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by Jensson 259 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
II2II 259 days ago
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.
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Jensson 259 days ago
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.
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convolvatron 259 days ago
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.

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pixl97 259 days ago
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.

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