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> Burnout is a huge one

Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release.

It absolutely sucks on the applicant's end, but we can't spend a year helping a new hire work through burnout when most companies are in a fairly competitive market with extremely demanding customers AND much more competitive vendors.




"Of course, but companies have deadlines to hit and features to release."

I mean, they're allowed to be shortsighted if they want. Burn through people and spend time and money hiring replacements.


Companies are well aware of Brooks's law and will instead chose to not hire someone and work with existing known productivity levels (and look to see what can be done to improve that) than to hire a risky person that puts existing deadlines even more at risk.

That companies aren't hiring people (and complaining that there's no one to hire) is what we're seeing rather than burning through people and dealing with Net Negative Producing Programmers ( https://web.archive.org/web/20030517045551/http://www.pyxisi... ).

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Because people are leaving for greener pa$ture$ at a faster rate, and the higher compensation demanded, companies are mitigating that risk by requiring a person to come in with the expected training rather than spending months training a person who may not be able to preform at expected levels.

The other side of that is that there are a lot of places out there that are moving slow and not updating things quickly. I worked at a retail company a number of years ago where you could make $70k / year as a programmer and be able to work at a more leisurely pace. I currently work in the public sector and things are on much longer timescales.

However, if you want to work in the fast paced and highly paid sector of Big Tech startups, you may need be able to meet the needs that they have. And there its less risky to have one of the existing employees take on another task than to hire someone (and burn runway faster) that might not be able to contribute until after the runway is gone.


This is about new hires. Not existing employers.

The answer is simple - don't burn out your existing employees.


Yeah, but even as a new employee, my past experiences have conditioned me to expect that I will get screwed over the same way even at a new company.


And this is why the job market sucks.

Enough hiring managers and applicants have been screwed over by the other that it's become adversarial.

It is what it is.

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My two cents though to you giantg2, the mentality you have is not feasible in the private sector as neither employers nor employees have any loyalty anymore.

Either switch to a government programming job (plenty of those now and they are increasingly remote first - especially Federal) or a new industry.

Or start learning the game (how to market yourself, constantly upskilling with "hot" tech stacks, networking, etc).


Eh, I've been at this job for somethingblike 13 years. Might as well stick at it. There isn't anything feasible for me to switch to anyways. I've tried the marketing shit and it didn't work for me.




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