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Pollyanna posted:Any other advice for a first-time remote worker? If you're in a video call after 2:00 Pacific Time, be sure to drink a beer on-camera, to remind people it's after five where you are. If you're in a video call after 4:00 Pacific, switch to martinis. If it's also Friday, call from your bathroom. (I had a coworker a while ago who would call in from London and be drinking a pint at like 10:00 AM our time. Made me jealous, every time.)
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Oct 26, 2017 18:15
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Pollyanna posted:Theres a WeWork I could get to, but a membership there is like $400 a month which is Make sure to ask during on boarding if you should expense that monthly or quarterly
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Oct 26, 2017 18:49
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. Still doing research on my options tho!
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Amusing, most of the advice is as relevant to on-site as well as remote. - Work is where you work, home is where you not work - Dress up - Drink after 5 - Make sure to talk to your colleagues and get some face time in - Have yourself heard in meetings - ADD is a hindrance in getting work done - Work to contribute, not to be a chair warmer Everything considered, I suck at working remote. There is kids coming home, a super powerful PC with distracting stuff like games and music and almost nobody talking to me so when my goals are not super clear I tend to gently caress around until that time it is socially acceptable to be no longer online (16:15). Some more content: Our team has 4 centralized environments for stuff, 2 for dev and 2 for test. These are stubbed, there is another integrated environment for pre-prod acceptance testing. This week I discovered weird poo poo. - The entire suit of backend tests were commented out in the Jenkinsfile, but the step was left intact, so it reported green in 1 ms all the time for the last 2 months. Nobody knew or cared, it was green after all. Re-establishing the tests made them take 10 minutes. It was not a small difference. - The tests are pointing at whatever environment is hardcoded into the one config file. Well, at least there is a config file. - In fact, only one guy looked at Jenkins reporting and took action - There is no response control or output control. the first was never implemented, the second has been broken for a while - It is not very clear (to me) what version is deployed where, so one might encounter the same bugs multiple times. - Running the application locally takes some ritual of 10 steps, including sacrificing a goat and spray it's blood on the interns. This needs to be done several times a day. - Everybody is pushing straight to development (I think I can block that in bitbucket tho, done it before) and no PR's are made at all. - Multiple teams working on the same project, each team is maintaining their test suits in their own framework. Yes, there are many overlapping tests. One suite takes over 4 hours. Every time I think I get it, there is another layer of arcane software development process uncovered. But hey, I get paid by the hour. Keetron fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Oct 26, 2017 |
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Oct 26, 2017 19:13
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I didnt have a problem working remote as much as the companies I was working for did not really handle remote workers well or used them over local for labor costing arbitrage. Companies that were located in very non-tech places trying to hire for highly skilled workers or companies that had poor reputations in their local markets are other red flags that management will suck for that company.
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Oct 26, 2017 19:19
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Hughlander posted:Make sure to ask during on boarding if you should expense that monthly or quarterly Yep. Your company should pay for workspace. They should pay for equipment -- if you get a laptop, I suggest asking for 1 or two external monitors, keyboard, mouse/trackpad. You should get a good pair of headphones for conference calls. Depending on how you're asked to work, they might need to pay for your home Internet or cell plan. Other advice: be visible! This is actually critical even if you're not working remotely. Push code, comment on code reviews, comment on bugs and features, make smalltalk in the chatroom, call/screen-share a coworker and ask them questions, announce what you're doing today. You must do at least one visible thing every day or people will forget that you're working.
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Oct 26, 2017 19:49
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Oh man, EE had a remote developer a while ago who was basically the first one the company had tried. This was before the switch to Scrum, so there weren't any check-ins, beyond his weekly one-on-one with the team lead. None of the rest of us had any idea what he was working on aside from the rare snippet we'd hear if he happened to be in a meeting we were in (and his Internet was working that day from the RV he was driving around). It turned out he was working on some crazy code to migrate stuff from HTML4 to HTML5 by doing weird things like "if there's a <div> with a class of 'section', output a <section> instead." As soon as the rest of us finally started to get a clear idea of what he was trying to do, we went to the team lead and told him, "Look, this stuff is completely bonkers. You have to stop this before he tries to commit it." (This was before branches, too, because we were still on SVN.) Thankfully, the team lead took our advice and shut it down. Anyway, uh, yeah, make sure people know who you are and what you're doing, so they don't think you're off in fantasy land working on building unicorns. The code was still outputting <div> elements with classes of "section" when I left.
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Oct 26, 2017 19:57
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CPColin posted:migrate stuff from HTML4 to HTML5 How is this even a thing?
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Oct 26, 2017 21:34
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I don't know! It should just have been turning our "div.section" CSS rules into "div.section, .section" rules and telling everybody that new code should use <section> instead of <div class="section">. I don't know why this developer and the guy he corralled from Creative thought adding a translation layer to the code was going to be a good idea. I can't imagine how many times people would have gotten confused when the code that was clearly trying to generate a <div> was suddenly outputting a <section>. This was the same developer who wrote the HTML-generation code and the crummy CMS in the first place. Creating a new component in this CMS, by the way, involved somebody in Creative asking a developer to write code that produced HTML, then trying to come up with CSS to style the HTML the developer hadn't produced yet. Meanwhile, QA twiddled their thumbs until Friday, because they had nothing to test until everything came together at the end. So much code assumed there was an HTML request in progress that the QA people couldn't write any automation that could test a component in isolation; they had to test via Selenium, after everything was all placed and styled. With laying off the entire Sales department and apparently now also the Marketing department and 1/3 of the developers, EE is going to be using that CMS until the owner finally puts the company out of its misery. Experts Exchange's final act will be to irritate whoever buys its database and code in the liquidation. Hopefully, whoever that is will just bin the mess. Edit: Just remembered my severance agreement says I may not make any "disparaging comments" about the company, so I should state, for the record, that everything above is absolutely true and, therefore, not disparagement. CPColin fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Oct 26, 2017 |
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Oct 26, 2017 21:51
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Don't work hunched over your laptop in a coffeeshop lol, come on. I told some coworkers they shouldn't use laptops for work, they did anyway. Now they have tennis elbow and a hosed up wrist from using the trackpad all the time.
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Oct 26, 2017 23:35
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Bring a Unicomp keyboard with you to the coffee shop. 
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Oct 26, 2017 23:51
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MacBook with an external monitor or two is the best way to work, the awfulness of having to use your mouse every now and again is much better if the trackpad is just right there.
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Oct 27, 2017 00:03
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Pollyanna posted:So my next position will be remote. See if they will pay for you to rent a spot at a co-working space or something similar. The points you mentioned are very real and you'll want a solid delineation between work and not-work time, and location.
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Oct 27, 2017 00:17
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Phobeste posted:MacBook with an external monitor or two is the best way to work, the awfulness of having to use your mouse every now and again is much better if the trackpad is just right there. The best way to work is to type on a laptop keyboard with your hands, arms and shoulders in an awkward position? I've seen someone get devastated in college by RSI because he worked too long on some paper in one sitting, took him about 9-12 months to recover (no typing allowed at all). Don't do it folks, you can do permanent damage. Get a good anti-RSI mouse as well, I'd recommend http://handshoemouse.com/
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Oct 27, 2017 12:03
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Trackpad use never bothered me. I even prefer it to a mouse if I'm on the laptop keyboard because I don't have to move my hand as far. I'd even play Unreal on my laptop with a trackpad in college, which seemed to amaze my friends. I do have a contoured keyboard and the giant-assed bubble mouse Microsoft makes for my normal work, though, and I like them both.
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Oct 27, 2017 14:06
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I forgot to mention something about the CMS that EE uses. Its initial implementation had separate environments for the backend code and the frontend content. In order for a component to be developed, it had to be programmed on Backend Dev, committed, deployed to Test Dev, deployed to Production, wrapped back around and deployed to Frontend Dev, styled there, deployed to Frontend Test, and finally deployed all the way Production. Yes, two deploys to Production. For every component. Not surprisingly, everything took loving forever until people figured out a way to hack the process and allow for styling while the code was still being written. Oh yeah, and the CMS had to be able to figure out what should be released, so there was a revision tracking system built in. Every content table in the database had a revision ID that was incremented after each deploy. Oh wait, now the primary key of all these tables was (ID, Rev_ID), but the code is all calling getID() everywhere? No problem. Just add a TableName_ID column to all the content tables and have the code translate behind the scenes. Well that's a lot of work. What the hell format was this content, anyway? loving XML, stored in the database. The developer architected a whole revision tracking system, bizarre database layout, and crazy release process, just to push XML around. I changed it so the XML was just stored on the loving disk and committed to SVN (later Git, with branching and everything!). What did the company do with this fancy new CMS, by the way? They rapidly prototyped two hundred new website skins, moved some of the EE questions onto those new "micro-sites," and actually released the prototypes. The experiment failed miserably and finally imploded like three years later, but not before the main site had been converted, poorly, to the CMS, where it'll be stuck forever.
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Oct 27, 2017 15:54
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I'm really pushing hard to get this last feature out before I leave my current place, but the acceptance criteria was still super vague up until just an hour ago even though I've been working on it for over a week. It's tough to not feel totally disconnected from it when I've been wrestling with it for so long and I'll be leaving soon...I feel bad admitting that I have senioritis of a sort 
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Oct 27, 2017 17:36
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I like to spend my last two weeks on a job cleaning up, documenting, bugfixing, and leaving at 5pm sharp.
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Oct 27, 2017 17:59
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Im also hella burned out, so thats influencing it somewhat. Nothing will stop me from getting this last thing out, and others are taking over the documentation/etc stuff. But man, is it hard to focus...
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Oct 27, 2017 18:13
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Pollyanna posted:Im also hella burned out, so thats influencing it somewhat. Nothing will stop me from getting this last thing out, and others are taking over the documentation/etc stuff. But man, is it hard to focus... TBH it's sounded like you've had senioritis for much longer than the past week.
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Oct 27, 2017 18:41
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Well yeah, hence the burnout.
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Oct 27, 2017 21:48
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A few more remote tips: Get a desktop microphone. Only fools wear headsets if they are the only person home. Get a proper webcam. Yes a MBP has one but it is bad. A decent one is under $100. Do not complain about other people being late for standup, even if you are justified.
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Oct 27, 2017 23:27
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smackfu posted:Get a desktop microphone. Only fools wear headsets if they are the only person home. booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Oct 27, 2017 23:27
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smackfu posted:Get a desktop microphone. Only fools wear headsets if they are the only person home.
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Oct 28, 2017 01:47
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Vulture Culture posted:It's you, you're the guy with the echo on every conference call If you use PTT, no big deal. Otherwise noooooooo
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Oct 28, 2017 02:09
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No echo for me, losers.
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Oct 28, 2017 03:09
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Vulture Culture posted:It's you, you're the guy with the echo on every conference call The periodic ffffff.......ffffff..... of a heavy-breather's nose-breath on headset mic is way worse
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Oct 28, 2017 11:50
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smackfu posted:Get a desktop microphone. Only fools wear headsets if they are the only person home. For the love of god this. I hate people who use their iPhone headphones and the mic scratches on their hoodie or whatever the entire meeting.
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Oct 28, 2017 15:17
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My team is trying yet again to instill some form of agile process, so we borrowed a product manager from another team to help with our agile things like getting the backlog in order, running estimation sessions, being a neutral arbiter, and so forth. First thing they do is pour the dev and SRE projects in JIRA together into a single one. WHYYYYYYYYY I have long been an advocate of *ban rather than Scrum for SREs because it more accurately reflects the interrupt-driven nature of SRE work, plus I find the bookended nature of sprints to be artificial. Case in point is our current sprint (3 weeks long, which I think is too long) got laid out with tickets, we estimated them all, started the sprint, aaaaaand... I'm done with all my stuff on Thursday. 16 days to go and I'm already fishing around making more work for myself, which gets me mildly scolded by the product owner and PM. I can't pull more than like one ticket apiece from the other SREs because the majority of their tickets are to become familiar with and deploy systems I already know about, and if I take tickets like that from them it's only going to reinforce the silo of me being The One Person Who Knows About X. Also, I really hate doing standups on video chat. We have a single guy on PST and we're all EST, so we have to delay our standups until like 1 PM every day and then it's 6 of us in the same row and one guy in California, so it's a festival of echoing mics and feedback the whole way through.
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Oct 28, 2017 16:21
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chutwig posted:aaaaaand... I'm done with all my stuff on Thursday. 16 days to go and I'm already fishing around making more work for myself, which gets me mildly scolded by the product owner and PM. I can't pull more than like one ticket apiece from the other SREs because the majority of their tickets are to become familiar with and deploy systems I already know about, and if I take tickets like that from them it's only going to reinforce the silo of me being The One Person Who Knows About X. Get a second job.
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Oct 28, 2017 16:32
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geeves posted:For the love of god this. I hate people who use their iPhone headphones and the mic scratches on their hoodie or whatever the entire meeting. Real problem there is that they aren't muting themselves when not speaking.
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Oct 28, 2017 17:22
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chutwig posted:My team is trying yet again to instill some form of agile process, so we borrowed a product manager from another team to help with our agile things like getting the backlog in order, running estimation sessions, being a neutral arbiter, and so forth. First thing they do is pour the dev and SRE projects in JIRA together into a single one.
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Oct 28, 2017 18:07
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Mniot posted:Get a second job. My second job is working on open source projects on company time (with company blessing), so it looks like I'll be filling gaps with a lot of that for a while.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:26
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chutwig posted:My team is trying yet again to instill some form of agile process, so we borrowed a product manager from another team to help with our agile things like getting the backlog in order, running estimation sessions, being a neutral arbiter, and so forth. First thing they do is pour the dev and SRE projects in JIRA together into a single one. Given you're not even really developing software, then using Scrum for SREs sounds incredibly dumb. Anyhow - the point of sprints is to have regular delivery and reflection [on the way the team is working]. All of this stuff you should really take up in a retrospective, which I'm assuming you do have. That's what they're for, to reflect upon and change the way people work to what works best in their particular situation.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:40
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I tried to do scrum for a hybrid support + ops team and after trying for months to explain point estimation and sprints to my management that only ever looked at billable hours and had never developed software except in waterfall orgs I gave up when they had an epiphany that story points = billable hours when my first slide I gave them literally was points != hours. But yeah, ops work is primarily transactional in nature so unless youre spending more than 80%+ of your time as a group doing project work I dont think its a good measure of team or individual performance or effectiveness. Similar false correlations people have are that the number of alerts in a period correspond to errors in a system - they usually are correlated more with system usage than anything else. Sure, stuff crashing is an error in some respect but it usually happens because a system was used, not because nobody fired off requests to it.
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Oct 28, 2017 23:31
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I work remote and I hate a lot of the remote advice like "dress like you're going to work!". Here's what works for me: - Having a routine that gets me out of the house daily. Right now I take a long walk in the mornings and go to the gym in the early afternoon. I don't use a coworking space or anything like that. I do have a coffee shop local to my house where I go when I need to really concentrate and knock something out, but I use that sparingly. - Eating on a real schedule with actual hot meals. Otherwise, it's easy to graze all day on junk. I also try to have lunch with a friend at least one day a week. - Early in the week, setting a weekly goal for myself. For me this means I look over all my assigned tasks and choose which ones I'll do Monday, Tues, etc. If there are assigned points / time estimates on them, I keep track of how long it takes me and try to finish them early. If I get in the weeds or otherwise discover an estimate was wrong, I tell my manager immediately and give him a new estimate of how long it will take. It's VERY easy to be working hard but uncommunicative when coding and I intentionally seek to avoid this. - Use chat liberally and succinctly for basic updates and respond to everything aimed at you. For example if a coworker posts code for review, I'll post something like "I'm looking now!" so they don't have to wonder if it was seen. - Use chat to be friendly as well as productive. We're an all-remote team and some team members literally just post status updates. Those team members are all kind of forgettable, which is bad. Don't forget to include some small talk or water cooler chat as well. However at the same time don't annoy everybody. - Pair remotely via screensharing. - Don't avoid the phone or webcam. If something needs to be specced out it's often a lot faster to have a short discussion than to use async chat. Plus, your face on webcam = you exist = you matter. Tl;dr: do everything in your shitposting power to make sure you don't just become a remote ghost.
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Oct 29, 2017 14:48
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Good advice! I'm nervous but not concerned about the remote work. I think I can adapt to it well. My family keeps worrying that I wouldn't get a chance to socialize if I wasn't at an office, but offices aren't a great place to socialize anyway, so not much lost on that end IMO.
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Oct 30, 2017 00:26
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Pollyanna posted:My family keeps worrying that I wouldn't get a chance to socialize if I wasn't at an office, but offices aren't a great place to socialize anyway, so not much lost on that end IMO. I always take my family advice about anything job related at arm's length because they think I'm some sort of computer wizard who works for the NSA or CIA but just can't tell them. Computers are scary! Working remote is a big switch for sure. I made sure to have my work office at my house in a room that has natural daylight. I worked for about 6 months in my basement and that was not a good situation for me. If you develop good "work friends" I suggest you maybe start up a chat application outside of the company scope where you can shoot the poo poo and do other normal social things you'd do in public or over beers. We use hangouts for our bitching and dicking around chat outside of the company sphere of influence. On Friday our remote group tries to do a beer:thirty where we all get on hangouts and have virtual beers.
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Oct 30, 2017 01:00
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Pollyanna posted:Good advice! I'm nervous but not concerned about the remote work. I think I can adapt to it well. I guess that depends on the office. We have nearly daily games of foosball or shuffleboard and often have game nights where we place CAH, Joking Hazard, etc. 4pm is often beer time and we have a kegerator with 2 beers always on tap and a fully stocked bar. Some of us even do stuff outside of the office from time-to-time together. It's a big reason why I've been with this company for 7 years.
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Oct 30, 2017 01:37
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geeves posted:I guess that depends on the office. We have nearly daily games of foosball or shuffleboard and often have game nights where we place CAH, Joking Hazard, etc. 4pm is often beer time and we have a kegerator with 2 beers always on tap and a fully stocked bar. jelly I know my office is a lot more like Pollyanna's than this, and my previous job was even worse.
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Oct 30, 2017 13:16
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So I'm the only SE in my company and my boss is highly open to sending me off to whatever training I'd like to make sure I can keep growing as a developer since I don't have any mentors here. What's the bees knees as far as training goes? I'm doing a lot of .NET development and a lot of ETL stuff.
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