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Can your company offer a challenging environment where I learn daily, and look forward to walking into your building? That's the biggest issue I find with most

Can your company offer a challenging environment where I learn daily, and look forward to walking into your building? That's the biggest issue I find with most employment opportunities. 90% of the jobs aren't stimulating me enough, and I'm thinking about being somewhere else. Cheesy puns I can handle, are you adept at talking in movie references only?

p4wnc6 11y ago
I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down). Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out." That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.
- overcast 11y ago
  God damn, I am stealing that quote. In regards to those "hire the best", where the application process is more drawn out than top secret government clearance. Those just aren't for me. I'm not looking for top tier(I'm not), but I am looking for intellectual stimulation, and being involved in something that someone will actually be using. I get the majority of my satisfaction watching others use something I've created. My rant is over!
- jared314 11y ago
  "It’s ridiculous, but most companies demand an astronomically higher quality of work experience than they give out." Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - Michael O. Church [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/why-programmers-cant-make-any-money-dimensionality-and-the-eternal-haskell-tax/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaeloc...
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Developers need to get away from the idea that it is the companies responsibility for your career development. You are responsible for your own career development. The company has hired you to do a job and they pay you for doing that job. Do not expect anyone else to invest in you unless it is in their interest.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      That's like saying developers need to get away from the idea that it is the company's responsibility to pay them salary, offer retirement benefits, provide them shelter from the weather while working, etc. The company may not have any literal obligation to provide such things, and no one cares. If they don't provide such things, reject them, move on, life's too short.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        No it is the companies responsibility to pay you a salary (and any other conditions negotiated or legislated) in return for your labor. Of course companies invest some resources in career development as part of their salary package, but it is likely to be less than what is ideal for you as an individual since you can walk out the door at anytime. Every developer needs to take control of their own career development because they gain the most out any investment. This does not mean that you always take the highest salary, but you need to look at training and career development as an extra that is part of your overall salary package. In some cases the training offered to you is more valuable to you than it costs the company to provide and in other cases it is better to take the cash and invest it yourself. The important thing is take control of your own career development and don’t expect it to be handed to you by someone else.
    - pdeuchler 11y ago
      It is in their interest. You want the best people at their best positions so you can leverage them to make more money. If your company doesn't care about making sure people are empowered to make the business money then I'd be worried about how they're going to pay your salary in the future.
rconti 11y ago
Is this a "you" problem, or a job problem? I've worked with quite a few people who initially impressed me with how much they knew, but then they peter out and disappear after 12-18 months, because they can't be bothered to actually do work. Too often people want to be paid to enjoy their pet projects and work on whether component they feel like working on; not maintain their stuff when they get bored of it, and so on. To be fair, you absolutely need to be able to learn and grow in a role to advance professionally.. But at the same time, some folks don't seem to understand that you're getting paid to use your existing knowledge to accomplish something you're already good at.
- CuriouslyC 11y ago
  Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems. If you hire someone ostensibly for that role, and they end up spending most of their time refactoring the code of junior devs, writing tests and tweaking the build process, they have a legitimate grievance and are fully justified in leaving. On the other hand, if someone got hired on for a typical mid-level developer/engineer position without any promises of a research/advanced engineering focus, they need to man up and do their job.
  - lazaroclapp 11y ago
    > Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems. Sure. But often when that's the case your title will say something closer to "Principal Researcher", rather than "Software Developer Engineer". Don't get me wrong, a good thing about a job in engineering is that figuring elegant solutions to hard problems is a significant part of what you do there. Also, you can definitely optimize for that being a larger part of your time, if you aim for that when choosing where to work. However, the jobs for which that is the only function you are employed to fill, and where you are expected to delegate maintenance of your elegant solution to someone else, are exceedingly rare. That's why the academic job market in CS is so much harsher (including industry research labs) than the software development job market. And, for the record, research work does end up involving either some amount of grunt work or some amount of management work at every place and level I have seen so far (universities, industry research labs, etc)

p4wnc6 11y ago

I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down). Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out." That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.

overcast 11y ago
God damn, I am stealing that quote. In regards to those "hire the best", where the application process is more drawn out than top secret government clearance. Those just aren't for me. I'm not looking for top tier(I'm not), but I am looking for intellectual stimulation, and being involved in something that someone will actually be using. I get the majority of my satisfaction watching others use something I've created. My rant is over!
jared314 11y ago
"It’s ridiculous, but most companies demand an astronomically higher quality of work experience than they give out." Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - Michael O. Church [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/why-programmers-cant-make-any-money-dimensionality-and-the-eternal-haskell-tax/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaeloc...
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Developers need to get away from the idea that it is the companies responsibility for your career development. You are responsible for your own career development. The company has hired you to do a job and they pay you for doing that job. Do not expect anyone else to invest in you unless it is in their interest.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    That's like saying developers need to get away from the idea that it is the company's responsibility to pay them salary, offer retirement benefits, provide them shelter from the weather while working, etc. The company may not have any literal obligation to provide such things, and no one cares. If they don't provide such things, reject them, move on, life's too short.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      No it is the companies responsibility to pay you a salary (and any other conditions negotiated or legislated) in return for your labor. Of course companies invest some resources in career development as part of their salary package, but it is likely to be less than what is ideal for you as an individual since you can walk out the door at anytime. Every developer needs to take control of their own career development because they gain the most out any investment. This does not mean that you always take the highest salary, but you need to look at training and career development as an extra that is part of your overall salary package. In some cases the training offered to you is more valuable to you than it costs the company to provide and in other cases it is better to take the cash and invest it yourself. The important thing is take control of your own career development and don’t expect it to be handed to you by someone else.
  - pdeuchler 11y ago
    It is in their interest. You want the best people at their best positions so you can leverage them to make more money. If your company doesn't care about making sure people are empowered to make the business money then I'd be worried about how they're going to pay your salary in the future.

rconti 11y ago

Is this a "you" problem, or a job problem? I've worked with quite a few people who initially impressed me with how much they knew, but then they peter out and disappear after 12-18 months, because they can't be bothered to actually do work. Too often people want to be paid to enjoy their pet projects and work on whether component they feel like working on; not maintain their stuff when they get bored of it, and so on. To be fair, you absolutely need to be able to learn and grow in a role to advance professionally.. But at the same time, some folks don't seem to understand that you're getting paid to use your existing knowledge to accomplish something you're already good at.

CuriouslyC 11y ago
Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems. If you hire someone ostensibly for that role, and they end up spending most of their time refactoring the code of junior devs, writing tests and tweaking the build process, they have a legitimate grievance and are fully justified in leaving. On the other hand, if someone got hired on for a typical mid-level developer/engineer position without any promises of a research/advanced engineering focus, they need to man up and do their job.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  > Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems. Sure. But often when that's the case your title will say something closer to "Principal Researcher", rather than "Software Developer Engineer". Don't get me wrong, a good thing about a job in engineering is that figuring elegant solutions to hard problems is a significant part of what you do there. Also, you can definitely optimize for that being a larger part of your time, if you aim for that when choosing where to work. However, the jobs for which that is the only function you are employed to fill, and where you are expected to delegate maintenance of your elegant solution to someone else, are exceedingly rare. That's why the academic job market in CS is so much harsher (including industry research labs) than the software development job market. And, for the record, research work does end up involving either some amount of grunt work or some amount of management work at every place and level I have seen so far (universities, industry research labs, etc)