Comment by git-pull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by git-pull | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure it's not the other way around?

Maybe it's hard for good engineers to find good employers and bosses.

9/10 of the technical screens I take are bunk. It boils down to what's fresh on my mind that moment; random trivia.

I feel the comment I made "It's an employer's market" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667346 rings true.

There's no incentive for the employer to apply more thought into holistically seeing if a can perform a role - or learn it if accommodated.

Not impromptu, fanciful, hypothetical scaling scenarios and job requirements.

> good engineer

What does that mean?

Those involved in hiring aren't skilled engineers. They lack qualification to determine what a good engineer is. It's Dunning-Kruger.

A manager is reluctant to hire a star programmer that could run laps around them and upstages them. A junior programmer will use on-the-spot technical interviews to disqualify - catch them off guard - so they don't hire the person who replaces them.

Merit is thrown out the door due to turf protection. So maybe a more correct word would be, an "appropriate" engineer. To suit the political dynamic and lack of incentive to make the company tech-centric.

If you've been bossing people around for the last years, you haven't been doing much other than talking while we've been hacking all this time.

You're generalising and stereotyping in a way that suggests you're not very experienced, so perhaps we can put down the bizarre sweeping statements to inexperience.

I'm an experienced engineer and have hired many people. I specifically look for people who are better than me and I can learn from, even if I'm going to be their boss.

Why would I do that? I believe if you want to get better at something, hang out with people who are already better. I get better if I work with better people and, as it happens, my bosses/shareholders are happy with that too because they end up with a more talented workforce.

The trick then is making them want to come and work with me. If I'm super lucky, they have gaps that others in the team can help with, and that way they can still grow within the team.

It's no different to building a band: Paul, John, George and Ringo all knew the others were better at something than they were, and knew that was the secret to them all individually stepping up and beyond their previous abilities.

The fact you've worked in toxic environments with toxic people is something I am sorry to hear. I sincerely hope it gets better for you one day. However, please don't make your experiences a statement of fact about the state of technical management and leadership in general.

> However, please don't make your experiences a statement of fact about the state of technical management and leadership in general.

Sure.

There's a name for it: The Bozo Event Horizon.

https://blogs.harvard.edu/waldo/2012/07/27/the-bozo-event-ho...

> You're generalising and stereotyping in a way that suggests you're not very experienced, so perhaps we can put down the bizarre sweeping statements to inexperience.

Dunno, his experience pretty much matches experience that I had in different parts of this industry in different roles all the way to being someone who only reports to a board of directors. It also matches the experience of lots of people that I know. It is the "mean" of all industries and even unicorns revert to the mean in time.

> Why would I do that? I believe if you want to get better at something, hang out with people who are already better. I get better if I work with better people and, as it happens, my bosses/shareholders are happy with that too because they end up with a more talented workforce.

That maybe true in some small companies. In fact, it probably is true for all small companies that survive. It is certainly not true in larger or large companies until those companies convert individual departments into entities judged by P&L and only P&L.

> It's no different to building a band: Paul, John, George and Ringo all knew the others were better at something than they were, and knew that was the secret to them all individually stepping up and beyond their previous abilities.

This is how the bands that do not make it out of a garage look like - the ones that are staffed by sad 40 year old men who think their music is awesome and they are just about to make it while working as waiters and bus boys in restaurants.

Successful bands are staffed by "rock stars" - the minimum acceptable level of performance is so high these people are not even in a market. There are no managers that are not rock stars at what they do and non-rock stars are definitely not telling rock stars what to do.

> A manager is reluctant to hire a star programmer that could run laps around them and upstages them.

I don't think so. I have seen something of the sort, but it was an engineer purposefully not hiring too good people.

Management is a quite different skill, good programmer is not threat to manager.

One of my favorite comments on HN for this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108883.

I agree that it's an employer's market: that comment you linked to is very good.

I've seen the "reluctant" manager before (and been a direct report to one), but I've always marveled at their existence. Managers ought to not be coding. Their senior (i.e. Lead) direct reports ought to be the ones doing the architecture and design work which the manager might be involved in discussions about, but only in the role of an advisor.

>9/10 of the technical screens I take are bunk. It boils down to what's fresh on my mind that moment; random trivia.

Real talk. Being able to define the term singleton or explain the difference between an interface and an abstract class is not much of a metric.

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