461–470 of 515 posts
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This is smart. I left GS right around the time they were starting such an (similar?) initiative. It also makes employees more fungible, on average, which is nice.
This was GS indeed. I personally liked that a lot. I've learn a lot there.
There’s no economical value of holding him back.
It’s cheaper to hire a replacement within planned budget.
Another point — in well organized business any engineer in any position is a replaceable unit.
Otherwise business is not scalable.
So companies do the right thing.
The right question is — why many engineers are staying for so long, even though its not profitable for them after some time/experience?
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I think you're both overestimating those costs and also underestimating the difficulty of just being able to suddenly pay 1.2X for people. Re: institutional knowledge and expertise, etc - we tried to avoid too much concentration. If all the institutional knowledge for system X is tied up in person Z, what if they want to take on to a new roll, or I want to ask them to work on a different system or a new project? I li…
You're trying very hard to dismiss experience specific to a company and industry, but I'm not buying it. Someone who has intimate experience with an established code-base and the company will be vastly more proficient than a new employee of similar intellectual capability. It's why companies often try to hire people within similar industries and tech stacks to help reduce this gap. It's like trying to argue that a me…
Also you maybe discounting the change in code itself even when I have years at a company I’m still continually learning things because I’m working on new things or new things are being built. If I left a new hire would be able to ramp up on these fresh code based without much hassle. So expertise itself has a half-life in a fast moving field like a lot of software shops.
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Speaking from experience, most large tech companies view engineers as area under the curve, as fungible hours. Speaking out about attrition usually doesn’t have any impact at all above the Director level.
> Speaking from experience, most large tech companies view engineers as area under the curve, as fungible hours. Speaking out about attrition usually doesn’t have any impact at all above the Director level. And blindly accepting things as it is, is the root cause of corporate decay. If you want a high performance team that cares about management and the job, management will have to return the favor. If corporate stru…
You need to have a realistic view of how things work to make progress, and managers banding together is comically unrealistic.
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This is the all-important point. It would be insane for me to try my best to make money for a company when the effort reward curve is so non linear. The only reason the idea of "doing the best job you can" is propagated is because it allows one to abuse workers. I could see myself working hard at a company with a flat-ish compensation structure tied directly to the revenue of the company. "If I make a penny my boss m…
And if the revenue tanked would you accept half your salary, say, or would you expect a floor to be applied?
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I worked for a company where devs would rebel because teams were partly re-shuffled at the beginning of a new year! I guess people are different.
Yeah, I don't think it really has to be mandatory, but it certainly should be allowed and encouraged. In the case where people were objecting to being re-shuffled, did they get to pick where they went? Or were they just told? a little agency can help a lot.
In the second year, we had a survey where devs could say what their preference was: (a) team/specific devs (b) topic (c) none
That worked pretty well.
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…
A senior developer on the other hand might say they didn't do much because they think "it was just small things that I've done before". You really have to look at the commits.
Companies have been bankrupted because of the "let's just get two new ones"-mentality, not seeing that the lead time for developers to become relatively productive by knowing the ins and outs of large codebases is very, very long (for backend development, frontend is more cookie cutter).
Never fails to make me smile watching capitalists advocate for planned economies :)
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…
Totally agree, that's exactly how it works for me. I join a company, work hard the first year to get a promotion and do the fun stuff, after that, I relax and stick around to vest most of the stocks and leave around the 2nd/3rd year. I have seen so called "architects" at big co that had been there for decades bringing absolutely no value to the table. And always asked myself why would the the company retain, promote…
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…
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…