[HN Gopher] This career feels like a few key hours with year-lon...
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This career feels like a few key hours with year-long cool-down
periods
Author : MattGaiser
Score : 169 points
Date : 2021-10-02 04:56 UTC (18 hours ago)
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| qq4 wrote:
| I'm curious why this upvoted (on HN, not reddit). It boils down
| to whining to me, with a bit of insecurity, "cowardly.. take
| forever.. lacking in discipline" tacked on the end of the post.
| Maybe the work they do doesn't matter, and maybe they are quite
| mediocre.
| dasil003 wrote:
| This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of
| self-worth.
|
| Yeah, life isn't fair, let alone performance reviews. No matter
| who you are, someone else has it easier, like the trust fund kid
| you see driving past in the Tesla, but do you think he's happy?
|
| We all have to eat, so by all means take the next job that will
| pay you more. But when you're at that job, whatever you are
| working on, take pride in it! Always do the best you can, even if
| you hate your boss. This is not for the benefit of the company,
| it's for your own mental health and integrity. Over time this
| builds your skills and competence, which opens more doors.
| Petulantly slacking off because you weren't sufficiently
| recognized hurts no one but yourself; the universe does not care.
| khazhoux wrote:
| And yet, is he wrong? It's a plain fact that after busting your
| ass for a year, your promotion will in most cases be shot down
| during performance review for all the usual scope ("not enough
| scope", "I want to see more leadership", "almost there but
| let's consider it in a year", etc)... and yet a single day of
| strong interviews can get you that bump just like that.
| katbyte wrote:
| Solution is give pay bumps without promotions.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Yes he's wrong: to be promoted you must be doing the next job
| already and the management must be terrified you leave.
|
| You can love your job and hop out sometimes. But petulantly
| slacking off like OP says, is not going to make you happy.
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| It's not about petulance, it's about motivation. I'm in a
| similar position to the author but acting more like you
| would want; I care about being good at my job and want to
| deliver because that is how I was raised, but there is a
| constant tension in me that this is the "wrong" approach
| since no company actually rewards loyalty or expertise, at
| least not nearly as much as self-promotion and being a
| corporate mouthpiece.
|
| Regarding promotion and being indispensable, that cuts both
| ways - in some roles being impossible to replace also means
| you are impossible to promote, since the next step up the
| rigidly defined corporate ladder may not have sufficient
| overlap with your current role.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _Yes he 's wrong: to be promoted you must be doing the next
| job already and the management must be terrified you
| leave._
|
| Sure about this? This isn't even possible everywhere -
| doing the next job, for example, isn't generally possible
| for lower wage jobs. How the heck are you going to train
| for a shift manager position by learning the job when you
| literally don't have the authority access to do it?
|
| You don't.
|
| Terrified that you leave? Try that in a call center. You,
| no matter how good you are, will be easily replaced with
| another warm body or two and folks quit these jobs all the
| time.
|
| Are you sure petulantly slacking off won't make one happy?
| I mean, what if you get joy out of seeing how far you can
| push that button - or alternatively, don't get satisfaction
| from a 'job well done' like you are told that you should?
| Or maybe you only do well for some recognition that you
| aren't getting... or maybe jobs don't give you satisfaction
| at all. They merely give you the means to do stuff that
| does make you happy.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| The context here is software development. Depending on
| what field you are in, I would tend to agree with you
| that it might either not be possible or a bit harder.
|
| That said, even in software, you don't always 'have the
| authority' to do that other job. But does that matter?
|
| Example: you're the junior, new to the team. When the
| team does backlog maintenance, everyone just slaps some
| estimate onto the barely defined ticket and calls it a
| day. Sprints slip all the time because tickets "explode"
| once you actually start working on them. The team lead
| does nothing about it, the PO couldn't care less, he just
| screams at everyone when none of the tickets are done at
| the end of the sprint.
|
| The junior could just resign himself and play along. Or
| he can start asking "dumb questions" during backlog
| maintenance. I.e. start a proper discussion. Suggest
| tickets to be split etc. The bad team lead and PO might
| ignore this and even actively try to get back to just
| slapping on estimates, not actually do the splitting or
| say "yeah I'll do the splitting by the time we do sprint
| planning" and then obviously nothing ever happens.
|
| Do it yourself! Offer helping out, to give them a chance
| to be part of it. They might refuse or try to "pull
| rank". Ignore them. Split the tickets. If you can't do it
| before a sprint starts (e.g. cause they'll notice and try
| to pull rank), split them after you've started on one of
| those bad tickets. Split it into 3 nicely sized ones and
| at the end of the sprint you can show that hey, ticket 1
| is finished, ticket 2 is almost done and ticket 3 isn't
| even started yet. We can release the functionality of
| ticket 1 to customers even!
|
| You've just done all of the following:
| Shown that you're not the junior you've been hired as but
| much more! Ignored the team lead's authority when
| it became clear that even when shown the proper way, he's
| not going to act Ignored the PO's authority when
| it became clear that even when shown the proper way, he's
| not going to act
|
| Let's take this to the call center:
|
| Folks quit these all the time, like you said. Even the
| shift leaders or managers. I don't know enough about call
| center operations to know what the equivalent tasks of
| the little story above are but I do know from experience
| w/ some of our guys that it's totally possible there as
| well. We had a really great QA that came in through the
| call center. Started as a regular rep, became a shift
| lead, moved into QA and then became a BA. He was awesome
| at that. Knew everything by heart or was able to quickly
| try it out in-product. Heck the department lead came in
| through the call center as well. Similar trajectory but
| didn't move over to the software side and stayed on the
| business side.
| Aeolun wrote:
| So getting hired for 20% more salary is much easier than
| performing at the next level and getting a promotion?
|
| Op is not saying he's slacking off. He's saying it doesn't
| matter what he does.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I dunno, my attitude is that capitalism is all a grift anyway
| so I do the best I can when I'm at work, then immediately
| forget all about it come 5 o'clock. The grift is that "fake it
| till you make it" legitimately works. Lie a bit in your
| interviews to make it look like you have experience, then you
| have at least 6 months to figure it out once on the job. Rinse
| and repeat every few years; if you don't stay anywhere long
| enough then nobody will catch on. Just make some friends along
| the way you can call when things get out of your league and
| you'll be fine. In my experience, good relationships will cover
| for poor execution every time, and the reverse is not true.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Why would I consider it 'good' to take pride in my work? So I
| can make another dollar for the shareholders of the company? So
| I can bring forward the destruction of the natural world by
| another millisecond? Even if you hunger for physical
| possessions, which I don't personally, why would that
| incentivise you when your level performance makes no
| difference?
|
| Are you so much a slave that you have to search for meaning in
| the nobility of work? Work does not offer us purpose because
| there is no purpose in the operation of institutions in the
| modern world. Where the driving philosophical principle of an
| enterprise is "make as much money as possible", who among us
| can wring out a meaning that satisfies us spiritually?
|
| Where even our charities are corrupted by the guiding principle
| of more money more good - from where is the conscious worker to
| draw their meaning?
|
| We exist in an age of spiritual and moral vacuum and there is
| no guiding principle at this time that a non idiot can align
| themselves with while retaining some semblance of internal
| consistency.
|
| How is Elon Musk working magic? A big part of it, apart from
| not being just another idiot with an MBA, is that he is giving
| people an actual purpose they can get behind. A purpose that is
| not just something slung over a money making machine in a vague
| attempt to align the workers. No, a real bottom up purpose that
| drives the enterprise. With that kind of purpose a team can
| move a mountain.
|
| You have to ask yourself... If you are not trying to save the
| world from cooking itself, or trying to end poverty or trying
| to cure cancer, or trying to ensure the existence of humanity
| into the far future, what the bleep are you working for?
| Answer: You're working for the thoughtless vacuous industrial
| machine that is devouring both our souls and our physical
| world.
|
| You should be depressed because this sh* is depressing. You
| should be angry because this sh* should make you angry. These
| emotions are deep intuitive reactions, they are drivers for
| change, hear them and move to change the way you work.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > You have to ask yourself... If you are not trying to save
| the world from cooking itself, or trying to end poverty or
| trying to cure cancer, or trying to ensure the existence of
| humanity into the far future, what the bleep are you working
| for?
|
| Some people consider life to be a party, hence they are
| working to "get more beers" and to "wire up the amps" that
| the band will use to play.
|
| In other words they spend time in working mode today in order
| to spend future time in leisure mode. And in their mind the
| future leisure mode is somewhat "better" or "more abundant"
| than the leisure they could have if they retired today.
|
| Not saying they are right or wrong, but most people don't
| have the need to become the undisputed savior of the world.
|
| I think getting emotional and screaming at them because they
| are focused on things that the intelligencia perceives as
| mundane is not the right way to encourage a healthy exchange
| of opinions between the aforementioned intelligencia and the
| general population
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| Thank you for expressing what I struggle with every day.
|
| The additional counterbalancing layer on top of this is an
| internal drive for justice - this is what pushes me to work
| for a big tech company rather than doing something which
| gives me more self-respect. If other people can earn 6+
| figures to fuck about with computers all day and deliver
| nothing of true societal value, why should I be the sucker
| doing scientific research for a fraction of that?
| Throwaway112211 wrote:
| >This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of
| self-worth.
|
| I would argue that tying your self-worth too closely to your
| career can be even more corrosive. Sometimes doing the bare
| minimum and saving your mental, emotional, and physical energy
| for your life outside your work is even more rewarding.
|
| I say this as someone who has spent time at both ends of the
| spectrum. I have had stretches in which my career is my only
| focus and times in which I honestly put in maybe half a day's
| worth of real effort in an average week. Which is better all
| depends on the specifics of your life, your job, and your
| personal motivations at the moment. And it is probably worth
| noting that my career didn't progressive any faster during
| those workaholic periods compared to my slacker periods.
| However those slacker periods were clearly better for my life
| outside of work.
| mettamage wrote:
| I have experienced a different version of this.
|
| I worked a lot on my studies, mostly in studying faster and a
| fair bit in obtaining high grades and studying wide/broad and
| studying deep (I studied for 8 years). Some things I have
| done were claimed to be impossible feats. I have taught
| others how to do it, how to think about learning, even one
| article was written about me.
|
| But the resulting job search was so brutal that I flipped to
| the other end. For 18 months, I couldn't find a job and I
| applied to a very broad bunch of positions and companies
| taking 4 hours on average to write a motivation letter and
| tailor my cv. The result? No response. No company cared what
| skills I have gained during my studies. They see courses like
| hardware security as non-practical and a course on
| multithreading as mostly theoretical. They couldn't care less
| that a part of what I learned there are transferable skills.
|
| When I learned that hard work isn't proportional to career
| advancement, that's where I decided to do whatever I feel
| like. I have too little control over it anyway.
|
| This is a European perspective. I doubt that things would've
| gone this badly if I was American. My way of thinking seems
| to fit better there (though I could be wrong).
| rewma wrote:
| > The result? No response. No company cared what skills I
| have gained during my studies. They see courses like
| hardware security as non-practical and a course on
| multithreading as mostly theoretical.
|
| I wouldn't take that personally, or even as a strong
| indication of a problem with your hard skills.
|
| Sometimes recruiters mainly look for real-world experience
| because that makes a hiring a candidate easier to justify.
| People without work experience or a portfolio are a
| crapshoot. Also, resume embellishment is indeed a common
| problem, thus great but unverifiable CVs might raise a red
| flag. Furthermore, if a company is looking for someone to
| tighten nuts but they get a CV from a highly trained
| engineer, they might prefer to pass on him. After all, if
| he's being underemployed then he might not be planning on
| sticking around for long.
|
| And finally, but not less importantly, soft skills matter.
| Sometimes they matter far more than hard skills. A
| recruiter can tolerate a competent candidate that is eager
| to learn, but they will be less inclined to tolerate an
| outstanding developer who is unbearable, insufferable, or
| unwilling to learn from (and work with) team members.
|
| In the end it's all a crapshoot anyway. There is a lot of
| confirmation bias, and a lot of lottery winners offering
| advise on how to win lotteries, but we would do well to
| acknowledge that the stars need to be aligned for good
| things to happen, and often they aren't.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| I have a similar experience, also European. While I'm not
| nearly as unlucky as you are regarding job interviews and
| getting a job, I can attest that the majority of corps I
| met do not respect transferrable theoretical skills (e.g.
| the ability to work in any language of the same paradigm,
| distilling overly corporate buzzword lingo back to basic
| programming concepts _). Instead, they would rather have
| someone who learned enough trivia to pass a basic test
| filled with code samples you 'd _never* see in real life,
| or which a compiler would quickly correct for you and teach
| you not to do within a week.
|
| Additionally, they will have you stuck doing mostly low-
| tier work spawning from bad decisions in the past instead
| of biting the bullet and having someone fix the foundation,
| and often perceive fixing that foundation as a skill only
| seniors / architects possess. I've met my fair share of
| seniors who believe design patterns are some of the highest
| order knowledge, despite having to learn them during my
| bachelor over a longer span of time than they get taught
| in-house, let alone having to actually use them.
|
| NB: this is not a jab towards seniority. But I do believe
| most corporates do not value educated juniors correctly,
| often equating them to uneducated juniors, as well as
| underestimating what makes a senior a senior. Basic CS
| fundamentals shouldn't be a skill exclusive to seniors.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Not saying this is you or GP, but I've dealt with enough
| juniors who just thought they're really smart and awesome
| but lacked any sense of what it's like to develop
| software for actual, normal people. They couldn't grasp
| that you don't just break your software for 20% of your
| userbase because it results in a cleaner database layout
| or nicer abstraction layer for something internal. "No I
| know what I'm doing, look I have this github project with
| 500 stars and none of the super techy people who use it
| ever complained when a new release broke something"
|
| Yeah, no.
|
| Usually these people come in two flavors: Those actually
| smart and developing an understanding for what it means
| to sell software and have customers with demands, and
| those who live in their little bubble where they're the
| most awesome person on the planet, and everybody else is
| just retarded. Halting all development for a year and
| refactoring everything according to what they think would
| be way superior after spending 5 minutes with the
| codebase is obviously a sane thing to demand.
|
| And I usually try to let them fall into this trap in a
| controlled manner, like when it's a relatively
| unimportant component/feature, or just one customer where
| I can more or less directly relay the expected complaints
| to the junior dev. Usually playing the "this guy is
| responsible for your paycheck" card makes something click
| after a while.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Halting all development for a year and refactoring
| everything according to what they think would be way
| superior after spending 5 minutes with the codebase is
| obviously a sane thing to demand.
|
| Sure, but this only paints one extreme. It's fair to
| expect adults to realize money has to come from
| somewhere, and halting any development and even bugfixes
| won't keep customers. On the other extreme, we have sales
| and management pushing insane demands, which get tacked
| onto already poor code, degrading further, causing bugs
| in the future, increasing the risk factor, on top of
| already taking more than 5x as long as it reasonably
| should with no difference in features whatsoever. Which
| further escalates into high turnover rates, worse code
| quality, dissatisfied employees, no seniority willing to
| come in unless they get paid big time, and more. It's a
| fine line no matter how you slice it. Both extremes can
| run a company into giant losses or even bankruptcy.
|
| Additionally, demands on juniors to prove a business case
| are often far higher than their seniors or managers,
| despite giving juniors less resources to do so. With such
| a simple mechanism in place, it is fair to assume the
| juniors who _do_ go through the trouble of speaking up
| care about the quality of the product and their
| responsibility in the matter. Likewise, I 've seen plenty
| of seniors fall into the same trap you described, either
| halting all progress or spending (read: wasting) months
| developing a strategy out of analysis paralysis only to
| not even have a business case. If anything, they tend to
| be able to do this even easier, since they are met with
| much less resistance thanks to their reputation and/or
| authority.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > This is a European perspective. I doubt that things
| would've gone this badly if I was American. My way of
| thinking seems to fit better there (though I could be
| wrong).
|
| You are wrong, unfortunately. There's a reason for the
| saying: "The A students work for the B students, the C
| students run the business, and the D students get the
| buildings named after them."
|
| A less cynical take is that in school, marketing skills
| (e.g. self-promotion and self-inflating) are irrelevant. In
| industry, they are at least on par with technical skills,
| and in most roles I've encountered, even more important.
| Look at the people you know who were fired (directly or
| made miserable enough to leave voluntarily): People are
| more likely to get fired for not understanding and
| exploiting social dynamics than for being poor in the
| technical arena.
|
| Also, in school, they care about objective evaluation, and
| usually your performance is not dependent on others. At
| work, your work is heavily dependent on others, and almost
| no one tries to objectively evaluate your work (unless
| you're in sales or something).
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| But if you've done research or tried to get a
| recommendation letter, you know self-promotion and self-
| inflating also matters in academia. Especially if you go
| to a large public school.
|
| > objectively evaluate your work
|
| I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al,
| yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on
| the business. If you are part of a successful product
| launch and you engineered major features (even if other
| people could've written those features) you get rewarded.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I wasn't referring to academic jobs, but being a student.
| I don't need recommendation letters to get an A or to
| learn.
|
| > I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al,
| yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on
| the business. If you are part of a successful product
| launch and you engineered major features (even if other
| people could've written those features) you get rewarded.
|
| A few remarks:
|
| If you do something fairly major, then probably yes.
|
| If you do something fairly major, there will often be
| people around you who will attempt (and often succeed) to
| take a fair amount of that credit without having
| contributed much. So yes, you get rewarded, but so will
| others who shouldn't. This is very common where I've
| worked. I think it's generally the case in large
| companies.
|
| We should not focus on major product launches where you
| did major work. Say there is an existing product and most
| of the work is bug fixing and adding features. This
| category is where most of the work in industry is, and is
| where my comment mostly applies. This is also the
| category where innovation is highly touted but rarely
| rewarded. I've certainly been in jobs where innovation is
| needed, but the one who steps up to solve those problems
| is often the one who gets poor reviews, because everyone
| in the team becomes more productive because of him, and
| the manager sees less output from him because he spent a
| big chunk of his time solving infrastructure issues.
|
| When I speak of objectively measuring performance, people
| often compare how it's done between jobs. This is not the
| point. Compare with how it's done when you were a
| student. In most technical courses, it's highly unlikely
| that someone who barely understands the material gets an
| A grade while simultaneously the one who understood the
| material well gets a B or a C. In industry, this scenario
| is quite common.
| r0s wrote:
| Those skills seem like a perfect fit for the video game
| industry, did you try there?
| ryanlol wrote:
| > like the trust fund kid you see driving past in the Tesla,
| but do you think he's happy?
|
| With that horrible plastic interior? I doubt it.
|
| The guy in a mclaren or a rolls royce? Probably.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > This attitude is terrible and corrosive to your own sense of
| self-worth.
|
| For some context: That subreddit is historically very cynical.
| It's more of a support group and a place to vent than an actual
| advice forum. A lot of people arrive on /r/cscareerquestions
| thinking that the only way to succeed is to spend all of your
| spare time doing side projects and grinding leetcode while
| pursuing FAANG jobs.
|
| I would sometimes try to answer questions there in between long
| builds but it became very demoralizing. Many of the regulars
| there are struggling with their careers or disgruntled with
| their jobs and they extrapolate to the entire tech industry.
|
| There were occasionally people putting in good comments in the
| sub, but it tends to get drowned out by cynical complaints. You
| know how internet relationship advice forums devolve into
| everyone telling the OP to break up or get divorced? That sub
| felt like the CS equivalent of a relationship forum: The advice
| is always to blame your employer or the industry and quit your
| job, ignoring any nuance in the situation.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Cscareerquestions also has the same problem all most all of
| reddit has, you cant express any ideas outside of what the
| hivemind says.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I diagree, I think this person has the right idea. Corporations
| aren't people. They have no feelings, no loyalties, no empathy.
| Sure the people who work there do, but you all work for the
| Corporation.
|
| Exploit the corporation. Give them exactly what they pay you
| for an not an ounce more. Stay within the bounds of the law and
| your personal ethics, but extract from the Corporation just as
| the Corporation extracts from everything else.
|
| Don't tie your identity or self-worth to your contractual
| obligations to the Corporation. Use the money you extract from
| the Corporation to enjoy life and the things that do define you
| and give you your sense of self-worth.
|
| The universe does not care if you're good at your job or not.
| You've only got so many years until you're dead and gone, spend
| as little of it as possible working and as much of it doing the
| things as you enjoy. If working is what you enjoy, good for
| you, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I completely agree with this line of thinking as I enter my
| 30s. But having lived in Europe for a while and seen the dark
| side of this "work to live vs live to work" mentality, we
| have to accept that building cutting edge stuff is the result
| of many hours of pain and suffering and most of all
| sacrifice. Somebody has got to do the pain and suffering part
| so that everyone else can do more of the "just work up to the
| requirements and not an ounce more" part.
| dbingham wrote:
| If companies were structured as employee owned worker
| cooperatives, then that sacrifice would be meaningfully
| rewarded. As it is now, a lot of people sacrifice so a
| handful can walk away with the rewards created by everyone
| else's sacrifices.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Driven and intelligent people will always be pushing the
| boundary because they feel a calling to it. The only
| tragedy is they're often not justly rewarded for it.
|
| I'm in the "not an ounce more" camp, but I also don't
| expect a cent more than I'm owed in return. Those who do
| push themselves further for the benefit of humanity deserve
| more than I do.
| dasil003 wrote:
| You're misinterpreting me here, I never said work overtime or
| devote your life to the company. My point was that your work
| and skills are an investment in yourself (especially if you
| work in software), and you're sabotaging yourself if you take
| the cynical view that what you do doesn't matter because
| interviewing pays off more than a capricious promo process.
| The fact is that doing good work has long-term feedback loops
| that build your opportunities from both a skills and
| relationships perspective. Job hopping early in your career
| will definitely ramp up your salary faster, but over the
| long-term it pales in comparison to having a good reputation.
| pg_1234 wrote:
| This x 1000 !
|
| There are not enough upvotes in the world for the parent
| post, but please add yours.
| herbst wrote:
| For my own mental health why would I take pride in a job I
| hate? A job where I can't agree with my boss? Why would I care
| about more money when I have enough?
|
| This sounds like accepting and denying more than anything. I
| would wish anyone a job they are actually valued in, a job they
| like.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think he means take pride in the quality of your work, not
| in whom you work for, as you seem to be inferring. I.e.,
| don't the job harm the good in you.
| nravic wrote:
| Do people out of college even do Leetcode anymore? Surely there's
| a better use of time once you're in a paying job.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Yeah, grinding leetcode is still effective below the staff
| engineer level. Above that we start looking at what you've done
| that's not code (conference talks, open source leadership,
| whitepapers, managing consultants, etc).
| shamiln wrote:
| I am interviewing for a Staff Software Engineer, SRE role and
| I expect leetcode to come up as part of the interviewing
| process.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Oh the leetcode is a given at the staff level -- it's a
| filter, not selection criteria.
| djur wrote:
| I have never heard the word "Leetcode" where I work, or indeed
| anywhere other than HN, and I've interviewed candidates for
| every rung of the IC ladder. Never seen it on a resume, either.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Software engineer salaries are increasing following a bimodal
| distribution, i always thought you had to be a genius level
| person to work at FB, GOOG, then i see my own coworkers (whom
| i consider smart but not exceptional) do the leetcode grind
| and 2x their salary. I'm pretty much in the same boat with
| you, i worked mainly outside of SF/Seattle for a long time
| and i'm amazed how much these engineers get paid compared to
| other cities.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Unaddressed in all these comments: are companies simply too
| stingy with promotions?
|
| Take a look at startups with strong engineers they got from
| FAANGs. I'm willing to bet in most cases, those people jumped
| because they were sick of being denied promotion.
|
| Take a look at the number of engineers on your team who have been
| contributing for years and are still stuck at junior engineer
| level. The next candidate who "seems strong" will get slotted in
| higher.
| sime2009 wrote:
| Companies are happy to compete with each other in the market
| for people when hiring, but they forget that they are still
| competing with the market to retain their existing employees.
|
| The situation is even dumber when you consider the costs
| incurred by on-boarding new employees and the knowledge lost
| when employees leave.
| VLM wrote:
| Which employees? Its like the old claim that only 10% of the
| money spent on advertising is worth anything but nobody can
| figure out which 10% it is.
|
| So the corporation knows that 99% of the employees showed up
| for work the day after their $10K paycheck, and the
| replacement for the guy who quit won't show up for less than
| $11K. Well, if they give no one a raise next payroll will
| cost 99 x 10 + 11 = $1001K, and if they give everyone a pay
| raise then no one will quit but payroll will cost 100 x 11 =
| $1100K. That's an extra $99K and that's gonna cost some HR
| exec her bonus.
|
| So you can guess what strategy they pursue.
|
| Companies also have a political/cultural/religious view that
| individual contributors are instantly interchangeable cogs
| and they have MASSIVE cognitive dissonance if you point out
| thats not true and the recruitment and onboarding process are
| staggeringly expensive, so everyone job hopping all the time
| would cost like 25% the total labor budget so you're paying
| (in the example above) $1001K but who cares whats outgoing,
| you're only getting at most $750K of work out of them when
| they're hopping vs you'd get $1100K of work out of them if
| they didn't hop. And you're financially in the long run far
| better off paying $1100K for $1100K worth of work output than
| paying $1001K for $750K of actual work output. But like I
| said that goes against their political/cultural/religious
| views so they'll slap hands over their ears and chant "nah
| nah nah" when you point it out.
|
| You get more of what you measure, and cutting productivity by
| a hard to measure 25% is worth it in a corporate Dilbert
| sense, if it saves an easy to measure $99K.
| tootie wrote:
| I'm dealing with this now. We pay low end of the market as a
| policy because of the nature of our business. We lure
| employees with "good vibes" of a positive mission and a low
| stress environment. After a rough year we've had to freeze
| raises in the face a a feeding frenzy for talent. Hiring is
| still done at market rates but retention is locked in to the
| low end of the 2018 market. I'm stuck pleading to HR that if
| we don't give out best people at least another 10% we'll be
| spending +25% on a backfill.
| alecco wrote:
| More like the CEO/CFO are only expected to have a churn rate
| similar to competitors. Above: raise comp. Below: slow down.
|
| Source: I was involved in comp decision meetings in previous
| jobs. They don't say it explicitly but the expected rates
| lead the discussion. Blame investors and boards whose goals
| are never past a year or two. This is the same in startups
| and in large companies.
| hammock wrote:
| >More like the CEO/CFO are only expected to have a churn
| rate similar to competitors. Above: raise comp. Below: slow
| down.
|
| Honest, curious question- What exactly is it that's wrong
| about that? Doesn't that exactly reflect the point that
| "they are still competing with the market to retain their
| existing employees"?
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| It's weird.
| lrem wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle is a fear
| commonly cited in Google. We have this superbly outperforming
| L4, but what if they would get burnt out by the L5
| requirements?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| In my experience a lot of engineers leave because they feel
| that they deserve to be promoted, but there is no clear way to
| get promoted. The criteria on the very extensive promotion
| guideline docs can be impossible to meet for even the most
| brilliant of engineers unless the engineer is in the right
| environment/team.
|
| It's a problem for the FANGs to fix. Leave, get hired for a
| role that pays better/has a better environment, and don't look
| back. There will always be another tech company to work for.
| pards wrote:
| > In my experience a lot of engineers leave because they feel
| that they deserve to be promoted
|
| I've found the opposite. Nothing will make an engineer resign
| faster than promoting them to tech lead.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I'm so glad I have experience now (few years). I remember how
| hard it was to get in (I'm not from a tech background). I don't
| have to memorize random things I don't even use in my day job.
|
| I agree though I got a 40% raise jumping to a new job, I'm still
| below $100K but it's something for me in the midwest.
|
| I don't aim to stay in it professionally for a long time though,
| will save/invest and get out. Do it on my own time for fun/to
| build things.
|
| Edited: took out random crap about me not relevant
| the_only_law wrote:
| I actually feel that job hunting has gotten worse as I gained
| more experience, though that's most likely due to the fact I've
| gotten more picky.
| lordlic wrote:
| > I don't have to memorize random things I don't even use in my
| day job
|
| Yeah, imagine what kind of nerd would be interested in the
| field and genuinely want to learn all they can, ha ha.
| the_only_law wrote:
| As someone who at one point was interested and learned all I
| could about the things that interested, I can say majority of
| it is useless, and dismissed if it ever comes u in an inter.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Oh I'm not a pro developer man, I'm mediocre. I can get
| things done but I'm no John Carmack or something.
|
| I do have random interests though and write code outside of
| work in other topics.
|
| I guess specifically I don't know much about algorithms/big-o
| stuff like that (working on it, trying to change fields where
| I can use that).
|
| I do acknowledge being weak in math, I'm concerned if I can
| actually do ML.
|
| I'm a glue-er is the term, crud apps. The OT talked about
| leetcode/that's something I hear people grind while also
| applying to "hundreds" of jobs.
| black_13 wrote:
| It was the average that built the pyramids.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It depends on why you are interested in the field. Some
| people inherently enjoy it. I personally enjoy the ability it
| gives me to create stuff. It is the closest thing to magic in
| my view.
|
| That is why I find Leetcode dull. I can't really do much with
| it as if I needed it, I would pull it from a library.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Yeah, imagine what kind of nerd would be interested in the
| field and genuinely want to learn all they can, ha ha.
|
| Yeah, this comment grinds my gears.
|
| So much "knowledge" in the software world (and parts of
| academia, and probably many other parts of society) is
| completely arbitrary bullshit that gets perpetuated because
| people who are familiar with it want to maintain their
| position of authority.
|
| Actively taking pride in this is not inherently a good thing.
| lordlic wrote:
| I think usually people who try to make this point are just
| pouting over how they shouldn't be expected to know basic,
| fundamental things. Like
| https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
| XorNot wrote:
| I can count on no hands the number of times I have ever
| needed to invert a binary tree in my entire career.
|
| I'm sure someone knows. I'm also sure that I don't care:
| why didn't they use the standard library function for it?
| lordlic wrote:
| Beyond parody.
| XorNot wrote:
| For your consideration I direct you to the struggles of
| developing Starcraft:
| https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-
| to-...
|
| Whereupon a huge proportion of early bugs were
| programmers who believed they were easily smart enough to
| write doubly linked list handling methods proceeded to
| ongoingly and continually screw up writing doubly linked
| list handling methods while refusing to use standard
| functions.
|
| This isn't hypothetical.
| lordlic wrote:
| There is no "standard library function" for inverting a
| binary tree. That's not a thing that exists, probably
| anywhere in any standard library for any language, and
| even if it did you should still know how to write it
| yourself.
|
| Also the article you linked doesn't argue that you
| shouldn't know how to write a linked list, it argues that
| you should implement ADT operations in functions instead
| of trying to wing it with ad-hoc logic all over the
| place. Blizzard's developers were definitely smart enough
| implement a doubly-linked list one time, they were just
| fallible humans who got tripped up consistently
| implementing the same logic in a hundred different
| places.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Honestly, I had things like WiX and CMake in my mind when
| responding to you, but the tweet you linked to seems
| pretty fair too.
|
| So many "nerdy" circles seem to be plagued by this
| subculture where your competence or intelligence is
| measured by how much obscure and useless knowledge you
| can accrue.
|
| The fact that Max's experience creating and maintaining
| the single best package manager on macOS (by a country
| mile, too) was considered less important than whether or
| not he knew the minutiae of a particular form of logic
| puzzle is bullshit, and I can completely synpathise him
| in that regard.
| lordlic wrote:
| I actually do think you have a point about the
| fetishization of trivia knowledge in this field. It's
| really not ideal, and I think it's more driven by social
| dysfunction or over-compensation for various kinds of
| imposter syndrome.
|
| But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary
| tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking
| a fundamental building block in computer science (binary
| trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the
| faintest ability when it comes to writing an _incredibly_
| basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can 't do it, but he
| doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!
|
| That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds _my_ gears. I
| 'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value
| to customers and fix bugs and string together code and
| everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I
| don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far
| without even a glimmer of curiosity about the
| fundamentals of computer science then something is
| disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other
| mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> But that is not this. In the case of inverting a
| binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just
| taking a fundamental building block in computer science
| (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even
| the faintest ability when it comes to writing an
| incredibly basic algorithm.
|
| The thing is that most programmers are not computer
| scientists anymore, in the same way that most computer
| scientists are not mathematicians anymore. In many CS101
| courses there's only a very brief study of algorithms and
| data structures and most of the course is about using
| this or that language (probably python, these days, java
| back in the day, Ada further back etc).
|
| This is partly the fault of universities, in a "the road
| to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of way.
| Universities try to prepare their students for the
| industry, except they seem to be in lockstep with the
| industry's requirements, but with a ten-year gap. So they
| try to teach students programming, rather than computer
| science, because they believe that's what the industry is
| asking for, then the students go to interviews and find
| themselves staring at a binary tree on a whiteboard.
|
| Also, to be fair, the majority of programmers nowadays
| are not nerds, anymore, and they're not even that
| interested in computers, or even progamming. Most of my
| class in my degree and in my Master's just wanted a cozy
| job at an office. In one company where I was hired
| through a graduate programme, all of the guys in my
| cohort came in with a qualification in CS, then
| immediately sought the better-paying manager jobs in the
| corp (and I left to go to academia because [edit:] they
| didn't let me train neural nets on their mainframes :P).
| Yoric wrote:
| Fully agreed.
|
| I usually don't need complex algorithms in my line of
| work, but I can't count how many times I've needed to
| implement topological sorts, for instance, or non-trivial
| tree traversals, or to rewrite code to increase
| parallelism, or to be able to quickly spot that a poorly
| performing algorithm was O(n^2) or O(n^3).
|
| And sometimes, it actually gets complicated. Sometimes,
| it's about increasing cache hits. Sometimes, it's about
| making sure that stuff gets allocated in the right order
| or in the right place in memory. Sometimes, it's about
| rewriting the IPC layer. Sometimes, it's about
| reimplementing foreign key logics in a low-level
| database/file system. Sometimes, it's about writing
| custom locking data structures or non-blocking
| algorithms, or a custom memory allocator or GC to match
| specific performance requirements. Sometimes, you need to
| do all of this without a debugger or a profiler or even
| logging.
|
| If you can't handle the simple tasks from the first list,
| well, how are you going to tackle the issues from the
| second?
|
| And if you're not curious, how are you going to learn all
| of this?
| saberience wrote:
| I'm a VP of Engineering now and I made it here without
| ever having to do any of the above and most engineers
| I've worked with haven't had to do any of that either.
| Your experience isn't the norm and you also sound
| incredibly arrogant and out of touch.
| VLM wrote:
| I would go a slightly different track after seeing
| comments on OPs linked article making fun of people who
| know what ACID compliance means WRT databases.
|
| The point of interviewing about algos or ACID or SOLID is
| fast inter-team communication and less wasted effort.
|
| So you have two sysadmins talking about some database's
| filesystem options and they talk about sync-writes vs
| non-sync writes and they immediately see a problem they
| need to research WRT ACID's "D" and sync writes and there
| are of course many solutions historically and workarounds
| and on the whiteboard they just look at each other and
| say "ACID's D" and the other nods knowingly and they know
| what to research and are on the same page and it took
| about 30 seconds total interaction. I mean two people who
| know about durability and sync writes are going to like
| "wink and nod" and they're on the same page and they're
| both productive in minutes.
|
| Then you meet some joker who don't wanna learn nothing
| about nothing he just does stuff that seems to work and
| googles for how to fix it later, and the guy doesn't even
| know the concept of what the "D" in ACID means and when
| the tickets start rolling in, tries to reinvent the wheel
| all himself and its just awful to see and he can't
| explain it was well as a textbook or wikipedia and you
| try to point out this is all old stuff "Everybody doing
| DBMS stuff should know" and "eh its just some trivia
| thing from the old days nobody knows like back when you
| wrote Perl for money" and its just a train wreck watching
| the guy. OR he doesn't get hired for the position because
| only 50 bazillion social media posts explain this
| employer loves "useless trivia stuff" and if you know
| anything about DBMS the concept of the ACID acronym makes
| so much obvious sense you can learn it well enough to BS
| past an interview in like two minutes, if you're a DBA
| worth anything. But nah they're too lazy, which is how
| its gonna be day to day if they get hired accidentally
| and nobody wants to deal with laziness either.
|
| The guy who invented homebrew and famously couldn't get
| hired at google wasn't not-hired because he couldn't flip
| a binary tree, but was not-hired because he couldn't talk
| like a programmer with programmers about programmer stuff
| quickly in a standard documentable format in the trivial
| and non-commercial sense of flipping a binary tree. So he
| could have memorized every algo just in case, or he could
| have learned to talk like a programmer with programmers
| about programmer stuff but he never did either, so ...
| that didn't work out well for him.
|
| As a terrible car analogy you wanna hire two car
| mechanics to change tires at a tire shop and one guy
| knows all the names for all the tools and parts and can
| at least BS plausibly at the interview how to fix
| something obscure like a malfunctioning TPMS, at least
| his answer sounded believable or rational if not perfect.
| The other guy doesn't know the names of any of the parts
| "This is the growly thing that twists the shiny things
| off the side of the heavy bouncy circles" and you ask him
| how he'd troubleshoot a broken TPMS in a general sense
| and he fires back about he don't know no fancy words but
| he's been changing tires for years and it'll probably be
| OK eventually. And you're like "Dude, you interviewed at
| a F-ing tire shop and read online that we'd ask about
| TPMS systems but couldn't be arsed to bother even looking
| up what the acronym means?"
| lordlic wrote:
| That is a big part of it I think, and just being able to
| provide meaningful names for
| code/documentation/discussions makes a _huge_ difference,
| though I 'd say communication problems alone don't tell
| the whole story.
|
| Even when you're just working alone, having seen
| something before and knowing the theory/literature means
| you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking
| about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine
| someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction
| isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs
| in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a
| locking mechanism to manually serialize database
| transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on
| that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance.
| Or if you're working on some task tracking application
| and wondering about how you can untangle dependency
| relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of
| graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them
| effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of
| being mired down in retreading basics that every CS
| graduate already knows.
|
| Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in
| the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.
| b3morales wrote:
| I agree, uses for this kind of knowledge do come up from
| time to time, but when you're implementing something like
| this on the job, are you starting from nothing, a blank
| piece of paper/whiteboard?
|
| Personally I wouldn't start writing a single line without
| doing some research first. I'd look around on the web for
| some sample implementations or at least pseudocode. I'd
| probably get one of my algorithm books down from the
| shelf to make sure I understand the basics -- and check
| for "gotcha" edge cases.
|
| So this is still wildly different than Max's interview
| environment, where the expectation is that you can
| effectively _invent_ the algorithm.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Couldn't a good lead suggest an engineer learn this
| after-the-fact?
|
| Also do most software problems involve optimizations at
| scale like at Netflix or Google ? It seems mismatched to
| assume that an esoteric use case is the gold standard.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I should not comment on this chain, just adding clarity
| on my behalf... all I've done in my "career" is web
| related stuff, mostly JavaScript paired with a backend...
| I've never used BT/BST only recently learned it for
| myself just to know what it is.
|
| If you went through a CS path then I would say you should
| know about it. I'm trying to pick it up due to FOMO. I
| hear about it.
| ngc248 wrote:
| Exactly, the technical interview has become like an arms
| race, harder and harder questions. Whereas in the
| management track, its all hustlin, any bozo can and will
| become a manager and go up the ladder, gain more power
| and control all us technical folks.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears.
|
| I do get where you're coming from there, but I
| interpreted the Tweet very differently. He wasn't just
| asked "how does a binary tree work?", but asked to go
| through an extremely specific process manually, on a
| whiteboard.
|
| And if I can just interject my one little quip (I come
| from a EEE background, stumbled into software engineering
| and then left after a couple of years to do my own
| thing), all of this knowledge of the academic aspects of
| CompSci doesn't seem to help people build code that is
| reliable and performant. We weren't taught it in EEE (we
| learned about programming and digital logic, but in a
| different, much more concrete way), and yet EEE-written
| code runs flawlessly on 8-bit micros in safety-critical
| systems for decades at a time without a single crash or
| missed timing constraint.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Because it's very simple- compared to a web app backend
| (which is typically an uhonly mess of unnecessary
| complication; but still, much more complex for that).
| reasonabl_human wrote:
| May be an over simplification here, I've done both and
| found most web app backends to be more trivial than
| embedded programming projects.
| mancerayder wrote:
| It's hard to tell whether your comment was sarcastic or
| serious, but the guy invented homebrew, and was passed
| over for as you say, not knowing fundamental things. I'd
| flip the script in this narrative: by passing over the
| author of a wildly popular piece of software, the
| interviewers showed their missing knowledge of
| fundamental things - like good business sense. No thanks,
| Google.
|
| And what does Google invent, anyway, given that their
| biggest financial successes have been acquisitions?
| grecy wrote:
| Shoot me a message if you'd like to sell any of those G lenses
| :) I promise to put them to good use exploring the world.
|
| Email in profile
| jcun4128 wrote:
| haha put your money where you mouth is right, I just got them
| have to hold on to them for a bit. just thinking it's crazy
| how much they cost despite how little you might use them.
| Gear Acquisition Syndrome as they say, I bought them used
| anyway.
|
| I checked out your sites, pretty cool what you do.
| black_13 wrote:
| Wow yeah thats about it
| jedberg wrote:
| I have to praise Netflix here for getting this right. They don't
| do pidly raises. They look at how much they have to offer to get
| good candidates in the door, and they give everyone doing the
| same work a raise up to that level. Some years I got 20%+ raises
| (and so did all of my peers). Almost no one left Netflix for more
| money. If they left it was either to do work they couldn't do at
| Netflix, to get a much larger scope (like going from manager to
| director), or to start their own company.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Ok, but that's just because they have covert levels:
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Netflix,Google,Facebook&trac...
|
| The pay raise between levels at Google or Facebook is about
| 20-30%
| jedberg wrote:
| The levels aren't covert, they just don't have any. But I
| wasn't getting a level promotion every year and neither were
| my coworkers. Besides I started at the equivalent of a senior
| principal so there weren't a lot of promotions to be had.
| hammock wrote:
| What is it about Netflix that they pay so well? Lots of tech
| companies have tons of cash, that's not it. Other tech
| companies are equally profitable, that's not it. What is the
| tradeoff that Netflix is making, in order to invest in its
| employees the way that it does?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| In general companies in the growth phase operate somewhat
| like Netflix. Once companies have reached their maximum /
| optimum size, they start focusing on operational
| efficiencies.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think it's because the founders were engineers, but more
| than that, engineers who actually worked for someone else
| first and also had another company before Netflix. So unlike
| say Facebook or Microsoft, the company culture was created by
| someone who has actually been an employee before.
|
| Also unlike a lot of the other tech companies, the salaries
| of the engineers aren't their biggest cost -- content is. So
| they don't take as big a hit on their stock price or
| profitability when their engineering costs go up because they
| are dwarfed by content costs.
|
| And lastly because they believe that overpaying for talent
| makes sense in the long run because then a lot of the best
| talent wants to work there, so they can get paid a lot and be
| surrounded by other people who like a culture where poor
| performance is rewarded with a big severance.
|
| I won't lie, the culture isn't for everyone. I personally
| enjoyed the pressure of having to constantly perform, I felt
| it made me do better work, but not everyone is like that.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Is Netflix still doing cutting edge stuff? Back in the day
| I was in awe of what they have accomplished over the years
| but now competitors seem to be rolling out basically
| equivalent services. That makes it seems like the core tech
| to do what they do has been commoditized and all the
| "magical" stuff has been figured out.
|
| I made a big miscalculation with Disney+ because when I
| heard stories of many good engineers leaving BAMTech in the
| initial rollout I thought these guys are clowns run by non-
| tech savvy executives. But I was proven wrong when they
| didn't crash and burn. Since then other companies that seem
| like legacy firms that don't know anything about tech are
| also rolling out services and they are more or less
| working.
| jedberg wrote:
| From what I hear most of the innovation is around content
| creation and studio tools down in LA. The innovation in
| Los Gatos is more around developer tools and efficiency
| and deployment and failover efficiency. They are however
| still doing a lot of work on product innovation but it's
| all in the algorithms and less user facing stuff.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Is this going to attract the cream of the crop or will
| they have to raise salaries even further to compensate?
|
| Just a theory: Maybe enough top tier people won't want to
| do this work at any price as they will be wasting
| valuable time not innovating on the cutting edge.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| At previous BigCo I got the feeling management's approach to
| problem solving was to get the right organizational structure
| with the right job reqs and the rest would sort itself out.
|
| At Netflix I felt the goal was to get the right people
| working on the right problems, and the rest would work itself
| out.
|
| I never detected a sense of "fungibility" of engineers at
| Netflix the way I have at previous gigs. Job reqs weren't job
| reqs, they were definitions of problem spaces and each team
| owned their own interview pipeline. Each team defined their
| own job postings, cultivated their own talent pipelines, and
| conducted their own interviews. At least from my experience,
| you don't interview for Netflix. You interview for a specific
| team at Netflix. I've met at least one NFLX engineer that
| interviewed for a half dozen teams before getting to "yes."
| jedberg wrote:
| I agree with you that at Netflix we hired for specific
| roles and that worked out well.
|
| But I think that has to do with the fact that we only hired
| senior engineers. At the other BigCos, they are hiring
| junior engineers right out of school who aren't specialized
| yet, so for all intents and purposes, they are fungible.
|
| Even the BigCos hire for specific roles at the higher
| levels.
| rconti wrote:
| My understanding is that Netflix gives huge raises, but shows
| you the door if you don't perform.
|
| Other companies don't want to be so aggressive, so they take
| a similar but related tack; give you a lot more money for
| promos if you perform, and hope you just leave of your own
| volition if you don't hit those marks and get those raises.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Netflix doesn't pay stock. So the offer is straightforward.
| Their competitors pay stock which employees have to valuate,
| which is hard and employees usually undervalue it.
| jedberg wrote:
| Netflix pays stock too. You get a small grant plus you get
| to choose your stock/cash mix beyond that. So it's actually
| for more complicated to value.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| I've heard Netflix also has a perform or get managed out
| culture. Can you comment on that side of things?
| jedberg wrote:
| There is very little managing out. If you don't perform they
| just fire you and give you a big severance check. Of course
| you get warnings and the firing isn't usually a surprise, but
| there isn't a lot of politics around it.
| zz865 wrote:
| I think everywhere that pays above market rates needs a
| strict cutting strategy, otherwise people just sit there and
| stagnate.
| omginternets wrote:
| > Impostor worries about being found out. Scoundrel thrives on
| the hilarity of not being found out.
|
| This comment immediately reminded me of Alan Watts' description
| of the scoundrel. I'm inclined to consider this to be the correct
| framing and attitude.
| ram_rar wrote:
| you can play musical chairs with Soft dev jobs for a while, but
| soon you'll plateau or/and eventually replaced by fresh out of
| college dev.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Depends.
|
| If you're switching jobs just for more money and don't get any
| useful experience or skills along they way, effectively
| coasting along and becoming a junior with X years of
| experience, then yes you can be replaced.
|
| However, if you're smart and a little bit selective, making
| sure to only job hop to gigs that provide some challenge and
| growth opportunities, not just going with every recruiter that
| promises you more $$$, then the skills you'll develop and pick
| up should guarantee that no junior can easily replace you.
|
| My $0.02.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah I think in a similar way
|
| The market is filled with "Juniors with X yrs experience".
| Even 10, 20 yrs experience. No kidding.
|
| A lot of newer developers are more accustomed to copy-pasting
| React stuff from SO. Which is fine, but it doesn't solve all
| problems.
|
| That's how you end up with people that only know how to
| deploy stuff using Docker containers (which, again, is fine
| for most situations).
|
| At some point the grown-ups have to show up. Can you be the
| grown-up?
| mnkmnk wrote:
| If you are going to get replaced by fresh out of college dev
| anyway, as well make money by switching companies lots of
| times.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| No senior I've worked with could be replaced by a fresh out of
| college dev. You don't deserve to be called senior if you can.
| trutannus wrote:
| SoP - Senior on Paper. There's a lot of places where senior
| is just a title they slap on someone to fit them into a
| position.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| Indeed, which is why my trusted definition of 'senior' is
| that you have a budget and can sign off on a decent signed
| purchase order.
|
| There are very few senior people.
| angarg12 wrote:
| So this person figured out the current meta-game of tech: jump
| jobs every 1-2 years early in your career to maximise comp. But
| that's not the whole story.
|
| First, this works in your early career where growth and learning
| are very fast, but at some level of seniority this strategy wont
| work as well.
|
| Second, I disagree that "what you do in between barely matters".
| Is like an athlete winning a medal and saying that those years of
| training were useless. That time is where you learn, grow, and
| get prepared for the next jump. If that's not the case, you are
| setting yourself up for failure.
|
| Third, the market is red-hot right now. It says more about the
| market than your personal abilities. It might not be always be
| like this.
|
| Fourth, companies are terrible at retaining talent, and sadly job
| hopping is often the easiest way to get a raise and a promotion.
| That's the point you got completely right.
| quanto wrote:
| I totally agree with your 4 points. However, OP, in my
| interpretation, is arguing that the job change process is so
| much more dependent on those few hours of interview rather than
| career-long growth that career-long growth (or on-the-job
| performance) doesn't matter.
|
| Of course, interviews are meant to test candidates on their
| career development and growth as well, but in reality, it is
| uncertain whether they do, especially if they are focused on
| LeetCode/theory questions.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| I dont know which domain you work in, but in banking everyone
| knows everyone and the interview either doesnt happen or
| doesnt lead to hiring if you ve been visibly slacking off.
| odiroot wrote:
| > That time is where you learn, grow, and get prepared for the
| next jump.
|
| Also the best time to make friends and/or build your network.
| Let people remember you (in a positive way).
| anotheryou wrote:
| > companies are terrible at retaining talent, and sadly job
| hopping is often the easiest way to get a raise and a promotion
|
| I wonder though if it's about hiring or about raises. Maybe
| it's the well paying companies that hire people who already get
| paid a relative lot and for the current employer that raise
| would be out of budget.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Is like an athlete winning a medal and saying that those years
| of training were useless. That time is where you learn, grow,
| and get prepared for the next jump. If that's not the case, you
| are setting yourself up for failure.
|
| I don't think this comparison works at all. An athlete is
| attuning both their body and mind for years for an increase in
| the exact same activity. An employee is largely waiting for
| their time to shine hitting a challenging breakpoint, and
| practicing repetition of that challenge will have diminishing
| returns kick in very, very quickly. At the same time, the
| payoff for going beyond that diminishing returns is highly
| arguable.
|
| As an example, in most companies, the far majority of employees
| will spend _months_ doing ridiculously similar, low scope
| issues. These low scope issues frequently have very, very
| little to do with what is expected in the next tier. Changing a
| few variables every day has much less in common with making a
| basic tool after analyzing requirements. Comparatively, a
| runner practicing for years is directly practicing to run
| faster, it 's the same toolset more carefully honed.
|
| The far majority of us are waiting for those challenges to come
| up while doing those low scope, low pay-off issues. The common
| advice is to "seek those challenges yourself" or to "do the low
| stuff faster so you can get more challenging things quicker" is
| cute, but doesn't nearly apply in practice as often as the
| frequency of this advice makes one think. Think of bureaucracy,
| managers getting in the way, petty office politics,
| bottlenecks, and more. Which only leaves practicing in one's
| own time.
|
| From the way I read it, OP is saying that there's far more of a
| difference between what one learns during those small
| challenging periods of time than the downtime of repetition
| compared to other fields. Which shouldn't be a surprise as
| software dev is largely a field of practicing mental challenges
| and logic puzzles, not honing physical skills.
| reedjosh wrote:
| For me, I always incorporated something interesting and new
| into the small projects.
|
| While maybe not necessary to use Pandas or an ARG parse
| framework, or even Redis caching, I found by adding little
| things like these to smaller projects I was able to maintain
| interest and motivation. While counterintuitive, I also
| usually delivered a better product even though a tool I
| wanted to learn was a bit shoehorned in.
|
| Now I'm about four years in, competent and confident. 100%
| worth it.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Takeaway: we aren't changing jobs enough.
|
| The OP suggests some "decision" was made so employees
| compensation is increased minimally, unless you change jobs.
|
| The only decisions that was made was by complacent individuals,
| which are apparently also here in the HN comments.
|
| Change jobs more frequently. If we all do that, the compensation
| increases from performance and job-change will converge.
| bagels wrote:
| This works well in the current market. It doesn't work as well
| when there is restraint in growth
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