431–440 of 515 posts
To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…
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Similarly, there are plenty of companies here in the Midwest who think it's ok to pay devs 50k/yr, and I want to say in the strongest possible terms fuck that. Employers who won't pay an equitable wage for devs don't deserve to hire them.
I'm not really sure that equitable is the right term to use here. $50k a year may very well be in line with what everyone else at a hypothetical midwestern company is making. I think it's always important to keep in mind that current developer salaries are the result of a constrained market and not because we innately deserve it or something. Yes it is a high-skill job, but there are plenty of high-skill jobs out the…
I spent the first twenty years of my career as a public school teacher, and the last four as a software engineer.
Most of the teachers I knew worked _literally_ twice as hard as the average software engineer I know now, even though they're paid one third as much.
And finding good teachers is just as difficult as finding good ICs. I think the ONLY difference is that it is possible for a lot more people to teach badly than to code badly. And of course that society has decided that teachers aren't worth paying very much.
To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…
It is common knowledge that the average developer leaves after the 2 year mark. When that happens, everyone else is left holding the bag and they become the new experts.
Companies are full of self created abandonware.
Another person leaves and it is now two extra things that the vet has to become the expert on. Then three, then four and on and on. Next thing you know, your vet isn't getting any work done because they are holding too many bags. As the expert, they are in too many meetings trying to keep other people productive. They are pulled into too many critical issues and they are trying to mentor new developers in your ever revolving door of new people.
But they are unproductive
No. They are keeping your company afloat and you aren't compensating them for it.
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I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months." I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does T…
The Japanese corporation I worked for had engineers and managers change jobs every two years. One of the reasons was that they wanted to "cross-train" people. They liked to have a lot of process, and tended to think of employees as "Swiss army knives," that could adapt. They had style guides, and a whole infrastructure (HR and technical), to support this. Lots of training. Not sure how effective it was. I feel that t…
Much of the administrative work related to educational and research program management is handled by the tenured faculty, and we get rotated regularly through administrative positions. In the sixteen years I've been there, I have, like most of my colleagues, served on a dozen or more committees and have managed programs for periods of several years each. The result of this process is that faculty members tend to become, over time, reasonably competent administrators with a broad understanding of how the university functions, and that in turn helps the university—a large, necessarily complex bureaucracy—to function reasonably well.
We also have a small professional administrative staff, and they also get rotated through positions every few years. They must keep really good documentation of what they do, as staff members are usually able to get up to speed on their new jobs very quickly.
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As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.
As long as you don't talk to your manager ahead of time. I watched a colleague tell our manager that the job wasn't in line with what was explained (colleague was right, he wasn't a fit). Instead of the manager moving him into a new roll, my colleague was PIP'd. When my colleague did try to transfer, the PIP blocked it. If you have a good manager, maybe its fine. But if your manager needs some headcount to cut.... do…
Feel free to teach me a lesson, but I feel this could be possible because:
- If people were paid to stay, then the supply of engineers in recruiting pipelines would decrease.
- If top performers were paid to stay, then the mere existence of a "counter-offer" mechanism would open up the door for bidding wars, where each bid is actually positive indicator for the quality of the talent. Today bidding wars largely only exist for somebody with multiple new offers, where neither company actually has a great measure of the talent.
- Retention pay is likely a compounding expense for the employer. Finance departments hates compounding liabilities.
Altogether would it make the labor market more efficient? Probably. Would it make businesses less profitable? Probably.
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I didn't say anything about working extra hours, I specifically said low effort during your billable hours. Sounds like you're talking about the extra time that some places seem to expect. If that's what we're talking about - I totally agree that it's not worth it.
Ignore my last sentence then. All I mean is, I get paid the same whether I put in half effort or full effort. Full effort, which can lead to burnout and stress, is a cost to me. Why would I increase personal cost with no monetary compensation for doing so? They're already paying me for half effort and I keep being told that I'm doing a great job. So I'm not going to go out of my way to do more . Edit: if I could doub…
I don't think the formula is particularly linear. Double value produced means double the salary is likely the wrong equation, but it is right in principle.
If you work hard you will be developing a lot more relevant skills than floating along. This makes you more valuable. Not everyone recognizes, or is willing to pay for that extra value in salary or promotions. But some people will, and some people are.
In the event you strike out on your own as a freelancer or your own business, working in that manner becomes your lifeblood that will make or break you.
I notice developers who switch jobs a lot claim to do so to “grow”. But they might not really stay anywhere long enough to get good mentorship and feedback. Growth takes tough feedback that we often don’t want to hear.
There’s almost no market incentive to “grow”, and much more incentive to job hop, never leaving a honeymoon phase with an employer.
Why would you grow as a developer? It’s much easier to switch jobs for a pay raise.
The market is hot for developers, that there’s very market pressure to grow, TBH. (That is if your priority is purely financial, which often is not the full picture)
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Also director and VP positions skip the leetcode.
Leetcode is one reason people don’t job hop. If you actually have a job, you don’t have time to spend on the silly, non-job-related problems. Leetcode doesn’t filter for skill, it filters for who has too much time on their hands.