16 ms·

Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspec

by lrossi 6y ago

Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, deploy and maintain. Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense.

mistrial9 6y ago
professional interview sign seen at the "interview desk" for work placement at an expensive school for digital creatives: "sit up straight; look the interviewer in the eye; wear presentable clothing; answer the questions asked of you" .. I believe the sign was there because that was not occuring in many cases !
- motogpjimbo 6y ago
  My experience from being on both sides of the desk has been that devteams are relatively tolerant of candidates exhibiting personality quirks during the interview process - it's the candidate's skills that are in demand, not their winning personality. Maybe it's different when you interview at a FAANG company though? I imagine FAANG recruitment is a merciless sausage machine.
  - folkhack 6y ago
    > My experience from being on both sides of the desk has been that devteams are relatively tolerant of candidates exhibiting personality quirks during the interview process - it's the candidate's skills that are in demand, not their winning personality. I'm growing further and further away from this mentality in hiring because the sad truth is most of those folks who come in with "quirks" lack maturity. To me, quirks are "yellow flags" in the interview stage because it means that you're not able to put your own weirdness aside to fit socially when you arguably need to the most. Invariably these same "quirks" come up down the road in the employment with output problems, copping attitude with superiors, weirdness in internal/external meetings, and just general antisocial behavior. I get that we're all in hella demand right now but I'm starting to go back on my, "I'm just hiring for the engineering skill/talent" as an excuse to overlook yellow flags. The other thing is contextually, what are the quirks? If the "quirk" is someone being super shy/timid it doesn't even register on my radar as a problem unless it's extreme... I'm talking about the stereotypical "oh so cute dev quirks" like: not dressing appropriately for an interview, interrupting me/talking over me, talking down to me, comparing their last junior position to being Steve Jobs, being sing-songy, inappropriate jokes in any way/shape/form, getting in arguments with themselves... etc etc. I'm at a point that if you can't act 95% professional in your first interview you're done as you're not capable of being "on".
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      > not dressing appropriately for an interview What is "dressing appropriately". I wore a suit to my very first interview for a dev position and very nearly didn't get the job because they were worried I wouldn't fit in (luckily I was able to explain that I don't usually wear a suit). The other ones in your list, sure. But I don't think those are what people typically means when they talk about quirks.
      - folkhack 6y ago
        > I wore a suit to my very first interview for a dev position and very nearly didn't get the job because they were worried I wouldn't fit in Yeah - I hate this. I had people at my last position give candidates negative points because they wore a suit and I went $%&#ing ape. In positions that I've held in the past it's been the appropriate action to wear a suit due to heavily corporate environments, and I see it as 110% normal that someone puts on a nice suit for an interview. The action of wearing a suit (or tie for that matter) to an interview should never be seen as a "cultural fit" problem - I'm looking at you SV... Sorry that almost happened to you. That's some bullshit. --- Overall a nice well-fitting button down + a pair of well-fitting dress slacks is what I would recommend. Personally, I wear a slim fit brand new white button-down (ironed), nice dark blue chinos (ironed, not pleated), and not-scuffed brown wing-tips. Often I also wear a tie, but am considering not thanks to a derelict SF "big-wig" grilling me in an interview as to "why are you wearing a tie?" All I wanted to say is "does it matter?" (offender: you're reading this don't do that again.) Also get a solid hair cut, ensure you're shaved if male, and yeah - sit up and be confident while you're in the chair. Body language does matter, and your interviewer will subconsciously notice regardless if they're giving you a "pass" or not.
        nicoburns 6y ago
        > The action of wearing a suit (or tie for that matter) to an interview should never be seen as a "cultural fit" problem I would agree and would go as far to say that dress in general should never be a hiring criteria for a non-customer facing position. Unless there are hygiene issues or they are wearing something actively offensive.
  - kemiller2002 6y ago
    I would agree although sometimes this is a little too much. I have seen instances where they solely focus on the skills and end up hiring jerk. Ultimately, that causes way more trouble than a weak skillset. An interesting experience I had at a previous company was that they really put culture almost above all else. It sounds great, but in all honesty it was actually depressing and horrible after a while. It almost always came down to, "Well we don't want to hire X person, because it's not a good culture fit." The real issue was that they wanted to hire people they could hang out with / mold into their way of thinking. No new ideas, and everything pretty much stagnated. If that's what you were looking for, then it was great, but people who think like that aren't typically the ones that can hit the homerun when you need to.
stroz 6y ago
I couldn't agree more, that said, I believe the difficulty for new hires in software engineering typically comes from the relentless focus on coding interviews.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Both, to some degree, matter. If your team makes poor technical decisions, that could spill over to eroding team trust. Your success is generally tied to how your team performs in aggregate. If your peers mess up, that could impact you professionally as your team's overall standing within your organization declines.
marcinzm 6y ago
>Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense. This is what FAANG interview generally look for so why is it a surprise that potential hires focus on it? Amazon literally says that you need to highlight all the leadership principles in the stories you tell when answering behavioral questions. Granted, FAANG barely asks behavioral questions for senior engineers (and then it's like 90% project and bureaucracy management) much less junior engineers.
- lrossi 6y ago
  Do you know why Amazon is focusing so much on the Leadership Principles questions, yet there seem to be so many horror stories from people who work there? I am genuinely curious why they don’t manage to filter out the jerks.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    As I see it, the Amazon leadership principles are designed to select for jerks. Specifically jerks who make money. Just look at them. One or two out of fourteen indicate to not be a jerk (Earn Trust, maybe Hire and Develop the Best) while multiple other ones rewards you for being a jerk if you succeed (Disagree and Commit, Bias for Action, Insist on the Highest Standards, Are Right A Lot, Ownership, Deliver Results, etc.). edit: Amazon's goal isn't to be a nice place to work, it's to make a lot of money and everything else is secondary to that. They are so far succeeding splendidly at that goal across multiple verticals so arguably their approach works. I wouldn't want to work there myself but you can't argue with results.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      I think that you may be onto something there. I have noted that when I meet (many) ex-Amazon employees, a lot of them (especially on the business side) are not nice people to work with (backstabbing, destructive political games etc). It's come to a point where I kinda assume that they are likely to screw me/other people if I don't know otherwise. (Obviously this is a generalisation, I'm sure there are loads of really nice people at Amazon).
xyzelement 6y ago
What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure you code the right stuff. The more of these other skills you have, the more you can (a) work independently (b) make others more productive and (c) make sure your team/business is doing the right things and (d) drive overall efficiency. The more of these things you do, you become orders of magnitude more impactful than a pure coder.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Agree. One of the most important skills is the one he describes like this: >> The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In my experience (35 years), this isn't just about knowing the right way to describe things, it's also understanding what things to concentrate on when communicating, and what to ignore. If you are a tech person communicating with a decision maker, they are typically looking to understand options and their implications and risks, not the details of how the options work. They can then decide, based on their (presumably) better knowledge of the wider context, which options to select. If the decision makers are genuinely intelligent and motivated, but their eyes glaze over when you describe something, chances are you have chosen the wrong things to communicate to them.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    Yup. I agree with you (and your pragmatic approach to helping the raptors!)
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      Thank you! (Actually the raptor conservancy [0] is interesting from this perspective as well. I'm a newbie / junior in that context, but I can see standard employee patterns that I recognise from the tech industry, e.g. in terms of people who know to report and / or delegate well, or to make effective decisions vs. be indecisive. Perhaps I'll have to see if I can document my observations on what I've learned in my career). [o] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650535
lumost 6y ago
Generally speaking - your technical qualifications value over a replacement hit their peak sometime between 3 and 10 years into your career for most folks. Meaning while you may be particularly skilled, learning one more discipline, stack, technique, or language probably won't let you get a particular job done any better or faster than the next engineer. Many engineers move to management at this point, which requires that you can mentor and grow a team of engineers, set goals, drive projects to completion, and manage your team through performance reviews. Folks who stick to the technical path need to become an indispensable piece of technical glue across N teams, keeping them all building in the right direction and not crushing each other. This job requires deep technical knowledge but often doesn't involve a ton of coding e.g. Linus Torvalds. If a junior engineer showed up with the behavioral qualifications of Torvalds and the technical skill of a junior engineer - they would still be a junior engineer and unable to build trust, guide a team effort, or other activities.
philk10 6y ago
"No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." - Jerry Weinberg
burade 6y ago
Hum... maybe it's because they have so much technical expertise that they are able to have insights into other things? Technical knowledge is still very important, and it's the basic foundation of being a software engineer, and maaaaannyyyyyy people out there don't even know the basics.
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  plus, the people that feel the need to give advice are ones that are the ones that value [their own] soft skills more highly. technical mastery advice doesn’t really need to be given at all. i’m not saying the advice isn’t good, but also you have to read it like a self help book. it is a point of information, don’t take it literally.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I entered the industry with no degree, having taught myself to code. After approx 15 years as a developer, I decided to get a degree, because it was becoming a problem (Australia is very sensitive to qualifications). I decided to get an MBA because all the hard problems I'd met were people and/or business problems. The tech is generally easy in commercial coding. There is usually a definitive answer, and if not then the trade-offs are generally well-known. It's rare to run into a problem that requires complex technical knowledge, and in those cases it's fine to hire a consultant to help. But the people problems are hard. Getting clued-up on these is important.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Wow. This must be the very first pro-MBA comment in the history of HN. Feels refreshing!
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Being a developer with an MBA is a rare combination ;) Worth it, from my experience.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    A mature MBA done after 10-15 years experience is very different that some one who went from BSC direct to a MBA (to game immigration hurdles in a lot of cases)
  - lmm 6y ago
    I think everyone agrees that bad management is the biggest problem facing a lot of software companies. The part that's disputed is whether managers with MBAs are actually any better than managers without them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I've been pondering this. I think an MBA will help you be a better manager if you want to be, because at least there's some clue about what a "good" manager should look like. I've met sooo many bad managers. In most cases they were bad because they didn't really know what they were doing and they felt they couldn't look "weak" or not be in charge. There's always the urge to authoritarian leadership because it's the default (for some reason). If the MBA course is any good, it will at least have exposed such a person to other leadership styles and some management theory. They might reject it, of course, but at least they'll know it. So, yeah, I don't think having an MBA makes you a better manager or leader automatically. But I think a manager who wants to get better could be helped by doing an MBA. Of course, there are lots of managers who are convinced they don't need to get better, and so won't/can't be helped. And there are lots of people who get MBA's because it's a ticket to promotion and don't really care about the learning.
dboreham 6y ago
"Psychology is eating the world"
- rusk 6y ago
  Well Zuckerberg’s major was psych so you might be onto something there ...
reaperducer 6y ago
This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, deploy and maintain. Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense. This was exactly the experience I had not so long ago. Management brought in a new "team leader" to "shake things up" with "new ideas." She spent most of her time reading management books, taking online management courses, and going to management seminars. She almost never spoke to the "team," and when she did, treated us like underlings. They gave her two years to make a difference, and then kicked her out in the first round of COVID cuts.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Wow. While I do not have experience with management courses, and seminars, one book I read about management (https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/1531865208 https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/...) talks about exactly this scenario. I am surprised to hear about it in the wild.
mattmcknight 6y ago
> they tend to focus on which stacks matter This is not just a junior problem. A lot of "people problems" seem to come from fighting over which stack to use. (and most people fight for whichever stack they are best at, to maximize their own personal contribution). I always spend a lot of time asking people what technology they would use to solve a particular problem, what technology they really don't like, etc. It saves a lot of trouble fighting over things if you get a team that is willing to go with a particular technical approach and is more important than most "cultural fit" issues.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  In my experience, this mostly happens with people who only know one technology. Many juniors are like this. On the other hand, when this happens with a senior, they fight extra hard. I suppose it also depends on company culture. What happens if a technology you have never seen before is selected for your project? Are you given some time to learn and is it expected that your initial contributions will be smaller, or are you supposed to be just as fast as people who used it for last ten years and get negative reviews otherwise?
zx14 6y ago
Most juniors have a much narrower focus in their day to day activities. Their responsibilities tend to be far more focused on churning code and dealing with cool or bad tech choices, whereas the more senior you get, the wider or high level your job can become.
watwut 6y ago
If you are junior you would make mistake to ignore technical aspects of work (stacks, what to learn, how to develop, deploy and maintain) in order to focus on communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. While communication is somewhat important for juniors, but usually the technical aspects are even more missing. It is when you have technical aspects down when the other aspects start to matter more. Also, juniors are not in political situations where the other aspects matter all that much. Generally, they find themselves in simply political situations. As long as they are not downright toxic, it is ok.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
I think it is because the older you get you realize that all those projects are anyway just notches on some stick. For example everybody with some experience will choose a boring project with aweseom colleagues over a cutting edge project with a bunch of self-obsessed nerds. Life is short.
mcguire 6y ago
Speaking as a career-long technical person, 1) All of those people aspects are very, very important. 2) Stacks don't matter. Languages don't matter. Editors/IDEs/whatever-the-hell-else doesn't matter. What I used to call a "firm theoretical grounding" does matter. What does that mean? At the base, the ability to write clear code that other people can read, and the ability to read code that other people have written. (Don't laugh, it's not uncommon to get called in when someone has bugs (or features) they can't get fixed after they've painted themselves into a corner.) (For me, the key to this is formal logic and what is variously known as axiomatic semantics (http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/Chapter11.pdf http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/Chapter11...) or Hoare logic, or predicate transformer semantics. Theoretical, right? But the ability to think about a piece of code as a block of text, without "simulating the computer" is darn useful.) Further, algorithms and data structures. No, you don't have to memorize a bunch of algorithms. But it's a good idea to understand what kind of things are out there and what they can do, as well as having experience writing them yourself. (I get downvoted a lot, but I do have to point out that everytime anyone puts code in an editor, they're building a data structure or writing an algorithm.) Then, at least some knowledge of computer architecture and all the stupid little electricy bits. :-) Then there is a stack of things that build on that, some of which are only relevant to some tasks: databases, network protocols, and so on. None of this has changed fundamentally in 30 years. The only major change I've seen is an increase in the importance of continuous math---which I noticed because I've always had a hate-hate relationship with trig and calculus and so on. But all of machine learning and statistical techniques are based on that nastyness, so you can't ignore it any more. Why does nobody mention technical things? For one thing, they're hard. You can practice communication at the grocery store. Not so much with technical matters. Further, the people aspects are important everywhere, whereas technical things just aren't. And at some point, it's easier to convince some one else to do the work while you have the ideas. (Personal motto: Ideas are cheap. Implementation matters.) Finally, technical mastery is not really encouraged. Outside of academia, there are no real incentives for it. (Inside academia, there are almost no incentives for it.) After 20, 30, or 40 years, people will migrate on to something else, even if they don't like it or are really horrible at it.
- yw3410 6y ago
hrktb 6y ago
I think there is the effect of weeding out people with strong technical skill but low focus on “people” skills (not talking about jerks, just people who don’t play politics). Honestly I don’t think it’s a good trend or that it’s unavoidable. We shouldn’t look at the world today and take it straight as a lesson of what should be done. A bit like saying being gorgeous, extrovert and good negociator is the key to success, it sure can be but it shouldn’t be the goal of everyone.
sidlls 6y ago
And over the last decade or so this has "trickled up" due to the interview process: experienced and even senior engineers are essentially funneled into the areas of focus you mention.
username90 6y ago
Technical skills were greatly undervalued anytime past a couple of decades ago so it makes sense, at the time they were building their career there where no highly paid people who weren't manager types.
tayo42 6y ago
You ever wonder if there's some kind of bias? Like successful people people (not a typo) will be more outgoing and likely to give advice. A successful tech focused person might not be blogging and giving unsolicited advice.
35_candelas 6y ago
Goldberg is talking about a longer term view and I think in general, after working for more time your job becomes more about interactions than the "knowledge" you have.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Definitely. In my experience, the nitty gritty "labor" part of software development, the actual process of learning and writing code, gives great satisfaction and enjoyment. But after a few years, a few projects and / or jobs, and especially once your hard work is effectively thrown away in favor of something newer and shinier written and advocated by younger and louder people, you get more cynical. But once you get over that, you realize that code itself is just an implementation detail, and it's the people higher up that have more influence. As developer you get paid an X amount a year, that's about it; as a higher up, you get to play with millions, both as money and as 'resources'. As a developer you'll learn your limitations, that you cannot solve everything and that you alone are not good or fast enough to tackle nontrivial projects (currently in the middle of that, single developer, at the current rate it'll take years for my software to become viable. At least I'm on the payroll). If you have bigger ambitions, climbing the ladder is the way to go. Personally I'm hoping to be able to get a small team together in the coming year.
dangisgay 6y ago
This is the exact reason why so many people fail their way to the top. Great excuse for mediocrity. Soon everyone with a job will uterly talentless
bananaface 6y ago
I really wonder whether this is a symptom of an industry that's bad at evaluating technical ability rather something that should be elevated. IME the best programmers by far are those who solve difficult technical problems quickly, whether or not they're abrasive. I don't like when they're assholes, but it doesn't matter. They still have more impact. I used to buy into the whole "communication is king" idea but the more I program the more I just don't think it works that way. Most good coders I know communicate clearly as a side effect of being good, even if they're otherwise completely socially crippled, and they're way more productive.
megous 6y ago
The author doesn't state much about himself, so it's hard to tell from the article who he is and what he's been doing last 10 years. Obviously if he's mostly in the management/not coding he'll not focus on the programming advice.

by lrossi 6y ago

mistrial9 6y ago

professional interview sign seen at the "interview desk" for work placement at an expensive school for digital creatives: "sit up straight; look the interviewer in the eye; wear presentable clothing; answer the questions asked of you" .. I believe the sign was there because that was not occuring in many cases !

motogpjimbo 6y ago
My experience from being on both sides of the desk has been that devteams are relatively tolerant of candidates exhibiting personality quirks during the interview process - it's the candidate's skills that are in demand, not their winning personality. Maybe it's different when you interview at a FAANG company though? I imagine FAANG recruitment is a merciless sausage machine.
- folkhack 6y ago
  > My experience from being on both sides of the desk has been that devteams are relatively tolerant of candidates exhibiting personality quirks during the interview process - it's the candidate's skills that are in demand, not their winning personality. I'm growing further and further away from this mentality in hiring because the sad truth is most of those folks who come in with "quirks" lack maturity. To me, quirks are "yellow flags" in the interview stage because it means that you're not able to put your own weirdness aside to fit socially when you arguably need to the most. Invariably these same "quirks" come up down the road in the employment with output problems, copping attitude with superiors, weirdness in internal/external meetings, and just general antisocial behavior. I get that we're all in hella demand right now but I'm starting to go back on my, "I'm just hiring for the engineering skill/talent" as an excuse to overlook yellow flags. The other thing is contextually, what are the quirks? If the "quirk" is someone being super shy/timid it doesn't even register on my radar as a problem unless it's extreme... I'm talking about the stereotypical "oh so cute dev quirks" like: not dressing appropriately for an interview, interrupting me/talking over me, talking down to me, comparing their last junior position to being Steve Jobs, being sing-songy, inappropriate jokes in any way/shape/form, getting in arguments with themselves... etc etc. I'm at a point that if you can't act 95% professional in your first interview you're done as you're not capable of being "on".
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > not dressing appropriately for an interview What is "dressing appropriately". I wore a suit to my very first interview for a dev position and very nearly didn't get the job because they were worried I wouldn't fit in (luckily I was able to explain that I don't usually wear a suit). The other ones in your list, sure. But I don't think those are what people typically means when they talk about quirks.
    - folkhack 6y ago
      > I wore a suit to my very first interview for a dev position and very nearly didn't get the job because they were worried I wouldn't fit in Yeah - I hate this. I had people at my last position give candidates negative points because they wore a suit and I went $%&#ing ape. In positions that I've held in the past it's been the appropriate action to wear a suit due to heavily corporate environments, and I see it as 110% normal that someone puts on a nice suit for an interview. The action of wearing a suit (or tie for that matter) to an interview should never be seen as a "cultural fit" problem - I'm looking at you SV... Sorry that almost happened to you. That's some bullshit. --- Overall a nice well-fitting button down + a pair of well-fitting dress slacks is what I would recommend. Personally, I wear a slim fit brand new white button-down (ironed), nice dark blue chinos (ironed, not pleated), and not-scuffed brown wing-tips. Often I also wear a tie, but am considering not thanks to a derelict SF "big-wig" grilling me in an interview as to "why are you wearing a tie?" All I wanted to say is "does it matter?" (offender: you're reading this don't do that again.) Also get a solid hair cut, ensure you're shaved if male, and yeah - sit up and be confident while you're in the chair. Body language does matter, and your interviewer will subconsciously notice regardless if they're giving you a "pass" or not.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        > The action of wearing a suit (or tie for that matter) to an interview should never be seen as a "cultural fit" problem I would agree and would go as far to say that dress in general should never be a hiring criteria for a non-customer facing position. Unless there are hygiene issues or they are wearing something actively offensive.
- kemiller2002 6y ago
  I would agree although sometimes this is a little too much. I have seen instances where they solely focus on the skills and end up hiring jerk. Ultimately, that causes way more trouble than a weak skillset. An interesting experience I had at a previous company was that they really put culture almost above all else. It sounds great, but in all honesty it was actually depressing and horrible after a while. It almost always came down to, "Well we don't want to hire X person, because it's not a good culture fit." The real issue was that they wanted to hire people they could hang out with / mold into their way of thinking. No new ideas, and everything pretty much stagnated. If that's what you were looking for, then it was great, but people who think like that aren't typically the ones that can hit the homerun when you need to.

stroz 6y ago

I couldn't agree more, that said, I believe the difficulty for new hires in software engineering typically comes from the relentless focus on coding interviews.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

Both, to some degree, matter. If your team makes poor technical decisions, that could spill over to eroding team trust. Your success is generally tied to how your team performs in aggregate. If your peers mess up, that could impact you professionally as your team's overall standing within your organization declines.

marcinzm 6y ago

>Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense. This is what FAANG interview generally look for so why is it a surprise that potential hires focus on it? Amazon literally says that you need to highlight all the leadership principles in the stories you tell when answering behavioral questions. Granted, FAANG barely asks behavioral questions for senior engineers (and then it's like 90% project and bureaucracy management) much less junior engineers.

lrossi 6y ago
Do you know why Amazon is focusing so much on the Leadership Principles questions, yet there seem to be so many horror stories from people who work there? I am genuinely curious why they don’t manage to filter out the jerks.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  As I see it, the Amazon leadership principles are designed to select for jerks. Specifically jerks who make money. Just look at them. One or two out of fourteen indicate to not be a jerk (Earn Trust, maybe Hire and Develop the Best) while multiple other ones rewards you for being a jerk if you succeed (Disagree and Commit, Bias for Action, Insist on the Highest Standards, Are Right A Lot, Ownership, Deliver Results, etc.). edit: Amazon's goal isn't to be a nice place to work, it's to make a lot of money and everything else is secondary to that. They are so far succeeding splendidly at that goal across multiple verticals so arguably their approach works. I wouldn't want to work there myself but you can't argue with results.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I think that you may be onto something there. I have noted that when I meet (many) ex-Amazon employees, a lot of them (especially on the business side) are not nice people to work with (backstabbing, destructive political games etc). It's come to a point where I kinda assume that they are likely to screw me/other people if I don't know otherwise. (Obviously this is a generalisation, I'm sure there are loads of really nice people at Amazon).

xyzelement 6y ago

What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure you code the right stuff. The more of these other skills you have, the more you can (a) work independently (b) make others more productive and (c) make sure your team/business is doing the right things and (d) drive overall efficiency. The more of these things you do, you become orders of magnitude more impactful than a pure coder.

KineticLensman 6y ago
Agree. One of the most important skills is the one he describes like this: >> The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In my experience (35 years), this isn't just about knowing the right way to describe things, it's also understanding what things to concentrate on when communicating, and what to ignore. If you are a tech person communicating with a decision maker, they are typically looking to understand options and their implications and risks, not the details of how the options work. They can then decide, based on their (presumably) better knowledge of the wider context, which options to select. If the decision makers are genuinely intelligent and motivated, but their eyes glaze over when you describe something, chances are you have chosen the wrong things to communicate to them.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Yup. I agree with you (and your pragmatic approach to helping the raptors!)
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    Thank you! (Actually the raptor conservancy [0] is interesting from this perspective as well. I'm a newbie / junior in that context, but I can see standard employee patterns that I recognise from the tech industry, e.g. in terms of people who know to report and / or delegate well, or to make effective decisions vs. be indecisive. Perhaps I'll have to see if I can document my observations on what I've learned in my career). [o] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650535

lumost 6y ago

Generally speaking - your technical qualifications value over a replacement hit their peak sometime between 3 and 10 years into your career for most folks. Meaning while you may be particularly skilled, learning one more discipline, stack, technique, or language probably won't let you get a particular job done any better or faster than the next engineer. Many engineers move to management at this point, which requires that you can mentor and grow a team of engineers, set goals, drive projects to completion, and manage your team through performance reviews. Folks who stick to the technical path need to become an indispensable piece of technical glue across N teams, keeping them all building in the right direction and not crushing each other. This job requires deep technical knowledge but often doesn't involve a ton of coding e.g. Linus Torvalds. If a junior engineer showed up with the behavioral qualifications of Torvalds and the technical skill of a junior engineer - they would still be a junior engineer and unable to build trust, guide a team effort, or other activities.

philk10 6y ago

"No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." - Jerry Weinberg

burade 6y ago

Hum... maybe it's because they have so much technical expertise that they are able to have insights into other things? Technical knowledge is still very important, and it's the basic foundation of being a software engineer, and maaaaannyyyyyy people out there don't even know the basics.

jiveturkey 6y ago
plus, the people that feel the need to give advice are ones that are the ones that value [their own] soft skills more highly. technical mastery advice doesn’t really need to be given at all. i’m not saying the advice isn’t good, but also you have to read it like a self help book. it is a point of information, don’t take it literally.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I entered the industry with no degree, having taught myself to code. After approx 15 years as a developer, I decided to get a degree, because it was becoming a problem (Australia is very sensitive to qualifications). I decided to get an MBA because all the hard problems I'd met were people and/or business problems. The tech is generally easy in commercial coding. There is usually a definitive answer, and if not then the trade-offs are generally well-known. It's rare to run into a problem that requires complex technical knowledge, and in those cases it's fine to hire a consultant to help. But the people problems are hard. Getting clued-up on these is important.

airstrike 6y ago
Wow. This must be the very first pro-MBA comment in the history of HN. Feels refreshing!
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Being a developer with an MBA is a rare combination ;) Worth it, from my experience.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  A mature MBA done after 10-15 years experience is very different that some one who went from BSC direct to a MBA (to game immigration hurdles in a lot of cases)
- lmm 6y ago
  I think everyone agrees that bad management is the biggest problem facing a lot of software companies. The part that's disputed is whether managers with MBAs are actually any better than managers without them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I've been pondering this. I think an MBA will help you be a better manager if you want to be, because at least there's some clue about what a "good" manager should look like. I've met sooo many bad managers. In most cases they were bad because they didn't really know what they were doing and they felt they couldn't look "weak" or not be in charge. There's always the urge to authoritarian leadership because it's the default (for some reason). If the MBA course is any good, it will at least have exposed such a person to other leadership styles and some management theory. They might reject it, of course, but at least they'll know it. So, yeah, I don't think having an MBA makes you a better manager or leader automatically. But I think a manager who wants to get better could be helped by doing an MBA. Of course, there are lots of managers who are convinced they don't need to get better, and so won't/can't be helped. And there are lots of people who get MBA's because it's a ticket to promotion and don't really care about the learning.

dboreham 6y ago

"Psychology is eating the world"

rusk 6y ago
Well Zuckerberg’s major was psych so you might be onto something there ...

reaperducer 6y ago

This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, deploy and maintain. Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense. This was exactly the experience I had not so long ago. Management brought in a new "team leader" to "shake things up" with "new ideas." She spent most of her time reading management books, taking online management courses, and going to management seminars. She almost never spoke to the "team," and when she did, treated us like underlings. They gave her two years to make a difference, and then kicked her out in the first round of COVID cuts.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
Wow. While I do not have experience with management courses, and seminars, one book I read about management (https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/1531865208 https://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/...) talks about exactly this scenario. I am surprised to hear about it in the wild.

mattmcknight 6y ago

> they tend to focus on which stacks matter This is not just a junior problem. A lot of "people problems" seem to come from fighting over which stack to use. (and most people fight for whichever stack they are best at, to maximize their own personal contribution). I always spend a lot of time asking people what technology they would use to solve a particular problem, what technology they really don't like, etc. It saves a lot of trouble fighting over things if you get a team that is willing to go with a particular technical approach and is more important than most "cultural fit" issues.

Viliam1234 6y ago
In my experience, this mostly happens with people who only know one technology. Many juniors are like this. On the other hand, when this happens with a senior, they fight extra hard. I suppose it also depends on company culture. What happens if a technology you have never seen before is selected for your project? Are you given some time to learn and is it expected that your initial contributions will be smaller, or are you supposed to be just as fast as people who used it for last ten years and get negative reviews otherwise?

zx14 6y ago

Most juniors have a much narrower focus in their day to day activities. Their responsibilities tend to be far more focused on churning code and dealing with cool or bad tech choices, whereas the more senior you get, the wider or high level your job can become.

watwut 6y ago

If you are junior you would make mistake to ignore technical aspects of work (stacks, what to learn, how to develop, deploy and maintain) in order to focus on communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. While communication is somewhat important for juniors, but usually the technical aspects are even more missing. It is when you have technical aspects down when the other aspects start to matter more. Also, juniors are not in political situations where the other aspects matter all that much. Generally, they find themselves in simply political situations. As long as they are not downright toxic, it is ok.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

I think it is because the older you get you realize that all those projects are anyway just notches on some stick. For example everybody with some experience will choose a boring project with aweseom colleagues over a cutting edge project with a bunch of self-obsessed nerds. Life is short.

mcguire 6y ago

Speaking as a career-long technical person, 1) All of those people aspects are very, very important. 2) Stacks don't matter. Languages don't matter. Editors/IDEs/whatever-the-hell-else doesn't matter. What I used to call a "firm theoretical grounding" does matter. What does that mean? At the base, the ability to write clear code that other people can read, and the ability to read code that other people have written. (Don't laugh, it's not uncommon to get called in when someone has bugs (or features) they can't get fixed after they've painted themselves into a corner.) (For me, the key to this is formal logic and what is variously known as axiomatic semantics (http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/Chapter11.pdf http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/Chapter11...) or Hoare logic, or predicate transformer semantics. Theoretical, right? But the ability to think about a piece of code as a block of text, without "simulating the computer" is darn useful.) Further, algorithms and data structures. No, you don't have to memorize a bunch of algorithms. But it's a good idea to understand what kind of things are out there and what they can do, as well as having experience writing them yourself. (I get downvoted a lot, but I do have to point out that everytime anyone puts code in an editor, they're building a data structure or writing an algorithm.) Then, at least some knowledge of computer architecture and all the stupid little electricy bits. :-) Then there is a stack of things that build on that, some of which are only relevant to some tasks: databases, network protocols, and so on. None of this has changed fundamentally in 30 years. The only major change I've seen is an increase in the importance of continuous math---which I noticed because I've always had a hate-hate relationship with trig and calculus and so on. But all of machine learning and statistical techniques are based on that nastyness, so you can't ignore it any more. Why does nobody mention technical things? For one thing, they're hard. You can practice communication at the grocery store. Not so much with technical matters. Further, the people aspects are important everywhere, whereas technical things just aren't. And at some point, it's easier to convince some one else to do the work while you have the ideas. (Personal motto: Ideas are cheap. Implementation matters.) Finally, technical mastery is not really encouraged. Outside of academia, there are no real incentives for it. (Inside academia, there are almost no incentives for it.) After 20, 30, or 40 years, people will migrate on to something else, even if they don't like it or are really horrible at it.

yw3410 6y ago

hrktb 6y ago

I think there is the effect of weeding out people with strong technical skill but low focus on “people” skills (not talking about jerks, just people who don’t play politics). Honestly I don’t think it’s a good trend or that it’s unavoidable. We shouldn’t look at the world today and take it straight as a lesson of what should be done. A bit like saying being gorgeous, extrovert and good negociator is the key to success, it sure can be but it shouldn’t be the goal of everyone.

sidlls 6y ago

And over the last decade or so this has "trickled up" due to the interview process: experienced and even senior engineers are essentially funneled into the areas of focus you mention.

username90 6y ago

Technical skills were greatly undervalued anytime past a couple of decades ago so it makes sense, at the time they were building their career there where no highly paid people who weren't manager types.

tayo42 6y ago

You ever wonder if there's some kind of bias? Like successful people people (not a typo) will be more outgoing and likely to give advice. A successful tech focused person might not be blogging and giving unsolicited advice.

35_candelas 6y ago

Goldberg is talking about a longer term view and I think in general, after working for more time your job becomes more about interactions than the "knowledge" you have.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Definitely. In my experience, the nitty gritty "labor" part of software development, the actual process of learning and writing code, gives great satisfaction and enjoyment. But after a few years, a few projects and / or jobs, and especially once your hard work is effectively thrown away in favor of something newer and shinier written and advocated by younger and louder people, you get more cynical. But once you get over that, you realize that code itself is just an implementation detail, and it's the people higher up that have more influence. As developer you get paid an X amount a year, that's about it; as a higher up, you get to play with millions, both as money and as 'resources'. As a developer you'll learn your limitations, that you cannot solve everything and that you alone are not good or fast enough to tackle nontrivial projects (currently in the middle of that, single developer, at the current rate it'll take years for my software to become viable. At least I'm on the payroll). If you have bigger ambitions, climbing the ladder is the way to go. Personally I'm hoping to be able to get a small team together in the coming year.

dangisgay 6y ago

This is the exact reason why so many people fail their way to the top. Great excuse for mediocrity. Soon everyone with a job will uterly talentless

bananaface 6y ago

I really wonder whether this is a symptom of an industry that's bad at evaluating technical ability rather something that should be elevated. IME the best programmers by far are those who solve difficult technical problems quickly, whether or not they're abrasive. I don't like when they're assholes, but it doesn't matter. They still have more impact. I used to buy into the whole "communication is king" idea but the more I program the more I just don't think it works that way. Most good coders I know communicate clearly as a side effect of being good, even if they're otherwise completely socially crippled, and they're way more productive.

megous 6y ago

The author doesn't state much about himself, so it's hard to tell from the article who he is and what he's been doing last 10 years. Obviously if he's mostly in the management/not coding he'll not focus on the programming advice.