Whilst I agree that it’s nice to get people who do get some enjoyment from the work, I think it’s unrealistic to expect to actually find it in senior professionals: maybe you’ll be lucky, but don’t count on it - such people need to have started with a natural knack for that domain, not having had all their enjoyment of that kind of activity totally crushed over the years by the industry (I’m afraid that over time having to do something again and again because it has to be done rather than because one wants to do it, crushes the fun out of any task for even for the most enthusiastic about it person), and not having been accepted or even demanded to get promoted to management as they became more senior because they were so good in the Technical side (were they’ll most likely suck, but that’s not consolation for you as they won’t be available anymore).

It simply is very unlikely to find experienced people combining all those things.

Further, even if you do manage to find such people, don’t expect that enjoyment of such tasks to be enough to drive an employee most of the time, since most of the work we have to do is generally something that needs to be done rather than something which is enjoyable to do.

If on the other hand you go for junior people who still retain their enthusiasm, you’re going to be “paying” for them doing all the mistakes in the book and then some as they learn, plus if you give them the really advanced complex stuff (say, designing a system to fit into existing business processes) they’re going to fuck it up beyond all recognition.

So statistically going for enthusiasm is and experience is like hoping to win the lottery.

If you do need to hire people with actual experience, it’s more realistic to aim for professionalism as their driver of doing the work well and in time, rather than enthusiasm.

This is why, IMHO, asking people how they feel about the work is a bit silly unless you have yourself a truckload of recent graduates looking for their first job and you’re trying to separate the gifted from the ones who went for it for the money (and there you’re competing with the likes of Google and other companies with more brand recognition who will far more easily attract said gifted naive young things than the overwhelming majority of companies out there, so that too is probably not realistic an expectation)

I suppose Lemmy is frequented by older Tech professionals, hence the “you must be joking!” reaction to your idea that asking people how they feel about the work is in any way form or shape a viable way of finding good professionals.

Sounds to me like you’re doing the fun part of the job - “solving challenging problems” - without having to do the vast majority of the work (which is seldom as much fun), such as making it suitable for actual end users, integration with existing systems and/or migration, maintaining it during its entire life-cycle, supporting it (which for devs generally means 3rd level support) and so on.

So not exactly a typical environment from which to derive general conclusions about what are the best characteristics for a professional in software engineering in general.

Mind you, I don’t disagree that if what you’re doing is basically skunworks, you want enthusiastic people who aren’t frozen into a certain set of habits and technologies: try shit out to see if it works kind of people rather than the kind that asks themselves “how do I make this maintainable and safe to extend for the innevitable extra requirements in the future”.

Having been on both sides of the fence, in my experience the software that comes from such skunkworks teams tends to be horribly designed, not suitable for production and often requires a total rewrite and similarly looking back at when I had that spirit, the software I made was shit for anything beyond the immediacy of “solving the problem at hand”.

(Personally when I had to hire mid-level and above devs, one of my criteria was if they had already been through the full life cycle for a project of theirs - having to maintain and support your own work really is the only way to undrestand and even burn into one’s brain the point and importance of otherwise “unexplained” good practices in software development and design).

Mind you, I can get your problem with people who indeed are just jobsworths - I’ve had to deal with my share of people who should’ve chosen a different professional occupation - but you might often confuse the demands and concerns of people from the production side as “covering their asses bullshit” when they’re in fact just the product of them working on short, mid and long term perspectives in terms of the software life-cycle and in a broader context hence caring about things like extensability, maintenability and systems integration, whilst your team’s concerns end up pretty much at the point were you’re delivering stuff that “works, now, in laboratory conditions”. Certainly, I’ve seen this dynamic of misunderstandings between “exploratory” and “production” teams, especially the skunkworks team because they tend to be younger people who never did anything else, whilst the production team (if they’re any good) is much more likely to have at least a few people who, when they were junior, did the same kind of work as the skunkworks guys.

Then again, sometimes it really is “jobsworths who should never have gone into software development” covering their asses and minimizing their own hassle.

Asking questions about the team and the work is how one detects and avoid shitty environments.

Ah, no concreted metrics for efficiency and delivery of results.

Explains why you prioritize employees who have fun on the job rather than efficient professionals who are there to do a job well done - you can’t really like to like compare with other teams (much less the broader industry) when it comes to delivering objectives because it’s all open ended and unique, so you really don’t know for sure which kind of employee is more effective but you do know for sure which kind is more fun to work with, hence you prioritize what you can measure - a fun team - not what is more effective and efficient.

Most work out there in software development is not “cracking interesting problems for fun without a strict timeline”, it’s “integrate new functionality into an existing massive custom-made system, which has at least 3 different styles of programming and software design because different people have worked on it over the last 8 years and only not a complete mess of spaghetti code if you’re lucky” - not really the kind of work were Enthusiasm lasts long, but it still has to be done and sometimes, millions, tens of millions and even hundreds of millions in yearly revenue of some company or other rides in doing that job well and in a timelly fashion.

Don’t take this badly, but from where I’m standing you’re in the playground sandbox of software engineering. No doubt it’s fun and even an environment others would love to be able to work in, it’s just not the place for professionals and doesn’t really reflect most of the software development being done out there, so not exactly a representative environment for determining what kind of professionals are suitable for the wider industry.

Look mate, I’ve been in Software Development for almost 3 decades, mainly in the Technical careed path (did some Project Management but, frankly, it’s not my thing) and all the way to Technical Architect, in 3 different countries and most of it as a contractor, so I worked in quite a number of companies and work environment.

(I’m not trying to pull rank here, just showing that I’ve seen a lot)

In my experience, things like Enthusiasm are what bright eyed naive junior developers have: they’re like me as a teen in the swiming pool having learnt to swim by myself and never having had lessons - intense strokes trowing water all over the place but moving very little for all that effort, or in other words lots of effort with little in the way of results.

Worse, Enthusiasm doesn’t last forever and, further, most of the work than needs to be done is not exactly stimulating (if it was fun, people wouldn’t have to pay money to others for doing it).

People who get at least some enjoyment of their work are good to have (and I’m lucky that after all these years I still get those moments of great enjoyment when at the end of doing something insanelly complex it all works), but in the real world most work that needs to be done is needed but boring so fun in that kind of task by itself won’t be enough, plus such people are actually uncommon beyond the bright eyed young things, so if you want somebody who will actually deliver you results (rather than work a lot to achieve little) and you’re not a prestigious company (say, like Google, which leverages their brand recognition to pull in such bright young things by the bucket load and drip them out drained of on the other side) and can’t pay well above average, you’re highly unlikely to get those kinds of people.

What you really want is people who have things like professional pride: they want to do a good job because they see themselves as professionals and feel a professional responsability to deliver good results in an efficient way that doesn’t hinder the work of others.

I’ve seen over the years people with your perspective heading Startups or teams within small companies, and invariably they end up with unproductive teams filled with inexperienced people making all the mistakes in the book (and inventing new ones), enthusiastically. Maybe the people seeking such workers should’ve asked themselves what their real objective is in that: is it deliver the results needed by the company so that it prospers and grows or is it the pleasure of being surrounded by people having fun.

IMHO, in Software Development it’s a good idea for a candidate to ask about the project, if only because any good professional would want to know if they’re a good fit or not.

Mind you, that makes sense in the Technical interview rather than with HR - no point in asking about what are the practical professional details of the work you will be doing from a person who doesn’t really have a clue (the HR person) when you know you will be facing an actual professional peer in a technical interview who knows the work that needs to be done in your terms and with the level of detail and understanding only domain professionals have.

In my experience doing the Technical Interview side of things (and most of my career I was a Contractor - so a Freelancer - which is hardly a “company man” with a rosy view of my relationship to them or somebody who thinks people work for fun), people who don’t ask about the project during the Technical Interview tend to as the interview proceeds end up get revealed as technically weak: an experienced “Engineer” would want to make sure they’re well matched to the kind of work they’re be doing (as well as, in my experience from the other side of the interviewing table, spot the messy fucked up situations before you take the contract so that if you can avoid ending in such disfunctional environments).

I mean, the whole “this is your second family” or “you should be proud of were you work” thing isn’t bad if they’re similarly dedicated to their employees welfare, for example “no questions asked sick days off” or maybe even more relevant in Tech, sizing the team to the work that need to be done in a project rather than expecting constant unpaid overwork from employees (rather than just once in a while).

The problem, as emphasized by the OP, is that they expect employees to invest themselves in the company without the company investing in employees.

There apparently are some companies out there which are almost like a second family, you know, the kind of place were they hear that your grandmother died and give you a week paid leave no questions asked to “deal with your loss”, but most aren’t at all like that - they treat employees as disposable cogs whilst expecting that the employees respond back by being dedicated to the company.

It’s either a business relation on both sides or it’s a personal relation on both sides.

I was in Tech in Europe through the transition from when employees were people and the company was loyal to them and expected loyalty to the company in return (the age of lifetime employment), to the world we live in now were employees are “human resources”, and for a great part of that period there was this thing were most employers expected employees to stay with the company whilst the company needed them and be dedicated to the company, whilst in return they treated employees as a business relationship with (in Tech) some manipulative “fake friendship” stuff thrown in (the ultimate examples: company paid pizza dinner when people stay working on a project till late, or the yearly company party, rather than, you know, paying people better or sizing the team to fit the work that needs to be done rather than relying on unpaid overwork) - still today we see this kind of shit very obviously and very purposefully done in places like Google.

Of course the “humour” part here is that plenty of managerial and HR people in companies still expect that employees are loyal to the company even all the while they treat them as disposable cogs who it’s fine to exploit without consideration for their feelings or welfare - or going back to the first paragraph of this post: they relate to employees as a business relationship whilst expecting the employees related to the company as a personal relationship (often a “second family”).

Nice neoliberal propaganda picture.

The actual Leftwing solution would be to remove the fence.

Also you’re “curiously” bypassing the whole “deeming people victims or oppressors based on the genetics they were born with rather than actually being victimized or victimizing others” part of my argument, which just so happens to be the core of it.

Leftwingers (and Humanists) help people based on their actual need, fight against any unjust treatment (not just for some identities but not others) and force the actual aggressors to compensate the actual victims for what they did to them, not give excuses for the aggressors or ignoring the victims because of their respective identities (unlike what’s so poignantly illustrated by the way the Democrat Party in the US has treated aggressors and victims in the Gaza Genocide).

So even in that propaganda picture of yours were the Ticket-buying Inducing fence stays up, the person on a wheelchair would get help under traditional Leftwing thinking because they have an actual need for it, not because of, say, being old - if they’re old but have no such need (say, a very wealthy person who had a very good life with proper food and living conditions so they did not end up on a wheelchair) they don’t get a wheelchair ramp merely for being old - and similarly a person who is not old (and hence in that metaphor not in an identity deemed in need by Identity Politics) and yet is on a wheelchair also gets a wheelchair ramp under Leftwing thinking because they too have a need, which is all that matters, not whatever identity label has been given to them.

So even in the Capitalist environment where that fence stays up, Leftwingers would help those who need help because they need help, whilst the Identity Politics warriors would be deciding if they would which are identities fro which all members get help and how much help does each Identity deserve all the while ignoring the actual personal need.

Who gains from help not being given based on need and the costs (direct or indirect) being borne by entire identities deemed “aggressors” rather than by the actual oppressors? The wealthy, of course: they get to oppress to their hearts content and the cost for that if the victims are ever compensated is spread over everybody of the “identity” who happens to be the same as them, and if they’re luck and were born with the “right” identity, they’ll even benefit from it even though they have no need at all for that and are actual oppressors rather than victims.

The transformation of Powerfull vs Powerless way of fighting inequality into a miriad of split identitarian fights which claim that people’s victims or aggressor status is wholly defned by the genetics they were born with (rather than, you know, actually being victimized or chosing to victimize others) which naturally ended up with the oppressed fighting amongst themselves as competing “identities” for the crumbs from the Powerful absolutelly is a modern phenomenon.

If you want to see the old style, just look at how traditional Unions still left in positions of relative strenght operate: they don’t fight for different salary and work condition improvements for people with different genders, skin colors or sexual orientation, the fight as all the workers vs the bosses.

Everyone being equal sounds great and all. Show me a left wing country that’s achieved it.

Show me a country were Identity Politics has merelly just reduced Inequality (as defined by the Gini Coeficient) since it became fashionable (so, the last 3 decades).

From what I can see, the countries with the most and loudest Identity Politics are the ones going in the exact opposite direction - higher inequality, collapsing social mobility - like the UK and the US. It’s “curious” that after the powerless fighting as a group against the powerfull were fragmented into different “identities” based on their genetics, each fighting for their “own” group rather than all together, the powerful have managed to capture an ever increasing share of the wealth and the median quality of live has even started going down.

As for your quoting tankies as examples of “left”, well, tankies are fucking authoritarians, so if you’re expecting they’re following the actual principles of being Leftwing rather than mindlessly parroting some Soviet slogans or whatnot and thinking Stalin was a great man, you are seriously deluded or ill informed.

It’s funny that people like you defending Identity Politics have a view of what is Leftwing that is basically the Red Scare. You’re helping prove my point.

Probably found at the bottom of a Complaints Form.

Mate, the basic principles of Equality and Fairness of the Leftwing naturally include minorities having the same rights and treatment than everybody else because Equality doesn’t make distinctions on skin color, gender or which kind of people one loves.

The artificial slicing of Equality into “one group at a time ‘Equality’” is exactly the strategy by which the Left was divided, distracted away from the biggest inequality and descrimination of all (that of Wealth) and made to fight each other and be baited by whatever rage-baite du jour served by the far-right populists to their muppets.

Whomever in some Neoliberal Billionaire-Funded Think Tank who came up with that perversion of Equality deserved whatever massive bonus they got for such a brilliant strategy of convincing people that are all being victims of the few, that it’s people like them but of a different ethnicity/gender/sexual-orientation who are their real enemies, not the ones exploiting them at every turn.

You’ve been had and made into a footsoldier in a fabricated war were the working class got divided into “groups” by ethnicity, gender and even sexual-orientation and turned against each other whilst the people doing the most damage and causing the most suffering keep on pillaging to their heart’s contents and, worse, it’s been done via preying on your qualities as a human being who desires a fairer world.

There’s no class war, at least not in a country like the US: for there to be a war the other side would have to be fighting which they’re not, and the billionaires have been into the pillaging stage of their conquest for decades and are just using information control, populism and rage-baiting to make sure the riff-raff remain out of their way.

Things are well beyond the “elites” merely taking an unfairly outsided cut of the growth and well into taking from the rest that which they and their parents accumulated, hence why quality of life for the majority has been going down for a while now and the last two Generations are set to be worse off than their parents.

I’ll give you a hint: billionaires don’t buy newspapers, social media and TV channels with shitty-shit Returns On Investment (if at all profitable) to make money from them - what they’re really buying isn’t the business, it’s an audience for “opinion making”.

Well, I for one did nazi that coming…

The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.

For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.

This is why I’ve actually chosen to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly done through customly setup ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.

It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.

Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.

In other words, the so called “Networking Effects” (which have nothing to do with technical networks and are actually about how “people go were people are, so the more people are in a place the more people go there, the more people are there, the more people go there and so on”) in the business of social networking that made a handful of players dominant, are very hard to revert.

It’s becoming like Facebook, which is were people’s parents, uncles and aunts and even grandparents (as well as technically inept organisations) are, but you yourself either moved on or are too young to have ever wanted to be there (“because nobody my age is there”), only whilst Facebook is merelly a Propaganda outlet for the Far Right, Twitter is openly Nazi.

It only works until the inevitable costs from the accumulated problems due to AI use (mainly excessivelly high AI error rates with a uniform distribution - were the most damaging errors are no less likely than little mistakes, unlike with humans who can learn to pay attention not to make mistakes in critical things - leading to customer losses and increased costs of correcting the errors) exceed the savings from cutting down manpower.

(Just imagine customers doing things that severely damage their equipment because they followed the AI customer support line advice and the accumulation of cost as said customers take the company whose support line gave that advice to court for damages and win those rulings, and in turn the companies outsourcing customer support to that “call center supplier” take it to court. It gets even worse than that for accounting, as for example the fines from submitting incorrect documentation to the IRS can get pretty nasty)

I expect we’ll see something similar to how many long established store chains at one point got managers who started cutting costs by getting rid of long time store employees and replacing them with an ever rotating revolving door of short term cheap as possible sellers, making the store experience inferior to just buying it from the Internet, and a few years later those chains were going bankrupt.

These venture capitalists’ grift works as long as they sell the businesses before the side effects of replacing people with language generators haven’t fully filtered through into revenue falls, court judgements for damages and tax authority fines and it’s going to be those buying such businesses (I bet the Venture Capitalists are going to try and sell them to Institutional Investors) that will end up with something that’s leaking customers, having to pay mass8ve compensations and having to hire back people to fix the consequences of AI errors, essentially reverting what the Venture Capitalists did and them spending even more money to cleanup the trail of problems cause by the excessive AI use.