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Volmarias posted:I'll admit that I did end up with that job briefly, but then I got out after less than a year and became much happier (and better paid) at the next one. Welp, had a nice long meeting with bossman and have basically been told that the ship has sailed and that they ignored pretty much all of our needs as devs. It's a political decision, whether that's because they want to sell the company or they just want to be trend-followers doesn't really matter to me at this point. We got one (potential) concession to mitigate visual distractions in the form of medium-height walls between our individual work spaces, but nothing to help with the noise. To add insult to injury, they're spending a LOT of money on brand new furniture (we have pretty drat good desks already), again all for the sake of appearances. No money for market rate salaries though  None of this is happening until the end of the year. So as someone else already suggested, at least I have a nice number of months to find a job that will pay me significantly better, even if it's also in a boiler room. And I'm starting the hunt this weekend. Screw this.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:25
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Keetron posted:You talk a lot but it can be distilled as: "no, not really" and "unfortunately yes". If that's your prediction, then what would your recommendation be?
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Mar 13, 2017 22:15
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Portland Sucks posted:This is going to be a tangential effort that will have to be a slow burn I think. During the interview w/ our exec he used the terms "data mining, deep learning, neural network, AI" freely and interchangeably and really really wanted to emphasize that he was convinced that it was ~~the future~~. I haven't had an opportunity to talk with him again since the interview so I'm running on minimal information in regards to what he actually wants to happen and how, but at the moment all I know is that he is apparently intensely excited about buzzwords concerning ML, approved spending six figures on a SAS license that hasn't been touched in over six months, and also hired an undergrad CS major to being this project. My thoughts so far are just that I need to sit down with him again as well as some of the other staff and start a discussion about what areas of the operations that we collect data on should be within the scope, spend some more time becoming familiar with the domain, and then just begin with some cursory data exploration to get the ball rolling while implementing some sort of warehousing plan. lol you can barely do deep learning on SAS that's a goddamned waste of money I went to Stanford for undergrad and master's and I knew like 5 undergrads who actually knew WTF they were doing wrt deep learning You can get 80% of the value of things from linear and logistic regressions guaranteed
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Mar 13, 2017 22:33
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curufinor posted:lol you can barely do deep learning on SAS that's a goddamned waste of money That's more or less my thought process at the moment. Knowing that they're paying for the SAS license, I'm hoping to demonstrate that some results can be had without paying the overhead. Ditching SAS when their license is up is currently the only thing I'm pretty strongly convinced I should be responsible to suggest early on. I get the feeling that someone figured you can replace an actual data scientist with expensive software and an undergrad.
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Mar 13, 2017 22:51
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Portland Sucks posted:If that's your prediction, then what would your recommendation be? The reason this place is in such dire straits is mostly due to upper management politics and internal people who don't know better. What you are planning to do is not just a change in software but also a big change in culture. I do not think an undergrad is in the best place to make a cultural change happen but it is what I recommend more than putting in more or different tooling. So if you really want to succeed at this place I think you should be very aware what compelled people to bypass IT, why they are now working the way they are and what you can leverage to move them into another direction. In general, a tool is just a tool. Organisational success is much more depending on who you know, how they like you and what benefits you bring to those you want something of.
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Mar 14, 2017 12:24
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Keetron posted:What you are planning to do is not just a change in software but also a big change in culture. If the company's plan is to grow the team by adding people who think like software developers instead of engineers trying to do dev work, the team's culture is going to change no matter what.
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Mar 14, 2017 14:35
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This all sounds more like "devops" which I've found is typically code for "we are bad at software and people and are too cheap to pay for consultants and our leadership sucks, so we'll put all these burdens on an underpaid business development engineer rebranded as devops."
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Mar 14, 2017 17:45
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Che Delilas posted:None of this is happening until the end of the year. So as someone else already suggested, at least I have a nice number of months to find a job that will pay me significantly better, even if it's also in a boiler room. And I'm starting the hunt this weekend. Screw this. Success story of the thread.
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Mar 14, 2017 17:51
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How do people manage to extract inputs and outputs from product owners when working on apps that have both a UI and an API? Right now our app has run into untold numbers of stupid bugs because of inputs and outputs being unclearly specified (what type? fractional percentages vs whole numbers???), conflated between API inputs and UI fields ("birthday" in the UI vs. "currentAge" for the API), and just plain misunderstandings (two variables named "health care", one being input and the other output). I'm staring at a word document with like a paragraph each for 25 inputs and it still doesn't answer my questions. Getting the information I need is like pulling teeth, especially when the person you're working with doesn't understand the difference between UI fields and API inputs. I'm starting to get sick of it. How is stuff like this usually compiled and documented?
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Mar 15, 2017 17:08
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I think API docs "usually" end up exactly like that. Like most documentation, it's written as an afterthought and potentially by somebody other than the person who wrote the code and it's out-of-date as soon as somebody touches the code for any reason. In the last bit of API work I did, before getting laid off, I made the function call spit out a usage message that the code generated via reflection, so nobody would have to remember to update it. I also wrote a unit test that used similar reflection to force developers to write a new unit test for every new field they added. I then told my PO that if people wanted to use the API and needed documentation, we should send them the unit test and tell them, "This is what we're guaranteeing will be available." I have no idea if any part of this strategy worked, because, naturally, the person who had been clamoring for the new API call for months hadn't used it by the time I left.
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Mar 15, 2017 17:32
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Pollyanna posted:How do people manage to extract inputs and outputs from product owners when working on apps that have both a UI and an API? Right now our app has run into untold numbers of stupid bugs because of inputs and outputs being unclearly specified (what type? fractional percentages vs whole numbers???), conflated between API inputs and UI fields ("birthday" in the UI vs. "currentAge" for the API), and just plain misunderstandings (two variables named "health care", one being input and the other output). From a requirements perspective, it doesn't matter. Figure out how the system in total has to handle currentAge, and then figure out for yourself how to handle in API and UI. Unless "expose API to external developers" is a feature, why would product owners care how either works? Try to understand the problem they want solved, and solve it. Don't try to trick them into being developers.
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Mar 15, 2017 18:14
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Skandranon posted:From a requirements perspective, it doesn't matter. Figure out how the system in total has to handle currentAge, and then figure out for yourself how to handle in API and UI. Unless "expose API to external developers" is a feature, why would product owners care how either works? Try to understand the problem they want solved, and solve it. Don't try to trick them into being developers. Well yeah, that's stuff I can figure out. What's more of a problem is stuff with a range of "$0~$10,000,000" where the default value for that field is "100%". 
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Mar 15, 2017 19:26
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Munkeymon posted:If the company's plan is to grow the team by adding people who think like software developers instead of engineers trying to do dev work, the team's culture is going to change no matter what. That's my thought as well. I'm thinking the safest route might just be to set up my own development server and establish procedures for myself that don't interfere with how they're currently running the shop, but can hopefully slowly pave the way for some structure as we continue to hire more developers. I'm not going to bank on trying to teach the old dogs new tricks, but we should have a team of new dogs in the next few years. If I end up staying I'd really like to find a way to repair relations with the IT department, but just seems like childish optimism at this point.
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Mar 16, 2017 00:20
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Portland Sucks posted:That's my thought as well. I'm thinking the safest route might just be to set up my own development server and establish procedures for myself that don't interfere with how they're currently running the shop, but can hopefully slowly pave the way for some structure as we continue to hire more developers. I'm not going to bank on trying to teach the old dogs new tricks, but we should have a team of new dogs in the next few years. If I end up staying I'd really like to find a way to repair relations with the IT department, but just seems like childish optimism at this point. You know, you might be on the right track with this. Re: API talk. The services we are now building against have insane documentation that is all over the place. So I just make a soap call using an existing application and then use the response as a baseline for what we can expect.
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Mar 16, 2017 06:56
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Pollyanna posted:How do people manage to extract inputs and outputs from product owners when working on apps that have both a UI and an API? Right now our app has run into untold numbers of stupid bugs because of inputs and outputs being unclearly specified (what type? fractional percentages vs whole numbers???), conflated between API inputs and UI fields ("birthday" in the UI vs. "currentAge" for the API), and just plain misunderstandings (two variables named "health care", one being input and the other output). Specification by Example, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, whatever you want to call it. Do it. You will need to actually talk to people though.
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Mar 16, 2017 15:34
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What's the going wisdom for putting in notice? I'll be receiving an offer next week and there's a good chance I'm going to take it. The standard 2 weeks is nowhere adequate to cover the loss of me leaving. The company has been hemorrhaging talent for over a year thanks to managerial incompetence and I'm one of only a few people left with any kind of expert domain knowledge, and for corporate reasons there's no hiring til maybe June. I feel bad leaving my team even more understaffed, but the situation is pretty untenable. I just don't want to burn any bridges.
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Mar 18, 2017 00:29
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That's just too bad for them. If they really want to stop losing knowledge, they'll do something to prevent it from continuing. Your team's in the same boat. They're all looking for jobs too if they have any ambition.
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Mar 18, 2017 00:39
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Clanpot Shake posted:What's the going wisdom for putting in notice? I'll be receiving an offer next week and there's a good chance I'm going to take it. The standard 2 weeks is nowhere adequate to cover the loss of me leaving. The company has been hemorrhaging talent for over a year thanks to managerial incompetence and I'm one of only a few people left with any kind of expert domain knowledge, and for corporate reasons there's no hiring til maybe June. I feel bad leaving my team even more understaffed, but the situation is pretty untenable. I just don't want to burn any bridges.
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Mar 18, 2017 00:41
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Clanpot Shake posted:What's the going wisdom for putting in notice? I'll be receiving an offer next week and there's a good chance I'm going to take it. The standard 2 weeks is nowhere adequate to cover the loss of me leaving. The company has been hemorrhaging talent for over a year thanks to managerial incompetence and I'm one of only a few people left with any kind of expert domain knowledge, and for corporate reasons there's no hiring til maybe June. I feel bad leaving my team even more understaffed, but the situation is pretty untenable. I just don't want to burn any bridges. Too drat bad for them. You owe them nothing but the two weeks. If all the talent is leaving because the management is stupid then gently caress 'em, that isn't your fault and won't be your problem anymore.
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Mar 18, 2017 01:57
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Too drat bad for them. You owe them nothing but the two weeks. If all the talent is leaving because the management is stupid then gently caress 'em, that isn't your fault and won't be your problem anymore. Cool, he can totally stick it to those upper management types! Ha! Oh, and the folks he's been in the trenches with for months or years are going to suffer the loss, and if he can give them 4 weeks instead of 2 to cover ramping them up on his work he's not completely loving those colleagues who had nothing to do with the bad management. You seem to give a lot of advice for your relative level of experience, have you been the domain expert leaving a team short staffed? Can you relate specifics of that experience? Clanpot, I'd open the meeting with your manager by stating that you're leaving in no uncertain terms. There's no salary amount that will keep you on long term. Once that's established, you can talk about notice. Have some reasonable guess on how long it'll take to transfer your knowledge out to the team. This is probably not longer than 4 weeks, and absolutely not longer than 6. Every minute from 9 to 5 you're committed to helping your teammates absorb the shock and leave them as capable as possible. You can give them more than 2 weeks, but nail down a date in the first meeting. If they absolutely cannot do without you for longer than that, offer to bill them at a contracting rate (open at $500/hr, bill for time on site, not when there's someone learning from you). If you want to that is, perfectly within your right to bounce after precisely 2.0 weeks.
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Mar 18, 2017 02:16
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JawnV6 posted:Clanpot, I'd open the meeting with your manager by stating that you're leaving in no uncertain terms. There's no salary amount that will keep you on long term. Once that's established, you can talk about notice. Have some reasonable guess on how long it'll take to transfer your knowledge out to the team. This is probably not longer than 4 weeks, and absolutely not longer than 6. Every minute from 9 to 5 you're committed to helping your teammates absorb the shock and leave them as capable as possible. You can give them more than 2 weeks, but nail down a date in the first meeting. If they absolutely cannot do without you for longer than that, offer to bill them at a contracting rate (open at $500/hr, bill for time on site, not when there's someone learning from you). If you want to that is, perfectly within your right to bounce after precisely 2.0 weeks. This but 2 weeks + up to 2 weeks of consulting at 500/hr.
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Mar 18, 2017 02:45
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You started looking for a new job because this job displeased you obviously. Is it worth your own time and mental well being to stick around for even longer than is normal? Is another week or 2 or 3 of your, increasingly as more days pass, disconnected presence going to make a difference? Honestly? Would they give you two weeks if the situation was reversed?
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Mar 18, 2017 02:53
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JawnV6 posted:Cool, he can totally stick it to those upper management types! Ha! Oh, and the folks he's been in the trenches with for months or years are going to suffer the loss, and if he can give them 4 weeks instead of 2 to cover ramping them up on his work he's not completely loving those colleagues who had nothing to do with the bad management. You seem to give a lot of advice for your relative level of experience, have you been the domain expert leaving a team short staffed? Can you relate specifics of that experience? Over the span of a month, I and about 1/3 of the development team left the local branch of the company I was working at. I heard from the people left behind that a light bulb went off in the heads of the site management that maybe they can't actually treat the staff like they were and expect them to stick around. Suddenly conditions started improving and people weren't required to work late nights and weekends. Don't be a martyr for the people staying behind. They'll be ok.
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Mar 18, 2017 02:55
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Hughlander posted:This but 2 weeks + up to 2 weeks of consulting at 500/hr. Volmarias posted:Over the span of a month, I and about 1/3 of the development team left the local branch of the company I was working at. I heard from the people left behind that a light bulb went off in the heads of the site management that maybe they can't actually treat the staff like they were and expect them to stick around. Suddenly conditions started improving and people weren't required to work late nights and weekends. I should also mention that when I've given notice, my entire perspective changed before and after that meeting. At least it has for me, it's like this giant weight gets lifted and there's a whole new perspective.
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Mar 18, 2017 03:38
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JawnV6 posted:Cool, he can totally stick it to those upper management types! Ha! Oh, and the folks he's been in the trenches with for months or years are going to suffer the loss, and if he can give them 4 weeks instead of 2 to cover ramping them up on his work he's not completely loving those colleagues who had nothing to do with the bad management. You seem to give a lot of advice for your relative level of experience, have you been the domain expert leaving a team short staffed? Can you relate specifics of that experience? It's based on my experience as a job-having person in general. If the management is being awful they deserve every bit of talent loss they have and in the situation of programmers it won't take anybody else that wants to leave long to find a new job. The argument you're making is something I've heard used as an excuse to get people to stay in lovely places by lovely managers. "But what about your coworkers?!? But what about us? We'll all have to retrain somebody and then nobody gets a raise because payroll!" It'll suck for his coworkers but if he's leaving because the management is bad then it's entirely the management's fault if there is knowledge-based fallout when he leaves. This is why bad management can be utterly disastrous and why you can't really blame employees for bailing if management is being lovely. Volmarias posted:Over the span of a month, I and about 1/3 of the development team left the local branch of the company I was working at. I heard from the people left behind that a light bulb went off in the heads of the site management that maybe they can't actually treat the staff like they were and expect them to stick around. Suddenly conditions started improving and people weren't required to work late nights and weekends. Plus sometimes that happens. We're talking about programmers here. It's generally pretty easy for a competent coder to find a new job before too long.
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Mar 18, 2017 04:08
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JawnV6 posted:Also good. It's less a matter of my own genius and more the years of experience with a very complicated, undocumented system with loads of gotchas. Just last week a team implemented something incorrectly that cost us ~$100k - a lesson we learned years ago (back before the band broke up and cost a good bit less). Management is paying the price for new people to learn the same lessons we already learned, and that's on them. One guy on my team is already aware I'll be leaving soon and I'm pretty sure he's also looking for the door, which leaves the company lifer and some recent team additions in different geographies without any expert domain knowledge. It's gonna be a rough time for them. I can definitely relate to the feeling of relief after putting in notice. At my last place I went to a going-away thing for me and a couple other people and more than a few people remarked they had never seen me so happy.
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Mar 18, 2017 16:44
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Nm
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Mar 18, 2017 21:51
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Clanpot Shake posted:It's less a matter of my own genius and more the years of experience with a very complicated, undocumented system with loads of gotchas. Just last week a team implemented something incorrectly that cost us ~$100k - a lesson we learned years ago (back before the band broke up and cost a good bit less). Management is paying the price for new people to learn the same lessons we already learned, and that's on them. Sounds like the company is going to understand what the end result of "we don't have time for documentation and refactoring, don't you understand that we need to launch <new dumb feature xyz>" is, which remains NOT YOUR FAULT and not a reason to stick around or get maudlin about what you're doing. 2 weeks is a courtesy, to give them time to transition. If they need more than 2 weeks, they can either give you a very expensive reason to stick around, or they can just deal with the fact that they had crappy planning.
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Mar 19, 2017 00:57
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My experience is that the upper management will actually not learn, so you should just serve yourself as best as you can. They'll blame anyone but themselves because most people that get into leadership positions that high up are completely delusional about the root causes of their business failures because the socially mediated nature of high level business will shield you from reality unless you make it a priority to get ground truth constantly from the field (uncommon without question). The personality traits selected for in much of modern business are basically sociopathy with very rare exceptions. Give no quarter, take no prisoners, only the weak feel loyalty - give only what you have been given after extending a warm handshake and demonstrable business value. Think of it as Agile applied to your career as a project.
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Mar 19, 2017 03:55
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Clanpot Shake posted:It's less a matter of my own genius and more the years of experience with a very complicated, undocumented system with loads of gotchas. Just last week a team implemented something incorrectly that cost us ~$100k - a lesson we learned years ago (back before the band broke up and cost a good bit less). Management is paying the price for new people to learn the same lessons we already learned, and that's on them.
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Mar 19, 2017 14:05
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's based on my experience as a job-having person in general. If the management is being awful they deserve every bit of talent loss they have and in the situation of programmers it won't take anybody else that wants to leave long to find a new job. The argument you're making is something I've heard used as an excuse to get people to stay in lovely places by lovely managers. Ok, so nothing approaching his experience level or situation, you're just representing the junior engineer perspective? I never said 'stay,' I said make sure the folks you're shoulder to shoulder with aren't hosed over more than they have to be. Do right by them. The past few years have taught me that this industry is really small. Since starting my current job, I've worked with 2 folks from high school, 2 from college, 4 from former employers, and run into a couple still at a former employer. Pretending your actions aren't observed by colleagues sets you up to burn folks you might work with or straight up need in the future. It's genuinely possible for a senior person to have some long-form task that is easier to complete than ramp someone up. It can be worth sticking around for up to 6 weeks to wrap that kind of thing up. After hearing Claypot's description, it doesn't sound like he's doing anything like that. It's just the normal scars from working with a legacy code base, those left behind can earn the same scars the honest way after he's gone. Advertise to colleagues you're leaving, make yourself available for questions and document the sharpest areas while you're around. 2 weeks, contracting rate after that.
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Mar 19, 2017 19:18
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I gave 4 weeks as a courtesy once and was told not to tell any of my teammates until ~1.5 weeks before I was out. Managers are weird.
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Mar 19, 2017 20:31
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jony neuemonic posted:I gave 4 weeks as a courtesy once and was told not to tell any of my teammates until ~1.5 weeks before I was out. At Job-2, I told my manager that I am going to be out in 2 weeks and asked him if he has someone in mind to take over shepherding our build -- at that point I spent the last 3 months unfucking our horrific nightmare of build system, so we went from 20+minute builds to <5 minutes including running tests, having build server build releases and binary artifacts for developers (we also didn't have enough licences for some of the software our builds required but thats different story) and generally making things work better on the development side, but there were still some rough edges.He asked me for 4 weeks, I said okay and then never got time to transfer knowledge to someone else. Last two tasks I was given were given to me literally on the last Friday I was there. The only knowledge transfer happened when I took one of my colleagues aside and gave him 1 hour crash course (here is what works, what doesnt, why, what is likely to go wrong and how to fix it) out of our own initiative. 
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Mar 19, 2017 23:18
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At my last place, management always asked quitters to keep quiet about it and then management would privately tell people a few days in advance or send out a company email at 5pm on their last day. Luckily, we had a private chat room (for complaining in) so I just told my coworkers that I was quitting before I told my boss.
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Mar 20, 2017 04:10
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where i work people just disappear and are never spoken of again
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Mar 20, 2017 04:44
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Give two weeks if you're miserable or you just want to. You won't burn any bridges with two weeks. Give four weeks if you want to. But you won't get enough done even with four weeks to save the company. Don't entertain a counteroffer.
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Mar 20, 2017 05:59
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Xarn posted:He asked me for 4 weeks, I said okay and then never got time to transfer knowledge to someone else. Last two tasks I was given were given to me literally on the last Friday I was there. The only knowledge transfer happened when I took one of my colleagues aside and gave him 1 hour crash course (here is what works, what doesnt, why, what is likely to go wrong and how to fix it) out of our own initiative.
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Mar 20, 2017 14:00
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Okay now I am curious. Do workers in IT in the US usually get two / a few weeks' notice when they get fired and the employer doesn't absolutely have to (legally)? I guess I have only heard about gross misconduct where people are (understandably) fired on the spot.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:15
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Neco posted:Okay now I am curious. Do workers in IT in the US usually get two / a few weeks' notice when they get fired and the employer doesn't absolutely have to (legally)? I guess I have only heard about gross misconduct where people are (understandably) fired on the spot. If you're fired or laid off in any way in the US, it's usually immediate. If you're laid off, you might get some sort of severance pay for some period of time. If you quit, and give two weeks notice, some companies will immediately let you go. Some will pay out the two week notice, others don't.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:24
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I've worked for a few places where tenured underperformers have been asked to leave and given the opportunity to find a new job. It's definitely not common.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:39
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