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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm thinking about something negative to say about my current company/team if i'm asked. If someone asks you this in an interview, what do you usually say? I have no shortage of complaints (poor code review process, poor story grooming process, strong emphasis on speed versus quality improvements, etc). Those all sound like legit complaints that I would have no problem busting out if someone asked me why I left. It's important to phrase things correctly, though. Like, focus on the process and why it wasn't giving satisfactory results, rather than the knuckleheads who demanded the process in the first place. You want to make it sound like your problem was being constrained by the company, rather than working with people you didn't like.
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Sep 13, 2016 20:30
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The weirdest anecdotal trend I've found is that most surveys out there conclude that people typically quit managers / coworkers rather than companies but I've never quit because of that - I've almost always quit because of attributes of the company that I can't control or wait out. This seems pretty typical for most engineers I've talked to though - how often do you guys quit because you're fed up with immediate coworkers or managers?
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Sep 13, 2016 21:09
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necrobobsledder posted:The weirdest anecdotal trend I've found is that most surveys out there conclude that people typically quit managers / coworkers rather than companies but I've never quit because of that - I've almost always quit because of attributes of the company that I can't control or wait out. This seems pretty typical for most engineers I've talked to though - how often do you guys quit because you're fed up with immediate coworkers or managers? I quit once because I had an abusive manager (drunken phone calls blaming me for coworker's screwups, etc), and once because new executive management came in and my manager moved to Europe (and I essentially lost any authority I had built up). So.. not terribly uncommon in my experience?
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Sep 13, 2016 21:19
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I'm quitting my current job after 4 months because of the cult-like leadership, lovely software, continued practices that lead to lovely software, bureaucracy as a replacement for good development practices, annoying/dangerous commute, annoying/incompetent coworkers, and annoying open floorplan office with ping pong and nerf guns and salesmen on speakerphone. Pay is decent, though. I told my interviewers that I'm leaving because of the commute and open floorplan. They were sympathetic. So pumped right now.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:33
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Noam Chomsky posted:As a 39-yo please share your strategies for staying on top of all of front-end and the other kinds of development you do AND also leading any kind of normal human life. This is an actual serious question. I follow a handful of useful RSS feeds, click on the articles about technologies that I see pop up enough, and implement stuff with technologies that seem interesting and/or useful. By reading enough articles about a framework or technology or whatever, you become familiar enough with it that when you do have a problem that such a technology would be useful for, you know enough to identify it as such. Also, you have to learn when to ignore typical bullshit frontend churn. I don't go out and learn every new library or framework. I just stay very abreast of whats going on at a high level, and only invest serious time into things that have a lot of activity going into them (as measured by things like amount of articles and the amount I just hear people talking about them). If you don't find the type of technology involved in front-end development interesting, then I don't think you can keep up with it without burning out. Being a normal human involves different things for different people. I'm 39 with a wife and kid and I lean toward introversion. Also, it's pretty natural for many people that as you get older and expand your family, you spend less time cultivating friendships and doing other young people type of stuff that takes up a lot of time. Of course you spend more time on family stuff, but I find I have more time to learn stuff then I used to. Also, I'm fairly sure I'm way above average on the likes-to-learn-stuff-and-willing-to-invest-time-into-it scale for my peer group. For example, when I see some tech mentioned a bunch, my gut reaction isn't usually "oh god, I've got to learn something else", it's "hmm, interesting, I wonder how this works."
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Sep 13, 2016 21:36
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For me it's almost always been because of the direction/vision/strategy of the org rather than co-workers and manager. Maybe I've been lucky but I've mostly had nice coworker and or managers. Or at least I can see enough niceness in them to not hate them. It did happen , once, gently caress them and their egos. They can create all the simplest buggy crap they want without me.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:36
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Noam Chomsky posted:As a 39-yo please share your strategies for staying on top of all of front-end and the other kinds of development you do AND also leading any kind of normal human life. This is an actual serious question. I'm not 39, but I am in my early thirties and have a family and a social life. I do some front-end dev at work, amongst other things. I've found it's pretty easy to stay on top of it. Follow HN or something on Twitter, read some articles on the train if you commute. Play about with stuff at work, they are paying you to be sharp. I'd rather move with tech as it gets better and work on a variety of stuff than be stuck on back-end on some service running an ancient Java version or whatever. Also I flat out will not work more that 40 hours a week. If someone wants more they have to promise me something good, else get hosed.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:50
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Noam Chomsky posted:As a 39-yo please share your strategies for staying on top of all of front-end and the other kinds of development you do AND also leading any kind of normal human life. This is an actual serious question. I'm not who you were responding to but I wanted to clarify that when I say 'pick up a new framework' I hardly mean mastering it. This seems to be how it goes: - Hear I'm going to be switched to a project next month using (Angular / React / Ember / Backbone / Vue / etc) because former manager advocated that it was the BEST JS FRAMEWORK! Or, get invited to work on a toy project with a friend who is in the same situation. - Grab a sample of the O'Reilly book for that framework on my Kindle to see if it's readable, read the sample, maybe download the whole thing if it's <$30 and not awful to read - Dick around online long enough to figure out what the particular weirdness of this framework is - Try to create some grocery list or to do list app using the official documentation Basically, a few evenings or weekends, enough to know what I'm getting into. I don't think this is particularly overwhelming, unless you are so burnt out by your day job that you have no energy for messing around after hours. In my experience, the people I know end up doing more of this sorts of stuff when they hate their current projects, 'cause at least this way they are in control of something.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:52
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Noam Chomsky posted:Front-end will never stabilize or mature in the way that some other disciplines have since the people leading the charge are an ever-churning mass of unmarried childless on-the-spectrum teenagers and twenty-somethings who engineer for extreme edge cases and 1ms gains on a competing framework. As Zuck said young people are just smarter so better slit your wrists now, grandpa; they could maybe use your blood to offset the costs of engineering the next version of Soylent. What sort of other disciplines would be a good fit for me to research/learn based on an ActionScript/JS/PHP background? I have some back-end Linux set-up/maintenance experience and a good head for documenting procedures, code sharing/peer review, and writing code that flows in a logical way and doesn't look like a bunch of copy-pasted textbook examples fed through a meat grinder. Whenever I see lovely code I want to vomit all over the code review conference table. 
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Sep 13, 2016 21:53
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AskYourself posted:For me it's almost always been because of the direction/vision/strategy of the org rather than co-workers and manager. Maybe I've been lucky but I've mostly had nice coworker and or managers. Or at least I can see enough niceness in them to not hate them. How does the direction/vision/strategy of the org affect your day to day though? More than the person who functions as your interface to the whole system and has the largest say in your regular review? Maybe I'm just some dumb prole, but "existential thread 5+ years out" doesn't weigh on me quite as heavily as "vast majority of in-person interactions"
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Sep 13, 2016 22:09
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JawnV6 posted:How does the direction/vision/strategy of the org affect your day to day though? More than the person who functions as your interface to the whole system and has the largest say in your regular review? Maybe I'm just some dumb prole, but "existential thread 5+ years out" doesn't weigh on me quite as heavily as "vast majority of in-person interactions" I've definitely been in places where everyone is sensible, competent, and nice, but the organisation is dysfunctional and all the all the things you're being told to work on are absurd and clearly a futile waste. It can be fun for a while (because people are cool) but it becomes very frustrating eventually.
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Sep 13, 2016 22:13
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Thermopyle posted:Also, you have to learn when to ignore typical bullshit frontend churn. I don't go out and learn every new library or framework. I just stay very abreast of whats going on at a high level, and only invest serious time into things that have a lot of activity going into them (as measured by things like amount of articles and the amount I just hear people talking about them). This is mainly my coping strategy. I'm currently focused on Angular 1 with an eye to be upgrading to Angular 2 / Aurelia, but beyond that I'm only keeping up to date on anything else at a very high level. I know Babel exists, but I've chosen TypeScript. I know React/Redux exists, but I'm not using it now so I don't care. I'm using Gulp now but maybe later will use Webpack, but will worry about that later.
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Sep 13, 2016 22:22
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return0 posted:I've definitely been in places where everyone is sensible, competent, and nice, but the organisation is dysfunctional and all the all the things you're being told to work on are absurd and clearly a futile waste. It can be fun for a while (because people are cool) but it becomes very frustrating eventually. This is exactly the situation I'm leaving right now and I still have all sorts of doubts about it. I genuinely love working with all my coworkers but we're sort of a bubble inside a massively incompetent organization with cheapskate upper management. I know I'm leaving for greener pastures but I'm worried about the possibility that my new coworkers will be lame or worse.
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Sep 13, 2016 22:45
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AskYourself posted:Maybe I've been lucky but I've mostly had nice coworker and or managers. Or at least I can see enough niceness in them to not hate them. Noam Chomsky posted:As a 39-yo please share your strategies for staying on top of all of front-end and the other kinds of development you do AND also leading any kind of normal human life. This is an actual serious question. Above all, use whatever techniques demonstrably work for you and stick with it until it becomes a net negative. Some people meticulously plan out events like Thanksgiving Dinner in a goddamn Gantt chart and others like my household that can handle 10+ guests with minimal stress using a basic reminder list and decisions made months ahead of time. Some people use Moleskin notebooks, some use org mode in Emacs. Task management is a skill. JawnV6 posted:How does the direction/vision/strategy of the org affect your day to day though? More than the person who functions as your interface to the whole system and has the largest say in your regular review? Maybe I'm just some dumb prole, but "existential thread 5+ years out" doesn't weigh on me quite as heavily as "vast majority of in-person interactions"
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Sep 13, 2016 23:37
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necrobobsledder posted:Tons of variation across companies but for me it has meant lay-offs, loss of contracts, 80+ hour weeks, death marches, truly useless "morale" type meetings, etc. When most big companies make changes of direction now, they're wanting action now because they're getting desperate (see: IBM - they're on "near-bankruptcy" status for the what 3rd time in the past 2 decades I think?). If you're a market leader and quite comfortable with healthy margins, it's not the same as if you're in a cagematch industry like a lot of others are facing increasing consolidation to keep things afloat. Huge difference between Apple making OS X more iOS-like and a company like GE that's trying to become a major tech employer by 2020 when most of its employees are in old school manufacturing. I generally agree with the notion that people quit managers, not companies, but I'm not eager go into too many specifics.
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Sep 14, 2016 00:40
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I quit my last job 100% because of my boss. It was a corporate CRUD factory so none of the projects were challenging in and of themselves. Under normal circumstances I would have used the time to learn basically whatever the hell I wanted and turned out little internal business apps until I felt in danger of stagnating or I wanted a real pay increase. My boss was such a vicious, toxic creature, though, that I used my time to desperately learn whatever I could that I thought might help me beef up my resume so I could get the gently caress out of there, without particularly giving a poo poo about the end product. My current gig doesn't pay as well as I'd like, but I'm going to have a really hard time leaving unless something changes. The work is challenging and the people are excellent, with one exception that I can more or less ignore (wipe up the seagull droppings as best I can and move forward, basically). Also I walk to work, which is a loving ENORMOUS benefit that is almost impossible for me to quantify.
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Sep 14, 2016 02:30
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JawnV6 posted:Assuming you're doing some basic checking and not signing on to a place with layoffs, loss of contracts, 80+ hour death marches, if you've found yourself in multiple jobs where a Fortune 500 company changed direction in such a drastic fashion it's pretty safe to say you're an outlier and the majority of folks changing jobs aren't in those same circumstances. I think you've hit on the difference here: company size. The jobs I have quit have been after joining onto a promising project / small company, and then after a few years things weren't turning out as well as hoped, or growth slowed, or whatever else caused things to appear relatively greener elsewhere. I've had lovely coworkers, but I've never quit over them, personally.
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Sep 14, 2016 05:47
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BlueInkAlchemist posted:What sort of other disciplines would be a good fit for me to research/learn based on an ActionScript/JS/PHP background? I have some back-end Linux set-up/maintenance experience and a good head for documenting procedures, code sharing/peer review, and writing code that flows in a logical way and doesn't look like a bunch of copy-pasted textbook examples fed through a meat grinder. Angular 2 is looking nice. React is good. Node is always a good thing to know if you're a JS dev. Anything that makes you well-rounded but isn't within a totally different discipline. I like to tell people to learn Rails since it's what helped me learn MVC, sever-side, and just how everything fit together. It also gave me a lot of exposure to other great tools and platforms like Heroku, S3, Vagrant, etc. tl;dr - if you learn some full-stack development you'll be better, smarter, more masculine, more feminine, more human than the front-end dev that doesn't. Huzanko fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Sep 14, 2016 |
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Sep 14, 2016 14:53
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I think some of you misinterpreted my question and comment regarding picking up skills and living some kind of human life. I work in corporate consulting. Anything but mastery of a skill or framework isn't enough most of the time. My view of the landscape is likely skewed because of this. Whereas, a lot of the time, at a SAAS company or a startup you have some kind of support structure, investment in learning new technologies, mentor-ship, and most importantly time to ramp up on something new - on most projects it's just little old me on the front-end and I wear a whole lot of hats. Right now I'm mostly annoyed by the shift from, namely, Angular 1.x and Gulp to Angular 2 or React and Webpack. The shift is good but it's a lot of time investment on my part to, essentially, do the same things in a different, more complicated way and achieve the same or similar outcome. I love learning new things but these are not new things, just things I already know but different and more complicated that offer little benefit for most of my use cases. It is what it is but it's definitely annoying. I also have many hobbies and interests aside from programming, so "living a human life" to me means having to spend as little time on programming as possible since. I am probably just burnt out.
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Sep 14, 2016 15:02
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I'm a little apprehensive for my "3 hours of pair programming" interview tomorrow. I'm just.. not sure how it will flow? At least with white-boarding, I've practiced so much that I'm used to it. With this I have no idea what kinds of problems we'll be working on, how I'll be judged, etc.
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Sep 14, 2016 15:10
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Just treat it like an interview, except you have a computer instead of a whiteboard. You may well also be working with unfamiliar tools, so it can't hurt to give a disclaimer of "okay, I've never used X framework/language/compiler/IDE/text editor before, so bear with me..." Good luck!
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Sep 14, 2016 15:49
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I just received an offer for a full-time remote job I've been interviewing about over the last few weeks. The HR person sent me a PDF to sign and scan within two days with the salary written directly on it. No details about benefits at all. Is that weird? It feels like they're trying to bypass basic negotiation. I want to get myself a signing bonus to buy a nice laptop in case my desktop dies for some reason. I'd also like whatever extra vacation time I can manage.
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Sep 14, 2016 16:18
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Noam Chomsky posted:I am probably just burnt out. Just from seeing your posts across the forum, I think this is either accurate or at the least something you should be aware that you are in danger of.
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Sep 14, 2016 16:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm a little apprehensive for my "3 hours of pair programming" interview tomorrow. I'm just.. not sure how it will flow? At least with white-boarding, I've practiced so much that I'm used to it. With this I have no idea what kinds of problems we'll be working on, how I'll be judged, etc. Just imagine you're in a CS class, and you've been assigned a project partner for your assignment, and these are lab hours and your partner is just not as solid on the material so you need to help them, but they also know some things you don't so you need to listen to them
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Sep 14, 2016 16:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Just treat it like an interview, except you have a computer instead of a whiteboard. You may well also be working with unfamiliar tools, so it can't hurt to give a disclaimer of "okay, I've never used X framework/language/compiler/IDE/text editor before, so bear with me..." Thanks! That's what really worries me, namely two things. My main project uses Dropwizard/Guice whereas they use Spring for a lot of stuff and also I don't do a lot of SQL stuff right now and mostly work with Mongo/Aerospike/Dynamo for real-time user lookups whereas the new role seems very SQL heavy. My SQL (  ) is very rusty.I'm sure any place I'd like to work would understand the time it takes to pick up new tech and that doing it in an interview environment isn't the easiest. Stinky_Pete posted:Just imagine you're in a CS class, and you've been assigned a project partner for your assignment, and these are lab hours and your partner is just not as solid on the material so you need to help them, but they also know some things you don't so you need to listen to them Yeah that's what i'm imagining. Also, that I'll have Google for any sort of APIs I need to look up.
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Sep 14, 2016 16:27
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rt4 posted:I just received an offer for a full-time remote job I've been interviewing about over the last few weeks. The HR person sent me a PDF to sign and scan within two days with the salary written directly on it. No details about benefits at all. Yes, that's weird. They're trying to trick you into accepting a bad offer by putting artificial time pressure on you -- there's absolutely no reason why they need a response in 2 days, it's just to keep you from thinking too hard about it. Push back.
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Sep 14, 2016 16:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yes, that's weird. They're trying to trick you into accepting a bad offer by putting artificial time pressure on you -- there's absolutely no reason why they need a response in 2 days, it's just to keep you from thinking too hard about it. Push back. I don't think it's uncommon, but it's definitely sleazy. Ask for the benefits package and say you want X time to make the decision.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:13
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I got HR to send me a vague description of the insurance, but no hard numbers besides "starts as low as $x per month." In response, I saidquote:Thanks for the information. How much do these things actually cost? Is that polite? I don't want to ruin weeks of effort, but I don't feel like HR is even trying.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:21
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Noam Chomsky posted:I work in corporate consulting. Anything but mastery of a skill or framework isn't enough most of the time. ... rt4 posted:Is that weird? It feels like they're trying to bypass basic negotiation. I want to get myself a signing bonus to buy a nice laptop in case my desktop dies for some reason. I'd also like whatever extra vacation time I can manage.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:21
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rt4 posted:I got HR to send me a vague description of the insurance, but no hard numbers besides "starts as low as $x per month." In response, I said I would not send that. You're probably frustrated, but I would just send a response that you would like to see the complete benefits package. You could fluff it up a little by stating that benefits like insurance, vacation are important to you and you need to understand what the company is offering to make a decision. Is the company small? I just find it bizarre that they don't have a document that outlines everything. asur fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Sep 14, 2016 |
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Sep 14, 2016 17:23
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Thermopyle posted:Just from seeing your posts across the forum, I think this is either accurate or at the least something you should be aware that you are in danger of. Too bad I can't afford to be burnt out. Fortunately it comes and goes. At least I don't have to work more than 40 hours per week except rare times when there's some kind of unmovable deadline. I also get to work from home. Tough to want to go somewhere else when the competing options all sound incredibly lovely. Commuting everyday to some corporate hellhole doesn't seem like it'd help or prevent burnout. I used to work at a University and that wasn't much better. Working in tech just blows unless you have a particular type of personality. Too bad it pays a ton better than most competing fields which also blow; not everyone gets their ~* dream job *~.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:35
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Noam Chomsky posted:Too bad I can't afford to be burnt out. Fortunately it comes and goes. At least I don't have to work more than 40 hours per week except rare times when there's some kind of unmovable deadline. I also get to work from home. It sounds a bit like maybe you're not happy with consulting? I like that I have a few years vision on where I want to take my projects, and am given the autonomy to make those decisions. I definitely would not be happy moving from one project to another, doing the same thing but slightly different each time.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:40
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After appealing the decision to not promote me twice a few months ago and putting in my resignation last week my employer just now called to ask if there were any financial considerations that we could talk over to keep me on board. Just a heads up to anyone in a management position: don't loving do this. It's insulting.
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Sep 14, 2016 17:46
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asur posted:I would not send that. You're probably frustrated, but I would just send a response that you would like to see the complete benefits package. You could fluff it up a little by stating that benefits like insurance, vacation are important to you and you need to understand what the company is offering to make a decision. Your idea is better, but I had already sent it. I think they have a couple hundred employees, but only five programmers. They all work on a single big application that runs the whole company. I believe most of the staff is tech support. It's hard to say much more without identifying them. I suppose it's possible that HR is just not accustomed to making negotiations with salaried professionals. On the other hand, the company president is actually one of the programmers.
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Sep 14, 2016 18:00
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Steve French posted:I think you've hit on the difference here: company size. The jobs I have quit have been after joining onto a promising project / small company, and then after a few years things weren't turning out as well as hoped, or growth slowed, or whatever else caused things to appear relatively greener elsewhere. I've had lovely coworkers, but I've never quit over them, personally. There's an interesting failure mode in larger companies with several verticals where an IC's front line manager can be unaware, uncaring, or downright hostile to work performed outside of their silo. Escalation can be difficult, transferring elsewhere may not be an option. Smaller companies are much better at that, everyone generally understands the global picture and can respect or at least tolerate work happening outside of an org chart solid line. I've generally left places because of a compelling option that I just couldn't turn down. But I don't think "bad manager" is a problem specific to company size. I appreciate the insight that that smaller companies make one more sensitive to those higher concerns, I had my doubts about one place starting to creep up before they resolved them by laying me off rt4 posted:I just received an offer for a full-time remote job I've been interviewing about over the last few weeks. The HR person sent me a PDF to sign and scan within two days with the salary written directly on it. No details about benefits at all.
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Sep 14, 2016 18:16
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Thermopyle posted:Just from seeing your posts across the forum, I think this is either accurate or at the least something you should be aware that you are in danger of. Going to take a break from my typical brand of being a stupid rear end in a top hat and say thanks for this post.
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Sep 14, 2016 19:23
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rt4 posted:I got HR to send me a vague description of the insurance, but no hard numbers besides "starts as low as $x per month." In response, I said In my opinion that's passive aggressive. Just counter with what you want, be friendly but assertive. This should be something you think is fair and reasonable that you'd be happy to work for. If they refuse, just decline. I would aim for: * excited about the company/role * need to see the full package before making a decision Then when they get back, if it's not to your liking say you were expecting $value base salary, but possibly willing to negotiate for more vacation/signing bonus/RSUs/remote work/whatever.
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Sep 14, 2016 19:25
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JawnV6 posted:...with several verticals where an IC's front line manager can be unaware... What's "IC" here?
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Sep 14, 2016 19:36
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IC = Individual Contributor, which is fancy way of saying "Not a manager".
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Sep 14, 2016 20:04
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minato posted:IC = Individual Contributor, which is fancy way of saying "Not a manager". What, do the managers use the royal we or something? What makes them more than one person?
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Sep 14, 2016 20:38
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