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Want good programmers? Then pay them.

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Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#481

Post by paulhauggis »

cletus wrote: post #264

The comparison to equity being getting paid in lottery tickets is apt (IMHO). Nevertheless there has never been a short of pioneering spirits willing to risk it all to strike it rich (just look at the gold rushes in the Dakotas, California and elsewhere). This is really the modern day equivalent. There was a thread here last year where people talked about their exits. A common story was "worked my ass off for X years…

"So I work more than I should. Thing is, I'm never looking at my watch because I enjoy what I do"

Google and many other companies take advantage of people like you. While I don't ever expect 30 days of paid vacation, expecting me to work past the 40 hours/week (which is most likely in my contract) is outrageous.

I work so I can enjoy my time off and anything past 40 hours is my time off.

In my 20s, I could make another companies dream my life, but now that I'm in my 30s, I can't do it anymore. Especially when you are not paid any extra and only get a sliver of the overall profits.

I will gladly help out in emergency situations, but from your post, it seems like you work late on a regular basis.

Oh, and free dinners and fooseball tables don't make up for it either.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#482

Post by weavejester »

ericd wrote: post #480
weavejester wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it works the other way around, too. The expected value of a random company is not that high unless the candidate considers themselves to have a good chance of success. Given how opaque the hiring process is from the point of view of an applicant, how do they know if it's worth spending their time solving a random puzzle? Investing time in open source software is a better use of time from the point of view of a ca…

Sure, I didn't say anything about that, but in this scenario it's implied that you're applying to this company, so presumably you know something about it and like it. You likely know a lot more about the company than it knows about you. The Github filter is a bad one, though - lots of good programmers don't do the whole open source thing, and we need to stop this pretense of a good Github account being necessary for…

At some point an employer needs to see code that a candidate has written, so unless the candidate wants to write code specifically for each company they send a resume to, maintaining some open source software is surely the most efficient mechanism to do that.

Artists maintain a portfolio of their work; why shouldn't programmers?

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#483

Post by reinhardt »

mryan wrote: post #475
reinhardt wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, thought your startup was Cloudfrag. I've seen Fashiolista before and was on my list of potentially interesting startups to join. I'll probably contact you when I'm back in the market :)

Don't worry, you don't need a sense of fashion to work here. It was one of the first things I asked in my interview - if it was a pre-requisite, I would have had no chance :-)

I meant the job market but that's also good to know :)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#484

Post by Natsu »

kragen wrote: post #408
kstenerud wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised... But actually, fizzbuzz is just the bottom level. You also want to do basic coding exercises for whatever specific area you are hiring for, such as: - Set up an extremely basic web app that lets the user enter a name and echoes it back to them. - Make a sprite move across the screen. - Display a 3d cube with different colors on each side and make it rotate. - Make it play some music. - Aggregate…

I wonder if there's a harder equivalent to FizzBuzz — one that doesn't take any longer to explain or do, but requires a much higher level of skill to pass. One we used at http://airwave.com/ was "Write a Perl subroutine to determine whether a string is a valid dotted-quad IP address," which is something you can do in various reasonable ways in one to five lines of code.

Is that really so much harder? Somehow, I expect you'd get a lot of opaque regexes like:

  sub isIP {
    return (shift =~ m/^((\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.){3}(\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])$/)? 1 : 0;
  }

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#485

Post by bartl »

cletus wrote: post #264

The comparison to equity being getting paid in lottery tickets is apt (IMHO). Nevertheless there has never been a short of pioneering spirits willing to risk it all to strike it rich (just look at the gold rushes in the Dakotas, California and elsewhere). This is really the modern day equivalent. There was a thread here last year where people talked about their exits. A common story was "worked my ass off for X years…

>Never working more than 40 hours a week nor staying late? It just smacks of entitlement.

I work 38 hours a week. Anything more is considered overtime, and not "part of the job".

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#486

Post by xbryanx »

khuey wrote: post #395
xbryanx wrote: post #237

Corollary: you'll never have a mass of good programmers in sectors that CAN'T PAY them competitive salaries. This is a bad thing.

Why is that a bad thing?

The brightest and the best selling ads while very little programming talent goes towards combating ignored problems like teen homelessness, and other under represented issues is bad in my book. But, I'm a bleeding heart idealist, and possible dinosaur.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#487

Post by ashray »

weavejester wrote: post #482
ericd wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I didn't say anything about that, but in this scenario it's implied that you're applying to this company, so presumably you know something about it and like it. You likely know a lot more about the company than it knows about you. The Github filter is a bad one, though - lots of good programmers don't do the whole open source thing, and we need to stop this pretense of a good Github account being necessary for…

At some point an employer needs to see code that a candidate has written, so unless the candidate wants to write code specifically for each company they send a resume to, maintaining some open source software is surely the most efficient mechanism to do that. Artists maintain a portfolio of their work; why shouldn't programmers?

Artists don't usually have to show what brushes or paints they used to make a particular work.

Sometimes it's best to evaluate the work rather than what goes into it. Granted, this isn't always the case and can't be attributed to multi team environments, but I've often been asked for code when I have a large number of (successful) projects solely developed by me.

Also, small code samples are fine but some employers are in the habit of asking for major work (demos) just to show off your coding chops. That's bad.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#488

Post by weavejester »

ashray wrote: post #487
weavejester wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point an employer needs to see code that a candidate has written, so unless the candidate wants to write code specifically for each company they send a resume to, maintaining some open source software is surely the most efficient mechanism to do that. Artists maintain a portfolio of their work; why shouldn't programmers?

Artists don't usually have to show what brushes or paints they used to make a particular work. Sometimes it's best to evaluate the work rather than what goes into it. Granted, this isn't always the case and can't be attributed to multi team environments, but I've often been asked for code when I have a large number of (successful) projects solely developed by me. Also, small code samples are fine but some employers a…

That's because it usually doesn't matter how an artist creates a piece of work, as long as their methods are not too idiosyncratic; what matters is the end result.

For a developer, the how matters as much, or even more so than the result. You could create a complete mess that still manages to just about work, and it wouldn't be obvious from a cursory execution of the binary just how bad it was.

Ideally, if I was going to hire someone, I'd want to know how they develop a reasonably-sized project. An interview or puzzle can give me some idea, but a GitHub account is far superior because it would show me how they work over a longer time frame, and perhaps with other people. I honestly can't think of anything that comes close to demonstrating skill.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#489

Post by rmc »

malandrew wrote: post #476
patio11 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason that good developer in any market shouldn't be living at the exact same standard of living as the good doctors, lawyers, finance people in that market. They should be living in the same homes and sending their kids to the same schools, etc. These words should be stapled to every CS degree, and reinforced with classes if necessary. The lawyers/doctors have an ingrained culture in their professions o…

Since you already got the audience, twould make a great blog post. It's should be an obligation of every professional in our industry to negotiate higher and be seen as valuable as we actually are to society. The fact that most professional software engineers know their value and demand it severely hurts the salary bar for every other software engineer. Silicon Valley and NYC are the only two places where I see devel…

Since you already got the audience, twould make a great blog post.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ ?

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#490

Post by kragen »

Natsu wrote: post #484
kragen wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a harder equivalent to FizzBuzz — one that doesn't take any longer to explain or do, but requires a much higher level of skill to pass. One we used at http://airwave.com/ was "Write a Perl subroutine to determine whether a string is a valid dotted-quad IP address," which is something you can do in various reasonable ways in one to five lines of code.

Is that really so much harder? Somehow, I expect you'd get a lot of opaque regexes like: sub isIP { return (shift =~ m/^((\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.){3}(\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])$/)? 1 : 0; }

I think we did get someone solving it that way once, and modulo Unicode, it's arguably a reasonable solution. But there are other one-line solutions that are more transparent.

The Stanford CS Ph.D. candidate whose solution included a Perl function for converting decimal numbers of up to three digits to binary was rejected.

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