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Great developers are raised, not hired

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Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#141

Post by patagonia »

msluyter wrote: post #20

I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding. But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someon…

I’m surprised there is not a compensation scheme something like what follows:

Setup: Bring on promising “apprentice” and have 3 year roadmap to reaching “solid individual contributor” status

- year 1: pay at market rate for standard recent college grad but payout 60% in year 1, 10% in year 2, 10% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5

- year 2: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary amount based on market rates but payout 75% in year 2, 5% in year 3, 10% in year 4, 10% in year 5

- year 3: beginning of year give merit raise to full salary but payout 90% in year 3, 5% in year 4, 5% in year 5

- beginning in year 4 get merit raise and receive 100% of salary cash that year as well as the 10% from year 1 and 5% from year 2

- year 5: includes 10% from year 1, 10% from year 2, 5% from year 3

If you can’t keep your employee after that, it’s on you, but they’ve def stuck around long enough to pay you back in productivity

(edit: I realize my math is a bit off but I’m on a cellphone on the move, you’re gonna have to mentally fix the math, but you get the idea)

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#142

Post by oarabbus_ »

salarycommenter wrote: post #107
luminati wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic - but your username and the vast majority of your commenting history is primarily on salaries. Curious - is there some backstory to it? Feel you got severely underpaid? To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together.…

This is an alt specifically for discussing compensation because I know it elicits that reaction and I don't want that associated with my professional identity. I think discussing compensation frankly and openly is very important. People have no idea what is possible. Two people on the same team at the same company can have wildly different compensation. My goal with this alt is to get people to take the biggest slice…

Any advice on learning your true worth? Assume for a minute that Glassdoor is useless, as the "salary range" it displays shows that the maximum is 2-2.5x the minimum.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#143

Post by SamuelAdams »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #44
kgraves wrote: post #4

I have never seen a single company/startup place a job posting for a junior position, (lucky if they even say training) Last time I checked, everyone wants to look for a senior developer with 5+ years of experience. It's some sort of hidden bonus if you're from a FAANG company as well. I'm guessing everyone wants to be the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Uber.

> everyone wants to look for a senior developer with 5+ years But no more than 10.

Right because 10+ year people are expensive and there's the stigma of spending your whole career as a programmer. After 5-10 years, most companies expect you to move into a specialized field or management.

I don't agree with that stigma at all, but it's there all the same.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#144

Post by busyra »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #84
thanksDr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds super fun! You're not in Toronto, are you?

Agreed, however am in Los Angeles. Would recommend remote but this type of thing might be better in person. Perhaps each city can create their own. Even in LA there'd probably need to be a group in each part of town, like west, downtown, and/or Pasadena.

I am interested in joining a group in the LA area. How can we make this happen?

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#145

Post by lkrubner »

I can agree with hiring novices and then giving them what they need to learn. We hired two women from Fullstack Academy (NYC) and they turned out to be amazing. They were novices, but incredibly motivated and talented. Both of them had had other interesting careers, and for both of them they were changing careers to get into computer programming.

Now we are expanding the team so we are hiring another of their classmates, who they have strongly recommended to me.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#146

Post by ausjke »

from my experience the only way you get better salary is to jump around, not too often, but if you stay with one company for two long(say, 5+ years), you become the lowest paid at your level in general.

only if you're on the management ladder you want to stay longer, for tech and engineering roles, the old employer does not really appreciate that much after you're loyal for too long as far as compensation goes, very ironic but it's the way it is.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#147

Post by gambiting »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #136
Fordec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

> CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?" It's quite simple, you lay them off. I've seen it happen more than once.

Maybe in US you do. In UK "laying off" a programmer for anything other than major breach of contract(like being caught red handed stealing) and without making the position demonstrably redundant, takes about ~6 months and it's not a pretty process. Laying off should be the option of last resort, purely because of how incredibly costly it is(not just financially - going through the right steps takes time from both HR and other engineers).

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#148

Post by xvb10 »

eduardsi wrote: post #10
cva10 wrote: post #7

Ok, so the guy is in the training and conference business. That would seem to skew his perspective. Usually the people who talk loudest about mentoring are clueless or are in the teaching business. In the real world, there is zero reward for mentoring. Moreover, if you do it, you might get fired and be replaced by the now cheaper mentee.

How can you mentor people if you are afraid of being fired or replaced by a "cheaper" mentee? To mentor people, you have to be a professional developer, at the first place. Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable. Mediocre developers – by building knowledge silos.

This is typical of how developers are treated by either their managers or by people who apparently aspire to consult managers by speaking the same BS lingo ("force multiplier": the consultant's salary is force multiplied.)

No other profession has to endure that level of incessant criticism. If a law firm has a fixed number of positions, no one says they should make themselves replaceable, or else they're building silos.

What utter nonsense. People like you are responsible for the constant stream of BS that working developers have to endure.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#149

Post by waiseristy »

vetinari wrote: post #131
chrisseaton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?

Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either. So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1. The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them. Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else ben…

I don't see why this rules out giving A.) developers who have now become B.) developers a raise to match their increased value

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#150

Post by dfrage »

didibus wrote: post #132

This seems to strike a chicken and egg problem. Who will grow the talent? It seems you'll need to hire the mentors for that. And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs? As far as I know, most interview processes are designed to hire potential. For example, if you can't learn fundamental algorithms in a reasonable amount of prep time to prepare for the interview, but so…

> And what's the level of growth possible? Isn't that capped by the level of your senior devs?

Senior devs who are good at mentoring also ought to be good at learning new stuff. They'll also be learning some things from the mentees, at least some of them will know stuff they don't know because our field is so vast.

Once the mentees catch up? If you've inculcated a learning culture, these new senior devs will be learning new things right along with the old ones.

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