Hacker News Reader

Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I have met some developers in my career that can communicate as effectively as this with equally brutal criticality, but those people are astonishingly rare. Maybe 2% of the developer population, if I am being gracious, can be described this way.

Most developers I have worked with are cowards exactly as he used that word. Now in all fairness my career is largely limited to large corporate employers that only hire Java developers and, god forbid, JavaScript developers. It’s frameworks, Maven, and NPM for absolutely everything.

The hiring managers always claim to look for innovators, but then you get in and everyone is just the same. Thousands of developers just retaining their employment doing the same shit day after day, fearing any changes coming down the pike.

View on HN

> The hiring managers always claim to look for innovators,

I can't recall the last time I saw a hiring manager looking for an innovator.

Most hiring managers want people who can just get the job done with as little supervision and involvement as possible.

Most of the time when I see a coworker going off and innovating, it's a questionable exercise designed for fun and entertainment rather than getting the job done.

My last job had someone spend months "innovating" an all new custom CI/CD system. It brought no benefits to the team and was a huge waste of time. They had fun and used it as a major accomplishment their resume and LinkedIn. You could say it was "innovative", but the rest of use really wished they would have helped us out with the work that had to be done instead of "innovating" off in the weeds.

Given that it brought no benefits to the team, I would probably not say it was innovative.

I think the poster is making the division that getting shit done unsupervised is what most people mean as innovators and that not many people want true "innovators" that just spin off doing random crap just to see what happens.

It's fair to say that you need to spin off and do random crap in order to innovate. But I would not say that "spinning off doing random crap == innovation". It dirties the word a little bit.

As an SE who is now working in Product, I can tell you that there is always an endless list of features to build to support the business goals. Some are pretty standard but some are true business innovations. As in, software features that support an improved and innovative business process that saves millions or improves quality or efficiency. These features are rarely innovative from a technical perspective, but from a business point of view they are true innovations. The business problem space should always push the innovation, not some fun technology, UNLESS a technical capability changes the landscape and encourages a new process innovation.

The fact you're using quotes around innovative indicates, even to yourself, that you're replying to a straw-man.

Industry use of "innovation" is using 3 year old tech instead of 10 year old tech.

Frameworks aren't necessarily a bad thing if you can critical think - why reinvent the wheel from scratch everytime when you're trying to make a newer version of a car? But if you're only a framework monkey who cannot communicate design decisions, architecture, and/or design you're definetly screwed in the job market.

A lot of people (especially newer profiles I've seen on HN) think just being able to glue libraries together is enough to justify being a developer with a 6 fig salary, when in reality the actual value add is the architecture, design, and other critical thinking actions.

Hiring managers do try to hire the archetype developer who is both eloquent and a critical thinker, but it's hard and those who can do both know their value.

I've always heard that tech employers value all the things you'd expect them to value, but I've only ever seen them value LeetCode.

Then again, just being able to glue libraries together ought to be enough to justify a 6 fig salary, because inflation adjusted that's potentially less than the 5 fig salaries I was offered last century, fresh out of school and still wet behind the ears.

And the only reason (I assume) you're still in the tech industry despite the dot com bust and the Great Recession is because you can at least show value to employers, and you most likely have some communication and critical thinking skills, not just gluing stuff together.

Plenty of code monkey types flamed out or remained underemployed.

> the 5 fig salaries I was offered last century, fresh out of school and still wet behind the ears

And there were also fewer developers in the 1990s/2000s than in the 2020s, and the hiring market was not yet fully globalized and async compared to the post-COVID WFH/Remote market.

Most companies don't offer WFH/remote though.

WFH/remote during the pandemic normalized the opening of foreign offices, because it successfully proved the operations can continue in an async model.

by any measure you contributed a lot more value than that, though

The worst thing about frameworks is that they are an excuse to qualify cowardice, people scared shitless to write original software. There are multiple second order consequences and ethical dilemmas that come from that.

Why are there always these smug "Dijkstra's right that everyone else is an idiot" replies to Dijkstraposts? Do people understand exactly what Dijkstra was advocating for?

> I have met some developers in my career that can communicate as effectively as this with equally brutal criticality, but those people are astonishingly rare

The fact that it's rare to find arrogant people who argue with "brutal criticality" that all programmers should use formal methods all the time (like Dijkstra did), is not a bad thing IMO.

> The hiring managers always claim to look for innovators,

I thought that they were looking for "rock stars". Not the same thing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com