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Comment by mrcold | Hacker News Reader

Not starting a side project earlier. And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.

Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do. All he cares about is how much money he can make with your energy. Know what hard work gets you? A pat on the back and more hard work.

Gone are the days where you could build a career based on mutual respect and trust. Nowadays it's just a list of previous employments. Nobody cares how good you are or what problems you can solve. All they care about is overqualified warm bodies. Hire skilled developers and throw them on meaningless tasks controlled by business politics. At least this seems to be the general experience among my peers.

If you want to be successful, become a good politician. It's the only thing that will make your life better. Anything else is just a lie designed to squeeze more value out of you.

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> And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.

> Maybe I've just grown cynical. But your employer doesn't care about you or what you do.

Hard work will get you places. But nobody said anything about hard work for your employer. You have to work hard, but you have to work hard on your personal goals.

If that means climbing the ranks at an organisation. Do that. Climb them as hard as you can. Identify what gets them climbed. Do that above all else.

If that means starting a business. Launch a side project. Or two. Or twenty. Or even fifty. However many it takes until you have enough of a side-income to drop your job and live off of yourself.

If that means starting a VC-backed business. Well, work hard on knowing what ticks the checkboxes for VCs. Work hard on meeting a lot of VCs. Work hard on whatever it takes to get VCs to dump money into your idea.

The world is literally your oyster.

Look at Silicon Valley. Look at all the big players in tech. Which is more important, hard work or politics?

We live in a world where who you know is more important than what you do. You can have the shittiest product on the market. If you know the right people, you can push everyone else into bankruptcy.

Hard work doesn't get you anywhere. Being able to sell things does. And when you sell yourself instead of your work, you may as well start calling yourself a politician.

Why do you think being good at politics isn't hard work?

Being able to sell things is very hard work indeed.

I'm sorry for your situation. I assume you're in the USA.

I care about our team and their wellbeing more than I do profit - although the two can go hand in hand if you reinvest in your people.

We send folks to conferences, as they learn and network, which is good for them and us. We generally give annual raises around the 15% mark. Above all we don't allow or accept the master-slave relationship anywhere in the company, and we're careful not to hire people who we feel will want to dominate other people.

I'm sure, in fact I know, many employers are assholes who treat their team like slaves - but it's not a universal law.

I'm a little intrigued by a 15% raise year of year ? How long can you sustain that rate ?

I'm supposed to be happy if I get 5% or really happy when I get 8% after extraordinary accomplishments. And if you performed extraordinary this year, that same level of performance doesn't get you 5% next year.

We reward merit - if you muddle along and half-ass, we worry about how to better motivate you, and typically grant a small (5%) raise inline with cpi inflation.

If someone is working their socks off, then we're not shy rewarding it.

In terms of sustainability - if we hire a fresh grad at £24k, by year four they're on 45 or so, assuming all is well. Most we pay anyone currently is about 60k, which is a very respectable income in a small city 100 miles from London.

Essentially, as long as someone produces more and more value for the business, we reward them more and more.

It also helps to have a decent war-chest, as this gives you confidence to pay people properly, knowing you've a year or more of salaries in the bank.

> I assume you're in the USA.

Europe. This kind of thinking probably originated in the USA. But all the tech CEOs I met so far idolize Silicon Valley. It was only a matter of time until they adopted the american way of thinking.

> I care about our team and their wellbeing more than I do profit - although the two can go hand in hand if you reinvest in your people.

Are you hiring?

Yes, for php and frontend devs.

I noticed this after we got bought by an American corp. They suck you dry and toss you.

This is the general feel of business in America. Aggressive, combative, winners and losers.

British capitalism tends to be based far more on mutual respect, trust, and benefit.

We don't work with US clients any more.

I've heard of (and been through) the same horror stories with british companies in the past, as well as Brazilian and German companies. I wouldn't say that's american-specific at all. It's just "business as usual" in most places.

>British capitalism tends to be based far more on mutual respect, trust, and benefit.

Anyone who's remotely familiar with the British East India Company should consider this the best joke they've ever heard.

> Nobody cares how good you are

> All they care about is overqualified warm bodies

Seems conflicting, no?

Only if you believe qualifications are a reflection of how good someone is.

Thought experiment: You meet two software developers who each have 10 years experience of C++. One has a CompSci degree. Does that in any way help you decide which is the better developer?

> Does that in any way help you decide which is the better developer?

No, but it has time and again proven that it tells you which is the better engineer. Not necessarily having a CompSci degree, but someone who's made it to senior year or even postgrad is, in my limited experience, an infinitely better engineer than someone who dropped out in freshman year or never attempted.

No, CompSci will not teach you how to code. But it sure does a hell of a lot in teaching you how to design systems and engineer solutions. Of course you also need experience on top of that, but it helps a lot.

Like, things that are completely obvious to somebody with a CompSci degree, might be wholly out of the range of somebody who is self-taught.

But as always, the question is: Is that something you need? Everyone can build you a CRUD app for sharing cat pics. Even a 15 year old high school student who codes on the side can do that. But who are you gonna call when your CRUD app needs to handle a million cat photos a day? Yup, someone with a CompSci degree.

source: being both that 15 year old high school kid and a CompSci person.

Yup, someone with a CompSci degree.

No. I'd call the person who's done something similar before regardless of their qualifications. Experience is far more valuable. That's the point I was making - two people with 10 years experience are at the the same level regardless of their respective qualifications, because they'll both have seen the problems and pitfalls firsthand (at least, you'd hope so).

Possibly the CompSci graduate will have dealt with them better the first few times they encountered problems (which is why a degree can be useful), but after that it's down to the relative merits of the individual and how interested they are.

I tend to disagree slightly. I have a math/cs degree, but work with a lot of physicists turned programmers. They are all smart and have plenty of experience at doing what they are doing, but have no idea what is out there CS wise. They reinvent the wheel quite often when building large systems. By not having the time taken out to read real cs text and instead focusing on just getting things done they missed a lot of sound computer science. They are all very bright, but just doing the relevant work only helps you on that type of work. Being exposed to a ton of different areas (as might happen in a cs degree, but there are other ways of course), lets you know what is out there in terms of different approaches.

They both have 10 years of development experience, but the one with the CS degree has 4 (give or take) years of additional experience in another setting (as an undergrad). It's not the same kind of experience, but it gives you a bit more more information about that person.

All other things equal (which they rarely are), I'd value 10 years dev experience + 4 years undergrad over 10 years dev experience + ?.

The game is not to pick the 'best' developer and employers don't have that ability. Employers pick the person likely to be most competent and then fire those that turn out not to be. A CS degree in this regard is light years ahead of some schmoe off the street who claims he/she is "the shit".

> And listening to everybody saying that hard work will get you places.

I try to work harder than average. If you don't, you get a lazy reputation, may not get a good reference, and might be one of the first to go in a round of lay-offs. However, I make sure I'm never the hardest worker. Some of the hardest working people I know are poor and too often taken for granted. I've never seen the hardest working person in a company get a fair deal. So, it's a balancing act, trying to work hard but not too hard.

How do I become a good politician?

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