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There is one thing that works in tech, and boss man doesn't want to hear it: pay a small team of good developers a good wage and treat them well. The second a

There is one thing that works in tech, and boss man doesn't want to hear it: pay a small team of good developers a good wage and treat them well. The second a difficult bug arises in your low-code (or, now, GPT-generated) solution, good luck.

giantg2 4y ago
Yep, the auto-generated stuff is a nightmare to understand. I've found it hard even switching from the old monolith architecture to the new Cloudformation stuff. But maybe I'm just stupid
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  > But maybe I'm just stupid No, I believe the cloud stuff has evolved in a way that is just strange. I know I'm not stupid, and I look at this stuff with suspicion. This is why I'm going vertical by owning my entire stack (except Amazon S3 because it is awesome...)
  - hothead334 4y ago
    Could replace S3 with a self hosted Minio instance?
    - mathgladiator 4y ago
      You can, but S3 has a special place in my heart as I worked there. I know a lot of the deep details. I wish it was cheaper, but I can leverage it well.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I think it's just idiosyncrasies of one system create idiosyncrasies in next system that uses it. Nobody would design it like that from scratch but having only already existing stuff to build on makes the end result more complex that the problem it solves requires
theteapot 4y ago
> There is one thing that works in tech, and boss man doesn't want to hear it: pay a small team of good developers a good wage and treat them well. And have a compelling product ...
azemetre 4y ago
I know someone that is an executive at a F500 who does this with his team. According to him most divisions similar to his require a staff of 150-200 but he gets in done with 50 distributed around the world (mostly Poland & US). He tells me that he still has to argue for his budgets despite massive success and other adjacent coworkers get very toxic once they find out a division in the company pays good wages to their workers. Not only do they get good pay, but the SWEs love working in the org because their leaders regularly listen to them and employ solutions they suggest. There is very very little turnover in the rg. You'd think the success of his model would be used elsewhere to reduce employer costs and increase retention (no SWE has left his org in 4 years). Instead other petty executives get pissy and poison the well. Something is extremely off with modern corporate America.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  I'm curious exactly what that toxic and pissy behavior looks like, and how it's motivated. Is it just because he's making them look bad?
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Seems to be just jealousy. From what I gather the old CEO and CTO liked him and his successes/goals but other junior level executives did not. When the new CEO was brought on they started to listen to the junior executives. They poison the well by stating things like how what he is doing isn't necessary or slowing down their own goals. Just humans being humans. As a result he will likely leave in <2 years. I don't doubt that his old org will falter extremely fast. It seems like well run orgs with less people are highly susceptible to quick change than large useless behemoths. Seems paradoxical, but a common fate at many companies/orgs.
- galdosdi 4y ago
  What they don't get outside of Big Tech is that non-junior developers are (relative to the traditional pre-software 20th century industrial business model) more like managers than like line workers. It's just that the "workers" we manage are robots. But even a pretty low level developer is going to end up making important business decisions just incidentally as part of their job, because it's hard to specify out every little decision that could impact the business without basically doing the dev's job for them. Businesses can embrace that or they can ignore it at their peril.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
The reason the boss man doesn't want to hear your thing is that it's basically super hard to get. "Good developers" are hard to find. Average developers aren't even easy to find nevermind ones that are actually good. The paying them a good salary and treating them well, companies are right onboard with in my experience. The tech department has better working conditions that most other departments. I worked at one company and one of the marketing teams once had to leave a resturant before eating because their lunch time ran out. So they paid for their food and left without it. All the techies just looked on in shock. We came and went as we wanted. But the thing of finding good developers is hard. Even if you target just the folks in the top 50% of the bell curve, it's still going to be hard. And in my experience you get a few lower quality developers in and the next minute you've got someone saying their AWS lambda solutiuon can scale to any level 10 minutes after their solution took down the whole system in cascading failures because it was returning 500 due to the non-serverless database not scaling... I swear to god, even the non-technical folk knew the guy was talking nonsense. And the thing is, these people can and will pass your tech tests because honestly tech tests aren't really good at showing you how good a developer is actually understanding things. They can write quicksort but have no idea, how to figure out the best way to scale a data export feature that is crashing because of memory limits. And the thing really with no-code, you encounter a bug, you're possibly dependent on a third party to fix the bug. Not a good place to be in because they never care as much as you do.
- ambicapter 4y ago
  > The tech department has better working conditions that most other departments. How many departments are asked to check in every single day with what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today?
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    The humanity of being asked two simple questions about what work you're doing. It's shocking. I know. But I've worked at a few companies where they rolled the standup out to otherd departments. If you honestly think being asked those 2 simple questions is not being treated well. You're going to have a hard life.
blowski 4y ago
It’s not that simple though, is it. There are plenty of highly paid engineers who couldn’t build a decent product given all the coffee in Shoreditch. As a non-tech person, how do I know to whom I should give all this money? Maybe a hands-off CTO or a hands-on architect cum engineering manager? Or a product person? Or maybe a skilled UX designer? Or a good infrastructure person? Or a DBA, and in which database? Or should I lower the money and get cheaper people in all those roles? Or maybe outsource the whole thing to an agency? There are plenty of stories of companies who have hired all the above on good money and built an over-engineered, unmaintainable mess that solved zero real world problems. I would argue that instead of money, you should build it with patience. Hire slowly. Solve one small problem at a time.
- ckdot 4y ago
  If you are a decision maker, especially a CTO, you should be able to know who to give all the money. True, there are too many people making the wrong technical decisions and by this increasing the complexity of a project easily by 10x or more. But, to answer your question, if someone doesn’t know, (s)he’s actually simply not in the right position.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  When it comes to over-engineering and solving zero real-world problems, that's mostly a company, management and/or investor problem. There's many startups out there where the primary goal is not to solve a business problem profitably but to build a complex engineering playground so they can be part of the "cool kids" club and justify the next VC round. This translates to hiring - if your job spec is nothing but buzzwords you'll attract the kind of people that "engineer" for engineering's sake and resume value as opposed to solving your business problem (hell, does the job spec even include the actual business problem you're solving beyond vague platitudes about changing the world and boasting about their VC funding?). Salaries need to reflect it too - if you pay too low, the only people that can afford to work for you are those that do so for the resume value rather than the money or the fun of playing in an engineering playground and potentially becoming its lead - with again zero concern as to whether they're solving the business problem. The kind of engineer you'd actually want usually already makes good money and no longer needs the resume value nor can be bothered to over-engineer. Even as a contractor I've had plenty of leads where it became clear they weren't looking for an efficient solution to their business problem but an over-engineered mess to expand their engineering playground and my counterpoints fell on deaf ears.
ken47 4y ago
And/or find a developer who makes your other developers better. I've been on many teams now where basic principles of establishing positive team dynamics are ignored so that people can gratify their insatiable egos.

giantg2 4y ago

Yep, the auto-generated stuff is a nightmare to understand. I've found it hard even switching from the old monolith architecture to the new Cloudformation stuff. But maybe I'm just stupid

mathgladiator 4y ago
> But maybe I'm just stupid No, I believe the cloud stuff has evolved in a way that is just strange. I know I'm not stupid, and I look at this stuff with suspicion. This is why I'm going vertical by owning my entire stack (except Amazon S3 because it is awesome...)
- hothead334 4y ago
  Could replace S3 with a self hosted Minio instance?
  - mathgladiator 4y ago
    You can, but S3 has a special place in my heart as I worked there. I know a lot of the deep details. I wish it was cheaper, but I can leverage it well.
ilyt 4y ago
I think it's just idiosyncrasies of one system create idiosyncrasies in next system that uses it. Nobody would design it like that from scratch but having only already existing stuff to build on makes the end result more complex that the problem it solves requires

theteapot 4y ago

> There is one thing that works in tech, and boss man doesn't want to hear it: pay a small team of good developers a good wage and treat them well. And have a compelling product ...

azemetre 4y ago

I know someone that is an executive at a F500 who does this with his team. According to him most divisions similar to his require a staff of 150-200 but he gets in done with 50 distributed around the world (mostly Poland & US). He tells me that he still has to argue for his budgets despite massive success and other adjacent coworkers get very toxic once they find out a division in the company pays good wages to their workers. Not only do they get good pay, but the SWEs love working in the org because their leaders regularly listen to them and employ solutions they suggest. There is very very little turnover in the rg. You'd think the success of his model would be used elsewhere to reduce employer costs and increase retention (no SWE has left his org in 4 years). Instead other petty executives get pissy and poison the well. Something is extremely off with modern corporate America.

andrewflnr 4y ago
I'm curious exactly what that toxic and pissy behavior looks like, and how it's motivated. Is it just because he's making them look bad?
- azemetre 4y ago
  Seems to be just jealousy. From what I gather the old CEO and CTO liked him and his successes/goals but other junior level executives did not. When the new CEO was brought on they started to listen to the junior executives. They poison the well by stating things like how what he is doing isn't necessary or slowing down their own goals. Just humans being humans. As a result he will likely leave in <2 years. I don't doubt that his old org will falter extremely fast. It seems like well run orgs with less people are highly susceptible to quick change than large useless behemoths. Seems paradoxical, but a common fate at many companies/orgs.
galdosdi 4y ago
What they don't get outside of Big Tech is that non-junior developers are (relative to the traditional pre-software 20th century industrial business model) more like managers than like line workers. It's just that the "workers" we manage are robots. But even a pretty low level developer is going to end up making important business decisions just incidentally as part of their job, because it's hard to specify out every little decision that could impact the business without basically doing the dev's job for them. Businesses can embrace that or they can ignore it at their peril.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

The reason the boss man doesn't want to hear your thing is that it's basically super hard to get. "Good developers" are hard to find. Average developers aren't even easy to find nevermind ones that are actually good. The paying them a good salary and treating them well, companies are right onboard with in my experience. The tech department has better working conditions that most other departments. I worked at one company and one of the marketing teams once had to leave a resturant before eating because their lunch time ran out. So they paid for their food and left without it. All the techies just looked on in shock. We came and went as we wanted. But the thing of finding good developers is hard. Even if you target just the folks in the top 50% of the bell curve, it's still going to be hard. And in my experience you get a few lower quality developers in and the next minute you've got someone saying their AWS lambda solutiuon can scale to any level 10 minutes after their solution took down the whole system in cascading failures because it was returning 500 due to the non-serverless database not scaling... I swear to god, even the non-technical folk knew the guy was talking nonsense. And the thing is, these people can and will pass your tech tests because honestly tech tests aren't really good at showing you how good a developer is actually understanding things. They can write quicksort but have no idea, how to figure out the best way to scale a data export feature that is crashing because of memory limits. And the thing really with no-code, you encounter a bug, you're possibly dependent on a third party to fix the bug. Not a good place to be in because they never care as much as you do.

ambicapter 4y ago
> The tech department has better working conditions that most other departments. How many departments are asked to check in every single day with what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today?
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  The humanity of being asked two simple questions about what work you're doing. It's shocking. I know. But I've worked at a few companies where they rolled the standup out to otherd departments. If you honestly think being asked those 2 simple questions is not being treated well. You're going to have a hard life.

blowski 4y ago

It’s not that simple though, is it. There are plenty of highly paid engineers who couldn’t build a decent product given all the coffee in Shoreditch. As a non-tech person, how do I know to whom I should give all this money? Maybe a hands-off CTO or a hands-on architect cum engineering manager? Or a product person? Or maybe a skilled UX designer? Or a good infrastructure person? Or a DBA, and in which database? Or should I lower the money and get cheaper people in all those roles? Or maybe outsource the whole thing to an agency? There are plenty of stories of companies who have hired all the above on good money and built an over-engineered, unmaintainable mess that solved zero real world problems. I would argue that instead of money, you should build it with patience. Hire slowly. Solve one small problem at a time.

ckdot 4y ago
If you are a decision maker, especially a CTO, you should be able to know who to give all the money. True, there are too many people making the wrong technical decisions and by this increasing the complexity of a project easily by 10x or more. But, to answer your question, if someone doesn’t know, (s)he’s actually simply not in the right position.
Nextgrid 4y ago
When it comes to over-engineering and solving zero real-world problems, that's mostly a company, management and/or investor problem. There's many startups out there where the primary goal is not to solve a business problem profitably but to build a complex engineering playground so they can be part of the "cool kids" club and justify the next VC round. This translates to hiring - if your job spec is nothing but buzzwords you'll attract the kind of people that "engineer" for engineering's sake and resume value as opposed to solving your business problem (hell, does the job spec even include the actual business problem you're solving beyond vague platitudes about changing the world and boasting about their VC funding?). Salaries need to reflect it too - if you pay too low, the only people that can afford to work for you are those that do so for the resume value rather than the money or the fun of playing in an engineering playground and potentially becoming its lead - with again zero concern as to whether they're solving the business problem. The kind of engineer you'd actually want usually already makes good money and no longer needs the resume value nor can be bothered to over-engineer. Even as a contractor I've had plenty of leads where it became clear they weren't looking for an efficient solution to their business problem but an over-engineered mess to expand their engineering playground and my counterpoints fell on deaf ears.

ken47 4y ago

And/or find a developer who makes your other developers better. I've been on many teams now where basic principles of establishing positive team dynamics are ignored so that people can gratify their insatiable egos.