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Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

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Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#121

Post by humanrebar »

_rerr wrote: post #75
humanrebar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract. What's the justification for monitoring total hours and not something more directly tied to business success? End users and profit margins (assuming your engineers are salaried) don't care about whether your engineers had consistent 40+ hour work weeks.

In my previous company, they has a name to distinguish these two kinds of metrics. - Inputs are the things employees can act on easily, like the number of LoC written or the number of features developped. - Outputs are related to business success, for example the number of customers, or the revenue. The key here is to consider the external business environment as a complex machine, in which you put some effort, measu…

> This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate separately the assumptions they made about the business...

That's basically the problem right there. If you treat the employees as a giant black box, you don't observe when workplace policies (that might not even work!) get in the way of human decency, let alone helping a diverse group of employees each flourish in their own way.

Employers instead sit around wondering why there aren't enough Latino engineers without even considering a remote work policy that would let engineers live in El Paso, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Miami.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#122

Post by barrkel »

humanrebar wrote: post #120
barrkel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incentive alignment problem. Developers want to maximize their human capital since they usually don't have significant capital in the business itself. With experience in all the latest buzzword technologies, they can get good offers elsewhere, or use the leverage to increase their pay. Whereas sinking all their effort into an in-house framework is fantastic for the business in multiple dimensions: it's a c…

> Whereas sinking all their effort into an in-house framework is fantastic for the business in multiple dimensions Well, it's fantastic until it isn't anyway. Companies do fail, at least fail to own new markets, by being tied down into legacy architectures.

I think that's orthogonal. You can fall behind just as easily by not addressing technical debt. Consider how easily it is, particularly in the JS world, to accrue multiple different bits of UI written in different frameworks du jour.

Rewriting stuff is very seldom in the business' interest, but stuff gets out of date at a rate controlled by the ecosystem, not the company.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#123

Post by humanrebar »

hrktb wrote: post #117
humanrebar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. It's a peculiar quirk of the tech industry that "changing the world through X" is a reasonable expectation. Bus drivers don't wonder how they can make a difference through bus driving. They do their shifts and then go volunteer at the hospital, food bank, homeless shelt…

I worked in a ad agency and people had the same gripes about their role in the society. Helping brand X to get market share from brand Y can feel like a huge waste of one’s life . I’d expect it to be the same for a lot of media industries. BTW a bus driver physicaly helps people by moving them from A to B. Isn’t it one of the most useful job of our society, until driveless cars come along ?

I didn't mean to degrade or single out bus drivers. I tried to pick a normal blue collar job. I don't think there's anything wrong, and a lot right, in people just doing a great job with the job they have, whatever it is. I don't really know how to compare:

* getting people to work

* keeping the web pages for N businesses all up and running

...but I do know that if it doesn't feel like enough, there are lots of organizations that need volunteers and donations, often both.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#124

Post by maxxxxx »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #31
maxxxxx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From me experience at least in the US there is a moral component to more vacation. The managers I have dealt with acted a little as if wanting more vacation is a moral failing of the person.

That's just because the manager is then responsible for the work when people take vacation, so dissuading it as much as possible saves them time and stress personally. Vacation is a big problem of you're running with just enough people to operate the business, which most are people are one of the most expensive parts of the business. Unless you're not doing anything time sensitive, mission critical, or customer facin…

Thinking that everything is time sensitive is often an illusion or management failure in my view. You can't be constantly on the critical path.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#125

Post by humanrebar »

barrkel wrote: post #122
humanrebar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whereas sinking all their effort into an in-house framework is fantastic for the business in multiple dimensions Well, it's fantastic until it isn't anyway. Companies do fail, at least fail to own new markets, by being tied down into legacy architectures.

I think that's orthogonal. You can fall behind just as easily by not addressing technical debt. Consider how easily it is, particularly in the JS world, to accrue multiple different bits of UI written in different frameworks du jour. Rewriting stuff is very seldom in the business' interest, but stuff gets out of date at a rate controlled by the ecosystem, not the company.

That's a lot to unpack.

Generally speaking, the worst kind of legacy code is the kind that cannot be easily rewritten. That's why I particularly called out custom frameworks and custom languages. Replacing custom service implementations, in comparison, doesn't even count as "replacing stuff" since it's so trivial.

It's not in the company's best interest, generally, to write business-critical things in ways that are hard to replace and/or pivot on. This means that a company needs to account for the whims of "the ecosystem" in both its business plan and in its technical strategy. If it's a huge concern, the profit margins need to stay high enough and customer expectations need to stay flexible enough to mitigate the concern. Also, if "the ecosystem" is a huge concern, technical strategies also need to help mitigate. For example, if you're running the same JS code both client and server side and you're worried about changes in the client-side ecosystem, you might want to think about implementing the backend in something more boring and stable just to mitigate ecosystem risk.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#126

Post by mathattack »

enraged_camel wrote: post #99
mathattack wrote: post #90

I find the most important thing is the “deal” with the manager. “Here is what I can give you, Here is what I want in return.” Some people want promotability. Some want remote work. Some want new technical challenges. Some flexibility. A manager can’t give everything to everyone but they can say, “I can give you all the flexibility you need as long as the servers never go down” or “I can work to promote you in a year…

This doesn't work in many states because labor laws require companies to give every worker in a given role the same perks. If you allow Bob to work remotely, you also need to give that choice to Jason and Ashley. Texas is like this for instance. This is the real reason why a lot of companies have trouble switching to remote work: they can't slowly transition. It has to be an on-off switch for all workers.

It's also hard because "Remote first" companies make it look easier because they're designed for it.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#127

Post by mathattack »

ben_jones wrote: post #95
mathattack wrote: post #90

I find the most important thing is the “deal” with the manager. “Here is what I can give you, Here is what I want in return.” Some people want promotability. Some want remote work. Some want new technical challenges. Some flexibility. A manager can’t give everything to everyone but they can say, “I can give you all the flexibility you need as long as the servers never go down” or “I can work to promote you in a year…

I agree 100% EXCEPT for the huge asymmetry in information that exists during that phase of an interview. "Hit every deadline", you would then need to know how aggressive and how frequent those deadlines are. You would have to know how stable the team(s) are because if a team has a deadline and loses the head engineer, well shit. Negotiating and accepting an offer letter is way too much like gambling. Whether its star…

True. I find this is easier as part of a longer term relationship. There is a gamble, and trust is involved. The one recourse is if they violate your trust, you can leave.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#128

Post by barrkel »

humanrebar wrote: post #125
barrkel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's orthogonal. You can fall behind just as easily by not addressing technical debt. Consider how easily it is, particularly in the JS world, to accrue multiple different bits of UI written in different frameworks du jour. Rewriting stuff is very seldom in the business' interest, but stuff gets out of date at a rate controlled by the ecosystem, not the company.

That's a lot to unpack. Generally speaking, the worst kind of legacy code is the kind that cannot be easily rewritten. That's why I particularly called out custom frameworks and custom languages. Replacing custom service implementations, in comparison, doesn't even count as "replacing stuff" since it's so trivial. It's not in the company's best interest, generally, to write business-critical things in ways that are h…

The code that you can't afford to rewrite is the code that is hairy with details. The details are some mix of essential and incidental complexity. The ratio is dependent on the degree of fit between your business logic and the framework, the primitives it's built out of, whether it's third-party, custom framework, custom language, whatever. And of course any custom component has its own complexity; it should be additive, but it may still be large. A good fit - an excellent fit - means your business logic is clear, concise, and is operating over abstractions that map directly to the business concepts. A poor fit is speaking haltingly in unidiomatic language, too verbose, aggregating globs of ugly code, losing track of the forest for the trees, etc. But it'll be easier to find average devs who are familiar with the particular style of thicket that ends up coming out. We even have names for the scar tissues that grow around each glob, helping them interface - we call them design patterns.

There's no hard and fast rules, it seems to me. Use a small fraction of lots of different third party bits and pieces and you get a recipe for pain. I'm fairly certain there's no more productive way for engineers to code than to raise the level of their language into their business domain - http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html - but this is the custom framework / language approach. I'm also fairly sure that it's hard to scale an organization around this approach because of the incentive problem when hiring developers. I think it only really works for startups that are composed of a bunch of hackers with decent equity stakes. It doesn't work out for employees, unless the company ends up moving the needle industry wide, like Java or Rust or React, and that's really rare, too rare to bet on.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#129

Post by crdoconnor »

MrMorden wrote: post #118
crdoconnor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contractor premium will get dragged down in a year or two as well - the Tories are planning on kicking up taxes for them in order to bring in an extra £200 mil. That will probably lead to an exodus of the experienced developers from the UK. This will not only have a negative effect on UK software houses it will also exacerbate the existing problems with UK government IT projects, which have already have a multibi…

Has any party even suggested moving council tax to a percentage of assessed value rather than the band system?

Yeah, and the Daily Mail went apeshit over the so called "garden tax". Lord Rothermere's country estate is taxed enough already, see.

Re: Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent

#130

Post by ageofwant »

kod wrote: post #94
ageofwant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'one bad apple' thing never cut it for me. If you are bad apple's manager, you have measurable metrics on her performance, and you act based on that, no more no less. This has no bearing on any of the other apples.

And what exactly do you think objective metrics for developers should be? LoC? Defects? As soon as a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. If one person in a group takes unfair advantage of flexibility by e.g. only going to the office half as much as the rest, it sure will have an effect on the "other apples".

Why would she need to go to the office? Work is something you do, not a place your'e at. If you, as a manager do not have any way of measuring how the people you are managing, then you have no reason to be there.
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