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Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism. Reward em
by thewarrior 6y ago
Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism.
Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear.
The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add.
The explosion of startups also contributes to this. They often have to attract employees by offering the promise of new tech. New tech can propagate these days same way how Bitcoin prices rise. Our industry is in a financial bubble which has created a complexity bubble. The financial bubble collapsing will pop the complexity bubble leading to huge surge in boring / low overhead stable tech.
Not to mention how ageism plays into this. People will hire someone who spent the past 5 years switching between 5 different JavaScript frameworks over someone who spent five years writing Java at some boring company.
Most startup employees know they aren’t getting rich. They go on to milk the startup for maximum resume points and move on.
The VCs unload these bloated companies into inflated stock markets and the cycle continues. Some small progress at the cost of tens of billions and lots of running in the same place.
Our industry is like some eccentric Howard Hughes drowning in so much money that all we do is come up with ever more esoteric contraptions to escape from reality.
DHH starts really small companies and pays his employees really well and doesn’t work them too hard. Employees have no real reason to leave. They see a direct link between the low overhead and their job security and work life balance. Since the team is smaller the work is less alienating / hyper specialized leading to a deeper connection with the company and its customers. Aligning incentives fixes a lot of problems.
- postfacto 6y agoWhy the downvotes? This comment’s dead accurate.
- cema 6y agoI am not sure about the down votes (no reason for them in my opinion) but the casual jab at capitalism looks gratuitous and does not help making the argument seem stronger.
- blacktriangle 6y agoNot to mention its objectively wrong.
- chris_wot 6y agoExcept a. it’s not casual, it’s part of a thought through argument (which you can disagree with), and b. you fail to explain why he is wrong.
- Bakary 6y agoIt's not gratuitous if it is central to the argument. The state of affairs they describe is dependent on a virtualized capitalist economy being in place.
- treeman79 6y agoPure Capitalism punishes wasteful spending. Assume company A sells a widget for 10 silver Then company B comes along and sells same widget for 3 silver. Company A will either learn to be more efficient and sell at 2-3 silver, or go out of business.
- afiori 6y agoThis is quite a simplistic view of capitalism. Consider the Moloch effect[1] where rational choices in environments with hard coordination problems can lead to degenerating incentives. Capitalism is not the same as free market; capitalism is rather a system where your economic power is mainly determinated by the amount of capital you have (money, investments, means of productions...) rather than class, bloodline, titles, popularity, or legislative regulations[2]. Capitalism is linked to free market in that they work well together: free markets want enterpreneuers to be compete for efficient capital gains and people with capital like how their economical power is only bounded by their capital (with the potential of an exponential growth). Apart from this ether can exist without the other. This is how supporters would like them to work together, but there can be a lot of bugs and traps on the way. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ [2]: This last one would be the characteristic of planned markets
- thewarrior 6y agoPerfect competition only happens in text books. In the real world monopolies, oligopolies, regulatory capture, control over social connections and capital, markets with asymmetric information (VCs vs public, employees vs companies), management consecrating itself into a class with its own interests , mean that companies can go on for 10-15 years before they are punished. By the time the market wakes up you’ve switched 3 times and after 10 times you’re retired in the suburbs with a nice BMW. Who cares then.
- chrisjharris 6y agoI wouldn't say that that's a flaw in capitalism, it's just that one (skill rarity) is observable ex-ante, the other (value added) is only observable ex-post.
- thewarrior 6y agoIf people stayed longer in jobs then they could be held accountable long enough into the future.