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> Programmers are in massive demand right now, especially skilled ones. From the hiring side: What we're really looking for is engineers who can work efficiently and deliver results with minimal drama. Counterintuitively, it's not always the most "skilled" engineers who get the most work done. It's not even the engineers who spend 60 hours per week at the office. It's usually the above-average people who show up, get down to work, deliver code, and go home on time or even early. One of the challenges with hiring, especially hiring more junior engineers, is that many of them have this idea that raw coding skill is the only thing that matters. We've struggled with numerous very talented engineers who simply could not deliver work on time. Some simply procrastinate excessively. Others have perfectionist tendencies, spending countless hours rewriting and refactoring code because they refuse to commit anything less than perfect code. Meanwhile, some of our highest output engineers are the ones who know how to strike a balance between good architecture and taking on the right amount of technical debt at each step. It can upset some of the juniors when they see other people getting ahead by shipping good-enough code that gets the job done instead of something that uses the latest and greatest frameworks and languages. At the end of the day, we're in the business of shipping things to customers, not crafting the picture perfect codebase. > You are harder to replace than you imagine. Those "must do" barriers are largely in your head, and if they are not (they really, really are) then MOVE. From the manager side, I'm increasing seeing young engineers who have a chip on their shoulder, believing that they are irreplaceable and therefore can make the company bend to their demands. Ironically, we're not the type of company that squeezes excess hours out of people or is constantly in crunch mode, yet some engineers are permanently convinced that any employment arrangement is exploiting them or that they're permanently underpaid. I've had multiple people leave for "greener pastures", lured away by higher paychecks, only to ask to come back once they realize how good they had it here. It pays to keep your ear to the ground about better opportunities, but beware of recruiters who are experts at telling you anything and everything you want to hear in order to get you in the door. |