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You don't need good developers as in top quartile genius ones. Even more, they don't want to work at your bank or web shop. You need good developers, where good means "decent human beings" while being just average ib talent. Those can be found without gigantic effort, I'd say a majority of developers fall in this category. There is only one hard requirement for recruiting such average team. To hire and retain developers who are "decent human beings" the manager/hr should also be good, as in "decent human beings".

Reminds me of the movie "Shaolin Soccer" [1] wherein a martial arts master becomes a soccer coach, and organizes a rag-tag group of misfits into a championship team.

Software is a team sport.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_Soccer

Without knowing the background to that anecdote, the impression I get is less that the tech folks at that company were coddled than that the marketing folks were undervalued. If the marketing folks really are providing value for the company and doing a good job marketing the company, then there's no sense in forcing them to miss lunch. If the marketing folks require so much micromanagement that they can't be trusted to schedule their own lunch breaks they probably aren't contributing significant value to the company anyway, so they should be let go and replaced with a more responsible marketing department.

It takes a lot of different skills to run a company. Even at a tech company, tech isn't the only skill that matters.

I believe that was exactly GP's point—they're just pointing out that the problem with retaining tech workers isn't often that they're treated poorly by their company, even when that might be the problem with retaining many other workers.

> "Good developers" are hard to find. Average developers aren't even easy to find nevermind ones that are actually good.

That's really not true. You don't need to find a Linus or Ken Thompson for that enterprise system. All you need is developers with sufficient maturity to not be distracted by shiny objects, who are proud to build reliable secure systems with the most boring technology applicable (complexity is the enemy of everything, including security, availability and maintainability). These people are easy to find. Yes, you still have to treat them humanely and pay fairly, but finding them is easy.

One factor that may seem to make them difficult to find is the current interviewing landscape. If your hiring process is laser focused on hiring leetcode ninjas, you will staff teams full of leetcode ninjas. I will say the union between the sets (leetcode ninjas) and (maturity to favor stable solutions) isn't super huge.

If for anyone who is doing leetcode hiring (not specifically leetcode, but that mindset) and finding hiring competent people difficult, I can suggest to change your hiring practices and your world will change dramatically.

(Or don't, leaving even more competent developers for me to find even easier.)

> The tech department has better working conditions that most other departments.

How many departments are asked to check in every single day with what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today?

The humanity of being asked two simple questions about what work you're doing. It's shocking. I know. But I've worked at a few companies where they rolled the standup out to otherd departments.

If you honestly think being asked those 2 simple questions is not being treated well. You're going to have a hard life.

No single example on it’s own seems like such a big deal. But long hours, being on call, little respect, etc show IT is a low status profession that happens to pay reasonably well.

> IT is a low status profession that happens to pay reasonably well.

IMO this is absolutely crucial to understand about our industry, for programmers too, not just IT.

We're paid well because they can't avoid paying us well. But they don't want to let us in The Club of the actual professional or upper-middle class, in terms of perks and status (and, actually, pay in most of the industry, even in the US, doesn't quite rise to that level—$200k+ for mid-career-or-earlier isn't what most programmers see).

Frequent monitoring and things like open floorplan offices are part of that. High-status gets very little monitoring, and an office. There are tons of little things like this.

I think it may also be a minor reason our interviews are so god-awful (but I think the main reason is the huge players trying to reduce turnover to suppress the rate of wage increases).

I think a major reason interviews are so god-awful is that, due in large part to the high wages, there are a lot of frankly totally unqualified people seeking SWE positions. And when they fail an interview, they don’t dematerialize, but rather keep banging away hopelessly at the front door of the process.

When companies want a fully algorithmic way to filter for signal, it’s not because we think it’s a great process, but because it’s one of the only viable processes.

> frankly totally unqualified people seeking SWE positions

PLEASE explain to me what value leetcode-type questions provide over what good of a software engineer someone is!

They don't measure "goodness", they merely check that the person actually knows how to write code. I disagree with them (I believe they are unnecessarily complex when it comes to the actual algorithms, and rarely mimic the real-world requirements of the job), but at least they do weed out idiots who can't even write a for loop.

There're shocking number of people who can't write simplest code.

Here's simple task that I ask on interviews: write JavaScript function which works like setTimeout and uses setTimeout internally but provides a Promise result so it can be awaited. Very few people can write that kind of code. They actually have no idea what Promise is. They want to get in frontend position. How can you write frontend code if you have no idea what Promise is.

I would say that's not a great example. I wrote literally that function as a utility in my project, and it was honestly kind of tricky. There's a big gap between knowing how to use a Promise, which is necessary and closer to an "idea what a Promise is", vs how to build one from scratch, which is nice but probably not necessary for a generic frontend job. It wasn't even really necessary for me, I just wanted to be able to pause functions with an await statement.

Imagine you had an automated oracle who could tell you how many out of three easy-level leetcode problems a candidate could solve in 90 minutes total.

Would that piece of information be helpful to you as you consider which candidates to invite to the first round of interviews? That is why companies do it.

A candidate who got 2 or 3 solved in 90 minutes is very likely to do much better on the rest of the interview and on the job than someone who couldn't solve any.

(I think a lot of people who can write code have a difficult time imagining just how many people both can't write code and apply for seemingly every posted SWE job listing.)

> Imagine you had an automated oracle

Haha. Hiring people is a job in and of itself. It needs a good eye for detail and intuition.

People are weird. Some days they write great code and hardly any serious bugs. Other days they need to look up a for-loop on MDN.

Also it is very difficult to assess someone's coding qualifications in an interview -- I feel like more difficult compared to other roles, although I'm interested in opposing opinions -- especially if the person doing the assessing isn't a coder themselves, but honestly either way.

It is just baffling that you think this. Have you worked in the service industry recently? Like about half of americans? Where you also work long hours, but don't have a set schedule, or health insurance, or pto. And are required to endure virtually any debasement a customer feels like exposing you to. And your behavior, appearance, comings and goings are rigidly governed by a handbook and enforced by petty tyrants enraged by also enduring all these same conditions?

Get some perspective ffs. This is the easiest, cushiest job I've ever had, and the only one where people with masters degrees often consider me their peer despite my 11th grade education.

Stop whining and join a union or something seriously. These are all minor and solvable problems.

That says more about you than the average developer. You may feel you won the lottery because you don't have to stack boxes in your hometown for minimum wage because of the limitations on a grade 11 education. That person who put in the effort/time/money to get that masters might feel left out of the club of his former peers run the show.

Please get some perspective not everyone is in your situation.

Being cushy isn’t high status.

Many IT jobs are paid hourly, don’t get health insurance, and some even get paid minimum wage. That said, I have had plenty of people describe their retail jobs as cushy because it’s low physical labor, inside with AC, and they don’t have to think.

Is being on call really a sign of low status? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure most doctors have an on-call schedule. And if you think doctors aren't in a high-status profession, I reckon your standards are wildly different from my own.

Long hours and little respect probably will vary from one employer to the next. However, I've been working as a developer for about ~10 years - most of it with a mid-size insurance company but the last couple with a large bank. I work longer hours than most of my colleagues, but I've rarely put in more than 50 hours in a week, and my average is probably closer to 45. And my non-engineering colleagues have always treated my fellow engineers and me with respect and an appreciation for the difficulty of what we do. If anything, they've usually been a bit too deferential.

YMMV, but I think our profession is probably among the best in the world for workers. If my child were about to enter the working world and had the ability + interest, I'd absolutely recommend this as a career.

I don't think on call is a sign of low status, but I think OP is correct that programming is a low status job. People respect the business guys with the big ideas, not the implementors and tbh I think that's fair. It's still one of the best jobs in terms of benefits, but you have to be willing to accept that your life as a corporate programmer is mainly carrying out someone else's ideas.

Being on call is just one sign, just as IT is more than just programming. Also the vast majority of doctors, especially the high status ones aren’t on call.

However, being on call is representative of something. Your electric company has linemen ready to respond at 2AM because they provide a service which needs to be available 24/7. However, good luck trying to contact your dermatologist, accountant, physical trainer etc at 2AM.

> Is being on call really a sign of low status?

For all practical purposes, above a certain level of management, you are implicitly on call all the time. However, the bar to clear to engage you gets higher the further up the leadership layers you go. A manager of a handful of teams comprising about 100 staff gets engaged for less serious fires than the CEO, but both are "on call". It might take the board of directors chartering a helicopter to get to the CEO's fly fishing cabin during the CEO's vacation if a situation warranting such presents itself, but the CEO is absolutely on call 24x7x365.

The complexity of what engages the on call person I suspect is what connotes status. Called for clearing out disk space: low status. Called for application outage that has stumped multiple technical teams: higher status. Called for a production outage impacting the next day's C-level reports that requires engaging other management: higher status. Called for heading off a shareholder proxy battle: even higher status.

Note here complexity doesn't solely reside in the technical realm, but frequently is rather a blend of technical factors, social factors, and quickly making impactful decisions in low-information situations.

Long hours, being on call, and not getting respect are bad things, and you should not work a job where they happen. That has absolutely zero relation to whether you're asked what you're working on.

The problem with the question is never liking the answer: "I'm probably gonna have to stare at the sky for 4-5 hours, and what you consider real work is gonna maybe start happening tomorrow."

I can't wait for low-code to get good. It's going to throw back in real time the obliqueness of the request:

"Validating most likely candidate solution..."

8 hrs later

"Solution failed to validate ... please try rephrasing request."

> I'm probably gonna have to stare at the sky for 4-5 hours, and what you consider real work is gonna maybe start happening tomorrow

It may not be indicative of the industry at large, but most engineers I know get away with this by changing the framing "I'm working on a doc" or "I'm scoping this feature" etc. Obviously this does not work with sufficiently bad management.

Daily interrogations by someone who finished a two-day "agile" course. Doctors don't have to put up with this. Or you could always get a better job that doesn't do "standups".

Do you happen to know what kind of BS doctors have to put up every day?

Care to outline it for me?

Doctors have to see multiple dozens of patients a day. Often their life sucks, have to sleep on the job in the hospital, etc. Never be envious with their plot, private capital sucks the juice out of everyone unlese we fight back.

> private capital sucks the juice out of everyone unlese we fight back.

They're even busier in public hosptials btw

Sure, show me the two-day course I can take that enables me to work in a hospital micro-managing the doctors.

Your lucky if they had a two-day course on "agile". And Doctors have rounds where they talk about what the status update of their patients.

Well, patients are important. Reinventing the wheel because your company suffers from NIH syndrome is not.

Software engineers already automated that. We know if the server is down.

Sales and Marketing both deal with this and have for much longer than software developers.

Having worked sales. You got asked what you've done today multiple times during the day.

Yeah, same. Once per day would be a dream.

Kids in US public schools stop getting micromanaged like this around first grade. Tech workers are treated like toddlers.

What will happen if you will tell your manager that you will not visit those standups anymore? Will you be fired?

Annoying as morning standups are, they are (well, should be) about keeping the team in sync and communicating, not about Big Brother watching you. Companies that want to be Big Brother have much more intrusive and insidious ways of doing that.

I am a disorganized guy who hates authority and interruptions, and even so I have grudgingly come to realize that (strictly) 15-minute morning standups actually do increase my productivity.

>Not a good place to be in because they never care as much as you do.

What you really want is developers who understand your solution and your stack, and actively want to contribute.

And for that, you need a good team mentality, easy-to-read code, and a good onboarding. And avoid crunch time as much as possible, especially when a new hire arrive, because you want him to ask dumb questions asap.

[useless personnal anecdote because i feel great about my new workplace removed]

>after their solution took down the whole system in cascading failures because it was returning 500 due to the non-serverless database not scaling

Why is a single dev able to take down your entire system without intention?

>They can write quicksort but have no idea

So don't use quicksort or identical questions and ask them more.

Your entire anecdote can just as well be held as testament of how a company's process is completely fragile. Which is at least a yellow flag as to what else it is hiding.

> you're possibly dependent on a third party to fix the bug.

IT departments love this, because it's not their problem and they don't have to do anything except press reload in the third party's ticketing system.