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> Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job. I love meeting people from other cultures and backgrounds and experiences. It’s great to

> Weak engineers hire more weak engineers and they suck and their job. I love meeting people from other cultures and backgrounds and experiences. It’s great to get to know each other. I perceive you to be one of those people for me. See, in my travels, weak engineers usually have no/little say in anything of import, except the yucky boring maths stuff others don’t want to/can’t do. Hiring a personality is something that our management types love to get involved in. They hire for all the wrong reasons. They retain people for all of the wrong reasons. They primitive for all the wrong reasons. We have “hiring as a service” institution here known often as HR that manages to meddle with things. It’s not that any of these bodies hire weak or strong engineers for any malicious purpose (oceans razor ya know), it’s just completely arbitrary for us and you kind of just learn to put op with and cope with the chaos. Where you’re from, is there a sort of settling function where after a while, all the weak engineers have cohired all of the week engineers? Do the strong engineers hire the other strong engineers?

throwawayoaky 4y ago
Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts. I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though
0x457 4y ago
What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later product proved to be valuable, so they hire a CTO of some sorts or even just an engineer. They have no idea what is a good CTO or engineer is when they do hiring. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not. In "not so well" scenario, the company ends up with weak engineers that don't have a lot of experience. They might have 20 years of making marketing websites at website mil with Drupal or maybe even Django, but zero experience in software development. Those people, either don't know what a good engineer is or they are afraid to hire someone noticeably better than them - so the team ends up stuffed with not so good engineers. Maybe by luck they hire a good engineer eventually, but a good engineer will look at all that mess and will bounce really quick unless the pay is worth it. As an anecdote, I worked with a very good engineer recently, but her team was weak - on her 1:1 she was told to not be so strict during her PR reviews. Reviews she was making, unlike mine, were very polite and people still complained about her being too strict (she wasn't it was bare minimum). When a strong engineer is interviewing a candidate - they know what to look for and willing to look the other way when it comes to personality. (that sometimes end up in toxic engineering team culture, but that's another issue) I also worked with strong engineers that would refuse to hire engineers that are better than them (it was unnoticed for some time). A lot of SRE complaints are coming because they have to babysit weak engineers and hold their hands. Management thinks that the solution to this is to hire junior SREs to deal with it, but the real solution is to reduce need for babysitting. For context, I'm a sysadmin that ventured into software development and now doing SRE work and honestly, there are a lot of days when I wish to go back to software development.

throwawayoaky 4y ago

Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts. I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though

0x457 4y ago

What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later product proved to be valuable, so they hire a CTO of some sorts or even just an engineer. They have no idea what is a good CTO or engineer is when they do hiring. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not. In "not so well" scenario, the company ends up with weak engineers that don't have a lot of experience. They might have 20 years of making marketing websites at website mil with Drupal or maybe even Django, but zero experience in software development. Those people, either don't know what a good engineer is or they are afraid to hire someone noticeably better than them - so the team ends up stuffed with not so good engineers. Maybe by luck they hire a good engineer eventually, but a good engineer will look at all that mess and will bounce really quick unless the pay is worth it. As an anecdote, I worked with a very good engineer recently, but her team was weak - on her 1:1 she was told to not be so strict during her PR reviews. Reviews she was making, unlike mine, were very polite and people still complained about her being too strict (she wasn't it was bare minimum). When a strong engineer is interviewing a candidate - they know what to look for and willing to look the other way when it comes to personality. (that sometimes end up in toxic engineering team culture, but that's another issue) I also worked with strong engineers that would refuse to hire engineers that are better than them (it was unnoticed for some time). A lot of SRE complaints are coming because they have to babysit weak engineers and hold their hands. Management thinks that the solution to this is to hire junior SREs to deal with it, but the real solution is to reduce need for babysitting. For context, I'm a sysadmin that ventured into software development and now doing SRE work and honestly, there are a lot of days when I wish to go back to software development.