351–360 of 803 posts
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In my experience promoting from within is still insufficient. Getting a promotion means maybe a 10% raise. Quitting means a 50-100% raise. I've got a guy on my team in a junior-ish position making 80 who is about to leave to make 160. There's no promotion path in the company to get that kind of raise over night.
Well that sucks time to change the company...
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> good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too! Pfft. I'm about as "senior" as it gets and I'm generally the fastest developer in any team I'm on. I've never met a junior dev that could hold a candle to me, and most senior devs I know are the same...we're coding monsters.
True. But the team as a whole would probably still achieve much more if you were mostly guiding other (less experienced) devs.
> can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!
is pure BS.
I have seen the "we don't want to waste time teaching people. So, hire only senior developers" scenario play out at couple of my previous employers. And, it doesn't end well. Senior devs have expectations around salary, growth and work. Over time when the company starts running out of steam - funding, growth or even interesting work it gets difficult to keep the senior devs happy. Once that scenario plays out, compan…
>Senior devs have expectations around salary, growth and work. A Junior Dev will have them, too, though. Not the ones fresh out of college, but maybe the ones that already worked for 6 months or so.
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Is there no room to fight management or make them understand?
High probability of “not productive effort”, i’m fighting my own rather serious battle with management at the moment. On further note, before i started the contract i was asked to bring my own laptop as work computer, i didn’t necessarily agree (for all the obvious reasons as security and business/personal risk) but he was being pushy about i said i could take my laptop (at least to get started) and i was expecting t…
I already got myself in boiling water by criticizing
management in that the way projects and tasks were being
managed was highly unprofessional...
I'm not making any comments on your personal situation, but as a general rule it's important to talk in terms of solutions and not problems. So don't say, "we have a problem and here is my recommendation to solve it". Say instead, "I think we can improve our productivity by...", or "I think we can save some money by...".
Do some calculations to help sell your case. You want to spend time optimising the build process? Record how long it takes to build the code currently. Maybe it takes 5 minutes. Maybe you build the software no fewer than 12 times a day. That's an hour of productivity wasted per developer. Do the maths, convert it into dollars. Then say, "we can save X dollars a week by optimising the build process. We spend a week working on this, we will have made our money back within a month (or whatever it is)."
Your manager will be quite happy to go to the board to tell them that he's improved efficiency by a factor of X.
Highlighting existing problems, even whilst providing solutions can put a manager on the defensive when you really need him to be your ally.
Obviously I'm not saying never highlight problems. Sometimes you have to highlight problems, but it requires delicacy and if you don't need to, then don't. You probably don't need to a lot more than you think. We developers tend to put the problem first and the solution afterwards and it's quite hard to put aside that mindset when talking to stakeholders. Even Elon Musk finds this hard to do when talking to the press. It's quite funny to hear him talking about all of a Tesla's inefficiencies while trying to sell it!
Also be patient. Your manager actually needs to be convinced of what you're saying; he can't just take your word for it. So if you see an example of how your solution would have prevented a problem that just had to be dealt with, point it out. Take him on a journey, to use an old cliché.
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> good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too! Pfft. I'm about as "senior" as it gets and I'm generally the fastest developer in any team I'm on. I've never met a junior dev that could hold a candle to me, and most senior devs I know are the same...we're coding monsters.
Dunning-Kruger called, they want their overblown ego steamroller back.
PS: Most people have never worked closely with someone with 25+ years of experience, but the difference is staggering.
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> You hire for needs in the next 12 months. That's like, your opinion, man. Why can't you hire long-term? If all you plan for is short-term, it will only work short-term, and it should be no surprise if on the longer term you fail or you find yourself in a world of pain. > I see this as a byproduct of product development time. MVP and its associated stuff... It's all about short horizons, I think you severely misunde…
> Why can't you hire long-term? You can , but I have never been offered a multi-year employment contract. Employers seem to prefer the flexibility of being able to terminate employment sooner than that.
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I am surprised no companies offer noise cancelling headphones for staff. They are relatively cheap (compared to restructuring an office building) and could increase productivity a lot for some people.
Those headphones only block constant background noise, not conversations . In order to do that you have to put your hearing at risk with enough actual noise to overwhelm the rest.
> we don’t hire junior developers because we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor them. That feels too dumb to be real (which is exactly why it's probably a real thing). You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too! You hire senior devs to guide you WHAT and HOW to code. And they can do that so much more effectively if they don't have to…
In my current job, for a tech company with less than 12 people, at least 5 are interns. Two of them were recent hires (January) and before they were onboarded, i had a meeting with my boss and the other senior developer regarding the new interns and my boss stated he didn’t want me and other senior dev spending too much time mentoring the interns and that if they couldn’t manage by themselves, he would just let them…
This is of course because of outsourcing. Junior devs usually do repeatable tasks guided by a manager closely, which is exactly what outsourced heads can do, definitely cheaper than the junior devs in the U.S. would. This is normal.