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Sinten posted:How do I resist the urge to tell my boss to eat poo poo (in a sterile, corporate way) and walk out? I have enough financial security to not need a job for years, so there's no risk of not making rent or starving before I can get another job. The reasons I have to stay around is to get paid for suffering through interactions with my dumbshit boss, to avoid awkward conversations during interviews, and to have more negotiating power with newly undiscovered dysfunctional teams that don't know that my work situation also sucks. But it takes so many hours out of my week and is making me deeply unhappy. Anyone else been in this position before? How did it go? Your first objection isn't important if you have cash reserves described in "years" and live in a place where there are many companies who need your skill set. Your second objection doesn't matter so much in our field as in fields like marketing, where a person's skills are hard to empirically evaluate in a short period of time. Your third objection assumes a false premise: your negotiating power is already insanely high because you have years of cash on hand and can't be pressured by time or need, which is the main leverage a corp has. If you're miserable, leave your job and hunt for a new one full time.
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Apr 28, 2017 23:21
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Hughlander posted:Has anyone worked at both Facebook and Amazon? Can you compare and contrast the two cultures and your roles with-in them? My co-worker at FB had previously worked at Amazon. He didn't have much to say about it, other than it was a fairly standard place to work at, but that it was run by retail people not technical people so a lot of the tech-first culture that exists at FB didn't exist at Amazon (he didn't cite specific examples, but it sounded like there was lots of tech debt). He also refuted that article that says everyone cries at their desks at Amazon, and he went home at 5pm every day. There are apparently few perks at Amazon (like free lunches, etc), apart from free bananas (!?!?).
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Apr 28, 2017 23:24
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I do want to clear up one point about the 'years' of cash on hand humblebrag. I'm a cheap weirdo that lives on 20k a year and it's more like one year.
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Apr 28, 2017 23:25
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"So Sinten, what's the current salary we have to beat?" "Zero. I am unmotivated by money. I want interesting work." Super weak position right there?
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Apr 28, 2017 23:27
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Sinten posted:I do want to clear up one point about the 'years' of cash on hand humblebrag. I'm a cheap weirdo that lives on 20k a year and it's more like one year. I would not quit a job with less than $20k in the bank. It sounds reasonable in that it's a year of expenses but you have to consider that you not only do you have to pay for healthcare and a risk that an emergency happens, health or something else, that costs $5k+. You'd then be under a significant deadline to get a job. I'd try to move your job search along and not give a gently caress at work.
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Apr 29, 2017 00:12
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Yeah. Continue showing up and getting paid while you look for your next job.
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Apr 29, 2017 00:15
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Hughlander posted:Has anyone worked at both Facebook and Amazon? Can you compare and contrast the two cultures and your roles with-in them? A coworker who went Amazon->FB talked about this a bit. Facebook has a lot of teams but are as a whole cooperative and work with each other to help each other with their goals. This can get pretty thrashy for core teams creating libraries or infrastructure to be used by product teams or other foundation teams (a layer above infrastructure, just below product). On the other hand, it means that everyone can work on anyone else's code for the most part, and roll up their sleeves and get stuff done. Sometimes there's review hell when you're waiting on specific reviewers but it's not that often. I view it as manageable chaos sustainable by virtue of the average developer being generally trustworthy to make the right choice or be convinced of it in relatively short order. At Amazon, you've got more teams with stronger SLAs for code review, but code ownership is a lot stricter, so working across different areas is less of an option, and as a result some things can move a lot slower. EDIT: for example, I just got done today with a codemod touching a couple thousand source files that I identified and initiated ~two days ago. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Apr 29, 2017 |
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Apr 29, 2017 02:43
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minato posted:My co-worker at FB had previously worked at Amazon. He didn't have much to say about it, other than it was a fairly standard place to work at, but that it was run by retail people not technical people so a lot of the tech-first culture that exists at FB didn't exist at Amazon (he didn't cite specific examples, but it sounded like there was lots of tech debt). He also refuted that article that says everyone cries at their desks at Amazon, and he went home at 5pm every day. There are apparently few perks at Amazon (like free lunches, etc), apart from free bananas (!?!?). the "retail people not technical people" really only seems true on teams that are doing very focused product work. the infrastructure teams and all of aws are generally technical all the way up. though i would say we're willing to take on technical debt/operational load if it provides customers a better experience, which also influences what we choose to work on over time. one thing i think that differentiates amazon is that we tend towards decentralized solutions whereas other large tech co's have chosen centralized solutions. teams are run as if they're their own small company and we have enough primitives in place to make it really easy for teams to do whatever it is they want to do. this does mean there is less homogeneity across the company and makes it much more difficult to contribute to teams that don't have good processes in place for accepting external contributions. one of the more interesting outcomes of this decentralization (imo) is that we're rapidly moving towards most/all teams running everything out of their own aws accounts s.t. retail is really just another company that runs on AWS.
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Apr 29, 2017 23:34
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FamDav posted:one of the more interesting outcomes of this decentralization (imo) is that we're rapidly moving towards most/all teams running everything out of their own aws accounts s.t. retail is really just another company that runs on AWS. This is really cool, I wonder if any of the other big cloud providers are dogfooding their own stuff.
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Apr 30, 2017 01:33
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jony neuemonic posted:This is really cool, I wonder if any of the other big cloud providers are dogfooding their own stuff. I can pretty much guarantee you that any cloud service that isn't poo poo is being dogfooded by its developers. Cloud services are so useful to big software companies that there's no reason not to dogfood; the only other alternative would be paying for someone else's cloud services, which doesn't say much about your confidence in your product.
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Apr 30, 2017 01:39
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Yeah I thought "cloud services" was pretty much just each company productizing the infrastructure they had already developed for their own services.
Paolomania fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 01:48
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Yeah, good points. Had a moment there.
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Apr 30, 2017 01:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I can pretty much guarantee you that any cloud service that isn't poo poo is being dogfooded by its developers. Cloud services are so useful to big software companies that there's no reason not to dogfood; the only other alternative would be paying for someone else's cloud services, which doesn't say much about your confidence in your product. so there is a difference between leveraging what you're building and running as if you were just another customer. Amazon has leveraged AWS for a long time but in a way that was unique to Amazon (in addition to legacy infrastructure), and there is now a big push to move away from that model towards using AWS as its publicly consumed, i.e. Amazon would be just another Netflix to AWS. thats what i think is so interesting. And just to be clear by Amazon I'm referring to everything but AWS. Paolomania posted:Yeah I thought "cloud services" was pretty much just each company productizing the infrastructure they had already developed for their own services. this is generally not the case, unless you want to argue that they are productizing their experience at building the infrastructure. the constraints, considerations, and priorities in building public infrastructure vs private infrastructure are such that what you have internally is rarely suitable for public consumption without a significant amount of changes/an entire rewrite.
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Apr 30, 2017 04:49
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Paolomania posted:Yeah I thought "cloud services" was pretty much just each company productizing the infrastructure they had already developed for their own services. I don't think this is actually the case for a single one of the major cloud services providers. Google sort of tried with AppEngine, but even then the public thing was still a fork of what they had internally (which very quickly fell behind the internal version, and then eventually went in a very different direction).
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Apr 30, 2017 06:15
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Plorkyeran posted:I don't think this is actually the case for a single one of the major cloud services providers. Google sort of tried with AppEngine, but even then the public thing was still a fork of what they had internally (which very quickly fell behind the internal version, and then eventually went in a very different direction). For sure many (most?) Google internal apps run on AppEngine. I think the version is identical to the external version.
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Apr 30, 2017 09:44
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This reminds me of the highly-enjoyable Steve Yegge post about Amazon vs Google from years ago: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX I wonder how much has changed since then.
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Apr 30, 2017 12:04
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FamDav posted:so there is a difference between leveraging what you're building and running as if you were just another customer. Amazon has leveraged AWS for a long time but in a way that was unique to Amazon (in addition to legacy infrastructure), and there is now a big push to move away from that model towards using AWS as its publicly consumed, i.e. Amazon would be just another Netflix to AWS. thats what i think is so interesting. quote:this is generally not the case, unless you want to argue that they are productizing their experience at building the infrastructure. the constraints, considerations, and priorities in building public infrastructure vs private infrastructure are such that what you have internally is rarely suitable for public consumption without a significant amount of changes/an entire rewrite. I would say that most (all?) cloud services were originally internal infrastructure that someone looked at and thought "I bet people would pay us to do this for them." Certainly, getting them to a product-ready state involved a lot more work; you don't generally see professionally-designed dashboards and thoroughly-documented APIs on internal websites, for example.
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Apr 30, 2017 15:24
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Evil Robot posted:For sure many (most?) Google internal apps run on AppEngine. I think the version is identical to the external version. Is that a recent (as in last few years) development? When I was last working on a project using AppEngine we ended up asking about that after a support request got elevated up to the actual developer responsible for the feature in question and got a very explicit "no, it's not the codebase our internal stuff runs on, it's an out of date fork that's diverging more over time".
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Apr 30, 2017 15:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:
It's not even just that (though it's part of it). There's a lot of work around billing, lifecycle management, security, and maybe even blast radius that you wouldn't do if you were just running internally. Also, at least in AWS' case there is little "what have we built internally?" And mostly "what do customers need/what's an interesting idea?" going on today.
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Apr 30, 2017 16:19
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I know I can use the b word because we published a research paper on it. Most of the production stuff at Google runs on a thing called Borg which is basically a massive scale container like environment. Kubernetes is the attempt to take all the stuff learned from Borg and generalize it to an open source product, but without the highly Google specific engineering decisions and weirdness that's accumulated over the years. edit: have some links https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html http://blog.kubernetes.io/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kubernetes.html
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Apr 30, 2017 18:34
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I got the impression that Omega works within the Borg ecosystem and that Google would be moving toward a successor to Borg after what they learned from Omega. Also, I got the impression that a lot of the search product still has tons of legacy that is still difficult to port over to stateless systems.
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Apr 30, 2017 19:11
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FamDav posted:It's not even just that (though it's part of it). There's a lot of work around billing, lifecycle management, security, and maybe even blast radius that you wouldn't do if you were just running internally. Also, at least in AWS' case there is little "what have we built internally?" And mostly "what do customers need/what's an interesting idea?" going on today. Aside: Since CPU cost varies hour-to-hour between cloud-providers, a special-effects company that used cloud-based render farms wrote a meta-cloud-API to poll all the major cloud providers and shift their workload to whatever was currently cheapest.
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Apr 30, 2017 19:27
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Please do not quote this directly as I'd like to eventually edit it out but my team woke up to this earlier this morning, sent on a Friday late night:quote:Team,
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May 1, 2017 15:10
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So... tell us about your boss. Is he, in fact, a patient individual?
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May 1, 2017 15:34
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lifg posted:So... tell us about your boss. Is he, in fact, a patient individual? He strikes me as the kind of person who tries so hard to be zen and patient while coming off as sagely but is a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode and blame others. When people question something of his, unless he 100% understands that it's a mistake he made, he'll get a bit defensive and lash out. "Things cannot possibly be his fault because he's far too smart for that" type attitude.
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May 1, 2017 15:46
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Please do not quote this directly as I'd like to eventually edit it out but my team woke up to this earlier this morning, sent on a Friday late night: Yeah, that strikes me as a notification that, as far as $boss is concerned, some fraction of y'all done hosed up. It's not clear to me how actionable this notification is from your perspective though, since it seems like you're doing what you can anyway and the issue for you is being blocked by others. Also, lol at getting things right the first time. That never happens. You absolutely can get into the trap of not being able to make changes because your tech debt is so high, but conversely, if you try to avoid all forms of tech debt, you'll never actually deploy anything because you spend years trying to come up with the Golden Design that will meet all of your projected needs for decades to come. And then when you do deploy, you'll find that your projections were completely off and your clients need a major change you couldn't possibly have predicted, and they need it in two months. The secret to technical debt is not to avoid it, but to manage it, and make certain that you're getting good tradeoffs of deployment speed vs. debt.
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May 1, 2017 15:52
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I don't think it's me because I've done exponentially more on this project than the other 2 devs (who have been here longer than me) but should I be worried and start interviewing again? That's definitely a level of "someone hosed up" beyond "time to cover my rear end" and more along the lines of "heads might have to roll if we gently caress up q2". And yes - blocked at every capacity, mostly spec wise. He even agreed about that in our 1 on 1 and assured us a product person was coming soon.
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May 1, 2017 15:55
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Between "Best," "individual," "myself," and "lame typos," I almost had a Boss Email Bingo, but my card had "I am writing to..." instead of "I want to take a moment to...."
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May 1, 2017 16:12
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I don't think it's me because I've done exponentially more on this project than the other 2 devs (who have been here longer than me) but should I be worried and start interviewing again? That's definitely a level of "someone hosed up" beyond "time to cover my rear end" and more along the lines of "heads might have to roll if we gently caress up q2". I would just take this as another warning sign. If you aren't happy there, which your other posts indicate, then move on otherwise maybe wait a bit and see how it plays out. Based on that email, I'd say you're relationship with him is going to be key.
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May 1, 2017 16:21
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If he's anything like that email, dude sounds insufferably arrogant. By any chance, was he a great engineer that was "rewarded" by promotion to manager?
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May 1, 2017 17:02
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mrmcd posted:If he's anything like that email, dude sounds insufferably arrogant. By any chance, was he a great engineer that was "rewarded" by promotion to manager? He was hired in June as VP of Engineering at Baby Company that was acquired by Parent Company and is now clashing with Parent Company management. Before this he was doing his PhD for a few years. Before that he spent time at two companies in our industry: the first was a really big and successful popular company, the other a startup he was at for 2+ years as "Principal Engineer/Director of Engineering" which means fuckall.
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May 1, 2017 17:11
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 Your job isn't immediately in danger since it seems like you're making the cut (at least from what we know) but that email is a raging red flag.
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May 1, 2017 17:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Please do not quote this directly as I'd like to eventually edit it out but my team woke up to this earlier this morning, sent on a Friday late night:  lmao
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May 1, 2017 18:07
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Please do not quote this directly as I'd like to eventually edit it out but my team woke up to this earlier this morning, sent on a Friday late night: I hate untargeted, vaguely threatening speeches like this. All that it results in is a lot of anxiety for the people who are doing fine, and half the time the one person who screwed up (or who the boss considers to have screwed up) doesn't make that connection anyway. If you've got a problem with an individual, loving take it up with that individual. My last boss (from hell) did this kind of thing, and he was ex-army so it doesn't exactly surprise me that he'd choose a disciplinary method from Full Metal Jacket. The rest of it, eh, standard managerial pressure. "High expectations, intensity, dedication" translation: work more unpaid overtime so I can get a bonus, plebs. I ignore that poo poo until it becomes unignorable, at which point I find a new gig.
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May 1, 2017 18:22
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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:
I've been given zero reason to believe I'm not meeting expectations and I feel like I'm exceeding them to be honest. I'm regularly pushing code and going above and beyond to do research/POCs for changes that aren't defined at spec time/during our "grooming" meetings. I don't feel like I'm in any danger but I'm also not happy so at 6 months I'll likely leave (I'll get 50% of my non-trivial bonus money then.)
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May 1, 2017 18:22
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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:
Yep. This isn't going to improve.
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May 1, 2017 18:38
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There's a lot to love in that little email, but I'm especially charmed that one of the things he won't tolerate is "lack of belief". I think you can expect one of your coworkers to be choked to death, so get ready for a promotion!
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May 1, 2017 19:05
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Che Delilas posted:I hate untargeted, vaguely threatening speeches like this. Yeah, he's clearly got some specific beef about someone(s) shipping bad code? Or not being fanatical enough? Not content to work evenings or weekends? Even if everyone in the team was at fault somehow he's not actually saying what people have done wrong so there's no way to know if he's being reasonable about it or not. Doesn't seem unrecoverable if his actual expectations (whatever they are) turn out to be sane, but he gots to work on that communication.
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May 1, 2017 19:56
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We haven't shipped anything. We were supposed to demo poo poo this week - but pushed it to next week. And that isn't because any of us hosed up, rather because there's constant blockage from managers that need to review the PRs. It's really just him projecting. He has too many responsibilities. It's really not hard at all to see this to be honest, the rest of the team agrees.
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May 1, 2017 20:46
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Good Will Hrunting posted:
There's a reason "can break down complex projects and delegate effectively to other team members; doesn't try to micromanage or be a hero by hoarding all complicated or challenging tasks" is considered a crucial skillet for senior engineers at places that aren't totally dysfunctional.
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May 1, 2017 20:55
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