Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

What's up with this usage of the word "talent"? Tech is in such acute need of humble pie I don't even know where to begin. I'm becoming disillusioned. Why is a programmer etc. a "talent", but a carpenter just an employee, hire or whatever?

But maybe it's actually an appropriate term, now when our interview processes so clearly have ceased to be job interviews, and have become auditions - because nothing less satisfies our own grandiose self-importance.

> "On the other hand, how many companies desperately need product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce?"

These middle-management positions are so unmeasurable that I think they may be greatest source of bullshit jobs in tech. So if it's true that their success is largely unmeasureable, I wonder how you've come to that conclusion?

View on HN

It’s just terminology from acting. Wouldn’t read too much into it. Getting annoyed by that is like being upset you have a team in your org called HR. “Human Resources? Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

> Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

Yes. This one is accurate.

I prefer the term 'Human Accounting' myself.

Human Remains is one term used in the UK

"Personnel" is the older, more appropriate name.

Why did we ever change? New hip management terms?

US invented HR, and the world adopted it.

“Associates”

Sorry I was guilty of using slang here its meant in a negative way.

Interestingly HR people don’t refer to themselves as “resources”, they call themselves “professionals” or “business partners”. But at least they’re honest about how they view real workers.

I disagree. To be clear, there's more to techs current flight towards the sun than just this. But for this kind of wording to be possible there need to be certain conditions present. In techs case; partly just a general boom/bubble. If you'd post searches for "talent" without these conditions present you'd likely be laughed out of the building, or at the very least come of as dorky, bordering unreliable.

"Talent" is now used in the context of recruitment for almost any job that requires some level of skill. E.g. I heard it being used for police officers ("law enforcement talent").

I think it's about visibility of failure. When a carpenter or office worker make a mistake, it often doesn't take an expert to figure it out (and if it does, it's always a "clerical" error, not an honest mistake in a complex environment). Thus, whenever people look at these jobs, they're not seeing skilled laborers but someone whose time is simply less valuable than theirs. If only they had the time, they could have done it better - whereas programming is mysterious so they need "talent."

In NYC it takes 8 years verifiable work experience (by W-2 forms) Before you are allowed to take a Plumbing test, for your license. I guarantee that you would Not be able to trouble shoot a problem that a licensed plumber couldn't figure out.

And yes, in a past life I was a master licensed plumber.

Oh, no doubt. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, just to present a hypothesis on why I think people perceive some jobs as requiring talent.

Fair enough.

> These middle-management positions are so unmeasurable that I think they may be greatest source of bullshit jobs in tech. So if it's true that their success is largely unmeasureable, I wonder how you've come to that conclusion?

But, product improvements shouldn't be immeasurable. Through analysis of engagement metrics, talking with users, etc. one can measure improvements. Sure, it isn't a direct measurement, but pure unmeasurable intuition is not how good PMs function

Except that no one actually evaluates KPIs like that. Product improvements are not KPIs that anyone gets measured on.

But the problem is that even if you measure an increase in KPIs you can't accurately attribute that success to the different team members and in the end the manager tends to get disproportionate credit.

It's the credit assignment problem IRL.

Because Tech is a "profession" and if you think we are you obviously haven't seen how other professions Architects for example and Journalists have a very high opinion of them selves.

All idealists have an high opinion of themselves.

Journalists, idealists, pick one

Come to the medical field, and it's all the way down.

Except that Tech isn't a profession. Professions have bodies that establish and enforce professional standards and appropriate evaluations and credentials.

Programmers that call themselves "engineers" are fooling themselves. Unless they are doing the sort of programming that the NASA shuttle team used, none of us are "engineers".

In the UK The BCS and IEEE would beg to differ. And a profession is not just the piece of paper its about social standing and relative pay rates.

And anyone with a degree who works in there field is a "engineer" even though the number that go for full Chartered status is a small minority - and that is more about who you know not what you know.

The BCS

The BCS is a complete joke, completely irrelevant to anyone working in the field, I have no idea how it still exists or what it actually does for practitioners or for the industry.

Here in Uruguay if you wish to call yourself an "engineer" you need to have an accredited engineering degree.

There is a career called C.S. Engineer and it has an huge amount of math and physics (equivalent to an undergrad + master's in the U.S.). Most of us take the career that's equivalent to an undergraduate degree though, the extra math (and grueling attrition) is mostly useless.

But graduates are very sought after because they've proven themselves able to go through a tough grind (even though they don't have a shred of practical experience after graduating)

Software development is not one of the 'Professions', and never will be until it has a governing body and some degree of accountability for the shoddy work they can put out.

They do all countries have certifying bodies for engineers and admit it professionals.

I never bothered going that route as the BCS kept changing their minds on qualifying experience and the rules and actually don't do anything concreate for their members unlike say the BMA does for doctors.

So honest Q here if you feel so strongly why haven't you got your Ceng / E status

> So honest Q here if you feel so strongly why haven't you got your Ceng / E status

I don't feel strongly about it. I don't need people to call me an engineer, because I'm not an engineer and I have no intention of being one.

I'm a software developer, which is very different.

Because Tech is a "profession"

If this were true, hard-won experience would be prized, as it is in law, medicine, and all real professions, instead we have rampant ageism and statements like “young people are just smarter”.

mainly because while we all go through the same basic CS-math foundations in HS...most never learn how to apply them...

...because the skill gap between “ok”, “good”, and “great” is so much bigger for some jobs (software development) than it is for other jobs (carpentry).

You would be surprised how hard is and how many years takes to be a good cabinetmaker.

It's not tho.

It's really not. Most of the software you use every day was developed by very average software developers. The vast majority of the work software developers do isn't terribly novel or particularly difficult. And you know what? They do just fine. Things work well. Systems stay on line. Companies make money.

I've seen too many "bad" teams produce perfectly functional software over the years to think that this gap exists anywhere but in Joel Spolsky essays.

I think comparing carpenters to software engineers does a disservice to carpenters. Software developers to me are more like dry-wallers. A really good one can do it faster, but the end result mostly always looks the same.

The difference between an average and a great carpenter, however, is immediately obvious. There is real craftsmanship there, and you can clearly see the difference.

It isn't until you get to the edges of software development that those same differences become clear. When you're dealing with very high scale, very aggressive performance metrics, or very difficult mathematical concepts you see the difference between average and great developers. But those are less than a fraction of 1% of software projects I'd wager.

* I should note: I'm a software developer.

It really is night and day between a good dev and a bad dev.

The key factor that you're probably not thinking about is time. A good dev doesn't think faster or have blazing fingers that fly across the keyboard, a good dev is constantly setting him/herself up to shave time off of future tasks, and those investments are constantly paying dividends.

Those "bad" teams can definitely produce software that runs, but they do it 10x slower than a "good" team could.

What takes a bad team of four six months to make takes a good team of two only 5 or 6 weeks.

In my view, a good developer writes maintainable code. Easy to understand, easy to fix, no spaghetti.

Yes, but what's the point of maintainable code? Speed. Quickly understandable, quickly fixable, and quickly upgradable.

Time is the key. Writing maintainable code is the investment a good developer makes because it pays off by increasing speed of interacting with that code.

A more accurate comparison is that software devs are like general contractors. I’m referring to those contractors who have experience doing plumbing, drywall, framing, finish work, etc but learned where to sub out to be more efficient for both their profit and to save customers time and money. A bad contractor can make a remodel a complete nightmare.

I should note that I’m a software dev and a family member is a general contractor

I’d argue they’re more like electricians. All their work is hidden behind the drywall, and as long as the lamp turns on, nobody has any idea of the absolute mess of wire that was used to turn on the single lamp.

If you have great developers, there will be a single straight wire from the switch to the lamp.

The end result for the user is the same though, until the mess of wire eventually overheats and burns down your house.

The statistics I've seen say 60% of all software projects fail. My experience, anecdotal as it is, bears that out.

Projects that don't fail, usually have to be rescued from some crazy doomed plans fairly regularly.

You seem to have found a calmer, saner corner of the industry.

I think 60% is an underestimate!

They probably failed due to bad product management.

I think most people are not able to tell the difference between a great piece of software and an average one.

For example, the people at Apple who came with blocks and Grand Central Dispatch did an amazing job, but the difference between them and the average software developer is like 100x. A great software developer can write something that other developers can build on, which makes them more productive.

Conversely, the people who came up with Java, they figured out how to turn a great programmer into an average one, and make them want to quit computers altogether, but the below average programmers are now also average.

I respectfully disagree, having worked in both software and carpentry.

While I do feel that folks grossly underestimate the skills that the best carpenters acquire over time, the software ecosystem generally is unique is that it's vastly large and complex. By any measure (switch points, surface area, person-years, etc.), the software we've all built in the past 70-ish years is the most complex thing ever implemented by human-kind.

Long ago it became far too large for any one person to "master" to the same degree an excellent carpenter might master his or her skills.

And the market agrees with the point of view, and values the economic output of the "best" software developers (at scale, not just one data point) at a far greater multiple over the "ok" ones, relative to other skills and trades.

One may not like this analysis (and my associated statement), but it is the state of the world.

Just because you cant distinguish the fine differences between a good and great carpenter doesn't mean they don't exist. Someone making detailed engravings for a casket is far more skilled than someone who hammers a wooden crate.

Any profession to which someone can devote their life to (incl. carpentry or software development) is going to have gaps in skills between "ok", "good", and "great". Pejorative attitudes which measure something like software development as "harder" than carpentry are not beneficial and simply dilute the discourse.

Whoa buddy. There's a huge difference in skills there.

As someone who has worked in carpentry, and as a software engineer for 10 years now, I completely disagree. I actually see the skill gap between ok, good, and great as being really similar in carpentry and software. A junior carpenter will make a lot of mistakes.

Especially as many software devs are becoming more like "code plumbers," if anything the skill gap may be bigger in carpentry in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com