Comment on We Can’t Hire You. Developers’ Challenge

• ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Team coordination is now being hostile to employees?

  Who do you prefer, someone who:

  • Thinks critically about his assignments
  • Communicates concerns with his coworkers
  • Can intelligently express his reasoning
  • Is open to being wrong
  • Helps improve a product

  Or someone who:

  • Thinks critically about his assignments
  • Creates alternative designs that they feel are better
  • Builds those designs despite this not being instructed
  • Creates beautiful software, which ends up incompatible with the other software it needs to work with because they didn’t consider various requirements from other stakeholders
  • Causes delays and frustration because their stuff, nice as it is, isn’t to spec and needs to be rebuilt

  You can be a brilliant developer and a terrible employee at the same time. If you want to design software as you like it, you should be in the design sessions. And not ignore the hard work those people already did and throw it out without discussion.

  Anti-authoritarianism is a bad trait. Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas is not. I frequently question design decisions I have not made myself, because A) there could be something that was overlooked or B) I’m overlooking something and I don’t have a full picture of the scope. Either should be resolved by a quick chat with the designers, not by me ignoring instructions and doing whatever I feel like is best.

  Part of being a good developer is also accepting that you might be wrong and your ideas might be bad. That doesn’t mix well with anti-authoritarianism.

  source

  • Senal@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m talking anecdotally and from my experience here, not as an absolute.

    I will upfront admit i am somewhat biased against authority in general, especially what i perceived to be unearned authority (if you wish to be a respected authority, earn it and continue to do so) In this case however I’m talking about “authority” in a professional sense somewhat measured against the success or failure of particular projects or initiatives.

    For the most part i agree with you but it seems like you are using the term “anti-authoritarian” as an absolute, as in being against authority is bad in all cases.

    At a lot of companies “Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas” is considered anti-authoritarian because the company culture doesn’t allow for that kind of autonomy of thought (by design or long term evolution usually).

    Your example works in the context of a company that works in a manner that promotes/encourage that kind of person, not all of them do. My personal experience and that of my circle of colleagues and acquaintances, I’d guess that percentage is around 30/70 with the 70% being companies that either actively or passively punish/discourage both of those types of employees.

    Which i’d imagine is what @bouh meant when they said “But good employees will hate your company, because you consider them like bad ones”

    Anti-authoritarianism is a bad trait. when the authority in question is doing the correct things (for whatever definition of correct you wish to use). “Anti-authoritarianism” and “Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas” are not mutually exclusive.

    As with most things it’s contextual.

    source
  • bouh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You are completely missing the point. The problem is that you are considering employees to be the bad ones, and thus you are selecting them.

    source