Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

atomicnumber3

I sure wish I could relate to this but I haven't been at a company that hired juniors since i was the junior being hired 15 years ago.

LPisGood

This is an interesting perspective(and a great roadmap for juniors to try to improve), but I think for the most part the thesis is wrong, at least in my experience. Companies do not hire juniors as some long tern play to develop them into good engineers. They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed.

noodletheworld

The A signals are not A signals in this article, and this: > You may be wondering where this “extra” time is going to come from. You’re already committed up to your eyeballs. …We’ll talk about time management, task queue management, diff queue management, and other topics that will accelerate your progress. Is just corporate dog whistling. If you are over committed, no amount of time management will solve your problem. Using AI wont solve your problem. You have a fixed amount of time and too much work? Work. More. Hours. Thats the real game; spend extra time outside of your normals hours doing extra. Congratulations, you’re an “A”. Makes no difference; your resilience against restructures is not correlated with how much respect you have from senior developers. That shouldn't be your goal. There are many places that do what they call “data driven” performance evaluation (translation: avoid being racist by looking only at anonymised numbers) and they do, indeed, look at 40 completed tasks and go: we will keep this one. The strongest advice for a new starter is: at your specific company ask what you will be reviewed on, and do your best to do whatever that is. Generic advice is a dime a dozen; don't fall in the trap of assuming [generic advice here] will apply to your specific workplace.

chalupa-supreme

For a B level: > * You did not cause other people unreasonable amounts of work.* I would be careful with this one. As the examples listed after, such as an on-call incident or extra review of code isn’t necessarily on the n00b. Maybe I’m biased being only 4 years into my career but engagement on stuff you did wrong or even points on what you can do better are extremely valuable. From my standpoint, screwing up isn’t a problem if you can engage with the team to recover and learn from it.

smackeyacky

I work at a place that is actively hiring juniors. While they don’t have an explicit rating system I feel like we unconsciously follow a similar pattern with new coders and it’s unfortunate. Given that older staff generally have a legacy of responsibility they don’t always have the time required to coach people who lack that self-starting spark. The quality of the questions and how much effort they have put in to answer things themselves are what differentiates a C from a B. Mostly you can quickly answer something a B asks. But a C who sponges up your day quickly gets categorised into not being given fun or difficult work. With funding and resources this wouldn’t have to happen but the industry treats mentoring time as lost time. You aren’t getting your story points done if you’re helping somebody else do theirs. The stupid agile bollocks management style has no eyes on the future of an organisation.

ANarrativeApe

This makes complete sense in an environment where people transition from noob to senior engineer within the same company. It makes less sense in an era when tenure is better measured in months than years. It makes even less sense in an era of LLMs. One area where it might be relevant is the military. People are more likely to stay for longer (unvalidated assumption) and the same personnel jacket follows them if they are transferred. It might also be thought of as a guide as to when to jump ship. If you have managed to get yourself categorized as a C, then leave. Start fresh somewhere else, take the learning with you, and discover if you have what it takes to make it as an A or B.

thin_carapace

what a foolish take. our benevolent overlords currently are bragging about how many lines of code that AI writes for their companies. clearly output volume is the only relevant metric, why would anyone bother demarcating quality and quantity

jofzar

> We seniors have our regular work to do, but we also have to figure out which category you fit into. We support the superior performers as much as we possibly can. We support the solid performers enough to help them mature. Brutal as it seems, we’d like to expend as little effort as possible on people who aren’t going to make it. Holy crap this person has only ever worked in toxic work environments

BobbyTables2

Some new hires end up cleaning the mess that their manager left behind from back when they were the noob…

logankeenan

> You uncover a better design and submit a string of diffs not only implementing the task but simplifying other parts of the code too. Bonus points for doing this before you implement (make the hard change easy then make the easy change). The last part of this really stands out. A high performer understands that software is malleable. However, the way you shape it, when things change, and how much is changed at one time matters a lot

AtlasBarfed

Yeah, someone is pulling up the ladder here.

0xbadcafebee

"Brutal as it seems, we’d like to expend as little effort as possible on people who aren’t going to make it. It’s your job to get in the category you want to be in and send us the signals that tell us that’s where you belong. " And this is what a complete lack of leadership looks like. "We are paying your salary now as the option premium on the engineer you are going to become. If we play this game right, we’ll have a kick-ass next generation of engineers." Not if you do jack shit to help them improve.

econ

You missed figuring out if your position is supposed to make [grandiose] proposals. Monitor what everyone else is doing, how fast they do it and what you can do to help. Condition everyone to think it's Xmas if you hand them something. After doing that 200 times hand them something obviously nonsensical just for laughs.

iJohnDoe

This only works if the culture is healthy and the seniors are mentally healthy. Usually, most are trying to protect their turf. Because even having “seniors” in the first place means they been there for a few years and they would like to keep it that way. Otherwise, no one gives a crap about what the n00b is doing.

radley

> You submit useful diffs in areas that having nothing to do with your team, but not at the cost of finishing your official tasks. > You write up what you learned in an interesting, useful and persuasive way. Very curious (and appreciative) that some company cultures allow this. I haven't had such experience (although I work in a parallel role). It's usually just grinding out tickets.

nilirl

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions. Which was awesome to see but the changes were off the hot path and the code was much harder to read. The part that still comes to me was when I'd said during a code review that there were other more pressing concerns, the intern said yes but you can't argue against the improvement in time complexity. Smart guy. Inspirational, even. But better suited to a large corp than a startup. I think a startup 'A' has a lot more to do with attitude about speed and uncertainty than competence.

asveikau

So much of this is written with an air of superiority over the noob. Indicates a bit of an ego problem. Yes, the noobs are noobs, but the goal isn't to exercise your status over them. Or even to waste that much time trying to categorize between A, B, C. The goal should be to boost everybody's productivity instead of treating them like a game.

graphememes

at this point i'd take people who complete tasks

psadri

It’s interesting that you have to be an A to tell the rest apart. And good luck if you have a lot Bs that believe they are As.

jswelker

I have known a lot of people who think they are (the only) As and spend all their time bike shedding and generally dicking around with tooling and griping about patterns that they prevent everyone around them getting anything done.