What's wrong with how we train, hire, and motivate programmers [video]

by todsacerdoti • 4 years ago

99 32 4 years ago

Something that's much more worthy of your time and consideration instead of this video is to read up on the history and goals of A. P. Ershov: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/gafinogenov/files/04_14-3a...

  Even more seriously for Ershov’s vision, the Ministry of 
  Education and the commission charged with implementing the 
  informatics course took aim directly at the cornerstone of 
  the whole concept.

  In contrast, the commission proposed that the course focus 
  on skills that would be directly useful to students in a 
  practical context, and specifically not train them to be 
  programmers.

solardev• 4 years ago

This is a really long article written in difficult language. Can anyone summarize?

newjersey• 4 years ago

how many [...] are actually solving problems [...] not a lot

How is this specific to programming? Surely there are more pressing matters if we are looking for BS jobs that don't solve problems.

U.S. health care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion or $12,530 per person. As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 19.7 percent.

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...

This is almost one out of every five dollars in this country. Now that is something actually worth talking about.

RhodesianHunter• 4 years ago

Particularly when you consider how poor our outcomes are relative to our spending.

drjasonharrison• 4 years ago

It's expensive to get good outcomes when you provide health care for a population with many older obese, inactive, and smoking members.

Retric5• 4 years ago

Not to detract from the overall point, but increased healthcare spending during a pandemic seems completely reasonable. I would also expect military spending to increase during a war.

What the US wastes so much money on isn’t really healthcare it’s healthcare adjacent tasks like medical billing, insurance, advertising, etc.

astrange2• 4 years ago

Not to detract from the overall point, but increased healthcare spending during a pandemic seems completely reasonable

Public health spending yes, healthcare spending maybe not. (For instance, if everyone's staying home they can't get injured in workplace or car accidents.)

I've seen this argument used for universal healthcare in the US too, but it doesn't really make sense. Formal healthcare couldn't do much for you if you got covid since there weren't treatments for it, and now there is an antiviral and vaccine you don't need to go visit a doctor to get them.

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

The dirty little secret is that the country's GDP depends on expensive healthcare. Imagine if something overnight dramatically cut spending and the knock-on effects for drug companies, healthcare providers, etc. losing massive amounts of profit, having down quarters, and their stocks tanking (which also tank all the mutual funds and retirement accounts that see them as dependable and good investments). It's an insane house of cards we have built up and expensive healthcare is a sick 'feature' not a bug of America today.

All of this was kind of laid out with the push for Obamacare and refusal to consider Medicare for all. It was a clear decision by Congress that the status quo of the healthcare industry being a huge part of the American economy would be solidified in law. Anything that tries to rock the boat or change that is going to be facing extreme resistance at all levels from the political and financial elite.

anu7df• 4 years ago

It is for precisely these kinds of reasons that I always thought GDP was a flawed or at the very least an incomplete measure. At constant "efficiency" for whatever definition of efficiency is appropriate for a given sector/activity/industry increase in GDP is a net positive. But what is happening in health care is a travesty. From my first real hospital visit (other than annual health checkup) to when my daughter was born the actual cost of care and the billed amount were so ridiculous, billing so confusing, that I decided to from now on not pay any out of pocket amount till may be a sternly worded letter gets to me. At least I would wait for bill number 3 before deciding to pay. Learned it the hard way after I ended up paying a few thousand dollars extra for maternity care. In a span of a 3 week I got 3 bills for the same service all progressively getting lower for some mysterious reason. Not collecting my mail often, I, idiotically paid the first one as soon as I opened it, not knowing that the lower amount is just 2 envelopes down in the pile.

analog31• 4 years ago

I'm not sure it would be a net negative. Reducing health care costs might possibly open up other sectors of economic growth.

Retric5• 4 years ago

The broken window fallacy is tempting but not actually true.

Reducing healthcare waste means people are available to actually do useful work. Consider, doctors spending less time dealing with insurance companies would actually improve healthcare outcomes either because they are less distracted or because they have more time to work with patients/research.

It also frees up money that can be spent on other things.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

It's hard to focus on this video when you're staring at a Firefox start screen, the audio isn't very good, and it's out of sync with the video

mihaigalos3• 4 years ago

Concerning the "Certified extra scrum master" quote from the video, I really like [1]:

[..] if your organization is struggling with an Agile transformation, drowning in chaos, you’re going to leap when someone offers you a lifeboat in the form of certifications and processes and tools. Executives understand processes and tools much more than they grok self-organizing teams.

[1] https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellio...

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

There's a reason startups run circles around not-so-agile but yet self-styled agile corporate teams: mental agility.

Mental agility is mostly found in young people and sometimes in older people that choose to stay humble and keep an open mind about their own abilities and skills. I like to think about myself as such; though if I'm honest, I'm more conservative than I used to be. It's disgusting how much value I get out of young people on my team willing to learn whatever and unburdened by experience vs. grizzled veterans with a lot of certificates and a rigid/dogmatic mindset that regard anything new as a threat rather than an opportunity to learn. I find it very energizing to be around such people.

I've worked with veteran teams as well (like more than half > 40) and there were some spectacularly cynical types on those teams sucking all energy out of any room they entered. Given the demographics of developers (doubling numbers of programmers every five years), finding yourself on such teams is relatively rare.

I've worked with numerous people that had certificates for this and that and rarely came away impressed by their skill sets. Also, I shook Ken Schwaber's hand (one of the people behind Scrum) at the end of a 2 day workshop many years ago that made me a "certified scrum master" and him probably a little bit wealthier. So, I know how hollow that phrase is. Licensed to wield multi colored post-its and sharpies, basically. That was one of the least agile companies I've worked with trying to be agile. No mental agility whatsoever at the senior level. But they compensated by sending all their senior engineers to trainings like this so they could virtue signal their supposed agility.

These days, I keep my teams agile mainly by keeping them small. Small, remote teams don't need a lot of process and can resolve issues by simply communicating with each other. Partitioning teams and keeping the team boundaries informal removes a lot of need for process.

In person meetings are rare with remote teams anyway. So post-its and sharpy wielding scrum masters have no place in such teams. We do have online meetings but I limit them to once a week for engineers and keep them informal: I want people to talk, ask questions, debate, and bond in the rare meetings we do have. Standups in front of a web cam are even more pointless than the zoned out de-caffienated cluster of extremely bored engineers droning on about what they did or did not do yesterday. So, not a thing that I do. I've always hated those type of standups and lots of developers I respect a lot seem to feel the same. I never got much value out of those.

People waiting for such meetings to raise important issues are actually wasting time instead of being agile. Reach out asynchronously as early as convenient. Lots of issue resolution and problem solving does not require having any meetings whatsoever. And when there is a conflict that requires a meeting, have it 1 on 1 as early as convenient and don't burden the rest of the team with unresolved conflict. The best resolution is often just asking "do you have time for a quick call about this?".

Waiting for some arbitrary meeting to happen turns those meetings into synchronization bottlenecks. The longer they are or the more you have of those, the worse the problem is. You solve synchronization bottlenecks with asynchronous processes and not with a "stop the world" point in time where people "meet" and are collectively not productive. Some OSS projects function entirely without meetings or meet very rarely. And some of those projects have orders of magnitudes more commits, developers, and change happening than most corporate "agile" projects. So, it can be done and IMHO is actually optimal and more agile.

zasdffaa2• 4 years ago

Mental agility is mostly found in young people

IME that isn't true. I'd like to know if you've any evidence of this at all. It's a trope too easily repeated but never seen any evidence presented.

I do agree that cynicism can come from older people simply mistreated/abused/ignored too long by a company, but that's directly from their treatment, and then, that isn't as common as one might expect. Again, IME.

nprateem• 4 years ago

It's not age. The reason is that there are lots of large mature businesses where people can coast due to poor accountability. If you're at a startup with equity you'll be much more self-motivated.

Older people (especially with kids) probably just want to get the easy money instead of the risky, long-hours startups.

watwut3• 4 years ago

Agile has been here for 30 years or so already. It is super absurd to still frame it as some kind of new thing organizations are transforming towards from something else.

mihaigalos3• 4 years ago

My understanding is that it's a template and you bring your own batteries, applying it differently depending on your organization.

That's why the focus on certifications is absurd, imho, not Agile itself.

sam0x17• 4 years ago

While this is generally true, I would point out that a lot of teams are always transitioning from [no process whatsoever] to [something like agile] by virtue of being incredibly early stage. This is the case for many, many startups when they go from pre-seed to seed or seed to series A, and I think many would be shocked to learn just how far some teams get before they do any kind of kanban or tracking. I think this may be partially responsible for the framing agile as something new, still, in 2022.

moonchrome• 4 years ago

I'm 10 mins into this video and it's unbearable.

Old farts (more about the attitude than the age, I'm not that young either) talking about architecture/organization layers that make things pointlessly complicated in the real world, cannot grasp stuff like the split between frontend/backend because likely haven't done nontrivial code on both for the last 10-15 years. Probably consult on "architecture and process" and the closest thing they get to writing code is write examples for books/talks. Guys like these are a big part of the reason we are an industry of building complex messes.

thorw73m• 4 years ago

nothing beats pay. Pay 20% more than your competitor.

What's wrong with how we train, hire, and motivate programmers [video]

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