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ratbert90 posted:I spent an entire day trying to figure out why a script I made for customer service for a huge order wasn't working.
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Jul 29, 2016 00:59
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Vulture Culture posted:I'm about to give up on vim after the thirtieth time this year a script didn't work because it had a random "i" or "a" somewhere in it This is hilarious, but I suspect not for the same reason as you might think.
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Jul 29, 2016 03:28
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Somebody already posted the book, so I'll just post some anecdotes from having to do literally the same thing--refactor lovely EE code--for a living: Great timing. I've been working on #7 for the last day and its enough to literally give me iterative nightmares. I talked to my boss about doing a lot of this and he told me "you know sometimes it is better to just rush it and get the product out rather than taking the time to do it the right way the first time -- we don't want to miss our window of opportunity. Maybe we can revisit doing it your way once we've got a working product." I sorta want to cry.
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Jul 29, 2016 16:32
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Portland Sucks posted:Great timing. I've been working on #7 for the last day and its enough to literally give me iterative nightmares. I talked to my boss about doing a lot of this and he told me "you know sometimes it is better to just rush it and get the product out rather than taking the time to do it the right way the first time -- we don't want to miss our window of opportunity. Maybe we can revisit doing it your way once we've got a working product." He's not wrong.
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Jul 29, 2016 16:37
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ratbert90 posted:He's not wrong. It's fine if you take some time after it's working to refactor. Unfortunately, companies tend not to do that and instead just pile on more features over and over while ignoring developers' pleas for help and mercy 
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Jul 29, 2016 16:51
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ratbert90 posted:He's not wrong. Take a wild guess how soon there will be time found for refactoring. "We'll make it suck less later when we have time" is a leading cause of technical debt.
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Jul 29, 2016 17:18
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Yeah, I've been trying more aggressively, lately, to get my teammates to get in the habit of filing clean-up tickets when they encounter rough spots in the code. Also, when code review finds something that could have been done better, but, well, it's Friday and we release Monday, so we need to keep moving. Acknowledging the need for a clean-up task and filing it is 1000x better than lamenting it and forgetting about it, in my eyes.
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Jul 29, 2016 17:19
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Portland Sucks posted:Great timing. I've been working on #7 for the last day and its enough to literally give me iterative nightmares. I talked to my boss about doing a lot of this and he told me "you know sometimes it is better to just rush it and get the product out rather than taking the time to do it the right way the first time -- we don't want to miss our window of opportunity. Maybe we can revisit doing it your way once we've got a working product." As for the timetable thing, if it's that compressed of a schedule, then just refactor the parts that are already proven to be broken. The whole thing might be broken, but you can readily justify the parts currently blowing up in people's faces. After all, you have to spend the time to comprehend and adjust that code already. Dealing with the other sections is picking extra battles.
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Jul 29, 2016 17:20
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"Technical debt" in and of itself isn't a bad thing. It's what you leverage to get a working product out on a timetable. Like any other kind of debt it can be overextended and cripple you eventually but it's not inherently evil. I've been fighting the same fight as CPColin on my team and emphasizing the importance of filing tickets when you see random things that need improvement in existing codebases. That gives the issues visibility and you'll have something to point to and say "This is why it's hard to add new features." Plus when you have the tickets recorded your team can agree on (or a technical lead can tell you) what takes priority and what doesn't, and you can take credit for completing tasks.
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Jul 29, 2016 19:32
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Pollyanna posted:It's fine if you take some time after it's working to refactor. Unfortunately, companies tend not to do that and instead just pile on more features over and over while ignoring developers' pleas for help and mercy ToxicSlurpee posted:Take a wild guess how soon there will be time found for refactoring. "We'll make it suck less later when we have time" is a leading cause of technical debt. Very little. I know it sucks, but at the end of the day, great code is awesome, but it doesn't sell unless its in a sellable product.
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Jul 29, 2016 19:41
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Yeah. Even if I'm writing great code, it doesn't matter if I'm getting let go in a week because the product isn't selling well.
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Jul 30, 2016 00:12
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So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. Am I wrong to just be completely against doing this poo poo? We've more or less had our training / conference budget nixed and this highly irritates me. I'm an introvert and the PM is an extrovert, who'd have imagined that?
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Jul 30, 2016 04:02
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Iverron posted:So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. I just did one of those last week (just most of a single day, I hope yours isn't an entire week...). FWIW I found it actually fairly valuable: more actionable and useful than Meyers Briggs "surprise, you're an introvert" poo poo. Try to go into it with an open mind; maybe you will find it was bullshit and I'm a sucker, but maybe not.
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Jul 30, 2016 05:02
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Iverron posted:So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. My experience with all of the pseudo-science personality tests is that they can sometimes be good for self-reflection and realization that you do, in fact, do things you didn't realize you did. They can also be useful for starting a conversation about how no, really, people really do think very differently about problems. But if you try to put any more stock in it, like using it to determine what jobs people would be "good" at, then it's going to blow up in your face.
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Jul 30, 2016 05:41
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Iverron posted:So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. It sounds dumb as all getout, but if you don't play along it will hurt you - someone important enough to get a budget for horseshit deemed it worthwhile. No reason to get on their bad side, IMO - i think you should just play along and keep your mouth shut.
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Jul 30, 2016 07:56
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We did DiSC stuff during my maritime work, and while the personality classifications were pretty drat accurate, and like others have said it can help to be able to define how you and your coworkers tick, but regardless I think all that stuff ends up being window dressing for the nitty gritty of a team workshop, which is improvement of empathy, communication and conflict resolution within the team. There are tons of ways to do team building, informal and formal, but they all boil down to opening lines of communication and awareness so people can hopefully carry that improvement into their everyday work.
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Jul 30, 2016 08:11
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It feels like a lazy (if expensive) way of saying "there are team / communication problems and I'm solving them!" Like handing out copies of Who Moved My Cheese. Maybe it will feel less bullshitty than the MB ones I've participated in the past, but after some googling it really came off as MB falling out of favor so let's find some other early 20th century psych to bankroll us. I'm sure this attitude only proves whatever point the workshop is trying to prove and I should stop and be a team player  .
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Jul 30, 2016 18:28
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Iverron posted:So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. I had to take one of these when I started my current job at a multi level marketing cult. They recorded the result (I'm "creative") but it didn't amount to anything.
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Jul 30, 2016 20:10
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Iverron posted:It feels like a lazy (if expensive) way of saying "there are team / communication problems and I'm solving them!" Like handing out copies of Who Moved My Cheese. Oh, absolutely. It's usually used at a point where the managers feels things are too far gone for them to handle, or they've been sold to. That said though, there are definitely benefits to putting a team into a different context to shake some issues loose. My work was sail training, and while our focus was youth we did corporate team building on occasion. The real benefit in my mind is putting the team in a situation that exposes communication issues quickly and visibly in a way that can be discussed. Sail training on a square rigger is great for that because you can see the whole deck, and things can 'usually' happen at a slow enough pace that you can get a group to attempt a tangible problem themselves with supervision. The thing that traps teams in office situations is typically the issues burn slow and bad/mediocre managers don't understand how to head issues off at the pass before they ossify into the team dynamics. A good team building workshop will have ways to expose those issues and properly talk about them in a way that gives them enough awareness and knowledge to move forward.
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Jul 30, 2016 23:35
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Iverron posted:So we're apparently doing a "DiSC Assessment" course as an office next week (devs, designers, social media, etc). After some preliminary googling this appears to be the same Myers Briggs psuedoscience bullshit I've dealt with in far more corporate-y environments. You have to roll with it, but I wouldn't take any stock in what the tests end up concluding. Real personality tests--like a properly administered Myers-Briggs test--are too expensive and too rigorous for a basic corporate exercise. Sure, there are 100-question tests or whatever that lump you into categories, but they're just about as good as Facebook quizzes that determine which anime character you are. For one, a real personality test will factor in context and try to reduce its effect in order to better reflect your consistent personality attributes. When you go into work, as your role as a worker, sit in some quiet room or whatever, and take this test, then all of that stuff factors into the results. As an anecdote, I remember actually getting tested twice on the same pseudo-Myers-Briggs test. On the first time, I was in my home office, alone, with headphones on. I was rated as an introverted cave troll that would turn to dust if exposed to sunlight. A little later, I had to take another one after getting out of a Toastmasters club meeting where I was the club president. I was then apparently an extroverted social butterfly that would turn to dust without the vital life energy of social symbiotes. You will self-report differently on a test based on the context. Consider those retail tests that want you to swear up and down that you'd throw your parents in jail if they walked in the store and walked out with a gumball they found on the floor or whatever. It should be no surprise with anybody that does technical work that they like to be mostly left alone in a quiet environment when doing that kind of work. If you asked people what they wanted when they were in that context, nobody should be surprised. That doesn't entirely define the person, their passions, and particularly how to frame their careers. Some of this stuff can have some merits. I remember having to do some strength finding thing. They made us all read a book. The different categories, the testing, and the exercises were bunk. However, thinking about people just outright having particularly good strengths in certain areas is a worthwhile message to remind people sometimes. They could have just sent around the foreword. Edit: If somebody wants to really get their mind blown, look at The Organization Man. Personality testing and how its abused is mentioned in there, and that book is from the 1950s. Hell, just hearing him observing people complaining that college needs to be more skill-oriented in the 1920s, and lamenting that colleges are slowly becoming just a corporate training ground so companies don't have to put in multi-year orientations is a mind-binder. Rocko Bonaparte fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jul 31, 2016 |
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Jul 31, 2016 06:17
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:3. Encapsulate the globals before you try to deal with any objects that are in there. The data flow problem of getting that global state passed around will drive most of your refactoring decisions. I feel like this is a problem we have, as I work with an inherently sequential process (launching and deploying test clusters) and figuring out state is either a matter of a) give up and go ask our platform's api surreptitiously or b) write statefiles everywhere and cry when they fall out of sync or need to be updated, also ask our platform's api surreptitiously but only for the bits you can save to a statefile. Any good place to read up on global state re data flow? I imagine it'll use some awful java program as its examples but the underlying issue rings similar. Also, I'm here to ask for good resources on kanban style management. My team gets to write features and is responsible for devops and infra, so I'm finally taking the plunge and separating concerns by splitting the team, and devops work does not necessarily follow a normal sprint pattern. TimWinter fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 14:24
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TimWinter posted:Also, I'm here to ask for good resources on kanban style management. My team gets to write features and is responsible for devops and infra, so I'm finally taking the plunge and separating concerns by splitting the team, and devops work does not necessarily follow a normal sprint pattern. Devops (if you mean by actually deploying and assisting with a software product of some sort) should sync up as closely with the development team's sprints as possible. This means committing to stories and all that business. Without software that you have visibility into and some input into how it should be written or maintained, that's not devops, that's just classic siloization again. For toil and operations infrastructure gruntwork, you are probably better off using a combination of something like Microsoft Project as well as a dedicated "interruption handler" similar to an on-call rotation except it's a person that lets others on the infrastructure team focus upon tougher problems similar to how we'd like to work as developers. I only say Microsoft Project because I mean that you should be syncing with whoever is above you in long-term projects like a big network or cross-enterprise SAN upgrade and these people in my experience have almost never worked in an agile-style software project and this kind of effort probably is better modeled with either a spiral or waterfall model anyway because the end-goal tends to be rather specific and there really isn't much room or expectation to explore and to perform discovery like in a lot of software projects. The hard part is reconciling tooling and automating it all so that there's as little friction as possible day-to-day while providing some form of organization that your managers can understand. The hardest problem I hit was that my managers had never worked in software before, never wanted to understand software development (except my immediate boss, what a trooper), yet I was now explaining that devops means we need to write code and deliver features. In hindsight, I may have been better off getting my coworkers to use Emacs' org mode and to write some integrations with JIRA and our ITIL ticketing system (although I spent a year on that in futility because we had disabled every API to it and put it all behind a neutered SOAP API that had .2% of the features of the actual APIs and made it impossible to automate anything besides "create ticket" and "add note to ticket").
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Aug 2, 2016 19:04
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TimWinter posted:I feel like this is a problem we have, as I work with an inherently sequential process (launching and deploying test clusters) and figuring out state is either a matter of a) give up and go ask our platform's api surreptitiously or b) write statefiles everywhere and cry when they fall out of sync or need to be updated, also ask our platform's api surreptitiously but only for the bits you can save to a statefile. Any good place to read up on global state re data flow? I imagine it'll use some awful java program as its examples but the underlying issue rings similar. The stuff I was most recently dealing with here didn't really have any rationale for being a global at all. People just started instinctively declaring everything as globals. There were a few cases where I put them in an object and didn't really have to do anything else; all the stuff was being used in a scoped way anyways. Before getting into writing any code at all: isn't your kind of problem something that can be handled with configuration management tools? So if that's a no-go, you can at least wrap all that stuff up in some kind of container representing context, and pass that around to all the different steps in the sequence. At least that way, people can look at that object's definition to determine what all is available to them in one place. This is a stark contrast to globals where they could be vomited all over the place, redeclared with type-o's, or declared in nested scopes. You might then be able to do something like the State pattern or whatever to describe how to add new sequences to the process. You'd pass the context to each state.
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Aug 2, 2016 19:14
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Question to you guys about sick days. I'm working as an intern over the summer going into my senior year. I'm technically a salary employee with no benefits/sick days. I'm scheduled to have a root canal in a couple days from now and until then am just in a massive amount of pain that has me mentally wrecked. At what point should I just tell my supervisor that I'm probably just sitting here creating technical debt trying to push through the pain and write some code. I've never really dealt with sick days before and I feel guilty asking for time off, but I also feel guilty like I'm just getting paid to make things worse at the moment. What's the right thing to do here?
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Aug 4, 2016 18:04
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Talk to your supervisor and if he blows you off or doesn't pull any strings then just warm your chair until you get that sorted out.
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Aug 4, 2016 18:08
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Portland Sucks posted:Question to you guys about sick days. Depends on the supervisor. If you have an old-school-work-ethic sort of supervisor ("if I'm not actually dying, I'm coming in to work because that's the right thing to do!") then you probably just have to resign yourself to suffering. If you have a reasonable, normal supervisor, then just talk to them and explain the situation. In most non-retail, non-food-service jobs I've experienced, people tend to be understanding and okay with it if you're not doing too hot, especially if you're in visible distress and aren't just calling in because you have the sniffles. Obviously though, as an intern you're going to be taking the pay hit for those days off. Which, admittedly, will probably help convey to your boss how serious you are about your ailment.
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Aug 4, 2016 18:12
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ChickenWing posted:Depends on the supervisor. If you have an old-school-work-ethic sort of supervisor ("if I'm not actually dying, I'm coming in to work because that's the right thing to do!") then you probably just have to resign yourself to suffering. If you have a reasonable, normal supervisor, then just talk to them and explain the situation. In most non-retail, non-food-service jobs I've experienced, people tend to be understanding and okay with it if you're not doing too hot, especially if you're in visible distress and aren't just calling in because you have the sniffles. Yeah I'd like to get paid and I know I could warm this chair for the next week and accomplish nothing and still get positive reviews when this is said and done with because of my performance up to this date. It just feels unethical to knowingly do that when I'm conscience of the fact that I'm probably not going to be productive given the circumstances and could save them time and money by just not being here until I'm better. That old school ethic is pretty lose-lose for everyone when the job isn't just working a factory line.
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Aug 4, 2016 18:20
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ChickenWing posted:Depends on the supervisor. If you have an old-school-work-ethic sort of supervisor ("if I'm not actually dying, I'm coming in to work because that's the right thing to do!") then you probably just have to resign yourself to suffering. If you have a reasonable, normal supervisor, then just talk to them and explain the situation. In most non-retail, non-food-service jobs I've experienced, people tend to be understanding and okay with it if you're not doing too hot, especially if you're in visible distress and aren't just calling in because you have the sniffles. Yeah, and that's something to look out for in future jobs as well. If they don't treat you like a professional, you don't want to work there. If I called out sick due to legitimate illness and my boss gave me poo poo about it, I would immediately start looking for a job where I was given respect and treated like an adult. (I just took my first sick days in years this week!)
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Aug 4, 2016 19:08
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It just occurred to me: In the 9.5 years I've been at my current job, I've pressed the team to upgrade to Java 5, Java 6, Java 7, and Java 8. And they still won't let me call myself "Java Architect."
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Aug 4, 2016 19:10
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Ithaqua posted:Yeah, and that's something to look out for in future jobs as well. If they don't treat you like a professional, you don't want to work there. If I called out sick due to legitimate illness and my boss gave me poo poo about it, I would immediately start looking for a job where I was given respect and treated like an adult. My dad has the super oldschool work ethic and every job I had up until about 3 years ago was hourly retail or food service so I still feel guilty every time I call in. My tech lead is hilariously, incredibly cool about everything, and it still weirds me out that I can just send him a message on slack to let him know I'm not coming in and leave it at that.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:24
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If you can't think, you can't work. If you can't work, then your job is to recover. The best and fastest way to recover is to stay home and rest.
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Aug 4, 2016 21:29
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I have that same weird crazy work-ethic, combined with a history in 'service' work, and goddamn is continues to throw me for a tailspin that I can literally just say "Hey I'm not going to be here few days, I'm about to take my girlfriend to the ER, I'll let you know later what my week looks like"
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Aug 5, 2016 00:25
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ChickenWing posted:My dad has the super oldschool work ethic and every job I had up until about 3 years ago was hourly retail or food service so I still feel guilty every time I call in. My tech lead is hilariously, incredibly cool about everything, and it still weirds me out that I can just send him a message on slack to let him know I'm not coming in and leave it at that. Yeah after all the time I spent in retail and the restaurant world I'm used to panicking about everything, all the time. I had something come up yesterday that I had to take care of before 4 p.m. I e-mailed my boss and was like "hey can I take a long lunch to take care of stuff and then just stay late to do my work?" His response was basically "it's cool, get it taken care of" and then on his way out ask me if everything was fine. It's a first world problem to be sure but it absolutely amazes me how loose everything is at my job and I'm honestly having trouble adjusting to it. I'm accustomed to places that will write you up or fire you for taking a 16 minute break instead of a 15 minute one. Now as long as I show up every day and do something useful while I'm there everything is gravy.
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Aug 5, 2016 02:23
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I used to be at a small web dev shop and the owner/manager would give you a talking to about "what you could do differently" if you showed up at 09:02 instead of 09:00. At the same time he'd work from home and then expect everyone else to be as motivated about his business as he was. The huge soulless corporation I'm at now has a good manager who understands the benefit of flexibility and my pay nearly doubled.
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Aug 5, 2016 04:58
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I got poo poo for showing up late/not knowing when I'd be in the day after my car was totaled in an accident a couple jobs ago. I got a new job and a new car within a few weeks 
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Aug 5, 2016 15:18
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A job ago, I had to take a few days off and then go home early one day while I was recovering from/dealing with a kidney stone. The pain made it impossible to concentrate, the pain medication made me extremely nauseous (hydrocodone/morphine, opiates are the worst), and the nausea medicine made me extremely drowsy, so there was no way I could operate well until I was fully recovered. I got pulled aside by my manager after I returned and got told that it was unacceptable behavior to take sick time like that and that I was being difficult and unreliable. I quit soon after, and then the company laid off most of its staff a month after that. Some people are assholes. Don't let them lord you around.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:28
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Cirofren posted:I used to be at a small web dev shop and the owner/manager would give you a talking to about "what you could do differently" if you showed up at 09:02 instead of 09:00. At the same time he'd work from home and then expect everyone else to be as motivated about his business as he was. Last job I literally got written up for punching in at 9:00 on the dot because "that means you are late to your shift by the time you get to your desk." Yes, I was salaried, yes, salaried people had to punch a loving time clock (okay we used our badges on a digital device but let's be real, it was punching a clock), yes, I had a "shift" as a software developer, and no, I did not answer phones or do real time tech support or otherwise have any responsibilities that relied upon me being in a certain place at a certain time. Current job is the polar opposite. Today, I'm working from home because I didn't get enough sleep and feel kinda crappy. And everybody is loving fine with that. 
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Aug 5, 2016 18:14
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When I was running an operations team as a contractor we were responsible for being on-call and supporting 24/7 for certain priority incidents. So it was kind of your duty to let me know if you're going to be around or not and people still had problems even telling me "oh yeah, not working today 5 year old is sick." I don't care if you're getting a sex change, just let me know so I can figure out if we need to do something that needs your specific expertise that we're not counting on it until you're back. However, if you're out literally 1/3 of the year and only claiming you're on 20 hours of PTO you're not making it hard for me to put a target on your back if we have a budget cutback.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:19
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necrobobsledder posted:When I was running an operations team as a contractor we were responsible for being on-call and supporting 24/7 for certain priority incidents. So it was kind of your duty to let me know if you're going to be around or not and people still had problems even telling me "oh yeah, not working today 5 year old is sick." I don't care if you're getting a sex change, just let me know so I can figure out if we need to do something that needs your specific expertise that we're not counting on it until you're back. However, if you're out literally 1/3 of the year and only claiming you're on 20 hours of PTO you're not making it hard for me to put a target on your back if we have a budget cutback. Yeah communication is key and I just want to emphasize from my story above that I emailed the team a picture of my smashed up, obviously un-driveable car from the scene* and said I'd be in as soon as I could get a rental and get to the office. Still got a phone call pestering me about when I'd show up while a friend was driving me to an Enterprise near work and then the same guy gave me a talking to about communicating arrival times when I got in ~45 minutes later than I normally would. He wasn't even someone I technically reported to and I don't think I've ever been so angry at a colleague. *millennial as gently caress, right?
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Aug 5, 2016 21:52
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Some managers are insanely traditional about work schedules even though they're like... late 30s or early 40s, and I'm not sure where they get these managerial ideas because decent MBA programs don't even say that's a good idea. I wouldn't have a problem with most managers if they showed they got results better than if we put a random slug off of the sidewalk in their spot, but most managers just try to copy the techniques they learned n years ago and in companies y, z which may really have nothing to do with how to make workers more productive in your current place. But really, the reason to quit wouldn't even be for that reason but that your colleagues aren't even caring about the fact you nearly uh... died. I had Trump supporters and climate change deniers I had to manage and I managed to have some empathy and was able to have some civilized discussions without getting people mad, not sure why being antagonistic is ever construed as effective management in the 21st century.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:27
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