[jjav]

> "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions"

I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

There is in many teams a lot of busywork that for various reasons can't be automated (or new incoming busywork that takes over when the older one gets automated).

If an employee is content with just handling this kind of lower level busywork and go home at 4:30pm in exchange of not pursuing raises and promotions, there's nothing wrong with that. That work still needs to get done, so rather than getting a never ending stream of junior new hires constantly having to get trained, I'd be fine with having someone who is happy to stay at that level and take it easy.

[jrozner]

Up or out generally stops once someone reaches engineer or sr engineer. Most of the time a jr engineer is going to need substantial mentoring and support. Them never moving beyond that point likely results in a net negative gain if you need another person always available to provide that for their entire time there if it goes beyond 1-2 years.

[Jensson]

> I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

But companies live or die by talent / passion density. If you try to only hire talented / passionate people, then many of them will still just be fit for grunt work so grunt work still gets done. If you on the other hand hire for grunt work you wont find much talent at all so company fails after a while.

[II2II]

Companies require different attributes in various roles. Those attributes extend far beyond passion and talent. The trouble with hiring based on those two attributes alone is that you're setting up a culture where the people who do the necessary grunt work are failed hires and where the employee themself feels held back. In otherwords, you are setting up a toxic workplace.

[Jensson]

I never saw a company hire grunt programmers separately though, and when you suggest that they should people also get angry at you here. So what do you want really? Do you want to have to pass the same tests as these roles, or do you want to pass grunt tests and have a different role? You can only have one of those.

[convolvatron]

Yes. if the work is installing software and being on pager duty then we can really stop pretending that identifying O(nlog(n))is relevant. And if the job is to write a compiler optimizer, it's pretty important you know the basics of CS (like decidability).

smashing these two together and pretending they are the same has been a huge source of cognitive dissonance in the industry and serves no one.

[pixl97]

I mean with as many 'who do these simple Google bugs last for years' posts we see on HN, how much of the grind and grunt work is getting done? If everyone thinks they are a superstar then anything that's not an A+ project ends up on a 'killed by Google list'.

As bad as big non-tech companies are at things I quite often see they are better at providing fixes and updates for the little hidden pieces in the background because they have people that aren't fighting their way up the ladder.

[aitchnyu]

How do candidates express that in interviews?