The guy who started bringing one of his young children around as a human shield after the United Healthcare CEO got murdered isn’t going to care about the fate of mere minions.

“So, what is this 5 month gap in your CV”

“Well, I was working for DOGE”

“Right, I think we know enough and can end this job interview. Thank you for your time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you”.

LOL!

I mean, defining the cheat sheet limitation in such a way for Math students is really just asking for it …

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.

That’s a logic totally anchored on the idea that “all rules are unchallengeable and undisputable”, hence from that point of view people must simply follow the rules and if they don’t it’s their fault, never that of the rules.

As I said, NAZI Germany relied on exactly that mindset to get Germans to meekly accepted what the NAZIs were doing because “it’s the rules and all people have to do is obbey them”. In fact, “people must obbey the rules and if they don’t and they get punished it’s their fault” is a general way of thinking of Fascists in general.

My entire point is that rules are no such thing - they’re made by humans, are meant to achieve certain goals and have certain costs. In a Democracy rules should be examined, evaluated and changed if they’re not more or a gain than a loss. This is even more important for rules around democratic processes such as lawmaking.

What this legislator managed to do was show the anti-Democratic nature of some of German processes, which was probably her intention.

Oh, and I’m European, not American, which is why nowadays I think Germany is a fucking disgrace (an opinion which is almost the opposite of what I thought about it a mere 5 years ago): it’s exactly because I come from a country which has Modern European Humanist values and which itself overthrew a Fascists dictatorship and transformed into a Democracy 50 years ago, that I have actual Democratic Values and am sorely dissapointed every time I find yet another way the country which had the worst version of Fascism in Human History, instead of being the strictest practicioner of Democratic Values possible, is instead doing things like civil society surveillance, supporting a massive Genocide very openly because of the ethnicity of the aggressors and their victims, trying to bypass the Rule Of Law to silence dissent, practicing overtly Discriminatory treatment of people depending on their ethnicity and as in this case suppressing free speech in the actual Bundestag by using an ill-defined rule about “protecting the image of Parliament” to override the ability of a Parliamentarian to represent their voters when there in Democracy there are very few things more important than that.

If I was from the land of Donald Trump, First Pass The Post and voting for the Lesser Evil because voting for Good instead of Evil is not a realistic option, the German Bundestag suppressing a parliamentarian’s ability to represent their voters because that parliamentarian is taking a political stand that the majority disagrees with through a perfectly legal means, with just the word “Palestine”, would seem miniscule and irrelevant in comparison.

It’s exactly when you’re used to real Democracy that the kind of shit going on in Germany really stands out as bit-by-bit continued reversion of Democracy in favor or surveillance, force and even racial selectivity in the exercise of Power.

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.

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”).

I get it: in your mind if it’s “a rule” it’s unchallengeable, always correct and must be followed.

It’s the kind of mindset the NAZIs leveraged to make German people comply with and even defend what the NAZIs did because they were “the rules” - “Jews have to wear a yellow David star on their clothes because it’s the rules”.

In my mind rules are just orders created by people, not brought down from the gods fully formed and perfect, so they’re subject to be analysed just like every other form by which people try and make other people do things - What does it achieve? What are its costs? Is it well defined and strictly enforced or it’s vague, open to interpretation and its enforcement is arbitrary and down to somebody’s choice?

So here’s a rule that per the article is broad and vague, with an interpretation left to the person that chooses or not to enforce it, arbitrarily. (If you are German and ever worked in anything which is complex enough that it has a process I expect you would share my distaste for vague rules that can be applied one day but not the next at the discretion of somebody: there really is no better way to fuck up the effective work of a team than having something important have no clear boundaries of acceptability and wholly depend on somebody’s arbitrary determination ).

The gain of it is, per what the rule itself says, to keep up appearances (yeah, really, it’s about the image of the German Parliament). Maybe it’s me, but that’s a very weak reason, with as shown here the exercising of the rule itself possibly causing damage to the image of the German Parliament: it’s a bit of a hard call whether expelling a Parliamentary member from Parliament for wearing a T-shirt with the word “Palestine” and that ending up in the news makes the German Parliament look better that letting somebody wearing such a t-shirt stay and treat it like any other t-shirt.

The cost of the rule being exercised is that for a day hundreds of thousands of Germans will not be represented in Parliament. How costly is that depends on what that days session was all about - were there important votes or was it only discussions? It also depend on how strong your Democratic values are - people who have little in the way of Democratic values are fine with hundreds of thousands of Germans being deprived of their representation in Parliament so long as those people have different political opinions, people with strong Democratic values think that the only acceptable reasons to expel a member of Parliament are those related to the proper working of the Democratic process, for example if those people were stopping other members of Parliaments from properly representing their constituents by not letting others talk (and one logical interpretation of Julia Klöckner’s chosing to to enforcing this rule is this time is “stopping other members of Parliaments from properly representing their constituents”)

Something that boils down to one person deciding all by themselves and arbitrarily what “damages the image of the German Parliament” and use that to deprive hundreds of thousands of Germans of their parliamentary representation for a day for no gain other than said vague “image” (when the exercise of the rule itself as we see here can actually cause damage to the image of the German Parliament) whilst doing nothing for the good operation of Parliament (like, say, kicking somebody out for not letting others speak would do) isn’t a good rule.

Just because that rule can be used against your political adversaries doesn’t make it a good rule, quite the contrary - in Democracy it’s the tools of Democracy that should win the political fight, not the exercise of force under the cover of a vaguely defined and arbitrarily enforced “rule” to deprive voters of their representation in lawmaking bodies and even the people whose opinions you profoundly disagree with are Democratically entitled to having their representatives in Parliament representing by them, not kicked on a vague rule that very overtly is about the image of Parliament not its good operation.

And yet here you are favoring the arbitrary expelling of representatives of hundreds of thousands of Germans from the place were laws are made using a vaguely defined rule whose enforcement is wholly arbitrary and which overtly is not about maintaining the good operation of Parliament (and hence of the Democratic process), and one of your reasons for suporting it is that it can be used against people you are against politically - as I said, the very opposite of Democracy.

It doesn’t matter that she knew: she brought to everybody’s attention that in Germany there’s an arbitrarily enforced rule to kick out from Parliament the representatives of voters and she showed how it gets used against those representatives that have certain opinions, but not others.

Of course you’re happy: you’ve been repeating “it’s the rules”, plus think it’s good because it can be used against people whose politics you don’t like, and it’s just as NAZI-supporters did back in the “good old days” and you probably don’t even realize that you’re using the same style of argument as they did.

I come from a country were our exit from Fascism was “only” 50 years ago, and really hope that in 25 years’ time we don’t end up like Germany, were Democracy is so degraded that people who think themselves “democrats” parrot the very same style of “arguments” as the Fascist did whilst thinking that it’s fine when they do it, just not when others do it.

The barrier for expelling an elected representative of voters from the actual Parliament in a Democracy should be far, far higher than their choice of clothing.

It’s not by chance that authoritarian regimes which try and simulate Democracy by having a Parliament will use such “arbitrarily enforced broad rules on irrelevant things” to selectively kick out elected representatives of voters, often as a means to exclude them from certain votes.

(Literally from the article: “its rules require MPs and visitors to dress ‘in keeping with the prestige’ of the institution” and “Enforcement of this standard is left to the discretion of the session chair”, so it’s exactly the kind of overbroad arbitrarily enforced rule that is perfect for the type of subversion of the political process that Authoritarian regimes so love).

So yeah, kicking out from Parliament an elected representative of voters for something which isn’t even breaking the Law (unlike your curiously chosen “swastika” example), is anti-Democratic - this is not a patron breaking the dress rules in some posh restaurant, it’s somebody who represents hundreds of thousands of Germans in the very Parliament were they have been tasked to represent them.

This together with other things such as forbidding the comparison of the actions of the nation state of Israel with those of Nazi Germany (outright Censorship) or the attempt by the authorities to kick out from Germany without a court order, much less a criminal conviction, non-German citizens for attending pro-Palestine demonstrations (avoidance of the Rule Of Law), adds up to a strong trend towards Authoritarianism.

Germany might not be Fascist yet, but by now it’s already less Democratic than most of Europe and, more alarming, keeps on moving away from Democratic practices and values.

Considering Germany’s past, one would expect a tendency to try and be as Democratic as possible, not using rules which are totally irrelevant for the political process (the wearing of a t-shirt with the word “Palestine” does not in any way form or shape impede the operation of the Parliament) to subvert the operation within the political process of those holding certain opinions, but not others

That then people come out claiming “it’s the rules” as a valid reason to remove an elected representative of voters from Parliament in a country were back in Nazi times “it’s the rules” was the most used excuse by Nazis and their supporters for the various actions against minorities, including some of the worst, is just mind boggling.

Are you seriously equating a swastika to the word “Palestine”???!

Also the whole “it’s the rules” justifying anti-Democratic actions is quite an old tradition in Germany that was used heavilly during a dark, dark part of German history, so one would expect extra alarm about “rules” there for things like silencing politicians in Parliament, rather than claiming “it’s the rules” - just like they did in the “good old days” - to justify anti-Democratic measures.

If you are German, your entire take on the whole subject of making an equivalence between the word “Palestine” and a swastika and an “appeal to the rules” to justify silencing politicians just like in Germany’s “good old days”, just emphasises my point about the alarming slide towards authoritarianism and authoritarian thinking in Germany.

By, as a sitting elected representative of actual German voters, being expelled from the German Parliament for merely wearing a T-shirt with the word Palestine in it and nothing else, Cansin just neatly managed to prove that Germany is not a Democracy anymore.

Removing a sitting representative of voters, even if temporarily, from Parliament for any reason is already fishy as hell, removing one for merely wearing a T-shirt with the name of what Germany recognizes as a region (and most of the World recognizes as a country) is outright antidemocratic - they literally kicked out a politician from Parliament for making a political statement that others in Parliament did not like, the very antithesis of Democracy.

This is genuinely worrisome, especially given what Germany did last time they were going down this very same route of ditching Democratic Rules and Values using overtly racial motovations.

Finally!

If I’m not mistaken there’s an EU project to integrate all such systems across Europe.