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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

triplebyte.com

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Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#391

Post by bostik »

mehrdadn wrote: post #286
bostik wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> There are research papers from 1950's that explicitly endorse [rapid] iterative bottom-up approach as the only sensible way forward. Interested in this... any links?

I'll dig out the archive when back at the office, next week. There is plenty of research into iterative/agile development, slightly less into quality, and surprisingly little on accountability.

The most valuable sources have been just 5 (yes, five) research papers / reports. Luckily they sport citations, but sadly I haven't poured over more than a fraction of them so far.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#392

Post by bostik »

perl4ever wrote: post #319
ddelt wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who has not worked in the heavily regulated finance industry should read the above post, because this person speaks the truth.

As someone who has never worked in the finance industry, I feel like one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the point of it all is to not have millions of dollars just vanish at random as often happens with Bitcoin. Making software engineers happy is not the point.

I agree with your sentiment. However, I believe you are missing the forest from the trees.

The desired result of the regulations is, first and foremost, accountability. This includes, but is not limited to, audit trails and provenance. But because the regulations have been written to specify exactly One True Way[tm] of reaching an adequate level of accountability, they end up causing nasty second-order effects.

As sibling comment by PeterStuer mentions, the unfortunate end result is inventive interpretation to avoid the worst of the disruptions. So from my point of view, the rules put in place to _enforce_ accountability have created perverse incentives to _reduce_ proper accountability.

That can not be a healthy situation either in short or long term.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#393

Post by richardwhiuk »

wyclif wrote: post #293
richardwhiuk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might, or you might go nowhere if the rocket ship falls over, which is much more likely.

But if the rocket explodes on the launching pad, as an employee you don't absorb much risk. You were probably going to jump ship in 2 years anyway, you're just doing it earlier than you thought and you can now say "I was at ___ when they were growing at ___% year-to-year" when you're interviewing for your next job.

You've probably taken 6 months to a year, at a lower salary - possibly longer.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#394

Post by Jach »

bostik wrote: post #205
Jach wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Thanks for the great comment. I don't think we're in disagreement. Government-mandated disorganized workplaces are still disorganized... I wonder about the thought experiment for such an environment though. Tragedy has a cruel way of striking from multiple vectors. You might have a critical issue that demands immediate deployment of a fix, but just before then you learned that the only named person who can legally sign-off on the deployment was involved in a fire and is dead/missing. I suspect the decision would get escalated to someone who might not have the legal authority that the dead person had, but who has enough business authority to make the call on whether the financial damage to the company from not rolling out the fix now will exceed the fine the government will impose for not following the regulation + any potential negligence lawsuit costs if the not-fully-approved fix causes even more issues.

You're right I haven't been directly exposed to such regulations (our emergency releases also require sign-off from management but there are multiple people who can approve and different people for different stages) and I don't ever intend to be. Even for something much lighter. At my current job I refused a request from my boss/boss's boss to go through the process of obtaining a Public Trust Position which would be necessary if I needed to debug my team's product for one of our government customers. Fortunately I didn't have to quit over it, and I still got promoted later. Other people on other teams just went along with it. So I guess I'd amend my thinking (aided by your comments on lots of the regulation in finance being self-requested) that for people who get themselves into a position where it's "not possible" to go 100% on vacation, regardless of the level of dysfunction at the org, many of them generally don't mind it. If they did, they could switch jobs, and anyone concerned about accepting such a deal should weigh that instead of imagining that there's nothing to be done.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#395

Post by meowface »

thedufer wrote: post #348
meowface wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can turn extra money pretty directly into time with actual autonomy (i.e. not working) pretty easily, though.

That's true, but it depends on the income rate, I guess. If I need to work a soul-sucking job for 15 years to be able to spend the rest of my life with mostly full autonomy, I think that trade-off isn't worth it. If it were working a soul-sucking job for 1 or 2 years to get enough to be autonomous for life, then it's probably worth it.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#396

Post by [deleted] »

titanomachy wrote: post #320
meowface wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is SEO spam, and TripleByte does seem to use a lot of "growth hacks" or something, because I see their ads on pretty much any platform that I see ads for (like on mobile apps, where I don't have any easy-to-use ad blockers), and they're mentioned on HN at a surprisingly high rate. But (I think?) I've seen people here genuinely recommend them, and I also don't think YC would work with and promote a company they did…

They do advertise very aggressively, to the point where I think they risk damaging their reputation. But I guess they've done the analysis and decided it's worth it. I went through their process and got lots of practice interviewing. Even though I didn't take any of the offers I got through them I was able to use one to negotiate a much higher salary at the job I did take. Their recruiters and interviewers treated me…

[deleted]

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#397

Post by thedufer »

meowface wrote: post #395
thedufer wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn extra money pretty directly into time with actual autonomy (i.e. not working) pretty easily, though.

That's true, but it depends on the income rate, I guess. If I need to work a soul-sucking job for 15 years to be able to spend the rest of my life with mostly full autonomy, I think that trade-off isn't worth it. If it were working a soul-sucking job for 1 or 2 years to get enough to be autonomous for life, then it's probably worth it.

Yes, there is some preferred balance between the two for any one person. But for reference, 15 years to retirement means shaving 25 years of full-time work off the typical career. That seems...pretty appealing.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#398

Post by softawre »

v-erne wrote: post #343
wysifnwyg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be overjoyed for even a single remote day a week. Give me the four day at-work week.

I'm guessing that You dont have kids :) I would say the same few years ago, but having young children now causes that I have nowhere to work at home that is relatively peacefull and quiet.

You need a bigger house with an office. At my house, I use the finished basement as the office and it works very well.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#399

Post by c0vfefe »

Iv wrote: post #327
puranjay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more I can't stress this enough. The more I charged as a consultant, the more my clients would shut up and heed my advice.

My first boss started to respect me after we had a shouting negotiation with him over my work contract. The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Work long hours? Develop additional tool during your free time? Help clients more than your job requires? You are a sucker. Manage to shout enough to get a raise? Now you are a champion.

Maybe it's only made toxic by those who need to shout to negotiate a raise.

Re: Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

#400

Post by 1000units »

Iv wrote: post #327
puranjay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more I can't stress this enough. The more I charged as a consultant, the more my clients would shut up and heed my advice.

My first boss started to respect me after we had a shouting negotiation with him over my work contract. The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Work long hours? Develop additional tool during your free time? Help clients more than your job requires? You are a sucker. Manage to shout enough to get a raise? Now you are a champion.

I've had the same experience. Whenever there's money involved, people will take advantage of you unless you adequately convince them it's a mistake.
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