[p4wnc6]

I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down).

Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out."

That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.

[jared314]

"It’s ridiculous, but most companies demand an astronomically higher quality of work experience than they give out."

Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - Michael O. Church [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaeloc...

[danieltillett]

Developers need to get away from the idea that it is the companies responsibility for your career development. You are responsible for your own career development. The company has hired you to do a job and they pay you for doing that job. Do not expect anyone else to invest in you unless it is in their interest.

[pdeuchler]

It is in their interest. You want the best people at their best positions so you can leverage them to make more money. If your company doesn't care about making sure people are empowered to make the business money then I'd be worried about how they're going to pay your salary in the future.

[danieltillett]

If empowering and training is in their interest then the company (if it is smart) will provide it. The problem is that because you can leave at anytime the ideal investment for the company is likely to be less than what is ideal for you.

[p4wnc6]

If they provide less than ideal for you, then you leave. Providing less than ideal is less than ideal for them, unless they don't care about losing you, in which case you probably don't want to be there anyway.

Out of the four jobs which I have voluntarily chosen to leave, three of my four resignations were because the employer stopped giving me meaningful work that prevented skill atrophy in my primary areas.

Preventing this skill atrophy on my own time, such as with side projects, is (a) ridiculous and (b) a physical impossibility because of the burden of working hours and exhaustion demanded by the employers I had at the time.

It's absolutely unreasonable to say that someone must find a way, outside of work hours, to effectively perform an entire second job's worth of practice and development, because their job isn't giving them work that exercises them.

It's like hiring a super model, asking him or her to sit on a sofa eating candy bars all day as the work you are paying them for, but then telling them to use their personal time to remain fit for supermodeling. It's a patently absurd idea.

You're free to say the words "developers should take control of their own career development" if you want to, it's just absurd. I mean, in once sense of course you're in control. Even if the career development happens at work, it's you doing it, so you (by definition) are in control.

But you aren't just saying "you're in control" in the obvious, tautological sense. You're going further to say that you should place no expectations whatsoever upon your employer to match up real-world business items to your skill set in any way that is related to appropriateness or which factors in your goals. That's the absurd part. You're saying "don't expect your manager to actually manage anything ... just resign yourself to the idea that they will randomly throw undifferentiated business concerns at you like a dartboard."

Real management acts as a double-sided adapter, with bespoke, unpleasant business realities on one side, and well-fitting tasks that are matched up to employees on the other side. Converting bespoke, unpleasant business needs into appropriate, on-topic tasks for specialized employees is managing. Saying an employee shouldn't care about this, to me, is among the worst advice I can think of. This should be one of the primary things any employee cares about.

Because the one thing that absolutely won't happen, simply by physical limits of exhaustion and life responsibilities, is for you to personally cultivate or exercise those skills during non-work time. Yeah, maybe you can read a tech book here and there. Maybe you go to a conference. Maybe you occasionally do some open-source work. And all of that put together amounts to maybe 5% of what's actually necessary to stay sharp and competitive in the employment market.

Instead, you absolutely should hold the employer accountable. They are asking you to bear an insane opportunity cost of lost time whenever you're working for them -- so much lost time in fact that if that time is not actively dedicated to building competitive skills, you will quickly become unemployable and you'll be so atrophied that you'll have no option but to stay at that employer because no one else will want the shell-of-a-former-expert your current job will have morphed you into.

There are a lot of good reasons to quit a job. You might not be paid the amount you prefer. You might not receive benefits that enable the life you prefer. And you might not be asked to perform tasks that cause you grow in skill, solve challenges, or learn new things in the way you prefer.

For me, these are not tradeoff-able. An employer either satisfies all of them adequately, or else it's not really an employer but just a thing wasting my time that I quit from.

[danieltillett]

For me, these are not tradeoff-able. An employer either satisfies all of them adequately, or else it's not really an employer but just a thing wasting my time that I quit from.

I think you might be missing that you have a total compensation and any costs to the company comes out of your salary. You could get lucky and the cost of the company providing you training and new skills is less than its value to you, but this normally doesn’t happen.

Think about it another way - if you lose a day a week of productive work because of training that means your employer is paying you for 5 days and only getting 4 days of work from you. This reduces your value to the company and hence how much they are willing to pay you. All things being equal you can choose to take a job at lower pay with more training or higher pay with less company provided training.

[p4wnc6]

That's like saying developers need to get away from the idea that it is the company's responsibility to pay them salary, offer retirement benefits, provide them shelter from the weather while working, etc.

The company may not have any literal obligation to provide such things, and no one cares. If they don't provide such things, reject them, move on, life's too short.

[danieltillett]

No it is the companies responsibility to pay you a salary (and any other conditions negotiated or legislated) in return for your labor.

Of course companies invest some resources in career development as part of their salary package, but it is likely to be less than what is ideal for you as an individual since you can walk out the door at anytime. Every developer needs to take control of their own career development because they gain the most out any investment.

This does not mean that you always take the highest salary, but you need to look at training and career development as an extra that is part of your overall salary package. In some cases the training offered to you is more valuable to you than it costs the company to provide and in other cases it is better to take the cash and invest it yourself. The important thing is take control of your own career development and don’t expect it to be handed to you by someone else.

[collyw]

If a decent developer gets bored or frustrated then they are more likely to leave, despite having spent a lot of time learning the system .

[danieltillett]

Yes this is one of the difficulties of management. You need to balance the desires of the employees with the needs of the company and try to achieve the right balance. It is not easy.

[overcast]

God damn, I am stealing that quote.

In regards to those "hire the best", where the application process is more drawn out than top secret government clearance. Those just aren't for me. I'm not looking for top tier(I'm not), but I am looking for intellectual stimulation, and being involved in something that someone will actually be using. I get the majority of my satisfaction watching others use something I've created. My rant is over!