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Khisanth Magus posted:Was wondering if I could get some advice from this thread. A month or so ago our only Sr developer was fired(which is a very long story, but the short of it was that he brought it on himself), and next week our manager is interviewing 2 candidates for the open position. The kicker is that he would like me and one other team member to also interview the people, both to ensure that they actually know their stuff and that they would be a good fit for the team. Neither of us have ever interviewed anyone before, and most of the interviews I've been on the other end of have been complete bullshit. I don't see any real value to asking someone to code some algorithm on a whiteboard. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources I could read to find good interview questions for a Sr dev position. Be prepared to be astonished at how many people fail FizzBuzz.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:08
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Yeah I would at least have them do something thing trivial like reverse a string or whatever. In my last round of interviews it was a slight concern if there was nothing involving writing a couple of lines of code in the technical part of the interview.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:14
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Khisanth Magus posted:Was wondering if I could get some advice from this thread. A month or so ago our only Sr developer was fired(which is a very long story, but the short of it was that he brought it on himself), and next week our manager is interviewing 2 candidates for the open position. The kicker is that he would like me and one other team member to also interview the people, both to ensure that they actually know their stuff and that they would be a good fit for the team. Neither of us have ever interviewed anyone before, and most of the interviews I've been on the other end of have been complete bullshit. I don't see any real value to asking someone to code some algorithm on a whiteboard. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources I could read to find good interview questions for a Sr dev position. "I see you've done some angular and some react, which do you prefer?" "If you were starting a new project, why would you pick one over another?" "Have you run into any problems with that one?" "Are there situations where you'd recommend the other one?" "Anything else you have to be aware of when starting out a new project with that / introducing it to a project?" It's a good check that they've actually used the technologies, a couple of years ago everyone did a five minute tutorial on angular then put it on their CV. You also get to see what sort of tradeoffs they consider and how well they can communicate the technical choices they would make.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:31
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Khisanth Magus posted:Was wondering if I could get some advice from this thread. A month or so ago our only Sr developer was fired(which is a very long story, but the short of it was that he brought it on himself), and next week our manager is interviewing 2 candidates for the open position. The kicker is that he would like me and one other team member to also interview the people, both to ensure that they actually know their stuff and that they would be a good fit for the team. Neither of us have ever interviewed anyone before, and most of the interviews I've been on the other end of have been complete bullshit. I don't see any real value to asking someone to code some algorithm on a whiteboard. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources I could read to find good interview questions for a Sr dev position. What happened to the first Sr. dev?
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Feb 23, 2017 18:02
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B-Nasty posted:I think the idea of a standup works well, as long as the terseness rule is strongly enforced. Getting a high-level view of what other developers are doing, and particularly their challenges, can be useful for the team as a whole. Gildiss posted:Stand ups are only useful for forcing a completely disfunctional team to communicate with each other. Otherwise most people know how to tell others what they are doing and if they need help in real-time throughout the day. In theory.
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Feb 23, 2017 18:17
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Pollyanna posted:What happened to the first Sr. dev? Was a long series of stuff. When I started he was the team leader/manager of the team I joined, but he was rather abrasive without any real brain-to-mouth filter and offended a lot of people, in particular the very controlling lead PM on our project, so he got demoted down to SR dev. Continued that way for a while, with him officially being SR dev but still doing lot of team lead stuff. Was a good developer and team lead, but continued to offend lots of people with his abrasiveness and outspokenness. He was in charge of updating the third party software we develop on to a newer version. The upgrade went tits up, with us being hosed over by the vendor at every turn. Which OK, that is bullshit and was not entirely his fault. What was his fault was deploying the broken, half finished stuff to our testing environments before going on maternity leave for 2 weeks, with no one else knowing enough about how our deployment software works to be able to undo it, causing us to waste 2 weeks trying to unfuck stuff. After he got repremanded for that be busy stopped giving a poo poo and didn't really do any real work until he was eventually fired after being on probation for like 4 months.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:06
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Khisanth Magus posted:Was a long series of stuff. When I started he was the team leader/manager of the team I joined, but he was rather abrasive without any real brain-to-mouth filter and offended a lot of people, in particular the very controlling lead PM on our project, so he got demoted down to SR dev. Continued that way for a while, with him officially being SR dev but still doing lot of team lead stuff. Was a good developer and team lead, but continued to offend lots of people with his abrasiveness and outspokenness. He was in charge of updating the third party software we develop on to a newer version. The upgrade went tits up, with us being hosed over by the vendor at every turn. Which OK, that is bullshit and was not entirely his fault. What was his fault was deploying the broken, half finished stuff to our testing environments before going on maternity leave for 2 weeks, with no one else knowing enough about how our deployment software works to be able to undo it, causing us to waste 2 weeks trying to unfuck stuff. After he got repremanded for that be busy stopped giving a poo poo and didn't really do any real work until he was eventually fired after being on probation for like 4 months. Wow I can relate with some stuff in this, especially the not caring part after coming back from parental leave. Having kids really put a lot of thing into perspective, what I though was a big deal before I really didn't give a poo poo after.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:21
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AskYourself posted:Wow I can relate with some stuff in this, especially the not caring part after coming back from parental leave. Well, this was his 5th or 6th kid, so its not like having a kid was a new thing to him :p He didn't really care about being fired though, during the entire time he was on probation he was job hunting and already had an offer lined up for when he eventually got fired.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:23
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From your personality description it seems you worked with Linus Thorvalds or a Dutch person.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:59
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Khisanth Magus posted:Was wondering if I could get some advice from this thread. A month or so ago our only Sr developer was fired(which is a very long story, but the short of it was that he brought it on himself), and next week our manager is interviewing 2 candidates for the open position. The kicker is that he would like me and one other team member to also interview the people, both to ensure that they actually know their stuff and that they would be a good fit for the team. Neither of us have ever interviewed anyone before, and most of the interviews I've been on the other end of have been complete bullshit. I don't see any real value to asking someone to code some algorithm on a whiteboard. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources I could read to find good interview questions for a Sr dev position. I work in web dev and I always ask questions in interviews that are conversational, but challenging while being simple at the same time. Keeps things on track while not getting dragged down into details and whiteboarding bullshit. - How do you center a div? - What does 'git stash' do? (I expect most people to fail this one) - Explain the general process of configuring an SSL cert - Explain public key cryptography as if you were trying to get your grandma to grasp it - What is a salted hash? - Explain the difference between a inner/outer/left/right join - What are some of the highlights of CSS3 and HTML5? - What text editor/IDE do you use? Why? - What are some of the methods you use to automate processes/increase your efficiency while coding? - I'll formulate some question where the answer will be 'use the divide and conquer strategy to locate a bug'. Bonus points if they mention git bisect. These sorts of questions lead into a more informal conversation, and once I can get just people talking, I can immediately assess their abilities in a broad manner. It only takes me about 3 minutes to put someone into a Jr/Sr/Unqualified bucket.
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Feb 25, 2017 15:49
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What do you do about a team member that's contributing negatively to the team? The lead developer on our project is a blocker on QA testing, core development, and deployment pipelines - they tend to go dark often and usually silo themselves (WFH constantly, often unable to get ahold of after ~2PM either on Slack or in the office), constantly change deployment approaches (they've been working on a new deployment pipeline to fix our current broken one for about a week now with no tangible progress and we can't test or deploy our code changes as a result), have been involving themselves across teams but not properly managing their work well enough to not piss every single team off somehow (I know at least one person on each team who has a beef with them), and tickets are constantly held up because we either need to get information from them or because they took the lead on the ticket but hasn't actually touched it in forever. This is really getting the team's morale down and the stress/burden is being passed off to me and my coworker, IMO very unfairly. The project manager, product owner, QA team, and us developers agree that they're a big blocker and from interviewing other teams this appears to be a pattern. I've considered bringing this up with my manager, but I'm afraid that my manager will simply take it as me trying to pass the blame off of myself. How do I broach this topic?
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Feb 25, 2017 16:22
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They're probably already mentally checked out and are done interviewing or have been interviewing for other positions. It'll probably clear itself up in a few weeks. Until then sit back and enjoy the blockers.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:41
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Talk to your manager. They will want to know what's going wrong with the work, the team, and you. They can't fix problems if they don't know there are problems.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:50
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Pollyanna posted:What do you do about a team member that's contributing negatively to the team? The lead developer on our project is a blocker on QA testing, core development, and deployment pipelines - they tend to go dark often and usually silo themselves (WFH constantly, often unable to get ahold of after ~2PM either on Slack or in the office), constantly change deployment approaches (they've been working on a new deployment pipeline to fix our current broken one for about a week now with no tangible progress and we can't test or deploy our code changes as a result), have been involving themselves across teams but not properly managing their work well enough to not piss every single team off somehow (I know at least one person on each team who has a beef with them), and tickets are constantly held up because we either need to get information from them or because they took the lead on the ticket but hasn't actually touched it in forever.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:18
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Also stay in the office until 5 PM for at least two weeks before going to the boss about how somebody else is hurting team <whatever>. Also stop letting them be a blocker, but you have a project manager and poo poo that are clued into this right? Get them to deal with this poo poo. sarehu fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Feb 26, 2017 |
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Feb 26, 2017 01:50
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Seriously, talk to your PM. Their whole job is cat herding people while continuously updating plans and estimates. Have the PM broach it to your manager if you're afraid to, but really your manager probably wants to know. If they're any good, they'll know how to quietly ask around and see if your lead developer really is loving off.
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Feb 26, 2017 02:08
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If it's a relatively new person, there's a possibility that you can complain around a bunch and get them fired. If they've been at the company for a while, it's really hard to get rid of them. I like Gildiss' answer, especially if they were a good contributor a year ago. On the other hand, if they've been useless for over a year, good luck getting rid of them because they're either buddies with management or management is useless (or both!). Personally, I found quitting the best solution. Instead of having uncomfortable conversations with my boss ("'Mniot, could Mr Clueless help with this?' 'Uhhh... sidebar? ... No, he's still totally useless. Here's a list of all the things he's failed to deliver since the last time I begged you to get rid of him.'"), I have a new group of coworkers who are all smart and hard-working. Who knows how long it can last, but it's done a lot to cheer me up so far!
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Feb 26, 2017 04:47
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AskYourself posted:Wow I can relate with some stuff in this, especially the not caring part after coming back from parental leave. Yeah. Not gonna lie, having kids took me from a couple hours per day after work of keeping on top of fancy new poo poo and best practices / labbing new tech at home to like 1-2 hours per week of that stuff. I try to make it up by being more efficient at work and spending a couple hours per week in the office on "R&D". But yeah if you want to be heavily involved in your kids' lives, career naturally suffers at least a bit.
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Feb 26, 2017 05:11
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After a restructuring a few changes are announced: - No more working from home - Instead of a developer from the team, this other guy who you never saw before is your scrummaster, he will not be working as a dev - Actually, he is a former PM - Actually, he never used Jira before, can you explain to him how it works? - I did not get the team allocation email, for some reason I got a new job lined up from the first of May, looks like there will be a vacation of some sort coming up. Looking forward to the coming weeks, as two seniors already left as they saw it coming and I know of at least 3 others (incl myself) that are going to jump ship if they are serious about the murder of whatever agility was left. I'll probably be let go by that time, but yeah.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:46
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Keetron posted:After a restructuring a few changes are announced: Kiss of death right there
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Feb 28, 2017 17:10
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Keetron posted:After a restructuring a few changes are announced: Out of curiosity how official/documented was that? I'm interested in cases where it's a known benefit and may be a reason for people choosing job A vs job B and then having it taken away from them. I mean if I chose a role with 15k less because I could work from home 60-100% of the time and they took that away. They better be bringing the pay up to market rate or expecting the walkout that seems to be on the way for Keetron's coworkers.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:42
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Keetron posted:After a restructuring a few changes are announced: The scrum master should not be a developer on the team, that is actually a correct move. [edit] In theory, from a Pure Agile perspective.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:56
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:The scrum master should not be a developer on the team, that is actually a correct move. I think they should BE a developer though, otherwise, it's just another word for Project Manager.
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Feb 28, 2017 21:01
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They probably should have at least been a developer at some point in their lives. If they're doing more than just scrum mastering though, they're probably program managing (projects, programs, etc.)
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Feb 28, 2017 21:03
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Hughlander posted:Out of curiosity how official/documented was that? I'm interested in cases where it's a known benefit and may be a reason for people choosing job A vs job B and then having it taken away from them. Agreed, remote was 100% spelled-out in my last contract. Had they changed course they'd have owed me a bit of cash (more than 10k less than 50)
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Feb 28, 2017 23:29
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If you have never personally delivered anything that you are responsible for managing at any previous point in your career, you probably have no business being put in charge of delivering it. Construction project foremen have usually gosh actually worked a construction project as a laborer before almost always. But half the time it's some random with a marketing / business background because management doesn't get along with engineers and wants to be in meetings with people more like them. The flip side is when engineers that don't like project management are forced into the role when the skillset of good project management only partly is about subject matter expertise.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:46
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I would never think of the scrum master as being the person in charge of delivering a product. A scrum master where I work is just the person who runs the stand-ups and planning/retrospective meetings. Is that weird?
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Mar 1, 2017 02:27
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Rubellavator posted:I would never think of the scrum master as being the person in charge of delivering a product. A scrum master where I work is just the person who runs the stand-ups and planning/retrospective meetings. Is that weird? That is basically what it has been in my experience. Run the meetings, and do the burn down chart, that is pretty much it.
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Mar 1, 2017 04:11
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Khisanth Magus posted:That is basically what it has been in my experience. Run the meetings, and do the burn down chart, that is pretty much it. How the gently caress is that an entire job?
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Mar 1, 2017 04:58
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Steve French posted:How the gently caress is that an entire job? Because it's Scrum(TM), so you gotta have a scrum master and a product owner in every meeting. Assuming the ideal size of a scrum team is like 8 or so people, that means you can bill an extra $100 an hour for every 7 people working on the project. That adds up.
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Mar 1, 2017 05:11
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Steve French posted:How the gently caress is that an entire job? It isn't, which is why usually it is a side role for an ambitious developer.
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Mar 1, 2017 06:32
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Steve French posted:How the gently caress is that an entire job? I quit asking this question about a lot of positions when I realized the answer is usually "it isn't".
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Mar 1, 2017 07:18
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It's a part time job if you do it about right in my experience so you need to be managing multiple projects for that to work out right in cost effectiveness of people. The project and product manager tends to get combined together in lots of places though and that makes it definitely full time. Then there's issues of handling the BS of enterprise needs needing lots of hand holding that is tough to scale without throwing bodies at the problem (think of how you'd address a consumer tech start-up targeting... 75 year olds. Yeah....)
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Mar 1, 2017 11:35
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So remember my rant about Marketing and how they refused to listen to me on creating a GUI? Here's how they ended up doing it: 1) They made a lovely single page PSD of the web interface. 2) They handed it off to a random guy they got from Robert Half and told him to create the rest of the pages from the engineering spec at 125$/hr. Now they are pissed when I refused to make a bunch of changes half-assed because it's not in the PSD which was half-baked and lovely. They are also even more pissed that I hired my brother to recreate what the developer made in PSD form, and that I am refusing to do any changes until it's in the PSD and approved. I have the CEO's approval on this, so the anger from the head of marketing is even funnier to me. 
FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 15:25
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Steve French posted:How the gently caress is that an entire job? The one time I worked with a decent scrum master he was working with ~4 product teams and constantly meeting (or at least communicating) with stakeholders to better understand what they wanted so he could prioritize the backlog for the planning meetings. It worked great and I miss it.
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Mar 1, 2017 16:04
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Munkeymon posted:The one time I worked with a decent scrum master he was working with ~4 product teams and constantly meeting (or at least communicating) with stakeholders to better understand what they wanted so he could prioritize the backlog for the planning meetings. It worked great and I miss it.
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Mar 1, 2017 18:19
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We're a small product company and have switched from scrummerfall to kanban and it has been liberating. Quick touch base once a day and a dedication to JIRA being updated. Everyone is magically on the same page. If things don't make the release, they are feature switched out and will get in the next.
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Mar 2, 2017 07:24
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Munkeymon posted:The one time I worked with a decent scrum master he was working with ~4 product teams and constantly meeting (or at least communicating) with stakeholders to better understand what they wanted so he could prioritize the backlog for the planning meetings. It worked great and I miss it. That's cool, but the second part (meeting with stakeholders and prioritizing the backlog) is officially the job of the product owner.
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Mar 2, 2017 09:39
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Messyass posted:That's cool, but the second part (meeting with stakeholders and prioritizing the backlog) is officially the job of the product owner. IIRC the official product owner was some VP or something who got a presentation every week or so. Maybe they just called her the product owner for management ego stroking? Plus I think she delegated significantly to PMs, but whatever it still worked great because she got to see the UI do new (generally actually just slightly different) things at the end of every sprint and was happy.
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Mar 2, 2017 15:42
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I guess as a database dev I'm allowed to post here. I'm getting super frustrated with the management here being stingy with non-standard editions of server software. We need to do data-driven report subscriptions in SQL Server. Great. No problem. Point and click, make it happen, awesome functionality. I send a quote to the IT manager for SQL Server Enterprise because it covers that plus some other features they want to see. Nope! Too expensive! "Why should we pay that much for software that will do the work for us? We're already paying you to do it!"  So now I have to code a suite of stored procedures from scratch that will do the same thing in a much more convoluted and backend-only way. Neat. I've been working on this for like a month. Hopefully one of my job interviews works out well and I'll be out of here in a few weeks anyway  I'd like to do actual development instead of 99% of my job being putting together ad-hoc reports because the management is too lazy to sort and filter in Excel.
Count Thrashula fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 17:54
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