Corporate companies killing geeks | Hacker News Reader

Corporate companies killing geeks

andrei.serdeliuc.ro

9 pointsmadmotive8 comments

"My point being, corporate companies look for money and large numbers of staff. Web development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is poetry."

HA HA HA

Most (not all) "web development agencies" are bodyshops, they bill their clients hourly and the one metric they care about is the utilization rate of their people. Been there, done that. It is beyond ridiculous to suggest that corporations hire web agencies because their code is so much more advanced than that of their internal developers. Body shops are hired so they can be easily gotten rid of when they're no longer needed, full stop.

Isn't being able to easily "get rid of" bodies the whole point of looking for outside help?

I guess I come to the same conclusion, but without the cynicism. It isn't exactly profitable to not care about utilization rate of bodies, but then a small web dev house has to pump out better stuff faster than the other guy (and there is always an "other guy").

I mean, if your product isn't selling, then you should probably find a new product, right?

"corporate companies look for money and large numbers of staff. Web development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is poetry."

This is a very naive statement. Web dev agencies are looking for the same thing as corporations: to make money, and maintain size or preferably grow. They are just smaller and earlier in the business lifecycle, which means less bureaucracy. Many cater to larger corporations anyway, and face the same political challenges by proxy.

The bottom line is that work experience will depend on your team much more than your company. There are just as many tight knit and creative groups who their love code poetry at big companies as at small.

> work experience will depend on your team much more than your company

I have just discovered this for myself. I went from a very closed-off, conservative, and staid team to a newer, more open, and more flexible team. The team-change was more significant than the initial job change.

I love the sense of web design that went into that page.

I think the problem is more with non-technology businesses killing geeks. When a business doesn't fundamentally understand technology at its highest level they don't understand how best to employ the skills of geeks/developers/engineers/hackers.

I've seen too many great engineers getting turned off working with technology because of the time they spent working in traditional businesses that just don't get it.

Um. Barf. Also, that randomized buzzword-y bold text makes my blood boil. Poor, precious little developer. He's probably making his colleagues crazy.

No matter where you're at, you need to find a way to decouple the "what" from the "how" in the mind of your boss/user/customer.

As soon as they start telling me what tool/framework/algorithm to use, I put on the brakes. "You decide the what, I decide the how. That's how it works around here." If they don't agree, work somewhere else.

This doesn't fix everything, but goes a long way toward quality and job satisfaction.

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