661–670 of 803 posts
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I honestly don’t know why so many companies are clinging to open offices with a death grip. Who does this benefit???
Accounting. Open offices take less space, which is cheaper. The real costs are hidden, so they tend to be ignored. It also looks good from the outside.
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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…
..if all you plan for is short-term, it will only work short-term.. My point exactly, only in reverse. In industries (eg, merchant banking, corporate law, industrial engineering) where the plans are longer term, the thinking is longer term. Here you see highly involved onboarding programs with mentorship, in depth training and such. Uber, FB, snapchat, netflix or whatnot never had plans that really looked past 2-3 ye…
I work in banking at the moment, and the thinking is anything but longer term. Management is so desperate to hire enough qualified developers that it fills a lot of the vacancies with contractors, which are, by company's definition, temporary. So, in other words, the company is already planning to let go of people who will build its vital systems. That's myopic thinking at its finest.
What's interesting is that big part of enterprise market in, for example, London seems to operate like that - management pretends that people are replaceable cogs that hold no company-specific knowledge and require no ramp-up time. The stupidity of it is mind-boggling.
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You are confusing senior devs and rockstar devs. Rockstars are lone wolves, write unmaintainable code that works quickly for demos but gives the company pain for years to come as nobody can figure out how to make it stable or maintain it. A rockstar's reputation is self reinforcing because it's easy to get a lot of shit done when one doesn't have to worry about maintainability, communication with the rest of the team…
You hire the rockstar to write version 1. That's the one that gets you to market fast, and the one you should be planning on throwing away. It's the one you keep in production as your non-rockstar ninja and guru coders write version 2 from scratch. Once you release version 2, you really need to fire your rockstar. They will never be happy in maintenance mode, and that's fine, because they're usually bad at writing fo…
It is literally a dream of mine to finally finish paying off tech debt while putting in policies to never have to take any on again.
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> The OP is saying: given two senior applicants with the same coding skill level, the one most suited to the job is the person who can communicate to juniors and delegate effectively. If that's what he was saying, I'd be much more in agreement. Instead he said, effectively, that senior devs shouldn't be coding because they can't do it any better than junior devs.
No. Read it again. What I was saying is two things: A. GOOD junior devs can (and often do) outperform good senior devs at the metric of "quantity of code produced" (I later added that IMO in fact they should , not just can ) B. (the central point of my argument, really) If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs. It's not just cost…
> If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs.
Actually, no argument there. Mentoring is indeed a critical function of senior devs.
> It's not just cost-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work)
And you lost me there. I'm so much more effective that it's always cheaper to have me do it, assuming I don't have a higher priority task (in which case it's a non-issue, since I'm working on that one). I.E. I'm a 10x (or 100x) developer, but I don't get paid 10x (or 100x).
There are two sets of juniors that I've come across. The first critically assesses a problem and it's edge cases, how to integrate the solution into the greater body of work, and considers performance. They might not know the stack of the company but they can be brought up to speed quickly by more experienced team members. The second is one that is incredibly proficient at the most cutting edge tools. They are hired because they are up to speed with what the company considers valuable at that moment. There is a much greater emphasis on getting shit done quickly rather than considering how it fits in later, how performant it is, or assessing how to integrate the solution in larger contexts.
I've found the first type to be much stronger teammates over an extended amount of time. They are also the ones that are able to command higher salaries when starting out because of the approach. The second type sees the salary numbers being set by the first and has an expectation that it is what they too are worth. Now you have two drastically different candidates competing for the same entry level positions, at the same rate. The first won't have an issue getting a job and the second will struggle.
Both can flourish in the right situations. We need to do a better job at distinguishing the two.
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People get better with practice. So, yes senior developers tend to be significantly faster coders. It's not that they do everything faster, but by getting better at the hard parts they finish complex tasks vastly more quickly. PS: Most people have never worked closely with someone with 25+ years of experience, but the difference is staggering.
I have. It was staggering how they had managed to survive for 25+ years. Every person is different.
Having not worked with the same person for 25 years I can only speak of the average case.
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There is absolutely a skill difference between senior and junior. The problem is that junior developers today somehow think they deserve mid or senior level salaries despite not having the skills. Developers are being told not only that higher level skills like algorithms and big-oh don't matter, but that they are such special people that they can even do jobs completely outside of their specialty like design, manage…
But algorithms and big-oh don't matter. All the CS stuff, by and large, doesn't matter. It's like learning biology when you're a Doctor. Might be slightly useful if you have certain jobs, but if you're a GP it's almost entirely useless. The difficulty in programming a web app is almost entirely complexity management. I just recreated a multi-million pound company's functionality without a single algo or any thought o…
It's pretty easy to get someone to understand doing stuff more than you have to is bad aka (no data calls in loops, sort at the DB not on the server, etc), but it's another type of developer to say "hey, this works good for now, but if this client has over X# of widgets we're going to run into performance problems, why don't we see if we can build a caching layer to share data across widgets".
Just that type of person in a room bringing up those issues saves close to 100 man hours by the time that bug gets found by a client, escalated through client support, pointed, moved into a sprint, retested, etc. That's saving the company a lot of money in a very concrete way and delivering a better product.
There were never any junior dev jobs. You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field. I have a buddy who legit cheated his way to the top Magento certification and now cycles through $150k+ jobs where they keep him on long enough to realize he doesn't have any coding skills then they fire him. Reason is software is always an ancillary concern to the business. You see this in other fields, like s…
What do you suggest for those of us who believe we would be terrible at management? Add to that, I also think I would be miserable doing it.
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You are confusing senior devs and rockstar devs. Rockstars are lone wolves, write unmaintainable code that works quickly for demos but gives the company pain for years to come as nobody can figure out how to make it stable or maintain it. A rockstar's reputation is self reinforcing because it's easy to get a lot of shit done when one doesn't have to worry about maintainability, communication with the rest of the team…
You hire the rockstar to write version 1. That's the one that gets you to market fast, and the one you should be planning on throwing away. It's the one you keep in production as your non-rockstar ninja and guru coders write version 2 from scratch. Once you release version 2, you really need to fire your rockstar. They will never be happy in maintenance mode, and that's fine, because they're usually bad at writing fo…
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is 50k really such a bad starting salary or is there such a big difference between US and EU?
If you are living somewhere with 2k a month rent, then yes, $50k a year is awful and nigh unlivable. You should not be in a position where you are working professionally and full time where you have to worry about having enough money each month to survive. The cost of living is out of control and nobody wants to acknowledge that should reflect rising salaries. It is why there was so much momentum around a $15 minimum…
Alternatively, we could look into reducing cost of living. US is dealing with a legacy system in the form of suburban sprawl that makes housing far more expensive than it has to be because the demand by the biggest generation far outstrips supply (simply due to area constraints and ridiculous zoning policies).
A small dilapidated house built in the 1950s with lead paint and asbestos should not cost $400,000.
Unfortunately, that is politically untenable right out of the gate.