451–460 of 535 posts
Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first? Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass. Imagine having no fear any more.
Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first? Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass. Imagine having no fear any more.
> Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first It actually might help. This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM, WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also the expectation that they self train and learn how to become productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low r…
1. if you're in a high CoL area, how are they living off of 60k?
2. the big gamble is trusting companies to give a salary bump after that point and not instead cut them off. trust in corporate isn't exactly high right now.
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> young folk these days You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who would never be given a chance at all. But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.
Sometimes people who are able to talk a lot do quite well in interviews - and University students need to be exposed to a wide variety of topics, but rarely support large projects for a long time, so that wouldn't be something that would come up in an interview.
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> young folk these days You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who would never be given a chance at all. But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.
> You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place The hiring process is probably barely better than random, and, probably even closer to random for a junior hire. Junior hires mostly don't know anything . So, you're pretty much hiring on "seems smart, curious, and enthusiastic" and praying a lot that you can train them. You're simply going to get misses. This is one of the advant…
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I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent. What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?
There's no fix for this problem in hiring upfront. Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end. If you want people to work after they're hired, you have to be able to give direct negative feedback, and if that doesn't work, fire quickly and easily.
Real junior hiring used to mean taking someone raw, pairing them heavily for six months, and turning them into a solid mid. Now the default is “we’ll only hire someone who needs zero ramp-up” and then wonder why the market feels empty.
The problem is "Seniors" started becoming worse a decade ago. Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example. Problem-solving on their own, collaborating with peers, sharing information/communication, doing proper due diligence, organizing and improving themselves and their team/product/business. This was around the same time bootcamps started flooding the industry with amateurs with no experience.…
Because their jobs were being outsourced.
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I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting? But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued ski…
I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months. Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test. That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctual…
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>Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through. I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the…
It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.
As an example, I'm sure the first Unreal Engine was made by a crew in their garage, in times where they were trailblazing techniques we take for granted 30 years later. That isn't something most modern seniors could do, but the engine could also reasonably be contained in one or two minds in its entirety.
But by UE5 you have teams that maintain every module of the engine. Millions upon millions of lines of code, hundreds of modules, dozens of features per module. It's a completely different beast. No one maintain all of that by themselves.
Maybe thars a part of what makes me want to go indie as an end goal. I want some semblance of the kinds of "responsibility" that involves a full product to ship, not just a portion of a module to maintain. Something somewhat close to what "old seniors" would do (even if I'm not coding every line of the engine like they would do).
> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation. This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions, 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time…
This will now become even more normalized given that on technical skills seniors are no longer needed for juniors to skill up. AI and the evolving ecosystem will help and assist them way more. In the new world, the more technical and non-technical work you do towards customers/teams/organization, the more senior you become. I see many not liking it, but I'm also seeing first hand that is how it is.
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I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months. Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test. That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctual…
Not so fast. I "saved" guys from being fired by asking to be more patient with them. The last one was not in my team as I moved out to lead another team. Turned out the guy did not please an influencial team member, who then complained about him. What I saw instead was a young silent guy, given boring work and was longing for more interesting work. A tad later he took ownership of a neglected project, completed it an…
Most (middle) management is an exercise in ass-covering, rather than creating healthy teams. They get easily scared when "Jira isn't green", and look someone else to blame for not doing the managing part correctly