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Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth

• ppcdeveloper 7y ago
  nuff said
• hidden_arachnid 7y ago
  Author of this article here. As long as this initial data-dive came out, there are still a bunch of things we’d like to look at. Does location (say, NYC vs Silicon Valley vs affect these preferences? Does which track (generalist, front-end, mobile) a candidate takes through our process? How does this link with how candidates actually behave when given an offer? Our data set has enough information that we can investigate these questions, but this was long enough as it is.
  • asdfman123 7y ago
    As a Houston developer, that chart of motivating factors describes exactly what I'm looking for. I won't work on an ancient Java codebase that has no tests or no deployment pipeline, because doing that is death. Gotta keep moving forward or find yourself sliding backwards. I would say your analysis is spot on and I could have written the same article myself. Companies should realize doing things that seem "fluffy" and not entirely necessary, like moving to a newer tech stack, might be worth it as it will make it easier to attract new talent. And if they stay behind, they might encounter the famous "dead sea effect" and wonder why things break, and every new feature takes forever -- the best technically minded people have left for greener pastures. However, I'd say that considering people who are great at interviewing are great engineers is flawed. There's a correlation, but it's probably a weak one. To get great at interviews, you have to practice interviews a lot. It's a separate skill orthogonal to software. Basically, you're selecting the most motivated to succeed -- but motivation to succeed doesn't necessarily translate into the best technical ability. It makes sense that they care most about salary, impressive surroundings and fast pace, as they're probably the most careerist SEs out there. > devoting (say) $1,000 or even $5,000 to classes or other forms of professional growth is not particularly expensive, but it can have a disproportionate effect on recruiting. I don't need classes. When I say I want professional growth, it means I want to play with new technologies and gain experience with them at work. So if you're willing to hire me to work on a new hot thing, I'll be more likely to take it. But please, please do away with the conceit that great interviewers are great employees unless you have data that suggests otherwise. Reading this, I'm under the impression you only look at candidates and don't have any metrics to understand their actual work performance.
    • maltalex 7y ago
      > Companies should realize doing things that seem "fluffy" and not entirely necessary, like moving to a newer tech stack, might be worth it as it will make it easier to attract new talent. Why are we as professionals (myself included, I'm not immune) so obsessed with shiny new things? Updating a product's tech stack just to attract new talent and not because the product needs it is objectively strange. Imagine if roads were torn down and rebuilt just because civil engineers wanted to try out some new road laying thingy.
      • asdfman123 7y ago
        I felt the same way when I closely followed indie rock, too. You have to pay close attention to all the new buzz coming out or you'll be at risk of being left behind and outed as "no longer with it." I assume the same thing goes for stuff like, say, fashion and art too. Funny how it has everything to do with style, and far less to do with engineering.
      • triceratops 7y ago
        Road-laying technology doesn't develop at the pace that computer technology does. We went from room-sized mainframes to powerful pocket computers in 40 years. Working on "new things" is objectively more interesting and pays better - modulo the COBOL devs making $500/hr now.
        • hollerith 7y ago
          You are describing advances in semiconductor performance whereas the person you are responding to has in mind things like new programming languages, libraries and frameworks, many of which we cannot even confidently say are advances at all.
          • triceratops 7y ago
            New programming languages, libraries, and frameworks often tend to go in lockstep with semi-conductor and hardware advances.
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  • itronitron 7y ago
    Your article is a fluff PR piece for your business.
• dventimi 7y ago
  Hire database developers.
• nscalf 7y ago
  I'm a software engineer with ~3 years of experience. I also want professional growth. Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it. levels.fyi sort of convinced me that being a good engineer is a life changing event for more than 1 generation. I answer questions like these as growth primarily because I know growth is an investment for my life long earning potential, and I just so happen to have a passion for growth to begin with---it's a lucky combination to be drawn to. I'd love to see questions like this phrased to account for this: "Opportunity for professional growth, to grow my future earning potential." "Opportunity for professional growth, because I enjoy learning new things." "Opportunity for professional growth, to reach a role I cannot fill with my current skills." I know the article tried to address this with the responses, but that's sort of the default answer you give in this field. No one really says, or enjoys hearing, "I want to learn more so I can make more money".
  • chadash 7y ago
    > "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it." And it's one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k/year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior equipment. Making $200K/year? I'll be you also have top of the line equipment, no one keeping close tabs on your hours, 4 weeks or more vacation, money to go to conferences, etc. A mentor of mine once told me that I should seek to make more money, even if that's not my motivation. He said that more money is always nice to have, but also that when someone pays you more, they respect you more, so you get all the benefits that come along with that.
    • logifail 7y ago
      > when someone pays you more, they respect you more The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work.
• RNeff 7y ago
  Offer a quiet, private office. Two or more monitors. Free snacks and free lunches. Modern software stack (whatever that is). Or full-time remote.
  • wysifnwyg 7y ago
    I'd be overjoyed for even a single remote day a week. Give me the four day at-work week.
    • v-erne 7y ago
      I'm guessing that You dont have kids :) I would say the same few years ago, but having young children now causes that I have nowhere to work at home that is relatively peacefull and quiet.
      • oldman123456789 7y ago
        I second that :P
      • softawre 7y ago
        You need a bigger house with an office. At my house, I use the finished basement as the office and it works very well.
  • ConcernedCoder 7y ago
    + for full time remote ( I can deal with everything else, but commuting just feels so antiquated now... we ARE living in the digital age right? )
    • holy_city 7y ago
      I'm holding out for cities on the carbon neutral push to offer subsidies for full remote work. Cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to get cars off the road, cheapest way to do that is to remove the need to travel.
  • 7y ago
• mytailorisrich 7y ago
  At the risk of sounding cynical, this is really the standard drive in all jobs: money and opportunity for more money and higher status.
  • wsc981 7y ago
    Personally I couldn’t care less about status, but money is very important to me, because I want to “retire” (work on my own stuff and by my own schedule) by the time I’m 45.
• elindbe2 7y ago
  I wonder how many people in the survey interpret "opportunities for professional growth" as "opportunities to get rich". To me that makes the survey data more understandable. People, myself included, basically want more money for less hours (AKA work/life balance).
  • ngngngng 7y ago
    Completely, I just asked in my open office space what "opportunities for professional growth" means and everyones said raise or promotion.
    • elindbe2 7y ago
      It seems like tricky wording used by businesses to pay people less. Tell people in your job description that you offer "opportunities for career growth" and they hear "opportunities to get rich". Then when they're actually working there you just change the meaning to some kind of title inflation or meaningless training or additional responsibilities for the same pay.
      • eropple 7y ago
        > even worse, additional responsibilities for the same pay FWIW, and I say this acutely aware that I'm of the "don't give them what you don't owe them" tribe, additional responsibilities for the same pay are how I got the broad skillset that got me to the point where I'm a principal developer with a hand in every part of our project--which is, in addition to no-complaints compensated, genuinely a lot of fun. I took on those responsibilities as an investment in myself; admittedly the key was finding high-value, high-leverage responsibilities, but it was for me more than for my current employer. Few enough people are going to pay you to learn something on their dime if you don't already show a ton of promise. Broadening your skillset is, IMO, how you get to the next job.
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• ngngngng 7y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions. Sure I really want to grow as an engineer, BECAUSE I want to make more money. When I think of professional growth, I think of a company that will give me large pay bumps equal to what I could get if I left, because as time goes on I get more productive and more knowledgeable.
• trilila 7y ago
  Don’t treat developers like bricklayers. Sack any product manager or manager that does it. This is the root of all evil, radical as it may sound. There needs to be a balance between engineering and product delivery, but too much emphasis on product delivery leads to tech debt, cutting too many corners and poor tech choices. Not to mention stress and little to no job satisfaction. Give devs some time to build something they are proud of. Good devs are in it because they love and once that love is gone the dev is gone.
  • dpeck 7y ago
    in my experience many developers want to be bricklayers (not to discount bricklaying, there's an art to it, but they're focused on the individual bricks, not the other aspects of the building). They get annoyed when they're asked to think about the bigger picture and just want to focus on the code, the architecture, and whatever is new and shiny. It is largely due to these sorts of developers that we've developed all the ritual around sprints/product owners/etc to put blinders on them because they cannot deal with deadline and thinking in terms of business value creation. This sort of person is under-represented here on HN for obvious reasons but they represent the majority of people developing software. The opportunity to contribute more than just lines of code should be offered and encouraged, but don't be surprised at how few will be interested.
    • ravenstine 7y ago
      There's a ton of truth to that. A lot of people speak like everyone wants to be a 10x engineer. Personally, being that sort of engineer has never appealed to me, and the majority of developers in my social circle in practice want to be the "bricklayers" of code because it's already a sweet financial deal.
    • yezanotherone 7y ago
      I am one of these happy bricklayers. It's the only way I can stay sane in a job. When I'm working on my own projects, I'm all in, and I love all aspects of the process. But in a job, on a project that 99% of the time is run badly, and my colleagues are writing terrible code, just give me the bricks and tell me what to build. If I try to care, I get frustrated and depressed. Plus, I'd be fooling myself if I were not like this. I've seen people put their passion into a job, argue their case, and then they get made redundant. Don't be fooled. P.s. I'm a very good, reliable bricklayer who makes very solid walls.
• davesmith1983 7y ago
  TBH I would settle for working on a sane codebase. Almost every codebase I have worked on except for my own are a complete mess. Basic things aren't done right e.g. Reproducible builds, source control, code review etc.
  • motivated_gear 7y ago
    It blows my mind that there are still projects managed without git. I've seen entire production projects in a shared network drive with appname_april_3_2014 appname_april_4_2014 appname_april_4_2014_new_order_schema
• umvi 7y ago
  Am I the only one here that likes growth because I like learning? I try and grow all the time in non-professional areas of my life even though there is no direct monetary compensation for doing so (such as learning new languages, instruments, etc.)
  • AznHisoka 7y ago
    Outside of work, absolutely. At work though, I find my thirst for learning new technical things has disappeared as I've gone older. What has grown instead is the thirst for learning new things in or related to my industry (domain knowledge). Like the problems my customers are facing, or where the industry is headed, or why they have been doing things a certain way.
    • eropple 7y ago
      This matches me pretty well, too. I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to get a broad base of knowledge very young and now don't have to run to catch up so much; because of it most of what I have to learn now are variations on a theme. Which is good, 'cause like you I've got way too many things to learn about the company and the industry and how to best apply those skills therein.
  • IggleSniggle 7y ago
    You are not alone. In fact, the opportunity to learn new things continuously and at a forced rapid pace is the reason I left academia to be a software developer.
    • stuxnet79 7y ago
      This has to be the most amusing thing I've read on HN in a while. I left academia for the same (counterintuitive) reason. Glad to see I'm not the only one and not crazy.
• bluedino 7y ago
  Is Triplebyte paying for product placement here now? They've taken over Reddit.
  • dang 7y ago
    Nobody pays for or gets product placement on HN. You have to make something readers find interesting. I assume that's the case with the current submission, since it hasn't been affected by moderators or by any of the below. We do sometimes place stories that we or a small number of story reviewers think the community might like. That program is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there. Such stories get lobbed by software randomly onto the bottom half of the front page, whence they fall off in a few minutes unless people upvote them. The purpose is to make HN more interesting (because https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Many good submissions fall through the cracks and this is a way to give some a second crack. Anyone who knows of a story that deserves a second chance like this should email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider throwing it in that pool. It's ok to ask this for one of your own stories, but it's better if you just ran across something and think it's cool. By the way, you can see a partial list of these at https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are the ones that were too old to be lobbed directly when we saw them, so we emailed the submitter and invited them to repost it instead. It's on my list to publish a more comprehensive set of lobbed stories. There are two other types of placed submission that HN does as a way to give back to YC for funding this place: job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs) and Launch HNs for startups (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      This (or an abstract of it) might make a good FAQ addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
      • 7y ago
• gringoDan 7y ago
  As the article mentioned, the importance of growth's influence can be explained in large part by a broad interpretation of the question. This article defined "Professional Growth" by saying: > "In short, software engineers of all stripes want, more than anything else, to develop their abilities as engineers" This is true, but it's also the first-order answer. The follow-up question to ask is why they want to develop their engineering ability. It may be to make a higher salary down the road (i.e. current salary is less important than future earning potential), to develop the skill set to found their own company, to gain prestige by moving up in an organization and managing other engineers. Overall, really interesting post - definitely worth diving into the data further.
• typon 7y ago
  Women value good code-bases more than men. Very interesting.
  • brabel 7y ago
    Of course they do... whose house do you expect to be tidier, an average woman's or an average man's?
    • mindfulgeek 7y ago
      This is a go to point for me whenever I discuss how women in technology can make a substantial impact in the code base.
    • the-dude 7y ago
      Have you ever seen a women's frat house?
    • hippich 7y ago
      I do not have anything to support it, but I think if you will be able to make such a study comparing women-into-programming vs men-into-programming there might be no difference in cleanness of one's house.
  • qntty 7y ago
    Perhaps women are less likely to be given the freedom to create the codebase (or part of it) and more likely to be involved in maintaining and extending it, and/or more likely to identify with such a role.
    • astrofinch 7y ago
      Another possible takeaway is if you want a clean codebase, you should hire a woman to write it, since women apparently care about clean code more.
• bozoUser 7y ago
  > “Opportunities for professional growth” is the clear winner, appearing 13 percentage points above even “salary”. Ofcourse professional growth is the winner as more often than not is directly proportional to one`s salary. As a s/w engg. "professional growth" is a hybrid of bunch of things - learning new tech, Cloud knowledge(k8s, docker etc.), and well summarized in the lines below by the author: > In short, software engineers of all stripes want, more than anything else, to develop their abilities as engineers. They want it more than pay, more than work/life balance, and more than autonomy.
  • itronitron 7y ago
    'opportunities for professional growth' is also a signal for 'growing company' and 'lower risk of layoffs' which helps explain why it is a winner
  • standardUser 7y ago
    I strongly agree - to me the term "professional growth" is synonymous with higher income and greater future employment opportunities. Not with learning a new framework or language.
• yowlingcat 7y ago
  I think this means we have to address some potentially specious statistical reasoning here. Assuming that a point cloud of pre transaction questions gives you the information to ascertain the career trajectory between great engineers and the "best" engineers is likely a fool's errand. What's the data source? Is it your technical screen? If there is any possibility that your technical screen doesn't track reality accurately, then your ranking metric is probabilistically very likely to be inaccurate. This is the risk of trying to quantify skill and potential levels before you try to qualify them properly. Most recruiting platforms work on a transaction processing fee on a per placement basis. Triplebyte is no different. The entire product is set up for a candidate to land a job. It is not set up for a candidate to structure and guide their entire career. The simple way to think of a transaction is as a point: point score on an assessment test, point score on a technical screen, point offer extended or not. You see these things being measured in this blog post, but that doesn't tell the full story to a hiring manager. If you're hiring an engineer that's actually growth oriented, you care about looking at the first and second order derivatives of all of these things, and you'll see them on a project to project basis, or on a person to person basis based on how they interact with their team and other teams. I want to repeat myself and restate that most recruiting platforms work on a transaction processing fee on a per placement basis. It's erroneous to try and draw the wrong kind of conclusions from data points gathered from enabling this transaction, especially when it's just 1. When a candidate receives multiple offers that they're interested in, it's very likely that they'll make a holistic judgment based on a combination of factors, and their gut. Is the company "good" or "sketchy?" Do they feel chemistry with the people they'll be working with? Are they stimulated by the work the team will be doing over the next year? The truth is, for most talented engineers at early stage companies, any company that makes a desirable product and has substantial growth left in building and scaling its product will allow for growth in literal terms. The limiting factors there will likely be the team, if anything. If there's juice left to be squeezed from building further product edge, and the team is good, the org is good, and the leadership is good, it's very likely that an engineer will receive more than one opportunity that is "good enough" -- good enough for them to exercise the upper limits on how far they can grow. It's easy to pay lip service to offering growth, but it's hard to actually do. In many cases, companies shouldn't be trying to offer that with a straight face. In growth stage startups, growth as an engineer is bound to the combination of the growth of the company and the growth of the product. In most cases, if you want to hire any kinds of the best employees, you need to offer growth. But, your business model, company growth and stage of company and culture all have to offer that. That's the hard part. It's something that needs to come from the executive level as well as good timing and a ton of foundational work. If you can offer growth, that's great. It will make it easy to hire the best. But, most companies are not in the position, and the ones that are certainly don't need this advice. So, this isn't really useful. Offering growth is not something you can turn on and off. You need to build a great company and build a great product that people want and which a great business can or is built around. If you can do that, expanding the engineering team becomes a matter of logistics instead of intractables. I think TripleByte is a great idea, and it's at an interesting point right now. But to use your data to answer this question requires looking at things longitudinally, and that could be hard unless TripleByte becomes more of a career management platform as well as a two sided hiring marketplace. Having used Hired, Angellist and TripleByte before on both sides, I'm definitely really curious about seeing where things evolve.
• antoinevg 7y ago
  Fuck that, I've been doing this for 25 years and what I want in order of importance is: 1) Pay me 2) Autonomy
  • dillonmckay 7y ago
    I am willing to forgo #2 if #1 is high enough.
    • tracker1 7y ago
      I'm willing to forgo growth if the money is high enough... but I'll be more strict on my time at the office, allowing me time to do things outside of work.
    • meowface 7y ago
      I'm the opposite. If my living and food expenses are covered, I'll prefer full autonomy over no or minimal autonomy. You can only spend so many years doing things you're asked to do which you don't really want to do before the value added by the extra money is outweighed by the value lost from life in general becoming more depressing and less inspiring.
      • OJFord 7y ago
        > If my living and food expenses are covered, I'll prefer full autonomy over no or minimal autonomy. Where are you living and what will you eat?
      • thedufer 7y ago
        You can turn extra money pretty directly into time with actual autonomy (i.e. not working) pretty easily, though.
        • meowface 7y ago
          That's true, but it depends on the income rate, I guess. If I need to work a soul-sucking job for 15 years to be able to spend the rest of my life with mostly full autonomy, I think that trade-off isn't worth it. If it were working a soul-sucking job for 1 or 2 years to get enough to be autonomous for life, then it's probably worth it.
• jodrellblank 7y ago
  Engineers Want To Learn, Even If They’re Very Senior But /what/ do they want to learn? Something about this bit is rubbing me the wrong way: > "In 2002, a very good COBOL or Fortran engineer was probably in a good place as far as their job search was concerned, but today they're unlikely to get much attention from companies that have moved on to more modern languages. Had that engineer focused on growth to keep up with changes in the industry, they might have learned Python or JavaScript and been able to keep up with the market." Is .. reinventing the wheel, or learning the same thing in a new language, really the same as "growth"? Is it even "learning" in any way more than "memorization"? Since when is "keeping up with the Joneses" the same as "(personal) growth"? Had that engineer focused on growth and learning, perhaps they'd now be a High Performance Computing specialist in Fortran, or a business analyst with an MBA overseeing a COBOL team's migration, or a founder of a COBOL codebase analysis tool company, or a bi-lingual contractor traveling to help foreign companies move away from COBOL, or .. anything, growing and changing instead of writing a database report in COBOL then in Java then C# then in JavaScript.
• joker3 7y ago
  "opportunity for growth" is ambiguous. TripleByte should really be asking about more specific things like "skill development" or "opportunities for promotion". I expect that you'd see some pretty different patterns with those.
• pixelrevision 7y ago
  Anecdotal but "opportunity for professional growth" seems like the best answer to a recruiter trying to sell you. Flexible work arrangements on a high quality code base is what everyone I know wants to do....
• iteriteratedone 7y ago
  I offer an alternative perspective. After a few years you become skilled to the point where you are not learning on the job. Also you start to dive into tech that is outside your job. At this point the job is not there for growth. Its not needed for growth. Like a chef, you are there to make good dishes known by the patrons. Not change the menu every week. Well seasoned engineers want stability and professionalism. They want consistent processes that cteate stable systems. Learning new tech for learnings sake is not growth. Its a headache.
• opportune 7y ago
  I have seen employers grossly misunderstand "professional growth" to mean paying for tons of random seminars telling you the basics of being a professional like taking care of your appearance, carrying yourself, setting goals, etc. I don't think they understood that growth == promotions and income advancement. I would have much rather taken home an extra $5k, or get a promotion two months earlier, than waste time sitting through self help seminars
  • john_moscow 7y ago
    Because the cost per employee of a useless self help seminar would be way below $5K and the HR might even get a kickback.
    • opportune 7y ago
      I don’t think so because they also paid for hotels, airfare, food etc for multiple days. But yeah probably a kickback involved
• georgeburdell 7y ago
  In my opinion this line of thinking may be good for the employee but bad for the company and its users. I bet a large chunk of the “Google Graveyard” is comprised of projects designed to get a few people a promotion or keep them around. And we’re worse off for it. My takeaway is that companies need to start focusing on matching jobs to skill level instead of always competing for the best
  • opportune 7y ago
    I have seen the opposite issue too, which is where if someone has sat in a chair in the company for X number of years and isn't terrible at their job, they are almost guaranteed advancement. And usually this is a bad recipe for stagnation and you end up with bad middle management (the Loser-Clueleess-Sociopath hierarchy comes to mind). Whereas if you force people to execute a project decently, at least you have the opportunity of those paying off even if most don't; for every 10 failures maybe you get a Google Maps or Google Docs.
• noncoml 7y ago
  Can we stop with this “we hire only the best programmers?” You are probably not the best company so stop trying to hire the best programmers. It’s like the fat, ugly, jobless guy that only dates accomplished super models.
  • wincy 7y ago
    Kim Dotcom wrote this article?
  • opportune 7y ago
    Why would a company ever insult their employees like that?
• diffset 7y ago
  I'm so sick of this Triplebyte spam everywhere
• radcon 7y ago
  In my experience, most managers think "If I can't objectively measure it, it doesn't exist." Therefore, since the benefits of fostering employee growth can't be easily quantified, most managers choose to believe they don't exist. Same goes for things like flexible work schedules, work-from-home days and generous vacation policies.
• deleted 7y ago
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• jv22222 7y ago
  Again, with the demonizing PHP as a staid old language to stick with. So silly, and completely incorrect, as PHP frameworks and the language itself continue to innovate and keep Up and in some cases are cutting edge.
  • IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Don’t worry. Give it a few years. The reason php has such a bad rap is that it was so important for low-skill web-devs, so there’s a lot of bad php out there. In 10 years, React will have the same reputation. Again, not because it’s bad, but because it’s usefulness is so high that all the worst devs will be using it.
  • potta_coffee 7y ago
    I have never cared for PHP but I've been working in Laravel recently and it's comfy. There are definitely worse tools out there.
• glutamate 7y ago
  Apparently no one is motivated by social or environmental impact
  • noodle 7y ago
    I think many people are, but it's not something that can be put first in your decision making process unless you are already successful. If you're financially unstable, paying down student debt, etc., it becomes much harder to justify picking a lower-paying job that is more personally motivating if you have other options on the table.
    • glutamate 7y ago
      I agree with you, but that's ultimately what this survey is about - how you weigh salary against professional growth, autonomy etc.
  • yxhuvud 7y ago
    Isn't that the Product something option?
• ptero 7y ago
  Growth is good, but it means different things to different people. Someone might want more money, another opportunities to attend and present at conferences, third a path to management, fourth a path to "technical expert at large", etc. etc. And mistakes can backfire: offer a management path to a person who wants more technology and he may think "ouch, bureaucracy and PowerPoint ahead". I think a general (and genuine) statement of support for technical leadership, management and whatever other paths a company offers would go further than a generic "support growth" mantra. My 2c.
  • wocram 7y ago
    What does technical expert at large mean to you? I have some idea from my experience, but it seems like it's usually a nebulous role that nobody asked for.
    • eropple 7y ago
      This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will not hire for. My current employer did, and it's a genuinely engaging role for me while also providing broad benefits to the engineering group overall. You're right in that it often de facto devolves to somebody who can sorta do it; my M.O. in my career has been instead to chase those roles, to be wide and deep and to plug as tightly as I can into the actual business hierarchy to understand how to solve high-value problems while exposing the results to the business to validate the time/effort/money expended. My current job is the most fun job I've ever had and I'm excited to be making stuff that people actually want to use, both in terms of our B2C product and the tools I work on for developers internally. I run our infrastructure team, with my focus there being around developer empowerment and developer-managed cloud resources for apps and services, and the necessary downstack education that that implies. But I've also done a lot of the formative work on our new APIs because I'd open-sourced a bunch of stuff in our stack and I've been building a lab so we can figure out what makes some web filters think our device (we sell in-home exercise equipment) is an "IoT device" that needs to be blackholed away from our API. I think you kinda have to run towards the fire, though. If it's high-value and requires pretty broad understanding of a grab bag of topics, I tend to move towards it--and it is always tremendously interesting and a lot of fun.
• pyb 7y ago
  My main motivator, "close collaboration within the team", didn't even make the list. Wonder what were the choices on offer in the survey ?
• john_moscow 7y ago
  If you want growth as a programmer, you need to learn how to see the business model of the company you are applying to and how your work integrates into it. It wouldn't be very wise to expect growth if your job is to keep a legacy system running on the minimum possible budget. Or to maintain a "leave us your email" website where the business is all about sales talking to the prospects and all they need from the devs is to make certain a database entry gets created when a user clicks "submit". You could expect growth if your job is about finding efficient ways to solve a business pain. Or creating a model that makes it easier to understand and navigate domain-specific data. Or anything else where the decisions you make affect how much the paying customers will appreciate the product. Unfortunately, most developers don't want to go into that domain, and so most of the developer jobs focus on pretty much CRUD where "growth" could at best mean learning a new framework that will get obsoleted in a few years anyway.
• tonymet 7y ago
  Not that I fully disagree, but with proper discipline growth can be found in maintenance work. no system is perfect and you can constantly improve, refactor, add coverage, add telemetry, reduce operations etc. It's not only Greenfield or "hip" projects that provide growth. like any endeavor it's up to the artisan to find meaning and challenge in any work
• cbanek 7y ago
  > Second, women engineers prioritize growth to an even greater extent than men, and they place particular secondary emphasis on inclusivity and comfort with their work and environment. Woman in tech here. I agree completely, and I'd almost say that saying you want to grow your career in an inclusive environment is saying "I want to grow in a place that will actually value me and promote me." Been in so many places where talented women are just not promoted, and it can be so demoralizing.
  • frequentnapper 7y ago
    true story: sister was hired at a big company as a tester with degrees in bio and comp sci. The manager had her doing manual testing for a year. She aspired to be a developer. Even offered to automate testing on her own time after work. The manager told her if she has extra time, she should do more manual testing instead. When a dev position opened up on the team, he just hired some coop guy instead for it without even considering her. She quit.
    • Benjammer 7y ago
      Why did she take a job as a tester if she was a CS grad with developer aspirations?
      • fernandopj 7y ago
        Why not? I do contract work for a big, public company, they have dozens of QA testers and every path is available for them (becoming a dev, analyst, manager, ... I've seen all). It's not even just an entry job for CS grads, many become senior testers as well and don't want to move to a dev position.
        • Benjammer 7y ago
          Edit: this was dumb I'm sorry I shouldn't get mad on the internet I apologize
          • 7y ago
• chrissnell 7y ago
  It's a little peculiar how this blog post really pushes the inclusiveness angle despite the numbers showing clearly that it is not a big priority for prospective employees. They even go as far as highlighting that the sampled women want inclusiveness 171% more than the sampled men, which sounds pretty strong, but hides the real story when you look at the _actual numbers_. Only 15% of women ranked inclusion as a top priority, which is telling. It seems pretty apparent to me that most employees (and that includes all genders, races, etc.) don't care nearly as much about inclusiveness as their leadership seems to. After reading this post, it seems to confirm what I've suspected all long: people mostly want money and the potential to make more money in the future.
  • xtracto 7y ago
    It is because it is SEO spam. TripleByte regularly posts these here in HackerNews to promote their hiring platform. People seem to like it nonetheless
    • meowface 7y ago
      It is SEO spam, and TripleByte does seem to use a lot of "growth hacks" or something, because I see their ads on pretty much any platform that I see ads for (like on mobile apps, where I don't have any easy-to-use ad blockers), and they're mentioned on HN at a surprisingly high rate. But (I think?) I've seen people here genuinely recommend them, and I also don't think YC would work with and promote a company they didn't like or trust. Companies' marketing and sales teams can sometimes have a very different vibe and sense of ethics compared to the rest of the company.
      • titanomachy 7y ago
        They do advertise very aggressively, to the point where I think they risk damaging their reputation. But I guess they've done the analysis and decided it's worth it. I went through their process and got lots of practice interviewing. Even though I didn't take any of the offers I got through them I was able to use one to negotiate a much higher salary at the job I did take. Their recruiters and interviewers treated me respectfully and professionally. So I'd recommend it, especially if you're very good and/or smart but not an attractive candidate by conventional standards. If you have 5 years at Microsoft or something then you probably don't need them, since you can interview wherever you want at that point.
• l0b0 7y ago
  Is there a dark side to this? A lot of the "not invented here" and chasing the latest tech could be caused by workplaces not realizing that there are less breaking ways to learn new things. Agile is great at this, by encouraging self-review at all levels. Then there's getting from sufficient to masterful at all sorts of general skills such as testing, version control, refactoring, requirements gathering, presenting etc. But to advance quickly in any of these you need mentors rather than self-study, because it's easier to learn directly from someone who has done it before and who can show you examples in the work context you already know.
• WomanCanCode 7y ago
  There's no such thing as growth in the technology field. Most of the organizations just want a specific and narrow expertise in a particular technology. If you think your 7+ years of experience in certain technology is something then you are wrong. There'll be an 18 year old who has been programing in that technology since he was 12. You'll eventually get pushed over. Employers don't want a well-rounded person. They just want someone who know enough to do maintenance and their current products.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    Your downvoted but there is some truth in this.
    • WomanCanCode 7y ago
      I've been in the technology field for 20 years. I'm also a female coder. I was a Java Expert. Then start again with entry level with other technology. Then start again with entry level web development in my third job. Whenever you start again with a different technology stacks you become an entry level. You cannot really climb higher or grow in this profession. And that's the inherent problem with information technology. It's changing to fast.
      • quickthrower2 7y ago
        I think you can climb higher and grow, but not necessarily in ways most technologists would enjoy. For me I see the growth opportunities as 1. Become a team leader, then manager, CTO, .. etc. 2. Become an "architect". I.e. move away from coding and design systems, choose technologies and suchlike. 3. Very rare: Become a very senior individual contributer with lots of freedom. I can see why side hussles are popular as a way for developers to express creativity and try to make some money a completely different way. > Whenever you start again with a different technology stacks you become an entry level. Totally. I can't (generally, there might be exceptions) get a full time non C# job without taking a paycut that would put me on the streets. Confounded with the fact that because of this people are going to lie about experience to change jobs to another tech stack, which I wont do, so I'm competing against those people too. I too am (almost) 20 years in. Male (but I think these problems apply to everyone).
• swalsh 7y ago
  My wife is a traditional "professional". When she has a 1:1 with her boss, her boss gives her advice on how to move up. They talk about what she needs to do for a promotion etc. I've never personally experienced that. If I talk about growth, my bosses always think i'm talking about what new kinds of technologies I want to work with. I've been writing code professionally for nearly 14 years, it's still interesting, but I've increasingly become less interested in the technical aspects. I've worked with my current boss at 3 different companies. He's always took care of me, and he trusts me to write code, but the one time I talked about moving my career along to the next step to something beyond what I am today he was ready to let me go. His exact words were "I'd be happy to provide a reference for you". It became clear that he had no interest in helping me grow unless growth meant learning a new technology. I've just avoided the topic since then.
  • empath75 7y ago
    Why did you not get another job?
  • pier25 7y ago
    What would be the next step? Being a manager?
  • d0100 7y ago
    May because your boss sees you as an asset? As 'his' asset. And once you decide to grow out of that role, he'll slap you right back to 'where you belong'. I'm being a bit uncharitable with my perception of your story, but it shouldn't be a stretch to believe that given how tech workers are generally perceived by 'business type folks'. As I see it, his response shows his complete disregard and lack of respect for you as anything other than 'his IT guy'. I'm way too proud to continue working with someone that thinks of me that way.
• notyourday 7y ago
  I love these kind of surveys. They just demonstrate time and time again how gullible people are, especially those that hire companies like TB to help with hiring. Want to hire best programmers? Pay. Them. More. Money. "I want to grow" is a polite way of saying "I want my compensation to grow". P.S. Do you know why people bend over backwards at interviews for Google/Netflix/Facebook and do not for a Domino's? It is because if they do well on interview at FAANG they would be making mid to high six figures while they would be making sixties as managers at Domino
• _def 7y ago
  Isn't this conclusion only natural? It baffles me that so many people responsible for companies don't understand basic human needs and instead blindly follow trends. I just don't get business stuff.
• draw_down 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but growth does get old. At a certain point you just want to do your job and be good at it, or at least for some of us that ends up being the case eventually.
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  The vast majority of programming jobs, like the vast majority of ordinary jobs, are not going to be able to offer growth potential, at least, not growth potential that would actually look appealing to anyone posting here. If the only incentive on the company's part is increased retention, that's just not a good-enough reason to spend time on more than lip service. My company is a weirdly-effective consulting firm with a staff-augmentation business model. I chalk their success up to two factors. One, there's no middle management, only team leads reporting to a cadre of developer-owners. Second, they've been really good at landing the right kind of clients. It's rather funny watching them try to figure out how to engage their workforce, but with a staff-aug model, devs feel more like employees of the client rather than of the consultant. So everyone's just kind of meh. It feels a little The Office-ish. The other consequence is that there is practically zero real growth potential, and no incentive to do anything other than keep butts in chairs. Nobody's going to let me jump from the consultant to the client, the only path up is out. I hope this business model dies. It feels distinctly evil.
  • robohoe 7y ago
    That sounds like something like Accenture, InfoSys, etc. I too hope this business model dies but I don't see it dying for a long time. As long as business school MBA types keep making decisions and hiring those companies, they will keep hiring butts in the chair.
• mxd3 7y ago
  Off topic: this company’s advertising on Reddit is beyond annoying. Has anyone else experienced this?
• Circuits 7y ago
  First of all I don't like how aloofly this article uses the term Engineer. Perhaps, as a community, we should be more careful when using the term Engineer as in most countries there is a distinct difference between programmer/developer and a professional, licensed Engineer. In any case, I have to ask myself how seriously one can take the answers given by their candidates. For instance, one of the top answers was opportunity for professional growth. So I tried imagining that I was in the position of a candidate who was answering the questions in their survey. I simply couldn't imagine a myself selecting: flexible work arrangements or high employee retention over something like opportunity for professional growth for a couple of reasons. The first being the one they addressed in the article: what exactly does that mean? However; the second reason is rather simple. If I was under the impression (even vaguely) that there was a chance that my potential employer would see the answers to my survey then that would highly influence my answers. So perhaps the 99'th percentile is just more confident and therefore more honest? In truth, I too: "...want comfortable and meaningful work..." with "...the ability to choose..." my "...work environment and timing." and if an employer could offer me those things I would take the job in a heartbeat.
• git-pull 7y ago
  Don't give coding quizzes if they can provide better evidence of their ability. It's unfair in the least, rude at the worst to pigeon-hole "senior" programmers into scenarios / pop quizzes. Let them show off recent personal projects. They'll probably have no problem spending a weekend hacking on something they're passionate about. Be a serious employer: Convince the best programmers (whatever that means) why they should reorganize their life around your business: - Pension plans / job security are nice. It's a good motivator to know that there will be an annuity when they're 60 / 65 and would rather spend time with their family. - Union contract (or something comparable) or a labor system with robust employee rights and unemployment insurance. It's pretty unfair in the US with at-will employment. - Have strong financials. Be a business that'll be around in 10 years. Can your business keep paying employees if it's in the red for a year? If you don't offer the above: Why feel deserving of the best? I'm being facetious on the above points: It's tech, it's a fast cycle and inherently unstable. But when orgs talk about hiring - it irks me to see the entitlement employers have when they have little investment in the welfare of employees as persons (and families)
  • davidw 7y ago
    None of these things are perfect - I agree with you about quizzes and the like. > Let them show off recent personal projects. They'll probably have no problem spending a weekend hacking on something they're passionate about. Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life.
    • knd775 7y ago
      As long as it's not a requirement or expected, I think it's fine. If someone has side projects they're proud of, I think it would be helpful to both parties for them to be brought up.
      • davidw 7y ago
        Oh, sure; side projects that people have worked on for fun over the years are a good thing to have and should be a potential avenue to show off one's abilities.
• thow_leet 7y ago
  I don’t think hiring managers really want to hire the best programmers. They want people they feel comfortable managing, someone who isn’t going to be challenging them. There is no risk in leaving roles open, in fact it contributes to their job security as long as there is VC money to burn. That is why the coding challenges are so popular, it communicates “here, do what I say.”
  • ritchiea 7y ago
    I have been freelance for years, recently I did some interviews for full time positions and I can't agree with you more. Companies that need freelancers are primarily concerned with can you do the job, there's a deadline, there's a contract, there's some urgency. Most companies I have interviewed with for full time roles advertise that they are a hiring for several roles but often are just hoping that someone who speaks at a lot of conferences or is a ex-FANG higher up will apply (I've heard this from friends on the inside). I have been very open about what my experience is and what I'm looking for. Somehow every full time job interview feels like getting picked apart to pieces while most freelance interviews feel like someone genuinely trying to assess if you can be useful to them.
    • thow_leet 7y ago
      You and me both. I just went through the Triplebyte process after my last contract wrapped up. Passed their exam and interview and went on-site at multiple companies. In the end it was a total waste of time and very stressful. I would go so far as to say that if you have been successful with startups and equity that it would be a net negative for you because the 5 peers you will be interviewing with will feel threatened as well. Rinky-dink organizations really don’t want very good people, they want people they feel comfortable with. Luckily I have a network which allows me to bypass all this.
  • president 7y ago
    Yes, I've encountered managers like this before. They value loyalty and obedience over skills. They don't hire "smart" people because then these "smart" hires would point out how ignorant they actually are and make them look bad. Or worse, they would become direct competitors and possibly take their job. These managers are abundant especially in large old enterprise companies where accountability and oversight is non-existent.
• pawelduda 7y ago
  And here I am, 1 day after a presentation in front of the entire company, about pretty much the same topic. Had I known about this article earlier, the execution would have been so much different (the presentation was terribad but whatever, I had good intentions). And the response would have been much better too (it's still very good, but I don't know whether that's good enough to push other people forward). Regardless, thank you for posting this. The article and most of the comments in here echo my thoughts.
• ticmasta 7y ago
  So in a candidate response-based survey 54% picked the more palatable "Growth Opportunities" item but 42% also selected the far less attractive motivator of "More money". Accounting for the "perceived gallantry" of these motivators I'd call that a statistical wash, but the article title "Want to hire the best programmers? Pay them the highest salaries." doesn't support the "best engineers / best companies" narrative very well.
• dymk 7y ago
  Interesting that Salary is the second most important. I think there might be an explanation for this. I've always interpreted "Personal Growth" as basically meaning "I'll have a higher salary in the future". So perhaps "Salary" is still the main motivator.
• c-smile 7y ago
  Management is an art of creating motivations to your subordinates. An art, sic! Each of us is different. Of course we can draw charts outlining average patients temperature in a hospital... with the same informational value. I wish all of us to experience joy from what we are doing. Let it be in the number of happy members of your team, beauty of your code, amount of salary you bring to your family … It can really be anything. Just keep your mind out of Procrustean bed of common stereotypes.
• dobleo 7y ago
  Is it just me, or did they twist the data in order to put "inclusive workplace" at the first place in the rating? Even the adjusted table shows that only 15% of women care enough about inclusivity at work, but the summary puts a lot of emphasis on how women prioritize it...
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Growth = new skills New skills = more money More money = better life
• keithnz 7y ago
  seems an odd title to the article given the analysis of "great" and "best" engineers where they highlight other factors as being more important?
• sombremesa 7y ago
  Want to hire the best programmers? Good luck. Same as "want to pick the best stocks", "want to win the lottery", "want to marry the best person", "want to get the best price", ...
  • doh 7y ago
    We rather look for nice, pleasant people. When I get excited to be around them, I do better job. I believe it works for others too.
• sheeshkebab 7y ago
  When someone offers me “Growth” at work, it makes me cringe. We’re all grown ups here - offer me either mission/things I’m passionate about or money. Ideally both. Don’t offer me bull shit.
• LordHumungous 7y ago
  Very interesting that women consistently rate salary as a lower priority and w/l balance as a higher priority than men.
• gronfr1 7y ago
  I like how the authors studiously avoided mentioning the gender tradeoff between wages and work-life balance that's right there in the graphs, staring them in the face. I also like how I'm the first person to mention this in 266 comments. Obviously this is a throwaway account.
• yangez 7y ago
  > We’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above. This is an important qualifier. I'd argue that the most technical candidates are not necessarily the ones who offer the most value to companies. In fact, I would argue that "notably de-emphasizing ambition" will cancel out your technical superiority in the overwhelming majority of cases. Here's a choice for your company's next hire: 1. A technically superior but comfortable candidate whose top priority is maintaining work-life balance and flexible work arrangements 2. A technically adequate but hungry candidate whose top priority is moving fast and learning tons Who would you choose?
  • lugg 7y ago
    1., 2. Sounds like a pain in the arse to manage while I work at maintaining my work-life balance. You're presenting a false dichotomy. There is also 3. Technically superior whose top priority of learning things got them where they are. Maintaining work life balance is just one of the many tools this person has learned over the years to be consistently effective over the long term instead of running into burnout.
  • jcbrand 7y ago
    I'd choose the first and I don't consider "moving fast and learning tons" very compelling. That might just mean that the 2nd person would try to shoehorn projects into new frameworks and discount working solutions for shiny new (and cutting edge) tech. All in the name of "moving fast and learning tons".
• itronitron 7y ago
  The article title conflicts with the conclusion of their analysis. The best engineers notably de-emphasize ambition. is one of their conclusions based on their 'best' category indicating a higher priority on work/life balance than the 'great' and 'all' categories. They say their data shows that all engineers care about growth, so the title would be more accurate written as 'Want to hire programmers? Offer growth'. It would be nice if they included information on the source data, in order to go through their system it is my understanding that candidates need to be willing to work where they have clients, and that is going to bias their sample considerably.
• eddd 7y ago
  Do they want to "grow" or just want to deploy shiny projects that showed on HN last week?
• julius_set 7y ago
  This article defines great and the best engineers by: “For the purposes of this article, we’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above.” A test that they’ve come up with internally. What makes this company an authority on determining great and best engineers purely on data structures and algorithms style interview questions that most likely a recent grad will be efficient with (for software engineers anyways*). This article is standing on a house of cards. It’s first principles lack and the assumptions it makes on top of those first principle is highly questionable. J
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