Hey, N00B, We Didn't Hire You to Complete Tasks
Key takeaways
- I am going to pass on to you the secret to a successful and brief noobitude, and I won’t even keep you in suspense: nobody cares how many tasks you complete.
- Look at your situation from our perspective (by “our” I mean “older engineers”).
- We seniors have our regular work to do, but we also have to figure out which category you fit into.
Kent Beck May 15, 20261841515Share Welcome! I am going to pass on to you the secret to a successful and brief noobitude, and I won’t even keep you in suspense: nobody cares how many tasks you complete. Why not, and what we care about instead are the subject of the rest of this essay.
Look at your situation from our perspective (by “our” I mean “older engineers”). We hired a bunch of people like you. Some of y’all (we’ll call them A’s) will be amazing game-changers, making everyone around them wildly more productive. Many of you (B’s) will be solid performers. Some of you (the C’s) won’t be here in a year.
We seniors have our regular work to do, but we also have to figure out which category you fit into. We support the superior performers as much as we possibly can. We support the solid performers enough to help them mature. Brutal as it seems, we’d like to expend as little effort as possible on people who aren’t going to make it.