Comment by godelski
12 hours ago
> How are you going to convince HR or the PHB that their policies are insane?
The underlying issue at hand is much more widespread.
I'm not trying to play wack-a-mole here.
I'm trying to be infectious so that the knowledge becomes widespread. We had it before, so I don't think it is naive to think we can't have it again. It was considered "common sense" before, the question is why it was lost. Given your age I guess I should be asking you why we dropped the aforementioned cliques. It's weird how common "you get what you pay for" was and how now we act in opposition to the clique: buying the cheapest option and making it hard to determine quality.
The only reason we had it before was because back in the 90s when I graduated, even outside of the dot com boom, regular old enterprise companies were looking for developers and there was a shortage. They didn’t have a choice but to hire juniors.
But as far as you get what you pay for, it’s not hard to find “good enough” framework enterprise developers and have a few good experience “seniors”. Especially with remote work, you dangle that in front of people my age, we are willing to take a haircut. For me now, remote work, autonomy, and a smaller company is worth being able to say “no” to more money when managers at Google (GCP) reach out to me.
By senior, I don’t mean “I codez real gud”, I mean the tech industries definition - someone who can deal with “scope” and “ambiguity” and has a history of highly impactful projects.
Just to be clear, I spent most of my career as an “enterprise dev” until 2020 at 46 when a position at AWS fell into my lap (Professional Services department). I’m no longer there. But it did cause me to pivot to cloud consulting specializing in app dev and now I am a “staff architect” at a third party company.