
Choose boring employees - marvel_boy
http://www.sicpers.info/2017/09/choose-boring-employees/
======
chrisco255
Tech choices matter. The industry evolves and all of this experimentation in
languages, frameworks, tooling, and libraries has led to real productivity
gains.

10X developers may be rare...but I don't think it's so rare to see 10X
productivity gains when it comes to tech stacks.

For example, a company who runs their own servers manually can see dramatic
improvements in productivity and agility if they move to a newer tech stack
and run on AWS or Heroku or some PaaS as an alternative.

Using JQuery may be the tried, true, and mature front end stack, but I've been
able to rewrite front-end code in a different framework with less than 1/5th
of the code to maintain.

To summarize, I think you should hire energized, motivated, continually
educated employees that stay at the top of their game...not boring ones.

~~~
rjzzleep
I built an private side project app that was in use at of the major brokers.

I built it in react redux, because I thought it would raise "my" value.

I've had to rebuild that shit more times than I care to admit. Imho for a
small dev shop picking react is a stupid choice. For a small dev shop picking
node in the backend is IMHO also a stupid choice. I could go on with the list,
but I'm going to stop knowing that I will already have upset enough people.

We've basically recreated the PHP problem. For whomever doesn't remember,
before the first decent php frameworks like codeigniter(let's not talk about
stuff like laravel) pretty much everyone built their own framework. After a
couple of years when zend started to get traction they would integrate
components from there.

The main issue wasn't all the security issues or the usual PHP complaints you
hear. The main was the same you have in the javascript community:

> No two projects are the same

If you have time and money to waste for people to constantly update your
tooling fine. But I don't. Hell just keeping up to date with airbnbs linting
style guide was a major PITA.

EDIT: no I don't think the constant rewrites of redux and react router
components, async connect, history etc. can be blamed on someone not having
"enough experience in react". there's even a plugin to do regression tests on
dependency updates. paying 100k for glorified javascript plumber jobs is
unacceptable to me.

~~~
joshwcomeau
I think a key thing you're missing is that you're new to React/Redux. Of
course you won't be as productive with something you're just starting to learn
(rebuilding something multiple times is natural when you're still figuring it
out, but that goes away).

That's not to say that everyone running Angular or Backbone or whatever should
ditch their current stack and rebuild in React. But, a new dev shop would be
wise to pick React, because most people who become experienced with it are
very productive.

~~~
pdimitar
Flawed feedback. I trained myself in Elixir for a few weekends and once things
started to click in my head (I was always an OOP / imperative programming guy
so learning functional programming took me some trying) then I was able to do
a mini-project that had real value... in 2 working days.

I didn't have to deal with dependencies for more than 10 seconds (not an
exaggeration), I didn't have to transpile, I didn't have to include shims /
polyfills, I didn't have to explicitly include 2-3 CLI "task runners", etc.
weird crap from the JS ecosystem that everybody in there thinks is normal for
some reason.

You can't just expect people to worship your tech stack and blame them for
"not being experienced enough". Hell, if you put enough labor, you can get
solid experience on a custom-tailored banking system written in COBOL, or
custom-programmed FPGA CPU units. You can become an expert manual tailor, too.
But that's not the point.

IMO the point is -- are you able to immerse yourself in the tech stack you're
proclaiming and be useful _in business terms_ no more than 1-2 weeks later? If
no, then your stack isn't worth investing into, _especially_ after your stack
is known to change trends as if it's some kind of a glamour fashion empire.

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CorvusCrypto
> Next year, your company will be a year more mature.

Yep and we will be looking at the cutting edge always to see if there are
things we can use to improve our stack/development process.

> Your product will be a year more developed.

Well that is how software development works.

> You will have a year more customers.

Yes and we will therefore have at least some stable income too!

> You’ll have a year more tech debt to pay off.

Yes, but because we have kept up to date in trends and technology the debt is
significantly less than one might expect. Plus we aren't laser beams (i.e.
very narrowly focused) which means we are able to manage three primary goals:
fix bugs, improve/add features, and maintain/improve our stack.

This post was not great imo.

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nulagrithom
Ugh, I hate this sentiment. "Technology moves too fast so don't bother trying
to keep up!" No... It's about balance...

We're looking for a Synon 2/E expert right now. It's going about as well as
you'd expect.

~~~
wavefunction
Those experts have been able to write their own tickets for decades so I'm not
surprised it's hard to find anyone.

First pro tech job was at a small (8000 customer) ISP back in the 90s and our
sysadmin was an AS/400 master. He'd show up once or twice a month, mostly just
to check on things.

I think he made more from that company than the owner ever did.

------
dwaltrip
What the author meant to say is "Don't hire people who pursue new tech solely
for the sake of newness".

It's not about being boring. It's about being pragmatic and focused on
actually executing.

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milesokeefe
Title should read "employees".

~~~
iffycan
Though the typo'd version probably has some merit, too.

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colbyh
Unpopular opinion, but I actually think this is very good advice in certain
situations. If your startup is using a technology tangentially related to your
core product it can totally make sense to use "boring" tech.

The simplest version would be something along the lines of - building a
hardware startup? It probably doesn't make sense to build your company's ecomm
site on top of React/Redux/etc. Rails works. Shopify works. They are boring
options but they get the job done and get out of the way. Same company needs a
blog? Don't roll your own, just find someone to manage a wordpress
installation and be done with it.

Now that might very not be the case if your hardware has a substantial online
component of course, but if your core product value is tied up in selling a
hard good that doesn't need an app or a management interface of any kind then
it doesn't really make sense to spend extra resources on a really cool
website.

------
payne92
TL;DR Don't chase the latest tech stack to attract developers. Hot today,
dated next year.

"Access to developer talent" is a reasonable factor in selecting a tech stack
(e.g. there's a reason few use COBOL, etc.) But it's one of MANY factors.

~~~
Kaedon
For whom do you imagine this is tl;dr? The article itself is quite short.

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StavrosK
This article is three lines long. What's next for the front page? Tweets?

~~~
prawn
Why not? I've seen a number of tweets make it to the HN front page.

Also, when many come here for the comments, or use an article about topic X
purely as an excuse to discuss that topic in general (or see what their peers
think), does the length of the source article matter much?

~~~
StavrosK
> when many come here for the comments, [..] does the length of the source
> article matter much?

Fair point, I guess it doesn't.

------
CM30
I think the more important thing here isn't to choose 'boring' employees or
tech stacks, but to choose what's actually needed for your situation.

If your site is a fancy web app where customers need to say, design their own
website in the browser with a visual editor complete with Photoshop style
image editing and what not, choose a tech stack that supports that as well as
employees skilled with said stack.

That's a good use case for the latest Javascript framework you've been working
with recently, along with cloud hosting on AWS or the likes.

On the other hand, if your site's just a content site (like say, a news blog
or a basic forum), you really don't need all that fancy technology setup for
it. Just create a nice basic frontend with HTML and CSS (with the odd line or
two of Javascript where necessary), then use whatever your preferred scripting
language and database is on the backend. Setting up a huge framework on AWS
for this is like using a nuke to crack an egg.

And if you're looking for web hosting... well think hard about how popular
your site is actually going to be first. Your tiny shop for local fishing
supplies is not going to draw 50 million people a day, so you probably don't
need a complex cloud hosting setup for it, nor a whole dedicated server/server
farm.

Alas, a lot of people and companies nowadays seem less interested in choosing
what they actually need so much as what sounds cool on their developers' CV/in
online blog posts/on internet forums and Hacker News. So you get companies who
are miles away from having any real customerbase whatsoever doing a boring job
with technology better suited to Facebook and a couple of thousand a month
cloud hosting bill.

------
Bretts89
I believe in hiring the very best employees that fit the culture of your
company. If your culture is a boring one, then hire the best employees which
would fit well into a boring culture. If your company culture is vibrant and
outgoing, then hire the very best employees that will thrive in a vibrant,
outgoing culture.

------
cannonedhamster
The flip side of this is that you have "boring" companies and employees who
are reluctant to change even if it would make a demonstrable improvement.
Doing things because you've always done them this way is just as much of a
trap, and I'd suspect far more common outside of the startup realm.

------
jonbarker
If boring == profitable, sign me up!

~~~
gtt
Sadly, usually boring is just boring.

~~~
jonbarker
One thing I've noticed is that companies will use cool languages as a
recruiting tactic. Then you get in the door and see it's all PHP and one team
wrote one Clojure script. (Not picking on PHP here).

------
abhi3
Reading the title I thought the article was going to talk about how not to
hire for culture fit nonsense like playing foosball or ability to down a keg
but instead it talks about hiring people who don't care enough to keep up with
tech advancements.

------
jeffdo
I'd rather hire an 'interesting' developer who wants to build and consistently
upgrade a product with the latest tech then someone who believes it too
difficult. Who says your stack cant change over time, ever heard of agile
development?

