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How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

lizthedeveloper.com

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Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#81

Post by ht_th »

dmfdmf wrote: post #54
choppaface wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing!! Like this story a lot better than the linked blog article. A positive example of real evidence is so much more effective than an essay of meta.

I am glad you liked it. I know HN doesn't like the supposedly contentless "thanks for sharing" type of comments but I appreciate it and think it is important to express such sentiments. In fact, about half way in to writing my comment I almost deleted it -- thinking no one would really care. I am glad I was wrong and that I completed it.

Maybe HN should add a "thank you for your contribution" link alongside the "reply" link and add a filter to show/hide these thank-you posts.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#82

Post by frozenport »

jshen wrote: post #56
ionforce wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it flawed?

The most obvious flaw, a programmer is only worth 5.7 times their 1999 salary if their work is generating 5.7 times as much revenue as it would have in 1999. I see no evidence that this is the case. If it were the case, and the vast majority of programmers are earning 1/6 of what their work is worth, then there is a huge opportunity that you can exploit to get rich. Go for it, and let us know how it works out.

It's even worse because you might code up a storm and not add any value. You might work a dead project and only loose the company money. I have seen many a John Henry try to save a project from technical failure when it was a business failure.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#83

Post by amirmc »

ht_th wrote: post #81
dmfdmf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am glad you liked it. I know HN doesn't like the supposedly contentless "thanks for sharing" type of comments but I appreciate it and think it is important to express such sentiments. In fact, about half way in to writing my comment I almost deleted it -- thinking no one would really care. I am glad I was wrong and that I completed it.

Maybe HN should add a "thank you for your contribution" link alongside the "reply" link and add a filter to show/hide these thank-you posts.

We can already upvote. Although we can't see the scores it's already a simple way to acknowledge the contribution.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#85

Post by chitresh »

blumkvist wrote: post #79
solistice wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So essentially managers are people sysadmins. They make sure everyone is working, try to resolve conflicts and ideally make sure that everyone is running the right tools. What would be a people engineer in that vein?

HR.

Nope. Those would be teachers and trainers.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#86

Post by chrisan »

dmfdmf wrote: post #54
choppaface wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing!! Like this story a lot better than the linked blog article. A positive example of real evidence is so much more effective than an essay of meta.

I am glad you liked it. I know HN doesn't like the supposedly contentless "thanks for sharing" type of comments but I appreciate it and think it is important to express such sentiments. In fact, about half way in to writing my comment I almost deleted it -- thinking no one would really care. I am glad I was wrong and that I completed it.

I loved it entirely. It was literally the first thing I read after the front page (I always read comments before the article).

I understand HN reason for not wanting countless thanks as it adds to scroll and doesnt add to the discussion... but it would be nice if they had a simple collapsible thread like reddit so once you got the gist or saw things are getting repetative you could jump down to the next main comment

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#87

Post by erikb »

zobzu wrote: post #14

One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…

I absolutely dig the money argument. A bad junior manager will probably make much more money than a jedi developer. Therefore many people choose to be a bad manager instead of a happy, good, developer.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#88

Post by baddox »

defen wrote: post #43
waterlesscloud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's management's job to be able to evaluate the contributions of their employees. If they can't, perhaps they're 0.5x managers.

Almost any process that measures human output will be gamed (optimizing for measured output rather than overall success). It's basically impossible to game sales without resorting to outright fraud, whereas there are all kinds of ways to game individual engineering output measurements, in ways that do not align with the business objective.

Sure you can game sales to some extent. You can game the specific commission system. That's why it's very important for the specific incentives of the commission system to match the specific goals of the company.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#89

Post by atlantic »

I worked for a while with a software consultancy, as a .NET consultant. One of the nicest things about the company what that they had two distinct career paths for developers - one technical, the other in project management - and they asked us up front what our preference was, and directed our work accordingly. I always thought other companies could take a leaf from their book in this respect.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#90

Post by fsloth »

dmfdmf wrote: post #52
icyfenix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the sentiment I was going for - people who want to stay engineers should be compensated for their badassery, and respected for it, which is usually all they want. That right there is exactly the "power to say No" I was talking about. And how do you know if an engineer wants to stay an engineer or not? By asking them.

I don't want to disparage the whole management class but I think part of it is that manager types don't really get the motivation to solve problems. They think that if someone doesn't have a manager telling them what to do then they won't do anything, but that is just psychological projection. Fred was one of the happiest (and busiest) guys at this company and many strived to achieve his status. Regarding respect; Af…

I don't think you are talking about the introspective capabilities of a whole class of employees (managers) but rather describe the percieved dynamic of an employee-manager relationship in a particular company culture.

Lots of industrial management theory offer this strategy oriented top-down command and control structure as the ideal dynamic for a BigOrg but my personal view is that it is the one that is most easy to describe academically and is probably best (best application for model, not the best model for...) for doing scalable things in a technologically fairly static setting.

If the company is structured around this top-down command tree then I imagine it's not as much necessarily about how the manager internally models peoples motivations but rather about the management culture of his colleagues and superiors within which he works.

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