I want money too. Like you, if you don't pay me enough I'm not showing up. That said, even with the money, I'm not super happy about the work I do, and often find myself wondering, "What the hell am I doing with my life? (other than making money)". I think that may be what this article is addressing: staving off existential ennui. For instance, certain physician specialties have very high self-reported job satisfaction. They're also compensated reasonably well. Is the high job sat score because the job itself is so great, or because they can tell a credible story to themselves about how their work is "meaningful" and how they're "helping people"? Other jobs that have high self-reported job satisfaction are clergy, firefighters, physical therapists, etc. The common thread seems to be the ability to assign "meaning" to the job, and not necessarily pay. I make considerably more than the average firefighter, yet the average firefighter is probably more satisfied with his or her job than I am with mine.
I won't ghost a recruiter or company with whom I've positively responded. Especially not if I have an interview scheduled. I'll call to cancel. That said, I will absolutely avoid calls from recruiters who call me once a month when I'm not looking. If they leave a voice mail I wont' respond. If they email I'll ignore it. Etc. But that's ignoring initial contact, not suddenly going silent once a conversation has begun.
It's also worth noting companies will sometimes (often?) ghost candidates. I've had multiple on-site interviews where the company never even bothered to call or email to tell me they'd decided to pass. Just...nothing. Even had a company make me an offer (by voice mail I think), then go dark when I tried to contact them to accept it. Emails and voicemails weren't returned, the whole nine yards. Guess they found a stronger candidate?
Agreed. In this context, the "A player" designation is relative to the entire universe of possible candidates. If the top 5% (choose your metric) are "A players", then Netflix may strive to hire exclusively from this small set of candidates.
you better believe they are increasing the salary of top talent
Quite likely, since this doesn't contradict anything in their manifesto. It specifically discusses compensating employees above their individual market value. A superstar is going to have a higher individual market value. Unless I just missed it, it doesn't stipulate anywhere that all employees with a given title need to be paid roughly the same.
And yet, they continue to find people to fill those positions. I think there's just disagreement over whether "pay top wages and get top people" is the optimal strategy to pursue organization-wide. Netflix apparently believes it is. Most companies, judging by their behavior, do not. Here's why I tend to side with Netflix:
a. The difference between "top pay" and "average pay" is not that huge. Maybe 10-20%. If your interview process is at all effective, "top pay" will probably allow you to get people who are more than 10-20% more effective than the ones you'll get at "average pay".
b. Working with "top people" is a job perk that serves to mitigate how much pay it takes to recruit "top people". If I knew going into a salary negotiation that my coworkers would be high-quality, then I would be willing to accept a lower level of compensation.
Does this result argue for wider adoption of Netflix's H.R. model, as expressed in the manifesto that went viral a few years back? Namely:
1. Hire "A" players, because the competence of one's coworkers is a large contributor to employee satisfaction.
2. Don't use golden handcuffs as a means of mitigating hiring churn; you want employees to stay at the company because they want to be there. Employees choose how much stock they want vs. cash.
3. Don't use performance based bonuses; high performance is the base level expectation, not something to be singled out and rewarded.
4. "We're a team, not a family." You don't "cut" people from a family; you do "cut" people from a pro sports team.
5. "Hard work - Not Relevant". They care about productivity, not how hard you worked to be productive.
6. Low tolerance for "brilliant jerks".
7. Pay "top of market" wages. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two 'adequate' employees." "Employees should feel they are being paid well relative to other options in the market."
"Stop requiring" and "stop considering" are two different things. Will they do the latter? If not, then students still have to take the test, but they opt not to submit their scores if their not very impressive. It also means admissions officers will most likely assume students who don't submit scores had substandard scores and that will color their evaluation of those students. If they were serious they'd prevent students from even submitting scores.
Here's an idea: make the freshman class approximately twice the size of the other years, and set a fixed curriculum for all first-year students. Front-load all the non-major-specific "core" classes or something. Stipulate that first-year classes must be graded on a curve. Then, after the first year, decline to invite back approximately half the freshman class. Keep the highest-performing half.
Depends on how you quantify "most used". I'm typing this on a browser written in C++, running on an operating system written in C. Am I "using" C and C++? I suspect "use", here, is defined as "number of developers actively working in this language on a day-to-day basis". By that metric, Ada and COBOL are not going to be in the top cohort.
Could Apple have bought GitHub? They could build in super-tight integration with Xcode, and get all the independent app devs to host their projects there. And, as you suggest for Microsoft, get corporate customers to pay for an "Enterprise" version.
Or Google, for that matter. Do the same exercise for Android Studio. Make GitHub the new "Google Code".
The more ruckus is raised around this, and the more developers credibly threaten to leave, then, if the haggling is still in progress, the less Microsoft has to pay to acquire GitHub. In negotiations, it can basically claim, "If we buy you guys, half your users are going to leave because they hate us. So we can't really justify paying you more than X."
If you get "X" so low that it's no longer an appealing price to GitHub then you've "won" in the sense that you've torpedoed the deal. If you don't get "X" low enough to torpedo the deal then you've just saved Microsoft some cash and put less in the pockets of the GitHub guys.
Three is probably fine, so long as they compete with each other in *all* geographies and on *all* platforms. Need to avoid situations like "If you live in X you can only choose Verizon" or "If you have device Y you can only choose Verizon".
I was taught roughly the same material in my high school C.S. classes that college students at my AAU-member alma mater were taught in the intro C.S. class there. I didn't actually take that class as an undergraduate (though I was a T.A. for it 4 years later) because I got credit by way of the C.S. AP exam. I was prepared to take that exam because of...my high school C.S. classes.
Having C.S. in high school gives kids a chance to learn what programming is like in a structured, guided environment. Maybe they find out "early" that it's not the career for them. That's a "win" as far as I'm concerned. Now, granted, "programming" isn't the same as "computer science", but in my high school classes we also covered algorithms, data structures and computational complexity, and those are typically considered "computer science". Partly this was because it was an AP class geared toward the "AB" exam (discontinued since 2009) and that exam focused more on algorithms and data structures.
Teaching in C++ instead of Pascal (and then Java instead of C++) seems perfectly reasonable. Why force a kid to take the time to learn the syntax of a language he's never going to use again? Totally agree that making it all about HTML/CSS would be foolish given they're markup (as opposed to programming) languages.
People are under no obligation to pay for training that's purely for the benefit of businesses.
Oh, I fully agree. But I'd add that employers are under no obligation to continue to employ personnel who aren't able to complete the tasks assigned to them.
Especially when businesses refuse to contribute towards subsidizing education and bring in immigrants specifically to drive down wages.
I'm all for more immigrants. If an immigrant will do your job for less, at the same quality, then you don't deserve it at the price you're asking. Though, I'd also support modifying our visa system such that immigrants aren't tied to a single employer. This would give them negotiating power.
An ignoramus of your caliber is in no position to make assertions about what should and shouldn't be included in the curriculum as you fail to even comprehend that businesses have an obligation to pay for what they use.
You're treating the assertion that businesses should be obligated to retrain their employees as an obvious and axiomatic truth, such that anyone who fails to see things your way is an ignoramus. That's on you, buddy. Employers are (and should be) obligated to do a number of things in the context of employer/employee relationship, but subsidizing my education ain't one of them.
Strongly disagree with this. Learning to program will be a complete waste of time for many/most people. If it's one or the other, there are a great many classes I'd prioritize over C.S.
The person I was responding to suggested that "Cletus" wouldn't be able to teach C.S. effectively when he put "teach" in scare-quotes. Rather than try to rebut that claim, I granted it for the sake of argument and tried to point out that even if true it's not a good argument against teaching some other niche elective instead of C.S.
People have been going into programming and CS for decades without those classes being available. Why on Earth is it any different now than it was 30 years ago?
It's not different. Now, as was the case 30 years ago, people can and will learn to code without the benefit of classes at school. Classes at school just makes it easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. Now, as was the case 30 years ago, you could learn Physics in your spare time as well. Or literature. Or Calculus. Or almost any other subject. That's not a good argument for dropping them from H.S. curricula.
As for plenty, of course we have plenty of programmers. If we didn't have plenty of them, then there wouldn't be all that bullshit about not offering entry level jobs to people in IT.
We have plenty of people who have some programming experience. Most of them are terrible at it. I'm not convinced we have an overabundance of people who actually know what they're doing.
Of course businesses are obligated to foot the bill for training their employees in one way or another.
[Citation Needed]. Why are businesses so obligated? If one of my employees lacks the skills I need him to have, why am I obligated, as an employer, to train him when I could just fire him and hire someone else who has those skills?
And lastly, yes, people do learn some of those things on their own. But, that's beside the point. Calculus aside, all of those things have a definite positive impact on the person doing the study independent of whether a company ultimately needs or wants that skill. Same goes for programming.
This, by the way, is why I oppose efforts to make C.S. education mandatory. I think it's a good option for some people, but for many people would be a complete waste of time. I'm not arguing that everyone have to take a C.S. class; just that it be an option for everyone, instead of some of the other less-useful electives we see fit to provide.
There's no single course or set of courses I'd target, but I'm guessing at any given school I could find something that is (in my opinion) less essential than C.S. I just looked up the course list of a high school in the school district where I live. Some of the courses I think are less useful than C.S.: Astronomy, Environmental Systems, Animation, Sports Medicine, Film Analysis, "Street Law and Criminal Law" (not even sure what "street law" is), Ethnic Studies, Child Development, or potentially some of the less-popular fine arts (this particular school has multiple levels of Dance, Band, Orchestra, Jazz Band, Guitar, Piano, Choir, Musical Theater, Art, Music Production, Drawing, Fibers, Painting, Theater, Theater Production, Technical Theater).
In addition, how are you sure it wouldn't require hiring a CS teacher? A good math teacher may not be able to teach CS anymore than someone who can teach CS would be able to teach math; plus you'd need to outfit and maintain a CS lab of some sort.
I'm by no means certain; just guessing that at most schools there's at least one Math/Physics teacher who could be trained up to the point where he/she could manage an intro level C.S. course. Extremely small rural schools are more of a problem, since there are relatively fewer teachers in total to draw from.
Yes, you'd need a lab, but most schools already have a room w/ a bunch of computers in order to teach typing/keyboarding. Would likely just need to invest in some software. Or use FOSS tools.
Good question. At the high school level, I'd want to see some basic computer literacy, then intro-level coding and exposure to some basic algorithms / data structures. If it's an AP course, then I'd want it to prepare students to pass the CS "A" exam.
I'm assuming your comment is meant to convey the idea that rural districts largely won't be able to effectively teach C.S., but will do so anyway (and poorly). I don't find this to be a compelling argument. Mainly because, to the extent it's true, those districts already teach other subjects poorly. I'm not convinced they're uniquely incapable of effectively teaching C.S. So it comes back to a question students are better served by C.S. or "whatever other electives are being offered instead of C.S." Are they better off with the option to take marine biology but not C.S., or vice versa? I'd argue vice versa. Not that I have anything against marine biology per se; but if it's that or C.S., marine bio. seems considerably more "niche".
Oh, for sure, there are schools dealing with more pressing issues. I'm just not convinced that offering C.S. as an option would steal time/resources from efforts to address those other issues. It's basically an issue of: "we can only offer a limited number of courses; what should be included and what shouldn't?" Replacing "something else" with C.S. needn't cost any more money or require hiring a dedicated C.S. teacher.
Slashdot Mirror
I want money too. Like you, if you don't pay me enough I'm not showing up. That said, even with the money, I'm not super happy about the work I do, and often find myself wondering, "What the hell am I doing with my life? (other than making money)". I think that may be what this article is addressing: staving off existential ennui. For instance, certain physician specialties have very high self-reported job satisfaction. They're also compensated reasonably well. Is the high job sat score because the job itself is so great, or because they can tell a credible story to themselves about how their work is "meaningful" and how they're "helping people"? Other jobs that have high self-reported job satisfaction are clergy, firefighters, physical therapists, etc. The common thread seems to be the ability to assign "meaning" to the job, and not necessarily pay. I make considerably more than the average firefighter, yet the average firefighter is probably more satisfied with his or her job than I am with mine.
Please let this lead to another bubble and subsequent market crash. I need to get out from under my oil investment.
I won't ghost a recruiter or company with whom I've positively responded. Especially not if I have an interview scheduled. I'll call to cancel. That said, I will absolutely avoid calls from recruiters who call me once a month when I'm not looking. If they leave a voice mail I wont' respond. If they email I'll ignore it. Etc. But that's ignoring initial contact, not suddenly going silent once a conversation has begun.
It's also worth noting companies will sometimes (often?) ghost candidates. I've had multiple on-site interviews where the company never even bothered to call or email to tell me they'd decided to pass. Just...nothing. Even had a company make me an offer (by voice mail I think), then go dark when I tried to contact them to accept it. Emails and voicemails weren't returned, the whole nine yards. Guess they found a stronger candidate?
Agreed. In this context, the "A player" designation is relative to the entire universe of possible candidates. If the top 5% (choose your metric) are "A players", then Netflix may strive to hire exclusively from this small set of candidates.
Apparently better than the alternatives, though. Perhaps Netflix's rate is the best we can hope for given the nature of the work.
Quite likely, since this doesn't contradict anything in their manifesto. It specifically discusses compensating employees above their individual market value. A superstar is going to have a higher individual market value. Unless I just missed it, it doesn't stipulate anywhere that all employees with a given title need to be paid roughly the same.
And yet, they continue to find people to fill those positions. I think there's just disagreement over whether "pay top wages and get top people" is the optimal strategy to pursue organization-wide. Netflix apparently believes it is. Most companies, judging by their behavior, do not. Here's why I tend to side with Netflix:
a. The difference between "top pay" and "average pay" is not that huge. Maybe 10-20%. If your interview process is at all effective, "top pay" will probably allow you to get people who are more than 10-20% more effective than the ones you'll get at "average pay".
b. Working with "top people" is a job perk that serves to mitigate how much pay it takes to recruit "top people". If I knew going into a salary negotiation that my coworkers would be high-quality, then I would be willing to accept a lower level of compensation.
Does this result argue for wider adoption of Netflix's H.R. model, as expressed in the manifesto that went viral a few years back? Namely:
1. Hire "A" players, because the competence of one's coworkers is a large contributor to employee satisfaction.
2. Don't use golden handcuffs as a means of mitigating hiring churn; you want employees to stay at the company because they want to be there. Employees choose how much stock they want vs. cash.
3. Don't use performance based bonuses; high performance is the base level expectation, not something to be singled out and rewarded.
4. "We're a team, not a family." You don't "cut" people from a family; you do "cut" people from a pro sports team.
5. "Hard work - Not Relevant". They care about productivity, not how hard you worked to be productive.
6. Low tolerance for "brilliant jerks".
7. Pay "top of market" wages. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two 'adequate' employees." "Employees should feel they are being paid well relative to other options in the market."
"Stop requiring" and "stop considering" are two different things. Will they do the latter? If not, then students still have to take the test, but they opt not to submit their scores if their not very impressive. It also means admissions officers will most likely assume students who don't submit scores had substandard scores and that will color their evaluation of those students. If they were serious they'd prevent students from even submitting scores.
Here's an idea: make the freshman class approximately twice the size of the other years, and set a fixed curriculum for all first-year students. Front-load all the non-major-specific "core" classes or something. Stipulate that first-year classes must be graded on a curve. Then, after the first year, decline to invite back approximately half the freshman class. Keep the highest-performing half.
I see you, Tim Cook.
Depends on how you quantify "most used". I'm typing this on a browser written in C++, running on an operating system written in C. Am I "using" C and C++? I suspect "use", here, is defined as "number of developers actively working in this language on a day-to-day basis". By that metric, Ada and COBOL are not going to be in the top cohort.
Could Apple have bought GitHub? They could build in super-tight integration with Xcode, and get all the independent app devs to host their projects there. And, as you suggest for Microsoft, get corporate customers to pay for an "Enterprise" version.
Or Google, for that matter. Do the same exercise for Android Studio. Make GitHub the new "Google Code".
Particularly with mobile, it often makes sense to validate both places. Avoid a network call if you can.
The more ruckus is raised around this, and the more developers credibly threaten to leave, then, if the haggling is still in progress, the less Microsoft has to pay to acquire GitHub. In negotiations, it can basically claim, "If we buy you guys, half your users are going to leave because they hate us. So we can't really justify paying you more than X."
If you get "X" so low that it's no longer an appealing price to GitHub then you've "won" in the sense that you've torpedoed the deal. If you don't get "X" low enough to torpedo the deal then you've just saved Microsoft some cash and put less in the pockets of the GitHub guys.
Three is probably fine, so long as they compete with each other in *all* geographies and on *all* platforms. Need to avoid situations like "If you live in X you can only choose Verizon" or "If you have device Y you can only choose Verizon".
I was taught roughly the same material in my high school C.S. classes that college students at my AAU-member alma mater were taught in the intro C.S. class there. I didn't actually take that class as an undergraduate (though I was a T.A. for it 4 years later) because I got credit by way of the C.S. AP exam. I was prepared to take that exam because of...my high school C.S. classes.
Having C.S. in high school gives kids a chance to learn what programming is like in a structured, guided environment. Maybe they find out "early" that it's not the career for them. That's a "win" as far as I'm concerned. Now, granted, "programming" isn't the same as "computer science", but in my high school classes we also covered algorithms, data structures and computational complexity, and those are typically considered "computer science". Partly this was because it was an AP class geared toward the "AB" exam (discontinued since 2009) and that exam focused more on algorithms and data structures.
Teaching in C++ instead of Pascal (and then Java instead of C++) seems perfectly reasonable. Why force a kid to take the time to learn the syntax of a language he's never going to use again? Totally agree that making it all about HTML/CSS would be foolish given they're markup (as opposed to programming) languages.
Oh, I fully agree. But I'd add that employers are under no obligation to continue to employ personnel who aren't able to complete the tasks assigned to them.
I'm all for more immigrants. If an immigrant will do your job for less, at the same quality, then you don't deserve it at the price you're asking. Though, I'd also support modifying our visa system such that immigrants aren't tied to a single employer. This would give them negotiating power.
You're treating the assertion that businesses should be obligated to retrain their employees as an obvious and axiomatic truth, such that anyone who fails to see things your way is an ignoramus. That's on you, buddy. Employers are (and should be) obligated to do a number of things in the context of employer/employee relationship, but subsidizing my education ain't one of them.
Somewhat disagree. More and more effective software devs probably has a much larger positive effect on GDP growth than, say, more tradesmen.
Strongly disagree with this. Learning to program will be a complete waste of time for many/most people. If it's one or the other, there are a great many classes I'd prioritize over C.S.
The person I was responding to suggested that "Cletus" wouldn't be able to teach C.S. effectively when he put "teach" in scare-quotes. Rather than try to rebut that claim, I granted it for the sake of argument and tried to point out that even if true it's not a good argument against teaching some other niche elective instead of C.S.
Nope. Gen-X.
It's not different. Now, as was the case 30 years ago, people can and will learn to code without the benefit of classes at school. Classes at school just makes it easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. Now, as was the case 30 years ago, you could learn Physics in your spare time as well. Or literature. Or Calculus. Or almost any other subject. That's not a good argument for dropping them from H.S. curricula.
We have plenty of people who have some programming experience. Most of them are terrible at it. I'm not convinced we have an overabundance of people who actually know what they're doing.
[Citation Needed]. Why are businesses so obligated? If one of my employees lacks the skills I need him to have, why am I obligated, as an employer, to train him when I could just fire him and hire someone else who has those skills?
This, by the way, is why I oppose efforts to make C.S. education mandatory. I think it's a good option for some people, but for many people would be a complete waste of time. I'm not arguing that everyone have to take a C.S. class; just that it be an option for everyone, instead of some of the other less-useful electives we see fit to provide.
There's no single course or set of courses I'd target, but I'm guessing at any given school I could find something that is (in my opinion) less essential than C.S. I just looked up the course list of a high school in the school district where I live. Some of the courses I think are less useful than C.S.: Astronomy, Environmental Systems, Animation, Sports Medicine, Film Analysis, "Street Law and Criminal Law" (not even sure what "street law" is), Ethnic Studies, Child Development, or potentially some of the less-popular fine arts (this particular school has multiple levels of Dance, Band, Orchestra, Jazz Band, Guitar, Piano, Choir, Musical Theater, Art, Music Production, Drawing, Fibers, Painting, Theater, Theater Production, Technical Theater).
I'm by no means certain; just guessing that at most schools there's at least one Math/Physics teacher who could be trained up to the point where he/she could manage an intro level C.S. course. Extremely small rural schools are more of a problem, since there are relatively fewer teachers in total to draw from.
Yes, you'd need a lab, but most schools already have a room w/ a bunch of computers in order to teach typing/keyboarding. Would likely just need to invest in some software. Or use FOSS tools.
Good question. At the high school level, I'd want to see some basic computer literacy, then intro-level coding and exposure to some basic algorithms / data structures. If it's an AP course, then I'd want it to prepare students to pass the CS "A" exam.
I'm assuming your comment is meant to convey the idea that rural districts largely won't be able to effectively teach C.S., but will do so anyway (and poorly). I don't find this to be a compelling argument. Mainly because, to the extent it's true, those districts already teach other subjects poorly. I'm not convinced they're uniquely incapable of effectively teaching C.S. So it comes back to a question students are better served by C.S. or "whatever other electives are being offered instead of C.S." Are they better off with the option to take marine biology but not C.S., or vice versa? I'd argue vice versa. Not that I have anything against marine biology per se; but if it's that or C.S., marine bio. seems considerably more "niche".
Oh, for sure, there are schools dealing with more pressing issues. I'm just not convinced that offering C.S. as an option would steal time/resources from efforts to address those other issues. It's basically an issue of: "we can only offer a limited number of courses; what should be included and what shouldn't?" Replacing "something else" with C.S. needn't cost any more money or require hiring a dedicated C.S. teacher.