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My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at
by deadghost 3y ago
My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.
An example to illustrate what I was working with:
Problem: input validation is too restrictive
Their solution: remove all input validation
For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
- jncfhnb 3y agoGood news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!
- deathanatos 3y agoYou probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s
- Tommah 3y agoReposting my comment from a couple of months ago: At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
- democracy 3y agothat could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))
- mewpmewp2 3y agoThat's called ruthless prioritization.
- wyclif 3y agoI've seen it too. Actually, I'm in SE Asia right now and the ISP I'm using routinely deletes tickets that haven't been resolved.
- deathpanels 3y agoNow that's problem solving!
- psunavy03 3y ago[little_bobby_tables.png]
- throwup238 3y agoAt the very least it makes pivoting from mediocre engineer to ransomware kingpin much easier. Pivot! Lean startup! Four hour workweek!
- nostrademons 3y agoMy company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code. It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
- wyclif 3y agoAre you allowed to say what company you work for?
- mewpmewp2 3y agoDo you want to avoid it or do you want to join it?
- wyclif 3y agoJoin.
- whoknew1122 3y agoAmazon has a few different programs to retrain people for tech jobs, such as non-tech Amazonians, people separating from the military, under-represented people, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 3y agoIt's a FANG.
- wyclif 3y agoThanks. If it's Google (and I suspect it is), what are they calling this employee development program and where can people apply?
- pram 3y agoPro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.
- unixfg 3y agoThis is the reference I like: https://nohello.net https://nohello.net
- tarxvf 3y agoI like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/ https://yeshello.org/
- neilv 3y agoI fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers. And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.
- dragonsky 3y agoAgreed. Just ask the bloody question.
- cableshaft 3y agoLook at the timestamps. That exchange extends over three days on that site, showing how useless it is in a subtle way.
- neilv 3y agoConsider all the people who are naturally inclined or conditioned to behave like the example, and then consider that many of them will miss the subtlety. Especially those who for whom American business culture might be foreign. "Oh, they have politeness and trust-building conventions, much like we do. This is more pleasant than Hollywood led us to believe. It seems the difference is that you also verbalize what you are doing in their conventions. Maybe that's because they are a nation with a diverse immigrant mix, so they evolved that to reduce misunderstandings, and to help integrate people to common conventions. That's nice of them, and I will be sure to emulate." I think the subtlety on that page is tuned for humor to those who already know, not to educate or persuade those who don't.
- zztop44 3y agoThat sounds like a frustrating experience. I wonder what caused this problem? We’re the people leading your company’s subsidiary’s hiring efforts incompetent? Was it a management issue? It’s not like there’s something about being German or British or Indian or Filipino or Australian, as opposed to American, that makes you think input validation doesn’t matter. With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoCompanies can have internal intermediaries. Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there. Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.
- coredog64 3y agoThe good news: Each employee only asks for 30% of what your onshore resources want. The bad news: You need four of them.
- schnitzelstoat 3y agoYou kind of can though. In Europe even 30% of a US FAANG wage would be an incredible wage here. 50% certainly would be. There are other problems like timezones etc. and maybe payroll taxes are higher here too but I think the possibility for labour arbitrage is definitely real.
- everforward 3y agoIn my dealings with companies that had European offices, European workers had far higher non-salary costs that brought the total compensation numbers closer together. Eg Europeans usually had much more time off. The costs of that time off scale with salary. I do think labor arbitrage could work, I just don't think it would be in Europe. I suspect the total employee cost in Europe approaches that of the US, the money just goes to non-salary places (taxes, time off, labor protection, etc).
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoI've had them confidently tell me they verified functionality by decrypting a TLS session even though that was impossible because I hadn't yet implemented a way to expose ephemeral TLS keys and there was no way to do it from the other side of the link.
- alasdair_ 3y agoMaybe you encrypted with 8-bit keys? :)