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I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for p

I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months." I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does Trader Joe's do it? To keep things interesting: "She tells Money that the change in jobs during shifts helps to keep things interesting for employees. 'It's perfect because it breaks down your shift. You don't get tired doing one repetitive thing,' she told them." https://www.mashed.com/175743/workers-reveal-what-its-really-like-to-work-at-trader-joes/ https://www.mashed.com/175743/workers-reveal-what-its-really... If Trader Joe's can do it hour by hour, I think tech companies can do it at least every year or so. I'm hiring right now and one of the major draws for the good people I'm talking to is the chance to do something interesting. If that's why their coming, it's unsurprising that I'll have to keep giving them that over time. For us, and for most places I've worked, I think that's doable.

wwweston 5y ago
Yes, but this won't work because there's just not enough different things for an engineer to master. ;) More seriously, your observation is brilliant (and almost makes me wish I hadn't just accepted a new role). Because the software field contains such a breadth of things to know and breadth of potential applications, it's hard to get very far without having the kind of mind that is motivated by some level of intrinsic interest, and that can be a currency in its own right.
itronitron 5y ago
I would really appreciate that as a developer, I have definite gaps in my skillset that I haven't needed (been paid) to fill. But everyone would have to get out of the mindset that developer Joe 'knows everything' about X. The perfect match would be pairing a developer that can explain some technology to a 12 year old with a developer that has the equivalent knowledge of a 12 year old (for that technology.) That would keep things interesting and build a very resilient organization.
- touisteur 5y ago
  I used to manage a team of mixed very-experimented / very-juniors and I'd make sure every senior worked on stuff I knew were not in their comfort zone, and assign tasks in their expertise domain to juniors. They'd act as consultants, while checking other parts of the codebase/docs (as noobs) for incoherencies, sand-in-gears, and improving them. Over time, the experts kept things getting better, up to their common standards, and the juniors would level up far more quickly than other parts of the org. To keep things interesting/challenging for the experts I'd have them also reach across domains (to system eng, safety, quality assurance, bids, R&D) and sometimes even overreach (blur the boundaries) while protecting them from corporate-strife. Software is far more interesting in the context of the product, the customers, actors on every critical team. I'd also have them try new techs, or find some innovation/maturity budget for 'pet peeve hunts' and we'd often end up with new tools, large-scale improvements in code, perf, readability, robustness, observability, or testing. I'm going off topic here but I'm sad that 'Slack', the book, isn't more widely read.
teawrecks 5y ago
That's a great idea on TJ's part. I have also wondered how giving some amount of project ownership to low level employees would help with morale. In grocery stores you see every little thing optimized by a marketing team; from the way products are stacked, to what the cashier is allowed to say to you. But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? I think we need to let workers be more creative. Give them a reason to feel invested in what they're doing and reward them for trying hard. You can find what they're good at over time, the hard part is making them feel like what they do matters. It seems like modern management theory has gone out of its way to optimize out the impact that any one low level employee can have on the company. And that makes sense when the goal is to make money. But what you're left with is a society full of people in mind numbing dead end jobs developing psychological issues.
- tikhonj 5y ago
  > But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does—I've been to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of the specific decorations seemed to be unique per store with nice local details. Of course, this could still be done in a totally top-down way—hiring local consultants or something—but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that was done by the store employees. > And that makes sense when the goal is to make money. Abstractly, I expect that this isn't the best way to make money. Modern management practices seem to value legibility and control even at the expense of expected income and company resilience. This probably says something fundamental about our culture, philosophy and incentives, but I'm not sure exactly what!
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching and support are the most important functions.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Absolutely this. Where I work, changing teams isn’t frowned upon. I was in one role for a few years, then moved to another. I know the systems that are used most widely, the data, the business, I know a particular side of the business inside and out, and I already have important relationships and lines of communication. And now things are interesting again.
cheriot 5y ago
This. Most companies pay lip service to internal mobility, but I still see managers trying to talk people out of it (presumably so they don't have to hire and ramp up a replacement).
- quanticle 5y ago
  And that ends up being self-defeating over the long term, because oftentimes the developer will quit the company entirely if their requests for internal transfers are stymied for too long.
cjvirtucio 5y ago
This approach reminds me of the DevOps practice of breaking down information silos: make everyone learn a little bit of everything so that no one becomes a risk.
Justsignedup 5y ago
I worked with an engineer. She told me that when working at her previous company they permitted you to switch teams every 2 years. Every 2 years she would take that opportunity and got to work on a huge variety of projects with lots of different people. Some of them good, some of them not. It kept her there for 12 years or so.
- wkimeria 5y ago
  I suspect there is a correlation between companies that have a culture of letting engineers change roles/departments (and a clear process for doing so) and retention/average tenure.
  - hunter321 5y ago
    As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.
    - mcast 5y ago
      That's untrue, a manager can put their employee into a performance improvement program (without even needing to inform them) which would block them from any internal transfers.
      - Thiez 5y ago
        How does a pip effect improved performance when the employee isn't even aware they're in one? Is trying to switch teams the only way to discover that, or are there other indirect ways?
        wombatpm 5y ago
        But HR sees it as a way to prevent a subpar employee from escaping the natural HR process. The fact that you have not been informed yet is just a failure of current management to follow process, but does not obsolve you of your subpar performance. HR is there for the company, not for you.
xanaxagoras 5y ago
Something that really helps me at my job is I have 2 primary roles that kind of wax and wane. When I get bored with one, there's always something to do in the other.
randall 5y ago
This is something I love about Facebook, fwiw. Engineers have tremendous liquidity in movement.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  True, but Facebook also reorgs every six months, moving team responsibilities across orgs and cities all the time. Surprise! Your team is shutting down and being moved to New York! Go back to the dating pool! FB is a company that is successful in spite of all its internal failures.
tintt 5y ago
Didn’t know that about Trader Joe’s, it’s really smart. To your point: for many companies out there it may be easier to raise compensation a bit rather than to figure out interesting tasks for their engineering force. Business usually wants its employees to solve specific problems, most of them mundane.
baxtr 5y ago
I worked for a company where devs would rebel because teams were partly re-shuffled at the beginning of a new year! I guess people are different.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't think it really has to be mandatory, but it certainly should be allowed and encouraged. In the case where people were objecting to being re-shuffled, did they get to pick where they went? Or were they just told? a little agency can help a lot.
  - baxtr 5y ago
    In the first year we just told people, which was obviously very stupid in hindsight. In the second year, we had a survey where devs could say what their preference was: (a) team/specific devs (b) topic (c) none That worked pretty well.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Glad to hear it!
austinl 5y ago
I stayed at my previous company for five years, but worked in four different roles across that time: - 1 year doing iOS frontend/product - 1 year doing low-level iOS systems - 2 years as a PM - 1 year doing backend I was never bored. I think giving engineers the flexibility to move around (provided they stick with one thing for a year or so) is a great way to retain folks. I can also say my efficiency during year 5 was fairly absurd (I won't necessarily say overall productivity was higher at the very end, since my interest in the company was waning, but I saved a lot of time by knowing exactly who to talk to and how systems across the stack worked).
lupire 5y ago
A software dev changes between a wide range of tasks pretty frequently, if "stock shelves, cashier, repeat" is your basis of comparison.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
The Japanese corporation I worked for had engineers and managers change jobs every two years. One of the reasons was that they wanted to "cross-train" people. They liked to have a lot of process, and tended to think of employees as "Swiss army knives," that could adapt. They had style guides, and a whole infrastructure (HR and technical), to support this. Lots of training. Not sure how effective it was. I feel that they weren't as productive as I'd like, but they were really good engineers. I had a lot of respect for them (which doesn't mean that I didn't want to strangle some of them; from time to time).
- tkgally 5y ago
  The Japanese university where I work is similar. Much of the administrative work related to educational and research program management is handled by the tenured faculty, and we get rotated regularly through administrative positions. In the sixteen years I've been there, I have, like most of my colleagues, served on a dozen or more committees and have managed programs for periods of several years each. The result of this process is that faculty members tend to become, over time, reasonably competent administrators with a broad understanding of how the university functions, and that in turn helps the university—a large, necessarily complex bureaucracy—to function reasonably well. We also have a small professional administrative staff, and they also get rotated through positions every few years. They must keep really good documentation of what they do, as staff members are usually able to get up to speed on their new jobs very quickly.
chrismcb 5y ago
Did Henry Ford figure that out like 100 years ago? That people get bored on the job.
tcmart14 5y ago
I am currently a SWE student, and non-traditional. I am a full time student with wife and kids. I work full time and prior to starting school and current job, was in the Navy. Now that I am close to graduating and looking at companies, I am trying to find tech companies that offer a breadth of areas to work in so precisely I hope I can find a place where perhaps I move around. Being in the Navy and working in chemical manufacturing, I know how dull and boring doing the same job over and over gets. On deployment (on a ship), we referred to it as ground hog day like the movie.
Tcepsa 5y ago
One more point of anecdata: I've been with my current employer for just over 14 years, and I've worked on probably about that many different projects--generally two or three at the same time--in a variety of roles and with a variety of technologies (often with some degree of leadership, both formal and informal). There are many aspects of my current situation that I appreciate, but the plethora of options available for me to work on certainly feels like one of the big reasons I've stayed for so long.

wwweston 5y ago

Yes, but this won't work because there's just not enough different things for an engineer to master. ;) More seriously, your observation is brilliant (and almost makes me wish I hadn't just accepted a new role). Because the software field contains such a breadth of things to know and breadth of potential applications, it's hard to get very far without having the kind of mind that is motivated by some level of intrinsic interest, and that can be a currency in its own right.

itronitron 5y ago

I would really appreciate that as a developer, I have definite gaps in my skillset that I haven't needed (been paid) to fill. But everyone would have to get out of the mindset that developer Joe 'knows everything' about X. The perfect match would be pairing a developer that can explain some technology to a 12 year old with a developer that has the equivalent knowledge of a 12 year old (for that technology.) That would keep things interesting and build a very resilient organization.

touisteur 5y ago
I used to manage a team of mixed very-experimented / very-juniors and I'd make sure every senior worked on stuff I knew were not in their comfort zone, and assign tasks in their expertise domain to juniors. They'd act as consultants, while checking other parts of the codebase/docs (as noobs) for incoherencies, sand-in-gears, and improving them. Over time, the experts kept things getting better, up to their common standards, and the juniors would level up far more quickly than other parts of the org. To keep things interesting/challenging for the experts I'd have them also reach across domains (to system eng, safety, quality assurance, bids, R&D) and sometimes even overreach (blur the boundaries) while protecting them from corporate-strife. Software is far more interesting in the context of the product, the customers, actors on every critical team. I'd also have them try new techs, or find some innovation/maturity budget for 'pet peeve hunts' and we'd often end up with new tools, large-scale improvements in code, perf, readability, robustness, observability, or testing. I'm going off topic here but I'm sad that 'Slack', the book, isn't more widely read.

teawrecks 5y ago

That's a great idea on TJ's part. I have also wondered how giving some amount of project ownership to low level employees would help with morale. In grocery stores you see every little thing optimized by a marketing team; from the way products are stacked, to what the cashier is allowed to say to you. But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? I think we need to let workers be more creative. Give them a reason to feel invested in what they're doing and reward them for trying hard. You can find what they're good at over time, the hard part is making them feel like what they do matters. It seems like modern management theory has gone out of its way to optimize out the impact that any one low level employee can have on the company. And that makes sense when the goal is to make money. But what you're left with is a society full of people in mind numbing dead end jobs developing psychological issues.

tikhonj 5y ago
> But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does—I've been to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of the specific decorations seemed to be unique per store with nice local details. Of course, this could still be done in a totally top-down way—hiring local consultants or something—but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that was done by the store employees. > And that makes sense when the goal is to make money. Abstractly, I expect that this isn't the best way to make money. Modern management practices seem to value legibility and control even at the expense of expected income and company resilience. This probably says something fundamental about our culture, philosophy and incentives, but I'm not sure exactly what!
- wpietri 5y ago
  Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching and support are the most important functions.
- perl4ever 5y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Absolutely this. Where I work, changing teams isn’t frowned upon. I was in one role for a few years, then moved to another. I know the systems that are used most widely, the data, the business, I know a particular side of the business inside and out, and I already have important relationships and lines of communication. And now things are interesting again.

cheriot 5y ago

This. Most companies pay lip service to internal mobility, but I still see managers trying to talk people out of it (presumably so they don't have to hire and ramp up a replacement).

quanticle 5y ago
And that ends up being self-defeating over the long term, because oftentimes the developer will quit the company entirely if their requests for internal transfers are stymied for too long.

cjvirtucio 5y ago

This approach reminds me of the DevOps practice of breaking down information silos: make everyone learn a little bit of everything so that no one becomes a risk.

Justsignedup 5y ago

I worked with an engineer. She told me that when working at her previous company they permitted you to switch teams every 2 years. Every 2 years she would take that opportunity and got to work on a huge variety of projects with lots of different people. Some of them good, some of them not. It kept her there for 12 years or so.

wkimeria 5y ago
I suspect there is a correlation between companies that have a culture of letting engineers change roles/departments (and a clear process for doing so) and retention/average tenure.
- hunter321 5y ago
  As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.
  - mcast 5y ago
    That's untrue, a manager can put their employee into a performance improvement program (without even needing to inform them) which would block them from any internal transfers.
    - Thiez 5y ago
      How does a pip effect improved performance when the employee isn't even aware they're in one? Is trying to switch teams the only way to discover that, or are there other indirect ways?
      - wombatpm 5y ago
        But HR sees it as a way to prevent a subpar employee from escaping the natural HR process. The fact that you have not been informed yet is just a failure of current management to follow process, but does not obsolve you of your subpar performance. HR is there for the company, not for you.

xanaxagoras 5y ago

Something that really helps me at my job is I have 2 primary roles that kind of wax and wane. When I get bored with one, there's always something to do in the other.

randall 5y ago

This is something I love about Facebook, fwiw. Engineers have tremendous liquidity in movement.

jonathankoren 5y ago
True, but Facebook also reorgs every six months, moving team responsibilities across orgs and cities all the time. Surprise! Your team is shutting down and being moved to New York! Go back to the dating pool! FB is a company that is successful in spite of all its internal failures.

tintt 5y ago

Didn’t know that about Trader Joe’s, it’s really smart. To your point: for many companies out there it may be easier to raise compensation a bit rather than to figure out interesting tasks for their engineering force. Business usually wants its employees to solve specific problems, most of them mundane.

baxtr 5y ago

I worked for a company where devs would rebel because teams were partly re-shuffled at the beginning of a new year! I guess people are different.

wpietri 5y ago
Yeah, I don't think it really has to be mandatory, but it certainly should be allowed and encouraged. In the case where people were objecting to being re-shuffled, did they get to pick where they went? Or were they just told? a little agency can help a lot.
- baxtr 5y ago
  In the first year we just told people, which was obviously very stupid in hindsight. In the second year, we had a survey where devs could say what their preference was: (a) team/specific devs (b) topic (c) none That worked pretty well.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Glad to hear it!

austinl 5y ago

I stayed at my previous company for five years, but worked in four different roles across that time: - 1 year doing iOS frontend/product - 1 year doing low-level iOS systems - 2 years as a PM - 1 year doing backend I was never bored. I think giving engineers the flexibility to move around (provided they stick with one thing for a year or so) is a great way to retain folks. I can also say my efficiency during year 5 was fairly absurd (I won't necessarily say overall productivity was higher at the very end, since my interest in the company was waning, but I saved a lot of time by knowing exactly who to talk to and how systems across the stack worked).

lupire 5y ago

A software dev changes between a wide range of tasks pretty frequently, if "stock shelves, cashier, repeat" is your basis of comparison.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

The Japanese corporation I worked for had engineers and managers change jobs every two years. One of the reasons was that they wanted to "cross-train" people. They liked to have a lot of process, and tended to think of employees as "Swiss army knives," that could adapt. They had style guides, and a whole infrastructure (HR and technical), to support this. Lots of training. Not sure how effective it was. I feel that they weren't as productive as I'd like, but they were really good engineers. I had a lot of respect for them (which doesn't mean that I didn't want to strangle some of them; from time to time).

tkgally 5y ago
The Japanese university where I work is similar. Much of the administrative work related to educational and research program management is handled by the tenured faculty, and we get rotated regularly through administrative positions. In the sixteen years I've been there, I have, like most of my colleagues, served on a dozen or more committees and have managed programs for periods of several years each. The result of this process is that faculty members tend to become, over time, reasonably competent administrators with a broad understanding of how the university functions, and that in turn helps the university—a large, necessarily complex bureaucracy—to function reasonably well. We also have a small professional administrative staff, and they also get rotated through positions every few years. They must keep really good documentation of what they do, as staff members are usually able to get up to speed on their new jobs very quickly.

chrismcb 5y ago

Did Henry Ford figure that out like 100 years ago? That people get bored on the job.

tcmart14 5y ago

I am currently a SWE student, and non-traditional. I am a full time student with wife and kids. I work full time and prior to starting school and current job, was in the Navy. Now that I am close to graduating and looking at companies, I am trying to find tech companies that offer a breadth of areas to work in so precisely I hope I can find a place where perhaps I move around. Being in the Navy and working in chemical manufacturing, I know how dull and boring doing the same job over and over gets. On deployment (on a ship), we referred to it as ground hog day like the movie.

Tcepsa 5y ago

One more point of anecdata: I've been with my current employer for just over 14 years, and I've worked on probably about that many different projects--generally two or three at the same time--in a variety of roles and with a variety of technologies (often with some degree of leadership, both formal and informal). There are many aspects of my current situation that I appreciate, but the plethora of options available for me to work on certainly feels like one of the big reasons I've stayed for so long.