271–280 of 460 posts
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YMMV but numbers of them! we offer good salary/benefits etc, but on the whole senior and mid-level devs seem to be contracting for our tech stack (React/Node) and that's a path I'm not particularly keen on going down. edit: if anyone reads this and wants a job, I've put my email in my profile.
Are you open to Juniors?
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You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).
> become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minut…
You can't even become good at flipping burgers without being interested in doing it.
My co-founder and I believe so strongly in this that we started a company around it. So many companies are willing to let perfect be the enemy of good. It's why this concept of an MVP has to be hammered in over and over again. And yet, we still let this mentality pervade hiring. We hire people on the slim chance that they'll need to re-implement a consensus algorithm and not on the 99.99% chance that all of their wor…
It's definitely possible to write your resume so that it just shows off relevant experience. I started programming professionally at age 26 - reading my resume, you basically just see my professional experience in programming since then. It helps having a baby face, too.
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It’s messed up in the other direction too, though. There’s no other STEM field where you attend a six week “boot camp” and expect to get a job. Or where people with two years of experience are “senior”.
Senior is ten years +/- a year depending on what they accomplished in my opinion.
At ten years you should be absolutely expert in the areas you've worked in. This is staff or senior staff level, if you also have some business acumen, ie the ability to see beyond engineering requirements.
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> But in most high-end professional fields, that's not true. Many of the top people in other fields also have a strong passion for the field, which came early. Ex. top lawyers usually love the law and many had experience with related areas (ex. debate) from high school. I know plenty of high school students who are very excited about medicine and do things like volunteering at a local hospital or helping a professor…
> I've never found someone who is only in tech for the money to be particularly good at it. Those people certainly exist, so this just sounds like a bias on your part.
Don't get me wrong, I believe most who pick this profession due to its perks, tend to be worse then their computer inclined counterparts; but there are lots of examples of this just not being true.
I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…
I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs someone who had 10 years experience but doesn't care Why? This is a legitimate, but deeply opinionated "why". You employing me and me working for you is a business transaction. Why should I care about your mission beyond giving enough 'care' to produce great work that helps you run your business, run it well, so much that you'll wa…
However, I think there are three big reasons that I don't want to hire people who are just clock-punchers.
One is the users. When I start in a new domain, I work hard to understand the people the product is meant to serve. And when I'm running teams, I work hard to make it so that everybody can develop empathy for the users. I don't believe it's possible to make great products without it.
Number two is the team. Google's research on good teams [1] matches my experience: you don't get good teams without people who care about their colleagues and what they're doing. I get the desire to think like a plumber, who just comes in to fix this one sink and then goes away again: that's easier and less risky. But software is a team sport. So I want people who care about their team members.
Number three is the bigger scale: infrastructure, process, culture. Anybody who just wants to focus on their contribution does that at the expense of paying attention to broader impact. I want to work with people who notice and care about that, who are interested in making tomorrow better than today. For themselves, for their colleagues, for the users. Because that shit doesn't happen on its own.
So yes, bullshit job requirements are bullshit. And any requirement can be bullshit given the context. But there are contexts which really caring is vital, and those are the places I want to work.
[1] https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...
My co-founder and I believe so strongly in this that we started a company around it. So many companies are willing to let perfect be the enemy of good. It's why this concept of an MVP has to be hammered in over and over again. And yet, we still let this mentality pervade hiring. We hire people on the slim chance that they'll need to re-implement a consensus algorithm and not on the 99.99% chance that all of their wor…
Most corporate dev jobs can be effectively handled by someone who can reliably show up and pull words from a database and display them on a screen.
So in principle, a lot of people can do it but only some do it while not making things more difficult for the next person.
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I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs someone who had 10 years experience but doesn't care Why? This is a legitimate, but deeply opinionated "why". You employing me and me working for you is a business transaction. Why should I care about your mission beyond giving enough 'care' to produce great work that helps you run your business, run it well, so much that you'll wa…
"Why should I care about your mission " I don't care if you care about the mission of the company. It probably helps but I don't care that much either as long as the company doesn't do anything illegal or something I find ethically objectionable. I care whether you care about your craft and want to improve. I care if we can have interesting discussions about work and tech or if you just want to be told what to do nex…
At Origin, we've hired multiple people without computer science degrees and whose resumes you would never pick out of a stack. One of our key players, for example, was a commercial real estate broker who taught himself how to code. The reason we hired him is that we're a 100% open-source project and he just started contributing. And he turned out to be really great. By the time we gave him a fulltime offer, he'd had…
Being able to look past the resume and pick up good people who don't fit a traditional pattern is definitely a skill. Business people tend to not understand this because they are stuck on matching patterns. In other words, don't let non-technical people be in charge of hiring developers :)