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Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday March 10 2020, @05:25PM (11 children)
Maybe it helps you to see that what you experience(d) is not specific to tech. There is hard skills (coding, expertise in the subject matter) and soft skills. Unfortunately, the hard skills only play a minor part in determining who gets promoted, gets credit or respect. The soft skills are often much more important as defined by your mode of interpersonal interaction. Soft skills is not a really positive term in this context, it comprises aggressiveness, boastfulness and other egotistic traits (most the time veiled in hypocritical kiss-ass behavior or seeming modesty). This is true for tech, science (arguably more so), public services, politics, basically all workplaces with competitive incentives.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday March 10 2020, @07:32PM (5 children)
And this is part of the ongoing lie. The simple fact is that there are nowhere near enough jobs for coders to advance into management, especially when most of the management jobs are already spoken for by people related to existing management. Has nothing to do with soft skills and everything to do with who you know (and no, ass kissing isn't a soft skill, it's a con artist skill). Then again , given how much of the industry is based on con games, that explains a lot.
The industry is dying. The consequences of massive consolidation are evident in a lack of innovation, and the need to exploit the poor via gig "platforms " because that haven't come up with new ways to add actual value to the overall economy.
We've been had. But keep plugging out code for your masters at google, Facebook, and amazon to use to further exploit the masses rather than help them improve their economic well-being and independence. Stupid is as stupid does.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:04PM (3 children)
Ah, so you are the bitter AC... Perfect match. I wouldn't hire you either. Luckily we are still allowed to discriminate against people with a bad attitude, though probably not for long in Canada if you win all your lawsuits.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday March 11 2020, @04:18PM (2 children)
No, I'm not the bitter AC. I posted under it specifically so that people would realize that I'm not the only one with the same sentiment. Do you really believe that I'm the only person in the last 20 years to realize that the open source movement has been co-opted by the big companies and that there is no other way forward to make money for small independent developers except to go to a closed-source license if they want to make money selling their fostfare, because RMS was full of crap?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:55AM
Do you really believe that I'm the only person in the last 20 years to realize...
No, with the Sith there are always two
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @06:23PM
Shows what you know https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html [gnu.org]
RMS never talked about financial viability that I know of, feel free to provide your own citations.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday March 30 2020, @03:58PM
Coders only 'advance into management' in companies with a crappy promotion model. In other companies, they advance to senior development (or possibly architect) roles. There are some skills common to developers and management, but most of the skills that they need are different. HP championed this model (in the '70s or '80s), where a person's manager may be more junior to the person, because a small but specialised engineering project may need senior engineers but only junior managers.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday March 23 2020, @03:44AM (4 children)
I came here to say something similar, though I have a more favourable view of soft skills to you. Too many developers think that their tech skills, and tech skills alone, are the sum of their value to an organisation. Further, anyone who demonstrates soft skills such as diplomacy, negotiation and managing upward is a "kiss-ass".
I started as a junior developer (Bachelor of Science, majoring in Computer Science), and am currently the manager of just under 200 technical and management consultants for a professional services firm. Over the years I've dealt with many technically talented people. Some of them have been wonderful to work with, and some have just been assholes. Any day of the week I'd take an 'average' developer who is willing to work collaboratively with others over a 'skilled' asshole who acts like a prima donna.
If you have deep technical skills and can't find work, it's probably because you have under-developed interview/social skills. These are just as important as your technical skills and only become more important as you work at higher levels. Calling everyone else a kiss-ass just shows that you haven't bothered to recognise the value of other skills, probably because of your arrogance about the superiority of your technical skills.
Coffee requires both ground Coffee Beans and hot water. Having one without the other is deeply unsatisfying to the drinker.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday March 23 2020, @05:37PM (1 child)
Thank you for providing some nuance and quite correctly characterizing my personality traits :-).
You mention the skills "diplomacy, negotiation and managing upward" (the latter I do not understand). Going into reflective mode, you will recoginise that these skills all include dispositions making it easier for you as a manager. The ideal worker is rough on the edges though, is independently thinking and would have the manager serving him instead of the other way round. My point being that the filters in place are never geared towards the technical goal, but towards the accountability to the next level in the hierarchy. This, almost by definition, will result in unjust decisions. I am personally on both sides, trying to rise through the ranks, but also being responsible for hiring and managing of people (not at your order of magnitude though). Honestly, after an interview I am most the time at a complete loss at whom to hire and how to do justice to the situation, and I am certain that most of my decisions were suboptimal.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 30 2020, @01:51PM
> would have the manager serving him
I think managing upward means helping the manager to know what worker needs to more effectively do his job. "Sorry to nag, but my laptop is busted so my project is gonna be late. Could you chase IT to get me a new one?" ... "I notice Jimbob's stuff is running a bit late, I can't get started on my thing without his stuff. Would it be okay if I lended him a hand?" etc
> would have the manager serving him instead of the other way round
Sure, and good workers will make this happen (without being too irritating to the manager). This is "managing upward".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:49PM
This. So much this. I've run development teams off and on for 25 years and this is absolutely true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday March 30 2020, @04:25PM
I like to frame this as additive impact versus multiplicative impact. Additive impact is the amount that you contribute by yourself, multiplicative impact is the amount that you increase other people's productivity, including things like mentorship, constructive feedback, and so on. On medium to large teams, a slightly above average multiplicative factor makes a huge impact, much more than a large additive impact. Imagine a team of 20 people. You have one developer who is a great hacker, 50% more effective than normal but doesn't contribute to the team. You have another developer who is an average developer but makes everyone 10% more efficient by improving CI systems, doing useful code reviews, and so on. One has an additive effect of 1.5 and a multiplicative effect of 1, the other has an additive effect of 1 and a multiplicative effect of 1.1. With 20 people on the team, one developer adds 1.5 to your team, the other adds 2.
In practice, it's actually worse because a lot of those 'highly skilled' developers are toxic and so their multiplicative factor is closer to 0.8, or even lower. On a team of 20, they demotivate the team and make life harder for everyone else enough that they are costing the equivalent of four people's worth of productivity. They need to be four times as productive as your average just to break even and that factor increases the larger your team gets. They are simply not worth hiring.
There is a corollary, of course, that some people have a negative additive effect: they introduce bugs or design flaws that take more time to fix than their overall positive contributions and if they'd just stop writing code then the project would move faster.
sudo mod me up