> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords.
I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable?
Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deals, periodically check for the best price to ensure you are getting it.
Why is it important to you that your employer view you as a person?
Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it.
Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"
One of the strongest signals of how good an engineering organization or a tech team is how few specific technologies they list in their job ads.
I've been hired as both a Ruby on Rails and Go developer without prior experience, and managed just fine in both case. Of course there's a bit of ramp-up time, but it's not that bad.
I'm not even an exceptionally talented programmer: just a competent one. Of course there are real differences between languages that matter, but at the end of the day ifs are ifs, ints are ints, functions are functions, etc.
That said: there are some reasonable scenarios when you want to hire someone with prior experience; for example as a first or second hire it's probably a good idea in most cases, or if you really need someone who can hit the ground running.
On the other hand, it would be nice to know the core languages in play. I have no interest in working in Java anymore, I avoid job listings for companies that would expect me to write Java. I don't want to have to go through recruiter screens etc before I can ask someone who will know what language I would be spending the next year of my life working with
Our solution to this is that we are clear that we're looking for Haskell programmers (as in that is what they should expect to do) but we have very modest requirements in terms of prior knowledge. I made sure to relay to HR that almost nothing is required in terms of prior knowledge (language-wise) and that we should expect to teach Haskell to people instead.
I think that in the specific case of Stripe, they specifically mostly use Ruby (from answers I found online). I may be wrong, but I assume that not mentioning Ruby is a way to attract Python/Go/C/etc. developers that might otherwise think that since they don’t code in Ruby, they shouldn’t apply.
Not to pick on Stripe, but why not say this explicitly?
"We mainly use [language X], but you don't need experience in [language X] for us to consider your application" - this is a totally normal thing I've seen in many job postings.
> Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"
You can't just go around telling people that: you are going to make hiring harder once everyone figures it out!
When you get a referral for a 10x and you're meeting at Blue Bottle you need an ice breaker; clueless community-college tier HR asking for versions of frameworks makes for an excellent one!
This makes a lot of sense. If a person has good fundamentals and understanding of engineering and CS, then they should be able to master any tech stack. I think in software development, we are in a weird position. In other engineering fields, it is expected to have a base line knowledge and the ability to learn into new processes. Most software companies seem to not want hire engineers who can do that.
The answer to a charitable interpretation of your question: most tech workers don't mind exchanging their labor for money, of course.
The answer to the question as written is...of course people want the entity that has outsize influence on 40 hours of their week to view them as a person instead of a mindless cog in a machine. People get treated better than cogs. Workers want their working hours to be as pleasant as possible, which is much more likely if your employer sees you as a person.
Not a mindless cog, but more as a merchant or even a labour supplying Lambda function. Just simply acknowledge that my employer and I are trading, the arrangement may end at any point for business reasons, and likely will end in a few years as our needs diverge.
Needs can include a nice workplace and you can negotiate specific details about what that means to you. I did not mean to say that it needs to be money.
A screwed hiring system is something most companies appear to be able to afford, given how many have one. When that same experience is flipped around to the employee, they can't afford it and it's a disaster. Few employees want zero job security and an expectation to be wading through the job hire swamp every couple of years.
You're not describing an employee, you're describing a consultant. Not everyone wants to be a consultant, particularly since most people don't get any training in it before they have responsibilities. If proper entrepreneurship was a subject at school, then maybe people would be willing to be their own business, but that's not what the system creates (or wants).
Fair, I can see why this might bother people. I don't think job security is a thing (career security perhaps), but I can get why its absence would be disturbing.
> expectation to be wading through the job hire swamp every couple of years.
The high level of turnover in this industry indicates that people at least tolerate it. The only people I know who make it 24 months in a role are chained by stock options.
But not all of us want to trade at that level of granularity. 'Do you have any mechanical engineering jobs' not 'Do you have any ceramic ball bearing housing design jobs'.
Because a Company expecting a "walking set of tech keywords" is a terrible deal for everyone but charlatans.
It is terrible for inexperienced developers eager to learn on the job as is common in other industries or was in ours in the past.
It's terrible you're an experienced developer that is able to pick technologies quickly, or just wants a proper work-life balance.
It is terrible for developers who are deeply familiar with the technology but expect to work with a team of professionals, rather than with "walking set of tech keywords".
I guess this is how I think of it. I enjoy the fruits of modern society, the airplanes and fast food and nice phones. But to make that happen, you need specialization, you need people know get really good at flying planes then just do that, and people who get good at making fast food and iphones and everything else. And inside that, you need people who specialize at every part of the supply chain, and what you end up with is people who have spent basically their whole lives fixing bugs in webservers used to sell analytics software to businesses etc. etc. and it becomes so abstract and you’re so disconnected from the feeling that you’re actually helping anyone or worth anything to society that it doesn’t really matter that intellectually you know the whole system would collapse if you don’t have people doing jobs like yours. And you should have friends outside of work, but many of us don’t really, at least not to the extent that way like, and even then work is literally most of your waking day most days of the week, and the knowledge that not even your coworkers or superiors or anyone else really cares about you in this grand societal project called modern civilization that you’re basically dedicating your life to maintaining, I can see how that would get to someone.
Dear god, that was beautiful but also depressing to read. I think this is it, exactly. I also think that it explains a large part of why so much software is bad. Specialization is a powerful thing, but without a unifying concept of the end goal, it's easy to become trapped by local maxima.
In short, employers have some degree of power over you, and if you perceive people who wield power over you as wielding that power arbitrarily, that is nearly universally experienced as frustrating.
In GP's case, the arbitrariness originates from their potential employer not taking the effort to really evaluate GP's relevant skills in software engineering, but instead resorting to lazily ticking boxes on a checklist. And what's on the checklist isn't even particularly relevant.
What I imagine this does to GP's view of the world (based on what it would do to mine) is: "I believe I am competent because I've built up a set of subtle skills in software engineering over many years, and this is what I take pride in. But from an employment point of view, this is wasted time: I should instead have focused on optimizing the checklist (and I only found this out after years in the industry)."
Great response. This is why I ended up not becoming a teacher, despite everyone and their brother telling me that that's my calling (I still hear this at work constantly from people I train). I could have absolutely dedicated my life to something with low pay. What I would not do is accept an environment where I was not treated as a professional. As far as I can tell, the modern American education system treats its educators like crap and hamstrings them every step of the way. No thanks.
Because people have brains, can learn new things and technologists don't need experience with particular technology to be successful using or working on it.
"I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable?"
Software engineering is at a schizophrenic point where it is very hard to categorize in either of traditional "blue collar" vocational job (given people seem to be employed close to very little formal schooling) or as a "white collar" professional job (given some roles need a CS degree level understanding of the fundamentals).
Some roles are more the other than the other.
I'd say listing a very specific tech stack signals the employer is looking for "blue collar" "commoditized" labour.
White collar "professional" types probably feel treating their contribution as "commoditized labour" is a category error.
More than anything else software engineering most closely resembles a trade.
The majority of useful education comes from mentorship and on-the-job experience. Sure, you can get a formal education, and sure it helps, but it doesn't make you a useful software engineer. It just gives you a foundation to build upon through mentorship and experience.
IMO, because the different .NET Core versions the commenter talks about aren’t that different and one can easily learn another version if they are already well-versed in one if them.
Also I am wondering: if management eventually decides (advised by external consultants of course) to switch to a newer version, then what do they plan to do? Hiring a new team?
Because the buzzwords are never even coherent. "Puppet or Ansible" - well no, those are not even slightly the same thing, which one are you using? GCP or AWS or Azure - same thing. Which one are you using, not what are you imagining?
This would all be fine, but no one writes ads saying what they actually need or what they're trying to do.
Minimum four slice toaster with proven experience to deliver results and work autonomously in a fast-paced family kitchen. Ability to cook eggs a plus. Must comply with government product safety laws.
> Why is it important to you that your employer view you as a person?
Because we, generally speaking, are people and not robots ;)
That being said, I agree with your point : people would have less issues if they just felt happy about whatever makes logical sense. That's just way too hard to live by for most people.
> Why is this objectionable? [to reduce an employee to "utility as a walking set of tech keywords"]
> Why is it important to you that your employer view you as a person?
If what you mean is that it can be rewarding (intrinsically and extrinsically) to think about skill, craftsmanship, and other ways to make your labor a great value add, sure. Most of us benefit by thinking about that.
If you're really asking about why keywordification is a problem, well... keywordification of job roles indicates a way in which companies are quite possibly struggling to actually model the roles they're hiring for and identify what makes make an individual productive within them.
This happens on at least two levels:
1) Technological. Engineering decisions are sometimes "we have a specific problem, specific tech is the solution to our problem, therefore we need expertise in specific tech." In that case, the keywords regarding that tech are meaningful. But for non-trivial use cases, engineering problems are very, very rarely just that, they're commonly the aggregation of off-the-shelf + consideration of how to mix them with what tradeoffs + in-house custom solutions embedded in an organization attempting to understand and model its domain problems and fit/reshape all those solutions to those models. This is not exactly a keyword-driven process. Keywords represent the shallow end of the pool.
2) Human. While labor clearly is something bought and sold on the market, even from a point of view of a value system which is OK thinking of humans primarily as industrial inputs, it turns out that's a significantly leaky abstraction and most of us have all kinds of "compiler flags" or other inputs of our own that make us more or less productive. Some might consider this to be too warm and fuzzy; they might find it comforting that it can be approached from as a-humane and manipulative point of view as one might approach tweaking a database to get it to perform better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkFztAgK-8U
As for whether it's OK to think of humans primarily as inputs to any process on a moral level... like Terry Pratchett's character Granny Weatherwax said “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” What are the consequences when social institutions consideration human beings primarily as inputs to institutional purposes? Generally, individual life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness become valued less, and individual suffering is more freely disregarded. Not super desirable under my value system. YMMV.
It’s not about humanism but mutual investment. I am investing my (very limited) time into your company to make you profit, you can invest in training me or helping me get up to speed on your specific needs.
But that is just trade and you can negotiate for those things. The employer benefits from getting you up to speed in the same way that someone might offer to send a truck to a store to get something delivered faster.
I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable?
Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deals, periodically check for the best price to ensure you are getting it.
Why is it important to you that your employer view you as a person?