Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

> I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too.

Apparently he was smart enough to get away from the Fortune 500 company he worked at, reporting to yourself, and "got a pay raise too."

> Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch.

See above.

> If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.

Maybe you don't know the talent within your own organization. Which is entirely understandable given your proclamation:

  Our engineers are fucking morons.

Then again, maybe this person who left your organization is accurately described as such, which really says more about the Fortune 500 company employing him and presumably continues to employ yourself.

IOW, either the guy left to get out from under an EM who says he is a "fucking moron" or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level.

> or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level.

sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.

White-Knighting for 'fucking morons' is not a good look though. You'll end up in a world where packets of peanuts have a label on saying 'may contain nuts'.

Which would be doubly silly as peanuts aren't actually nuts.

... or a world where grown adults pay millions of dollars to watch grown adults fighting like school children.

In fact, what am I even doing in this thread? - close-tab.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read today

I was consulting at a place, there was a very bad programmer whose code looked sort of like this

cost arrayIneed = [];

const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => {

if(item.hasProp) { arrayIneed.push(item); }

});

return arrayIneed;

the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo.

he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise.

I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.

… which is why the label makes sense. They may have been contaminated with nuts during production.

I think acting as if peanuts are actually nuts for purposes of communication is much more defensible than acting as if tomatoes are vegetables, in short you are dying on a hill that was paved over long ago.

> failed as a manager to elevate...

Managers aren't teachers. They can spend some time mentoring and teaching but there's a limit to that. I've worked with someone who could not write good code and no manager could change that.

Most people I've worked with aren't like that of course (there's really only one that stands out), so maybe you've just been lucky enough to avoid them.

I do find it unlikely that all of his engineers are morons, but on the other hand I haven't worked for a typical fortune 500 company - maybe that's where all the mediocre programmers end up.

I agree most people will conflate them, but someone who's allergic to peanuts but not tree nuts (or vice versa), i.e. the people the labels are intended for, are going to care about the difference.

And you think white knighting for managers who call their directs all “fucking morons” is a good look?

> the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.

Incentives are fucked across the board right now.

Move on a low performer today and you'll have an uphill battle for a backfill at all. If you get one, many companies are "level-normalizing" (read: level-- for all backfills). Or perhaps your management thinks the job could be done overseas cheaper, or you get pushed to turn it into a set of tasks so you can farm it out to contractors.

So you keep at least some shitty devs to hold their positions, and as ballast to throw overboard when your bosses say "5% flat cut, give me your names". We all do it. If we get back to ZIRP I'll get rid of the actively bad devs when I won't risk losing their position entirely. Until then, it's all about squeezing what limited value they have out and keeping them away from anything important.

this however was back when incentives were not so messed up, but sure.

That's the biggest confusion to me. Why on earth was this such a big deal? But perhaps Hacker News isn't the best place for that conversation.