Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
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Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
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Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#2I sure wish I could relate to this but I haven't been at a company that hired juniors since i was the junior being hired 15 years ago.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#3This is an interesting perspective(and a great roadmap for juniors to try to improve), but I think for the most part the thesis is wrong, at least in my experience.
Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers. They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#4This is an interesting perspective(and a great roadmap for juniors to try to improve), but I think for the most part the thesis is wrong, at least in my experience. Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers. They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed.
>Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers
Working for companies, as a manager, I have. I have said to my management that is what my intention was, and subsequently hired people for exactly that.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#5The A signals are not A signals in this article, and this:
> You may be wondering where this “extra” time is going to come from. You’re already committed up to your eyeballs. …We’ll talk about time management, task queue management, diff queue management, and other topics that will accelerate your progress.
Is just corporate dog whistling.
If you are over committed, no amount of time management will solve your problem. Using AI wont solve your problem.
You have a fixed amount of time and too much work?
Work. More. Hours.
Thats the real game; spend extra time outside of your normals hours doing extra.
Congratulations, you’re an “A”.
Makes no difference; your resilience against restructures is not correlated with how much respect you have from senior developers.
That shouldn't be your goal.
There are many places that do what they call “data driven” performance evaluation (translation: avoid being racist by looking only at anonymised numbers) and they do, indeed, look at 40 completed tasks and go: we will keep this one.
The strongest advice for a new starter is: at your specific company ask what you will be reviewed on, and do your best to do whatever that is.
Generic advice is a dime a dozen; don't fall in the trap of assuming [generic advice here] will apply to your specific workplace.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#6For a B level:
> * You did not cause other people unreasonable amounts of work.*
I would be careful with this one. As the examples listed after, such as an on-call incident or extra review of code isn’t necessarily on the n00b. Maybe I’m biased being only 4 years into my career but engagement on stuff you did wrong or even points on what you can do better are extremely valuable. From my standpoint, screwing up isn’t a problem if you can engage with the team to recover and learn from it.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#7I work at a place that is actively hiring juniors. While they don’t have an explicit rating system I feel like we unconsciously follow a similar pattern with new coders and it’s unfortunate.
Given that older staff generally have a legacy of responsibility they don’t always have the time required to coach people who lack that self-starting spark. The quality of the questions and how much effort they have put in to answer things themselves are what differentiates a C from a B.
Mostly you can quickly answer something a B asks. But a C who sponges up your day quickly gets categorised into not being given fun or difficult work.
With funding and resources this wouldn’t have to happen but the industry treats mentoring time as lost time. You aren’t getting your story points done if you’re helping somebody else do theirs.
The stupid agile bollocks management style has no eyes on the future of an organisation.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#8This makes complete sense in an environment where people transition from noob to senior engineer within the same company.
It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years.
It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs.
One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they are transferred.
It might also be thought of as a guide as to when to jump ship. If you have managed to get yourself categorized as a C, then leave. Start fresh somewhere else, take the learning with you, and discover if you have what it takes to make it as an A or B.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#9The A signals are not A signals in this article, and this: > You may be wondering where this “extra” time is going to come from. You’re already committed up to your eyeballs. …We’ll talk about time management, task queue management, diff queue management, and other topics that will accelerate your progress. Is just corporate dog whistling. If you are over committed, no amount of time management will solve your proble…
Eh.
There is a lot to be said about how efficiently you work. This involves making choices about how you solve problems, in what order you solve problems, how you manage people interrupting you, your personal life interface with work, how you advocate for what work to be done... on and on and on.
An easy example: spending 2 days on automation for a task that takes an hour to do manually -- is this a task you have to do once a year or once a week? -- what do you choose to do?
How many meetings do you schedule? How many do you accept? How long do you spend struggling on a problem before asking for help? How often do you not even try something before asking for help?
And on and on and on.
Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks
#10This is an interesting perspective(and a great roadmap for juniors to try to improve), but I think for the most part the thesis is wrong, at least in my experience. Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers. They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed.
>Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers Working for companies, as a manager, I have. I have said to my management that is what my intention was, and subsequently hired people for exactly that.
The thing is when you're starting out this is probably what you have in mind for each job you apply. But that only happens one out of ten.