7 ms·

I seriously struggle to tell the difference between certain types of low quality candidates during interviews and people that just bounce around looking for the

by verelo 3y ago

I seriously struggle to tell the difference between certain types of low quality candidates during interviews and people that just bounce around looking for the next shiny thing. I say this as a manager/developer/founder that comes from a very hands on background. The obvious low quality candidate that is east to spot is the person that cannot answer the first question i always ask (write me a function, in any language, that takes an array of ints and returns the sum - half don’t ever pass this question the other 25% fail to consider or be able to discuss what might go wrong at runtime), the majority though sound very smart, can code, but put into a team just want to fixate on issues that serve zero value to the end user. Oh and i should add, when you tell certain developer personas things like: youre not here to decide what problems to solve, youre here to solve the problems the product team wants solved (they think about this all day, let them do their jobs) they get all upset and moody. I always encourage other devs to speak up about solutions and opportunity but we need to let each player in the team do their position, if we try do it all then this stops being a team. This to me feels like the reason we have a billion js frameworks and why no one wants to hand roll an api, but would rather fight with Apollo for hours. Being a developer has turned into a pseudo academic task, but with no interest in the process behind research. It’s such a shitfest out there, and frankly, I’m pretty over managing these folks. I’ve been doing contract work for about 12 months now and it’s been a fresh experience that I’m hoping continues for a while to come. Plug: if i sound like the kind of person you want helping with something feel free to ping me.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
I understand what you mean, and after several tours of duty across FAANGs and startups I think the bouncing-around tends to me less of an individual characteristic and more of a symptom of organizational dysfunction. For startups, the landscape within a given role tends to vary drastically year over year. Some folks like being employee #10 but don't want to hang around past employee #20. Other folks like being employee #1000 but out of 2000 or 3000 feel overwhelmed. Organizations these days hire, especially where employment is at-will, with the expectation that their staff are fungible (they're not) and can be rearranged at the drop of a hat (which happens often). One project can be a blast, and if the next one isn't then the grass is indeed often greener on the other side -- at least in our industry. Some of my best hires have been folks who have never stuck around at previous places for more than 6-9 months over the course of several years. On the whole, it's all a total crapshoot.
- verelo 3y ago
  Your last sentence for me is it: total crapshoot. Agreed, it’s so hard to tell. I try hire more for personality and general intelligence and assume we can teach process and new tools. Historically I’ve attempted to tell developers what you said upfront, that some projects will suck but I’ll do my best to make sure you’re not always on the sucky work. I think managers often forget that cycling people in and out of fun roles is important for retention, just as is pay etc. There is some value in expectation setting around “I’m not going to abandon you in the shit forever, but at times you’ll be in the shit and so will i, and i appreciate you sticking with me and will do everything i can to reward that” Ted Lasso kinda stuff…but it’s not all worthless even if it doesn’t work 100% of the time.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    I have definitely noticed that fewer and fewer managers are fostering that type of relationship with their team. Seems like managers are doing the same, and hopping from ship to ship. I've recently seen some managers totally throw folks under the bus -- otherwise very good folks too. But otherwise I agree. The market has been quick to hire and fire which makes building and retaining talent difficult. The instability of the last several years has really left things in a seemingly universal bad state.
    - verelo 3y ago
      That’s a good point. I guess this is just how it goes right now. I’ve found that retaining members on a team is the best hack for high performance. You need management bought into paying them well and giving you some autonomy around HR processes and what you work on, but if you can do it i believe the returns are real.
happytiger 3y ago
That is some deeply targeted recruiting my friend. ;)
- verelo 3y ago
  Lol, yeah honestly wasn’t the plan but adding the plug felt like an opportune moment.
uoaei 3y ago
If I can be blunt, you sound like the kind of person who manages purely top-down and makes what could be an interesting and engaging workplace into corporate drudgery.
- verelo 3y ago
  And that’s kind of the point right? I mean, it’s very hard to be that honest and reflective with one’s self but everyone has their preferences of style, engagement tactics etc, and it’s very hard to get right. I truly hope your impression isn’t reality but all i can say is in certain settings it’s worked great, in others it’s been meh. I’m subject to the same issues we all experience here.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I appreciate your candor and self-reflection. I want to encourage more of it. I'm curious what you mean -- worked great for what aspect? Short-term bottom-line targets for the company at the expense of workers, or long-term culture-supported productivity ones that benefit both company and worker? I suppose if you have a team of people who treat work as "doing homework for the rest of your life" (and quite a few SWEs never grow out of this mindset) then you can help them stunt their growth and extract whatever you want out of them for the company's sake. It's been my experience that typically the real movers and shakers need more than that to thrive, and they need to feel like they're thriving to stick around. I worked too long in a dessicated environment because the people who were insightful and good at their jobs were told to shut up and grind. They left for places where they could have more agency and feel like part of a team that values their input.
    - verelo 3y ago
      All good, i try not take things too seriously. Appreciate your bluntness and curiosity. Most of my career has been with early stage tech but I’ve also been in companies of thousands. I think I’m best cast in teams of 5-20 and I’ve found I’ve done well building good culture around working within the limits of what the business needs (realistic costing, time estimates, alignment to product vision) while finding ways to intertwine the quality developers want to see in their own work with the objectives of product and the leadership team. I think to try put it in simpler terms, the best people want an environment where they can do their best work. The question i encourage people to ask themselves is if they actually know what that environment looks like? Often they have an idea of what’s worked best so far, but not what is optimal. I like having discussions around that as you can go from there to a) learn from their perspective and see if you can include part of that in the environment you’re presently operating under and b) determine if that’s a good near team goal or long term goal for the current environment and set realistic expectations with that individual as to not “bait and switch” them. I really see little point wasting someone’s time with promises of utopia when you’ve got a team that just isn’t working…that’ll end predictably. I’ve said before my best skill has been building small teams of very bright people, retaining them and out performing larger teams. It’s pretty trivial to out perform larger teams if you can retain people, but to retain them they need to like what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
floor2 3y ago
> youre not here to decide what problems to solve, youre here to solve the problems the product team wants solved they get all upset and moody Please be very up front that you hold this view when recruiting, it will be better for everyone. This may need to be an "agree to disagree" situation, but my experience goes completely the opposite direction of what you're suggesting here. One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. We've recreated all the dysfunctions of the "pointy haired boss" just now with a PM title instead. The 90s had the trope of incompetent business/managerial class folks being in charge and engineers being expected to do as they were told. Then in the 00s/10s there was a renaissance as engineer-founder companies (Google, Facebook, etc) elevated the status of developers and gave them increased autonomy and influence. This period saw technical innovation, business growth and increased wellness for employees. In the past few years, the people who couldn't thrive as developers realized they could rebrand themselves as product managers and do all the fun parts of making things while leaving the difficult implementation work to developers. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is worse business behavior, worse customer experience, and burnt out developers who don't want to just be a cog in a machine building someone else's idea.
- jjav 3y ago
  > One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. This is absolutely correct. Although your timeline is a bit off. In the 80s and 90s there was no such thing as a product manager. At least, I never met or heard of one. If any existed, they were rare as hens teeth. Engineering was driven by engineering. Thus craftsmanship mattered and it was a very fulfilling job. Engineers were expected to define the product and had the authority and responsibility to do it. The PMs started to appear in the 00s and spread like wildfire in the 2010s. Now they almost outnumber engineering. Engineers own nothing and are expected to like it.
- happytiger 3y ago
  This is exactly correct. We have seen “market maturity” which basically means “tech companies are now run on modern management theory” and that theory, frankly, is wrong. Open doors, frank discussions, flat hierarchy, hacking culture, planning at the edge, and personal relationships all took a dive. Performance plans, recruiters, mid-level managers, central planning and product management overuse exploded. Somewhere around 2014-2017 working in a tech company started to be indistinguishable from working in any other Enterprise. Now a lot of that seems to be the result of all the pioneers leaving the industry and the settlers arriving. There was a point around 2012-13 where Ivy League grads stopped going to McKinsey and started going to the valley, and they brought all their management theory with them.

by verelo 3y ago

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

I understand what you mean, and after several tours of duty across FAANGs and startups I think the bouncing-around tends to me less of an individual characteristic and more of a symptom of organizational dysfunction. For startups, the landscape within a given role tends to vary drastically year over year. Some folks like being employee #10 but don't want to hang around past employee #20. Other folks like being employee #1000 but out of 2000 or 3000 feel overwhelmed. Organizations these days hire, especially where employment is at-will, with the expectation that their staff are fungible (they're not) and can be rearranged at the drop of a hat (which happens often). One project can be a blast, and if the next one isn't then the grass is indeed often greener on the other side -- at least in our industry. Some of my best hires have been folks who have never stuck around at previous places for more than 6-9 months over the course of several years. On the whole, it's all a total crapshoot.

verelo 3y ago
Your last sentence for me is it: total crapshoot. Agreed, it’s so hard to tell. I try hire more for personality and general intelligence and assume we can teach process and new tools. Historically I’ve attempted to tell developers what you said upfront, that some projects will suck but I’ll do my best to make sure you’re not always on the sucky work. I think managers often forget that cycling people in and out of fun roles is important for retention, just as is pay etc. There is some value in expectation setting around “I’m not going to abandon you in the shit forever, but at times you’ll be in the shit and so will i, and i appreciate you sticking with me and will do everything i can to reward that” Ted Lasso kinda stuff…but it’s not all worthless even if it doesn’t work 100% of the time.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  I have definitely noticed that fewer and fewer managers are fostering that type of relationship with their team. Seems like managers are doing the same, and hopping from ship to ship. I've recently seen some managers totally throw folks under the bus -- otherwise very good folks too. But otherwise I agree. The market has been quick to hire and fire which makes building and retaining talent difficult. The instability of the last several years has really left things in a seemingly universal bad state.
  - verelo 3y ago
    That’s a good point. I guess this is just how it goes right now. I’ve found that retaining members on a team is the best hack for high performance. You need management bought into paying them well and giving you some autonomy around HR processes and what you work on, but if you can do it i believe the returns are real.

happytiger 3y ago

That is some deeply targeted recruiting my friend. ;)

verelo 3y ago
Lol, yeah honestly wasn’t the plan but adding the plug felt like an opportune moment.

uoaei 3y ago

If I can be blunt, you sound like the kind of person who manages purely top-down and makes what could be an interesting and engaging workplace into corporate drudgery.

verelo 3y ago
And that’s kind of the point right? I mean, it’s very hard to be that honest and reflective with one’s self but everyone has their preferences of style, engagement tactics etc, and it’s very hard to get right. I truly hope your impression isn’t reality but all i can say is in certain settings it’s worked great, in others it’s been meh. I’m subject to the same issues we all experience here.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I appreciate your candor and self-reflection. I want to encourage more of it. I'm curious what you mean -- worked great for what aspect? Short-term bottom-line targets for the company at the expense of workers, or long-term culture-supported productivity ones that benefit both company and worker? I suppose if you have a team of people who treat work as "doing homework for the rest of your life" (and quite a few SWEs never grow out of this mindset) then you can help them stunt their growth and extract whatever you want out of them for the company's sake. It's been my experience that typically the real movers and shakers need more than that to thrive, and they need to feel like they're thriving to stick around. I worked too long in a dessicated environment because the people who were insightful and good at their jobs were told to shut up and grind. They left for places where they could have more agency and feel like part of a team that values their input.
  - verelo 3y ago
    All good, i try not take things too seriously. Appreciate your bluntness and curiosity. Most of my career has been with early stage tech but I’ve also been in companies of thousands. I think I’m best cast in teams of 5-20 and I’ve found I’ve done well building good culture around working within the limits of what the business needs (realistic costing, time estimates, alignment to product vision) while finding ways to intertwine the quality developers want to see in their own work with the objectives of product and the leadership team. I think to try put it in simpler terms, the best people want an environment where they can do their best work. The question i encourage people to ask themselves is if they actually know what that environment looks like? Often they have an idea of what’s worked best so far, but not what is optimal. I like having discussions around that as you can go from there to a) learn from their perspective and see if you can include part of that in the environment you’re presently operating under and b) determine if that’s a good near team goal or long term goal for the current environment and set realistic expectations with that individual as to not “bait and switch” them. I really see little point wasting someone’s time with promises of utopia when you’ve got a team that just isn’t working…that’ll end predictably. I’ve said before my best skill has been building small teams of very bright people, retaining them and out performing larger teams. It’s pretty trivial to out perform larger teams if you can retain people, but to retain them they need to like what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

floor2 3y ago

> youre not here to decide what problems to solve, youre here to solve the problems the product team wants solved they get all upset and moody Please be very up front that you hold this view when recruiting, it will be better for everyone. This may need to be an "agree to disagree" situation, but my experience goes completely the opposite direction of what you're suggesting here. One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. We've recreated all the dysfunctions of the "pointy haired boss" just now with a PM title instead. The 90s had the trope of incompetent business/managerial class folks being in charge and engineers being expected to do as they were told. Then in the 00s/10s there was a renaissance as engineer-founder companies (Google, Facebook, etc) elevated the status of developers and gave them increased autonomy and influence. This period saw technical innovation, business growth and increased wellness for employees. In the past few years, the people who couldn't thrive as developers realized they could rebrand themselves as product managers and do all the fun parts of making things while leaving the difficult implementation work to developers. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is worse business behavior, worse customer experience, and burnt out developers who don't want to just be a cog in a machine building someone else's idea.

jjav 3y ago
> One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. This is absolutely correct. Although your timeline is a bit off. In the 80s and 90s there was no such thing as a product manager. At least, I never met or heard of one. If any existed, they were rare as hens teeth. Engineering was driven by engineering. Thus craftsmanship mattered and it was a very fulfilling job. Engineers were expected to define the product and had the authority and responsibility to do it. The PMs started to appear in the 00s and spread like wildfire in the 2010s. Now they almost outnumber engineering. Engineers own nothing and are expected to like it.
happytiger 3y ago
This is exactly correct. We have seen “market maturity” which basically means “tech companies are now run on modern management theory” and that theory, frankly, is wrong. Open doors, frank discussions, flat hierarchy, hacking culture, planning at the edge, and personal relationships all took a dive. Performance plans, recruiters, mid-level managers, central planning and product management overuse exploded. Somewhere around 2014-2017 working in a tech company started to be indistinguishable from working in any other Enterprise. Now a lot of that seems to be the result of all the pioneers leaving the industry and the settlers arriving. There was a point around 2012-13 where Ivy League grads stopped going to McKinsey and started going to the valley, and they brought all their management theory with them.