Blackmail Hiring

A manager was talking about a former software tester, Aaron, who was regarded by many as a waste of time. He struggled to learn simple things, and you often had to explain concepts to him multiple times.

Many times I sat with him, and essentially did his work for him. I heard similar complaints from other colleagues.

The confession the manager made was: that Aaron actually failed the interview process. It was just that his friend Richard had recommended him, and when Richard realised that Aaron wasn’t going to be offered the job, Richard threatened to resign. So to appease him, Aaron was hired.

The thing is, Richard ended up leaving the company less than half a year later, whereas Aaron remained for years. Eventually, his manager lost patience with him, and Aaron initially moved teams and line manager.

His new manager wasn’t so patient, and issued him with a Performance Improvement Plan. Aaron’s position was finally untenable, so he finally resigned. No idea why we didn’t act earlier, but he should never have been employed in the first place.

Mentoring Again

Background

A few years back, I was assigned an Apprentice to mentor. I said I would love to do it, but I questioned why the Senior Developers in the team didn’t have anyone to mentor when it is literally in their job descriptions.

At the time, my manager said that she thought I’d be the best mentor in the team, and if I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I think the mentoring went successfully, but I didn’t get a promotion.

Present Day

Fast-forward to the present day: My new manager said that an Apprentice is joining our team, and out of everyone, he reckons I would be the best mentor. If I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I said I’d love to do it. This time I didn’t complain about the Seniors not mentoring. I didn’t want to risk my manager reassigning the Apprentice. I have a good feeling my manager will actually promote me, but we will see.

The Future

I had a chat with my Apprentice. He has never done C# before; but it’s vital to our team. We already had a lack of developers – and a lack of skilled ones. Now we have someone who has never seen the program we are working on, and never used the language it is written in. He has come via a bootcamp that taught him basic Web Development, so that’s some wasted training.

This means that I’ll have to spend a lot of time training him, which means my productivity to bug fixes/enhancements will drop. Our team’s productivity was already low, and now we have another member which is actually going to decrease productivity. I hope managers realise this.

I think I’ll have to encourage him to learn as much as he can on his own. I’ve sent him a C# ebook which is pretty comprehensive. He has access to an online training platform to watch in his own time, plus all the rest of the free content on the internet.

This is another topic to write about on the blog. It can document me learning how to teach someone from scratch, and also document funny mistakes he makes.

Testing and Developer Equality

I think it is possible to have an “us and them” kind of attitude between the developers and testers. You are supposed to work together to a common goal; deliver quality software.

Since testers have the responsibility of making the final call if the work is good or not, and can send it back to the Developer, then there can be some resentment here. I have felt that a bit when I was a Tester, but it’s rare to witness events like that.

There was a time when it was announced that the Software Tester job title was changing to sound more important, and recently, there has been rumours that my employer is considering making Developers and Testers: “Engineers”. I don’t understand what a blanket term like that even achieves. Surely it is a nightmare for managers to sort out projects in the future. New managers may end up trying to put several Testers in a team together because all they see on a spreadsheet are several “Engineers”.

Surely it makes recruitment harder when you are advertising for “Engineers” and it isn’t clear what job you are applying for.

Some Testers can write code, and they will create Automated Test scripts, or some helpful application. Not all Testers can write code, or have even a slight interest in writing code.

I think it’s a case of managers trying to fix a problem that doesn’t even exist. There have been a few Testers that were vocal that they don’t want to be called Engineers. They are Testers and are proud of it. They feel that being called Engineers will come with the expectation that they have to be able to code and they don’t want that. I’m sure some Testers will be happy with the proposed change, but I think most people will agree it is a stupid change.

I do wonder who came up with the idea? Why change something if there isn’t a problem? What problem is this trying to address?

The Junior Contractors

Recently, we have hired a bunch of Junior developers via a Bootcamp company. This company basically takes people on an intensive training course, then they find them work. So they are essentially a contracting company, but are sending out fresh-faced developers to their first jobs. Let’s refer to them as Training Company.

As far as I understand, the intention is to hire them permanently, but my company is prepared to pay the premium for the Training Company to educate them.

I think to preserve their own interests, the Training Company give them assignments/exams to complete. This way they can understand how good they are and quickly reassign them if they are let go by their current “employer”.

So for the past two weeks, these Juniors have either been studying for an Agile exam, or writing an essay based on work they completed, but they are doing it in company time, not in their own free time.

So the way I see it; they are getting paid by my employer to do work for the Training Company… with the Training Company pocketing a fee.

They are completely mugging us off there.

Yet, if the intention is to employ them permanently after the initial contract; then all these assignments the Training Company give them are pointless. Unless of course, you can prove that these assignments and exams are actually beneficial.

One of the Juniors comes back from the exam and says they have failed. They then go up to their line manager and say “was that a retrospective I led last week?”, the line manager brutally replies “no, it was a refinement session; that’s exactly why you failed”.

Hiring Juniors

The company I work for sometimes has problems with recruitment, because they don’t often offer wages comparable with the rest of the industry. Also, there are companies offering more money with better transport links. Instead of increasing wages, they often have the idea of acquiring unskilled workers and training them up; hoping enough of them will be long-term employees.

The thing is, although that has worked in the past, we were in a situation where we had experienced C# developers teaching Juniors C# to work on C#. Now we have the case that C# developers are expected to teach Juniors Web-related technologies like Javascript and AWS.

We have hired a batch of these Juniors from Bootcamp companies that do “crash courses”, where they learn various skills within 3 months, then they find them a proper job. Some of them I’ve asked questions, expecting them to be more knowledgable than me, and then they say something along the lines of “this is new to me, I didn’t study it”. So what are they doing their crash course on? We are hiring them for Javascript and AWS and they come here and tell us they haven’t seen it before.

The other day, one of these Juniors asked me a question, but added: “I expect you won’t know because this is new to you as well, but I don’t know who I can ask”. This is exactly the problem. How can we train them if we are trying to learn ourselves. The whole point of hiring Juniors is that you have enough Seniors to turn them into good developers and this just can’t happen with our structure. The fact that a Junior has joined, all excited to learn and start an exciting career; only to find he has little support and is set to struggle; it’s disheartening, and he knows this already.

Managers are proper proud of all this recruitment though, and even HR/Marketing have placed sponsored articles about it in a local newspaper. One article was about how one guy had all these dead end jobs and now he is employed to produce “solutions and codes”. Such strange phrasing.

Women In Tech

Recently, there seems to be more of a push to encourage women to apply for tech roles through means of tech conferences. I was thinking though, that surely the types of people that know about tech conferences – are the people that are already in the industry.

It probably makes sense to target the promotion directly at schools. Back in my day, if you knew programming, it was because you taught yourself, or went onto further education to study it. I have heard that these days, it is taught more at schools, so over time, I think the new generation will naturally enter the industry. It’s at that age you really need to get people interested. Otherwise, they will go and get a degree in some other field and the tech industry probably has a lower chance of getting someone to switch.

I think my employer has a lot of females in the managerial side of the department, but are severely lacking in terms of female developers. There’s a better representation of testers though, although still male dominated. I firmly believe this is purely a case of the representation of applicants, rather than any gender bias of offering roles. If anything, females have a better chance of landing jobs (LinkedIn even state this here https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/diversity/2019/how-women-find-jobs-gender-report).

Recently at one of these “Women In Tech” events, one female manager, Jackie goes to it. She surely has been in the industry for 30+ years, she joined the company in a high managerial position within the department, and has had promotions since. Surely her experiences of being a woman in tech hasn’t been negative. Therefore, I think she isn’t really the sort of person that could benefit from the event. Maybe a good candidate for actually doing a talk though.

If the talks involve how to tailor job advertisements to encourage female applications, then it’s probably a great event for HR to attend. It’s also ideal for women not currently in the industry, but they need to know the event is on, and be encouraged to go to it. This poses a question of where to advertise, and how to advertise.

So on to the actual criticism. Jackie comes back and reports on the event. One of the “facts” caught my attention. It said:

“Women apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the job listing. Men apply when they meet 60%.”

Now, I’m always sceptical of “facts” and severely doubted this one. Surely you can easily disprove it by simply assuming it is true. Sounds odd, but bear with me. A female reads this “fact”, then applies for a job when she meets 60% of the criteria. Fact disproved. Any fact that claims it applies to all people surely cannot be accurate.

As it turns out, with a bit of Googling, I found a more accurate quote, although I couldn’t find the actual source.

“Women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.”

So the quote was from Hewlett-Packard, observing their staff applying for promotions. So it’s a very small sample size to base the statement on, and it is for internal staff rather than external applicants. So women and men already in the tech industry. Interestingly enough, the LinkedIn study I mentioned early verified that women did apply to roles differently to men.

I was thinking about job advertisements and thought there is no way I’d ever would have had a job if I only applied to jobs when I met 100% of the criteria. Most of them do contain irrelevant technologies just to sound more exciting (maybe they use C# but they will say C#/Java/C++). They often ask for degrees, or experience as a “Full-Stack” developer when it’s not actually required. Maybe they specify things you use rather than things you need to know the inner workings of (virtual machines). Maybe they even ramble on about generic stuff like “enthusiasm for technology”, “passion for quality”. The more things you list, and the more jargon you list – the more chance people are put off because they don’t feel qualified.