Techstop. That's all I'm going to say.
[deleted]
"The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see 2 flaws in an otherwise fine argument. 1/ I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. I sure believe a good CEO should be paid adequately but those are just ridiculous amounts, and the CEO is only one part of the puzzle, even if important. As a CEO its hard to screw up (even thus many do), its hard to be very good, but its easy to be in the middle. Like most jobs in fact. 2/Work…
I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. Viscerally, I agree. On the other hand, if we go back to 1995 or any time before it, no 25-year-old programmer was "worth" $100,000 per year. Now that's a typical salary for a strong engineer. I'm cautious about saying people "make too much" money because, ultimately, no one really knows what work is worth. That's why we have markets, and th…
You're making a simple mistake: valuing the worth of something by its impact. But that's not how worth is determined; you need both supply and demand. If providing something has high impact, but that something is very common, then it has low worth, irrespective of how high impact it is. People would die without oxygen and water, but neither of these things are expensive.
The market for CEO compensation is clearly not very efficient. It's a big risk to put someone into the job to see how they do, so there isn't a lot of experimentation; few people get to build up experience. So the supply is very restricted, and this will inflate the price of labour quite a bit. There's not a lot of hard science between how applicable experience in one company or type of company is transferable to another, so even CVs can't be relied upon. And performance and actual value created may take some time to show up; there's a lot of things that a CEO could do that seem to create short-term value at long-term expense.
The biggest reason CEO compensation is so high is because they are in a pyramid peak position where they can skim off a small percentage of a lot of people's productivity and claim it as their own. In effect, it doesn't "cost" a lot for a large corporation to pay its executives a lot of money, compared to all the other costs.
I wonder if we'll ever have virtual economies / simulators developed enough to be able to learn / train / evaluate prospective company leaders in the future.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see 2 flaws in an otherwise fine argument. 1/ I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. I sure believe a good CEO should be paid adequately but those are just ridiculous amounts, and the CEO is only one part of the puzzle, even if important. As a CEO its hard to screw up (even thus many do), its hard to be very good, but its easy to be in the middle. Like most jobs in fact. 2/Work…
I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. Viscerally, I agree. On the other hand, if we go back to 1995 or any time before it, no 25-year-old programmer was "worth" $100,000 per year. Now that's a typical salary for a strong engineer. I'm cautious about saying people "make too much" money because, ultimately, no one really knows what work is worth. That's why we have markets, and th…
theres an order of magnitudes between 100k and 10M. Plus; 17 years ago 100K was a lot yes. 17 YEARS ago :p
Maybe in 50 years 10M will be okay but the point is moot.
As for time, I know in many companies people "work" many hours which consist of non-work chatter, coffee, etc. I'm talking of actual real work time. You can work 2H and sit 8H, then I'd say 2H work is not enough as the actual work discussions take more than that. Of course some barely even work 1H per week. But they don't get anything done, so its not that they're efficient. It's that they don't work.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation". You might want to speak to…
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
The problem is trying to communicate this to management. I was told that standups are non-optional.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation". You might want to speak to…
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
You can do standup meetings in lots of different ways. Our standups are maybe 5min max for a team of 6 and they're very worth it.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#86As fun as getting out our tribal aversion to managers who don't respect geeks is, let's focus on the actionable career point: do not work for cost centers.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation". You might want to speak to…
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
Our standups are at 11:45, so we have impetus to keep it brief and get to lunch. In any case, even if it does cut into a stretch of programming, it serves as an invaluable reminder to go get lunch.
Yeah, I agree that I'd be annoyed with standup at any time before 11:30, but 11:45 is perfect and basically doesn't interfere with anything. In a certain sense it doesn't cost any dev time at all if you take it for granted that your developers should stop coding midway through the day and eat lunch. (We absolutely do not eat lunch during standup - we have standup, then we physically leave the office to go eat.) Sure, some days we end up in endless meetings which mean we're stuck in the building eating takeout, but that has nothing to do with standup.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
Our standups are at 11:45, so we have impetus to keep it brief and get to lunch. In any case, even if it does cut into a stretch of programming, it serves as an invaluable reminder to go get lunch. Yeah, I agree that I'd be annoyed with standup at any time before 11:30, but 11:45 is perfect and basically doesn't interfere with anything. In a certain sense it doesn't cost any dev time at all if you take it for granted…
We experimented with 10 AM scrum but I found that if I came to the office at 9ish, I used to get distracted with the thought of Scrum. Eventually, we decided to move it to the afternoons at 4:30 which works out well because you are almost done with your work day and you can get distracted all you want.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really sure how you're implementing scrum. Our scrum standups are always just the programmers, once a day in the mornings, and are used to keep all the programmers on the same page and talk to each other to find out if features might have a codependency, or if other blockers can be solved by something else another dev is working on. There's no "watching" of people or "intimidation". You might want to speak to…
A daily 30 minute standup with 10 programmers (three minutes each) is 5 hours of development time lost. That's 25 hours a week, over half a full-time developer. It's probably more. Let's say stand-up is at 0900. Nobody getting in early is going to really get in the zone because they know standup is coming. Then after standup there's another 15 - 30 minutes getting into the flow. Then it's nearly lunchtime. In other w…
A 30 minute standup counters the whole idea of a 'standup' meeting.
Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"
#90In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides, and by the time the mistake is obvious, returning to the previous state is difficult, and an incentive has been created for short term savings at the expense of long term ones. By way of example, several years ago I sold tools at Sears. Sears had spent decades build…
> I'm not sure how that squares with moving from company to company...
The stipulation to accommodate moving from company to company could be an artificial constraint. The desired outcome goals of the company outweighs the desired outcome expressed by any individual executive. Incentive structures can reflect that.
There are many ways to accomplish this, but the reality is shareholders who wield sufficient power to enforce this goal-seeking simply are not interested in doing this. That's the real nut to crack. The incentive structure of owners and not just employees subject to the agency problem is part of the spectrum to consider.
Incentive structures all up and down the line of authority are a real tough design problem.