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Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#51

Post by salmo »

Uh, yeah. Especially in large companies, this is common practice, even without that transition you describe.

It is often much easier to hire internally than externally. And that's good. It keeps people happy within the company vs forcing folks to move on. Onboarding new employees is expensive. If you can shift 1 and keep them happy vs having them leave and having to externally hire 2 it's a win.

For my team (I have no hiring decision, just input), I frequently look for smart people dissatisfied with their work somewhere else. Things I look for: people wanting to work on something more interesting, work with a higher performing team, having greater "impact" with their work, wanting a new skillset, stuck without upward mobility, wanting opportunities for more visibility, etc.

It also avoids the gamble of a resume and behavioral interview. You know the person and can take a reasonable guess on their "fit" with the team. You know their actual skillset ("hard" and "soft" skills) vs claimed.

We've lost a few to job hopping, but for the most part, it's a much better predictor of someone who will stick around, be happy, and be a valuable contributor.

You do have to followup with being an advocate for those high performing people. That can just be recognizing their work publicly or pay/promotion opportunities.

Also, if someone is frustrated with the job on my team, I try to use my internal connections to find a place that they will be happy. I really do care about them as humans and see happiness and job satisfaction as more important than hoarding them.

From the other side, every job I've taken (internally or externally) based on people I know has worked out great. Every one I took by just applying to a posting, notsomuch. No it doesn't sound fair or like a meritocracy, but it's human. Walking in with trust and understanding is a real advantage.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#52

Post by thorin »

I got pulled into a meeting telling me I'd been made redundant at short notice (UK based). A few mins later I was asked if I would consider moving teams. I moved to another team for a few months and did some training, and did a load of projects for them, it worked out well for both of us. They then moved me back to my original team. This kind of stuff happens all the time. If I was a manager and even as a tech lead, I'm constantly looking to pull in the best people, and it's much easier to do that internally rather than recruiting.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#53

Post by dvtrn »

vanusa wrote: post #29
dvtrn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm a Senior SRE, started off my tech career (21 years ago) on a help desk at a law firm, worked up to where I am now through various startups, roles, promotions. It's been my own personal observation in other tech communities when a Devops practitioner or Site Reliability Engineer is bemoaning some of the more common antipatterns[1] that manifest when companies decide "We're Devops now", the popular responses…

So would you say DevOps is ... more a "brand" than useful proscription for anything? Or what are its useful / redeeming features, in your view? Don't mean to be dismissive, I'm still trying to figure out what it is, actually. In reality, as opposed to the stuff people like to hear themselves say about it.

Good question. Had to sit here and think about how I wanted to answer that one.

Proscriptively? Probably. Inherently, not as much, but maybe.

What I mean is, in some cases it probably is just a ‘brand’ in that I’ve just had too many experiences with companies that hired “DevOps Engineers” due to a lack of hiring discipline to actually bring in a SME for a critical component.

This is how I think some Devops practitioners end up getting shit “thrown over the wall” and probably lies at the root of what they’re complaining about.

So yeah I would say Devops is probably more of a brand than a transformational way of delivering software for SOME companies. These are the “pretenders” IMO.

To your other question, what are redeeming features? Also a good question. One in fact. . . that forces me to really sit down and think about. I haven’t ever thought about the question of “what’s redeeming about Devops” as a Devops practitioner.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#54

Post by rapjr9 »

I've had two positions where most of my work was doing nothing but working in other teams. In one I was part of a computer simulation group where other teams in the company would come to us with simulation problems and one of us would go join their meetings, learn the problem, and work on it with them. Usually short term for weeks to months, though there were often repeat embeddings. In the other position I worked as a programmer supporting research and usually worked on multiple grant funded projects at the same time and the grants often ran out and new grants came in. So my work and the people I worked with was always changing and professors would often "borrow" or "loan" me to other professors. Professors and students would come and go adding more churn to the nature of the work. Sometimes I had a say in which projects I wanted to work on, sometimes I didn't. Technically I could have moved to any grant funded job in the university, moving from the CS to the Physics dept for example. In practice there wasn't a lot of grant funding that included funding for a staff programmer so I tended to work with a fairly small group of professors who brought in other professors on their projects.

In some of my other jobs shifting departments or teams would have been very difficult, the teams were territorial and kept boundaries and moving across those boundaries would be taken as a betrayal, so even if it was possible it would have created ill will between the teams, making working together more difficult. I recommend avoiding places like that.

Yet another workplace sought government grants and would encourage everyone to shop themselves to the various teams currently seeking grants. If the team won a grant you could stay with them and work on the grant. Or you could move to another grant seeking team and work with them. All you had to to was find someone who would give you a paycode to put on your weekly report, which was where your salary came from. I had a boss, but if I found my own paycode sources he was happy. It was described to me as forming small companies inside the main company.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#56

Post by vanusa »

dvtrn wrote: post #53
vanusa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would you say DevOps is ... more a "brand" than useful proscription for anything? Or what are its useful / redeeming features, in your view? Don't mean to be dismissive, I'm still trying to figure out what it is, actually. In reality, as opposed to the stuff people like to hear themselves say about it.

Good question. Had to sit here and think about how I wanted to answer that one. Proscriptively ? Probably. Inherently, not as much, but maybe. What I mean is, in some cases it probably is just a ‘brand’ in that I’ve just had too many experiences with companies that hired “DevOps Engineers” due to a lack of hiring discipline to actually bring in a SME for a critical component. This is how I think some Devops practitio…

Thanks - that echoes a lot of what I'd been quietly suspecting.

I just didn't have heart to raise the issue with the resident 'DevOps Evangelist' a certain place I worked at recently.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#58

Post by TigeriusKirk »

Back at the start of my career I worked for a mid-sized software company that was growing by buying small companies in our general field. I was assigned to work on integrating one of those company's products with my team's product. Mostly because I was young and not tied down and could happily spend a couple weeks at a time in another state.

Once I finished that, the CTO decided I was going to be the guy he sent around to all the acquired companies to work out the technical integration plans. Obviously integration was a priority, but no one understood all the technical details of the various pieces that needed to fit together.

I wasn't really poached to another team, exactly, but I also had no direct work on my officially assigned project. I spent months and months bouncing around the country figuring out how to make everything work together. I kept my same manager, but all my work product went to the CTO.

It was kind of a weird situation on paper, but on the ground it made sense to have someone "outside the system" to be the one digging around in all the newly acquired projects. Obviously great for my career, and indirectly great for my manager's career. Heck, he has his own consulting business even now that's based on supporting and customizing that suite of software. He knows all the pieces from my work bouncing around.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#59

Post by p2t2p »

We’ve got internal mobility portal and process, other teams regullary publish open positions and you’re free to move unless there are couple impeding issues like PIP. There are couple interviews, one is about tech stuff, just to ensure that you will be able to carry on (I switched from Java to Node stack recently) and “culture”, to ensure that you’re ok with the way team works and don’t seem like a toxic addition. It is a normal situation to hop teams and no one thinks anything special about it.

I recently switched from between tech stacks and quite different ways of working and different products.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#60

Post by ruh-roh »

When I was just out of school 20ish years ago, I wanted to take my CS degree to an application development position. I got hired, but it was more of a technical Product/BA/QA role, not writing code. I did the job as asked, learned the systems, contributed value, etc - but I was also young and stupid. I complained about my role to anyone who would listen. I wanted to be a developer. Most team members encouraged me to stick it out, my time would come, or rolled their eyes. Or both.

At a team outing a few months in, I had too much to drink and approached the Tech Lead to complain about it. He looked at me square in the eyes and (basically) shouted - "There are hundreds of low and medium severity bugs in the bug database, go fix one then come talk to me! Better yet, fix a bunch and I'll come talk to you!"

(It worked, I was an app dev 3 months later.)

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