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Discussion on: What's your ideal job / who is your ideal employer?

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jwp profile image
John Peters • Edited

The remote environment is great (for responsible people). Culture always reflects the leaders of the company, in fact, it's the leaders responsibility for the environment.

  • Mutual respect and professionalism is mandatory. Favoring the individual over process is paramount.

  • Processes get in the way of respecting staff when the deadlines (always wrongly determined) drive the environment.

  • All companies reach the point where 80% of all work is maintenance work. New code and projects only arrive in small chunks, and often; the companies will bring in outsiders to do the work. This is a slap in the face to those that have been around for a while.

Check this post out from 2014

  • Pay is an indicator of respect for the individual. For example can a developer easily cover living costs in your area? Are you paying them for $17.00 a day parking ramp fees, or is parking free? Proper pay is very much related to the area your programmers live. People that work in London or NYC or the Silicon Valley must be paid higher.

  • The flexibility of the environment must include Flex hours. People get sick, they don't always feel great, the children need doctor's visits, as well as the Pets need to see the veterinarian. We need time to take care of our own health, not in the form of payment, rather in the form of flex-time.

  • I have found that working for small employers does impose financial concerns. In the U.S. our Health Care costs are super high now. Large companies try to help out there by pooling all their employees into a large pool of monies to help defer costs to those that are required to pay high premiums. Small companies usually don't have these funds, so an extra $10.00 USD per hour is required just for health insurance.

  • Career prospects; are interesting, because in my opinion, those who attempt to transfer the responsibility of learning new things (via opening slots etc) on the company or company sponsored (expensive training), are not responsible people. We should use our free time to learn new skills, employ them in our current position and let the offers arrive. Big companies are innately unable to focus on individual careers. So it's up to us, and our own job seeking to "get there"

  • Large and super large companies have a tendency to lose focus on the person. This is because, the super highly paid leaders and major corporate policies must show something in return. This means due dates never slide regardless of the trench work. This is due to corporate mentalities which say "If we don't get this done tomorrow, Amazon is going to put us out of business".

  • Large companies are inflexible elephants. For example "No corporate Security policy can be violated, the one rule fits all is paramount" I once lost 6 weeks trying to prove a server side issue behind a firewall just because the company wouldn't let me run network traces to prove the origin of the failures. I also watched Microsoft topple IBM.

  • Architecture of software being worked on is a snake in the grass event. Companies will vet new hires based on their extreme (list of lists) of skills. Once the person gets in and sees the mess for the first time, that person is in danger of not fitting in. The reason is that old-timers really believe what they have is already the best, and any attempt to change it (even in small bits) is a cross current to them. They can become very snide in code reviews, ask questions in a unprofessional way, and ultimately demean the new comer for even thinking about violating all of their unwritten standards and concepts.

Finally, I heard an argument once concerning JavaScript.

"If you aren't programming in JavsSript now, you will soon."

ISOMORPHISM

Yes there's a major movement happening right under our noses. The isomorphic front-end and back-end in same language movement. With the power of NPM and the opensource Javascript movement, all other frameworks appear to be doomed; including one of my favs. .Net. It hasn't happened yet, but it is happening.

I worked as a contractor for a huge Consumer Electronics Company, where their public facing Web Site is already isomorphic. I'm sure the same is true with Google. Perhaps even Amazon is there.

Perfect Environment for me

  • Angular, React or Vue front end
  • Isomorphic back end
  • Typescript
  • Web sockets for full-duplex conversations
  • Web Components
  • Windows server (I grew up on Windows)

  • A leadership team that are true collaborators and take proper responsibilities.

  • No arrogance allowed no matter how freaking smart you are.

  • Longer Scrum iterations 3 to 4 weeks.

  • VSTS

  • GitHub

Woops, forgot the cloud.

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miketalbot profile image
Mike Talbot ⭐

John, wow thanks for such a detailed response! I may add more later. But I do think the whole - how much you get paid based on where you live and what your cost of living is a very important debate, especially right now.

I have always found that it's worth paying more for great people, a great developer can often be dramatically more productive.

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Daragh Byrne

This is a great post. What stood out for me was the "architecture snobbery" and no arrogance allowed. Toxic is toxic, and leaders who tolerate it are not real leaders. I am up close with that at the moment, ready to leave.

Also the longer scrum iterations part is the truth. I see people trying to do a week, it never works. Two at a stretch.