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Why Developers Get Fired
jammag writes "Other coders get canned — but never you, right? From a developer who's now a manager (and who admits to being fired himself) comes the inside story on how the Big Ax might sneak up on you. To prevent it, he recommends some strategic bragging, keeping a CYA (Cover Your ...) folder to document your efforts, and making sure that your talent isn't frittered away so much that even your most mediocre colleagues look good. "
It depends, if said developer is completing the most work, but also one of the highest paid, then the next round of down sizing it goes something like this:
PHB: Hmmm, Bob is making over $X. I see he's the most productive, but we could higher two new grads and an intern for the same amount. They'd be at least that productive right?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
His advice seems to be "If you are a great programmer, you still have to get out and market". Jesus freaking Christ, can't companies do employee evaluations at all? It is like these guys think marketing is the best way to do everything.
Got a crappy product, market more; Sued for incompetence? Create a press release.
Yes, this crap bothers me.
Spiegel claims he's fired people. I wonder how he would have chosen people if he saw through an employee's thinly veiled attempts to make himself look better? Or if he knew that employee spent time trying to cover his or her own ass instead of -- you know -- just get work done? These points aren't addressed in the blog.
I think it's a matter of semantics. Bragging as a thin attempt to make yourself look better when you suck is worthless. Managers are not stupid.
However, managers are busy. In most organizations, too busy to do too much work managing their employees. Business bragging simply means to inform your boss when you do something good. Don't lie. Don't stretch the truth. Just provide information the boss might be too busy to notice.
Managers like when you make their jobs easier.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
You must be wet behind the ears. None of what is mentioned in TFA really states you have to take these steps to the extreme. While you never came out and wrote it, you sure make the implication that the writer of the article is telling you to do this.
Hard work only gets you so far. And guess what else? Hard work may never get you promoted. You go on to make another point on the other absolute end, that if you're a hard worker, you must be the top producer in your company. You can work hard and still fail at what you're doing. This is why people are sometimes oblivious. I've worked with a few people like this. They do work really hard. The work that they do, however isn't usually the best and no amount of training can help them out. Some of them just never got it. Some of them were the type of people who thought that their way was the best way to do things when it clearly wasn't. In either case, they worked hard but were eventually let go because of how their work turned out.
It never hurts to chat yourself up casually every now and then. You can do this a number of different ways. I'm a supervisor where I work. All of the supervisor's used to here that the president of the company thought we were doing the bare minimum for our jobs. That we were just good little foot soldiers. I realized part of the problem was that my immediate manager didn't really have an idea of what the fuck I did every day. All he knew was that I helped my team to produce a lot of work that generated a lot of profit.
So one day I took about an hour to sit down and type out a list of projects my team needs to address. These were mostly "as we encounter them" issues. Items where if we take half an hour, an hour even, we could figure out a few things out to help us out in the future. I send this list to my boss with updates about once a month now. It gives him an idea of what else I'm doing and how quickly these tasks are getting done. It also allows him to more easily give me help when I need it.
So what was the net effect of me doing that besides a little extra help from the boss? The president of the company has personally told me on several occasions that he views me as a very valuable employee. That I have a bright future there and that he would rather not ever see me go.
And honestly, if you don't spend a modicum amount of time trying to cover your ass, you may get blind-sided one day. You rail against it, but then in your last paragraph you even cite an example of how to cover your ass. Not everyone has access to raw data to pull up, so some tracking on their end might be necessary. It doesn't take a lot of time to do this.
Or, you could just come off looking like a jerk to both your team and to your boss. You're on a team for a reason: to work together, not complain about how bad someone else's code (or any other work, for that matter) is.
If you are a team member and not in a lead role, you're not in a position to decide what's acceptable and what's not. And you'd be foolish to believe that you are in that position.
Yes, you should let the other person know that improvement is needed, but "throwing them under the bus" isn't the way to do it.
His advice seems to be "If you are a great programmer, you still have to get out and market". Jesus freaking Christ, can't companies do employee evaluations at all?
In a word, no. The reason they can't do it is that measuring the value of n programmers on a team would require reading and understanding all of their code. Managers have too much other work.
You need to make the job of the people around you easier. That includes your manager.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Good coders get canned all the time. Often it's because they have and exercise integrity which equates to shitting on the kitchen floor in today's corporate environments. The advice in the article is entertaining but probably not practical. If you're on the chopping block there is little you can do to mitigate the outcome. It really depends on your *perceived* value to the organization. People are too smart and narcissistic to change their perception of you based on your bragging. Bragging used to work back when most people with power in an organization had absolutely no idea about technology. If I walk into work and start bragging about my work and skills today, my peers and superiors are just going to be annoyed and think I'm a jerk. Bragging about the team's successes, and how the current team is a cohesive unit, is better advice that may save not only your butt, but your entire team's as well.
--Jesus freaking Christ, can't companies do employee evaluations at all?--
I appears that they can't. I haven't seen one in a long time that even had a clue as to who did what. It's just whether you are liked or not and not what results you produce.
I had a manager once I didn't get along with, and our 1-on-1 meetings weren't very pleasant. I actually got up and walked-out on one, when she told me "this isn't an 8 to 4 job, you know". The previous night, I'd actually been up until midnight working on a particularly difficult problem.
But when I thought about it, I was being the ass-- not her. How could she have known I was up until midnight working? I was working from home. I didn't send out any emails saying I was working that late. At that time, our company didn't have timecards, and even if it had this was the next day, long before the timecard would have been submitted.
Anyway, the next day I apologized, and since then I've always managed to find some excuse to send out an email (CCing my management) whenever I'm working extra late, just so they're aware that it's happening. Since then I haven't had any problems.
The moral of the story: don't "brag" brag. Be smart about it. Managers can't judge you based on things they don't know about. This article basically says the same thing. I know we're all geeks and we hate actually talking to people, but the time you spend communicating to your co-workers is golden, slack on whatever else you want, but never hesitate to pop off an email.
Comment of the year
...the horrible degree of corruption implied by just about every post under this article?
The essential implication seems to be that your longevity in employment has absolutely nothing to do with your actual work. Rather, it has everything to do with someone else's perception of you, and said perception doesn't necessarily need to have any honest or factual relationship with your work output whatsoever.
If this is the case, I seriously wonder how much longer contemporary human society can last. Is it really so completely, unsparingly rotten out there these days?
My question is why do good developers, that are talented get laid off?
Because they earn more money. This goes double for if they have lots of experience. I know someone who's almost 60 and they kept incompetent people in the department but laid him off (when the last 3 months before he was laid off he was working 14 hour days to make up all the work that wasn't being done by the others in the same department) because he made too much money.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
In my experience, bosses want to see things. Working user interfaces. They want to be able to play with products as soon as possible.
Bad strategy:
- Choose the best tools for the job even if this is not one the company used for previous projects
- Write solid, reliable, secure, clean, flexible, scalable, optimized and tested foundations.
- Tell your boss that you spent 80% of the time allowed to the project writing quality code, but there's nothing to look at yet.
- Sequentially and methodically write every part of the project, with a crappy UI just for testing
- Polish the UI, replace images with nice-looking ones
- Profit?
Rewarding strategy:
- Stick with the same old tools: no need to justify nor to demonstrate anything.
- Write crappy foundations. Hard-code data as much as possible. You just need to get a working test case.
- Work on the UI. Make it look cool even if it barely works. Add every possible button as soon as possible, even if they don't trigger any action. Looking at the interface is the way most people will judge the completion of the project.
- Connect the UI to the crappy foundations. You can easily show how much progress you did on the project.
- Rewrite the foundations so that they can deal with real data.
- The project is ready for production, you made the deadline.
- Plugging security holes, rewriting everything so that it can handle the real load, and fixing bugs will be dealt with after the deadline.
- Who cares about the quality of the code ? It's closed source anyway.
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The larger the corporation the less results actually matter. What REALLY matters at review time is what people, especially managers other than your own, think you've done. It doesn't matter if you've written 100,000 lines of bug free code if you've been quietly flying under the radar and getting your job done you will be rated lower than the person who speaks up at every meeting, sends emails to everyone in sight but really produces very little. Microsoft is especially bad for this, as you can tell by their products. What counts is how well you market yourself to the team and senior managers, not your results.
we could higher two new grads and an intern for the same amount. They'd be at least that productive right?
And nine women could have a baby in 1 month.
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Not so much stupid as not thinking everything through. Most American jobs were designed with interchangable workers. In fields like software development, talent isn't a recognisable commodity to the boards of directors. Want to cut development costs? Dump the expensive American coders with interchangeable $OFFSHORE_NATION coders. They're cheaper.
Since talent isn't looked at, from the beancounters' viewpoint, outsourcing is win-win. And they're the first to bitch when the $OFFSHORE_NATION coders have problems understanding the initial design of the application.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.