9 ms·

My "standard" team typically has two jr engineers, and two Sr engineers. When we hire Sr engineers we hire people that like to mentor others and see it as part

• vinceguidry 9y ago
  I'll see your management issue and raise you a leadership one. 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.
  • jmvoodoo 9y ago
    This is absolutely true. Ive been lucky that the last 17 years of my career have been spent reporting to the CEO and have had a large amount of leeway in my position. That's not always the case and a bad leadership team can't create a good culture.
    • vinceguidry 9y ago
      I should have made a case for reporting to the CEO myself. None of the three managers could figure out how to do it, and I spent more time than I should have trying to coach them on how to handle him. But I wanted to be comfortable and reporting to the CEO would have been the opposite of that.
  • ethbro 9y ago
    I never thought about it, but "IT / development is crap in legacy industries" follows as a tautology from your perspective. 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.
  • tropshop 9y ago
    E-commerce is unique in that it has such a massive impact on revenue generation, but the skills needed to effectively manage it are rarely inline with the core competencies of the business. 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.
    • blr246 9y ago
      Well put. 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.
    • walshemj 9y ago
      That is because business regards its technical staff "in comtempt" and that is a direct quote from one of my previous bosses (a director at on of the largest publishers in the world)
      • FilterSweep 9y ago
        "We keep our developers away from sales teams as they tend to be dreamkillers." A client one time told me in the past. At the time, I wanted to ask, "so, how badly are you treating them?"
    • rapind 9y ago
      I've seen the same issue, only they never tried it in house. Instead they spent a million or so over 5 years with different consultants who all did an extremely poor job and each time through out previous work and requirements. This problem isn't unique to in house teams. It's hard to find and motivate competent people whether salaried or consulting.
    • 9y ago
• binarycheese 9y ago
  Then you will need two senior devs. This is because rockstar devs rarely want to mentor junior devs nor attend meetings. Most inventors are not professors.
  • jmvoodoo 9y ago
    First off I hate the phrase "Rockstar dev" because it gives the impression that someone can be successful without the support of the team, which is wrong. 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.
    • ethbro 9y ago
      Related to this: know what you're hiring for. 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...
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • thomaslangston 9y ago
    If you don't want to teach, you're not a rockstar. The best developers I know have always been ready to show and explain what and why and how. Inventors love to talk about their inventions.
    • michaelt 9y ago
      Teaching isn't a simple matter you can flatten down to like/dislike. 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.
• jnovek 9y ago
  I am philosophically similar, although I generally hire at a 2 to 1 ratio, senior to junior. 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.
• steveeq1 9y ago
  > 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. You're giving preferential treatment to your recruits on the basis of their gender?
  • redblacktree 9y ago
    I'm not the person you're replying to, but I took it to mean that they end up hiring about half women for those roles, not that the explicitly seek them out.
  • jmvoodoo 9y ago
    No. However we get more applicants that are women for the Jr roles and our hiring criteria matches them roughly as often as it matches men. For the sr positions 80% or more of applicants are men which roughly translates into 80% or more of hires being men. Pretty easy to see the math there without having to introduce any sort of preferential treatment.
  • antisthenes 9y ago
    It seems like men and women are applying to the junior roles in roughly equal proportion, while the applications to the senior roles might be more skewed to the tune of 80/20 or worse. Just ball-parking numbers, but that's what I got from his post.
  • entered_val 9y ago
    Why are you so eager to call out what you perceive as "preferential treatment" towards women that you ignore logic? It's beyond obvious that he meant half the people hired happen to be women. Are you that misogynist that reason doesn't matter?
• shabangcohen 9y ago
  As a woman currently applying/interviewing for a new grad role, I think you're definitely right about most companies caring only about current knowledge/skill.
  • laythea 9y ago
    Why is that bad? Jobs should be filled based on skill/knowledge. (The ability to learn is a skill too, one that means what you know currently matters less). I take slight offence to your statement. Why is being a woman relevant to anything, unless your company is going for 50/50 male female. But in my opinion that is wrong, and amounts to sex discrimination against men, because if 50% of roles are filled by men, even if there is a better male candidate, then the female will get the role. (And vice versa, but that is generally not the case in my experience). This is wrong. It's about what the person can do, not evening numbers. Sex discrimination gone mad!
    • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
      This is just the current zeitgeist we live in right now. In my prior career as an electrician, I didn't see any of this brought up by my employer/industry, but now that I'm a software developer, I see it all the time. I think that might be because the work of an electrician is more physical and labor-intensive, and therefore not very enticing to a lot of women looking to enter the workforce.
    • bovermyer 9y ago
      Building diversity is an important component of forward progress, since it engenders a broader experiential pool to draw from. 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.
      • coldtea 9y ago
        >Building diversity is an important component of forward progress, since it engenders a broader experiential pool to draw from. 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.
• Romanulus 9y ago
  How many women hired would be enough to satisfy those roles you mention?
• tomxor 9y ago
  > 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 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.