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Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

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Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#51

Post by k3n »

bunderbunder wrote: post #47
megablast wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ is a better place for this sort of question.

It's a sad day for nerds everywhere when we have to start thinking of Reddit as a better place than Stack Exchange to ask this sort of question.

I think that's unfair, just because you may have some axe to grind with Reddit doesn't mean that it's not a good source of information and discussion.

SO works great for some formats, but as a discussion board, it sucks. The question that was posed had no clear answer, we could all wax poetic on the pathology and prognosis and cure of the OP's problem, but there's only 1 big green checkmark to go around -- and when it's been doled out, there's no going back. Essentially, every answer to the OP's question in that thread is an opinion and, by definition, is impossible to accurately score.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#53

Post by bunderbunder »

k3n wrote: post #51
bunderbunder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad day for nerds everywhere when we have to start thinking of Reddit as a better place than Stack Exchange to ask this sort of question.

I think that's unfair, just because you may have some axe to grind with Reddit doesn't mean that it's not a good source of information and discussion. SO works great for some formats, but as a discussion board, it sucks. The question that was posed had no clear answer, we could all wax poetic on the pathology and prognosis and cure of the OP's problem, but there's only 1 big green checkmark to go around -- and when i…

You're right, as a discussion board it does suck.

But as a place to ask advice from other experts and get a feel for how they're inclined to think about the issue, it's absolutely fantastic. And the reason why it's such a great platform for that kind of thing is that the interface goes to such great lengths to discourage drawn-out discussion. By making it hard for argumentative people to dominate the topic, it makes it possible to get a feel for what everyone's really thinking in a way that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented.

It's true that there is one little detail, the green checkbox, that isn't a good match for this use case. At least not if you think of it as a way to pick the one Objectively True[tm] answer. But to think of it that way is absurd. Even with concrete programming issues there's often more than one way to do it, and everyone knows that in those cases and many others the green checkbox really just indicates which option the question asker liked best.

And beyond that, it's just plain wrongheaded to suggest that there shouldn't be room for opinion at a place like SE. It's tantamount to saying that there's no room for discussing the difficult, nebulous problems that real professionals have to deal with on a daily basis, and that the site's really only intended for helping people with the one case in which we can always expect a single objective answer: Homework help.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#54

Post by simonh »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #43
simonh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but with 'only' a 15% raise every year, your salary would quadruple every 10 years. That's not really a normal career trajectory. Pay growth as a percentage tends to be higher for talented youngsters, but then again a lot of the value in an older engineer comes from experience, which often means experience in different work environments.

Why not? Its not the same engineer expecting cost-of-living increases. Its an ever-more-experienced engineer growing from newbie to architect. Quadrupling every 10 years seems about right to me.

So by retirement a 20 year old starter on $50k (a little low) should expect to be on $200k by age 30 (which I accept isn't at all impossible for a smart kid), and retire on around $12.8 million a year....

I'm clearly doing something wrong, or the job market here in the UK is a lot more different than in the US than I assumed.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#55

Post by wpietri »

gizzlon wrote: post #24
wpietri wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. There was a question on Programmers that was something like "What is the good/bad decision you made in your mid-20s about your career". There were a ton of great answers, and I was so proud of my heavily upvoted answer that I linked it on my website. Only to get a note a couple of months later that the link was 404ing. I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness,…

Maybe someone has mirror it? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That would be great. If somebody has old mirrors, please let me know or mention it here.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#56

Post by wpietri »

simonh wrote: post #35
notimetorelax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods are getting too trigger happy? In fairness if you give random "trusted" strangers power to delete anything they deem inappropriate they will start abusing their power, that's in human nature.

But to them they're not abusing it, they're just interpreting the rules very literally and strictly. The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.

So true.

That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru...

Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#57

Post by wpietri »

k3n wrote: post #51
bunderbunder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad day for nerds everywhere when we have to start thinking of Reddit as a better place than Stack Exchange to ask this sort of question.

I think that's unfair, just because you may have some axe to grind with Reddit doesn't mean that it's not a good source of information and discussion. SO works great for some formats, but as a discussion board, it sucks. The question that was posed had no clear answer, we could all wax poetic on the pathology and prognosis and cure of the OP's problem, but there's only 1 big green checkmark to go around -- and when i…

You weight the intent system too highly and ignore the effect on the reader.

SO's interface worked pretty well for opinion. Who cares if it's impossible to accurately score? The most useful stuff generally ended up near the top, so readers could quickly find a lot of good material.

As to the green checkmark, a querent isn't obligated to select a best answer. And if they selected one, so what? It pushed one answer up, but readers were perfectly capable of reading down.

SO's behavior with opinion is a classic case of founders saying "B-b-b-b-ut they're doing it wrong". Which is backwards. The purpose of a discussion system is to serve its users, not its programmers. This is exactly the same sort of idiocy that killed Friendster: https://plus.google.com/116014836340643816850/posts/WFH5eDug...

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#58

Post by wpietri »

bunderbunder wrote: post #48
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I cannot recollect getting a useful answer there. Google rarely links to it; the links are often questions without answers (I searched for my question terms after all, not knowing the answer). And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.

My pet theory is that it's something I've come to think of as the "WELL effect". Named for the famous online community which I was a member of for approximately one month in the early 2000s, and which is still talking itself up for how vibrant it was 20 years ago but hasn't been vibrant for any time during this century. It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how…

This is a brilliant explanation of the effect. Does anybody know of a forum that has some structure that will keep that from happening?

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#59

Post by bunderbunder »

wpietri wrote: post #58
bunderbunder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet theory is that it's something I've come to think of as the "WELL effect". Named for the famous online community which I was a member of for approximately one month in the early 2000s, and which is still talking itself up for how vibrant it was 20 years ago but hasn't been vibrant for any time during this century. It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how…

This is a brilliant explanation of the effect. Does anybody know of a forum that has some structure that will keep that from happening?

When I joined WELL they had introduced forums that were only intended for people who joined during a specific calendar year. Presumably it was an attempt to try and counteract the effect somewhat. Personally, it just made me feel ghettoized.

At an old-fashioned web forum I used to run we toyed with the idea of closing down and archiving old threads after they reached a certain age. The idea was to try and codify our opinion that old conversations might be worth preserving for posterity, but they aren't a substitute for new conversations and shouldn't be used as an excuse to stifle them. Never actually got around to implementing it, though.

Re: Dealing with engineers that frequently leave their jobs

#60

Post by wpietri »

bluedanieru wrote: post #33
davidlumley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most confusing thing for me, is that this _isn't_ Stack Overflow - it's Programmers. While SO is meant to have objectively correct answers, and that's why they are so quick to close threads, Programmers is meant to be more open and allow more general questions.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq It's not 'anything goes', however. This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site. The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. T…

It was closed at "not constructive", which is obviously thought untrue by the hundreds of people who engaged with it. So I can't agree with the specific closing.

It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?

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