4 ms·

The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like

The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like in every market, some are overvalued and some are undervalued. But unlike stocks, you don’t extract value from your programmers by selling them at what the market perceives it will pay. So you aren’t hunting for programmers that are valued by the market, you’re hunting for programmers that will be productive. And because it costs you time and money to even talk to programmers, you want the programmers with the highest probability of accepting an offer and being productive. Which means that regardless of your budget productive programmers that are undervalued by the market are the very best ones to interview. Think about that the next time you see an ad that “encourages women and people of colour to apply.” Maybe they’re raving SJWs who hate white men. Or maybe they’re playing Moneyball. (Where or is `||`, not `^^`, of course.)

p4wnc6 11y ago
In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about productivity, and most businesses are not punished by consumers when the business is not productive, beyond a low, low threshold of productivity that non-do-or-die stage businesses can mostly automate and extract from workers who only even need to be semi-conscious to do the work. I've experienced this laissez-faire autopilot attitude first hand, even in a multi-billion dollar asset management company where there was "real money on the line every day" and blah blah blah. Just look at the office space provided to knowledge workers. Open-plan offices demonstrably destroy productivity. You're literally throwing away something like 10-15% of a worker's productivity (and thus also the corresponding compensation you pay them) just by placing them in a loud, no-privacy open-plan space. But companies can't get enough open-plan. They want on-site cafes, rock-climbing walls, elaborate decorations, game rooms, liquor-focused cultural activities, etc. etc. all taking place right on top of the space where work is supposed to get done. Can there be more of an unequivocal admission that they don't actually value productivity? The idea that most businesses have to be really sensitive to bottom-line productivity is a Big Lie. They hire you because they think you'll be a politically ally to their particular internal faction for their pet projects and power struggles. They may need to use your on-paper credentials to win arguments or to "certify" some things, but make no mistake, they absolutely don't care about what you can do.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  Your cynicism is noted. But my cynicism says that managers often hire people who will be productive because a huge part of their political game is producing software that appears to be “strategic” or will generate the revenues that make their group more valued and garner more budget and power for said managers. So yes, it’s cynicism all the way down, but no, that doesn’t mean that managers aren’t trying to hire productive programmers :-)
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    > appears to be “strategic” The key word is appears which is just a game of status and certification.
    - braythwayt 11y ago
      Somehow, I don't think we're going to find any agreement here, when your comments consistently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as having an invalid perspective.
      - p4wnc6 11y ago
        I am striving to back up my disagreement with cogent points. The excuses that are used to justify the anti-human way that we allow HR-type thinking to structure our working lives are something I am passionate about criticizing. There are a lot of time-honored HR-type tactics used to try to justify and proliferate these anti-human patterns, and I do wholeheartedly acknowledge that my belief is that attempts to defend them are fundamentally invalid. In the sense of principled sociological understanding of bureaucracy, such as in the book Moral Mazes, it's probably the aspect of technology culture that I am most interested in. You are surely correct in at least some cases where my comments are expressed poorly or come with too little supporting information, but I strive for that to be the minority.
- mdpopescu 11y ago
  Absolutely. I've had a contract where I could have done the job in two months; there were four people in the team and the contract was for six months. I spent most of my time reading articles on the internet :) The reason for the over-budgeting? The team lead was a permanent employee trying to get promoted to manager; in order to do that, he needed a 1) successful and 2) significant project. Genuinely large projects risk being unsuccessful, but an overestimated one ticks both checkboxes.

p4wnc6 11y ago

In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about productivity, and most businesses are not punished by consumers when the business is not productive, beyond a low, low threshold of productivity that non-do-or-die stage businesses can mostly automate and extract from workers who only even need to be semi-conscious to do the work. I've experienced this laissez-faire autopilot attitude first hand, even in a multi-billion dollar asset management company where there was "real money on the line every day" and blah blah blah. Just look at the office space provided to knowledge workers. Open-plan offices demonstrably destroy productivity. You're literally throwing away something like 10-15% of a worker's productivity (and thus also the corresponding compensation you pay them) just by placing them in a loud, no-privacy open-plan space. But companies can't get enough open-plan. They want on-site cafes, rock-climbing walls, elaborate decorations, game rooms, liquor-focused cultural activities, etc. etc. all taking place right on top of the space where work is supposed to get done. Can there be more of an unequivocal admission that they don't actually value productivity? The idea that most businesses have to be really sensitive to bottom-line productivity is a Big Lie. They hire you because they think you'll be a politically ally to their particular internal faction for their pet projects and power struggles. They may need to use your on-paper credentials to win arguments or to "certify" some things, but make no mistake, they absolutely don't care about what you can do.

braythwayt 11y ago
Your cynicism is noted. But my cynicism says that managers often hire people who will be productive because a huge part of their political game is producing software that appears to be “strategic” or will generate the revenues that make their group more valued and garner more budget and power for said managers. So yes, it’s cynicism all the way down, but no, that doesn’t mean that managers aren’t trying to hire productive programmers :-)
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  > appears to be “strategic” The key word is appears which is just a game of status and certification.
  - braythwayt 11y ago
    Somehow, I don't think we're going to find any agreement here, when your comments consistently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as having an invalid perspective.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      I am striving to back up my disagreement with cogent points. The excuses that are used to justify the anti-human way that we allow HR-type thinking to structure our working lives are something I am passionate about criticizing. There are a lot of time-honored HR-type tactics used to try to justify and proliferate these anti-human patterns, and I do wholeheartedly acknowledge that my belief is that attempts to defend them are fundamentally invalid. In the sense of principled sociological understanding of bureaucracy, such as in the book Moral Mazes, it's probably the aspect of technology culture that I am most interested in. You are surely correct in at least some cases where my comments are expressed poorly or come with too little supporting information, but I strive for that to be the minority.
mdpopescu 11y ago
Absolutely. I've had a contract where I could have done the job in two months; there were four people in the team and the contract was for six months. I spent most of my time reading articles on the internet :) The reason for the over-budgeting? The team lead was a permanent employee trying to get promoted to manager; in order to do that, he needed a 1) successful and 2) significant project. Genuinely large projects risk being unsuccessful, but an overestimated one ticks both checkboxes.