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Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

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Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#51

Post by apsurd »

renegade-otter wrote: post #44
nilirl wrote: post #34

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions…

Related, but the best quality to have in a startup is knowing when and what corners to cut instead of going on these side quests.

I used to think this but you only know which were the right corners to cut after the fact. And most things are not obviously right or obviously wrong, instead it’s a slow zombie death by a thousand fuzzy signals.

And the management tier of the startup will too easily color the signal by the flavor they want to see.

My latest take on this matter is to separate speed as in fast from quick. Quick is the thing you want and almost always good. Fast is what usually gets lauded and measured but fast just gets you large volumes of fuzzy signal faster.

(quick means that something can take time and be measured, not rushed, things can bake, and the feedback loop is responsive quickly throughout the loop. while fast is looking at wall clock time and goaling on the end-result yield from the loop. i think it’s very misguided. things very often need bake time)

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#52

Post by Antoniocl »

luipugs wrote: post #48
ANarrativeApe wrote: post #8

This makes complete sense in an environment where people transition from noob to senior engineer within the same company. It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years. It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs. One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they…

> It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years. If a person's tenure in companies is measured in months then they're signalling they're a C by your logic, or is at least raising a red flag to whoever's hiring. I may be showing my age but that sounds wild to me if that's the norm now.

Maybe this depends on the framing? Ex. 18 months is fairly common in some circles, but that could alternatively have been expressed as a year and a half.

6-12 months? Red flag 12-24 months, especially early-to-mid career? Not uncommon

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#53

Post by throwaway314155 »

nilirl wrote: post #34

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions…

Large corps value readability over algorithmic complexity too...

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#54

Post by danavar »

This perspective is more of a confession about the current state of employment in big-tech, less so than engineering in general.

There are plenty of places outside of FAANG where you can just be a butt-in-seat, completing tasks.

I met plenty of principal, staff engineers in defense and medical device companies who were just amazing engineers who knew how to complete tasks and dispatch them.

> That stack of tasks you have to do? Your manager or your tech lead could finish those in much less time and with much less hassle than it takes to help you through them"

Ehhh.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#55

Post by chrismcb »

nilirl wrote: post #34

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions…

Yeah, I can argue against it. How much time did he spend on it, how much is games on the user the (as in, is this a common use path or an uncommon one) you may have doubled the speed but did it go from several seconds to a few, it a split second to a half split second? Are there other things that should be implemented before speeding things up. Etc etc.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#58

Post by ecshafer »

ANarrativeApe wrote: post #8

This makes complete sense in an environment where people transition from noob to senior engineer within the same company. It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years. It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs. One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they…

> It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years.

Is this common though? Most places I have worked have had people with pretty long tenures. Maybe Silicon Valley during peak ZIRP where you could just keep jumping as long as you could pass the leet code... but then why aren't you staying for RSU vesting?

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#59

Post by znkr »

ANarrativeApe wrote: post #8

This makes complete sense in an environment where people transition from noob to senior engineer within the same company. It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years. It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs. One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they…

> It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs.

I would argue that out makes even more sense in the era of LLMs. LLM shaped tasks are tasks that we would hand out to junior engineers. Now, I can implement one of these tasks in 1hr instead of waiting for a junior engineer to finish this in 1-3 days. This means the equation for investing in junior engineers has shifted towards disfavoring investment.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#60

Post by falsemyrmidon »

nilirl wrote: post #34

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions…

As someone that's a senior at a large corp, I absolutely do not want someone making the codebase more complex with the only benefit being being that it's now barely measurably faster. Especially when there are probably better things to be spending time on (spoiler, there are). Unless you're knocking like 20% off a very impactful metric, or addressing a looming scaling probably, go find something better to do than making tiny algorithm optimizations.
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