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Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering.

This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.

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I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company.

Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.

Not just software-engineering, either; a lot of large engineering companies don't provide much of an engineering career path that doesn't involve being promoted into management. For almost the entire time my dad was at Amoco (later bought by BP), for a few decades, they were discussing implementing a technical career path with some sort of high-level engineering rank, but it somehow never happened. So the top engineers either languished at "senior engineer" (a reasonably high rank, but basically a ~15 years of experience rank, not equivalent to something like IBM Fellow), or else jumped to management, or left to do consulting. One predictable result was a lot of middle managers who were neither good at nor particularly excited about management, and a lack of senior engineers, in particular engineers in the 3rd phase of a project who had actually worked on the 1st and 2nd phases.

GE actually writes a lot of software, especially industrial applications. Their software division is bigger than most software-only companies: http://www.ge.com/products_services/software_services.html

Oh, I agree 100%. The software industry barely understands software (see also: offshoring), so I simply don't expect a non-software company to even be in the ballpark.

Big companies assume software projects will be failures, and treat their employees accordingly. Then they get what they expect.

(Hire a bunch of good programmers with good management, and you can get amazingly reliable software from a team of two. Hire a bunch of bad programmers, though, and a team of 100 produces something worse than most kids' intro-to-java app. But nobody but the best programmers understand this, and it looks better to the business to pay 10 people each $60,000 a year instead of paying 2 people $200,000 a year. When a big company "gets this", their software becomes a lot better.)

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields as well.)

Data are hard to come by in the industry (compared to, say, manufacturing where science branches were spawned based on analysis, observations).

From where I stand, the cost of poor quality software goes beyond the production. It's more in maintenance, licensing, lost opportunities, and poor adaptability to changing business needs.

Right. Which is why we need a long term study. To follow a product from conception to production to end of life.

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones

The question is, tho', "at what"? Oracle's product offering is VAST. And most of it is technically quite simple; it just does an awful lot. You can't use clever Lisp macros to do stuff like this: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard You just have to chuck people at it.

I don't think it's necessarily a career path, or lack thereof, but the companies' perspective on software: I left biotech because the companies I worked for, and it seemed to be an industry problem, viewed software not as their differentiator or edge or product, but rather purely as a cost center to be minimized. From that distinction, everything flows.

I had the same problem at a mutual fund company, which is funny when you think about it. What is financial services company but a group of people that manages information?

This is why Goldman Sachs has weathered the financial crisis so well: they invest heavily in their IT.

Worse here in the frozen North.

I can't be a senior engineer because developers can't be engineers at all - and only engineers are allowed to supervise staff.

So Gosling's boss would be a 21 engineer-in-training.

That was one of the things that destroyed NCR after AT&T bought it. AT&T had no technical career path, and effectively cut its own head off.

As a result, AT&T bought NCR for something like $9 billion, and ended up spinning it off for something close to $3 million. My mother was at the time an IBM exec (since retired), and she was ecstatic -- IBM was much bigger in the US, but until AT&T bought it, NCR dominated the international big iron market. AT&T effectively killed off IBM's biggest competitor, and a major part of that was the fact that the entire company culture was optimized around funneling talent into management or out the door.

I forgot to mention in my AT&T diatribe... when they ended my contract there, in customer support (where believe it or not, our phones did not work), the person that they brought in to replace me was internal. Internal transfer displaced contractors, and since we were getting many calls (which the phones not working, that wasn't a surprise), rather than expanding staff, they cut the contracts.

Shortly after I'd been informed but before my last day, my replacement showed me two screw drivers and asked me which one was the FLAT head. At least I could have understood if she'd asked which was the Philips head (is Philips the flat one?), but no.

I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?

Job security, 401k, health care benefits, etc. Same reasons anyone signs up as a permanent employee anywhere.

Except that you don't have job security precisely because you're not going into management. Cost of living raises for 15 years without moving up the ladder (i.e. going into management) make you stick out like a soar thumb. In my experience these are always the first to go because they just look too expensive on any chart.

This isn't always evident from the outside, and it may not even be evident from the inside, until you realize you should be advancing along that non-existent career path.

Some companies actually do have career paths of technical people, and most companies will claim to have them. It's hard to tell from bottom rung exactly what track you may or may not have a few steps up.

Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of finding the next contract.

I know many people who have done contracting and several told me a) the money _is_ very good b) other than the money, it's not worth it (stressful, uninteresting projects, high overhead).

Most companies do have technical career path

Genuine question - who? The technical career path at almost every organization ends after about 10 years, then it's management or plateau.

Remember - companies are run by people who fundamentally don't, or can't, understand why everyone doesn't aspire to management...

Red Hat has a good technical career path. No need to go into management if you don't want to, and plenty of people on my team in their 40s and 50s still working happily on the "codeface".

The contracting money isn't what is was. When I started contracting in 2000 you could write your own ticket - obscene wages and all the hours you want. Now I'm an employee at the same company, and the contractors make less than I do if you add the bonus. These guys are making about 40% less than I made ten years ago.

I'm almost 38 and had my first child not too long ago. Sometimes I surprise myself at feeling tempted to chase the illusion of "stability" at a bigger company. Then I remind myself of all my friends who have been through terrible layoffs and remember that there almost never is such a thing as stability nowadays.

I think a lot of people get the same feeling I do for the same reasons, but then forget the whole "remind yourself" part.

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