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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions. Which was awesome to see but the changes were off the hot path and the code was much harder to read. The part that still comes to me was when I'd said during a code review that there were other more pressing concerns, the intern said yes but you can't argue against the improvement in time complexity.
Smart guy. Inspirational, even. But better suited to a large corp than a startup. I think a startup 'A' has a lot more to do with attitude about speed and uncertainty than competence.
And the management tier of the startup will too easily color the signal by the flavor they want to see.
My latest of this matter is to separate speed as in fast from quick. Quick as the thing you want and almost always good. Fast is what everybody is measured by and fast mostly just gets you large volumes of fuzzy signal.
It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years.
It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs.
One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they are transferred.
It might also be thought of as a guide as to when to jump ship. If you have managed to get yourself categorized as a C, then leave. Start fresh somewhere else, take the learning with you, and discover if you have what it takes to make it as an A or B.
If a person's tenure in companies is measured in months then they're signalling they're a C by your logic, or is at least raising a red flag to whoever's hiring. I may be showing my age but that sounds wild to me if that's the norm now.
I've seen a B player on my team turn into an A player in just the last couple of months
But I do agree with you about the C thing, if youre a C you need to move immediately to at least a B, otherwise leave
Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers. They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed.
I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant.
The only reason we ever hired a junior was because we saw potential and thought they could grow into solid colleagues.
Working for companies, as a manager, I have. I have said to my management that is what my intention was, and subsequently hired people for exactly that.
Stock options which vested over 5 years were meant to make it worth everyone's time.
I would be careful with this one. As the examples listed after, such as an on-call incident or extra review of code isn’t necessarily on the n00b. Maybe I’m biased being only 4 years into my career but engagement on stuff you did wrong or even points on what you can do better are extremely valuable. From my standpoint, screwing up isn’t a problem if you can engage with the team to recover and learn from it.
Also the "Your manager or your tech lead could finish those in much less time and with much less hassle than it takes to help you through them." suggests that he is not hiring talented juniors.
It is also a good senior dev's job to architect and scope tasks so that juniors dont bring the whole system crashing down.
Sure, try not to be useless, but if the company doesn’t have guardrails that’s not on them. If an intern deletes something: why did they have access in the first place? Why wasn’t there a backup?
This bit is important. It's not great if a new hire nukes production, but it doesn't preclude them from being a B or A.
Additionally being considered a C isn't necessarily a blame game. If an employee nukes production multiple times, they may not be in the right headspace to work at that company, through no fault of their own.
It's trendy in buisness culture right now to erase the individual. Zero accountability can also mean zero growth. I don't think it's honestly the most enjoyable situation to be in.
Yes, the noobs are noobs, but the goal isn't to exercise your status over them. Or even to waste that much time trying to categorize between A, B, C. The goal should be to boost everybody's productivity instead of treating them like a game.
The last part of this really stands out. A high performer understands that software is malleable. However, the way you shape it, when things change, and how much is changed at one time matters a lot
It’s good to not just go change things for the sake of it — it’s equally as important to ask yourself if you’ve gone too far in the other direction and to always remain curious and critical of yourself.
Given that older staff generally have a legacy of responsibility they don’t always have the time required to coach people who lack that self-starting spark. The quality of the questions and how much effort they have put in to answer things themselves are what differentiates a C from a B.
Mostly you can quickly answer something a B asks. But a C who sponges up your day quickly gets categorised into not being given fun or difficult work.
With funding and resources this wouldn’t have to happen but the industry treats mentoring time as lost time. You aren’t getting your story points done if you’re helping somebody else do theirs.
The stupid agile bollocks management style has no eyes on the future of an organisation.
Unless we have no options I don’t see why so that. I’ve had to deal with people like that and it’s a tar pit.
There's something that is very pernicious in the government in Brazil (where I'm from) where in a department there's one person that does all the work while everyone else sits around. You can't fire the non-performing ones or push them because there is a very strong worker protection system for them. Back in college it took me a full week to get my grade history because the person that did all the work was on vacation and nobody else bothered to learn how to pull it or cared if students couldn't get the report.
These are the C's, people that have to be forced to do the work, and that will eventually cause all the work to pile on everyone else. There's no fun in working in an environment like that and its a quick recipe for a burnout.
As a senior I worry about the juniors coming in — Claude can do what I would have previously tasked to a junior.
I guess the shape of the junior role just changes.
Ironically on the token use leader boards the C guys are crushing it.
Edit: I was worried about Claude+junior myself but it’s not working out that way. It’s like giving an apprentice access to a full woodworking shop full of tools and expecting fine joinery, but getting a high school spice rack and 2 tons of sawdust
> You write up what you learned in an interesting, useful and persuasive way.
Very curious (and appreciative) that some company cultures allow this. I haven't had such experience (although I work in a parallel role). It's usually just grinding out tickets.
And this is what a complete lack of leadership looks like.
"We are paying your salary now as the option premium on the engineer you are going to become. If we play this game right, we’ll have a kick-ass next generation of engineers."
Not if you do jack shit to help them improve.
Holy crap this person has only ever worked in toxic work environments
Monitor what everyone else is doing, how fast they do it and what you can do to help. Condition everyone to think it's Xmas if you hand them something. After doing that 200 times hand them something obviously nonsensical just for laughs.
And good luck if you have a lot Bs that believe they are As.
Otherwise, no one gives a crap about what the n00b is doing.
> You may be wondering where this “extra” time is going to come from. You’re already committed up to your eyeballs. …We’ll talk about time management, task queue management, diff queue management, and other topics that will accelerate your progress.
Is just corporate dog whistling.
If you are over committed, no amount of time management will solve your problem. Using AI wont solve your problem.
You have a fixed amount of time and too much work?
Work. More. Hours.
Thats the real game; spend extra time outside of your normals hours doing extra.
Congratulations, you’re an “A”.
Makes no difference; your resilience against restructures is not correlated with how much respect you have from senior developers.
That shouldn't be your goal.
There are many places that do what they call “data driven” performance evaluation (translation: avoid being racist by looking only at anonymised numbers) and they do, indeed, look at 40 completed tasks and go: we will keep this one.
The strongest advice for a new starter is: at your specific company ask what you will be reviewed on, and do your best to do whatever that is.
Generic advice is a dime a dozen; don't fall in the trap of assuming [generic advice here] will apply to your specific workplace.
There is a lot to be said about how efficiently you work. This involves making choices about how you solve problems, in what order you solve problems, how you manage people interrupting you, your personal life interface with work, how you advocate for what work to be done... on and on and on.
An easy example: spending 2 days on automation for a task that takes an hour to do manually -- is this a task you have to do once a year or once a week? -- what do you choose to do?
How many meetings do you schedule? How many do you accept? How long do you spend struggling on a problem before asking for help? How often do you not even try something before asking for help?
And on and on and on.
Companies will smartly balance the amount of work allocated to people.
…and then they will push you to take on more work.
High achievers, across the board, consistently demonstrate putting more effort in.
Its just a bitter pill to swallow for some people.
Not wasting a tremendous amount of time automating something is indeed an important skill to learn (because automating things is way more fun for some people than actually doing the thing).
Coaching junior employees to neither ask me for help the instant they're confused nor spin their wheels for two weeks without asking for help is a COMMON thread.
>High achievers, across the board, consistently demonstrate putting more effort in.
Growing up, in school, I did almost nothing and was consistently at the top of my class until I got older and things started requiring effort for me. The early years of high achievement had literally nothing to do with effort.
These days being a high achiever has a lot to do with managing the perception of your work.