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Not sure about the article, since it doesn't seem to say anything useful, but one problem I'm having with beginners is that beginners are extremely superficial

Not sure about the article, since it doesn't seem to say anything useful, but one problem I'm having with beginners is that beginners are extremely superficial in analyzing a problem and extremely superficial in coming up with solutions and have to be told what to do in very precise words and even if you give them a list of things to do, you still have to review their work because they might have missed some of the bullet points. This happens, I believe, primarily due to lack of experience - they haven't suffered from superficial understanding of a problem with clients rejecting their solutions, they haven't stayed too many times at 2 a.m. fixing production issues, the haven't witnessed the proverbial big ball of mud coming to life because of patched up solutions and they haven't had a project that had to be rebooted in part because of technical debt created by them. We as humans, only find out that fire burns badly once we get burnt a couple of times. And as a senior I'm completely out of my league when it comes to educating other people - I'm totally incapable of compressing 5 or 10 years of experience into a couple of months worth of education. And for example I have initiatives, like lets do presentations on Fridays, lets do code reviews and so on. And we do them for a couple of weeks, but then we observe that nothing changes and that our productivity dropped, because communication represents points of concurrency in the development process and concurrency represents the death of parallelization, which is incompatible with really harsh deadlines. And because these deadlines are a never ending story and the seniors are overwhelmed, management kicks in to "solve the problem" and they start thinking of hiring more people, which really means even more rookies to train, because good people that have the required experience are rare. And the problem to be solved by our project is so complex, that only seniors with a deep understanding of the problem can come up with working solutions for the core pieces, the number of seniors isn't growing and these seniors also have to train people and to continuously fix the mistakes that rookies did. It's enough to say that it's turning into a nightmare.

collyw 12y ago
And I bet management have no thoughts about giving you a pay rise....
- bad_user 12y ago
  Heh, that's an interesting discussion - management never has any thoughts about giving pay raises, you have to ask for it, sometimes brutally. Developers should learn a bit about marketing, have a couple of valuable things on GitHub, have a blog, have an up to date LinkedIn, etc... then you end up being contacted by recruiters, which is cool for an ego boost and as a safety net. It's then much easier to go in and say "Hey Bob, I'm producing twice the value you expect for this salary, work conditions have changed, so I want a significant pay raise". And sometimes you have to threaten with resignation, which doesn't really work in big companies, because there you have the "cog in the machine" mentality, with developers often being the bottom of the food-chain. But in smaller companies or when working as a consultant or in general when the "stock holders" have good visibility in the value that you bring, it's a very effective tactic. It's also very healthy getting a pay raise especially when the stress levels are going through the roof, as it keeps you sane, because what's worse than being stressed about deadlines is being stressed while you're not being payed enough, i.e. compensation is a hygienic issue and when working in unhygienic conditions, there's nowhere to go but down. But you know, fortunately we live in times in which the supply and demand ratio is favoring us :-)

collyw 12y ago

And I bet management have no thoughts about giving you a pay rise....

bad_user 12y ago
Heh, that's an interesting discussion - management never has any thoughts about giving pay raises, you have to ask for it, sometimes brutally. Developers should learn a bit about marketing, have a couple of valuable things on GitHub, have a blog, have an up to date LinkedIn, etc... then you end up being contacted by recruiters, which is cool for an ego boost and as a safety net. It's then much easier to go in and say "Hey Bob, I'm producing twice the value you expect for this salary, work conditions have changed, so I want a significant pay raise". And sometimes you have to threaten with resignation, which doesn't really work in big companies, because there you have the "cog in the machine" mentality, with developers often being the bottom of the food-chain. But in smaller companies or when working as a consultant or in general when the "stock holders" have good visibility in the value that you bring, it's a very effective tactic. It's also very healthy getting a pay raise especially when the stress levels are going through the roof, as it keeps you sane, because what's worse than being stressed about deadlines is being stressed while you're not being payed enough, i.e. compensation is a hygienic issue and when working in unhygienic conditions, there's nowhere to go but down. But you know, fortunately we live in times in which the supply and demand ratio is favoring us :-)