That feels too dumb to be real (which is exactly why it's probably a real thing).

You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too! You hire senior devs to guide you WHAT and HOW to code. And they can do that so much more effectively if they don't have to actually code all that stuff themselves! "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do... how can people say with a straight face that they can't afford to let them do it?

I don't view this as "tragedy of the commons" as other people here suggest. I view this as plain human stupidity (which we're all guilty of, sometimes... it's just good to realize when you're being stupid before it seriously hurts you).

As far as i know, management provided zero training (online courses, conferences, books etc) and the dev intern is receiving 500€/month for 40h work week, which around Amsterdam/Netherlands hardly covers housing expenses in shared accommodation, even though the intern is soon expecting Erasmus support, which will alleviate his situation apparently.

Needless to say i find the situation rather vile independently if it’s a common practice or even if non-paid internships are common.

Recently i took the dev intern out for dinner and beers, gave him a few tips on how to improve himself to be ready for a decent job (online courses, writing blog posts etc) and told him he could repay me by paying forward to an intern at his next proper jobs.

As a note, another intern (part time) is also working on his maybe 5 years old laptop that apparently crashes a lot and can hardly run something like Pycharm.

I’m looking for another job :-)

"Devs can't be cheap enough! We can't find decent devs!"

If you want to get paid a lot more and you have the right skills the City or Silicon Valley are good options (assuming you are allowed to move there).

It doesn’t need to be a huge tech hub at all. Luckily English resembles Dutch so most Dutch speak it well enough to survive a job abroad.

I know very well paid developers in NL and very poorly paid ones, it is mostly a matter of knowing what you are worth and refusing to charge less than that. You might find 'your spot' taken by a skilled immigrant but that's a relatively small chance.

I'd hate to have to find a developer job in Spain or Portugal judging by the number of people from there that have moved to either NL or DE. Anything East of the German-Polish border is going to pay a lot worse unless you are willing to move to Finland where there are pockets of start-ups with reasonable compensation.

Dutch developers moving abroad to increase their salary is not a trend as far as I can see.

I know well paid developers as well, some niches pay pretty well. SAP for example. Or simply people that have domain knowledge that's irreplaceable and know how to negotiate. But something average like C#, RoR or Node development doesn't really pay well in The Netherlands. It's a decent salary but nothing to brag about.

My take on this: it's so easy for Polish developers to move to and find a job in Western Europe, that local companies have to pay salary that provides at least a roughly comparable living standard (vs the West)- as otherwise talented people would just leave. For "suits", on the other hand, there's far less opportunities abroad, so their wages don't need to track Western standards so much.

This effect is even stronger in Ukraine, where a teacher will be paid $300 (per month) while a dev will make $3000.

Internships in the Netherlands are akin to modern slavery imo. You work full time and with luck you get a compensation of 500 euros a month,though often no compensation is more likely to be the case. You will get a maximum loan of 1100 euros a month from the government, so a lot of students have to take on a second job if they don't get any compensation at all at their internship.

National institute of neuroscience provides no compensation whatsoever, and for applied mathematics students the average compensation is around 200 euros.

Obviously not wholly related to your comment but the internship situation in the Netherlands really grinds my gears.

Your employer has no obligation to compensate for your internship, but is not prohibited either. There is no minimum or maximum amount set for this compensation.

The focus for internship should be on training, not work. If the Inspectie SZW (employment auditor) finds that the internship consisted of mostly paid work, the employer will be ordered to salary the intern according to normal wages [effectively, minimum wage].

However, there is a practical limit to compensation: students earning more than E20,000 a year are no longer eligible for the student loans you mention.

Student visas?

Hmm...I don't think you are correct, or possibly you are misconstruing a limited, special case to generally apply.

From my own experience I earned more than 600eur as an intern in the NL, and I had classmates who earned full minimum wage as interns too (~1200eur).

Good, I was just going to suggest that!

On further note, before i started the contract i was asked to bring my own laptop as work computer, i didn’t necessarily agree (for all the obvious reasons as security and business/personal risk) but he was being pushy about i said i could take my laptop (at least to get started) and i was expecting to get a working computer. I never did. Management recently purchased brand new macbook pros and iphonex for themselves (which they are in their full right to do).

So i didn’t even dare to criticize them regarding the interns. I already got myself in boiling water by criticizing management in that the way projects and tasks were being managed was highly unprofessional and my only wish is if i could leave a warning sign for interns (and devs) to keep clear of this company (or think really hard on how much they need the job)

Edit: which is unfortunate given that the projects there are interesting in my opinion

    I already got myself in boiling water by criticizing
    management in that the way projects and tasks were being
    managed was highly unprofessional...

I'm not making any comments on your personal situation, but as a general rule it's important to talk in terms of solutions and not problems. So don't say, "we have a problem and here is my recommendation to solve it". Say instead, "I think we can improve our productivity by...", or "I think we can save some money by...".

Do some calculations to help sell your case. You want to spend time optimising the build process? Record how long it takes to build the code currently. Maybe it takes 5 minutes. Maybe you build the software no fewer than 12 times a day. That's an hour of productivity wasted per developer. Do the maths, convert it into dollars. Then say, "we can save X dollars a week by optimising the build process. We spend a week working on this, we will have made our money back within a month (or whatever it is)."

Your manager will be quite happy to go to the board to tell them that he's improved efficiency by a factor of X.

Highlighting existing problems, even whilst providing solutions can put a manager on the defensive when you really need him to be your ally.

Obviously I'm not saying never highlight problems. Sometimes you have to highlight problems, but it requires delicacy and if you don't need to, then don't. You probably don't need to a lot more than you think. We developers tend to put the problem first and the solution afterwards and it's quite hard to put aside that mindset when talking to stakeholders. Even Elon Musk finds this hard to do when talking to the press. It's quite funny to hear him talking about all of a Tesla's inefficiencies while trying to sell it!

Also be patient. Your manager actually needs to be convinced of what you're saying; he can't just take your word for it. So if you see an example of how your solution would have prevented a problem that just had to be dealt with, point it out. Take him on a journey, to use an old cliché.

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do anything without getting permission first, but for the things you do need permission for, the above advice might help.

You have to watch out that a "go getter" attitude doesn't result in you just getting overburdened.

They seem to be scamming the shareholders diverting money from productive investment into their self worth. It's not your problem, but it's not in their full right to do either.

It is also almost certainly not the employees (unless it's a cooperative).

I told them they could pay me a compensation (for using/bringing my own tools) but that is quite expensive since most deductions don't count for this. Even more expensive than buying a proper laptop. Quite quickly I got a proper company laptop after finances improved to resolve the issue.

On another note:

In my experience the term 'middle management' is a synonym for corrupt, useless idiots so getting rid of them saves huge amounts of money since they add no value to any product or to the company as a whole. Unfortunately there is no way to even moderately grow within most companies around here except for a management track which is idiotic since specialists are way more valuable to the gross product of the company.

and: Never underestimate the value of skilled workers and how to keep them or train them. In software they are your main business. Everything else is easily replaceable.

In the US at least, any work you do for an employer and get paid for is covered under what are called work-for-hire laws which assign the copyright to the company, unless you have a written contract stating otherwise. This is true regardless of what equipment you use, and there’s absolutely zero legal barrier to a company asking you to use your own equipment in the course of a job without any compensation. The fact that your ultimatum wasn’t met with a “lol no” from Legal is pure luck.

That's the norm in some professions. Welders and mechanics often have their own tools, which can cost a lot more than a laptop.

Some managers, mentors or such seem to deal with this well. But, in the cases that I've seen having an employee that is not producing value is stressful and time consuming. Largely, it's driven by empathy. You don't want them to get fired, or embarrassed.

Anyway, the person taking up most mentoring time (including:'leave this part, I'll fix it) is also producing the least of the least important stuff. The best juniors can be left to their devices and everything is ok, but basically the time and effort allocation becomes very inefficient.

Mentoring is important, but I disagree with you somewhat. Software is just an ADD industry. Everything is fast. You hire for needs in the next 12 months. Junior devs (all devs, some places) average short stints.

Anyway, mentiring, training and such are long term investments. Makes less sense in industry segments that think in shorter horizons and treat everything from office space to employees or even products as 1-2 year solutions. Entire companies are built around 3-6 year horizons from cenception to exit.

I see this as a byproduct of product development time. MVP and its associated stuff... It's all about short horizons, clean slates and short term planning. Nothing is free and the cost of this is anything that's part of long term strategy, like hiring and training for long term benefit.

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 misunderstand MVP... it's not at all about short horizons, on the contrary. It's about doing the right thing in the longer term. To put "MVP" in a hiring context - the right "MVP" attitude is to hire temporarily to see whether the person is right for the job - and once you determine you've got a good fit, invest massively in that person to make sure you've got a long-term employee (don't just skim him/her for short-term profit, but invest to build a long-lasting relationship).

> Entire companies are built around 3-6 year horizons from cenception to exit.

I've yet to see that work (and not in the sense that "lottery works" - nobody seriously suggests buying lots of lottery tickets if you want to get rich.

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 years into the future. Ambitions, possibly. That's different to plans. These are on the young/ADD end of the spectrum, but they have cultural influence industry-wide.

I disagree about MVP. First, I don't think short horizon is bad, it's choice with advantages and disadvantages. Second, I do think MVP is part of a wider, shorter horizon planning mentality. That has certainly been my experience. The idea (IMO) is that instead of planning, you evolve. Evolution and planning are at odds with eachother, to an extent. You can make decisions early, and you get a longer term plan to work with. You can make decisions just-in-time (eg after launching an MVP), this gets you more informed decisions. That's not necessarily related to HR. You're hiring and onboarding could be unrelated to your product and engineering plans (or lack thereof). But (again, in practice), I think that mentality is influenced by these things.

^That's like, your opinion, man. ...always ;)

"I've yet to see that work" ... Uber. Netflix' streaming service.... for large, famous examples. Call those lotteries if you want. They're definitely risky. You may not like high risk strategies but they are a big part of the software industry, especially on the culturally influential wing.

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.

I really don't think that Uber and Netflix hired for the short term. Especially Netflix. How did you get that? Netflix in particular seems to have been playing the long game for quite a while.

You can, but I have never been offered a multi-year employment contract. Employers seem to prefer the flexibility of being able to terminate employment sooner than that.

I've been working >10 years as a software engineer. If I'd never worked on a (necessarily) complicated system(s), I could maybe understand your viewpoint. Churning out the same CRUD app with minor differences would probably be safe enough to expect a junior dev to 'have at it'.

> Everything is fast

Unfortunately, this is the current 'thinking' on how some un-enlightened people think the industry should work. Ultimately, I think this is a load of nonsense. Software engineering is engineering. Some people may have snuck in & survived as they never had to do something non trivial & deal with the resulting consequences.

Anyway ,it's not about how people think the industry should work it's about how it does work. This is a fast industry, irl. People change jobs more frequently. Companies grow faster. Products go from conception to release faster. Financial horizons are shorter.

A big chunk of the 2018 industry did not exist in 2008. Mobile, for example. Not the companies, not the specializations. It's not philosophy. It's reality. I'm talking about side effects of this reality.

No one at Snapchat thinks "we'll hire this kid, he'll make a great engineering manager in 15 years." They do in some industries. We're on the other end of the spectrum.

In one case you've hired someone who isn't ready to do the tasks you need without excessive scaffolding. In the other you're not providing enough structure and scaffolding for the intern to succeed with help.

Mentoring, particularly in the legal context of what makes an intern, an intern and not a Jr. Developer ought to be a short run project, and frankly if you can't commit time to providing an educational experience you shouldn't be filling your staffing needs with an intern at all.

The thing is - they got 2 very driven loyal devs out of it, and cheaper than normal at first. They also had an assessment period of 3 months after which the one who would take up all my time was let go. It was absolutely worth it for the company.

I end up spending my own time helping out senior developers in places they get stuck! (Inconceivable!) Yeah sounds like a management team and a bunch of senior devs who have no concept of a team to me?... Which makes them no-hire types at my job. I help people regardless of what they're working on. If any of us fails it affects all of us in the long run.

I love programming and helping others achieve it and working with others to learn is one of the better and more fun parts of it.

I learned to not get upset by it but still help/share, trying to inspire others and always learning more in this process.

My suspicion is that anyone my age or older had to do a lot of banging their heads against the wall, alone in a room with the machine, when they were learning their craft. It becomes very tiresome dealing with people that don't even try to figure things out on their own first.

I've heard that being a dev is 90% thinking about code and 10% writing it.

In my experience you hire senior devs to do the thinking part and junior devs to do the writing part while learning how to do the thinking part.

Senior developers should be writing code for important systems, and juniors should be writing the less important bits. That way, they get the opportunity to experiment without the company being stuck with a critical system written by a person who reinvented Yet Another Elliptical Wheel.

Mentoring is important and all, but at some point, you just have to start working.

For at least 2 companies I've worked at, this is false. Junior devs cannot complete their work at all without help.

This may be the real problem: there is no way to learn the skills to do the job without actually getting a job first and learning the skills as you go.

Now that I’ve had some mentorship I can be productive on my own, but yeah, it took some work.

The senior devs get pulled into meetings, customer escalations, bug reviews, etc. all the time. The juniors, now trained and competent are free to code all day and get the work done because they have fewer responsibilities.

Yes, it takes work to get there, but it’s worth the effort.

As the employer/manager, you need to work to minimize the period of time this is the case and ensure those junior devs quickly get to a point where they can work individually.

I mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion - we have a 1 month on-boarding program for new devs. They all arrive at the same time (summer after graduation), stay near HQ, and work through all the common training together (some tech, some culture, some "how to be an adult", etc). They also work through a simple, but in-depth (UI, API, build pipeline, etc), group project. And wrap up with a two day hackathon for fun (done in common with the summer interns).

Pfft. I'm about as "senior" as it gets and I'm generally the fastest developer in any team I'm on. I've never met a junior dev that could hold a candle to me, and most senior devs I know are the same...we're coding monsters.

- Better (usually simpler) designs.

- Breaking the problem and choosing the order in which things are implemented.

- Setting up usefull feedback loops.

- etc, etc.

It is a lot about judgment.

that’s the worst kind of data - gives a meaningless feeling of objectivity.

PS: Most people have never worked closely with someone with 25+ years of experience, but the difference is staggering.

Good junior devs are... well, by definition, good. They're just younger, and less experienced - but every bit as smart as you are, and pretty skilled in the art of coding. If anything, they have more time than I do and are a lot more eager to "prove themselves".

I don't view the value I add as "can code features faster"...

I do, at least partly. I can code so much faster that my cost per feature is lower than a junior dev.

It was staggering how they had managed to survive for 25+ years. Every person is different.

I pointed out how you decided to pick out a totally irrelevant, rhetorical sentence out of all points that OP made, and then decided to refute that, by claiming how much experience you have, and setting up yourself center stage, instead of adding value to the actual discussion topic at hand, which is the coaching gap.

> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do

What other "points" did OP make?

The topic is about a lack of mentoring for junior devs. You being a certified 100x rockstar developer is totally fine but irrelevant, because you don't scale.

What would scale is if you were to start coaching junior devs, because if you don't, all the juniors will keep reinventing 'left-pad' in this week's ES201x iteration, while your retirement keeps getting closer.

Instead of adding to the discussion on how to solve the coaching gap, you decided to defend your coding efficiency and how you deliver features faster than a Junior Dev. You missed the point completely. You're part of the problem the article addresses, don't you realize?

That is exactly what the post I was responding to said, and I've quoted it several times. Here it is a gain, since you keep glossing over it:

> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do

So, yes, the person I responded to said "senior developers shouldn't be coding'".

> You being a certified 100x rockstar developer is totally fine but irrelevant, because you don't scale.

How so? I'm a mentor as well as a developer. In addition to doing my part to train the next wave of devs, I also code my ass off. What part of that doesn't scale?

> You missed the point completely.

No. That's what you did though. And are increasingly insulting about it as well.

> You're part of the problem the article addresses, don't you realize?

Who's talking about the article? I was talking about the bogus "point" in the post I responded to.

I’m surprised you mentor, given all the hubris you have displyed on this thread.

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.

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-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work), but you also run into other risks as well (juniors that ask questions force seniors to explain stuff, which in turn forces them to think clearly about it; you may have experienced the phenomenon where you understand something much better after explaining it to somebody else)

> 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).

Could you do an MSc at a top-level US university (in your primary domain of expertise) in a week? Because plenty of people (juniors by definition, almost all of them) can do it in 2 years, so if you're "100x" in the sense that you say you are, you should be able to do all that work in 1 week. At least that much should be plainly obvious to you, that you can't possibly be "100x" in the sense that you claim to be. Or well, if you are... you're rather unique, I definitely haven't seen anybody that can even come close to you, and I know some top-notch engineers. So you're definitely the exception, not the rule.

No, but I probably think better...i.e. how to approach a problem, sift out the relevant details, formulate a plan, execute it, understand the trade-offs, etc. As a result, I can deliver more correct code faster than a junior dev.

> you can't possibly be "100x" in the sense that you claim to be.

I never claimed to be 100x. I was just mentioning the reason why I'm cheaper than a junior dev (that I'm not paid in line with my "effectiveness multiplier"). You were the one that mentioned a 100x engineer thing in a link, so I included the number.

You actually did - look 2 posts up, "i.e. I'm a 10x (100x) dev". But I suspect you didn't actually read that link, just the URL - not fair to chide me for mentioning the number if you didn't read what that meant.

> how to approach a problem, sift out the relevant details, formulate a plan, understand the trade-offs

That's exactly my claim, that you add more value with this sort of activity than the "execute it" part; doing that plus teaching others to do it, you add exponentially more value to the company, than just coding stuff in a corner .

You cling on the fact that a junior dev can't possibly code faster than you - even though it's a completely irrelevant detail. And yes they can, if you remove qualifications like "correct code" or "maintainable" or whatever (I never claimed junior devs will do the right thing all by themselves, that'd make them seniors, right? But - I participated in coding competitions in high-school, got a silver medal at IOI - I know very well that my younger self could code circles around my older self when it comes to raw speed. And I've seen other people like that later; experience can't fight youth when it comes to speed and enthusiasm... it just can't. It's more likely that you just never worked with a good junior dev before, than it is that you can always code everything faster).

> 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).

The numbers were merely to indicate that my multiplier is sufficient that I'm cheaper than a dev.

> I suspect you didn't actually read that link, just the URL - not fair to chide me for mentioning the number if you didn't read what that meant.

No need to suspect, I confirm I didn't read it. I saw the number in the URL and just dismissed it as puffery.

> That's exactly my claim, that you add more value with this sort of activity than the "execute it" part; doing that plus teaching others to do it, you add exponentially more value to the company, than just coding stuff in a corner .

That was in no way you're claim, at least, not the claim I disputed. Your claim(s) were:

> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do

No way. Maybe mentoring is a part of the job, but it's by no means the main job in many organizations.

> if you remove qualifications like "correct code" or "maintainable" or whatever

??? This is a pretty ludicrous statement. Why would you ever count incorrect code? And yes, I probably can code incorrectly faster than a junior dev, too. After decades of experience, I'm a faster typist than most junior devs.

> I know very well that my younger self could code circles around my older self when it comes to raw speed. And I've seen other people like that later; experience can't fight youth when it comes to speed and enthusiasm... it just can't.

Rose colored glasses, to say the least. You seem to be switching back and forth on whether raw LOC throughput is meaningful...first you were "flabbergasted" that it might be a measure of productivity, now you're bragging about raw speed, and even suggesting that creating "correct code" or "maintainable" code is irrelevant, which is insane.

> It's more likely that you just never worked with a good junior dev before, than it is that you can always code everything faster).

I've worked with (and mentored) some really great junior devs, who grew into great senior devs. But they didn't walk into the building as my equals in coding.

This whole debate is nutty. I personally would welcome as much strategic and intellectual diversity as possible onto teams I'm running. I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, either.

Me too. I just think the blanket assertion that a junior dev is the coding equal to a senior dev is what's nutty.

> can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

is pure BS.

Good junior devs will be more skilled in some areas than you are. Maybe it's stuff you're not interested in; or just stuff they're really interested in. The only way a good junior dev doesn't "out-code" you, ever - is if you're only skilled in a very narrow niche (bonus points if only few people are interested in it, at all).

Junior devs absolutely can, and often do, build "wrong things" faster than senior devs. The measure of seniority is in my mind about knowing what to NOT build, in the first place.

Who uses LOC? I'm talking about completed, tested, accepted features, as defined by our project teams.

> Good junior devs will be more skilled in some areas than you are.

Well, yeah...of course. I'm not comparing myself to someone who works in an entirely different field. A junior front-end dev will be better than me at front-end stuff. I'm talking about a junior in my area, who I'd be in a team with or would mentor.

> The measure of seniority is in my mind about knowing what to NOT build, in the first place.

I agree with that statement.

Still rather strange metrics for productivity in a senior engineer. This is more what I'm taking about: https://zef.me/the-100x-engineer-6d50a690a866

If you're really senior, you shouldn't be working on the kind of features that get delivered at a rate of "5 per sprint". More like on stuff that gets delivered once every year. The junior SHOULD outperform you in "code produced" - they just shouldn't outperform you in dollars produced (or saved).

When I look at code written by junior devs I often think 'dear god, how is there so much code that does nothing, and how did it all get witten since I last had a chance to look'.

Makes me wonder if there are parallels in writing. My understanding is that the most prolific authors can only write 8 publishable pages a day. I'd bet that amateur writers can produce more pages than that, but no page could be published without at least as much time spent by an editor.

This, 100 times over! It is simply incredible how much code and how complex systems a junior dev (junior by knowledge, not by years of coding) can produce in a short time while you were looking the other way... :-D

Senior developers make sure to question their assumptions on a regular basis, FYI

I'm sure you're a quick learner but at least in scenarios I've worked in there are often many, many possible solutions and no specific "right answer."

After all, it's hard for anyone to be right all of the time.

A better point is that this drought of new talent is just the other side of the pendulum. In the odd years, the problem is layoffs and difficulty finding work without being a new-grad or knowing the latest tech fad. You've seen some of those summers, too?

If we both had to read the manual? Yeah, I'd still be faster. It's just as easy to cherry-pick for one side or another.

All this to say that we need to be careful that we don't point the finger too hard at management and miss our own failings. Software done well is incredibly hard and increasingly complex. Focusing on adding value and not on code/day can help us all stay focused on the real goal and what is best for us and the company and the customers. </r>

Every organization I've worked at (for the past 25 years) has relegated that rule to the much lower prestige, much lower paying, zero career path role of either "business analyst" or "project manager". If you can produce code, you'll be producing code - and by and large, that's the only way to have anything resembling a future unless you're on an upper management track.

I think this is a stereotype that will lead to more harm than good. What if a junior dev doesn't code just as fast or faster? Does that mean we hired the wrong junior dev? I agree we can should be open to junior developers, just implanting this stereotype is harmful

Reason is software is always an ancillary concern to the business. You see this in other fields, like say accounting, but the difference is that accountants leave school fully capable of employment. HR understands how to hire and manage accountants.

But programming is this black box in the corporate world that no one knows how to understand, value, or hire for. This is why every company wants rockstars, they're hoping that someone whose at least confident to present themselves as a rockstar won't be a net negative to the company.

Eventually they'll figure it out, took them a decade to figure out how to manage IT. Then companies will learn that they can't skimp on middle management for software developers. Some companies will need to give software a legit seat at the table and hire upper management. The political cover will allow shops to stabilize and with stabilization, you'll finally start seeing small and midsize organizations open up positions for juniors.

But it'll never happen so long as companies don't take software development seriously by giving them political cover. If you are a software developer nearing the middle or end of your career, you're pulling the ladder up behind you if you don't seriously consider moving into management. It's too important a job to ignore to go chase your dreams.

This is 100% a management issue, and it starts at the hiring filter.

Hiring Jrs btw is its own skill as you are filtering for potential not skill or knowledge. Identifying the person who is passionate about learning, has dedication to the craft and pride in their work, and has a natural talent for software is hard. Figure it out though and you have a competitive advantage for life as a manager.

Also, half of the Jrs we hire are women. We could never do that if we only hired experienced talent. Not enough women even apply for those roles.

At my last job, a $40MM cosmetics and skincare company, the CEO had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to get his e-commerce department properly managed. I was willing to step up, and for a brief time they allowed me to bring in candidates for a position that would report to me, but I didn't have enough political cover over me so that fizzled out.

I cycled through 3 managers in 2 1/2 years at that job, 2 in the "Director of E-Commerce" role, and one in the "VP of E-Commerce" role. All three left for more sane roles.

It's hard to fix management problems at your company when leadership is so confused.

If the only way to effectively perform the job (in the broader, department sense) is with political cover.

And if political cover is only apportioned in a zero-sum game of high level positions.

And if there are legacy industries in which those positions are, and have been for decades, apportioned to predefined departments (notably standardized before the information revolution).

Then those legacy industries are going to have insufficient political cover over IT/development. And therefore terrible performance.

My current employer recently had a security epiphany, and they definitely empowered a reorganized security department to make necessary changes. But I'm sure there were many points where "VP of X" could have squashed a necessary security change, had security not been of equal seniority.

Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship a product that immediately increases revenue in a fraction of the time. It generally only takes a few basic UI improvements and timing strategic automatic email tiggers.

Find a consultant that will make more from what you already have, and move on to your business problems. You don’t need to pivot into an internet company to be successful.

My impression was that we'd squeezed all the blood we could out of the stone, yet the CEO wasn't going to accept "focus on other business problems" as an answer.

Eventually my pleas were heard and they consulted out a new platform. They didn't pick a platform that I wanted to administer, so I moved on. The fourth manager they hired after I left did not appear to have made any purchase on the problem the last time I talked to her.

I naively thought the problem was technology, but the real problem was the expectations of the CEO. There was nothing I could do about it, of course, so it worked out for the best.

A client one time told me in the past. At the time, I wanted to ask, "so, how badly are you treating them?"

This problem isn't unique to in house teams. It's hard to find and motivate competent people whether salaried or consulting.

Do you still do consulting?

Please reach me at brandon {at} brandonreiss {dot} com to explore an opportunity with a small e-commerce retailer/wholesaler.

I've found that I'm (as in, the boss guy) the most common blockade to ensuring that mentorship is productive and not disruptive. A 2 to 1 hiring ratio is playing the same game you are but on "Easy" instead of "Normal". So :thumbsup: on maintaining a 1 to 1 ratio.

Regarding how this relates to hiring women -- it's not just women. It has been a general diversity boon to teams where I've employed this practice, increasing diversity not just in the "affirmative action" groups (not to diminish the importance of that) but also in programmer background. I've had junior engineers bring insights far outside my sphere simply because they were previously (e.g.) a copywriter.

In the case of gender, female developers have been shut out of the industry for long enough that corrective action has to be taken to balance the scales. Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.

Only the pool has to be created in the lower levels (education etc) not imposed at the company level with less good candidates favored just because of their sex.

>Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.

It's very possible, if meritocracy is sidestepped, and the person who gets sidestepped is a man in favor of e.g. 50-50 parity with a woman.

Unless the pool entering the workforce is 50-50 already, then 50-50 hiring requires discrimination.

"Meritocracy" is almost always a flawed idea, because it relies on the principle of those in positions of authority choosing the best candidate for a given role; the key word here is "best." That's a subjective term, and usually favors a small set of criteria over a more holistic view. People, with some exceptions, are bad at seeing the big picture.

With very few exceptions, I will always favor candidates with broader experience over those with narrow strengths.

That's the whole idea. When you need a surgeon you don't need a specifically sexed, or colored, or whatever surgeon. You just need a person good at the "small set of criteria" of performing a surgery.

Eg. Imagine if I was at the top of a burning building and my family needed rescued. I would want 5 men to try to save us, not 5 women. Does that make be sexist or normal minded?

EDIT: and off course vice versa for tasks that women are best suited.

"Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually" - Merriam Webster Dictionary

Please don't bend what the word means just because others do. If we have our own meanings for every word, than the words mean nothing.

But it's discrimination with a higher purpose.

I would urge you to reconsider the notion that affirmative action is a sustainable solution for anything. It's hack. You only need to look at the current state of India's government, which over the course of more than 50 years of affirmative action (and other varying factors) has managed to convert the government sector into a cesspool of corruption and bad management.

This seems to imply that India's government fifty years ago was NOT full of corruption and bad management. The Raj was definitely corrupt but I know little about the two decades after India got its independence - were things really that good fifty years ago? Or was it just that it was less obvious?

I'm going to step away and do some more reading on the subject before responding. Since this thread will likely be stale by then, I'll put up a blog post or similar with my updated thoughts.

I think this is so true of software development roles, but doesn't it actually apply to every hire? unless you have a _very_ specific role with explicit skill set, senior roles need to be just as flexible and able to learn new things quickly.

Just ball-parking numbers, but that's what I got from his post.

The idea of a "rockstar" you seem to be referring to has, in my experience, been a dev who can go into a corner and pump out high volumes of code with little supervision or collaboration. That's great, except no one else can make sense of the code they pump out, so when it comes time for the next guy to add a feature to the rockstar's mess it takes 2 to 3 times as long as it should.

I've also had to clean up messes by rockstars who made unilateral decisions about incorporating new technologies into a product. Like building out a single part of the product in React with out asking anyone else. You see, the rockstar didn't like meetings and didn't want to make the case to the rest of the team for why we should all learn React and gradually switch over. Instead, he just stuck it into the code. So now, you have a couple of views built as React components, and the rest of the thing is in Backbone. No one else knows React or has time to learn it, cause we're blazing ahead really fast. They just get very confused when they have to change something in those components and it takes them forever. But the rockstar got to have his fun and play with new tech.

This conception of a "rockstar" isn't a great developer... it's a selfish, cocky developer. When you hear "rockstar" dev, you shouldn't hear great performer. You should think of Keith Moon trashing his hotel room and driving his car into the hotel pool.

A great dev knows the value of documenting their code and writing testable code. A great dev knows the value of taking the extra time to make code easily understood and easily modified -- that sweet spot between spaghetti and over engineering. A great dev loves to mentor junior devs, enjoys walking other devs through their code, is happy to discuss design decisions with the team, and willing to admit when maybe their idea isn't the best one.

A great dev doesn't think they are god's gift to code, they are humble enough to understand they are one part of a team. They put the team first and work hard to teach others what they know, while always remembering they don't know everything.

I have worked with a Musician with Phd in music who taught him self coding after an accident broke all the bones in his feet (drink had been taken)

It was fun in the pub when some hit tracks came on he would say ah I think that's one of mine :-)

Eventually in the 90s, some developers really took the rock star bit to heart and started plastering their own names all over their output (cf. "John Romero's Daikatana", "American McGee's Whatever-American-McGee-Is-Working-On-Now"), but for the most part, developers at the time hated the rock star characterization.

I don't disagree with your "great dev" qualities but there is more needed to make a "great dev". Otherwise all the documentation, code ease, mentoring, being a part of the team, etc. is not going to make the code useful to anyone.

Second, I hear this extremely often: Rockstar devs don't like to mentor, Rockstar devs don't like to write documentation, Rockstar devs don't like to write tests.

At what point do you need to reevaluate your definition of a rockstar dev?

The hiring filter is a powerful thing. It allows you to find very special people if you know how to look. It's also a feedback loop. Getting momentum with a program like this is the hardest part. Once it's going it practically self sustains. The biggest part of your role becomes quickly firing any mistakes.

Are you looking for someone who can parachute in with expertise on a specific tech and churn out working code themselves?

Or are you willing to accept more lag time and less initial code productivity in exchange for a deeper bench and sustainable team?

There are times and places for both of these developer types...

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 members or the company at large, and service.

Senior devs balance development work and "service", a term I'll borrow from academia - hiring, mentoring, speaking, writing docs, etc. They either find fun in these tasks as well (I legit enjoy interviewing and mentoring), or understand this is a necessary part of being a well functioning team player at a senior level.

Then you can hire some boring reliable folks from the khaki-and-polo brigade to help upgrade version 2 to version 3. This is when you have an opportunity to hire juniors and mentor them on what good software actually looks like, and how to make good-enough software better. The ninjas will probably leave at this point, and if they have done their job, the company will never need that level of expertise again in a permanent employee. The gurus will stay on to be an expert in your specific system, and teach the new people how to preserve its grandest traditions.

The problem is that a lot of companies never get to what I call "version 3". They might slap higher release numbers on it every so often, but if they never did a clean re-implementation of the quick-and-dirty prototype, that's still "version 1.X", no matter how high the numbers go. You put a junior in that environment, and they're not going to become a stable maintenance developer, and that's where the majority of the jobs will be for the foreseeable future, especially for inexperienced people.

To sum up: rockstars live fast and die young; ninjas quietly demonstrate incredible skills, and vanish; and gurus are the high priests for your established project, who will eventually pay off all your tech debt, if you let them.

There are different breeds of senior developer, and you really want the gurus teaching juniors when they start to run short of other useful things to do. If you don't have the kind of company that is mature enough to evolve a developer into a guru, you won't be able to handle juniors. And there aren't enough companies that can handle juniors. It may be because they aren't honoring the full software lifecycle that includes the long, long tail of maintenance mode.

I think the never getting there often happens because management isn't aware of the current quality of their software vs hypothetical quality of a rewrite.

And I get it: I imagine every one of them has been burned by an overly optimistic developer. "It'll be rewritten in 3 months and run 2x as fast" types.

As a discipline, inculcating "respect that the years of person-work in the current version weren't done by idiots solving unimportant niche use cases" would be very healthy.

When a person takes on for themselves labels like rockstar, guru, ninja, etc. I don't doubt that they can write code, but I certainly doubt that they can write code that fulfils the needs of those who will be using it.

Labels likes these are a detriment to the profession. If we want businesses to take note and consider those in the IT profession to be anything more than ignored, we need to lift our game a long way.

What is IT known for (in the general sense), games, social media, search engines and lots of crappy software that users have to fight to get anything done.

Yet we have people and companies that produce great software that fulfils the needs of those who use it in a way that is not detrimental to those users.

It's coming up to forty years that I have been involved with the industry and I hear complaints every day from users who are frustrated by the inconsistencies in the software they are using, whether it be social media, business software, games, etc.

In general, as an industry, we are far too arrogant about our own self-importance and what we develop. Whether it be the likes of Apple, Oracle, IBM, Google, etc, the industry has forgotten that they only exist as long as people will tolerate the bull dust that is thrown at them by these companies. We are always looking for the "next big thing", yet many of the actual needs that we could be filling are not being done. We like flashy and not substance.

The others can be "foundation developer", "transition developer", and "maintenance developer". It's still meaningless as long as different companies won't standardize on those titles.

We likely all know which category we belong to now, and which one we want to be. We also know that any company that asks directly for a "rockstar", "ninja", or "guru" is probably one to be avoided.

The frustrating ones are those who talk a good talk about "doing things right" (and, generally, talk a lot...), but then work on something for an age and come back with a solution that's objectively worse than the "RIGHT NOW" solution we've been using in the interim.

This is not a great example. In academia, that's because they are fundamentally different jobs in most cases.

Most of the professor roles are not teaching their research, and where they are, i would bet your best professors are the inventors. But most are researching x and teaching y.

By contrast, in software development, the devs should be teaching, because what they are teaching is what they are doing on a daily basis, and the knowledge they've learned in how to do that well.

The notion that people who refuse to mentor or attend meetings (assuming these are symptoms of the same "not team player" phenomenon, and not something else) are rockstars is, imho, pretty misguided.

Even if you assume the 10x people silliness is true, each person mentoring 2-3 new people and building them will make the organization more productive than your 10x person fairly quickly.

(Again, situation may be reasonably different if you only will have a team of one or two, etc)

I don't agree, senior tasks are often much more high-level and related to figuring out requirements/stories, or their tasks are hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive.

"hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive" I strongly doubt this. Most of the differences i've seen over the years are in approach to complexity, and not level of complexity themselves.

One aspect of teaching is explaining your inventions to your peers.

But another aspect is telling a new graduate what a version control system is and why you need one. Then doing the same for your build system, continuous integration system, staging environment, code review, bug tracker, style guide, and so on.

Seems to me those are quite different skills - I can easily imagine a person who is good at / enjoys one might not be good at / enjoy the other.

Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay.

Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige. If you mentor three engineers, that's three warm bodies at your company who will have good things to say when asked about you. If you do a good job, you now have a team of four capable engineers who can get things done.

What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

“Prestige” and “respect” are essentially synonyms, and careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management.

> What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way.

This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted

> careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management

You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.

No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.

39 never noticed anything. Where do you work?

You can't imagine all the ways management can dismiss women's actions - "she's a great connector in that department. Let's leave her there, that's working great." or "sure she's got all the guys eating out of her hand. But lets talk leadership - Bob has got everybody afraid of him! Lets promote Bob"

Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive.

It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.

But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype.

In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.

You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement.

The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.

Back in the 90's, when I wanted to move up to working with C++ (the hip, new, "in" thing at the time), I bought a book about C++, read through it, worked the examples, and then started interviewing. The interviewers asked all sorts of arcane questions that I hadn't come across in my few months of study, so I was tanking the interviews. The trick I figured out back then, though, was that the interviewers all tended to ask the same sorts of questions - so after getting my rejection, I'd go look up what the answers to all their questions were so that the next time I was asked the same question, I'd know the answer. I did eventually get a job doing C++ (and did well at it), but... yeah, looking back it was maybe a little bit dishonest.

If the hiring process wasn't able to distinguish between you or who they thought they were looking for, then it wasn't your responsibility to inform them of it.

Oh, God no. I've never been asked a question in a job interview that was in any way relevant to the work I actually ended up doing.

Well, fully capable of entry-level employment. Anyone who graduates from a reputable school with a Comp. Sci. or InfoSys type of major is also fully capable of entry-level employment.

Accountants aren't really capable of anything but grunt work until they pass the CPA which normally is after several years of grunt work and additional learning and study.

Programmers aren't much good in a business until after several years of actually programming business systems.

It doesn't seem to hard to understand to me, in fact they seem quite similar.

No, they're really not, for at least a year. It takes at least that long for most new graduates to get over the hump and learn enough of the practical skills and industry practices that their university left them woefully ignorant of, so that they can start being marginally useful. Once in a while you find somebody who has been doing real work on the side for years during or before college, and thus has a clue how things work, but that's a diamond in the rough, usually.

And unfortunately, many of them just can't hack being a professional programmer, and they never get to the point where they become a net positive, in which case you just hope they leave of their own volition or you can silo them off in some area of little importance that won't cause you problems down the road.

A year?!

You're either scraping the bottom of the barrel for new hires, have a terrible on-boarding process, over-estimating the difference between the code someone fresh out of college writes or have absolutely terrible documentation or some combination thereof.

I'm leaning toward on-boarding and/or documentation. Junior devs are the ones who most need documentation because they're not gonna be able to infer the existence of policy and best practices from existing code and procedures as well as a senior dev will.

Either you and your HR is doing a terrible job giving new hires a lead on what to be asking and where to find information or that information just doesn't exist outside of the heads of existing employees.

I work at a CDN. We have plenty of issues with legacy code, cumbersome interactions between business units, outdated policies/docs, lack of documentation on stuff and all the other BigCo problems.

A huge chunk of new hires at any time are fresh out of school. It takes ~3-4mo before they're dealing with stuff on their own with perfectly fine results.

People aren't idiots but they don't know what they don't know. People with more experience are better at knowing when there's something that they don't know. Fix your process and you'll be able to get good value for junior devs.

If you don't fix your process don't whine when someone who has business practices that let them deliver the same results at lower cost by utilizing cheaper labor comes along and undercuts you.

Isn't that the definition of entry-level or junior?

FWIW, the four recent graduates I hired this summer are all capable of completing well-defined programming tasks with minimal assistance. Does that mean I spend more time with my PO ensuring those tasks are well-defined and consumable by the new developers? Yeah (but that's our job). Do the senior team members spend part of their day mentoring? Yeah (but that's their job).

As for some of them not hacking it. Yeah that's true. But, I've also interviewed plenty of "senior devs" who were terrible. I've even hired one or two who didn't work out. I just do my best to avoid hiring them.

I'm not an accountant but I did do a business minor and I don't see this being much different for new accountant hires vs. new developer hires.

Then I got on a new project as a dev. Within months I was down to 3-4 hours for similar assignments. My last class at school was the first time we had a shortage of hardware (good school). I would sit at home and remote into one of the machines, get my code to compile and show up to the lab the afternoon before it was due to debug. And everybody looked at me like I looked at my old coworkers.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked to undergrads but I always tell them to beg borrow or steal an internship or a job on campus. You have no idea how far a little concrete experience takes you.

Finish with the boring programming, and you get to do fun programming.

Can you define "real work"?

Something built for a need--whether profitable business, or personal need--tends to provide more meaningful experience than a "write this contrived program to learn how [specific programming functionality] works" project.