Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by Benjammer on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:27PM
(#15118373)
How do you maintain the "treat others with respect, keep it professional" culture without getting into a position where some team members become sensitive to any amount of criticism, and the focus becomes more about not upsetting people rather than genuinely caring to provide kind but constructive feedback and move forward?
Basically, how to you strengthen and guide this part of it:
>When Joe proposes something and Jane disagrees, it's on a professional, technical level. Joe knows this and responds in kind.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by gwbas1c on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:41PM
(#15118506)
Either you need to work on how you deliver the message, or your manager needs to handle the other team members as difficult.
(Assuming that you're not rejecting pull requests with "this code sucks,") It's time to escalate the problem with management. Otherwise, you need to plan to spend more time mentoring, and/or find another strong member of the team to split the mentoring with.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by jressey on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:39PM
(#15118476)
Professional respect is absolutely the magic ingredient. I just joined a place like this where the mission is effectively "We will grow and sell stuff through service to each other." I was borderline ready to go back to blue-collar work before coming here but I'm home. My takeaway is that it is about the people you're around. Not the language, tools, hot-shot coworker you saw at a conference or anything else.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by dahdum on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:27PM
(#15118375)
My first two jobs were in environments exactly as you describe, and hadn't a clue how lucky I was until I worked under the "because I said so" cloud.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by claytonjy on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:37PM
(#15118458)
Do you worry about this changing as the company grows? I feel blessed to work in a similar environment, but at 4 people it seems easy and obvious to behave this way, and to hire appropriately; if we ballooned to 20+ I'm not sure what our chances of staying like this would be.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by thehardsphere on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:54PM
(#15118630)
My own experience is that things start getting stupid once your company has more than 100 people. That's close to the limit where individual human beings can be familiar with the entire organization, so beyond that is when you start getting more hierarchy and more distance.
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by whitepoplar on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:22PM
(#15118313)
Can I ask what the name of the company is?
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by kstrauser on Monday August 28, 2017 @02:14PM
(#15118792)
I work at Amino. Here's a blog post from our hiring team that expounds on this a bit: https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by ataki12 on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:26PM
(#15118356)
that sounds awesome! We're striving to have a similar culture - care to share where you work?
Re:Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?
by kstrauser on Thursday August 31, 2017 @11:01AM
(#15140774)
Cc'ing another post:
I work at Amino. Here's a blog post from our hiring team that expounds on this a bit: https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/
Not related to the subject at hand but still worth reading: https://amino.com/blog/struck-by-what-bizarre-diagnoses-in-m...
I'm a senior backend engineer in a healthcare startup, but I think the single biggest determining factor to why this place is so awesome is that my coworkers genuinely, complete respect each other. That manifests in lots of ways:
- Arguing and infighting is nonexistent. When Joe proposes something and Jane disagrees, it's on a professional, technical level. Joe knows this and responds in kind. Agreements are made and consensus reached.
- Sometimes we make mistakes, but we all know that it's because a smart person acted on perhaps incomplete information, not because they're incompetent or untrustworthy. We have actual blameless post-mortems to figure out what happened and how to prevent it, and then we move on.
- If you want vacation, you take vacation. We know you're not a slacker who's trying to get away with working as little as possible.
- If I have a question about a management decision, I ask the CEO to explain it. He makes time to meet with me and we discuss it. There's never any "because I said so". There've been times when I think I might have made a different decision (or maybe not; he has more information about it than I do), but I've always been 100% convinced that the decision was reasonable and justifiable.
There are literally no hiring requirements more important than "treats others with respect". If you're an asshole genius, don't bother applying because you won't fit in at all here. Those people would wreck our corporate culture so we avoid them like the plague. No one is so much better than my awesome coworkers that it'd be worthwhile.