Companies usually want new hires to "hit the ground running" with projects in $MAJOR_TECHNOLOGY and usually don't really care about employee growth. Corporate Agile processes are there, in part, to mitigate the effects of mediocre programmers and drag their bog-standard enterprise applications across the finish line in spite of the competence, or lack thereof, of developer staff. In that environment, yes, you want to filter out anyone who doesn't meet some baseline threshold of facility with your tech stack. But you don't really care how they grow as developers; someone with a steep "slope" may be a net negative as they're at risk of growing bored and leaving when the business needs them most.
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#62Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
> For seniors (say 10 years and beyond), they're not going to be with you long enough for progress to make a huge difference, especially if they're decent to start out with - maybe that's not true 100% of the time, some people will stay around longer than expected and some people really do keep growing rapidly even into late career, but it's a reasonable guess. You're paying them primarily for the growth they've already done.
I strongly disagree. Why would I not be around as long as a younger person? Most young people last about 3-5 years in a job as far as I can tell. As I get older, I'm jumping around less. And I'd say that my skills are growing faster than I was when I was younger. I don't waste time on a lot of fluff that I would have when I was younger. I focus on areas of growth that are more likely to have an impact, not only on myself but on the rest of my team. I see the same patterns in other older engineers I work with.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#63Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
I've seen 10+ year engineers grow at the same pace as 3-year engineers. I think this generalization is too broad.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#64I dislike this in that it promotes ageist thinking in many people. There is a presumption that younger people will have a higher slope. In one sense, it's true. Consider the weightlifting analogy. It is easier to train to deadlift from half your body weight to 1x your body weight, than is is to deadlift 2x your body weight to 2.5x your body weight. Similarly, capable junior developers become "mid-level" and sometimes…
A lifelong learner with decades of experience will outperform a 5-year "senior" many times over, not just in output but also in the headaches and mess that they save you from having to experience. What we need is better titling. There's nothing shameful about being a junior or a mid-level for multiple years each. Until we get that, one can usually tease out the "seniorness" of the position by discussing salary.
So, that's an orthogonal problem. I was pointing to the direct advice and suggesting that people will look at this advice and their prejudices will lead them to hire a younger person over an older person because the older person will be mispercieved as having a "lower slope."
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#65I dislike this in that it promotes ageist thinking in many people. There is a presumption that younger people will have a higher slope. In one sense, it's true. Consider the weightlifting analogy. It is easier to train to deadlift from half your body weight to 1x your body weight, than is is to deadlift 2x your body weight to 2.5x your body weight. Similarly, capable junior developers become "mid-level" and sometimes…
This is all about value to the company… they have to pay the 60 year old the actual value of their work, because it is established and known. The 22 year old they can pay at an entry level rate, and then in a few years be getting intermediate value for that same entry level rate.
How often are early developers staying for long enough to realize that value anymore? Or, alternatively, how often are they given pay bumps because it would otherwise be logical for them to leave?
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#66Hire for polynomial degree, not slope! But watch for negative coefficients, particularly on the highest powered term.
Wow, this shit writes itself.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#67Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
> the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more
I am misunderstanding something seemingly-fundamental... are you saying that the average career of a software developer is only 2-6 years? If so, I guess I need to feel much older than I'd ever previously have thought...
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#68Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
> the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more I am misunderstanding something seemingly-fundamental... are you saying that the average career of a software developer is only 2-6 years? If so, I guess I need to feel much older than I'd ever previously have thought...
Thats how I read it at first, but I think he is saying if someone has 2yrs experience then working another 2 years somewhere else would make that second job half of their current career. I think "work experience" would have been a better term to use.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#69Without reading the article, I think I get it! Lol.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#70Better yet, hire for area under the curve