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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

I survived the dot com crash (yes I'm old).

I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.

If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".

I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.

Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.

Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.

Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.

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"We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done"

I really appreciate the sentiment. In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.

"You need to make some changes" is not particularly helpful when you're outside the fold. What's typically unstated is something about loyalty, esp. not disclosing the mistakes of others.

The best advice someone could give?

1. Achieve impressive things

2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you

That's pretty good advice. Get stuff done and be likable is good.

I have a colleague who almost feels like he's actively trying to make me hate him by throwing completely unrelated to work off-hand remarks in the most basic thing I do, like telling people that I'm gonna take a lunch break or just opening up a terminal prompt while we pair program.

I know it's off-topic but It's hard for me to try to be likeable with people who are actively trying stuff like that, and I don't know what else to do. It feels like I'm sitting on a table and the other side ignores their table manners because they're just that valuable to the company that they can.

I think I don’t fully understand the opening up a terminal prompt part of that comment.

Not the one or replying to, but I’ve encountered this too. Some pair programming takes the form of two people operating one computer. When I’ve done this style and I’m driving, certain people wouldn’t let me finish my thought on what I’m doing. They’ll grab their keyboard or mouse and change programs, or just start typing in stuff while I’m typing too.

I like pair programming with the right person. It is very rewarding. What you describe sounds awful. I would tell them to stop immediately. If it continues, I would stop the pair programming session. What a pain.

Yeah, I like it when it’s good. That experience happened at a company where it was full time mandatory, and with our clients’ engineers too. I had positive experiences from that, but also really frustrating ones.

Have you told this person what they’re doing bothers you and asked them to stop? If you haven’t, then you are partially to blame for not speaking up for yourself. Good opportunity for you to learn how to tactfully set boundaries with people.

> In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.

I think that's all true except for the "more than competence" part and it's a good thing. Competence is directly related to loyalty. When you recommend someone for a job and they excel, it makes you look good. It makes you loyal to them and giving the opportunity makes them more loyal to you. If someone isn't recommended you for job openings they know about, it's because they think you might make them look bad, either through experience with you or the lack thereof. Unfortunately, it takes time to prove you're competent and gain that loyalty.

Sometimes nepotism can creep in and someone can use their influence to get someone under qualified into a position they shouldn't but that influence was, generally, built through competence, including a history of recommended qualified and competent people.

> The best advice someone could give? > 1. Achieve impressive things > 2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you

I think the real advice is be reliable and don't be abrasive. A recommendation for a position goes a long way because it alleviates the risk of hiring an unknown person that may be unreliable or not be able to work with other people.

Seconding this. I'm wondering if the person you are replying to might be having a bit of a dunning kruger issue

I only recommend the people that I have worked with that I would want to work with again. Not because of loyalty, but because they are good, and will make me look good for recommending them

To clarify for other users, "dunning kruger issue" means:

    The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[2] whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Loyalty, like love, can be blind. One of the best SREs I work with, is just a stellar performer. Over delivers, solves complex problems quickly and with well thought out and reliable solutions. We needed another SRE, so we hired his best friend. Terrible employee, both in what they deliver and how they act. Night and day difference from the first SRE.

> We needed another SRE, so we hired his best friend.

Well there was your mistake. You should have hired the best SRE he knows, not his best friend.

I’m good friends with many software engineers, but the strength of our friendship has no correlation with their engineering capabilities.

I think the point is that they were brought on on the strength of the first person's recommendation, not because they were the best friend.

I agree. There is different mindsets though. If someone was my best friend, I would not recommend them because of that, if they were a bad fit. That would be unfair to both the employer and the friend.

Not sure why anybody would do that. Even for inexperienced people or people that need more guidance in general there's usually spots, just in other other companies.

Companies still hire people that chose the completely wrong career and fields. And in many companies there is demand for them for all sorts of reasons. Worst case they have to do shitty jobs, nobody else wants to do.

With the current lay-offs I think it's mostly the result of "hire everyone" during covid.

Obviously I left out that the bad apple came from his recommendation. That's where trusting the judgement of a great employee can have blind spots.

I agree. Hiring friends and family is dangerous in my view, unless you are running your own small company.

Alan C. Greenberg, former CEO of investment bank Bear, Stearns & Co. said (to paraphrase): "The problem with hiring friends and family: You hire 100% of the dummies." Bear had an incredibly strict policy about not hiring friends and family. As a result, I am always suspicious when people recommend to hire friends and family.

And I bet you didn't ask that guy next time you needed to hire someone.

The people whom I’d recommend are not on the basis of loyalty but rather on some dot product of competence and willingness/propensity to do hard work.

It’s true that a network referral will inherently be of someone that I worked with (or have other [rare] reason to vouch for). That’s the value of it: if you know me enough to trust my judgment, that vouch has information value for you.

I don’t see any other way it could work more effectively.

The people I would recommend are usually never needing help finding work and are probably already in their ideal role: I never have anyone to recommend!

>In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.

The point being? That is how human social network and constructs work. The ultimate point is to help yourself and not based on some ephemeral grand concept. No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day? Incompetent people will indirectly stab you in the back eventually so you really want an adequate level of competence and loyalty.

Dislike and loyalty are also very different things so not sure why you're equating them. There's people who do things I dislike that will support others that support them. There are people I like greatly who have a record of stabbing others in the back even if they were helped by that person. Guess which ones I'd recommend for a job?

Loyalty is not a quality that should be selected for. Someone could be "stabbing you in the back" because you're doing something wrong, either morally or because your choices are not good for the business, which is ostensibly what you both should be working towards. Demanding or expecting loyalty blinds you to important signals.

Loyalty is a huge failure of human reasoning, and it's frankly bizarre that people see it as a moral virtue given how easily it can be and has been exploited in the past.

You're confusing giving feedback or pushing back with stabbing in the back. Someone loyal will tell you the truth to your face or confront you directly understanding that you mutually trust each other. In fact the people I consider most loyal are the ones most likely to call me out in situations and give me a different perspective.

Loyalty is defined as devotion to a person, institution or idea. I think"devotion" is somewhat stronger than what you're describing.

I'd say someone calling you out is not exhibiting loyalty to you, but more like integrity, or loyalty to some other ideal, like truth, or business success, that you also value. Devotion to ideals is better than to people, though devotion by definition can still be blinding and dangerous (religion? Laissez-faire free markets?).

I'd say that what you're describing is a respect for people with who will fight for principles that you agree with, and that generates a kind of camaraderie, but don't confuse camaraderie for loyalty.

Anyway, not to go down a rabbit hole, the danger of loyalty as a concept is just something I happened to be thinking about lately. I just can't think of any valid instances of loyalty that didn't have very bad failure modes, so I'm inclined to write it off entirely as a value one should aspire to develop.

> No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day?

Let me say this bluntly: everyone has the ability to stab some anyone in the back. Maybe some have had the unique pleasure of not needing to be in a position to do this, which is great for them, but highly unrealistic for an overwhelming majority of people.

Bad situations bring the worst out in people.

Bad situations take competent people and make the incompetent.

Bad situations can make good people behave poorly.

I'd gamble the attitude you've expressed here will cause you lots of issues down the road. The most successful career folks I've met take chances on "incompetent" people but they're systematic. Part of their process allows for tolerance and growth -- i.e. taking a chance. I don't mean to solo you out but this is a very harsh attitude and definitely makes the industry a much worse place to be in.

Nothing in life is absolute but that doesn't mean everything in life is equal. Some people will stab you in the back more likely than others. Other will be more likely to provide support for you in a difficult situation. Likewise competence isn't an absolute value but changes with times and there is both current and future competence. Consequence for actions and judgement of others does not mean absolutes.

If you want to actively aim to have coworkers that in your own judgement are more likely to stab you in the back and more likely to be incompetent for the job at hand then you do you. I'll go with having mutually supportive coworkers who are capable of doing the job at hand.

> If you want to actively aim to have coworkers that in your own judgement are more likely to stab you in the back and more likely to be incompetent for the job at hand then you do you.

No need to be dismissive only pointing out that your valuation of people will likely cause you more grief than benefit (imo). Also, incompetent people would probably be far less likely to actually be a threat because, well, they're incompetent... It's the smart people that you write off as incompetent that stab you in the back (in my experience). Having some coined judgemental framework will definitely cause oversights eventually.

There's no single way to define someone as incompetent or smart. It's all context and job specific rather than some blanket absolute judgement of someone. Someone not competent for the job at hand will have gotten that far in their careers for some other reason. A fairly common reason is being able to play office politics and sacrifice others for their own benefit.

>Having some coined judgemental framework will definitely cause oversights eventually.

Yes, nothing ever is perfect, everything is tradeoffs and likelihoods of certain outcomes. I'd like to note that judging something as broken because it is not perfect is in itself an inflexible judgmental framework.

I think you are discounting the social aspect of the advice. Most people do great things, but very few can stand out only on the strength of their work. So for the vast majority doing good work has to be coupled with having a network that knows about one's work.

And frankly looking for a job is probably one of the most self-serving efforts in one's life, by definition. That is a good thing.

Something I noticed in tech is that loyalty is generally a consequence of competence.

If competent people are valued, recognized and promoted that leads to more interesting projects and compensation. That's how you build loyalty.

We all know software shops that are always whining about the "tech talent shortage" and whose technical employees don't stay more than two years. And we know why nobody is loyal to those!

> 2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you

I'm someone who tends to get along and work well with others. That part definitely has its advantages for employability (and life in general), and is recommended. However, taking it to this extreme is just dangerous advice. Constantly being a people pleaser can carry enormous risks, especially (but not limited to) to yourself. It's important to learn to be ok with people disliking you sometimes.

People pleasers can cause people to dislike them in a workplace, ironically. Being a people pleaser in software dev very often means you will over-burden yourself because you'd rather say "yes, I can do that for you" than "no, I don't have the bandwidth for that".

I'd rather a teammate who is honest about their current limitations than someone who tells me what I want to hear. If someone admits they are stretched thin, it's now an "us versus the problem" to find why you are so overtasked. If someone consistently takes on too much (because they can't say no) and causes the team to miss deadlines, it's now an "us versus you" problem.

10000%.

The most hated guy at my old job would start every request with an elaborate hand-wrung introduction to make sure no one could possibly be offended by what he was asking for.

Because of this, everyone had to read one or two paragraphs of niceties before they had any idea what he actually needed.

It was incredibly annoying and actually quite selfish in practice since it wasted so much time.

A good manager would have broached the subject with the employee and gently moved them in the direction of adjustment and likely some therapy.

That sort of people pleasing behavior can easily come from a past where asserting even a minor need or boundary was met with abuse from caretakers or peers.

Not saying it's not maladaptive and irritating behavior. It is! But they probably came by it honestly.

I totally agree; unfortunately he was a contractor hired through an agency, which meant his management resources were poorly defined and somewhat diffuse across the two companies' reporting chains.

I'd imagine if he was strictly an FTE he would have been getting that guidance and support, but I guess the politics of trying to do so across company boundaries made it too much of a career risk for the "manager" he was assigned from my company.

Totally, that has been me in the past. You also burn yourself out and start underperforming.

Everyone has different and possibly ridiculous expectations;w whether they dislike you or not is not really within your control.

Edit: I'd maybe clarify that trying to get people above you not to dislike you is essentially the nature the politics of careerist ladder climbing. If you get laid off, it's just pretty common for people to see themselves as inherently superior because they weren't let go, and therefore think, right or wrong, that you'll reflect poorly on them, because they're careerist ladder climbers. So maybe it's best to carefully cultivate the people from the very start of meeting them which ones still have souls.

Your first comment re: exclusionary is simply a filter for the flip side of your 2nd point.

The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire. A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.

Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.

I'm not sure about the 10x part. On my team I have roughly 15 coworkers. Two are pretty useless, or at least perform at a level dramatically lower than the other 13. So how do we deal with it? Like the Internet, we route around them. Sure they're a waste of company resources/money, but big companies often waste so much money in IT that it's not really a significant factor.

Now if your team is very small, one or two bad apples can be quite damaging.

Maybe you've not gotten the truly bad apples, or have enough process in place to mitigate.

I've been in environments with people who are breaking things at a rate that causes a day of their work to cause more than a day of work for others.

Fighting with management for months and then shunting them off to their own 'strategic branch' for 6 months was the only way to protect the team until they were fired.

Most people don’t understand how bad “average” is.

It’s true that a bad hire has a large impact. But people assume this means the folks like you’re describing. When not taking money into account I view those types of people as net neutral.

A good litmus is to answer the question “would the team be any better off if we replaced them with no one”, and usually the answer is “no” or at least close to it.

Factoring money in does change things. Especially for smaller companies. But even then people overestimate what “bad” means when they cite the massive impact of a bad hire

Yup - there are actually net negative contributors that simply removing would cause in an increase in team output.

Whether it be rate of damage to codebase, manual interventions in prod, hurting morale, time suck in meetings/idle chitchat, causing drama with stakeholders that needs to be triaged, etc.

They are rare, but they happen, and the process of onboarding, feedback, giving a chance, documenting, and off boarding can take a year.

Joel Spolsky has written extensively about avoiding bad hires. Average and above is the ultimate goal. I agree the impact of a bad hire far outweighs good hires because they consumer the time of managers. Good hires only need a quick steer now and again. Bad hires need a manager to spoon feed them until layoff season arrives.

> the impact of a bad hire far outweighs good hires because they consumer the time of managers

Sounds like a lot of bad manager hires...

> Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.

This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers. At most companies, the best they can do is enter their recently-laid-off colleagues information and resume into the internal referral system. Yes, that's usually better than going in through the "random applicant from the internet" funnel, but it's still limited. Even if they have a good relationship with the hiring manager, often the applicant still has to go through the funnel, and it's easy to get lost there. This usually isn't an issue with smaller companies that have less process, though.

Regardless, on the few occasions where I (as a non-manager) have referred someone and they've been hired, I don't think it gave me much of a reputation boost as someone who brought someone good onboard. Regardless, there are certainly some people for whom I'd go above and beyond to try to help them get an interview, but I'd do that because they are close friends whom I want to help, not because I of any professional perks of successfully referring someone, which I absolutely don't care about.

I wrote the comment your replying to...

> This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers.

A good number of my management gigs were PEERS hiring me in as a fellow engineer, and me getting promoted to be their boss. Much of the hiring I have done is peers of the good engineers on my team. If your peers think your great, that your going to make them look good by doing well then your name will come up.

Every manager is different, "hire this person" with some sort of resume is going to get my attention! Your peer can do that for you!

I thrived in the dotcom crash while I watched many of my friends go to companies with generic names like "Global Digital Media" with silly business plans like putting Internet kiosks in U.S. airports. It was incredible - their entire business plan was to ramp up over the next 5 years with a massive capital outlay just in time for smart phones to make them completely obsolete. This is an actual example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/22/technology/the-web-withou...

I thrived by staying put. I got retention bonuses while my friends got tons of equity in companies that became 0. When they lowered their salaries to conserve money, they gave them more equity to compensate. Again, all the equity became 0.

Everything you said about networking is spot on. I would add to it - don't waste time. Don't think, "I'm going to ride on my severance and unemployment for six months and start on x date." Start literally today. If it's the holidays and nobody is hiring, get a certification. Learn a new technology. Work on networking. Exercise. Do 8 hours of productive something every day.

I have a friend who has been unemployed the last 2.5 years. He now wishes he didn't take a year off without improving himself / looking for a job.

>I would add to it - don't waste time.

In the dotcom crash, when I was laid off I think the first email I sent the next day was to someone who we were a client of at a previous employer. And we had stayed in touch because I had moved onto a competitor of his (until I was laid off). Just a "Hey. I was laid off. Love to pick your brain." sort of thing. Took me out to lunch with his COO the next week. Discussed some contracting but they ended up making me an offer in about of month.

Things got rocky for the company later. And it was touch and go for a bit. Not the greatest period for me financially but I was never really unemployed and it was a pretty great job in a lot of ways which set me up for my current one. Had I decided to take the autumn off, I could easily see myself being unemployed for 2 or 3 years. Other people I knew never really recovered from the dotcom bubble bursting.

This advice boils down to "be the best of the best" because you'd only go out of your way for someone if they're that good.

I don't think people who haven't reached that bar are necessarily doing something "wrong". It takes hard work to reach it and some people prioritize other things in life over hustling. Others simply don't have the talent to reach it.

I would argue most if not everyone has the talent to reach being the "best of the best" but it takes time. Time, Time, Time... It's everything. Some can reach higher bars sooner simply because they were exposed to something earlier and more frequently.

Competency is only ever recognized over time.

Hear, hear, agree wholeheartedly.

I, too, survived the dot com crash, and, too, benefited from and serve as part of the kind of network described above. When it comes to job hunting, my two favorite career stats are having helped a friend get a job I was interviewing for and working at least a second time for four different former managers. I actually just talked to one yesterday, we hadn't worked together in 20 years.

If this is what's necessary for experienced devs, imagine all the students and upcoming devs that are not allowed a foot in the door. The great social barrier that keeps jobs in very specific parts of the U.S.

Mainly agree, but maybe can be a bit more generous.

"30" sounds low to me, having worked in large companies for many years. Sure, the number of people you worked super-closely with for years is maybe in double digits but you probably know a lot of other people by reputation (which is still good signal) and there may be low effort things you can do for them. I try to, anyway.

This is a hidden danger that I only understood late in my career. I like working at small companies. You can contribute big things relatively easily when there are only a few contributors to begin with. You can build something and nurture it over time - anything from a technical asset to a working relationship with a colleague. You get a more diverse range of things to do because not everyone has to be pigeonholed and not everything needs approval from three different committees. You don't need to constantly try to do "high visibility" projects that will show up in your promotion panel because everyone in the company knows if you're good and the right person to take the lead on the next big thing anyway. You don't need to job hop every year or two to find interesting and well-compensated work for the same reasons.

But then after a while you've only worked in a few different places and with a few different people at each one. Your professional network is much smaller than someone who worked for a variety of big name tech giants in that time doing no-one-really-cares-what and climbing the career ladder by job hopping.

I'm really not bitter. If I could go back and tell my newly graduated self how their career would have gone a few decades later they'd probably still have made very similar decisions even with that knowledge. I've enjoyed many of my roles at small companies immensely and I can't think of many less attractive jobs in this industry than being a cog in the machine at some tech giant whose primary contribution to humanity is turning us all into spyware targets and then ad targets.

But it's undeniably true that sometimes in a tough market - even many years into a career and having reached the equivalent of staff/principal level or followed the independent/entrepreneur route - you can still end up knocking on the front door of an interesting employer or doing the recruiter thing to make a move when habitual networkers with similar YOE would not need to stoop so low because they'd find something via someone some other way.

Doesn’t necessarily apply to every industry… sure to a growing sector like software then maybe yes. In other parts of the economy, teams can have fixed sizes and budgets. This means no wiggle room to bring in new people. I manage a team but can’t hire a new full time person right now…I would put resumes in a pile..

> Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network.

What did non-survival look like? I assume you’re speaking metaphorically.

This is very generational and depends on what sort of work circle you’re in too. There’s people I know would do this sort of thing for me but they literally couldn’t. This sounds like the equivalent of “hit the pavement with your resume” advice

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