Comment by lapcat
1 month ago
> a team of effectively 5 new grads
> they were constantly missing deadlines
Gee, go figure.
> I like to tell myself I could have gotten the team ahead of schedule as a solo endeavor writing 80% of the code myself.
> what delivered the most businesses value?
What the company should have done is hire you and one new grad (rather than five), who you could mentor without spending all of your time mentoring, and get the same amount of work done with two people for less money.
Advice from the world where things always go as well as they could is of limited value in this one.
It seems hard for us to say, from the outside, how the deal ended up for them. They spent the experienced programmer’s time setting up a team of five. If they’d had GP train one person and work on code as well, they’d have one good new engineer and some code. Now they have five good new engineers.
I mean, it depends on how long it took, how much code GP could have produced in the meantime, and how sticky the lessons were. There’s certainly room to believe GP is right and it was a good trade for the company.
this particular company paid way below market rate with the promise of interesting work. It without a doubt incentivizes hiring new grads where you roll the dice and hope the good ones will stay because they enjoy the job. It's very hard for them to attract experts at the salary that they're offering.
Yah. I also just wanted to make the meta point or whatever—this is your anecdote, technically there’s room for you to be wrong or right, but we don’t have any connection to the underlying reality to argue against your interpretation… so why not just go along with your story?
yeah, what the company should have done, is only hire experts! Hiring new grads is definitely a mistake they're making!
...except then I never would have been willing to work there. I won't work for an MBA bean counter. I want to work for a company that's willing to invest in people. One that doesn't treat life as a zero sum game, where someone else has to lose so the company can make money.
I get it; for most people the line on the graph must go up! And it must keep going up, forever! But I reject that meme as the direct cause of the enshittification of reality, and refuse to play any negative sum game. "The only winning move...." and all that.
BTW, that project would have died with just a team of two because I did eventually leave that company. So that suggestion would have killed that project. System resilience matters too.
edit:
> Gee, go figure.
This isn't a given. If their manager was as good at teaching and understanding code as I was, they shouldn't have been missing deadlines. Proven by the fact that I admit I didn't contribute a significant number of lines of code. So what is this trying to say? New grads are bad?
> yeah, what the company should have done, is only hire experts!
I did not say that, and you know it: "What the company should have done is hire you and one new grad (rather than five)".
> I won't work for an MBA bean counter. I want to work for a company that's willing to invest in people.
Um, IMO someone who hired a team of 5 new grads sounds like an MBA bean counter and not someone that's willing to invest in people. It sounds like they brought in an experienced programmer (you) only because the preexisting pathological team was (predictably) failing.
> BTW, that project would have died with just a team of two because I did eventually leave that company. So that suggestion would have killed that project. System resilience matters too.
And you could not be replaced because.. why? People leave, other people are hired. Life goes on. The new grads may leave too.
> Um, IMO someone who hired a team of 5 new grads sounds like an MBA bean counter and not someone that's willing to invest in people. It sounds like they brought in an experienced programmer (you) only because the preexisting pathological team was (predictably) failing.
Nah, this was a pet project of my skip level, and I joined after he asked my boss for solutions to the delay. The manager who owned the project had all of his experienced eng working on direct contracts.
This company had a lot of contracts in where the number of engineering hours allocated are specified. This was an internal project, without a hard cap on number of hours, and they were assigned because it would have been malpractice otherwise. This was very much a team built out of the resources available, rather than intentionally selecting only new grads.
I couldn't be replaced because it being an internal project, it would have been killed once it had no active development. And I suspect internal politics would have prevented it getting restarted after the first delay/failure. Turns out stuff is way more complicated than the easy assumptions people like to make.
> sounds like they brought in an experienced programmer (you) only because the preexisting pathological team was (predictably) failing.
It's easier to predict failure than success. That's that same zero or negative sum game though. Usually a cheap way to feel superior instead of doing the harder things. My previous edit already addresses that though. Failure wasn't actually a given like you want to predict.
edit:
> I did not say that, and you know it: "What the company should have done is hire you and one new grad (rather than five)".
Right, of course I know you didn't say that, nor do I think you'd actually advocate for it. But taking something to the extreme to see where it fails is a useful rhetorical tool. The point being, that only hiring experts is obviously bad, for the same reason that only hiring new grads is bad.
I think we agree that there is a balance to be struck?
I think 5 noobs to 1 expert is fine, just like 5 to zero is bad, just like 1 to 1 is bad. The point being, there's no magic line where one is right, the other wrong. This team had no problem once the missing puzzle piece was added. And it was able to be successful in ways that 1 and 1 wouldn't have been. There is no reasonable way to say "what you should have done" when describing a puzzle where you can't see most of the pieces.
3 replies →