I'm in testing and i am concerned about the technical capabilities of some lately hired principals. Despite their titles, i have seen them struggling with basic coding tasks and debugging and they require major handholding and spoon-feeding. I'm wondering if our hiring process needs refinement to ensure the right talent is selected and retained.
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I didn’t scroll through old posts until you made them appear back at the top of the active list. Whereas, you literally had to scroll way down to find them. You do know how the buttons at the top of this page work, right? No wonder you were “laid off”.
Perhaps stop scrolling through old posts Aries to you also. However I do u derstand that you are one of the chosen elite
There seems to be enough quality to sell it, deploy it, support it. I can tell you we’re still in business, plenty of customers, plenty of new customers, no mass abandonment of the products. Does software have bugs? Yes. Now go find something else to do besides scroll through old posts. Go make a difference in something you can.
There is no quality. Simple as that.
Another case of Favoring the advancement of specific nationality or race??
Sadly this is true,,,,tolerating one. Needs more handholding than an intern, holds high connections.
No layoffss, layoffs cost money.. pip is the way to go.
One or two principals won't make the products better. It requires team effort and incentives. When management "measures" people instead of products and user satisfaction, expect nothing good. Say hello to quarterly "performance" reviews and layoffs.
That your product quality is really over the moon makes so much sense after I read this ..
Paying someone 275k+ who has no technical expertise but are good to talk to, seems being unfair to everyone else. The role of principal loes i. The role is to make the product better, not to make people feel good.
I remember they used to not hire principals from outside. Very rarely they’d hire them from outside. May be they should have started them from senior. I have also heard about circumstances when someone was hired just because they were approachable and were good to talk to/collaborate with, even though the technical expertise was missing
Yup, all they cate about is how to save their own a….
The execs don't give a flip.
I came across a similar post few months ago too. Hope the senior execs and directors are reading this thread and take necessary action.Hiring fraud shouldn’t be entertained.
Yup, that has been my experience too. House grown principals are far more worthy and capable than the external hired ones. It is a shame that the hired ones are paid a lot more than the in grown ones, while the value they bring as a principal is close to nil. Have seen this in a team and was such a frustrating experience. thankfully the hired one was moved out of the team to bring down the productivity of another team while trying whatever possible to be in good books of the manager
IT layoffs--- the outgoing and wholly incompetent CIO is leaving a field of death in her wake. She made a priority to hire friends as VPs who couldn't get the job done, then pushed scope she didn't need because she lacked fundamental technology understanding.... then they got hit with SOX audit issues and punished the teams who were telling them there was a problem.. now she's leaving but still fu--ing with the TS group... stay away if you want to work in TS...
I was hired in to deal with quality issues that had plagued (and continue to plague) F5. Background was in navigational guidance systems, portable test instrumentation, and medical instrumentation. After going through my first release of BIG-IP and the number of defects it was shipped with, I was stunned and in disbelief. I was overruled on all my objections to ship. Thank you Program Managers.
I really thought I could make a difference. I stayed thinking I could still make a difference. I was wrong - very wrong. Then I was RIFd as I was told that my skill set (quality) which I had been hired for with didn't match the future diredtion of the company (whatever that was). There is no possibility or hope of quality at F5.
History continues to repeat itself and this is my last read/post of this board as it is so depressing.
This is a very serious statement! Have you mentioned it to your manager?
I remember there was a time F5 hired funky capable people and it often took a few times to get hired when everyone worse was taking in anyone else
This very much retells my experience with one such, when i worked for BigIP-NEXT. I collaborated with a newly hired principal who consistently cited inadequate documentation as the reason for their incompetencies. Forget about design, implement and debug, I would be surprised, if they were able to write/fix even a test-case/bug in couple of days on their own. And blame it on the east indian family thing or the incompetent managers, I later learned that, despite these difficulties, they were reassigned to an even more complex domain. God save F5!
Principals should have the skills to design, implement and debug... but their responsibilities should mostly be focused on architectural runway, alignment of requirements and mentorship.
What that usually entails is lots of fu--ing meetings. They also may run circles around you on tech stacks or products they have worked on in the past, so you should probably stop trying to measure their relative worth in a single dimension and look for things that they do better than you. Most of the time it comes down to communication and planning.
Also, as a newly minted principal... It's not all rainbows and sunshine. If someone had asked whether I wanted to give up 50% of my IC heads-down time to attend meetings, but get paid 7% more (yes, you read that correctly), I would have told them to fu-k right off.
I was writing about it half a year ago. I think it's protection, big eastern families that got used to survive in 3rd world country by any means, not to sleep on the street. they don't have the mentality not to do illegal thing once they keep high lead position. while you can work hard and guide all that experts and be downgraded or keep being sw3 or sw2 forever.
Well, are you saying that principal engineers use their time for "basic coding tasks and debugging"? Maybe the company needs more leet code automatic exercises for principal engineering positions. This way, the Prophet will "attract" more talent.