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A comment on Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract ma... by mschuster91 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:55AM (#27063231)
> I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children.

This is not just true for British businesses... it's common worldwide across everything that's not a tech startup. The older the people in management are, the less likely they are to even understand what the younger staff is talking about.

German Mittelstand is infamous for this - they're roadblocked on one side by the government bending over backwards to impede proper buildout of real broadband across the country and not just in cities, and on the other side by 80+ aged patriarchs who still are dictating business communication in an audio recorder for their secretaries to type down. These pre-Boomer fossils are only focused on micromanagement and keeping control until the day they literally die, and the Boomer generation isn't much more modern either.

The result? Humble startups led by young people of a diverse background are eating their lunch left and right, and the Boomer+older generation are standing still, scratching their heads and wondering what's going on.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract ma... by heywherelogingo on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:16PM (#27065465)
What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure? What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers, either because they went straight into management having negligible interest in tech, or because they soon found out they weren't any good at implementation?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract ma... by tharkun__ on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:53PM (#27071526)
Wanna live in a nice place with a garden for reasonable prices in your own house? Rural Germany is for you. Remote work from there? Yeah, not on 36k modem speeds you're not!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract ma... by mschuster91 on Friday May 07, 2021 @05:53AM (#27074161)
> What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure?

The rural fibre point was only to illustrate how German Mittelstand is blocked on not just the treatment of their tech staff.

> What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers

Micromanaging octogenarians are who are calling the shots in way too many Mittelstand companies, often against the express demands of their younger staff and management level.

[ Parent | on HN ]