Companies surely cant expect people to stick around if the work is BORING
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Let’s cook up a discussion on hiring issues again…
Look, seriously — when did everyone just start becoming so self-centered and shameless? “I’m worth a lot y’now” seems to be a phrase that people — fresh grads or people who’ve spent some time somewhere utter shamelessly every chance they get.
In almost 99% of the cases these people are nothing but rhetoric, and almost 99% of the time companies buy that rhetoric — and we wonder why our industry can’t produce high-quality work.
Are you really good? Great! I have a website that just started scaling exponentially from 20 users to 15Million visits a month and counting — go create me an infrastructure that can help me scale in costs linearly with an exponentially increasing user-base. Or go figure out how to fight off a well-planned DDOS attack on multiple streaming nodes in my datacenter. Or go distribute my application across multi-site tiers with transparent replication and distributed data recovery built-in. OR ATLEAST architect this app so that you can minimize the total cost of developing future enhancements and to ensure that we can provide a 15-min first-analysis support guarantee to our priority customers.
Heck, just architect something so that the cost of integrating your code with others and maintaining it diminshes over time and doesn’t infact increase exponentially — you could do that much right?
But you say you’d rather have people utilize you for your “brilliant ideas”? Err.. ok. Go invent a new way for people to think about risk-management in a social context. Figure out what the UI and interaction model should be if that is applied to personal banking. Do it in a month.
Cool problems huh — but if you can do them, I’ll stand corrected. You’re smart, and worth your sweat.
Oh sorry, you have 7-8 years of experience now — maybe you can help me with prioritizing my release schedule to maximize profits over the next 2 years — identify two new markets to enter in the next year and tell me how to maximize the consumer surplus in that market based on interviewing the few thousand types of customers we can expect to support. How can we make an investment bet in technology infrastructure so that 4 years from now we can offer [this solution] to [this market]? Help me penetrate [this market] over the next 3-5 months using [these channels] based on [this PR strategy] — what are the entry points for this market? What are your KPIs and how sensitive is this market to them / what influences those KPIs? What are the price/features mix for this market now and in 5 months? Who is already talking to them?
Again, if you can do these, great — you’re worth your sweat.
But ofcourse you dont care about that — who cares about people asking you to build dumb use-cases after use-cases on dumb user-interaction maps in dumb-websites — you know, CODER STUFF. Its not COOL, and since YOU FEEL that you were better than 95% of your graduating class IN YOUR OPINION, you’re already better than 95% of all companies in a competitve environment.
Thus, if a company doesn’t have COOL stuff to give you, then that company just isn’t worth the holiness and divine presence that you ensue.
Who cares what I have to say anyway — I’m just a “management” type who doesn’t get your “perspective” and “needs” regarding “cool work”.
Maybe someone else could guide you along better — enter the Cranky Product Manager on Agile Methodology:
Yo, yo, yo! Listen up, Enterprise Software Developers. Yeah, you!
The news: The Cranky Product Manager knows that there is a certain percentage of you that doesn’t really care for her or her PM brethren.
And why? Because the Cranky Product Manager is a pain in your ass. Because, YES, she totally cramps your style.
For one thing, the Cranky PM always prioritizes the boring projects higher than creating super-cool new products, or rewriting existing products from scratch. In other words, she wants you to FIX (not completely rewrite) Joe Idiot’s effed-up code so it can handle multiple users. Instead of doing that WICKED COOL feature — the one you pet-named “Extreme E” — that 64-bit, Web 2.0-ish, open source, DRM-defeating wet dream (based on an SOA architecture and Ruby on Rails, of course). You know, the idea that occurred to you in between that mega-bong hit at Softwarehaus’s annual Geekapalooza party and 4am, when you started drunk dialing all your ex-girlfriends.
The other thing the Cranky PM does that is TOTALLY annoying is always say things like “we’re not seeing market demand for Extreme E.” And whenever you try to shoot down her proposed projects as being stupid or irrelevant, she always starts reciting a list of customers who want it or need it, explains the new markets her beloved project would help DysfunctoSoft attack, and then she starts explaining use cases. Ugh. If that wasn’t bad enough, if you persist, she’ll bore you to death with a freakin’ slideshow containing revenue projections for her stupid, dumb-ass project.
Doesn’t she realize that her projects are freakin’ BORING? No technical challenge. And who wants to sully his hands fixing some other engineer’s code? Disgusting — like sloppy seconds. None for you, thank you. You need excitement in your life. You need to create something cool, something from scratch, something you can brag about or at least put on your resume. Her project does not qualify.
Read the rest at the CPM blog
1:17 am
I think the start-up company hiring the person should tell him its short-term and long-term goals, and its future vision. And he should be clearly told that what’s going to be his role, and how could he play a role in the success of the company.
Don’t make him feel as he is an employee, instead, try to promote the love of the company, and the love of the company’s product/service inside him.
Start-up companies here usually don’t create a motivating environment. Employees don’t know what are their roles; they don’t have any goals; they are just working on the daily commands of their bosses.
2:13 am
This is my first post
just saying HI