, etc.)

Outside of work, absolutely. At work though, I find my thirst for learning new technical things has disappeared as I've gone older. What has grown instead is the thirst for learning new things in or related to my industry (domain knowledge). Like the problems my customers are facing, or where the industry is headed, or why they have been doing things a certain way.

This matches me pretty well, too. I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to get a broad base of knowledge very young and now don't have to run to catch up so much; because of it most of what I have to learn now are variations on a theme. Which is good, 'cause like you I've got way too many things to learn about the company and the industry and how to best apply those skills therein.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#336

Post by eropple »

wocram wrote: post #111
ptero wrote: post #107

Growth is good, but it means different things to different people. Someone might want more money, another opportunities to attend and present at conferences, third a path to management, fourth a path to "technical expert at large", etc. etc. And mistakes can backfire: offer a management path to a person who wants more technology and he may think "ouch, bureaucracy and PowerPoint ahead". I think a general (and genuine…

What does technical expert at large mean to you? I have some idea from my experience, but it seems like it's usually a nebulous role that nobody asked for.

This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will not hire for. My current employer did, and it's a genuinely engaging role for me while also providing broad benefits to the engineering group overall. You're right in that it often de facto devolves to somebody who can sorta do it; my M.O. in my career has been instead to chase those roles, to be wide and deep and to plug as tightly as I can into the actual business hierarchy to understand how to solve high-value problems while exposing the results to the business to validate the time/effort/money expended.

My current job is the most fun job I've ever had and I'm excited to be making stuff that people actually want to use, both in terms of our B2C product and the tools I work on for developers internally. I run our infrastructure team, with my focus there being around developer empowerment and developer-managed cloud resources for apps and services, and the necessary downstack education that that implies. But I've also done a lot of the formative work on our new APIs because I'd open-sourced a bunch of stuff in our stack and I've been building a lab so we can figure out what makes some web filters think our device (we sell in-home exercise equipment) is an "IoT device" that needs to be blackholed away from our API.

I think you kinda have to run towards the fire, though. If it's high-value and requires pretty broad understanding of a grab bag of topics, I tend to move towards it--and it is always tremendously interesting and a lot of fun.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#337

Post by PeterStuer »

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…

You observe a correlation but not necessarily causation.

Technical jobs that are well payed and well respected are found more often in companies that produce a product or service that is sold rather than in companies that sell your time, whether directly or under the guise of 'projects'. If your time-sheet impacts the bill to the customer, you are the product being sold. The reason to avoid the latter is that all benefits to you, either salary or equipment/working conditions, are seen as expenses that impact the margin on the rate, while in a product company they are far more likely to written of as investments into the IP producing engine.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#338

Post by pure-awesome »

RussianCow wrote: post #316
viscanti wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.

This is accurate, although to be fair to myself, I didn't know I would be on call until after the plans were made. With that said, I take issue with this being an "obvious outcome" and the notion that I was "training" our staff to use my wife's number. I was explicit with the company (at least I thought) about the need to use her number only being applicable for that weekend; the fact that some people tried to use it…

I suspect "training" here was meant much in the same way the person in the following story "trained" their cat that they're entitled to food when they high-five:

https://the-sky-traveler.tumblr.com/post/152838744627/my-bro...

> my brother is teaching his cat how to high five by giving her a treat every time she successfully taps her hand to his hand, which is all well and good, but now she thinks that she is entitled to food every time she high fives someone. i can’t eat in the same room as her anymore because she’ll just bap my hand rapid fire and then go nyoom straight in for my pizza like no Kelly that’s illegal go finish ur own dinner

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#339

Post by badpun »

rabidrat wrote: post #184
badpun wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Are you over 40 yet? It changed for me this last job hunt.

I'm 38. We'll see what happens in a couple of years. In any case, these enterprise companies usually have a position of architect on their teams, where grey hair are even an advantage. I don't like this job, as it's more headaches than coding in a lot of ways, but when if ages turns out to be a thing, then I guess I'll be architecting (I've done it several times already, so I have the CV for that).

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#340

Post by [deleted] »

adrianpike wrote: post #57
farisjarrah wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some cognitive dissonance that I can't seem to get over while reading your comment. While your statement is technically true, I just don't see it being true in the real world. Any time I have gotten a job that has paid better, it also came with more challenges and more difficulty and invariably more of a time investment(even if that means studying outside of work). Maybe I am just taking the wrong jobs...

It's possible the OP is thinking from a consulting or contract perspective, because my experience is in line with yours - as my salary grows, so does my sphere of influence, but also my scope of responsibility, and that usually has meant more time investment. The thing that's interesting though, is on the consulting side, as my rates and overall project cost have increased, the time investment to close a sale has als…

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