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Comment by zck | Hacker News Reader

Where are the companies that try to make their employees better? As someone who is an employed software developer, but has never been confused for a rockstar coding ninja, things like this hit me emotionally when I read them.

This might not be the smartest thing to put onto the internet, but I'm not someone who comes in guns a-blazing and ships dozens of features my first week. Or do I ever get to a high velocity. Would I like to? Sure. But that's not where I am at now.

So, a lot of companies talk like this. I suspect this is like baseball before Moneyball -- what if you can get people who are undervalued and make them better? What companies are doing that? Or even, how does one do that on their own?

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A lot of the big tech companies actually have processes around mentorship. It's one of the reasons I think working at a big tech company can be more valuable than at a small startup, especially early on in one's career.

I don't mean to suggest all startups forgo mentorship, but often, smaller startups simply don't have processes in place for most things, including mentorship. And of course, what you get mentored on depends on the company too: at a big company, the focus may be on growing your career, whereas the mentorship at a smaller company may be about navigating an uncertain product roadmap.

Unfortunately, getting into a big tech company (especially when not doing so right out of a well-known college) requires a lot of luck, so getting access to this mentorship isn't exactly easy...

> This might not be the smartest thing to put onto the internet, but I'm not someone who comes in guns a-blazing and ships dozens of features my first week.

Nobody does. We have a running joke at our company of avoiding anyone who thinks they’re going to accomplish anything meaningful in the first month. Unless your company is totally mismanaged (ours is not), there won’t be the low-hanging fruit around that they think will be.

My company does this, but our pay is somewhat under market rate - our developers make not much compared to what is bandied about here. But then again, I run a company in a desirable field, the rules are pretty lax, and we invest a ton of money in employees.

You might find the inverse relationship, unfortunately. High salaries often come with high expectations and low time to develop employees because of your high salary. That's been my experience, and I've worked for a fair number of large and small tech firms.

> You might find the inverse relationship, unfortunately. High salaries often come with high expectations and low time to develop employees because of your high salary. That's been my experience, and I've worked for a fair number of large and small tech firms.

This is surely correct. I just ask myself whether this is just a very different formulation of what zck wrote:

> I suspect this is like baseball before Moneyball -- what if you can get people who are undervalued and make them better?

If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them.

>> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them.

Yeah, I don't disagree with this at all. My software architect was writing JCL COBOL full-time before he took this job and has a degree in Computer Science from a no-name private school. He knew nothing of our tech stack, but he was a hard worker and a good culture fit, so I hired him and gave him two months (EDIT: on salary) to teach himself - bought him all the courses, books, and such he could stand. Within 3 weeks he was pushing to our repo.

> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them.

This is very close to what I was thinking, but there's a slight difference. I was thinking less about people who are _underpaid_ relative to how well they are performing, and more about people who are _underperforming_ relative to how well they could be.

I imagine this to be the most powerful kind of sports scouting -- you look for the people who could do well in the majors, no matter how well they're doing now. It's trivial to say "LeBron James would be a good #1 pick"; it's harder to recognize people like Kurt Warner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner), an NFL quarterback who went undrafted, but was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. I'm talking about people who have more potential than they're showing.

Tbh it has been the opposite experience for me.

Small companies had little onboarding process, little to no training budget, and everything had be deployed yesterday. Plus a lower salary.

Large companies had formal onboarding, training budgets which they encouraged you to use, and didn't mind spending more time get the thing right before releasing and a higher salary.

The only large company I worked at where this was true was Microsoft. I have literally nothing bad to say about my experiences there, even the fact that I was caught up in the massive layoffs after the Great Financial Crisis. They handled it all with class and encouraged us to abuse their educational resources.

This hasn't been true most other places I've done contracting work for, or heard from friends who are full-timers.

It probably just runs the gamut depending on personal experiences. I guess my point is that it's hard to find a really high salary and expect to be trained up, and that seems logical enough to me.

High salaries often come with high expectations and low time to develop employees because of your high salary.

The strangest thing I've noticed about my experience in the tech industry is the utter and complete disconnect between salary and expectations. I've worked for a wide gamut of firms, from startups with single-digit numbers of engineers to FAANG companies with thousands of engineers. I have never noticed a clear correlation between salary and expectations.

The job where I was under the most pressure and where I had the most asked of me was actually my lowest paid position. I graduated in 2009, on the tail end of the financial crisis, and I counted myself fortunate to find a job at a local firm that was hiring. This was in the Midwest, so I counted myself fortunate to have a job offer at all, regardless of the salary. I very quickly found out why that firm was perpetually hiring. The work environment was so high pressure (and the wages so far below market rate, even during the recession) that people would leave as soon as they could find an opportunity (any opportunity) elsewhere. I held out for about 8 months before finding another role that paid significantly more and had significantly less expectations around how fast I would ship.

Well it's good that it's up on the internet. Gives you and me data on which companies to avoid.

Ha, it does. Though, I meant "I don't know if it's smart to admit publicly that I'm not a Linus Torvalds-level programmer".

Very few companies want employees who think they're as good as Linus. No companies should want that, but they gotta learn the hard way...

> If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive. There’s someplace for everyone.

You don't need to fit in everywhere, different places work in different ways.

Express interest in improving yourself to a more senior colleague. Too many people just sign off on PRs, etc because we "don't have time" to help our junior engineers grow. Encourage real feedback on your work. Companies do a dis-service not to invest in improving their employees.

In other fields, both unions I've worked under have training programs. Companies don't offer education directly but they do pay a tiny percentage into the training fund, which goes towards classes.

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