vsareto

Well if you can't, then I guess we shouldn't be complaining about feeding brains and average employees who just want to follow specs

This just sounds like someone who can't write good specs

It's because defining requirements is someone else's job, so if you get involved, you will be doing part of their job while you might already be working at your capacity.

The Agile style user stories that often lack technical details because the author doesn't know enough about the technical details means the developer is the one actually writing the requirements (usually as they are doing the work).

How sure are you they are incompetent vs. just not giving any fucks/disconnected from the job and there to get paid (it's objective one after all!)

This seems a little inconsistent to me.

Is it really their fault if the industry says they are qualified and gives them a job when they are incompetent?

I remembered the account of developers committing bugs so that reviewers were forced to find something instead of just giving the all clear.

You'd be better off pair programming everything and forgoing code reviews.

Sometimes I think the people that come up with this shit are sociopaths.

It would be nice if only the people with real conviction were doing things by choice, but that isn't realistic. Most people are compelled to have a job, and the system has no guarantee of placing you in the job where you best fit.

It's possible he is right, but it is also possible that these traits aren't trainable, and without that, you may not have a population sufficient enough to sustain his ideal.

There's two abuses in this system you have to watch out for:

- being presented under-cooked ideas so you do the thinking for them.

- too many ideas (which can lead to the first) with an inability to focus

There is a feedback loop for the first where people don't dive too deeply into their idea because they know they'll get a lot of criticism.

The second can be bad because the idea or its implementation is never polished.

Comparison to the rest of the market (on both sides) is the crux here, not being 'honest' or whatever (what does this even mean). Isn't it?

That market comparison is fraught with conditions and often only follows ill-defined job titles.

If you take a look at one of these postings - https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/292552236 - you'll note that the way it's written, there aren't any exceptional job requirements here. It's hard to see why the salary range has such a high ceiling.

Obviously in the interview, they could have much higher requirements, but we don't know that unless someone from Netflix chimes in.

For example,

You have knowledge of various regulations and controls (SOX, PCI, CCPA, GDPR, etc)

how much is knowledge of each of those worth towards the final salary? Pricing each of those would add more fidelity to the market's signals, but companies often don't do that. Same with technical skills or knowledge of individual products: how much is AWS knowledge worth at the beginner, intermediate, and expert levels to a job that needs AWS knowledge?

This is like buying a publicly traded stock (not yolo'ing) with roughly 80% of the company information not available to you. That information is there for a reason because it promotes market efficiency. It allows you to more easily compare two companies that do similar work.

This is what is meant by honesty, but the job market hides this information. And the job market is often dishonest because it does not price these things, because it is hiding information from applicants, because that gives an advantage to employers. An extremely wide salary range here only serves that goal.

And on the employee side, it would mean that I can go learn AWS to a certain level, and I know that skill would contribute $X amount to the final salary that I can ask for. I don't have to play games trying to sell my skills for more than they're worth.

They should remove the L4 from the job post title if that's the case, or replace it with (L1 - L7) so it's clear it's for broad levels of experience

How far are they going to go to validate it’s legit if you make one up?

But say you don’t want to forge one for just any company because that might not be legal. You could make your own company with a site and make offer letters that way.

Most people don't know what a $400k Security Engineer actually does to warrant that pay because you can probably find a similar job at another company that pays much less and probably makes you work more. I sure as fuck don't and I at least have one pentesting cert FWIW.

This pricing scheme punishes people trying to be honest about their skill set. Otherwise why stop at the average? Just max it out and ask for $700k. Another $300k/yr won't break Netflix's bank and everyone else is getting rich that they won't care to call you out either.

The GPTs/GPT Agents and Assistants demos in particular showed that they are a black box within a black box within a black box that you can't port anywhere else.

This just rings hollow to me. We lost the fights for database portability, cloud portability, payments/billing portability, and other individual SaaS lock-in. I don't see why it'll be different this time around.

You need specific hardware for Win 11. A motherboard for a Ryzen 7 I bought in only 2017 doesn't qualify.

I doubt any military or strategically important applications will be regulated

Better than companies doing their own thing and not having any restrictions or oversight at all. Remember that those companies will get rid of some portion of their workers as soon as they think an AI can do most of that work. Heck, they did layoffs and started hiring again without any advancements.

You can't trust companies to self-regulate.

Your commit message should have a short title explaining the change and the body should go into as much detail as necessary into why the change took place, I can see the what from looking at the diff.

That sounds tedious like commenting every line of code. You might have to do this if the code is hard to read and maintain though. Most of the time the why is "because feature X demands that it change".

Maybe it's just me, but I prefer squashed merges because lots of small commits are also annoying to switch between and if I'm diving into git history, I'm investigating and have some extra time to understand everything instead of relying on commit messages.

If you do it for yourself, that's great, but you should withhold the benefits of that from the company if they aren't going to reward you for being better.

But why should any of us bother picking up new skills and adjusting mindsets if the author has to fight for a raise after saving the company $500k?

Secondarily, why should the author continue to fix things like this when they don't benefit, but others responsible are also not facing any consequences?

My guess is they aren't seeing how much they're going to need for retirement (maybe it's much cheaper in Finland than the US), or have not thought about it, or have accepted/decided that they will work for more of their lives.

The biggest looming factor is that many jobs in the US are at-will employment, so while people can have good intentions and share those with you, the person or company can turn around and fire you for almost any reason. There's no penalty for going back on their word.

Finland has something different than that though and it sounds like it's harder to fire people.

The trust that’s given to employees will be returned tenfold–or even hundredfold. Everyone wins.

I must be a mercenary because that still reads to me as "we can do these things instead of paying you more". In fact, there is no mention of where their compensation falls, so it would be especially rude to do all of these things and then underpay your employees.

I wish, but those things are heinously expensive for what you get

It is a natural consequence of people who only “develop” by gluing things together. God help them if they’d actually have to write some core function themselves.

That's on the industry for not training and gating well. It would be nice to have glue/plumber positions so expectations are not out of line too.

I just don't see it mattering long-term. We bounced back from the dotcom crash to even higher levels. Same with other downturns. The importance of tech hasn't declined any. There are plenty of tech companies to find good jobs at that you can afford to carry a grudge, while companies have plenty of people to hire from still.

If some don't return, they'll relax hiring requirements until they're filled. Hiring requirements from top companies have a lot of room to relax - easier questions, less interview rounds, etc.

Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?

A bigger population just hasn't been trained properly. We have no controls for that, so people get lucky with disparate learning being just enough for their first job, then that turns into experience towards the next job.

Then they find themselves among high performers and can't keep up, really through no fault of their own.

Some high performers are just natural and born with it, which is unfair to let that affect how anyone judges others' performance, but it still happens too (esp. if the high performer is doing the judgment).

What I generally see when people categorize their workers into high/low performance is from a bigger issue of poor stewardship over the industry and training its talent.

This means I don't actually have to improve, I can instead just spam job applications and get lucky just because technology is such a large industry.

If you can be good at front and back end and keep up with both of them simultaneously, that's great, but:

- you spend more time to keep up with both of those sectors compared to dedicated front or back end positions

- you context switch more often than dedicated positions

- you spent more time getting good at both of those things

- you removed some amount of communication overhead if there were two positions

You are definitely not being compensated for that extra work and benefit to the business given that full stack salaries are close to front end and back end position salaries.

Instead, many of those functions are performed by software development teams.

And they likely won’t be as good as dedicated SRE teams.

But few businesses care about that right now considering layoffs.

Throwing developers at a problem even if it isn’t in their skill set is an industry trend that won’t go away and be more pronounced during downturns.

Full stack developers are a great example of rolling two roles together without twice the pay.

I am baffled by my teammates who seem to have no visual awareness of their code.

I have somewhat avoided this because it can make you look like you're changing things for no good reason (no easily communicable reason, anyway).

I still do it when people have too much going on for a single line though (ternary ops + function calls + string/number formatting, etc which is very common in enterprise-y programs).

At some point that's going to hurt you in terms of the sharpness of your knowledge and what you can demo/talk about on your successful projects when interviewing.

I don't think this is a real problem IMO. If you learned it in the first place, you can learn it again after slacking off for a bit. You might need a few months for the focused effort, which is honestly not a cost but probably what we in the industry call a sabbatical.

It may add some risk to getting a job if your life is suddenly turned upside down after slacking and you need a job right this instant. That slacking might fail you some interviews, but not all of them. Even in this situation, there are financial options and temp jobs to get by with.

I don't think anyone should ever be convinced that if you stop practicing something that your ability disappears completely. I'd put some faith into the idea that you can relearn it just as well or better when the need arises.

There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards

People are so disillusioned to "hard work == comfortable life" that they might not even recognize it when it's real, or be incredibly suspicious.

There is also a separate, much bigger lesson in that if you make friends and/or play politics, you also don't have to work as hard and still get rewarded (sometimes massively).

When you layer all of these facts, it's really hard to sign up to be a hard worker. It feels more like punishment once you learn how easy the rich people have it.