
Corporate companies killing geeks - madmotive
http://andrei.serdeliuc.ro/article/corporate-companies-killing-geeks/
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gaius
"My point being, corporate companies look for money and large numbers of
staff. Web development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is
poetry."

HA HA HA

Most (not all) "web development agencies" are bodyshops, they bill their
clients hourly and the one metric they care about is the utilization rate of
their people. Been there, done that. It is beyond ridiculous to suggest that
corporations hire web agencies because their code is so much more advanced
than that of their internal developers. Body shops are hired so they can be
easily gotten rid of when they're no longer needed, full stop.

~~~
donal
Isn't being able to easily "get rid of" bodies the whole point of looking for
outside help?

I guess I come to the same conclusion, but without the cynicism. It isn't
exactly profitable to not care about utilization rate of bodies, but then a
small web dev house has to pump out better stuff faster than the other guy
(and there is always an "other guy").

I mean, if your product isn't selling, then you should probably find a new
product, right?

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ocskills
"corporate companies look for money and large numbers of staff. Web
development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is poetry."

This is a very naive statement. Web dev agencies are looking for the same
thing as corporations: to make money, and maintain size or preferably grow.
They are just smaller and earlier in the business lifecycle, which means less
bureaucracy. Many cater to larger corporations anyway, and face the same
political challenges by proxy.

The bottom line is that work experience will depend on _your team_ much more
than your company. There are just as many tight knit and creative groups who
their love code poetry at big companies as at small.

~~~
jcromartie
> work experience will depend on your team much more than your company

I have just discovered this for myself. I went from a very closed-off,
conservative, and staid team to a newer, more open, and more flexible team.
The team-change was more significant than the initial job change.

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cousin_it
I love the sense of web design that went into that page.

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madmotive
I think the problem is more with non-technology businesses killing geeks. When
a business doesn't fundamentally understand technology at its highest level
they don't understand how best to employ the skills of
geeks/developers/engineers/hackers.

I've seen too many great engineers getting turned off working with technology
because of the time they spent working in traditional businesses that just
don't get it.

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JoeBlu
Um. Barf. Also, that randomized buzzword-y bold text makes my blood boil.
Poor, precious little developer. He's probably making his colleagues crazy.

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edw519
No matter where you're at, you need to find a way to decouple the "what" from
the "how" in the mind of your boss/user/customer.

As soon as they start telling me what tool/framework/algorithm to use, I put
on the brakes. "You decide the what, I decide the how. That's how it works
around here." If they don't agree, work somewhere else.

This doesn't fix everything, but goes a long way toward quality and job
satisfaction.

