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bonds0097 posted:There's no reason to put references in your resume. Honestly, I don't even know the last time I was asked for references during a hiring process. I got this questionnaire once for one of my ex-coworkers: quote:Accurate Background, Inc. is a background screening company and candidate’s name listed you as a reference. She/he provided your email address to aid in obtaining a reference in his/her regard. If you could please take a moment to answer the following questions, we would greatly appreciate your help. Please contact me if you have any questions regarding this reference request.
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# ? May 12, 2024 13:58 |
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b0lt posted:I got this questionnaire once for one of my ex-coworkers... drat... how do you even answer that?
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Isn't the reason it's standard practice for companies just to answer "Person X was employed here from <start-date> to <finish-date>" to avoid lawsuits if they decided to say something bad about Person X? If so, it sound like that questionnaire is inviting a visit from Saul Goodman.
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minato posted:Isn't the reason it's standard practice for companies just to answer "Person X was employed here from <start-date> to <finish-date>" to avoid lawsuits if they decided to say something bad about Person X? If so, it sound like that questionnaire is inviting a visit from Saul Goodman. There is a difference between references and basic employment confirmation. You call up every company on a candidate's resume to confirm that yes, they did work there and no, they aren't lying about that. You contact a reference to get more subjective information about a candidate. References are people specifically listed by the candidate as references with the understanding that the candidate will be discussed in detail, some of which will be subjective. More to the point, a candidate would have to be pretty stupid to list someone hostile to them as a reference. I'm no lawyer, but some quick googling tells me that it would be very difficult to prove defamation in this situation. Apparently many states recognize some kind of privilege for references, because they need to be candid to have any value (yay, state law variations again!). Then there's the whole thing about the reference needing to have made a knowingly false statement that provably damages the candidate in order for it to be defamation. No, I don't think that questionnaire is particularly sticky, though as a reference I would much prefer a phone call and conversation - filling out a form like that seems to defeat the purpose of a personal reference if you ask me.
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Not so hypothetical question... You're being interviewed for a job where an ex-colleague of yours and of the interviewers once worked. The ex-colleague left the place you're interviewing at on ok terms, but left your current work follwing conflict with the team and subsequent HR process. The interviewers aren't aware of this, and ask how their old workmate is doing and what he's up to. How do you respond without coming off like a dickhead and sabotaging your interview? I think I lost a job because of some offhand commend I made in that situation, after the interview was finished. I'd be interested to hear anyone elses approach.
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mortarr posted:Not so hypothetical question... You're being interviewed for a job where an ex-colleague of yours and of the interviewers once worked. The ex-colleague left the place you're interviewing at on ok terms, but left your current work follwing conflict with the team and subsequent HR process. "S/He has moved on from there, I haven't heard from him/her in a while" (if that part is the truth).
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Is working in games as much of a brutal meat grinder as rumors say? A coworker of mine is leaving us to go work for Cloud Imperium Games in Austin making Star Citizen, and it's a $20k pay bump from an already fairly compensated developer position, 6 weeks total paid time off, and they don't start work until 10am.
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Twerk from Home posted:Is working in games as much of a brutal meat grinder as rumors say? A coworker of mine is leaving us to go work for Cloud Imperium Games in Austin making Star Citizen, and it's a $20k pay bump from an already fairly compensated developer position, 6 weeks total paid time off, and they don't start work until 10am. It depends on the Studio. I work for a large mobile developer, I don't think I've ever had to stay past 7p for work, and am well paid for my role and experience. However, knowing people from the old Origin, I don't think I'd work for a Chris Roberts studio without inside knowledge that his executive management style has 'changed' to say the least.
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Twerk from Home posted:Is working in games as much of a brutal meat grinder as rumors say? A coworker of mine is leaving us to go work for Cloud Imperium Games in Austin making Star Citizen, and it's a $20k pay bump from an already fairly compensated developer position, 6 weeks total paid time off, and they don't start work until 10am. It can be. Depending on the studio there can be a lot of crunch time near the end of a project, and I've had friends in the industry do things like sleep in the office overnight to try and meet deadlines. It's a young person's game I think; younger people are more tolerant of longer crunch periods, whereas older people tend to value a better work/life balance. If it's something you're concerned about, try to get a feel for what it's like at Cloud Imperium by talking to some leads.
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Twerk from Home posted:Is working in games as much of a brutal meat grinder as rumors say? A coworker of mine is leaving us to go work for Cloud Imperium Games in Austin making Star Citizen, and it's a $20k pay bump from an already fairly compensated developer position, 6 weeks total paid time off, and they don't start work until 10am. Like the others mentioned, it really depends on the studio. The grind is something you can plan around and avoid - though sometimes even the most well-meaning and conservative plans fall short and the release date can't be pushed back (because you're running out of money, because it's a yearly release franchise, because the marketing blitz already went out etc.) Some studios are better at this than others. It is A-OK to explicitly bring this up during your interview: How do you deal with overtime? Do you plan around it? How much overtime did people have to put in for last release (ballpark estimate)? If I were to poke in on an average Tuesday 8 PM, how likely am I to find people still working? HR is unlikely to outright lie to you (though they will definitely try to skirt around touchy subjects, so do make a note of when that happens). I also think it's good general advice (i.e. outside gaming as well) to see if you can talk to any ground level employees there indirectly - preferably via your network, but LinkedIn can work in a pinch. Do they like their job, how many "that guy" do they have to put up with, is management helpful or an obstacle etc. Having said all that Star Citizen is pretty flush and lord knows they have no real set deadlines - so odds are not bad it's fine, though working for a big-name ![]() ![]()
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Mr. Wynand posted:Having said all that Star Citizen is pretty flush and lord knows they have no real set deadlines - so odds are not bad it's fine, though working for a big-name They may have no deadlines, but they've got more than 400 employees and are growing at an insane pace on a questionable revenue model.
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Twerk from Home posted:Is working in games as much of a brutal meat grinder as rumors say? A coworker of mine is leaving us to go work for Cloud Imperium Games in Austin making Star Citizen, and it's a $20k pay bump from an already fairly compensated developer position, 6 weeks total paid time off, and they don't start work until 10am.
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Twerk from Home posted:They may have no deadlines, but they've got more than 400 employees and are growing at an insane pace on a questionable revenue model. That reminds me: also consider that there is no such thing as a safe game development studio job. Tools maybe, ancillary/corporate services related to game dev, sure - but studios live and die by each product release and even the best "apple of mine eyes" publisher-darling studios are unlikely to survive past 2 failures in a row. There's no established customer base to keep the lights on with an old version of the product if your new one fails - it's just the nature of the biz. TBH Star Citizen doesn't strike me as an especially risky franchise to work on.
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Sorry if this belongs in an E/N thread. My team is understaffed at the moment and has been, well, since my team was formed 8 months ago. We were a small skunkworks project that they decided to productize but not throw lots of resources at. Engineering leadership at the company is unwilling to hire to solve this problem. Even if they were it'd be moot on the short-to-mid-term; it took us six months to find someone competent and qualified last time we tried hiring. I'm getting burned the gently caress out and feeling completely checked out at work. I definitely feel it's time to GTFO and find a new job. I also have some weird feeling of duty to my remaining teammates because they'll be screwed even further if I leave. This combined with a healthy helping of impostor syndrome is keeping me from aggressively looking for a new job. Maybe I just need someone else to tell me I don't owe anyone poo poo but myself, and then I'll internalize it. But also I'm curious how you deal with developer burnout because I'm going to still have to work here until I get around to finding a new job. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Give accurate estimates for tasks that don't cause you to burn out, finish tasks to your estimates and then say no when asked to work ridiculous hours. There's an assumption here that your boss won't fire you for not working ridiculous hours, but I've never seen that happen and if it's difficult to replace you then it doesn't make any sense to do so.
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kitten smoothie posted:But also I'm curious how you deal with developer burnout because I'm going to still have to work here until I get around to finding a new job. bourbon
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kitten smoothie posted:I also have some weird feeling of duty to my remaining teammates because they'll be screwed even further if I leave. This combined with a healthy helping of impostor syndrome is keeping me from aggressively looking for a new job. So yeah, you don't owe anyone anything but yourself. A better way to think about it is, while it's fine to consider your co-workers, especially if you're on good terms with them, they're still co-workers, not friends or family; you have to take care of yourself and burning out is not healthy. As asur said, don't work crazy overtime anymore, if you're doing that. It's not your loving responsibility to make up for the company refusing to hire enough people to get the job done, stop rewarding that lovely behavior. Stop caring about the success of the project overall, focus on making your personal pieces work well, and then when 5:00 or 5:30 or whatever rolls around, put down the work (in every sense of the phrase), go home, and do something you enjoy, spend time with the family, etc. It's hard to burn out when you're not redlining yourself. The hardest part of that is to stop caring, of course; working on a doomed project is pretty unfulfilling. I did that once, it was a big ambitious thing that my boss wanted to sell to industry bigwigs, and I was flying solo on it. I told him we needed more people, for quality control and UI design and polish at the bare minimum, if this was ever going to be a marketable product. The company wouldn't agree to another dime. I knew it wouldn't go anywhere. I knew. So what I did was for each major feature that was left for me to do, I tried to build it in a way I hadn't done before. This gave me the opportunity to learn some new things and feel satisfied when I made them work. Yeah, it took longer than the "easy way" but the project was effectively dead and due to other circumstances there was no hard deadline, so that didn't matter. Essentially I shifted from being invested in the success of the project to being invested in the success of a single feature. I left after the project was minimally functional. Last I heard, the company I worked for uses it and likes it, but when they showed it off to previously mentioned industry bigwigs, their reaction was basically, "Yeah that's cute. Come back when it has polish." The company shelved development on it, and it didn't go anywhere, as I predicted.
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Burnout can still happen even in a 9-5 job. Resource-strapped companies frequently take shortcuts and use sub-par tools to get under budget, and while this obviously results in an inferior product delivered late, I think it also causes significant "cognitive stress" in the developers as they have to deal with doing more with less. An apropos quote from Terry Pratchett:quote:“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. To me, these kinds of money problems can make it stressful to work, and it contributes to burnout. Even if the employee decides to switch to an 8 hour day, it doesn't get rid of that extra cognitive load. The only way to solve these at the source is to get more money, and that usually means gathering metrics showing how under-resourced your team is and what the bottom line value would be if they allocated more to your team.
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kitten smoothie posted:I also have some weird feeling of duty to my remaining teammates because they'll be screwed even further if I leave. This combined with a healthy helping of impostor syndrome is keeping me from aggressively looking for a new job. Imposter Syndrome is something I think we all feel from time to time. I think it's compounded by seeing stories of 20-year old whizkids become billionaires. But being part of the hiring process for so many years and seeing the low quality of candidates has convinced me that developer rockstars are far-and-few between.
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minato posted:Burnout can still happen even in a 9-5 job. Nobody's saying it can't. Reining yourself back in to an 8 hour work day is a big step you can take to help yourself avoid it, though.
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Che Delilas posted:Reining yourself back in to an 8 hour work day is a big step you can take to help yourself avoid it, though. kitten smoothie posted:I don't owe anyone poo poo but myself wwb posted:bourbon kitten smoothie posted:But also I'm curious how you deal with developer burnout because I'm going to still have to work here until I get around to finding a new job. Personally, I travel out of the country with no concrete plans and no responsibilities for a minimum of two weeks. By the time I get back, I've managed to forget my routine and what the mindset that went with it felt like.
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Yep, a longish (1 wk+) usually gets me to miss working again, provided I don't fundamentally hate the job to begin with. Which it sounds like you do, unfortunately. Lucky for you, lime everyone else said, people move on all the time, even key core tech people. Company sometimes may counter offer to fix things, but that's rare. It really is more common to get promoted by quitting than staying. A 3 year stint at a particular place is more than adequate - and I'd say 5 years is on the long side. Just go for it - and jokes aside don't actually take up systematic drinking.
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Thanks for all the posts, folks. I definitely agree I'm letting myself get way more personally invested into the success than I should. I really need to follow the lead of a colleague of mine. Unless there's an absolute business burning problem (which probably is defined as the building on fire, since I've never seen him stay late), he's out the door at 5 and on the 5:15 train home every day. He's been in the game for 20 years, compared to my 10. If I expect to make it to 20 years in this industry without a catastrophic failure of my mental and physical health I had better quit caring so much. I did actually like the job and found it to be fairly low stress/rewarding. It's the last six months or so and upper management changes + expectations that have happened during that time that have been putting me over the edge. Edit: this just came across my Twitter timeline https://twitter.com/nickstenning/status/580697408448958464 kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Anyone have successful coping strategies for coping with stress? My usual coping mechanism is to work harder until I feel depressed, then switch it to scaling my effort back down until that doesn't happen -- rinse and repeat. This is a headache for me because besides driving me crazy for a period of time, it makes my productivity switch between "very effective" to "a week or two of slow progress"*. I'm almost at that low point now, yet have a hard deadline coming up really soon. Games aren't working. Help? * For reference, I have contributed almost 15x as much code in my current project as my coworker on it, but it comes in bursts.
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I go in cycles where I start to feel burned out, and then I remind myself to stop giving so many shits because nobody else does.
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Do you actively try to avoid this or is it a case of "this is just how I work best"? I'm also prone to boom-bust, and I still do it all the time but I definitely know it's bad for me and as much as possible I try to avoid it. Come in at 9, leave at 5:00 sharp - turns out the sky won't fall if you do that. Again, that's just the plan - in reality I still end up doing runs of 10+ hour days whenever I get caught up in something, but the first step is to recognize the problem and commit to dealing with it. I don't know a single programmer that does the boom-bust thing and comes off as sane and down to earth. All the best senior programmers I've worked with tend to be very good at maintaining a consistent level of effort - I suspect this is no accident.
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Anyone have successful coping strategies for coping with stress? Depends on the source of the stress. Usually I just strive on it. But if it's supreme external idiocy, I drink way too much and show up the next day afternoon. Hanging leg lifts and shrugs also do wonders for loosening tense muscles from stress.
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If you're a programmer, deadlines are not your problem. They are your manager's problem, though they'd like you to believe otherwise. My litmus test on this is "if we miss this deadline, who is going to die?". The answer is invariably "no-one", though your manager might lose a few hairs. Development is supposed to be sustainable, and that's one of the goals of Agile. The agile manifesto recognizes that developer estimates are always way off, so it's pointless to make hard deadlines for 3 months down the track. The theory is that by switching to Agile you'll gather data on how much you get done per iteration, and so you'll get a better idea of how much you can achieve sustainably in the future. No more crunches. (Well, that's the theory. In practice, there's lots of ways to do Agile wrong and screw this up) Another source of stress can be lack of focus. I work in an open plan environment where there's constant noise, and headphones don't help because there's constant interruptions for questions, support, and meetings. Productivity drops to zero because I can't get into "flow" mode. Paul Graham wrote a good article about this. He suggests that managers should propose all meetings for (say) the morning, and leave the afternoons free as pure coding time. Additionally, our workplace has a bunch of meeting rooms so I'll occasionally commandeer one as a quiet space. To echo what was said above, a lot of the older programmers seem to have a consistent productivity rate and seem to be unstressed. I'd love to know their secret. All I've observed is that (a) they don't work overtime, and (b) they don't give a poo poo about deadlines, they just make sure their manager is aware of their progress and any obstacles.
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minato posted:To echo what was said above, a lot of the older programmers seem to have a consistent productivity rate and seem to be unstressed. I'd love to know their secret. All I've observed is that (a) they don't work overtime, and (b) they don't give a poo poo about deadlines, they just make sure their manager is aware of their progress and any obstacles. I guess it must vary by culture. I am happy and most productive working hard from 9-5. But my older coworkers all have families, and tend to work 11-6 with an hour for lunch and an hour for ping pong in between. Then they work nights and weekends to make up for it, particularly during crunch time. Every day for the past week I've gotten emails (cc-ed to my manager and a bunch of other people) between 10pm and 5am, asking me to look at something so they can continue their work. This includes Saturday and Sunday. I don't want to be the reason we fall behind, but I'm not sure how to push back.
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minato posted:Well, that's the theory. In practice, there's lots of ways to do Agile wrong and screw this up Yeah. My team basically works on this awful combination of agile and waterfall. We've got the feature roadmap set up, already broken down into user stories by our product designer. We focus on the stories, what can be delivered in an iteration, and at the end we release it internally for dogfood. If it didn't blow up then we ship it to our customers the following week. Every two weeks, we're putting new features in our customers' hands. Yay! The problem though comes in that the roadmap is defined basically as "these are the features that the business demands to have implemented absolutely by some date D" Of course engineers are awful at estimating two or three months out. Oh, yeah, we can hit that. And since this edict came from on high, it's not like we can really say no anyway. So we work on our sustainable pace for a while. Then we get to the last iteration or two before the deadline. Crunch time! The thing about working to arbitrary dates like this is that it turns priorities and incentives completely wrong. There is a large penalty for failing to deliver or slipping the date. The penalty for bugs found after release is far lower. So when crunch time hits, everyone starts trying to shovel features in as quickly as they can. QA gets just as sloppy on testing. We end up delivering a worse product and we're all stressed out, but hey, it's on time!
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The Agile Waterfall development model wins again.
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in_cahoots posted:
It's not your problem unless they are actively being blocked by something that you hosed up, and even then it's not really your problem. This isn't unique to you, there are plenty of teams operating in different timezones or on different schedules. I frequently work with people that are 3 hours behind (I'm in US eastern time and they're in US western time). They know that if they have a problem after 2 PM, I may not be available. I know that if I have a problem before 11 am, they might not be available. We make sure that we communicate clearly and resolve blocking issues during the 5 hours a day we're both guaranteed to be working, and we show a little bit of flexibility with each others' schedules (I've worked 11 to 8, they've worked 5 to 2, or some other overlapping 9-hour period) MrMoo posted:The Agile Waterfall development model wins again. In the ALM business, we call it "agilefall" or "waterscrum" ![]()
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in_cahoots posted:Every day for the past week I've gotten emails (cc-ed to my manager and a bunch of other people) between 10pm and 5am, asking me to look at something so they can continue their work. This includes Saturday and Sunday. I don't want to be the reason we fall behind, but I'm not sure how to push back. Don't look at work email in any way over the weekend and if anyone complains tell them to gently caress off? If they're blocked on you at a time when you're not working then that's their problem, and they're trying to make it yours instead.
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MrMoo posted:The Agile Waterfall development model wins again. Agile is Waterfall - there's still the process of "Gather requirements, design, implement, verify with stakeholders", but it's done on a 1-2 week cycle instead of a 6-12 month one. Agile doesn't get rid of Waterfall problems, it just reduces their impact. It's (supposedly) hard to completely and irreversibly gently caress something up in 2 weeks without stakeholders keeping an eye on your progress, but you can certainly do it in 6 months. Point being, if you were crunching with Waterfall then moving to Agile 2-week iterations won't solve the crunching, it'll just reduce the crunches from 3 solid weeks to 2 days, every 2 weeks. If a team has any crunch at all, they're (glibly put) Doing It Wrong. kitten smoothie posted:The thing about working to arbitrary dates like this is that it turns priorities and incentives completely wrong. There is a large penalty for failing to deliver or slipping the date. The penalty for bugs found after release is far lower. So when crunch time hits, everyone starts trying to shovel features in as quickly as they can. QA gets just as sloppy on testing. We end up delivering a worse product and we're all stressed out, but hey, it's on time! The SAFe methodology states that Program Increment planning (where you plan for 5-6 iterations ahead) is something to give POs a rough idea of when features are going to land in the next quarter. They use the evil word "commitment", saying that the team commits to the 12 week plan. But I've also read the opposite: "As soon as you make this 12-week plan, throw it away." Because in reality it's not a commitment at all. All kinds of stuff happens in those 12 weeks to mess with the plan. People get sick, priorities shift, small stories explode due to unforeseen obstacles. "Commitment" implies "I'll take responsibility for this job and do whatever it takes to get it done on time" but to me that's just a manager trying to trick me into working my guts out to meet some arbitrary deadline. I don't want to commit to any deadline. This is why I prefer Kanban or Scrumban which don't have commitments as such. You take on the work as it comes, and it's up to the manager to measure the average rate that stories pass through the pipeline, and it's their job to optimize that rate.
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in_cahoots posted:Every day for the past week I've gotten emails (cc-ed to my manager and a bunch of other people) between 10pm and 5am, asking me to look at something so they can continue their work. This includes Saturday and Sunday. I don't want to be the reason we fall behind, but I'm not sure how to push back. You won't be the reason your group falls behind. It's either management's fault for not partitioning the work correctly, or the other team is lazy/incompetent and trying to dump all the responsibility onto you (this seems more likely if they're CCing your boss). What are they asking you to look at? Are you teaching them how to code, or is there confusion about which features are actually supposed to go in a project, or what? How to push back: as Plorkyeran said, stop checking or answering your company email (or your phone if they start calling) when you're off. I am baffled as to why you would do this anyway - you're in development, not IT, there is nothing you need to be on-call for because you're not responsible for the real-time operation of your company's network.
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Che Delilas posted:You won't be the reason your group falls behind. It's either management's fault for not partitioning the work correctly, or the other team is lazy/incompetent and trying to dump all the responsibility onto you (this seems more likely if they're CCing your boss). What are they asking you to look at? Are you teaching them how to code, or is there confusion about which features are actually supposed to go in a project, or what? We're trying to release a new product, and for various reasons I am the only person who knows how to tell if the code is working as expected. Sorry for being deliberately vague. We are all on the same team, which is why I can't really push back to my boss, who set the deadline in the first place. But you're right that this is a management problem more than a coworker problem. I'll have to give that some thought.
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in_cahoots posted:We're trying to release a new product, and for various reasons I am the only person who knows how to tell if the code is working as expected. Sorry for being deliberately vague. We are all on the same team, which is why I can't really push back to my boss, who set the deadline in the first place. But you're right that this is a management problem more than a coworker problem. I'll have to give that some thought. If this is really a huge issue for them, then it would be worth it to either invest in doing some unit tests up which would allow them to proceed without your constant testing, or to train them to be able to make such judgements, at least until you have a chance to look it over. I have a hard time believing they truly have nothing else to do but wait on you. Yes, as said by others, this is largely a management issue, but there are things you could do to fix some of the problems and make your life easier.
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Skandranon posted:I have a hard time believing they truly have nothing else to do but wait on you. Seriously, there have to be other features they can work on while they wait for your input on the ones that need it. Or their workflow is just seriously hosed, which again is a project management problem. in_cahoots posted:which is why I can't really push back to my boss, who set the deadline in the first place. As has been discussed, the deadline is not your problem either. If your management has created a situation in which you are the bottleneck, it is their responsibility to plan around the fact that you are a single human being with a life and needs like sleep and food and free time and weekends. You don't have to push back or discuss this with your boss. Just stop enabling their lovely behavior. gently caress the deadline, you need to sleep and you need two out of every seven days off. What the gently caress are they going to do, fire you? If you are REALLY the only person who can verify this poo poo, how hosed would they be if you had a goddamn nervous breakdown and quit because you literally cannot get a single night's sleep? Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Mar 30, 2015 |
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Doublepost, but I wanted to add: if this is a thing that's only happening once, like you're in pre-release crunch mode, then maybe don't aggressively refuse to participate like I was advocating. It's still pretty silly that these programmers can't find SOMETHING to work on for one whole day without your input, and having crunch at all is STILL a problem with management, but if it's short-term (the definition of short-term is like two weeks maximum for me) and infrequent, I'd maybe just deal with it. But if this happens continually, then gently caress. that.
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# ? May 12, 2024 13:58 |
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Che Delilas posted:As has been discussed, the deadline is not your problem either. If your management has created a situation in which you are the bottleneck, it is their responsibility to plan around the fact that you are a single human being with a life and needs like sleep and food and free time and weekends. What if the board has created a situation in which I am the bottleneck?
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