[KaiserPro]

"personal engineering brands"

You do not want to hire engineers with "personal brands", in the same way that hiring celebrities for anything other than showbiz, normally causes problems.

At a previous large company with massive opensource scheme, "personal brand" engineers blocked many attempts to increase security, specifically filtering git commits for keys, PII and other expensive mistakes.

the "personal brand engineer's" solution? everyone singing a pledge to stop committing PII & keys to git.

The argument was: "well, committing 60,000 PII records to github was done by an idiot[1], not one of us, there is no way it could happen to _us_. We can't work on private repos, because that means we can't collaborate"

[1]They are not an idiot, they weren't in the trendy department.

If you want good engineers, don't let your tech department be run by penises. Let me put that into a list:

o hard limit on work hours(rota for Out of Hours support, if needed) no more than a 40 hours week, ever (averaged over a month)

o Solicit feedback from everyone, more importantly, action it.

o Pay well

o only use data for decisions (HR or otherwise)

o keep no secrets

o Balance empowerment with maintainability

o aggressively kill legacy

o correct or eject bullies

o allow differences (live and let live)

o don't all look and think the same

o Train the next generation

o don't allow silos (rotate at least twice a year, bonus points for feature teams)

Its really that simple

[Jyaif]

For me the problem is that to create a brand around yourself you need a pretty damn big ego, and ego is just bad in a team setting. The best engineers I know have zero ego.

[gered]

This is a really important point. I work with someone who has quite a bit of an ego. Definitely cares far too much about his personal brand, which has been built up over the years through open source projects. Any time you work on a project with this person you basically need to use all of his open source libraries if any of them are at all relevant for the project, regardless of if they are the best option for the task or not ... sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.

By far, the best developers I've ever worked with are quite humble.

[matwood]

This is a great point. The best engineers are the ones working with their teams to get shit done. If someone on the team is more worried about their OSS contribution than getting work done, it can be a red flag that they are more concerned about themselves than the team.

[narwally]

> engineers blocked many attempts to increase security, specifically filtering git commits for keys, PII and other expensive mistakes.

I am struggling really hard to find a good reason why anyone would be against this change. Committing keys is a very easy mistake to make, especially for a junior dev. Github is littered with secret keys committed by college students trying to figure out web development for the first time.

I did the same thing when I was fresh out of college and new to both git and using web apis. Luckily it was just a Spotify key and not one for my Dropbox or email.