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Kate Heddleston is freaking awesome, if you don't know. Her talk at Pycon 2015 about diversity in engineering environments is fantastic. Well explained in langu
by agentultra 11y ago
Kate Heddleston is freaking awesome, if you don't know. Her talk at Pycon 2015 about diversity in engineering environments is fantastic. Well explained in language free of activist rhetoric -- it was a pragmatic and thoughtful speech. Her blog expands on much of what she covers and should be read.
On the topic of on-boarding -- super important to get right! The idea of making your people the best they can be is lost, I think, on our generation. My grandfather-in-law was a mechanical engineer at Chrysler back in the day when they had a special school they ran to train their new recruits. When he started he had no idea of how cars worked but they picked him up from school and gave him the training he needed to become an important figure in their company.
Focusing on hiring the best because hiring someone mediocre will damage your business is negative thinking that can kill your on-boarding, and thus your culture and business. I've worked at places with terrible on-boarding and it was a fight just to get some direction and support for your work. Getting the attention of management was something you wanted to avoid which led to people becoming complacent about their work and its quality.
Great article. On-boarding is important to get right.
- nicolewhite 11y agoKate's talk at PyCon Sweden was one of my favorites. It's called "The Ethics of Being a Programmer." Here's the video for anyone interested in watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB7ei5W1eRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB7ei5W1eRQ
- mattyb 11y agoHere are video and slide links for the aforementioned PyCon 2015 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNke_4WOWAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNke_4WOWAU https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2015/kate-heddleston-how-our-engineering-environments-are-killing-diversity-and-how-we-can-fix-it https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2015/kate-heddleston-how-our-en...
- markcampbell 11y agoDoes anyone have a link to the Twitter lawsuit mentioned in the slides and talk? edit: found it (I think) http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/21/8270585/twitter-gender-discrimination-lawsuit-tina-huang http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/21/8270585/twitter-gender-dis...
- Kalium 11y agoIt's not that the idea of making your people the best they can be is lost. It's that our industry has accept job-hopping as normal, with the side-effect of limiting how much training a company is willing to invest in someone who stands a good chance of being gone in three years. The notion has less been lost and more been re-evaluated in a new context.
- hobs 11y agoJob hopping only became normal as a side effect of massive layoffs, union busting, and other anti-employee tactics. They started it, employees would be fools to not leave when the wind is blowing in that direction.
- humanrebar 11y agoYou left out a bigger factor, in my opinion: tracking compensation to inflation or the success of the business, not market rates. If the market rate for an engineer is (making up numbers) 35% higher than it was in 2010, each engineer better be making at least 1.35 times what they were five years ago. Probably more, considering they're likely better at what they do than they were five years ago.
- fieryeagle 11y agoMarket rate means nothing to employers. If they could give you 3% raise per year and get away with it, they would. The only way for non-union developers to protect their interest is to look out.
- littleweep 11y agoBloomberg does this for its software engineers. I know a few of their software developers (one was EE, one ME) who were both very sharp guys that they trained while paying them for six months while they sat in classes (at Bloomberg from a current Software Engineer) to develop for the Bloomberg terminal. Great way to introduce new talent to the company while also training them for the role.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoAny proprietary software maker will need to train its employees on their software as there is no existing knowledge pool to hire from.
- Apocryphon 11y agoFacebook provides a boot camp to all new engineers, and it's unlikely that it's only for their proprietary stuff.
- sjcrank 11y agoRegarding the negative thinking, this is a really important point. Consider these two alternative attitudes when on-boarding a new employee: 1. Let's evaluate to see whether the new developer is good enough, so we can fire fast if our expectations are not met. 2. Let's figure out how to help this developer achieve his/her maximum potential for adding value to the organization. If for some reason the developer is unwilling or unable to develop to a level that makes a positive contribution, then we consider separating. I find the second approach much healthier for the employee and the organization.
- devonkim 11y agoFalse dichotomy in my world since I employ both 1 and 2 with a very, very lenient set of guidelines for 1. Some things do not manifest in an interview, and that's where during the first couple weeks I check for some basic professionalism. Things like: 1. Are you responsive to e-mails or IMs at all? I don't mean are you answering e-mails constantly and within 10 minutes each time, I mean "do you answer e-mails when you are asked for a response?" 2. Do you ask questions at all? If it's day 7 and you still don't have access to Github because you never asked "So where do I, you know... push code?" I have to wonder what you were doing from days 1 to 6. 3. Have you confirmed what your expectations are if they are not clear to you? I give a basic 1-day project fully expecting it to take a bit longer, but if it takes a whole week and you're silent, I have to ask why you think it's ok that you have no idea what's going on and that it's ok. If I suspect they're not pulling their weight, I'll give a project where they will immediately be blocked and require assistance if they spend more than 10 minutes investigating the issue. This also helps me determine if someone is simply really, really shy or if they're just not doing any work. And lastly, reaffirm that you've done 1 to 3 and communicate clearly that those are the expectations before you fire the person for being pretty much dead weight. You can't figure out how a lot of people will work until they actually start a job.
- svensken 11y agoThe point you make about hiring ordinary people is an important one. The timeless, old essay "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men"[1] makes a lot of great arguments to this end. The meat of the essay comes down to this quote: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks. Your grandfather-in-law is the perfect example of something I wish we'd see more of today. 1: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Men https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_...
- organsnyder 11y agoI'd never read that before—thanks for sharing it. The author's examples of people that led him astray sound eerily familiar to the founder of a startup that I spent a few months at earlier this year... (which, thankfully, I was able to leave before things got too bad)