this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
613 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59329 readers
6443 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Senior professionals in high demand area are very hard to find and hire - when I worked as a freelance very senior software designer-developer some years ago were I was paid big bucks for it, in most of my contracts they had ended up hiring an expensive freelancer like me because the company simply could not find anybody with that level of seniority willing to either become a permanent employee or move jobs (it's funny ´cause they almost invariably though it was temporary and they would find somebody and then generally I ended up working 2 years or so for them and eventually I would choose to leave because I was getting bored).
These people are also older and have families, not naive young men that will work crazy hours and take any shit.
This is IT, not some kind of early 20th century industry filled with employees for life who have "seniority" because merelly of how long they've working in the same company: they're senior in the sence of their domain expertise being very advanced, not in the sense of being old (though such expertise usually requires one to be older because it takes time to accumulate, being older does not guarantee such expertise and always working for the same company actually makes it harder to keep on evolving as a domain expert into the most senior levels because all you know is one way of doing things)
So it makes a lot more sense to me that the executives in these companies which have a tradition of over-exploiting bright young naive techies, didn't account for their most experienced staff (who are not only are past the age and insecurity about their skills that they will simply lie down and take shit but can also much more easilly find a job somewhere else than the less experienced ones) not just taking it and getting used to it and instead endind up prompted by these RTO policies to start looking for something else and eventually leave because, I repeat, it's much more easy for them to find a place to leave to.
There's an assumption that these companies actually value competency.
For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it's about high margin while churning so the customers don't immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they've converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.
In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry...
They value the job getting done efficiently with the minimum amount of confusion and risk, which is what good senior types will do and enable others to do (when doing something big or new, a team with only more junior types will fall into every pitfall and end up in every programming dead-end imaginable, but much less so if there's a senior person around, mainly because such people already went through similar things and often recognize certain kinds of potential problems before they're actual problems)
That said, plenty of managers in plenty of companies often don't know what they have until they lose it, and I expect B2C companies and larger B2B - which as you point out are mainly Brand driven - are less likely to value predictable delivery which is much closer to what's actually needed on the first release than smaller B2B, consultancies or in-house development were it's a lot harder to shove inadequate shit out and then convince the paying customers or the business side (if doing in-house development) that's what they want.
Certainly that's my own experience.
IMHO, as long as the senior types in these companies aren't fixated in staying in B2C, they'll have no problem finding new jobs and may even enjoy it more, so as I wrote in the previous post, it's easier for them to leave.