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revmoo posted:Just got through to the end of the interview process at a company. Sat down today to sign the new hire paperwork and they shoved a contract in front of me that says if I quit within a year I have to reimburse the company's costs for the recruitment fee. That is a new low. My company only asks for a year contract if they help you move. Recruiters are part of the game and sure as gently caress don't fall on the employees.
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Nov 3, 2016 00:08
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ratbert90 posted:My company only asks for a year contract if they help you move. Recruiters are part of the game and sure as gently caress don't fall on the employees. Having to pay back your relocation bonus on a prorated basis is pretty normal; recruitment fees, not so much.
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Nov 3, 2016 03:34
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kedo posted:A company that thinks putting something like that in a contract is a good idea is going to be terrible to work for regardless as to whether or not they'd strike it. I conditionally disagree with this statement. Contracts and employment agreements are generally products of HR and Legal. Legal is Legal wherever you go, they're going to be as broad and weighted towards the company as they think can get away with. HR is almost always lovely, the question is how much power they have. Strike the clauses you don't like, see what happens. If they are fine with the alterations you're probably okay (you know, as long as your manager/co-workers aren't horrible but hopefully you twigged to that during the interview). If your prospective manager comes back trying to argue in favor of them, or if they come back saying something like, "HR has overridden us," then yeah, probably a terrible company to work for (meddling HR is a nightmare).
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Nov 3, 2016 04:38
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As someone who actually redlined an employment agreement with an overly broad IP assignment clause and would walk over things like that: no, that clause is dumb. Putting a clause that says "if you last less than a year you owe us money" when they didn't front relocation costs is a pretty good indicator of the company's priorities and general penny pinching. If you're currently unemployed or in a super tough market, maybe think about it, but I'm a big believer in "when people show you who they really are, believe them" and that's a giant flashing sign that they don't trust their employees or their hiring process enough to actually pay their recruiters, and that they'll be agonizingly hard to work with in other ways that involve actually investing in their business and employees. And I've spent too much time at places like that. Content for this thread: onboarding a new developer and getting to explain all the horrible choices we've made as he struggles to successfully get the dependencies needed to build our software. This is all documented, but none of the docs are for Ubuntu 16, and all sorts of fun things have changed. I'm tempted to just install a puppet agent on every dev's machine: "here, run this, grab coffee, come back to a functional laptop." At least he won't need to build subversion 1.6 to merge branches anymore.
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Nov 3, 2016 08:23
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This JIRA workflow speaks to me:
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Nov 4, 2016 17:04
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Che Delilas posted:I conditionally disagree with this statement. Contracts and employment agreements are generally products of HR and Legal. Legal is Legal wherever you go, they're going to be as broad and weighted towards the company as they think can get away with. HR is almost always lovely, the question is how much power they have. Even so, the clause in this contract indicates to me that they previously had a problem of developers getting the gently caress out early on in their employment. Developers getting the gently caress out early in their employment probably have a good reason for doing so. So he should get the gently caress out. MisterZimbu fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 20:15
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CPColin posted:This JIRA workflow speaks to me: Story of my life.
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Nov 4, 2016 20:43
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MisterZimbu posted:Even so, the clause in this contract indicates to me that they previously had a problem of developers getting the gently caress out early on in their employment. If there is any possibility of a job netting you negative pay you walk. End of story. A clause where you have to pay them recruiter costs back is that possibility. It absolutely sounds like a solution somebody came up with to force people to stay rather than convince them to. I'd have walked on seeing that too. No questions asked. Just gone.
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Nov 4, 2016 22:36
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That kind of clause is worse than my last company that counted my travel expenses to meet them on-site (I was remote) as part of my compensation, meaning I paid 28%+ of my travel costs out of pocket by increasing my taxable income without getting paid any more. It means that if I traveled, say, 50% of the time that I would be starting to get paid negative because my salary and bonuses would be less than the taxes I'd owe on the taxable income. I complained to my manager and he said "yeah, we had a problem for a while where people couldn't pay their mortgages because they had traveled so much for the company and the company just cut them a check in those cases." That company was poo poo though, which is why if you're getting a worse deal than even that before you're even signed on you should absolutely run. Be thankful you were given this kind of warning flag up-front.
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Nov 4, 2016 23:02
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If there is any possibility of a job netting you negative pay you walk. End of story. A clause where you have to pay them recruiter costs back is that possibility. It absolutely sounds like a solution somebody came up with to force people to stay rather than convince them to.
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Nov 5, 2016 18:24
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necrobobsledder posted:That kind of clause is worse than my last company that counted my travel expenses to meet them on-site (I was remote) as part of my compensation, meaning I paid 28%+ of my travel costs out of pocket by increasing my taxable income without getting paid any more. It means that if I traveled, say, 50% of the time that I would be starting to get paid negative because my salary and bonuses would be less than the taxes I'd owe on the taxable income. I complained to my manager and he said "yeah, we had a problem for a while where people couldn't pay their mortgages because they had traveled so much for the company and the company just cut them a check in those cases." That company was poo poo though, which is why if you're getting a worse deal than even that before you're even signed on you should absolutely run. Did you ever check with an accountant or attorney to see if there was any remedy? edit: this happens when they don't have an accountable plan: https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/2595504-can-my-company-show-reimbursed-expenses-as-my-earnings I don't see how a company could have an accountant and not have some of the most basic accounting stuff so that's a good reason to run - who knows what questionable stuff they're doing. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Nov 6, 2016 |
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Nov 5, 2016 23:53
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I never went that far since the amount I could recoup was maybe $800 and I'm pretty savvy with taxes. I spent a week researching the matter, in fact. I looked at the tax code they filed for travel expenses and they counted the reimbursement as not ordinary for business so it disqualified me from deducting it under every section that lets individuals line item deduct costs of conducting business. I considered going to a CPA to help me properly word the flaw to our incompetent accountants but I was too burned out from work to fight over it. Months after I left I got a prorated quarterly bonus that I don't think I was entitled to, so that evened it out a bit.
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Nov 6, 2016 01:58
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hobbesmaster posted:Did you ever check with an accountant or attorney to see if there was any remedy? I'm really glad these things come up in these threads because I had never fully understood the scope of the galaxy of bullshit employers can subject people to 
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Nov 7, 2016 15:25
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today in Learning Git With ChickenWing: git rebase --onto I'm worried that one day this all might make sense and I'll never be able to use another SCM again. Reading that "git is a graph" guide is rapidly accelerating me in that direction
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Nov 7, 2016 21:18
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What's really fun is when you realize that git rebase -i allows you to not just modify your commit ordering, but add and remove arbitrary commits, including commits by branch name and other label types
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Nov 7, 2016 21:45
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ChickenWing posted:today in Learning Git With ChickenWing: git rebase --onto I used to like fossil for the built in tickets/wiki, but I've recently found that my todo list on my iPad serves that purpose fairly well
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Nov 7, 2016 21:58
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ChickenWing posted:today in Learning Git With ChickenWing: git rebase --onto I don't want to know anything else. Seems like everything else is bad technology lol.
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Nov 7, 2016 22:15
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KoRMaK posted:I don't want to know anything else. Seems like everything else is bad technology lol. Mercurial!
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Nov 9, 2016 12:54
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Just bitching a bit. We have lots of features to build, and naturally these tend to get priority over everything but the show-stoppiest of bugs. There are some bugs that generate a lot of error logs and subsequent alerts, but that don't result in any customer complaints or performance problems, so naturally they don't get a lot of attention from the people who are prioritizing. Lately one of the managers has noticed these alerts. He recently complained to me that these alerts are getting ignored by the developers. I reminded him that we have a feature backlog and constant pressure to get all the features done now why aren't they done now everything is highest priority now now now (I phrased it more diplomatically, but that's the basic situation). He indicated that these alerts should be annoying us and that we should want to fix the problems generating them. I said we do want to fix this poo poo, but we don't control the priorities, are you saying we should just decide on our own to let a prioritized and committed task drop from a sprint and work on something that we want to work on? He is apparently used to working at companies where devs would just take care of this stuff because it annoyed them. Dude does this kind of thing all the time: doesn't say straight out that yes, he wants us to work longer hours so we can cram in 'unsanctioned' improvements along with getting our official work done (as if that would ever be appreciated without them adding a "well if you had time to do this random thing why didn't you take the next highest priority from our backlog instead?"). He just talks about what would be nice, what he's "used to," what we as devs could be doing, and then when nobody decides to work a 12 hour day, acts like a disappointed parent. He clearly knows that if he mandates anything or makes his expectations official, people would jump ship, because this company doesn't pay well enough and our product isn't inspiring enough to get us to sacrifice any more of our lives to it than we already do. So he instead resorts to these indirect pressure tactics to get us to feel bad about not doing more. It's really irritating, and while most of the time I can more or less ignore it, this has not been a good week and it's sticking in my craw.
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Nov 10, 2016 01:47
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Che Delilas posted:Just bitching a bit. The solution is to go out for beers with your team afterwards and all laugh at how he expects you to feel guilty for not working 60 hour weeks like a permacrunch shop
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Nov 10, 2016 13:20
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Storysmith posted:I'm tempted to just install a puppet agent on every dev's machine: "here, run this, grab coffee, come back to a functional laptop." You should do this. Being able to create/refresh a development environment with a single command is a huge advantage, especially with explicit configuration files brought under version control. If you already enjoy Puppet, maybe check out Boxen.
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Nov 10, 2016 14:24
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Doc Hawkins posted:You should do this. Being able to create/refresh a development environment with a single command is a huge advantage, especially with explicit configuration files brought under version control. Onboarding a new dev is so useful. It shows you all the ways you've been boiling the frog for your team. Whenever I'm onboarded, or onboarding someone, I try to make the first change an edit to the README or project setup. edit: also, gently caress all managers who won't schedule maintenance into sprints. If it's not a priority for them, it's not a priority for me. I can make my case during sprint planning but I'm not about to cowboy bugfixes after hours. vonnegutt fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Nov 10, 2016 |
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Nov 10, 2016 14:53
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Doc Hawkins posted:You should do this. Being able to create/refresh a development environment with a single command is a huge advantage, especially with explicit configuration files brought under version control. No you shouldn't do it. Because then you become desktop support for every change. Any time there's a new so release you get to update it. My group was responsible for that in the past and I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.
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Nov 10, 2016 15:49
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Well, both of the teams I've seen it work well on were command-line centric, and everyone self-serviced the changes they wanted via pull-requests, so maybe those were important factors too. But if you'll be punished for improving things, that might be something more important to fix than development environment provisioning.
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Nov 10, 2016 17:23
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Doc Hawkins posted:Well, both of the teams I've seen it work well on were command-line centric, and everyone self-serviced the changes they wanted via pull-requests, so maybe those were important factors too. It's not punished it's rewarded with ownership! And the culture that sprung up was, "We can't update to X because that team didn't update the scripts yet!" Yes anyone could have since it was in git same as anything else, but they didn't want to be responsible for it in the future either.
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Nov 10, 2016 17:41
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Going full hog automation on everything locally as a developer seems like a silly time investment unless it's a particular pain point or you guys churn through developers a lot. A lot of the problems people have had with getting a development environment up have been solved using just Vagrant and/or Docker and those things can be installed with a small shell script nowadays. You don't want your developers spending time like they're devops / infrastructure guys, that's a full-blown violation of separation of concerns in my view.vonnegutt posted:Onboarding a new dev is so useful. It shows you all the ways you've been boiling the frog for your team. Whenever I'm onboarded, or onboarding someone, I try to make the first change an edit to the README or project setup.
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Nov 10, 2016 18:38
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM
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Nov 21, 2016 20:18
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Didn't watch that yet but just by name alone and skipping through it, it reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MAL8pJImQ Current OOP is (mostly) bad because we never left our procedural crutches behind. Ruby is cool and good, and introduced me to smalltalk which also seemed really cool and good. I hate having to do stuff in C#
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Nov 21, 2016 20:24
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Who has a holiday production freeze? How does that work for you with sprints and continuous delivery? We have retail clients so our freeze starts the week before Black Friday until January 2nd. So that's nice.
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Nov 23, 2016 01:03
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Polio Vax Scene posted:Is this a thing that actually happens or am I better off not knowing and being able to sleep peacefully? Well, if you're writing software that runs on (unshielded) devices in areas exposed to high radiation, yes. Aerospace... possibly defense.
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Nov 23, 2016 01:11
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smackfu posted:Who has a holiday production freeze? How does that work for you with sprints and continuous delivery? IMO I think q4 freeze is rude and unnecessary in 2016 but I do understand it as it's hard to incentivize having sufficient preparation for q4 such that it's no big thing. Ideally you still deploy to beta and gamma (or even your shadow prod that takes synthetic traffic!) while focusing on tools/infra improvements. It's really nice having a month to go fix whatever after you've worked quite hard on features/launches.
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Nov 23, 2016 02:12
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necrobobsledder posted:Going full hog automation on everything locally as a developer seems like a silly time investment unless it's a particular pain point or you guys churn through developers a lot. A lot of the problems people have had with getting a development environment up have been solved using just Vagrant and/or Docker and those things can be installed with a small shell script nowadays. A single command creating/synchronizing a usable environment sure would count as full automation in my book. I've seen Vagrant used for good effect at one company, though as soon as someone started running the same virtual machines in our data center, everyone flocked to those en masse. It is good for bringing new developers up to speed, but that's just a proxy metric: the more important benefits I saw were preventing environment drift and reducing the cost of improvement. I haven't worked at a non-pairing shop for a while, and I know that changes the trade-offs significantly. quote:You don't want your developers spending time like they're devops / infrastructure guys, that's a full-blown violation of separation of concerns in my view. Well, the idea is to get a net savings of developer time, but my summary of the whole devops meme would be that those aren't really separate concerns.
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Nov 23, 2016 03:01
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smackfu posted:Who has a holiday production freeze? How does that work for you with sprints and continuous delivery? We do because first party shuts down, and out of 18!developers the last workweek of the year has one present. We plan sprints for the number and velocity present and continue delivering. Other groups do product integration and I'm not sure their plans but ops have put a stop to deployments for not having spare capacity for self inflicted prod fires.
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Nov 23, 2016 03:06
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smackfu posted:Who has a holiday production freeze? How does that work for you with sprints and continuous delivery? it means the race to push features we promised for this quarter starts a month early.
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Nov 23, 2016 03:09
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smackfu posted:Who has a holiday production freeze? How does that work for you with sprints and continuous delivery?
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Nov 23, 2016 14:20
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Vulture Culture posted:it's not like there's a dev/prod disconnect where we're just sitting on these huge feature branches until January 1.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:02
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FamDav posted:IMO I think q4 freeze is rude and unnecessary in 2016 but I do understand it as it's hard to incentivize having sufficient preparation for q4 such that it's no big thing. For businesses with exceptional volume and potentially huge consequences at this time of year, a freeze makes perfect sense. We want to minimize the chances for something to go wrong in production, and no feature we might release is worth the potential headache. We don't release anything but critical hotfixes until after the peak. It's been pretty nice getting to burn off some tech debt these last few weeks, too.
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Nov 24, 2016 11:32
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metztli posted:For businesses with exceptional volume and potentially huge consequences at this time of year, a freeze makes perfect sense. We want to minimize the chances for something to go wrong in production, and no feature we might release is worth the potential headache. I imagine that also depends heavily on what kind of software you're making. You absolutely do not want to have your point of sale cash register software that fuels any store at all go down any time during the holiday season. Same goes with inventory, tracking, or accounting software.
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Nov 25, 2016 03:24
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You may remember me as the guy with the boss everyone hated. Some of his bad habits have rubbed off on the underlings, resulting in a Serious Fuckup in production on Friday. Fridays are big for us, we generally don't touch production, as we want all our systems and automation to run over the weekend without issue. The coworker in question was developing on the production server, and overwrote the production files with his development files, which were ancient. The ancient files resulted in about 100 rows getting mangled in the production DB. I restored the data and files with no drama. My boss immediately started in with his usual logic: "Well, the API should be smart enough to prevent you from setting values to null and ...  "I responded "This is why I urge everyone to develop and test on the dev server, using the cloned DB" He kinda paused and just for a second, I hoped that it would sink in... but then he went back to rambling about making the API do magic. My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 11, 2016 |
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Dec 11, 2016 21:31
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Why did you stop there? You gotta be insistent if he's an idiot
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Dec 11, 2016 21:35
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