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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of terrible advice that many people (including many programmers) think is great advice because they don’t see nuance in the world.

To get a job you don’t have to agree to the nth degree with everything that’s said to you. You just have to be a nice more-or-less qualified person who’s enjoyable to be around and communicate with. That’s a foreign concept to many people (not just programmers) so they look for some “trick” like never disagreeing.

It’s even better that this trick makes them feel better about being a miserable wet blanket because they’re putting one over on the interviewers.

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Counterpoint: I interview developers regularly and my current company is 100% looking for agreeable people. If you say you love doing TDD and pair programming, then you are half way through being hired.

If you mention reservations about either, that's going to cost you.

It may “cost them” but they may not want the job either after that point depending on the context of the question. I really dislike pair programming if it’s required all the time and would kindly thank you for your time and look elsewhere. If they want a job at all costs I guess I can’t speak to that.

On a side note, oh man the stories I could tell you. Pair programming all the time is like an evolution of Foucault's panopticon. You police yourself because you are closely being watched all the time and your peers will tattletale to your manager if you don't pair hard enough.

It's brutal.

You police yourself so you do well at the thing your bosses want you to do well at? That sounds awful.

I disagree but I don't think a discussion with you would be productive. The sarcasm tells me you are not going to engage honestly. If you wish to learn more about the negative psychological effects of being watched all the time, there's plenty of material online for you to read. Particularly, Foucault and the panopticon.

To be honest, I think you’re the one who won’t engage honestly.

Here’s a question for you: What are the benefits of being watched all the time?

I understand that from the employee’s perspective they might not like being watched all the time and that it can affect their behavior. It can also prevent them from doing their best work.

That said, there are reasons why an employer would want to watch their employees all the time. If the employee dislikes it enough and thinks they have better options, they can stop working there.

Doesn't the culture of being watched all of the time result in people staying later and doing things to appear busy but generally not productive? In Japan that culture is present in many offices but in the west we've adopted a different balance.

My impression is that you certainly were angling for a very specific negative interpretation of what the person you were responding to was saying, namely that that person was implying they didn't want to perform the duties of their job. They were not saying this, they were saying that constant surveillance is not good.

The only reasons an employer has to constantly be watching relate to paranoia or micromanagement, i.e. a lack of trust in the professionalism and competence of their employees. This is abysmal and the employee quitting or not is unrelated, much as how bullying is bad even if technically an employee can quit. Not to mention that quitting is not an optional for everyone, depending on their circumstances.

The truth is that some people can’t be trusted and aren’t that competent. These people may be cheap to hire though. Pair programming and/or monitoring of them is a way to get a predictable baseline out of them - even if that baseline is very low. You can say it’s a bad decision by the business, but it’s their bad decision to make.

It's their bad decision to make, and it deserves criticism. If you're basically intentionally hiring terrible performers and the only way to ensure an adequate baseline is to literally monitor them 8 hours a day, I hope that that company goes out of business. The alternative is to promote a culture of competence whereby other employees will want to set such a baseline for other employees such that abysmal performance does not slide but without someone hovering over your shoulder your entire tenure.

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