I think the person who wrote it really believes it - and it probably works in their world. It has nothing to do with developers, though, just usual office politics.
Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.
For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"
Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.
The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.
Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.
This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.
Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?
It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.
> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.
I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).
As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.
In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.
> Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead.
I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow did find out and I got my marching papers.
Personally, I think disallowing other work should be illegal. Having said that: What was the policy at your workplace for other work? In my company it's clearly allowed if it's in a different industry - although they've not given clear guidance on whether I need to disclose it in those cases.
W-2 “freelance” in addition to W-2 “non-freelance” at the same time? In other words, you violated your employment agreement and got fired. The sad part is you still don’t quite understand the basics of W-2 and why you got fired in the first place.
Apparently you don’t either. In the US at will employment doesn’t mean you can’t have another job. There may be a clause in an employment agreement that says you agree to not work for any other company, but I’ve only seen this clause once in 10 jobs. Do you know what this clause is commonly called?
In Clerky, you will find it under the section “Outside Activities.” Custom contracts may have a different name for that clause. 1 out of 10? Maybe if you’re in Hollywood or some other highly specialized vertical. In tech, it will be 99 out of 100.
Given Monzo's hiring practices, I'm not sanguine about the future of this company.
I myself went through their interview process not long ago and to say it lived up to the sentiment of the glassdoor reviews is putting it mildly. Several rounds, silly armchair-psychologist behavioral questions, and the interviewers made it blatant that they didn't want to be there. Did my last interview at 4pm one day, got rejected by 8am next business day. I've gotten offers from Google, Amazon, etc so I know I interview well, not sure what happened there but really got the vibe that their employees are never quite sure if they're doing well, and management likes it that way.
They're a bank struggling to market themselves as a tech company.
I’d you have offers from Google and Amazon then why are you interviewing at a place like Monzo? They can probably tell you’re both wasting your time so rejected you on that.
I turned down my offers from Google at Amazon because I value WLB and being able to continue with my freelance work and content creation. I figured working at a bank would be congruent with this sentiment.
You do cool work, btw. Just be careful, Shopify seems to be real layoff happy. I've even had some of your staff engineers hmu on Linkedin for a position and I've been having to say thanks but no thanks.
This hasn't been the case in my experience interviewing at all of those three -- both Google and Amazon's comp for a similar role and level at Monzo were way higher.
Edit: to clarify, I didn't actually end up interviewing at Monzo because the recruiter said no pretty much right away on hearing my salary ask.
> I mean, really, what's going to happen if you can't see the score of a baseball game until tomorrow?
Well, nothing. Unless you’re MLB.com and have tens of millions of people paying you >$100/yr to have that information readily available. If that’s the case, you’re issuing credits (which is a huge time and money sink) and losing customers.
> This is why I started my own contracting/consulting company, I hate on call and it always gets abused.
Hate to break it to you, but starting your own contracting/consulting company means you are forever on-call. It just so happens that it's not called that explicitly, and the people you have to answer to are your customers (aka your bosses).
That is not true at all. I have active retainer contracts with several companies providing security engineering and support. All of them understand I am only reachable when I am physically in my home office.
I get back to clients typically within one business day or I will show up to any meetings scheduled a week in advance. This has never been an issue.
I do not carry a cell phone and I make sure every client knows this. If I am outside my office I am living my life.
This is the main reason that I use Go as my main language, and why many orgs are starting to adopt it: it's easy to read and jump into. I would argue, however, that it's very easy to create antipatterns and just general spaghetti code with Go. A language that's easy to be productive with != one that's also easy to maintain. Design and philosophy becomes very important with large codebases in the language.
source: consultant, seen some truly heinous Go monoliths.
There are definitely some ways to do bad designs in go, but i have the feeling it will be more immediately apparent what's wrong (or at least what part of the system needs rework). The reason being that there are no ways to obfsucate an awful design by wrapping it on mountains of generics programming and language sugar, making the whole thing a lot worse.
It's only my gut feeling, but does that match your experience ?
I remain unconvinced of a major recession, I think there are a lot of elites out there who are just angry that they now just can't borrow money for free, so they throw a tantrum.
The fed was consistently raising interest rates from 2016 up to the pandemic, and the u-6 rate was consistently falling, and median weekly earnings rising, all in the same time frame.
