[walrushunter]

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.

Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.

[AdieuToLogic]

> 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.

[IshKebab]

> 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.

[briansm]

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'.

[ripped_britches]

This is the funniest thing I’ve read today

[JCharante]

> 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.

[spike021]

Hmm. Engineering managers should be setting the team culture and determining best criteria for extending an offer to a candidate. If theres a problem with the hiring process I'd look for the closest source that could or should be fixing it.

I don't think I'd want to work for you.

[Lammy]

I hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.

[JamesBarney]

Almost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes.

In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"

[bryanrasmussen]

dumbness is ranking intelligence, which is a positive trait, dumbness is just a metric for how often intelligence fails.

Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons.

You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.

[geodel]

Btw how do you know your current manager is not doing that.

[strken]

I'm not a manager and I don't stack rank people, but I am 100% capable of knowing when one of my co-workers or predecessors is a fucking moron.

The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like

    // @ts-nocheck
    // obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it?
    async function upsertWidget() {
      try {
        // await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... })
        // 20 line block of commented-out useless code
        // pretend this went on much longer
        let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c })
        if (!result.ok) {
           result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun
           if (!result.ok) {
             result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating
           }
        }
        // notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently
        // also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript
        return result
      } catch (error) {
        return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object 
      }
    }

    function doSomething() {
      const widget = await upsertWidget()
    }

...except even worse, because instead of createWidget the name was something far less descriptive, the nesting was deeper and involved loops, there were random assignments that made no goddamn sense, and the API calls just went to an unnecessary microservice that was only called from here and which literally just passed the data through to a third party with minor changes. Those minor changes resulted in an internal API that was actually worse than the unmodified third party API.

I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.

[AlotOfReading]

I've never seen a team that has somehow managed to hire exclusively morons. Even the shittiest of call center jobs and construction crews have a few people with enough brain cells to tie their shoelaces.

Have you considered that maybe you're being overly harsh about your co-workers? Maybe take the fact that one of them was hired by a top paying employer as a sign that you should improve your own ability to judge skill?

[theendisney]

I've seen tons of them! The formula is to create conditions that will make even slightly competent people leave. They hire their morron nephew, he is always 30 min late then they moan when you are 5 min late because the parking lot was blocked by their car. He always leaves 2 hours early while you do overtime that they regularly forget to pay for. Your day is filled with your own work PLUS that of your retarded coworkers who only drink coffee while joking about you doing their work. You are not as fast as the last guy! haha! If something goes wrong the morrons collectively blame you, just like the last time. You get a formal warning. etc etc The other normal person they hire is let go after 2 days because they complaint which means they didnt fit the team.

And so on

If he still works there the morron who left was less of a.

[that_guy_iain]

Having worked with a bunch of guys who have gone on to "top teams", I no longer believe they have top teams. My fav was the guy who said the system could scale indefinitely after it literally fell on its ass from too much traffic. He couldn't understand that just because Lambdas my themselves can scale, they are limited by the resources they use, so just ignored it and insisted that it could. The same guy also kept on saying we should change the TPEG standard because he didn't like how it worked. And these companies are seriously pretending they've got the best and brightest. If that's really true, I really need to find another profession.

[YZF]

I've worked for many companies that said they hired the best. And to be honest when I hire I also try to hire good people. I think I could hire better if a) I had an open cheque, b) I was running coolest project in the universe. I did hire for some interesting projects but nothing close to an open cheque. Even under these conditions it's tough to find great people. You can go after people with a proven track record but even that doesn't always guarantee their next project will be as successful.

The reality though is that large companies with thousands of people generally end up having average people. Some company may hire more PhD's. But on average those aren't better software engineers than non-PhD's. Some might hire people who are strong competitive coders, but that also on average isn't really that strong of a signal for strong engineers.

Once you have a mix of average people, on a curve, which is the norm, the question becomes do you have an environment where the better people can be successful. In many corporate environments this doesn't happen. Better engineers may have obstacles put in front of them or they can forced out of the organization. This is natural because for most organizations can be more of a political question than a technical question.

Smaller organizations, that are very successful (so can meet my two criterias) and can be highly selective or are highly desirable, can have better teams. By their nature as smaller organizations those teams can also be effective. As organizations grow the talent will spread out towards average and the politics/processes/debt/legacy will make those teams less effective.

[cultofmetatron]

> Our engineers are fucking morons.

I interviewed at Netflix a few years ago; with several of their engineers. One thing I cannot say is that they are morons.

their interview process is top notch too and while I was ultimately rejected, I used their format as the base template for how I started hiring at my company.

[silisili]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but you typically use your A players for hiring/interviews.

It can be both true that Netflix has God tier talent and a bunch of idiots. In fact, that's probably true of most places. I guess the ratio matters more.

[tayo42]

what seemed good about it that makes different then any other hiring process that seems detached from the job?

[wordofx]

None of the Fortune 500 companies hire top talent. They have a few good people but 98% of the engineers are average at best. Over paid.

[qingcharles]

This is every dev house I've worked at. For most people (mostly not the ones on HN), coding is a 9-5 job. No ambition. Just lines of code. Go home. I don't know there is anything particularly wrong with that.

You just have to accept most staff at any corporation are simply just average. There has to be an average for there to be better and worse.

[gamblor956]

Our engineers are fucking morons

If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron at this Fortune 500 company because he was reporting to a manager who was calling him and the entire team morons and he didn't feel the need to go above and beyond for that manager.

Also, highly likely that it was the manager that was the moron and not everyone around him.

[throwawaythekey]

> If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron

It's also possible that there's very little correlation between capability, reputation and salary.

Don't we all know someone who is overpaid? There are more than a few well known cases of particular employers who select for overpaid employees...

[djbusby]

Why is your team morons? Kind of disparaging maybe? Fish rots from the head situation?

[reagan83]

Curb your enthusiasm had a good segment of episodes that were a parody on Netflix and how they shifted hiring from merit to other criteria.

[indigodaddy]

Curb did? What season/episodes?

[moralestapia]

I can +1 with a similar anecdote.

They obviously have some really good engineers, but many low-tier ones as well. No idea how long they stay there, though.

I'm watching the fight now and have experienced the buffering issues. Bit embarrassing for a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this. Also, yeah, 900k TC and whatnot but irl you get this. Mediocre.

[spencerchubb]

livestream is quite different from streaming pre-processed video, so I'm not surprised by the scaling issues

[anakaine]

I have to wonder if its a regional thing. I'm watching from the southern pacific in HD, and its been excellent.

[pfannkuchen]

Reputation usually lags reality by 5+ years. See: Google.

[renewiltord]

Absolutely right. Netflix was once all about the sports team mentality. Now they’re Man Utd.

[geodel]

It mostly makes sense to me. From their bombastic blogs to github projects full of overwrought Enterprise java design patterns. The only thing great about Netflix is it pays a lot more.

[29athrowaway]

What are the chances that your entire engineering team is entirely composed of low performers or people with bad attitude or whatever you designate as "fucking morons"?

It's more likely that you are bad at managing, growing and motivating your team.

Even if it was true, to refer to your team in this way makes you look like you are not ready for management.

Your duty is to get the most out of the team, and that mindset won't help you.

[notadoomer236]

Don’t agree. Sometimes you can observe the world around you, and it’s not pretty. Are they not allowed to observe the truth as they see it? What if they are right?

[ohyes]

Sometimes if everyone else is the problem you are the problem.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Its all ego when these companies think they hire the best.

[_giorgio_]

I don't understand why nobody here believes you.

There's no reason to doubt what you say, probably people identify with the mistreated one. Why?

[horns4lyfe]

Because the idea that all the engineers that work at his large company are morons is absurd. Anyone in that situation that believes that and even more, states it, is just making their own character flaws apparent.

[blinded]

You ever thought they were doing the bare minimum and studying at night to leave?

[kkielhofner]

> I'm an engineering manager

How are you involved in the hiring process?

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

Very indicative of a toxic culture you seem to have been pulled in to and likely have contributed to by this point given your language and broad generalizations.

Describing a wide group of people you're also responsible for as "fucking morons" says more about you than them.

[dang]

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154036.)

[globalnode]

this is why managers get a bad rap. what proportion think like this? hopefully not a large one but i do worry. ultimately if the team sucks its because of the management. theyre the ones with the greatest power to change things for the better.

[throw10920]

I'm going to avoid leaving a zero-effort response like "actually you're the problem" like half of the replies and contribute:

Why do you call your engineers morons? Is it a lack of intelligence, a lack of wisdom, a lack of experience, inability to meet deadlines, reading comprehension, or something else?

I wonder if Netflix is just hiring for different criteria (e.g. you want people who will make thoughtful decisions while they want people who have memorized all the leetcode problems).

[horns4lyfe]

Sounds like you’re a good match for their team then

[justmarc]

Your job must be truly awful.

[0xpgm]

An engineering manager who thinks his engineers are morons and dumb?

I have questions..

[midtake]

Top troll bro

[reactordev]

Sounds like he got a better deal. If this is how you describe your team, I suspect they are all submitting their resumes hoping to get away from you.