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by pyjug 1826 days ago
> The companies that put up the contest benefits

> if you’re looking to make a job move,…

Why would companies allow their best developers to be poached? Unless of course there’s a way for companies to keep their developer scores private…
1 comments
jedberg 1826 days ago
The risk to the company is pretty low that their employee would show up on a global leaderboard. And even if they do, they can give them a raise or other benefits. It helps them determine the market rate for their employee.
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pyjug 1826 days ago
> The risk to the company is pretty low that their employee would show up on a global leaderboard.

This invalidates your other point that it benefits developers. Why would a dev sink countless hours for a “very low” chance at being on the global leaderboard and hence moving jobs.

You can’t simultaneously posit it’s good for both companies and developers.

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jedberg 1826 days ago
> This invalidates your other point that it benefits developers.

Not at all. The company undervalues their employee and sees little risk in them showing up on the board, and the employee overvalues their skill, thinking that showing up on the leaderboard is a shoo-in. Maybe the employer is right, maybe the employee is right, or maybe both or neither is right.

Also, the employee does it because they get paid to hunt bugs regardless. It just helps the company by putting a structure around what they are already doing.

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pyjug 1826 days ago
> the employee overvalues their skill, thinking that showing up on the leaderboard is a shoo-in. Maybe the employer is right, maybe the employee is right,

Come on, this is just being coy — you and I both know this is a terrible deal for employees — as you write earlier, there’s a very low chance that a random dev will appear on the global leaderboard. What’s more, the best devs won’t even play this game, so it’s left for juniors and people trying to “prove themselves” to trample over each other for peanuts.

Not to single you out, but I wish influential tech folks like you would speak up more about the cynical exploitation that’s going on here in plain sight.

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jedberg 1826 days ago
I'm not sure where the exploitation is. The developers are already getting paid to fix bugs. Now they have some structure and added incentives.
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pyjug 1826 days ago
The structure already exists. It’s called your bug tracker. By building tools to gamify this process, it’s clearly incentivizing devs to put in more hours. I have no doubt that the global leaderboard will consist of devs that would’ve clocked 100s of hours above their regular hours. For very little benefit to the employee.

Let me put it you this way - would an engineer at Netflix ever “play this game” to win ? Would employees at Netflix even put up with something like this? If not, why would you think employees at random tech co should?

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