As above - what strategies have people got for attracting senior engineers to join a company full-time, when it's pretty much impossible to match day rates pro-rata in the contract market for anyone other than the FAANG's?
Comments
By HumblyTossed 2021-05-0613:1411 reply I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me.
1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating.
2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figure out a solution and then we present that together.
3. A good team. I highly respect every single member of my team. We all know each others strengths, weaknesses and areas of interest. I'm never embarrassed to ask any of them for help and I'm often asked for help/advice/opinion.
4. I have the freedom to learn about projects other teams are working on so I can understand how those projects might affect the project I work on. I can also go work on those teams for a while if I choose to. Those teams are made up of good people who don't mind sharing information.
5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.
Does the company have warts. Yup. But the above makes those warts tolerable.
[0] I'll take interesting work over tech stack any day. I don't give a rat's ass about language wars. Pick something suitable and let's get to making something great.
A big one I have to add is time off. I've rejected a lot of companies that tell me, "All new employees start with two weeks off per year." Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too. I've been doing this for 25 years, and if you offer me two weeks, we're done.
> Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too.
LOL
I would add that if the company has "unlimited vacation time" it's really important to press and find out how much time people actually take. I like to ask for averages or how much time <executive not doing the interview> has taken off in the last few years.
That'll tell you what the limits really are.
"unlimited vacation time" is just really an accounting hack. It allows the employer not to have to track that stuff and on your way out, owe you nothing for vacation time. It also allows them to say, well, it's unlimited, take it when you want; then the only option to take time off is around federal holidays. It's basically a scheme to rip you off....
I've had unlimited PTO at 4 companies and 3/4 were truly unlimited. I've taken an international trip for 14 days every year + 5-6 days off for 3 days weekends + any fat hoidays like taking off Christmas eve. I'm sure there are shit companies but it seems like most companies respect it.
I feel like the onus is on the employee to ask off. Most people are just too afraid or too much of a workaholic to take off.
By jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 2021-05-0623:252 reply Uhhhhh... so you took under a month off? That's not a strong argument. If unlimited is actually unlimited then I would be taking 2 months a year at least.
By xeromal 2021-05-070:14 I have no need for more than that though. I could take off more if I wanted but I'd just be bored. lol
By BrandoElFollito 2021-05-0819:171 reply Yes, we have about 8 weeks off in France by law. I feel it could be 12 or 15 and it would be great (what children have at school, at least)
By jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 2021-05-1515:00 Yeah I was thinking to myself, people in Europe get 5+ weeks off per year so if my employer is saying unlimited then I would be crazy to not take at least that much time off. Then again maybe this guy just loves working but I definitely prefer being paid to not work.
That's a very important point. My company has always had unlimited time. We just had an announcement from our HR head that managers are going to start making sure you take at least 2 weeks a year, ideally in a big block. I've never had trouble taking my vacation, but I'm really pleased that we're going to be enforcing a minimum, to help folks who are more hesitant to take theirs.
The legal minimum in the EU (and many countries) is 20 days.
I've seen this enforced once, and everyone was amazed that our colleague hadn't used the minimum 20 days. (We had 30 days according to our contract, but the requirement was for him to take 20. The other 10 were up to him.)
Yeah, I think the average European probably takes more time off than even Americans that think they take a lot of time off.
We get 32 days + public holidays, so you could take something like 7 weeks off with careful planning. Most people do. Because most people do, it isn't looked down upon at all.
A friend at a US firm said they told him if someone could take 3 weeks off then clearly the company didn't need them and there wouldn't be a job to come back to. Here it wouldn't be anything unusual at all.
By lowercased 2021-05-0622:52 i remember years ago my wife's friend (we're in US, she was in the UK) commented about how crappy US 'vacation' policies were. She'd been at a place for ... several years, and now had seniority for... at the time it was 11 paid weeks off. It seemed a bit excessive, because it didn't include some national holidays as well, so... basically she had > 3 months 'off' every year. The biggest problem she/they had was trying to figure out stuff to 'do' during that time (visited us in the US for a bit). I think another issue was trying to coordinate her 'time off' with her husband (IIRC he 'only' got 8 weeks paid vacation).
This is good for the company, too. It's a form of fraud detection. When employees take two weeks away in a block, the company can more easily detect ongoing fraud or other funny business going on. That's how a French rogue trader was finally caught:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615...
By trcarney 2021-05-0716:41 Yeah, my mom works at a bank in the US and within her department they have to take off at least 2 weeks consecutively and only that one person in the department can be off during that time for just this reason. They use it as a yearly check to make sure there is no fraud going on.
We have unlimited vacation time I have taken 4 days holiday and 6 days sick leave in the past 12 months (4 days because i was on my ass with the COVID vaccine doses).
I would have normally taken at least 20 days holiday but it seems pointless to take time off to sit at home and do nothing.
This year i have 2 weeks in July and 2 in October and a week for thanksgiving and a week for Christmas.
By Symbiote 2021-05-0620:18 Take a break!
I took 26 days leave last year (4 pre-Covid), and carried over a few extra. Even with Covid, there were opportunities to take trips locally, or just have a day out of the house with no obligations. I used a few days to work on hobbies when friends were working.
When it's use-it-or-lose it (or, in my case, use-it-or-be-forced-to-use-it-in-crap-weather-December), why work?
By plank_time 2021-05-0616:08 Uber had/has unlimited vacation time. When I worked there I took no less than 6 weeks a year and one year took 8 weeks. The formula is one week every quarter and then 2 weeks at Christmas. That already brings you to 6 weeks.
By sameboat632746 2021-05-0616:14 Yup I have interviewed at a lot of companies with unlimited time off, every single one of them seems to have taken less than 4 weeks off. This is what I get at my current company with no unlimited vacation. And at our company, sick time and mental health days are separate and not counted against your regular PTO.
In California at least, if you have X days of vacation time and you don't use it in the year when you leave, they have to pay you for these days. If it's "unlimited" time, you get bupkis.
By wstuartcl 2021-05-073:15 thats the rub, the companies dont need to pay you on exit and they can manage against the average they would have granted in the first place and prune employees taking more. net win.
Also, unlimited vacations[0] are a trap. People end up taking less than market norms (US - 2 weeks) or informally/tribally decided what is the normal amount of time to take off. It also means people work while traveling.
[0] - if you're an employer and offer unlimited vacations be honest about it: set guidelines about how many days people typically take, if people are expected to be responsive / working while on vacation, etc.
By lukifer 2021-05-0617:18 I counter-act the unlimited vacation thing during onboarding (if not interviewing) by setting expectations: "I consider a reasonable amount of vacation to be X(=3) weeks, does that sound reasonable to you?". Then I track it myself and make sure I take every day. (A very good sign, and really the only way to ethically do unlimited, is when a company sets a minimum amount of time off.)
Isn’t 2 weeks the standard within the US? If you’d like longer vacations then Europe is your best bet
It's a pretty standard thing (US) to start with for entry level jobs. What the GP is claiming that is that policies that: "everyone starts here with 2 weeks, you get a 3rd week after N years, a 4th after M" are kind of bs for senior employees. They have a point; this rarely applies to senior management, for example - and effectively you are asking people to take a major quality-of-life hit when changing jobs.
This can lead to conversations like: "You've asked for N weeks vacation but policy is strict everyone starts here with 2 weeks". "I can probably live with that for an extra X k/year." ... "We can do N weeks".
I think in tech 2 week is becoming rare though. More likely either longer, or so-called "unlimited" (which itself is nonsense).
The more weird thing I find in US corporate culture is a tendency to not take the vacation you are allotted. In some countries this is legally at least problematic, in the US it's sometimes a badge of honor.
By LanceH 2021-05-0616:43 Three weeks is becoming pretty normal. A lot of places like to combine that with holidays and say 25 days (standard US is 10 holidays).
At most small places where HR is flexible, the PTO package is highly negotiable and I usually leave that to last and tack on an extra week, as they know they want me by that point and it doesn't cost them anything extra.
The conversation does go like you describe at some places, but others are absolutely rigid. One place where I actually accepted an offer, they increased everyone's vacation after my negotiations (small company). That has to be the most goodwill I've had when joining a team of people I didn't know.
But you're right, I never say now. I price it all accordingly, so they can say no.
By detaro 2021-05-0615:31 In a discussion of "it's so hard to attract employees", you probably should consider doing things that are better than "standard".
By sokoloff 2021-05-0615:29 Standard for many companies? Probably. For tech? I don't think so. We start at 10 days the company picks (the typical ones) plus 19 days that "you pick"* and add 1 day per year of tenure for the first 5 years and that feels "competitive but not exceptional" for tech to me.
We also offer an additional 4 weeks (contiguous) once every 5 years, which is not standard for tech and is an enjoyable perq.
* - plus sick time which you aren’t paid out if you’re fortunate enough to not need to use, plus parental leave
By cpach 2021-05-0619:40 My impression is that allowed vacation days has increased a lot in US tech companies over the past 10-15 years. Salaries and bonuses too.
By lacksconfidence 2021-05-0616:14 Not in tech. We aren't anything special and we start with ~30 days holiday + vacation on day 1, up to 49 after a decade.
By tommypalm 2021-05-0615:42 20 days is standard in the UK but most companies will give you 25. Some also give you the option to buy more.
By packetlost 2021-05-0614:545 reply > I'll take interesting work over tech stack any day. I don't give a rat's ass about language wars
For me, having a Windows (Server) environment is enough to kill my interest. I know several shops in my area (mostly medical field adjacent tech) that are entirely Windows. That's probably more because of my extensive *nix background than anything. Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some
Yeah, my preferences for tech stack are less "I must have X, Y, Z" and more "I refuse to work with X, Y, Z"
By bluefirebrand 2021-05-0617:381 reply I'm kinda the same, except one further: I don't think I ever want to use Visual Studio again.
I cut my teeth on Emacs and find VSCode a decent compromise but Visual Studio is just such a clunky editor. Extremely limited UI customization and code highlighting options and such. I don't like it at all
By packetlost 2021-05-0617:48 VSCode is fine IMO. I'm a vim guy and I'd take vim without plugins in PowerShell before I even go through the install process for VisualStudio again.
By npsimons 2021-05-0615:57 > Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some
Very much this. I can put up even with FORTRAN - hell one of the most interesting challenges I had recently was figuring out how to call C++ from FORTRAN.
But I've been living in Emacs for almost two decades, and longer than that in Linux. I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs on Linux. Yes, I can target Windows and probably anything else from Linux (iOS is a challenge, but I'm looking into it), so I don't see the "need" to develop natively.
By wyldfire 2021-05-0615:14 Yeah, after developing on linux for the last 17 years or so I would never go back.
By Guest42 2021-05-0616:55 I also prefer non-Win environments but generally my higher concern is whether the hardware specs and configurations are sufficient for the loads that are placed on them.
18 years experience here. I have recently converted to startup employee (again), giving up a lot of money in the contract market exclusively because I am motivated by the business case and have a deep respect for one of the founders, who is an actual domain expert and proven leader from the industry our customers are in.
What I find the most difficult, by far, is "coaching up". Coaching down and motivating junior and intermediate developers comes easy by leveraging the inherent mutual respect that craftspeople have for expert colleagues who are fair and supportive. But coaching up is really hard. Because it often requires convincing superiors with less technical understanding and experience in building teams.
In contract world, it is easier to be accountable for the Whole Project™ because that's how liability works and we have full power to get it done. As an employee who might have to report to nascent technical and product managers, that initiative can be perceived as stepping on toes, and can invite being thrown under the bus for their mistakes. I don't have a solution, but any company that can solve this issue and is good on the other material benefits should have no problem retaining talent IMHO.
By marcus_holmes 2021-05-0616:411 reply This is my pain at the moment. My co-founder is new to startup but seems to think that because I can code, I should just focus on that. I've been working in startups for >10 years now, have run Startup Weekends, and have a bloody MBA. Trying to coach him on what should be happening with the marketing funnel is proving impossible.
If I was contracting I would be counting the money while watching them mess it up with a wry grin on my face.
By marcus_holmes 2021-05-0714:26 This is a very good question, that I keep asking myself.
Mostly because loyalty and friendship, and the continual hope that it'll turn a corner soon.
But I've put a date on my willingness to tolerate this. If it doesn't turn a corner by July, I'm out.
By bradstewart 2021-05-0613:542 reply > 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.
Is a big one. I am very unsure why companies seem so reluctant to do this when the cost of hiring and training a replacement are non-negligible.
By techsupporter 2021-05-0615:481 reply I think a big reason is because that "1% to 2% base pay raise" gets hidden behind bonuses that (usually, but not always) seem bigger, plus stock-based pay that tends to be bigger every year (until it isn't).
For me, it's not as gigantic of a deal because as long as my raises cover the rising cost of rent--which it might not this year due to where I live becoming even more massively popular in the wake of COVID--then I am fine with this trade because I hate interviewing and I hate change even more. I used to spend the bulk of my annual bonus and stock grants and saving a little; in recent years, I've flipped that.
By bradstewart 2021-05-0617:54 If I was seeing a consistent 10% YoY gain in my total compensation, you're right--I probably wouldn't care much about the 1-2% base increase.
But that wasn't the case, at least for me.
By tut-urut-utut 2021-05-0614:083 reply Because it works?
With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. And saving for not doing 5 to 10 percent on everyone every year are much bigger than an occasional hiring and training costs.
>With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company.
But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.
>occasional hiring and training costs.
Hiring and training costs are enormous, and they aren't occasional when you're talking about software companies with very high turnover. If you're incentivizing job hopping every few years, the average programmer at your company could be spending 25% or more of their tenure ramping up to full capacity.
>But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs.
Depends on the company. Mine is 100% remote since COVID, has generous benefits, a strict 9-5 M-F culture, and plenty of interesting work to do as much (or as little) as I have an appetite for. I make maybe 10% under market rate, but it would take at least a 50% raise to get me to leave. That's never happening, as it would be well over what anyone short of FAANG would pay for a senior dev, so there are definitely intangibles about a work environment that are worth more to me than another $15-$20k a year.
By learc83 2021-05-0614:44 Right but there's an assumption of all else being equal when making a comparison like that.
Obviously you can get away with paying below market rates if you provide some other benefits to make up for it.
By pessimizer 2021-05-0614:551 reply What if there are identical "intangibles" at the place offering you a 10% raise?
By omgwtfbbq 2021-05-0615:09 Unless you know someone inside the company I'd guess that's pretty hard to judge from the outside or through a few interviews.
By anaerobicover 2021-05-0617:12 Seconding this. I was in my previous position at a little under 5 years, with in fact substantive raises (8-10%) each. But still I jumped 15% immediately in base salary by joining to another company.
By dspillett 2021-05-0614:20 > Because it works?
Only if you have people who crave stability more than they need/want more compensation or who are invested in the work with you (i.e. they find it _really_ interesting). Otherwise it just creates churn, as people need to leave to get much of a bump up and leave the next place next time they want a bump up too.
So it only works overall if most people are in the "wanting stability" group.
This is probably part of the driver towards contract work rather than perm: if you need to switch jobs regularly to keep improving your conditions, then why not have the extra flexibility and/or extra compensation of working contract?
By giantg2 2021-05-0614:15 It becomes a reason over time. The raises are less than inflation, so over time the external jobs are more appealing since those postings have to stay competitive. That's why people jump from company to company every 2 years for the pay bump.
By jjav 2021-05-0619:44 > 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult.
IMO, pay or raises don't matter much (as long as it's enough to live without worries).
If the company culture is bad then yes, it's all about money. Pay me top of the market or I'm looking to move. But if the job is a pleasure and I'm respected, I don't much care for the pay.
What does it take to make job a pleasure? In a summary: respect expertise.
I wouldn't dream of telling our legal or accounting departments how to do their job, they're the experts in their fields. But for some reason engineering no longer commands any respect (pay != respect) so has lost all autonomy. (I say no longer because it wasn't always that way, in the 90s engineering expertise was highly valued.)
Here are three sure fire ways to make me leave ASAP:
"Agile". If you treat everyone as a replaceable cog kept under the daily whip of constant status reports then don't expect me to stay very long.
Lack of autonomy. If engineering decisions are being made by a product manager with a BA in Arts instead of principal engineers, you can bet I'm interviewing behind your back. (Sadly this is most silicon valley companies these days.)
"Unlimited vacation", aka might get 2-3 days per year. Instead, align compay interests with mine, accumulate vacation days and I can take everything I've accumulated. No less than 20 days per year + holidays.
By AnimalMuppet 2021-05-0616:07 Yeah, this is pretty much it. Be a place I want to work. That means interesting work, good people, sane management, and good pay. (You don't have to pay more than contracting, but you have to pay well. I might take somewhat less money to work at a place I like, but if you're pay is lousy, I won't like it no matter how nice the people are.)
This. I was going to write out my own list, but you covered everything I wanted to say.
I would counter that most companies can't attract or retain talent because they don't really want it. Most of the work that needs to be done in the world doesn't require the top 5 percent of the pool.
By mattgreenrocks 2021-05-0614:30 This is a difficult thing for companies and people to accept, but it's very true.
By foobarian 2021-05-0613:39 Maybe we should rephrase OP's question as
"How to attract perm Snr Engs when there are so many companies where there is: 1. Interesting work. The day to day is not a slog. ..."
You get the idea :-)
By m4tthumphrey 2021-05-0614:21 > 5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.
This x100.
I don't understand why companies see this as acceptable, especially when market rates might be so much higher.
By erik998 2021-05-0619:12 The top 3-5% of software engineers do not work at startups. They work via their own S Corporation... Why? To copy the same way most doctors and high end professions get paid...
1. solo 401k - hit maximum contribution limit (57k-63.5k)
2. cash balance/defined benefit plan - your solo pension plan up to 3 million For year 2021, the maximum compensation is $290,000 to contribute to your defined benefit plan...
As governments grant corporations better preference in tax treatment, you really got to ask yourself why anyone would want to be a W-2 employee anymore... (w-2 employee of your solo S-corp is the exception)
Nothing stopping any company from giving you options as well...
Some extra rules and costs arise with defined benefit plans but well worth it.
SV wants capitalism and free markets but when forced to do so with workers the hesitation comes up... but but but you gotta come a play foozeball at work on the weekends... and we gotta share a beer and tell me about your dev friends..
https://www.manning-napier.com/insights/blogs/research-libra...
https://saberpension.com/defined-benefit-plans-self-employed
By adreamingsoul 2021-05-0614:31 Are they hiring? :)
By PragmaticPulp 2021-05-0611:477 reply Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work. The day rates look high, but they have to pay self-employment taxes and health insurance, as well as charge more to cover inevitable gaps between contracts.
It seems unlikely that the existence of contract work is preventing senior engineers from joining your company. To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive or you’re not an attractive place to work.
Without knowing more details about your specific situation, the obvious change would be to simply offer more compensation. Higher compensation can make an unattractive job more attractive.
> Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work.
The better contractors I've worked with all do, here in the UK. The day rates are high. The taxes are the same or lower, health insurance is optional. There's some company insurances you need and you have to get an accountant, but all-in that should be covered by less than a week of work each year.
Gaps between contracts are desirable! Having a whole summer off to live on your accumulated war chest and chill out, it's amazing.
Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting, rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.
I mean, it’s not surprising that people who are doing well in the contract market like the contract market.
For my part, I literally left the UK in part because the industry there was so geared towards contract work or boutique contract houses as the only viable career path for senior developers. It’s just not for everyone. I like staying with a product team and building and owning stuff; I like companies that build their technology in-house rather than outsourcing; I like being able to shape what the technology team contributes to the business rather than respond to already-baked RFPs. I like stock-based comp.
The UK tech job market is very well suited to certain kinds of developers and certain kinds of relationships between businesses (and frequently government organizations) and their technology providers.
It’s not the only way though.
I certainly agree that the UK market for senior tech people is very poor, you're right that past a certain point the only way to keep advancing in your career and keep raising your income is to strike out on your own this way.
I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children.
Ah yes, the "highly skilled engineer paid at great expense but not allowed to have an extra pen" problem. Sounds ridiculous until you go and need to almost beg to get a pen.
Oh this triggered some memories! Yes, I've worked for companies that made you return the old pen to get a new one.
By kwdc 2021-05-072:20 Definitely for me. Having to sign for pens snd pencils was a thing at one place. They later went broke. My contract ended two years before they did, I wonder if it was the stationery budget or the bad will it caused?
There's a potential research paper in this somewhere: "Subtle consequences of mildly antagonistic workplace practices and their effect on annoying the crap out of people to the extent of later bankrupting a company due to the snowball effect."
Been a long day.
By mschuster91 2021-05-0613:551 reply > I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children.
This is not just true for British businesses... it's common worldwide across everything that's not a tech startup. The older the people in management are, the less likely they are to even understand what the younger staff is talking about.
German Mittelstand is infamous for this - they're roadblocked on one side by the government bending over backwards to impede proper buildout of real broadband across the country and not just in cities, and on the other side by 80+ aged patriarchs who still are dictating business communication in an audio recorder for their secretaries to type down. These pre-Boomer fossils are only focused on micromanagement and keeping control until the day they literally die, and the Boomer generation isn't much more modern either.
The result? Humble startups led by young people of a diverse background are eating their lunch left and right, and the Boomer+older generation are standing still, scratching their heads and wondering what's going on.
By heywherelogingo 2021-05-0616:162 reply What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure? What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers, either because they went straight into management having negligible interest in tech, or because they soon found out they weren't any good at implementation?
By tharkun__ 2021-05-072:53 Wanna live in a nice place with a garden for reasonable prices in your own house? Rural Germany is for you. Remote work from there? Yeah, not on 36k modem speeds you're not!
By mschuster91 2021-05-079:53 > What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure?
The rural fibre point was only to illustrate how German Mittelstand is blocked on not just the treatment of their tech staff.
> What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers
Micromanaging octogenarians are who are calling the shots in way too many Mittelstand companies, often against the express demands of their younger staff and management level.
By dopidopHN 2021-05-0613:48 That why I can’t stand contracting. If you treat your team like children they are gonna behave like it.
Also: no accountability of decision. Fire a few people and keep pushing harder. Never smarter.
This does not convey to quality product. It convey to pass arbitrary deadlines with half the team gone and the other ready to switch project.
Terrible knowledge management, too.
By Emigre_ 2021-05-0616:33 I’ve had a similar impression, I think. What kinds of developers, and relationships, if you don’t mind elaborating on your reply?... Thanks
By raverbashing 2021-05-0613:181 reply Curious, where are you located right now and did the market there cater to your expectations of less contract work?
By jameshart 2021-05-0613:23 I’m in the US, in the Boston area, and yes: I have been successful in growing my career within tech companies.
We build software businesses here. The UK should try it some time.
> Gaps between contracts are desirable! Having a whole summer off to live on your accumulated war chest and chill out, it's amazing.
If you can do that, that's amazing. Unfortunately many contractors fall into the "if I don't work I'm losing money" mentality and never stop. Then they start converting everything to how many days it cost them to earn and try to never spend money. I've seen it so many times and it's so unhealthy. Strangely it seems to mostly affect people who do get stupid-high rates.
The most absurd case was a contractor guy in a big corp at lunch with employees from the same team - he was pulling 3x our employee rate equivalent and complaining how he can't afford to take any days off or he'd be "losing" his daily rate.
By compiler-guy 2021-05-0615:28 This happens with everyone I know who is self employed. Lawyers, auto shop owners, repair shops. If you bill hourly, or by the job, it is very easy to calculate how much you lose by not working right now.
By Nursie 2021-05-0613:59 It's true, and you do get into "If I take the week off I'm losing £X!" headspace sometimes. But it's important to remember that if you don't take that week off, you're more likely to burn out.
And it's also important to remember why you got into it in the first place - being able to take significant amounts of time between contracts was a big part of it for me. I intend to take three months downtime a little later this year.
> Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting
But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects.
eg: If you are a backend programmer, no one will hire you to work on as a machine learning engineer on day rates.
This is a big myth that contractors are working on something new and exciting every few months. Most of contracting work is short term grunt work.
> rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.
No its the opposite. Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.
By sanitycheck 2021-05-0613:292 reply I've been contracting for 16 years, had a few perm jobs before that. While it's true that you get paid to do what you're already good at that's the case for everyone.
The difference is, as a contractor you can afford to take a few months off and become good at something else - then you'll get a job doing that instead.
You can also pick and choose your projects more freely and there's usually nothing stopping you having long term projects as well as short term gigs, often working for multiple clients at once.
In the US or elsewhere where health insurance is a thing I would probably go perm.
> Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.
I literally LOL'd at this... If you're great at what you're doing, they're keeping you where you are - and "invest in training" could easily mean a 3 day workshop where you find you already know more than the instructor. No thanks.
In answer to the original question, offer more money than you think you can offer and set it up as a 3 month contract-to-perm situation (don't write that down anywhere if you're in the UK - they'll immediately be inside IR35) so you know it's a good match. Alternatively, skin in the game in the form of shares or whatever - but they'd have to be confident in the business, I've rejected that offer in the past.
> become good at something else - then you'll get a job doing that instead.
I don't understand this. How can someone trust you that you picked up some new skill if you have no experience in it. Do you put it on your resume anyways? How can somone even pickup software sales ( for example) on their own free time.
> I literally LOL'd at this... If you're great at what you're doing, they're keeping you where they are - and "invest in training" could easily mean a 3 day workshop where you find you already know more than the instructor. No thanks.
No didn't mean that kind of investment lol. I meant more like taking a chance on you. I was able to convince my manager to let me work on product marketing and sales even though i was regular backend dev. It was one of the best career moments for me. This would've never happened if i was contractor.
By sanitycheck 2021-05-0613:511 reply > I don't understand this. How can someone trust you that you picked up some new skill if you have no experience in it. Do you put it on your resume anyways? How can somone even pickup software sales ( for example) on their own free time.
Well, for anything which produces tangible output you can show off (I'm obviously thinking of programming) it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it. Software sales? Yeah, no, I couldn't learn that in my spare time - good point.
Personally a jump to marketing and sales sounds roughly as enticing as the time I was offered either redundancy or a new role as a Lotus Notes dev, but I'm happy it floats your boat.
> it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it.
How? What do you put on your resume ? I am genuinely curious. Forget about sales, how do you prove that you can now implement their machine learning projects.
Contractors can be let go immediately with almost no repercussions, so the bar for engaging them is much lower than the bar for hiring a full-time employee.
When I was contracting, companies would generally contract me for a week or 2 based on nothing but me telling them I could do something. If I delivered on that initial result, they'd come back for more.
By fallingknife 2021-05-0615:08 How do you get into that market?
By lizardking 2021-05-0711:18 > In the US or elsewhere where health insurance is a thing I would probably go perm.
The difference in compensation more than offsets the cost for insurance, in most cases.
All I have to say to that is "You'd be surprised", particularly when you get a reputation for picking up new things quickly.
> Companies invest in training
Literally never happened for me in 12 years of perm work, for large and small companies. Discounting trivial/patronising things like security training. I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor, just as I did when perm.
By erikerikson 2021-05-0614:151 reply The time you use to self train is an investment by the company that you are expected to carry out. The trappings of instruction are not what makes training educational.
By Nursie 2021-05-0614:17 > The time you use to self train is an investment by the company that you are expected to carry out.
Then contracting has been no different to perm work in that respect, for me. :shrug:
> I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor
Why would i hire a self trained machine learning engineer with no experience on high day rates when I can hire someone with experience. Ppl hiring contractors don't have time or patience for you to experiment with self training on their dime, I would hire a fulltimer if i have all the time and money for ppl to learn on the job.
Again, all I can really say is "You'd be surprised".
I think ML is probably different, in that it's not something that can be just 'picked up' that easily (AFAICT).
But it's honestly surprised me over the years how often my clients have said "Hey, I know it's not your main area of competence, but do you reckon you could have a go at this?"
By nasmorn 2021-05-0614:06 Wouldn’t we all just rather have someone competent work at our issues? It is not like most orgs can simply hire some perfectly knowledgeable superstar for their next problem. They can just spin the wheel of fortune and get someone who has the correct experience on paper. I‘d go with the person who solved my last 5 problems competently as well.
> "Hey, I know it's not your main area of competence, but do you reckon you could have a go at this?"
If you're already working in their systems and domain, you probably have a decent idea of how you can address it, even if it's outside your main area of expertise. This happens to me, and... if I'm completely unqualified, I just say "I can't do that, here's someone else who can" and make a referral/connection to someone in my network. That's often the harder part - finding someone in my network who is both competent and available.
By Silhouette 2021-05-0614:04 The most important thing is probably having that network in the first place, not just to offer referrals but to get good gigs yourself.
I know a few very experienced people who have looked into contracting or freelancing over the past year either for the first time or for the first round in many years. They have good skills and the aptitude to pick up whatever else they need, but without the broad network that comes with years of doing short term gigs, they've found the market very tough to break into. I doubt they would recognise the talk of a seller's market and ever-increasing rates that we see on sites like HN!
If you don't have that network and people actively seeking you out, you get stuck with looking via agencies (= ghosted often if you don't already have exactly the right buzzwords) or the online marketplaces (= low rates, poor quality clients and high risk of problems with the marketplace itself). And even if you do, I've seen more than one person whose whole network basically all fell apart around the same time because whole industries were hit by COVID.
Today even more than usual, it is about who you know as much as what you know.
companies investing in training is real.
Be it pushing for certification, mooc, internal training credit.
All of that was part of my review for instance. It does work.
Ugh, reviews, another part of employee life I haven't missed!
That stuff re: training was not something that was part of my life as a perm worker, in the UK or Australia. The companies certainly liked to pay lip-service to employee development, but I didn't see much evidence of it actually happening.
One of the things I enjoy about contracting is that instead of watching all the videos on harassment and whatever, I usually just have to sign a code of conduct. Those corporate videos are soul crushing.
I guess the exception was one quiz about bribery I had to take at IBM. It asked me what I would do if I were offered a cook to go with my lodgings where I was staying during an engagement. This woke me up to the possibilities of bribery I didn't know people were getting. I'm not exactly looking for bribes, but my the hypotheticals had me thinking way too small.
Actually you raise a good point - I also did a short bribery and corruption self-driven training thing at IBM, and that one was at least interesting.
The “Active Shooter” one at JPMC was somewhat sobering.
By LanceH 2021-05-0616:44 I would accept a cook, btw, if anyone out there is bribing :)
By dopidopHN 2021-05-0714:58 I received quality training on framework, language and protocols by coworker of that company. Those people spend a good 20% of their time doing that for clients anyway, so they are both comfortable doing it and I thougt it was decent dive ( modules span 20-30 hours )
I was not referring to conplicance trainings. Those, of course you won’t learn a thing.
By blaser-waffle 2021-05-0615:52 Same. Heard much discussion about it at every job, but in terms of actual time or dollars -- nah.
> But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects.
That's not been the case with our best contractors. Yes, in some cases, they were hired for skillsets they already had. But a couple of them we work with, we were happy to let them learn elixir on company time because they demonstrated solid polyglot skills. And that's paid off in spades.
I've had the same experience with my personal consulting agreements. People sometimes hire you for your experience, and know you'll still bring your judgement, experience, and problem solving mindset to the technology du jour and not start from scratch.
> But a couple of them we work with, we were happy to let them learn elixir on company time
Yes thats what i am saying. Hiring rails devs and letting them learn elixir is no big deal and kind of makes sense. But that not really exciting stuff for senior engineers.
Senior engineers want to learn new domains like sales, learn leadership skills, have a say in product direction ect. That to me is exciting stuff, not learning another web framework.
By Nursie 2021-05-0613:45 > Senior engineers want to learn new domains like sales, learn leadership skills, have a say in product direction ect.
Not all senior folks are interested in that stuff though. Some are more interested in picking up new tech and delivering good quality technical work than they are in going outside of tech to other parts of a business, or getting into management.
> That to me is exciting stuff
Sounds to me like you're less interested in the software creation aspects these days, which is also fine :)
By atonse 2021-05-0614:36 I think the key there is the new domain/language.
One of the contractors was a rails dev, the other one was actually just a polyglot, although we had hired him for Ember.js help.
But the project is also a high impact, high stress, and challenging project (COVID vaccination software) so yes the domain, level of challenge, and impact helps tremendously to stand out.
As a tech exec and senior engineer myself, I find it highly appealing to do contract work mainly because there are many options/opportunities, and the ability to take a gap wherever you want. That's why I've had my own company for roughly 12 years.
I do think it'll remain that way for the foreseeable future. Many of the smartest people I know are happy to remain contractors because of the flexibility.
I will say though, that I would never do this without Obamacare (in the US). If not for that, I would be "stuck" in a W-2 job just so I could insure my family. (honestly not trying to pass judgment on people who have 9-5 jobs, I'm just not wired for climbing the corporate ladder, etc)
Which is why I always say, supporting Medicare for All is (ironically) one of the most pro-business moves we could make. It will unleash entrepreneurial spirit unlike anything we've ever seen in the US. The number of 1-2 person businesses will explode. All the talent that's stuck at large employers so they can get those health benefits for their families (even though, thanks to Obamacare, you really don't need to anymore) will get liberated.
By softveda 2021-05-076:05 As a contractor training is my own responsibility. I pay for own Pluralsight and O'Reilly subscriptions and conferences all tax dedcutible. I take at least 2 certification exams each year as the motivation to stay current. This has allowed me to improve my resume year after year.
Asking a contractor if they like doing contract work is a bit like asking someone at McDonald's if they like hamburgers. The answer is pretty likely to be "yes".
No argument here!
I'm just taking (minor) issue with the assertion that relatively few engineers want to do contract work. If that were the case you'd expect some contractors to wish they were perm. I think the benefits I outlined are such that quite a few do want to. I've also run into quite a number of perm folk over the years who want to do it but don't quite have the confidence in their own skills to make that leap.
I was one of them!
By nsonha 2021-05-0613:12 you can start by working in consulting
By softveda 2021-05-075:59 The same in Australia. I doubled my income from going to contract work without even using a business/company structure. Long timers use a company structure for even better gains.
As someone that is employed full-time in the UK I must say you (and others in this thread) have piqued my interest. I am still quite early in my career but the ability to choose contracts (and possibly even the tech stack) sounds like a dream.
Do you or anyone else have advice on how to get started with becoming a contractors?
By mpalfrey 2021-05-0712:12 I would recommend doing your own research on this one. Contractor UK forums are worth reading - http://contractoruk.com
Contracting in the UK used to be pretty good. These days things have changed a lot with further IR35 crackdowns.
I've investigated this a few times personally over the years and am a permanent employee still. Admittedly a few rungs up the corporate ladder these days, but contracting isn't the gravy train it used to be.
By willcipriano 2021-05-0611:584 reply Contract is a instant no for me. I've done the math and haven't found them to be competitive long term after what the above commenter mentioned (and that's before all the headaches of actually getting paid). Most of my peers feel the same way.
By sam_lowry_ 2021-05-0612:072 reply I contracted for 10 years, then switched to a full-time job at a unicorn. Salary-wise, I calculated my yearly netto for the last contracting year, and submitted it to the HR as the netto salary I want to have. They approved in a blink of an eye.
The main problem with contracting is lack of career path and random, not very interesting projects where the contractor has little say.
The downside of employee life is non-technical meetings, personality trainings and yearly reviews. They make me feel like a kid.
I also miss the luxury of buying VAT-free tax-deducible gadgets.
By qorrect 2021-05-0613:53 > I also miss the luxury of buying VAT-free tax-deducible gadgets.
Like what kind of gadgets ?
By sam_lowry_ 2021-05-0614:20 We had a dumbed down MBTI offspring. And a security training. And the bias/unconscious bias/unknown bias training. And a few more that I can not remember.
By JoeAltmaier 2021-05-0613:131 reply Been contracting for decades. Wouldn't do it any other way.
The critical thing is to get a pipeline of folks you know that send work your way. So rarely idle. That was done by working 15 years in the field in a variety of companies. I keep in contact with many old colleagues and remind them I've got bandwidth.
I never made more money than I do contracting now. I've never had to 'chase down money' - never had a bad check, never been stiffed. Had some late checks for sure. Probably due to the quality of my contacts.
By deliriousferret 2021-05-090:001 reply What kind of day rate do you manage to pull?
By JoeAltmaier 2021-05-1815:06 It depends. Some midwestern companies want to pay < $100/hr. Californians will pay up to $145/hr for special skills. New York is accustomed to outrageous fees. I feel bad about taking advantage them so I only go up to $165/hr or so. And of course for assurances about hours and duration of the project, discounts.
By cookguyruffles 2021-05-0612:052 reply You cannot put a price on career-long isolation from office politics
By bavell 2021-05-0613:14 This is one of my favorite parts about contracting... you still have to deal with a little bit of office politics and drama but you're mostly shielded from it. I love dropping in once a week or so, greasing the relationship wheels, and getting the heck outta there.
By ghaff 2021-05-0612:57 Instead you have politics at the companies hiring you.
By Nursie 2021-05-0612:47 Which country?
By whalesalad 2021-05-0612:44 Funny - I’m the opposite. I’d much rather make my great rate doing indie work and helping lots of people versus being stuck in one role with a fixed salary and limited mobility.
By jackcosgrove 2021-05-0613:28 > To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive
I get a lot of cold emails from recruiters and the jobs always seem to pay the same rate, which is no better than what I make.
By runT1ME 2021-05-0616:12 > The day rates look high, but they have to pay self-employment taxes and health insurance
Most SWEs doing 'contract work' aren't actually 1099 contractors, what it means is they work for an intermediary and then 'contracted out' to a big company with a recognizable name (Google/BofA/Verizon/IBM). These jobs are W2 so you don't pay self-employment tax, they usually have mediocre insurance options, and you lose your job as soon as the work dries up.
It's simply a way for a company to staff up quickly without going through as strict of hiring committee and having any obligation to keep said staff around if plans change.
It's often easier for a department to get a req for a senior/staff contractor (and make salary exceptions) than a FTE, so what happens is departments will offer 200, 250 an hour for temp work but only able to hire engineers for 150k a year because their 'employee' req is slotted lower.
By x86_64Ubuntu 2021-05-0613:22 I'm with you. As a QlikSense developer, almost all jobs I see are Contract-To-Hire. The rates look good, but they aren't good enough to justify me having to get my own health insurance, nor do I want to risk 6-months of nothing happening for a full-time position I may not want in the end.
yes exactly. I did contracting when i was single and young. Contracting requires you to tolerate random loss of income, paying health insurance yourself ( in usa), traveling, unpredictable work schedules. Its impossible to afford health insurance for the family, traveling ect when you have kids.
By bavell 2021-05-0613:17 This is currently me. There's no shortage of work and the pay is good but I think I'll need to shift gears to start a family. I don't travel much so that helps but you're spot on about healthcare and the unpredictable nature of this work.
By coldpie 2021-05-0613:43 > ect
It's "etc". Short for "et cetera". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera
I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own:
- My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads.
- I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work that I do.
- Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash.
- If you're approaching me claiming you've seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven't used in a decade. I don't care, personally, if you've done your research on me, but don't act like you have if you haven't.
- My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me.
- I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic (yes, even if it's some fancy SaaS). Don't knock me if I'm not. Most senior engineers I know of don't like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We're probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that's okay.
- Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we're making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.)
- Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.
- A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you'll be fighting us off with bats.
> incompetent managers or tech leads.
This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job.
> Agile is a time stuck and time waster
This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc.
> I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic
Same! I've never worked on anything that I would have an interest in using personally. I don't have anything against the products, and they served their target audience well, but that's not me.
> Stop drowning us in processes.
See above. The so called "Agile" stuff they brought in basically crushed our development staff. It was used as a bludgeon.
Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team.
Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.
> Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software.
One other learning that I've taken from big-A Agile is that it is only suited for teams where everybody is a "generalist" within the team. By "generalist" I mean that any developer on the team can work on any issue within that team's purview.
If your team is responsible for any component where only a subset of the team has the specialization to work on it, team-wide sprint planning actually hinders progress.
In the "agile" environments I've seen, devs are expected to be the ultimate generalist. We have to do planning, documentation, testing, qa, ops, and still write the code.
Personally I don't see that as a bad thing. I care more about ownership, I'd much rather be responsible for a project instead of just tickets.
By g051051 2021-05-0711:55 That philosophy preaches that any person can fulfill any task equally well, which isn't true. QA and ops are distinct skill sets, very different from what's needed to be a good developer. If I'm doing all that other stuff, when does the code get written? By who?
> This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc.
That's curious since "agile", as the name suggests, should be very lean on the process. There is nothing agile about a lot of process details!
Sure, people get too invested and miss the boat, but in general it's not too hard to remind them what "agile" is about (hey, it's in the name!), and in my experience, they usually relent.
By g051051 2021-05-0711:58 You've been lucky. I've seen first hand, heard from my peers in other companies, and read throughout the industry, that Agile is probably the most poorly named thing out there. Just because they put it in the name, doesn't make it a lean, lightweight, easy to use process. So in my experience, "Agile" is not in the least bit agile.
You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment.
There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too.
Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways?
You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically.
Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.
By ericbarrett 2021-05-0613:002 reply From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.
Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later.
You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.
By ericbarrett 2021-05-0613:161 reply Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.
I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.
I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you.
If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity...
... why would you work for anyone?
You're assuming that agile is a "positive spin on the working environment".
In 11 years of professional work, it's only ever been used as a weapon against the development team.
By ex_amazon_sde 2021-05-0615:591 reply Spot on. Often it feels like a cult, but even more often is used as a micromanagement tool.
This has nothing to do with agile practices. Micromanagement is micromanagement. The people you are apparently working for and with will micro manage regardless of any process.
I also suspect that you do not actually work in a team. You probably work with other people that are loosely grouped together. I doubt you are actually working together on a common goal though, if you do not see value in standups for example. If there's no value in knowing what your team members are working on, you are not working closely together,you aren't helping each other etc.
I suspect you have a product owner that sees standup as a progress report to them and that tries to exert their micromanaging power through it. I also suspect that you don't have a Scrum master that protects the team from this rogue product owner.
I would take such a PO to the side and explain to him that if he doesn't stop this practice they will soon be disallowed from being in standup and that they have one chance to stay in standup and at least listen. Meaning unless asked a question by a team member they better keep their mouth shut.
Am I at least somewhat close?
By Davertron 2021-05-1413:06 > I doubt you are actually working together on a common goal though, if you do not see value in standups for example.
It sounds like you're assuming the only way to sync up with folks is a stand up, which is just ridiculous. I'd even make the argument that if you think you need a stand up so that team members actually communicate with each other then you're not working on an actual team, you're working with other people that are loosely grouped together. Any good team I've ever worked on, people just organically collaborate as needed. You don't have to wait for some arbitrary sync-up time to let each other know what's going on.
In general, I'm not necessarily against stand-ups, as long as they're quick and don't turn into status meetings. In my mind, a perfectly reasonable stand up could be "does everyone know what they're doing? Does anyone need help?" and if the answers to those are "yes" and "no" respectively, then we can be on our way. But more often these things turn into minor status report meetings, where everyone starts saying "this is what I did yesterday; this is what I'm doing today..." and often those details are not relevant for everyone on the team and could just as easily be communicated elsewhere in an async fashion.
I feel like a lot of things like stand-ups exist for the lowest common denominator teams. Bad teams don't organically communicate, people slack off if you don't micromanage them, etc., and so for those teams you NEED a stand-up. But then it gets forced on everyone and is a drag for high-performing teams, and good people end up leaving because they just don't want to deal with all the BS. So you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy where what you're mostly left with is bad teams and so it feels like stand-up is necessary or is working. It's kind of maddening.
By jameshart 2021-05-0616:26 They're putting it in their job ad. It's fair to conclude they think it's a perk.
By Frost1x 2021-05-0620:27 Because you have to? Your other options are to be born wealthy, start an independent business (which also usually requires up front capital), or live out in the wilderness.
As the alternative, you try to find positions that don't look like they have a pile of spin buried in them that seem to be hiding something. You look for red flags and then interview the set of employers that is also interested in interviewing you.
You can reduce the filter and wait for the interview processes to reduce false positives but from my experience, being cynical is a good filter to save me time from working in toxic positions at toxic companies. After interviewing and working in business environments, you learn more and more of the spin techniques everyone seems to use.
It's interesring how being critical of business ads is viewed negatively, yet it's perfectly fine for businesses to have full day interview processes, background checks, resume filters, skill tests, etc. Hiring businesses obviously don't trust you and your advertising, why is it assumed you should trust them? Trust is a two way street and has to be built and business relationships are growing increasing transactional and shorter term which doesn't exactly instill a sense of trust between people.
By jjav 2021-05-0619:56 > I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you.
Not OP, but cynicism against agile get me (somewhat) avoidance of the most toxic workplaces, which is what agile is.
Sure, just as for every company that actually offers competitive payrates there are a dozen who just say they do. But it's not like not caring about management practices magically makes a company good at them either.
By ericbarrett 2021-05-0613:483 reply You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly negative. 45-minute “standups,” major projects given 3 points, every negative stereotype bandied about on HN is something I’ve experienced.
Why do I 'defend' agile?
I guess... for one thing, I have, multiple times in my career, been part of technology organizations that have positively transformed their relationship with business stakeholders by getting the business to buy the underlying truth: building software is a learning exercise; the requirements can and will change.
And the frameworks you have to put in place to make that kind of relationship work, to replace the arbitrary deadlines and deathmarches? Turns out 'agile practice' has a bunch of useful ideas for those.
Teams have limited capacity for 'work in progress'. The upcoming work can be prioritized on a backlog. Loose sizing estimates can help us make decisions about trading off time and features. You can only have one top priority at a time. It helps to let teams understand what problem they are trying to solve, not just tell them to implement a piece of a solution.
That's what I value when I talk about 'agile'. A bunch of useful ideas stolen from scrum and kanban and lean and so on that actually help put developers in a position to solve the right problems in the right way, and get 'management' off their back.
I'm also a fan of daily planning meetings to facilitate collaboration inside teams. I like retrospectives as a way to identify ways for teams to improve how they work. I like short fixed-duration iterations which deliver working code. I like pairing on problems. I like continuous integration and deployment and automated tests written alongside the code. Those are good practices that we, as a small team of developers, can use to help one another do good work, and ship working software.
And those ideas are all also stolen from things like scrum and XP and TDD and devops, which are also all 'agile' practices.
If someone tells me they don't like agile I am confused because... I don't know why you wouldn't want to work on teams that follow those kinds of practices.
I do get that plenty of people have been subjected to environments that use things with the same names as these things in ways that aren't remotely agile. But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them is like saying you never want to use a programming language that has strings because PHP's string coercion sucks.
I find these practices helpful, and better than not following them. I've been lucky to get to enjoy working in environments that use them, rather than have them badly forced upon me.
By ericbarrett 2021-05-0615:241 reply Thanks for the detailed reply!
I have to say, everything you wrote sounds great. We'd probably agree on more than we'd disagree. That said...
> But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them
It's not that I've been subject to "a bad implementation." It's been multiple, across a decade, ever since Scrum became a thing, really. Disaster after disaster.
I'd also add that most of the effective engineering I've seen (aside from the occasional uber-productive solo code artist) had clear priorities, effective intra- and inter-team communication, and certainly a disciplined retrospective process, all without Agile or Scrum. In the best cases it was self-organized, because we wanted to do good things for the sake of doing good things, and management understood we were trying to do the right thing, and got out of our way when we were being effective. When we weren't, it was a conversation, not school-time lockdown. I don't think that environment can be replicated by process or fiat, which is what the formalized Agile/Scrum of today seems to try (leaving aside the more cynical cases).
So let me put it this way:
Most businesses do not know how to manage software projects. That's not entirely special to software - most businesses don't really know how to manage anything.
Agile tools offer a framework for technical teams for fighting off and thwarting crappy management that doesn't understand how to make software.
But some crappy management organizations are really, really hard to thwart.
Worse, some crappy management organizations have figured out how to neutralize agile tools, by co-opting them and trying to use them to continue crappily managing the software project. Sometimes they do this pre-emptively, neutering one of the only tools a technology organization has to fight back.
I would love to know what else people have had success with as a way to fix crappy management other than setting up a properly agile 'safe space' for tech to happen in.
By ericbarrett 2021-05-0616:52 This makes sense and puts it in a slightly new light for me—as a way of salvaging some productivity, when run by the developers, Agile/Scrum would certainly be better than many alternatives. I guess that’s what we did in my earlier reference, about 16 years ago. I wish it hadn’t become so coopted by the usual suspects.
This reads exactly like someone who's never been on the development-end of an agile team. You could have said you copied this from some promotional material for an Agile consultant and I'd believe it.
Really your only argument is "those companies didn't do it right", but the problem is that if agile is so hard to do correctly then doesn't that mean there's a problem with it?
Weird, because it was written by someone who's been a working software developer for 20 years and who has so far successfully resisted getting shoved into a hands-off-keyboard management role...
By AnimalMuppet 2021-05-0622:29 Contact info?
By Viliam1234 2021-05-0622:10 I am a Scrum Master, because I decided that if I can't avoid Agile, at least I might learn to do it properly. So I got some training and read some books. And I was confused, because "this sounds nice, but is totally unlike any Agile I have actually seen as a developer".
Then I took my role, and tried to implement the first thing they taught us at the training... but the management said "no". So I tried a different thing... but the management said "no" again. I asked what's the point of sending me to an Agile training if they override all my decisions, and the answer was, more or less, "we are doing Agile this way". My options were limited to do "Agile" their way, or to quit my role and be replaced by someone who will do "Agile" their way.
So now we are doing Agile the way everyone hates and everyone does, with me in the role of the bad guy. Except our standups are 5 minutes long, because... that's the only part that remained firmly under my control. Otherwise, everything is the opposite of what the Agile trainings and books said. The management made a big announcement where they congratulated themselves for successfully transforming the company to Agile.
From my perspective, this answers the question why "true Agile has never been tried". The people who make the decisions, they want the buzzwords and some of the rituals. They do not really want to give up any of their managing power.
To try the Agile as intended... you would probably have to start a cooperative. Or be a very enlightened founder who can resist the temptation to use their power.
By lmm 2021-05-077:51 I've seen Agile be hugely effective when actually done. It results in a much better product that's also more suited to what the customer needs, and therefore much more fulfilling to work on. It cuts through many of the most frustrating and wasteful parts of other kinds of software development at a stroke (e.g. endless architectural arguments). I genuinely think it's the best thing that's happened to my career. So it's frustrating to hear people attack it and especially frustrating when it gets attacked for the opposite of what it actually is.
I don't know how to make people stop lying about what they're actually doing (I wish I did), but I don't think it's reasonable to expect any kind of process to work when you do the opposite of what that process actually tells you to do. (And I'm quite prepared to entertain the possibility that an organisation that actually committed to following RUP or Six Sigma or whatever and followed through on it might be better than half-assed non-Agile "Agile". But I haven't found the HN-endorsed "lol no process" to be effective in practice either)
By geofft 2021-05-0613:28 Wow, I would love to work somewhere with waterfall requirements-gathering processes and change-control documents. Across several employers, I've seen a lot of misdirected work that just makes future work harder.
Now of course the response is, why would I want to put up with that bureaucracy - won't it backfire on me? But it shouldn't be bureaucracy, it should be something driven by the engineers with the goal of shipping better products.
Which is the problem with advertising agile. When a company says they follow agile, what they often mean is that there are people whose job it is to make sure the agile process is followed, effectively making their own agile bureaucracy. That's what scares people.
I want to know that the company is going to get out of the way of practitioners and let us do big-design-up-front if we in our judgment as practitioners determine that a specific situation calls for it.
> You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment.
Fine by me. Everything I've seen and heard of Agile (both in the last company I worked at and from others) is that's it's a dumpster fire. It wasn't created by developers to improve development, it was created by consultants to sell consulting.
DevOps is dumb, too.
> Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean?
That they haven't fallen for the hype and do what works for them.
By sirsinsalot 2021-05-0613:341 reply As a counter-point, i've seen engineer-led Scrum and other agile varients work very well. Low stress, high productivity, high predictability.
YMMV, and sadly the norm tends to be bad practice, but it isn't all like that. Companies with good engineering culture do engineering well.
Companies with a poor culture do most things poorly.
> Companies with good engineering culture do engineering well. Companies with a poor culture do most things poorly.
Very true, but the "good" companies will be good regardless of what methodology they use. And it's rarely a one-size-fits-all approach. They recognize what works and what doesn't, without slavishly adhering to a single doctrine in the face of all evidence.
So... when you're looking at a job ad, what words are you looking for that tell you a place has good engineering culture?
I'm getting that 'agile' is not one of those words, but what words are?
By g051051 2021-05-0613:53 An ad is pretty much useless for that, other than "negative" words (to me) like "scrum", "agile", etc. I'd be looking at the tech stack for things I'm proficient in, or things I'd be interested in learning. Also, WFH is now a critical for me, so it has to be 100% full-time remote work.
By sirsinsalot 2021-05-0614:28 I'm indifferent to seeing "agile" in a job ad. Getting a job or client is like dating ... you find out what they mean by their bio over a few dates.
If I ever accept a client or job, there's always a grace period.
I'm so confused by this thread.
It's like I've wandered into a conversation where people are saying,
"You know, my boss tried to give me cake the other day." "Cake? Everywhere seems to be doing it nowadays. What I would give to find a place to work where the boss doesn't make you eat cake all day." "Yeah, cake cake cake, all the time."
And I'm like,
"Er... cake? The yummy thing that's really nice? Your boss gave you cake? And you didn't like it?"
And everybody replies:
"No, you idiot, cake! Smelly, hard, poisonous cake, with glass shards in it as usual."
I'm standing here, with my slice of yummy cake, thinking... are you the crazy ones, or am I?
"You know, cake's meant to be like this: soft, sweet, really tasty?"
"Yeah, that's what consultants want you to think, but cake is actually made of burnt tires and crushed up bottles."
"Your boss gives you burnt tires and crushed bottles and tells you that's cake?"
"Yes, that's what cake IS."
And I can point to all the recipe books for cakes, and show you the cake I'm eating right now, and you'll all still tell me:
"Well every cake I've ever been given smelled of burning rubber and made my mouth bleed, so I don't want to work anywhere that advertises that they give employees cake any more." "You sound just like the last guy who gave me cake."
I mean, I get why that kind of experience might make you cynical, but I don't understand this desire to wallow in the belief that anyone who tells you it doesn't have to be like that must be lying or selling something.
"And chocolate's awful too."
Really? The same asshole who has gaslit you about what cake is has lied to you about chocolate too?
I'm so sorry for you. Please. Let someone help.
Have some cake.
> I don't understand this desire to wallow in the belief that anyone who tells you it doesn't have to be like that must be lying or selling something.
Because literally every time we've encountered cake it's a painful and disgusting experience.
It's more like you've been given something that's been called cake, but is actually not cake. Whoever baked it realized that the recipe for cake could never work, so they changed it into something that would, and told you that was "real" cake.
Yes, I believe you have been subjected to that abuse.
But... the point of my metaphor is: cake does exist. It's real. You can make your own! The recipes are available! They do work! The fact that people have convinced you that cake doesn't exist is a reflection on them, not on me.
You are trying to convince me - a person who is eating a cake right now - that cake is a lie. And for some reason you seem really angry with me about it.
By g051051 2021-05-071:35 Angry? That's an odd assessment. I'm angry at the people that make and sell LieCake, and how they've deluded you into thinking that cake is a sweet, tasty treat. The key point for you to take away, is that it's remarkably hard to make an edible cake. It should be clear that you're in the minority (in this thread) of having received something edible when many others have been given burnt tires and glass.
It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way.
However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
By rhodozelia 2021-05-0617:221 reply The code I write is going to be used for 20-30 years, and then when the platform is replaced I assume someone will read the code to see what they have to do to get the system working on the new platform. I have documentation for end-users and documentation for maintenance / troubleshooters and zoomed out documentation that explains the problems and approaches taken, and sometimes justifying any tradeoffs.
If code is temporary then it might not be worth the effort to document, but my documentation is what everybody except one person 20 years from now sees along with the user interface, so for my application the code doesn’t matter and the documentation matters quite a bit!
By junon 2021-05-0619:44 I was more referring to how the code works and development practices/codebase layout/etc, not end-user documentation.
I'll take that as a yes.
So I wonder how you feel about:
Individuals and interactions VS processes and tools
Customer collaboration VS contract negotiation
Responding to change VS following a plan
They're all important. I don't really see the point in chosing one or the other.
By water8 2021-05-0620:08 You have to pick one or the other when choosing your development strategy. If you focus on customer collaboration, you could end up giving away too many freebee features that should have been feature requests and billed.
If you have a design iteration plan, how do you respond to a showstopper that makes the plan infeasible if you are on a strictly waterfall design plan?
Each has it's trade offs so you can't always pick one or the other willy-nilly or else you don't have a design strategy at all
By water8 2021-05-0614:48 I get a lot less grief from the people who pay the bills this way.
By dboreham 2021-05-0613:30 You're hired!
By junon 2021-05-0615:23 I disagree. The only shooting-myself-in-the-foot I've done is to accept positions at companies with agile.
It just doesn't work.
By heywherelogingo 2021-05-0616:251 reply "self-organize" - oh, sooner or later you're in for a treat. Agile coach: "Everybody go to the meeting room, you're going to self-organize. This is how you're going to do it...". I've not yet met an agile coach with the intelligence to parse what they're regurgitating. The only time I've seen agile work was pre-Agile when it had nothing to do with Agile.
By tharkun__ 2021-05-080:27 Then you've been with the wrong ones. Here's what my favourite agile coach does first thing in his courses. I've seen him consistently do this over many many times I've seen/participated in his courses:
He runs a self organization exercise!
You laugh now because you imagine it the way you described it.
Well actually the first thing he does is to appoint someone as 'the worst micro manager in the world' and asks them to sort participant's by number of years of experience with agile development. He times this with a stop watch.
When that's done he simply states that he wants participants to self organize standing next to each other sorted from one end to the other by number of years of experience in software development now. He then stands somewhere in the middle of the room himself and just starts repeating over and over "21 years, 21 years, 21 years,..."
Usually it takes a little while for people to 'get' what he's doing but he stoically just repeats his 2 words.
This is timed too of course. It's interesting how much less organized the second round seems when you are in the room watching this. But it's so much faster and gets the point across brilliantly if you ask me.
By whimsicalism 2021-05-0617:23 If they're really interested in talking about how agile they are, the signal to me is that this is a management-run company, not an engineer-run company.
Plenty of engineer-run shops are lowercase a agile, but it's not something they bring up constantly.
By jjav 2021-05-0619:54 > getting out of the way of tech practitioners
Agile is the literal exact opposite of "getting out of the way of tech practitioners".
By omgwtfbbq 2021-05-0615:15 Even at places that "do it well" it usually ends up being a massive time sink. 30 Minute daily standups, hour long sprint plannings and retros. Its hours of time lost each week.
I once worked at a place on the opposite side of the "process" spectrum:
No source control
No bug tracker
No formal QA
No versioning or release process. When a customer needed a build they just took whatever happened to be on the lead developer's PC at the time.
No roadmap planning process. The CEO would walk into your office and spout off about some idea for the product, and that's what you'd be working on next.
And I can assure you the did not do agile or scrum. Wasn't a really great place to work. Very chaotic and everything was a fire to put out. Lots of turnover and burnout too. Would not recommend. There's a sweet spot in the middle of the 'process' spectrum.
By topkai22 2021-05-0616:17 I interned in the software process group for a defense company building sattelites. It had the other extreme of the process spectrum- true waterfall/CMMI processes in place, but they were so painful that people just did work and then figured out how to claim they followed the process afterwards. They actually had a couple good processes that I walked away with (different levels of formality for code reviews, structured and a risk based QA processes), but overall it was about frustration and a molasses like movement. I was glad to end up on consumer software for a while after college.
By npsimons 2021-05-0616:11 > Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.
OTOH, there are groups that don't have their shit together. I fought tooth and nail to try to get continuous integration up and running at the last project I worked on, and it was just so fucking frustrating trying to get people to change. They recognized the need and the benefit, but wouldn't take any action to actually implement it.
And now they're actually looking to abandon Gitlab "because it corrupted one of the repositories." They're going to go to a direct git repo and someone proposed building their own CI from scratch out of cronjobs and such.
By Cederfjard 2021-05-0612:571 reply > Agile is a time stuck and time waster
How do you prefer to organize larger software development efforts that have to be coordinated with other business processes?
By TimTheTinker 2021-05-0613:143 reply Anything that treats software development as an iterative research and development process, lets engineers self-organize, respects their time, and respects that time estimate certainty is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.
And many companies filled with employees with "Agile" in their job title have probably never read it.
By Cederfjard 2021-05-0614:471 reply Sure, but the top-level comment’s stated point wasn’t that, but rather that Agile is a waste of time, period. So I’m curious what other ways of working handle these kinds of projects better.
Edit: This is a genuine question, I'd be very keen to hear concrete ideas on how to work better.
Identify the problems first. Everyone is searching for a solution when half the time they don't even know what the problems are.
Sure, releases might be slow. Why, though? Is it because you're not letting your engineers fix broken windows? How long does it take for PRs to get reviewed? If a long time, why? Do your engineers even know how to make proper commits? Are your PRs more than about 100 changes on average? Are you building your product from a prototype a non-programmer made? etc.
There is no silver bullet, period. Searching for one indicates you're looking for workarounds to fundamental issues on your team.
By jameshart 2021-05-0713:30 I wonder if this is just a matter of having a very different frame of reference.
Before agile became widespread, when someone said "We have a problem with slow releases" they meant "we schedule each release 18 months out and yet it always ships 6 to 12 months late."
Now that agile practices are widespread in the industry, when someone says "we have a problem with slow releases" they often mean something like "sometimes the time from code change to it being in live in prod is more than a couple of days," or maybe "the CD job sometimes takes more than 20 minutes to push things to production."
The problems you are describing above are problems that can only exist because of agile adoption. (kids today, get off my lawn, etc. etc.)
Your biggest problem is that you have to wait a couple of days to get your PR reviewed? Before agile, replace that with 'you have to wait two weeks for your change to get integrated into the build then another week to get an incomplete bug report from the QA team'.
And what's more, agile introduced the industry to tools for systematically, continuously identifying problems like 'the releases are slow' and letting the development teams themselves change the way they work to eliminate issues like 'we're not getting time to fix broken windows' or 'it takes us too long to review PRs'.
My understanding of 'we're agile' is precisely 'we give teams space to change the way they work to eliminate things that cause them problems'. If someone tells me they reject agility, I would interpret that as them saying 'we don't let you change the way you do things', and 'you will be dependent on other teams who don't share your goals which will slow you down'.
I think we're in violent agreement about what good software development practice looks like. I just can't believe how badly the word 'agile' has been warped to the point where people actively think it creates the very situations it set out to resolve.
> asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.
I don't get what you're trying to say here.
By StevenWaterman 2021-05-0613:441 reply If I understood correctly, if I estimate something will take 5 minutes, and I'm doing it now, it'll probably take 5 minutes. If my estimate is 18 months and we don't start for another year, my estimate is worthless.
By 3np 2021-05-070:40 Ah, makes perfect sense. My brain was glitching a bit trying to make sense of it as "Anything that [...] is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon"
By Cederfjard 2021-05-0614:451 reply If Agile doesn’t achieve those things, which it explicitly is meant to do, are you familiar with any other methodology or set of guidelines that does?
By TimTheTinker 2021-05-0621:17 Big-A Agile and Scrum don't do such a great job, but the principles of agility do.
There's a book called Accelerate that describes and prescribes proven values and techniques that promote agility.
Also, Don Reinertsen is awesome - check out his books on running a software organization based on lean principles.
By nsonha 2021-05-0613:21 There are great companies out there who not only are remote first but also works distributed and async, like github and gitlab. Per your point about managers there is also the concept of "Manager of one" for being own manager in these companies.
