561–570 of 668 posts
Some 20 years ago, I worked at a moderately large software company that sold a desktop application for Mac and Windows. The team had mostly Mac experience and they were just getting their feet wet with Windows. So naturally the Windows version had some problems. At the time, I was known as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help improve that version and help the team get more familiar with Windows programming. I…
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> that's great for covering your a, but the project will still fail and no one will get value / praise for all that time spent Yes the project will fail. But if my manager only cares about speed, why should I care about anything more? Why should an engineer be responsible for a manager's poor decisions?
>Why should an engineer be responsible for a manager's poor decisions? Because the corporate hierarchy demands it. Front-line workers are expendable, much like front-line soldiers. Corporations are not democracies, and neither are militaries. If your job is to write and commit code, you are the corporate equivalent of infantry. In short: a grunt.
And if I am being treated as a grunt, I will act like a grunt aka I don't care more than my bosses. I will even abandon ship at the sign of incompetence and point out the incompetence to others.
Evaluating someone’s performance, especially, software engineers by non-tech people might produce dramatic results. Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine, codenamed tommy . Tommy was an IT guy with incredible skills in networking. He moved to an energy company, fully-owned and operated by the government. Just a few weeks from his arrival, they had to rebuild the entire network from scratch with new, modern,…
He should’ve had a friend make a company and bid for the job. Then, later on, Tommy could be brought on as a contractor for extra pay
In a system that doesn’t have any forms of rewards, this should be a logical path to follow. In fact, Tommy has considered this approach as the way to go from now on but only when he got hit hard by his first experience.
Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.
It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135). 'In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell…
Woah. He has a huge list of "Known for"!
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HR will definitely reject someone because of the title of a blog post. When you have a pile of a hundred CVs and two openings, you disqualify quickly. I'm basing this on real world experience.
If you're letting HR who have no idea what they're doing, go from "a hundred CVs" to "two openings" you are bad at your job. HR's job, like legal, or many other departments, is to facilitate what you actually do which in this case means work like chasing references and ensuring the candidates have somebody who can answer stupid logistics questions without bothering the interviewer, not figuring out who is the best fi…
What I said was different. How many CVs should we eliminate before calling people back for the two openings? What if the pile is 500 CVs? Call all of them? I guess you stop coding for the next two months and that's ok? Or maybe you let HR help you sort the CVs by priority.
> who have no idea what they're doing
I've worked with some very talented HR people. Maybe you haven't been so lucky.
> HR's job, like legal, or many other departments, is to facilitate what you actually do which in this case means work like chasing references and ensuring the candidates have somebody who can answer stupid logistics questions without bothering the interviewer.
HR does more than facilitate. They protect the company from legal threats, just as one example. In the case of needing to trim down a huge stack of applicants to an actually manageable stack, then HR will do things like search the internet for people's reputation. If you think that's not their job, that doesn't change the fact that they are going to do it anyway. HR very often has a say in candidate fit. Especially if HR is responsible for company culture, as is often the case these days.
> Picking software engineers, especially if you actually care whether they're any good, is not the purpose of an HR department.
At most companies the HR department is pretty involved in the hiring process no matter what the position is. At smaller companies maybe less so.
The worst programmer I knew never had any productivity problem; if anything he produced too much code, outpacing the others' ability to maintain certain levels of quality. He ended up promoted; in many organizations, people that hack the code rather than properly design and build sustainable solutions are highly valued.
Was he promoted to a job where he did more of that, or a job where they could make him stop writing code and do something else?
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20 years ago when I started there wasn’t anything I experienced that could be called coaching, mentoring, or leveling up. Sure, I could get some time from a more experienced developer to get another set of eyes on a particularly hard problem if I wasn’t able to come up with a solution but for the most part I was just expected to work with minimal explanation or direction. Very little in the way of code reviews as wel…
Around that same time, my first job was at GE medical systems. The team I was part of was responsible for developing systems for digital X-ray machines. We were developing a new mobile x-ray product and it needed some new capabilities. As a fresher out of college I worked on some of the most critical systems capabilities and features and I got brilliant support from my seniors in software engineering and domain exper…
The problem is financials on both employee and employer side.
If you actually want to have a chance at a decent lifestyle without being born into existing wealth, there aren't that many options in the first place, and of these IT is the only sector that doesn't take care much about formal qualifications/education - although you're almost guaranteed to make money if you have a CS degree, you still have a very high chance of doing so if all you have is a coding bootcamp and willingness to learn.
However, unless you land in a well funded startup that has money to burn and not much oversight / managers have actual freedom, the organizations capable of paying that kind of money tend to be very large, very bureaucratic, and pay rises are closely tied to some sort of "performance metric" - hence if you want to rise in level and pay, you gotta game the system because HR won't just give you a pay rise based on your manager's good word, they want something as evidence, even if only to insulate themselves against claims of discrimination or nepotism.
And to make it worse, even if you're in the first case of a well funded startup, if it succeeds and grows eventually "professionalism" will creep in sooner or later - either because the company hires enough experienced people (particularly in HR and finance) that bring it with them, because the company gets pressured to do so by investors/boards/unemployment insurance/legal requirements, or because inevitably complaints of discrimination crop up.
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PSA... check out this guy's LinkedIn profile. It's a great read.
Thank you! You gave me an excuse to look at my own LinkedIn profile, which I've ignored for a few years. I have a distinct memory from not that long ago when I was unemployed and asking people for advice on what to put on LinkedIn and on my resume. One consistent piece of advice was "Don't list anything more than five years ago. People will think you're old!" I thought, "Screw that, everyone already knows I'm old." S…
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20 years ago when I started there wasn’t anything I experienced that could be called coaching, mentoring, or leveling up. Sure, I could get some time from a more experienced developer to get another set of eyes on a particularly hard problem if I wasn’t able to come up with a solution but for the most part I was just expected to work with minimal explanation or direction. Very little in the way of code reviews as wel…
Around that same time, my first job was at GE medical systems. The team I was part of was responsible for developing systems for digital X-ray machines. We were developing a new mobile x-ray product and it needed some new capabilities. As a fresher out of college I worked on some of the most critical systems capabilities and features and I got brilliant support from my seniors in software engineering and domain exper…
There most definitely is a correlation here. Language shapes Thought and the more complex/expressive a language is the more does that Programmer have opportunities to explore new paradigms/ideas that expand his mind. Your knowledge footprint increases and you do get better than somebody else who learns a "simpler" language and/or just stays at the surface level without any exploration (i.e. i will just use this API and not learn about anything else).
Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.
Do people honestly think this kind of thing replicates with formally scheduled Zoom 1:1s? I don’t.