I like Kent Beck, but this reads as mostly boomer nonsense. What if that C player is working 3 jobs at once making 3x as much with more job security to boot. What if that C player is simply working less because they’re content working less and having less responsibility?

Corporations love people with Kent Beck’s mindset, ladder climbers willing to jump on command for praise, working twice as hard for a raise or meaningless title that may not justify the stress and hours.

And when corporate needs to lay off 30% they’ll think nothing of it.

If you have Kent Beck’s mindset and you’re not pouring it into something you have equity in, you may as well just call yourself a useful idiot.

> And when corporate needs to lay off 30% they’ll think nothing of it.

Having seen this literally play out this year: it was all of the C’s that were first to be cut shrug

> Typical Kent, trying to do the right thing, regardless of the cost. Unfortunately, this time the cost was him losing his job.

Well Kent got fired from Facebook, so maybe he wasn’t such an A player in their eyes. ;)

In a couple of companies I'm familiar with the cuts weren't based on performance in any discernable way.

If I hired a full time programmer and found out they had two other jobs I'd probably let them focus on those other two. If they were showing the "C" behaviors in all three jobs, they have no job security, unless they work where they can't be let go.

Shouldn't you measure output instead of hours spent on the job? People could be productive or not with one job as well as there.

Measuring output is what this whole post is about.

1. "If you have poor output, you won't last long. Here's what 'poor output' looks like..."

2. "But what if they have poor output because they're working three jobs?"

3. "Then I'd let them go."

You: "Cruel! Shouldn't you be measuring their output!?"

LOL

IME many people are in it for the love of the game. They want to get better, they want to be able to perform the “magic” the Sr people come up with. It’s fun.

Please omit swipes, not to mention slurs, from your comments here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

"Edit out swipes."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I agree. A more modest way of speaking would be welcome. It takes effort to get through but the content is quite interesting: it gives pragmatic milestones.

I think the article is explicitly saying, "Ok, you're green, we know that. We're spending extra time with you to make you productive. You can help that process or hinder it, and if you're unteachable or uninspired, we'll probably end up letting you go. So here's some attitudes that get people singing your praises at this early stage."

I'm not sure if this is the last gasp of this type of thinking as AI changes the landscape. There's a good chance that the future is just noobs, perpetually begging LLMs to do better until it works.

One possibility is it makes grasping these points quickly even more important.

IME new grad hires are break even effort for me for the first 6-9 months. If it’s clear they will become positive after that I put more effort into helping them.

LLMs may alter that break even math.

Yeah, the author clearly has his head up his own arse.

The seniors are superior to the noobs. Kind of by definition.

Nobody is superior to another human. They tried your thinking in Germany.

Is this a serious comment? Because if your first thought when hearing "experienced people are superior () to inexperienced people" in an article about a trade is to fail to mentally insert "in the skills of that trade" and instead insert "as people" and then immediately call the speaker a Nazi, you have serious issues to work through.

It's easier to dismiss me as having a screw loose than to look inward.

I have always cringed at the senior-junior distinction, especially because it is mostly espoused by those calling themselves senior, and that felt unnecessarily imperious.

Any senior in any workplace is senior because of their specific and narrow experience in their particular role, over a sufficient amount of dedicated time. So it felt wrong to me to allow such a bifurcation of human ability with a senior-junior framing.

The thing is, when some people employ the senior-junior language, they are implicitly referring to that very particular, unique, and narrow situation of the role-space they have found themselves in, and justifiably so.

We are all juniors in a much larger space than we are seniors. Does it irk that someone is a senior in the nest they have made? It did, for me, but not anymore. “I tilled this field 17 times; I know it”, is a statement not only of knowing a single field (as opposed to any other fields), but also about some way of tilling.

Without a universal standardization over behaviour, we’re all mostly junior mostly all of the time. Any claim of “senior”ness is therefore a claim of finding something cool in some narrow space. It’s worth listening to and extracting the value from such claims, if the practices therein are producing evidently worthy outcomes.

That said, “senior” is a very small boat in a very large sea. Better to be aware and humble, no matter the efficacy of your current practices in your current environment.

It's even easier to mute you thereby improving the level of discourse I see here, which I will now do.