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Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix
- draw_down 6y agoAnd frogs don't really sit in boiling water. These are called figures of speech for a reason, being literal about them is not admirable nor worthwhile.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI still see it as an important distinction simply because developers also have an interest in not getting hit by a bus. But they are quite happy to leave for Netflix and given turnover rates in tech, are almost guaranteed to leave in a few years.
- tom-thistime 6y agoIt would be an important distinction, except that "hit by a bus" always primarily meant being hired away. (For me "always" means "since the mid 1990s".)
- MattGaiser 6y agoFair, but an organization should still be able to survive a literal bus hit too.
- paulgb 6y ago> never underestimate the amount of money the FAANGs have to poach your talent. I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.
- dqpb 6y agoAnother way of saying it: > Never underestimate how much better a person's life can be by working for a FAANG instead of working for you Edit: For those who are downvoting, I'm simply saying this is what's implied by the quote. I'm not making a statement about FAANGs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nitrogen 6y agoI don't think that is actually implied. A better life is very subjective.
- jariel 6y agoEmployees are absolutely allowed to define for themselves what 'makes a better life' for them, and their choice to move would almost assuredly be an indication of that, hence the implication by moving there. Edit: I should add, it's probably mostly about the money. I mean, nice office, all the perks, all enabled by money. And for most people a very material raise in pay makes a difference
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago> Never underestimate how much better a person's life can be by working for an AANG instead of working for you FTFY.
- dqpb 6y agoI happily don't work at a FAANG. The original quote was about their ability to poach employees. What does it mean to poach an employee? It means to convince the employee to make the major life decision to work for them instead. Why do people choose to make such a major life decision? Usually it's because they think it will make their life better. Why do they think it will make their life better? Because the FAANG offers >= 70,000usd to switch jobs, pays for them to relocate and sell their existing home, offers fully paid health insurance for their entire family, offers hundreds of thousands in stock options, and an unbeatable salary. This is how they convince engineers to work on the world's most effective attention machines. By making their life better in all these ways and more. If you fail to understand that, if you fail to engage in any kind deep or abstract thought that isn't summarized by a four letter meme, then you're doing exactly what this article warns you not to do - you're underestimating FAANGs.
- perlgeek 6y agoThe "hit by a bus" thing is used for the most dramatic effect: there's nothing you can do, there's no grace period where a "poached" developer can give some wisdom to his/her successor etc. Managers know that it's not the most likely case, but it's still possible.
- roland35 6y agoYeah I think "hit by a bus" generally means there is 0 chance of knowledge transfer and is more a disaster recovery term than a talent retention term. Unless you really burn a bridge with your workers they should have at least a week or 2 to transfer knowledge!
- gwd 6y agoI'm picking up from a senior colleague who wasn't hit by a bus, but did die suddenly out of the blue, with absolutely zero warning. Reconstructing everything that he was doing, and why things are the way they are, has been an interesting challenge to say the least.
- treeman79 6y agoOpposite opinion. You should never need more then a day to knowledge transfer. If that. I always try and cross train people enough that I can quit at any point and it’s not an issue. All processes are kept automatic where no one is crucial to keep it running. Mostly it’s useful for vacations. In the past I went on a cruise. And I wasn’t sure the company will be online without me to baby them through. After that I got extremely serious about investing in the team and tools to never let that happen again.
- nitrogen 6y agoI agree with making things automatic. But sometimes you have to let team members specialize. It's less efficient for everyone to know everything. But, it is good if everything is known, at least in part, by at least two people.
- arez 6y agois this a RoR ad? It doesn't really provide any new insights. If your devs are hired by nflx or hit by a bus the outcome is the same. It's just a saying
- imdsm 6y agoI also thought that. Great title, and then a lacking blog post.
- saagarjha 6y agoYeah, it was kind of jarring to go from "your developers might get hit by a bus" to "Ruby on Rails solves all your problems!"
- nwsm 6y agoYes it is. From the homepage [0]: "Dedicated to the stewardship of Ruby on Rails applications." I guarantee no one needed the author to explain that "hit by a bus" applies to more than tragic accidents. [0] https://www.neomindlabs.com/ https://www.neomindlabs.com/
- gremlinsinc 6y agoI wouldn't hire them cause their ui/ux sucks. I'm fullstack, and not a design expert but I can do better than that easy. The dropdowns at the bottom of the page are the worst.
- marcinzm 6y agoThere's several reasons a bus is seen as worse than them being poached: * Early startup employees have golden handcuffs regarding switching jobs. Sure, Facebook is offering them $500k but they'd be on the hook for $200k in taxes if they exercise their options and they leave a bunch more un-vested options on the table. * You can mitigate them leaving by having a better work environment, equity and so on. Not much you can do about a bus. * You can pay them to stay on for another month or to consult after the fact. No amount of money get's you an hour long phone call to the afterlife. edit: Also, the article underestimates the effort needed to get a FAANG job. They don't just call you up and offer you a job. They offer you the chance to take a grueling set of white board interviews that require months of studying to pass.
- JonLim 6y agoAs a counter point: the golden handcuffs for startups/companies aren't guaranteed to pay off, so the employee may decide that the options are still worth $0 and not bother with incurring taxes by exercising. I'm probably okay with losing out on a sale event with a startup I've left, especially if my stake is <1%, if the big tech company pays as well as it's reported. YMMV.
- redisman 6y agoOptions for most startups are mostly way overrated. The opportunity cost to hang around for 5-10 years to maybe get to a liquidation event is very high.
- acapybara 6y agoSeems like a thing where if a FAANG wanted the early startup employee enough, they would gladly compensate for the one-time cost with a signing bonus.
- shrimpx 6y agoI think an important part of the "golden handcuffs" is the employee's sense of deep expertise and importance at their current company, especially if they were a very early hire. Coupled with a bit of impostor syndrome, this can create a huge gravitational well where the employee sticks around even in a bad situation. They are afraid that by switching they will take a huge "demotion" in terms of their overall importance and the weight of their decisions in a new team/company.
- roland35 6y agoFAANG companies can certainly offer more money, but there are lots of things other companies can offer too (besides Ruby on Rails apparently). - ownership of the product and process - less red tape and politics - good work life balance - location other than Silicon Valley - boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants Money is a huge factor but it isn't the only one!
- thelean12 6y agoI feel like people try to tell themselves this, but money is BY FAR the most important factor. And FAANGs pay a ton. Maybe this can be true if you're going from like $250k to $270k from FAANG to FAANG. But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG. It would take a huge amount of perks or otherwise to make that gap worth it. (Of course this isn't true for everyone. But it's true for most)
- hinkley 6y agoI know a guy who passed on Apple because they weren't offering anywhere near that. Are a lot of people really seeing this kind of money?
- faangFar 6y agoApple is known to live off Marketing. Wouldn't surprise me if they had low wages in favor of koolaid drinkers (for lack of a better term)
- khalilravanna 6y agoYes: https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
- hinkley 6y agoSee, I always have trouble with 'stock'. I need more details. Is it a stock grant, or an option grant? Because with a publicly traded company, they'll let anyone buy options. The difference is that I don't have to wait 2 years, but I also don't get to wait three years if things aren't great at 2.
- at_a_remove 6y agoWhen working on a project, I would title my documentation something like "Bus Document," aiming for a soup-to-nuts file describing how the project came to be all the way out with appendices describing each file format, etc. I spent a lot of time talking about the Bus Factor, to little avail. A pity.
- heyoo 6y agoAre $500k+ yearly salaries in SV really that usual?
- RhodesianHunter 6y agoIf you factor in stock grants and the crazy run-up in their valuations over the last decade(s), yes. This may or may not continue.
- influx 6y agoFor senior engineers, yes. I've found that https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is pretty accurate.
- esrauch 6y agoLevels.fyi seems to indicate senior total comp as more like 300k in Bay Area for FAANG.
- pb7 6y agoGoogle is ~$350K, Facebook is ~$375K, Amazon is ~$315K (and not known to pay well outside of equity appreciation), Apple is ~$320K for ICT4 which doesn't map well to Senior at the others, probably a bit low. Netflix is severely north of $300K but hard to say because there's just one title -- average at $450K.
- esrauch 6y agoRight: the grandparent was about north of $500k though which apparently seniors don't make, only higher levels. I'm surprised I was downvoted there?
- pb7 6y agoI guess "senior engineers" can be up to interpretation. Colloquially, I take it as someone with mid-career experience. For most of the FAANGs, "senior" can be reached in as little as 3 years out of college, with a median somewhere around 4-5. For a 30+ year career, one can safely assume your compensation will continue going up from your "senior" title 5 years in. To summarize: yeah, I suppose $500K 4-5 years out of school isn't achievable, but within 10 it is.
- joncrane 6y agoI always call it the "lottery problem" instead of the "bus problem" because it's more positive. Also for some people, getting hired at a FAANG is like winning the lottery so it jives with OP's article.
- hobofan 6y agoThe problem with either of those is that the chances of either of those things happening are incredibly low, so the urgency to act on it isn't there. If someone would tell you that you have to prepare to the one in a few million chance of winning in the lottery, you would likely also ignore it. An employee getting hired by another company (doesn't need to be FAANG) is on the contrary a rather common occurrence, and a lot of people understand the importance of preparing for that.
- neomindryan 6y agoI love this, thank you
- BrentOzar 6y agoInstead of "hit by a bus," I prefer the term "win the lotto." Any member of your team could win a life-changing amount of money in the lottery, inherit it, win a gambling bet, etc. Frame it as a good thing rather than a death or a change of hire - somebody might just flat out retire because they don't financially need your employment anymore.
- dgritsko 6y agoI'm a fan of "hit by the lottery bus" myself.
- dang 6y agoThat poor person would then need rocket surgery.
- nkrisc 6y agoSure, but even someone retiring after winning the lottery might deign to write a few things down for you. The point of the bus scenario is that there is not even the possibility to ask them a question you might get an answer to. I don't really see why framing it as a positive thing or negative thing matters, no one is actually getting hit by a bus, it's just a hypothetical scenario.
- BrentOzar 6y ago> Sure, but even someone retiring after winning the lottery might deign to write a few things down for you. Might, or they might not. Just as if someone were hit by a bus, they might be able to communicate from their hospital bed...or they might not. Hope is not a strategy.
- nkrisc 6y ago> Hope is not a strategy. Well yeah, that's why the whole scenario in the first place is that they're hit by a bus and instantly killed. Maybe it should be rephrased as "blown to a million pieces" then there's no question you're discussing a situation in when there's an immediate and irreversible loss of knowledge.
- pavlov 6y agoThe author makes it sound like Rails is the recommended way to build software that is maintained by a revolving door of junior developers whom you don't have to motivate or compensate, because you can just hire another cog-in-the-machine when the old ones inevitably wise up to your game. Not sure if that was the intended message.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoyeah, kind of read it that way, or as an ad for their rails churn 'shop'. More than anything seems like an ad for rails developers, nothing else. as a fullstack guy who's worked w/ rails, laravel, etc... and who's done my share of frontend stuff, I'd say focusing on the frontend might be a bigger sell, cause that shit is VERY opinionated lately. Vue vs React vs Vanilla vs Alpinejs. Do you use bootstrap or tailwinds? Backend code is rudimentary but nailing the ui stuff and also cross platform if needing mobile or w/e is much harder personally.
- biztos 6y agoAlso, it might not even work! What happens when one of your fungible junior engineers happens to be smart enough to do some tricky things even with Rails? And then she gets hired by Netflix to do something more career-enhancing than copy-pasting Ruby code from StackOverflow. Now you're stuck with your revolving door of undercompensated junior developers and a complicated Rails application. Uh-oh!
- neomindryan 6y agoThanks for this perspective. I believe it takes developers at all levels to maintain a piece of software. A developer of 10 years experience may not get professional fulfillment out of form validation changes, but a bootcamp grad shouldn't run the SOC2 audit.
- sushid 6y agoI'm pretty sure that's the intended message and the thread is simply hijacking the thesis to talk about developer compensation as usual.
- rl1987 6y agoRealistically speaking, isn't getting hired by Netflix et. al. a practical impossibility for 99+ % of software developers?
- staycoolboy 6y agoYes, it is. And the high salaries at netflix are for top performers, not someone who did a full stack, once. Like you said, 99% of software developers are NOT the top 1%. ;-) EDIT: I removed some snark after reading Zenbit_UX's reply.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoIn response to your assertion that 99% of devs think they are in the top 1%, I'm not sure if that's true... Here's my case: Devs who work in a team with others are constantly exposed to the skills, cleverness and ingenuity of their colleagues. Most interns and juniors look at sys architects and senior devs with awe, not down on them. Obviously we're all exposed to incompetent dev's at similar rates, but I feel like when you become the best dev in a company most realize they're unlikely to learn much more and should consider moving on, if not out of à desired to learn more, than likely out of frustration. The wildcards are the "1 man shows", a dev in a department of 1. These people are often either incredibly brilliant and don't need any help or so stunted in their development and inflated I'm ego that they genuinely do believe they're the 1%. As a 1 man show dev myself, I often have to remind myself I have no baseline reference for how good I am - despite my talents being sufficient for my employer to not need to hire others. To combat this, I just have to read HN and get a frame of reference for what others in the industry are accomplishing. It's quite humbling.
- staycoolboy 6y agoGood point, I edited my post. Thanks.
- iso947 6y agoSo 1% chance of it happening. Far more than being hit by a bus.
- game_the0ry 6y agoI agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market. Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. Example - when you new grad starts in i-banking, they're in training for 4-6 weeks. Not doing anything productive, just training to do the job. Not the case in engineering, you are assigned user stories day one and your training is doing the work. So new i-banks are highly paid (so they don't leave because talent is perceived to be scarce and valuable) and they're companies invest in them (through training early on). Right now, corporate managers are vomiting in their mouth when the have to look at how much they need to pay to keep their engineers from leaving. It's because of the perception of engineers - they're seen as semi-skilled labor (cost center, not strategic to the business) and are easily replaceable (no, they're not). Culturally, they have been conditioned to think this way, so no wonder turn over is so high every where.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoOnly failing companies in 2020 view their engineers as easily replaceable. That said, there are a lot of failing companies these days thanks to cheap and readily available debt.
- outworlder 6y ago> Only failing companies in 2020 view their engineers as easily replaceable. Indeed. You should engineer your systems as if everyone is replaceable (including yourself) but treat your employees as if they aren't (even though they are, just not _easily_).
- Element_ 6y agoThat's simply not true. There are lots of companies in highly regulated industries that remain profitable and have low regard for engineers.
- 6y ago
- Kalium 6y agoSometimes it does happen. I once interviewed with a company that was hiring because one of their engineers had died in a motorcycle accident. Personally, I think trying to reframe it as happy and positive and coming with a grace period is a little frivolous. Your team should be prepared to transition someone's responsibilities in the context of a sudden, wrenching, and traumatic change.
- darth_avocado 6y agoAnd here I am, can't even get a recruiter from Netflix to reply, after submitting my resume on a job that I was match for 10/10 requirements on the description AND got someone to refer me.
- rmellow 6y agoDon't put yourself down, hiring is broken. Very few recruiters actually understand the requirements that are in demand for a given position, and many will discard you for irrelevant reasons: e.g. they dislike your CV formatting, or you have extra unrelated experience in the CV (thus you're not specialized). It's mostly a numbers game, so keep putting in the time - but not mindlessly: keep optimizing your CV/presentation/skills and it will eventually happen.
- dadoge 6y agoWhen was this? Companies now are slowing hiring down a whole bunch
- darth_avocado 6y agoPretty much last 5 years of my career
- nwsm 6y agoA good idiom doesn't need over-explanation, and I think the "bus factor" is a good idiom; no Rails or Netflix commentary required.
- ryathal 6y agoI think "poach factor" is a more important idiom/risk, naming particular boogeymen isn't all that relevant. It's far more common, and far costlier. As someone who has literally experienced the bus (well car) factor, after the blow of the initial loss, there is some sense of we have to find a way to manage that takes over.
- crazygringo 6y ago> you want more than one person in your business to have domain knowledge > Everything gets a lot easier if you select the right software and framework Huh? Domain knowledge doesn't refer to your tech stack or coding practices. It refers to why you've built things the way you've built them -- customer requirements, business requirements, technical requirements. Ruby on Rails may improve onboarding time, but it has zero to do with domain knowledge.
- giantg2 6y agoI guess I'll be the one to say it. No, I am much more likely to be hit by a bus than hired by any high-caliber tech company. I'd say stroke or heart attack top the list for me - probably will happen before 40 too.
- tom-thistime 6y ago"Hit by a bus" means hired away. That's the meaning of the phrase.
- fernandokokocha 6y agoThat might be an unusual situation but actually happened to me. I used to be in a team of two, going to work after one weekend - he's dead.
- rl3 6y agoBeing on the receiving end of poaching is simply a failure to compete in arenas beyond compensation. Not only must you compensate your talent at the top of the market and then some (including generous equity), but you must give your employees an amazing work environment with excellent work/life balance, while providing something for them to work on that motivates them on an ideological level. When any part of this aegis cracks, poaching has the potential to ravage your ranks. I would say that in the case of especially valuable or world-class talent, it's the founder's responsibility to know as much as they can about that person, and to truly pitch them on a level that fully aligns across all dimensions of that person's life. Give them not only excellent comp, but fulfillment and purpose that is congruent or even symbiotic with their personal lives and overall ambitions. Deep down, most people aren't pawns that you can simply acquire with a number and expect the highest quality work from.
- yourapostasy 6y ago> Deep down, most people aren't pawns that you can simply acquire with a number and expect the highest quality work from. In practice, it is extremely rare to find managers who effectively practice this. When you do, it's pretty amazing to watch in action. I've only seen one such manager out of hundreds I've encountered consulting. That manager's team members won't leave the team for even 2X pay increases, because they figure the additional anticipated stress and job insecurity is not worth it. The amount of trust between that manager and the individual team members is higher than I've ever seen elsewhere, and that manager redefined for me what was possible with people skills superpowers. RDF doesn't even begin to describe it, and this field was accomplished without Jobs' infamous tantrums.
- rl3 6y agoThanks for that, it's encouraging to hear. While I've no experience in the corporate world proper, as a solo founder 7 years into the same project I've a similar game plan with respect to talent, and just hope one day to have the privilege of giving it a go. Further (albeit slightly outdated) context in the link below.[0] My scenario is more to do with how to put together a dream team, and convince people to join that team. With world-class talent, you have to consider that some of the people you want to hire are already quite wealthy and/or famous. Therefore, if you want any hope of landing let alone retaining them, you have to dig deep and discover what motivates them, and understand what aligns with their existing pursuits and goals. If I ever do get the chance to hire any of these people, I'm not that worried about the sell. I've probably had countless imaginary conversations with each of them over the past few years. To even have the opportunity to talk to any of these people would be an honor, so the notion of somehow mistreating them, or failing to both compensate and appreciate them to the maximum extent possible just doesn't compute. That extends to the non-wealthy, non-legendary hires as well; if anything it's a healthy model to approach how you treat all people in your employ. As an aside, one of the biggest problem I face with respect to hiring (minus funding and, you know, actually getting off the ground) is: who to approach first? Dream team assembly dynamics are very delicate from a game theoretical point of view, and I've begun to think this is perhaps the wrong way to approach thinking about the problem. Elizabeth Holmes infamously used the "If I get person X, then getting person Y will be easier." strategy to great effect, but she was a complete fraud. There's a few ideas I have here that aren't fully elucidated, but probably could be thought of as consensus-based offers. Pitch people individually and in a personalized fashion, but with no expectation they accept the offer unless certain conditions are met, such as others on the prospective dream team agreeing to the same understanding, or even making it contingent on funding itself. Assembling a ~50 person team pre-funding certainly is putting the cart before the horse in so many ways, but I think it can be done. The look on the VC's faces would something. "Here is the vision, here is the prototype, here's a team of 50 exceptional people—some of whom are legends—that have agreed to build this thing together, contingent on funding. Just need the money." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22429827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22429827
- catwind7 6y ago> Everything gets a lot easier if you select the right software and framework, primarily if you use Ruby on Rails. Rails itself is a full-stack framework that has a best practice for every piece of a web application. If you are committed to doing things “the Rails way,” you cut the total cost of ownership by A LOT. Rails has an incredibly large community but I think this statement would be equally true for any tool you're well versed in
- gremlinsinc 6y agoHaving worked w/ rails/laravel, I'd say you could say the same thing and it may even be 'more' true about laravel (see: built in queues, authentication, etc), with rails you need devise, and 3rd party packages for a lot of the normal boilerplate. However, lately I'm thinking more about performance so would love to work more with rust or golang, though I find rust harder to grok mentally. Golang is nice though, and easy to follow most code samples.
- catwind7 6y agoI've been meaning to checkout rust/golang for some time now - might pick up a book on it. I've worked primarily with rails the past few years and at times it feels like some of our biggest maintainability issues are the direct result of certain third party packages we reached for to solve boilerplate. Not to knock on using libraries or anything like that, but we've definitely felt the pain of putting tools / convenience ahead of architecture.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoThis reads basically as an ad for "use rails its better than the rest, cause it's what we use, and you need us! So hire us!"
- madrox 6y agoI don't care how you put it, but the fact is that people leave. I led an engineering team I was quite proud of, and days came that I had to let top engineers go. Everyone has growth arcs, and they had opportunities to seize their dream jobs working on things they'd never get to otherwise. I was proud to have felt like a stepping stone on the way to their dreams, even though it screwed the business temporarily. I learned a lot of what this article is trying to say. Calling it a bus sounds like a one in a million disaster to prepare for. Getting hired by Netflix is far more likely but just as impactful. This is written to business leaders, but I feel like if phrased differently would sound familiar and accepted by HN. Namely, don't adopt esoteric technologies no one else knows. Document production process. Never let mission critical operations exist solely in your lead engineer's head. The fact is that it's never a good time for your best people to leave, but that's inevitable on a long enough timeline. It's the duty of business leaders to be prepared for that so they don't have to resort to dirty tactics to convince them to stay.
- neomindryan 6y agoThank you, this is great feedback.
- auganov 6y ago> “Staying on the Rails” makes any new developer productive almost immediately ... Sticking to the standards evangelized by the community and adding proper documentation ... makes onboarding a breeze, which creates more productive developers, which makes hiring more accessible, which reduces your “bus factor.” You could make the reverse argument. Using "industry standard" tools makes your top performers much more likely to get poached. Using unusual (but enjoyable) technologies might increase employee loyalty.
- Tainnor 6y agoThis is such a low-effort blog post: 1. It's click-baity. From the headline you'd think it would be a discussion about why engineers hop jobs so frequently, why in particular FAANGs seem to be so attractive, and what we could do to increase retention. Instead, the post just quickly summarises what we've known for ages (turnover is a big problem), very briefly goes off on a completely irrelevant tangent (that it's more likely for an engineer to change the company than to be hit by a bus, which is true, but pointless) and then tops it off by the insane suggestion that "just use Rails" is the answer to all of your turnover woes (more on that below). 2. There is an interesting discussion here to be had: why exactly do companies suck so badly at retaining talent? My take on it is that we all (companies, developers, etc.) routinely emphasise the wrong things (office perks, showing off tech skills, etc., instead of a good understanding of the product) and burn people out, but as said: this is a much larger discussion. More importantly though I disagree with the received wisdom that "developers are developers" and domain knowledge is worth nothing. Of course, you always should be prepared for the worst (i.e. the proverbial bus), but it should still be the companies' priority to retain good people as long as possible because once somebody leaves, so much knowledge just goes to waste and has to be reacquired. At my last company, my whole team was fired because they thought that some other team would be just as good for the product, ignoring the fact that we'd built up the product ourselves and all the knowledge for two years. But to the higher-ups, the view was that developers are exchangeable. 3. The author just really comes across as immature and uniformed with their unilateral praise of Rails. I've worked on Rails apps so messy that they were almost impossible to understand. And, by now, Rails is by far not the only framework with strong conventions and a lot of out-of-the-box support for many common things - Spring Boot for example (whatever its faults) arguably supports even many more requirements. But more importantly, for any kind of non-trivial app, the complexity is not just in the technology: it's in the (often contradictory) requirements, the different architectural tradeoffs, the little gotchas, the personalities in the team, etc. etc.
- warmcat 6y agoPretty sure the author will also get "poached" if a FAANG offers them 200k more than what they currently make.
- gsich 6y agoWhy is Netflix seen as such a tech giant? They serve videos. CBS, HBO, Vimeo, Youtube, Amazon do it too. Nothing special.
- yieldinglylow 6y agoIn Soviet Russia, if developer go to Netflix, developer get hit with bus.
- ninju 6y agoI use the phrase "win the lottery" rather than "hit by a bus". Has the same impact but it's less negative (though probably less likely :-))
- markmiro 6y agoI've felt companies would want what the post lays out: - A safe software stack - Make code understandable (industry best practices) - Focus on employee ramp up time I was confused when some companies stressed different things, and I didn't quite realize until reading this post that it might be coming from a place of fear of losing engineers. What I've seen: 1) Committees for coding standards 2) Teamwork over code ownership 3) Peer code reviews to enforce quality Sounds like these things would help increase code quality and reduce the bus factor. But I think there are some dangers. 1) Committees can mean that no individual is responsible for bad decisions 2,3) Teamwork is great if people have separate roles. Too many cooks can become a real problem otherwise. I suspect people afraid of responsibility are more likely to embrace committees and teamwork. Dickheads incapable of working with others are more likely to take ownership (or else they'd be completely unemployable). I also suspect many startups cargo cult practices that work well for giants, but are net negatives that encourage your employees to leave if you're small. Lacking ownership but getting paid super well is a better tradeoff than lacking ownership AND lacking amazing pay.
- pronik 6y agoNitpicking, but FWIW that's not the definition of a bus factor I've learned. It's a number of people to be hit by a bus for the project to die. Bus factor of one is a SPOF, so you need to increase your factor, not decrease it.