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Keetron posted:If you are still around on Thursday, there is a meetup.com hands-on test tooling workshop at bol.com where I will be a TA on the FitNesse automation framework. And speaking of bol.com, I work there and we're always looking for talented people and can assist with your move to The Netherlands. For a fairly large company we have managed to avoid most agilefall traps (most...) and it's a friendly work atmosphere. PM for details 
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Jun 11, 2017 12:54
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Maluco Marinero posted:Dear lord that guy sounds like he's a terminal case. Better implement that rest API in node because.... people know JavaScript? What a well thought out position You joke but being able to hire devs who know X is worth taking into consideration when selecting a language/platform. At my new place this is (unfortunately) leading our stack away from Scala toward JS and Go (of all things). For a rest API 
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Jun 11, 2017 15:01
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Sagacity posted:And speaking of bol.com, I work there and we're always looking for talented people and can assist with your move to The Netherlands. For a fairly large company we have managed to avoid most agilefall traps (most...) and it's a friendly work atmosphere. PM for details My wife works there and loves it. Pm this guy! Also @Sagacity: are you joining Thursday?
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Jun 11, 2017 18:55
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No, but there will be plenty of colleagues there.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:26
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Clanpot Shake posted:You joke but being able to hire devs who know X is worth taking into consideration when selecting a language/platform. At my new place this is (unfortunately) leading our stack away from Scala toward JS and Go (of all things). For a rest API This can also go in a good direction! We have several old-rear end web services written in PHP (5.3  ). For a variety of reasons, including "ability to hire engineers who know their rear end from their elbow" and "ability to hire people excited instead of reluctant to work on the codebase", all new development is being done in Java. And existing features are being ported over as time allows.Sagacity posted:And speaking of bol.com, I work there and we're always looking for talented people and can assist with your move to The Netherlands. For a fairly large company we have managed to avoid most agilefall traps (most...) and it's a friendly work atmosphere. PM for details Out of curiosity, is this for EU candidates, or does bol help with relocation worldwide? Realistically I have major family ties to the US and am not going anywhere, but I've visited and loved both Belgium and Amsterdam. I occasionally fantasize about moving overseas while our kids are still very young, and an employment opportunity like that would certainly make it more realistic. I'd be applying to the operations/sysadmin side of the house, for what it's worth, which Google Translate leads me to believe you have openings for.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:39
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Doc Hawkins posted:e: and that this post hasn't completely destroyed my computer-touching-subforum reputation. This is a good post. Thanks.
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Jun 12, 2017 06:15
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Clanpot Shake posted:You joke but being able to hire devs who know X is worth taking into consideration when selecting a language/platform. At my new place this is (unfortunately) leading our stack away from Scala toward JS and Go (of all things). For a rest API Oh, for sure, adoption % does form part of the equation, but for a task as common as a Rest API, there are a number of other concerns and node.js just makes all the concerns of versioning, consistency, interaction with server tech harder because of the immaturity of node libraries, or the looseness of Javascript as a language. Adoption because people know the language feels like a bit of a cop out for the industry given there's a lot of roles where you're essentially expected to pick up more than one language to be functional (see what I did there :p ). With languages I feel like it's less learning the syntax as advertised, and more learning the ecosystem and the bullshit that isn't advertised.
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Jun 12, 2017 08:01
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Docjowles posted:Out of curiosity, is this for EU candidates, or does bol help with relocation worldwide? 
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Jun 12, 2017 09:26
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Doc Hawkins posted:I would not. I'm not ashamed of it, though it might not reflect well on me. Maybe it belongs in this thread anyway. Good post, thanks. It's worth mentioning that a degree in basket weaving from the community college of St. Who Knows Where Valley isn't as big of an issue once you have industry experience. I'll save my "Computer Science vs Software Engineering" rant for another time, but suffice to say as long as you know Big O of 1, logn, n, nlogn, and n^whatever and that 2n collapses to n, that's really fine for an interview's sake. Similarly, as long as you're passingly familiar with all the data structures on the Wikipedia Page, you're generally fine. Anyone that wants you to write a red-black tree implementation from memory in an interview is a huge red flag that you don't want to work there anyway. It sounds like you might enjoy SRE than SWE, have you ever looked into that?
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Jun 12, 2017 12:38
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As a devopsy/SRE-ish engineer, I'd rather do coding puzzles for interviews for weeks than be on-call for someone's code that they'll never get adequate feedback for and notified to fix like at most places. Why most places? Almost all ops-ish jobs are horrible as an extension of even half of software development jobs are bad because any deficiencies in software design and processes are magnified an order of magnitude in production environments. For every coding horror in the thread, there are 5 more that have been deployed to production and are waiting to wake someone up at 2 am.
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Jun 12, 2017 12:51
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If you're woken up at 2am because your developers are too dumb and lazy to do things right, and there isn't a reason to believe that they'll do better in the future, you should bail immediately. Good SREs should effectively never get paged unless something truly unforseen has happened. SRE shouldn't mean "we're too cheap for a NOC"
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Jun 12, 2017 12:56
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The worst ops I've seen are in places with incredible amounts of spending on it - they spend it on NOCs that function as extremely expensive and unreliable PagerDuty (because only the bottom of the barrel will stay in that job much and training is just plain bad as a rule), developers usually never get told that their app dies in prod every night and ops just simply reboots it constantly on a cron job, etc. The problems have nothing to do with whether developers are lazy or even smart but whether there's a feedback loop that works or even exists. 90s style ops / dev is very, very popular in the F500 and with the cultural deficiencies of these places it's really not going away despite whatever BS they're going to spend on re-orging and doing "agile" and "devops."
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Jun 12, 2017 16:58
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Mniot posted:I would say that Amazon and Uber are two well-known companies that have gotten a lot of negative press in the last few years about their work environment. Google and Microsoft are also two well-known companies that have not gotten similar negative press. No, I don't think that Amazon has a comically anti-federal-labor-regulation policy baked so thoroughly through the company that they'd be so stupid as to put it on an official letterhead or enforce "MUST WORK ON VACATION" company-wide. How useful is that rando data point for, say, Lab 126 positions? Would hardware development have the same on-call requirements and culture as their central SRE? Or does the general public's relative ignorance of Lab 126 grant them better working conditions through this "well-known" metric you're keen on applying?
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Jun 12, 2017 19:09
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For more anecdotal fuel for this fire, goon Agrikk works in AWS and seems to quite enjoy it.
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Jun 12, 2017 19:16
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I had an Amazon interview a few months ago and asked about jackasses with nerf guns, working hours, and other office problems. My interviewer said he works precisely 40 hours in a quiet office, but it varies by team and location. He also said that he gets hounded about annoying poo poo like whether his commit added a millisecond to a page load.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:56
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JawnV6 posted:Gee, one of those has Literally 20x The Bodies of the other, so I'm thinking my point about scale was wholly lost on you. Working in the same building as a first-time known-awful CEO isn't exactly the same as working 3 time zones away in a recently-acquired subsidiary. I was trying to think of the next-biggest company with as bad a reputation for culture and came up empty. I'm not claiming that literally every Amazoner cries at their desk 24/7, just that a bad reputation doesn't come out of nowhere and Amazon is unique in being a big name for software engineering without a reputation for respecting engineers. Maybe Microsoft and stack-ranking? Or Apple and speaking to Steve Jobs? (Both dead) There were plenty of jobs at those places where the widely-criticized negatives didn't matter, but if you were thinking about a job I don't see why "isn't stack-ranking awful?" or "won't Jobs push me down the stairs and laugh?" wouldn't be sensible questions to wonder about.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:06
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The only thing that's constant is change.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:45
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Mniot posted:I was trying to think of the next-biggest company with as bad a reputation for culture and came up empty. I'm really not sure WHAT you're claiming at this point. I never said every engineer is a happy lifer, which appears to be the straw man you'd rather be arguing. Back to my original question: does "my buddy's friend's dog's sister's walker heard about an Amazon guy that died on call" affect your impression more or less than Actual Journalism on the topic? How useful are potshot anecdotes devoid of any context to even avoid that group?
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Jun 12, 2017 21:52
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You wroteJawnV6 posted:How representative of 300k+ person companies have y'all generally found half-remembered anecdotes from acquaintances? in response to a bunch of people making vague "I heard Amazon sucks" posts. I'm saying that while an individual anecdote is inconsequential, when it rises to the level that everyone "met some guy at a party once who said that Amazon killed his cat so he'd work harder" then that means something. Because that's not an isolated anecdote, that's part of a trend. There were other posts saying "well that particular Amazon group that I'm at is great", which seems reasonable. I assume you're familiar with the NY Times article about Amazon, so I'm not sure what your comment about "Actual Journalism" means? I guess if there was a legitimate-looking article about how Amazon was a fine place to work and actually a victim of a smear campaign by Ali Baba, then I'd be more skeptical when I hear anecdotes.
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Jun 12, 2017 22:22
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Half way through my initial phone screen with Amazon I realized I really, really didn't want to work there. Only twice has a recruiter call set off alarm bells in my head and that was one of them. necrobobsledder posted:The worst ops I've seen are in places with incredible amounts of spending on it - they spend it on NOCs that function as extremely expensive and unreliable PagerDuty (because only the bottom of the barrel will stay in that job much and training is just plain bad as a rule), developers usually never get told that their app dies in prod every night and ops just simply reboots it constantly on a cron job, etc. The problems have nothing to do with whether developers are lazy or even smart but whether there's a feedback loop that works or even exists. 90s style ops / dev is very, very popular in the F500 and with the cultural deficiencies of these places it's really not going away despite whatever BS they're going to spend on re-orging and doing "agile" and "devops." This perfectly describes the job I just left. Ops was it's own silo who did things there way, kept those ways a secret from us devs, and threw a fit every time we did something that violated one of their secret rules. By the time I left the needs of the business were finally catching up to them (hey, we actually need to automate some of this), but as a department they were totally intractable. Refused to do anything new, learn anything, or give up any control at all. I'm pretty sure they're all about to get laid off with recent business changes, which is a nice bit of schadenfreude.
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Jun 12, 2017 22:42
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Clanpot Shake posted:Half way through my initial phone screen with Amazon I realized I really, really didn't want to work there. Only twice has a recruiter call set off alarm bells in my head and that was one of them. What made you feel that way?
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Jun 12, 2017 23:05
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Mniot posted:I'm saying that while an individual anecdote is inconsequential, when it rises to the level that everyone "met some guy at a party once who said that Amazon killed his cat so he'd work harder" then that means something. Because that's not an isolated anecdote, that's part of a trend. I still don't really think anecdotes about individuals half-remembered by acquaintances are all that useful of a data point in isolation but you seem really set on them being the gold standard for considering employers, go nuts! My cousin worked at a fulfillment center, should I post the hearsay from her experience? She said a guy there cursed a lot, or maybe that was a surgeon her sister worked with, in any case I guess every Amazon worker is subjected to lots of swear words.
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Jun 12, 2017 23:10
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a foolish pianist posted:What made you feel that way? This was over 4 years ago so I can't really give you anything specific. I remember getting the impression they wanted someone who would put in all the hours they asked with no regard for work-life balance. I've got a pretty good nose for bullshit and got that shady used car dealer feel.
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Jun 12, 2017 23:24
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Mniot posted:Amazoner Amazonian 
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Jun 12, 2017 23:44
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Volmarias posted:Amazonian Badgeholes.
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Jun 12, 2017 23:55
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Gildiss posted:Badgeholes. Also acceptable.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:57
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JawnV6 posted:Maybe you could've opened with that article instead of a vague allusion to it's supposed existence? My bad. Sorry. That story got posted in a bunch of places when it came out and I thought you were just being weird. If you missed it upthread, Steve Yegge's post about Google and Amazon is also relevant, I think. (It's personal anecdotes and 6 years old, but it's entertaining and has some interesting stuff about both company and engineering culture.)
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Jun 13, 2017 04:38
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Volmarias posted:Good post, thanks. Thank you, and everyone else, for the kind words. quote:It sounds like you might enjoy SRE than SWE, have you ever looked into that? I have and I am currently. I'm very glad we have a name for it now: it's saved me time explaining to folks what we should be doing, and I think it's steering my job search well now. Another thing I think I can thank Google for! (I am one of those curmudgeons who is 👎 on the industry usage of "engineer," but I'll live.)
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Jun 13, 2017 05:06
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I can only speak to my personal experience, but I'm glad I didn't put too much weight into the Amazon horror stories before joining. I've worked in two offices, in both there have been sane working hours, smart and respectful colleagues, and good high-end equipment. For an organizational of it's size, I've found the autonomy teams get over product decisions, tech choices, and working practices pretty incredible. There is oncall rotation, but I assume there is the same at Google/FB. I've personally had one out of hours page so far this year. Perhaps it has changed significantly over the last few years? I should mention I haven't worked in Seattle (or indeed the US).
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Jun 13, 2017 07:28
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It's quite possible that the country you live in has actual labor laws.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:44
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hailthefish posted:It's quite possible that the country you live in has actual labor laws. Also, if you work for a subsidiary they get quite a bit of control over their own destiny, like being able to offer free coffee instead of requiring employees to pay for it.
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Jun 13, 2017 13:35
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Volmarias posted:Also, if you work for a subsidiary they get quite a bit of control over their own destiny, like being able to offer free coffee instead of requiring employees to pay for it. This is not true, you don't have to pay for coffee or snacks etc. There aren't excesses like masseuses or gourmet lunches, but that's cool with me. I should stop defending it now, but didn't want misinformation to discourage anyone itt from considering it.
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Jun 14, 2017 00:04
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return0 posted:This is not true, you don't have to pay for coffee or snacks etc. There aren't excesses like masseuses or gourmet lunches, but that's cool with me. This is new because they definitely used to.
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Jun 14, 2017 06:02
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Sagacity posted:And speaking of bol.com, I work there and we're always looking for talented people and can assist with your move to The Netherlands. For a fairly large company we have managed to avoid most agilefall traps (most...) and it's a friendly work atmosphere. PM for details Why does your plaza API always break 
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Jun 14, 2017 12:14
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Hey bol.com guys your talk today at Goto was good and cool.
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Jun 14, 2017 18:58
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Cancelbot posted:Why does your plaza API always break It's one of the areas in the company that's in heavy flux and there are many conflicting requirements that the team is trying to unironically agilefall to success. Especially in the area of test automation they could use some help, I think. Carbon dioxide posted:Hey bol.com guys your talk today at Goto was good and cool.
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Jun 14, 2017 21:02
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I'm fascinated by Amazon's organization structure but I sure am not at all sure I want to be part of it.
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Jun 14, 2017 21:12
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Sagacity posted:I'll have to plead ignorance about that. You're welcome to come and fix it? Tomorrow some time will be spend on that.
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Jun 14, 2017 21:43
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Sagacity posted:Was that the resilience one? Feedback is welcome! Yeah it was. I heard quite a few people in the room who were impressed by that demo reporting web page to show how Hystrix works - and when the speaker was asked about this he first thought the question was about the Hystrix monitoring page, and when he found out it wasn't, it was about the demo thing, he was like "oh that's just something I hacked together with javascript". 
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Jun 14, 2017 22:02
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Sagacity posted:I'll have to plead ignorance about that. You're welcome to come and fix it? Hah, we are a UK dev team with a tiny NL office. I'm sure we'd love to have a go but we have our own agilefall to contend with 
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Jun 14, 2017 22:39
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