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Sinten posted:I have 4 years of experience as a web developer (react, angular, java, php ( I'm not saying your company is peachy to be a developer at. But, perhaps there is room for you should take more initiative, figure out (with the business people) what would make an impact -- or appears to make an impact -- to the bottom line, and do that. The relationship needn't be adversarial or your goals orthogonal from business. Being surrounded by tech-illiterate people isn't necessarily the problem, but the lack of trust is. Could it be that you are focusing a bit too much on tooling and scalability and all that cool tech stuff rather than what the company needs the most, from business perspective? Do the business people think that you're just tinkering with some nonsense for weeks and months on end with little useful output, while you believe your scaling is keeping the company afloat in the longer term? Maybe you're both wrong.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:39
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), sql) and am sick of working in non-tech companies. I'm tired of clueless, non-technical leaders, and am tired of working in organizations that don't have a strong tech culture. I single handedly implemented many sorely needed features in our platform at work (including unit testing, code coverage reports, CI, refactoring for horizontal scaling, etc) and no one seems to give a poo poo. I continually run into big fish little pond problems. I just had a sit down with leadership to learn about my below inflation raise, and was told that I am talented but impatient, and that I should focus more on the business and less on my technical skills, and that I am already paid above market and should be happy since I sit next to other people that are underpaid. The decision makers care more about revenue impact and less about developer velocity, improved tooling, mature tech and scalability.
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The current project I am working on had super vague engineering specs which of course lead to tons of headaches. I told my boss that in the future We needed a super thorough specs or I will lose my poo poo. My boss tried to tell me that our company of 35 couldn’t possibly have the resources to write a thorough spec doc and that it will have to be rough and vague due to resources. I told him for a personal project I wrote almost 100 pages of engineering specification by myself just for my own project, and that if I can do it, there’s no way he could possibly convince me that our company can’t do it either. He mumbled for a bit and wandered off. 
FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Mar 4, 2018 |
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Mar 4, 2018 13:40
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 Are you sure you're not simply offloading your work on some poor analyst who has to come up with these super detailed specs? Which will obviously be hilariously wrong, because (s)he'll have no idea about the actual engineering challenges and thought processes involved. Then you can throw your hands up in despair for being forced to work with such restrictive, unworkable specs that have been written by idiots. How about, get the thing actually working, then write how it's working into a spec, if you can name a person who's actually interested in reading it. The size of your company by itself doesn't warrant such detailed work products, unless you're working with literally life-critical software.
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Mar 4, 2018 14:37
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Every Megathread on SA: Maybe The Answer is Somewhere in the Middle
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Mar 4, 2018 15:06
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Hey, great, you know how to write designs. Now you just need to gather the specs and you can write designs for work. The great part of this is that this is a key skill that will make you a lot more attractive to other companies. There's a lot more people of the "tell me what to do and I'll do it" variety than of the "I'll figure out what needs to be done, come up with a design that will achieve that goal, and then implement it" variety.
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Mar 4, 2018 15:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hey, great, you know how to write designs. Now you just need to gather the specs and you can write designs for work. The great part of this is that this is a key skill that will make you a lot more attractive to other companies. There's a lot more people of the "tell me what to do and I'll do it" variety than of the "I'll figure out what needs to be done, come up with a design that will achieve that goal, and then implement it" variety. The main reason I have succeeded in teaching myself to code and changing careers is because I came from the world of commercial graphic design and knew how to communicate with a client and get them to tell me what they mean by "make it pop". The secret? Very few people actually know what they want. Most just have a problem and a broad guess as to what will fix it. If you can figure out what their actual problem is, and present them an option to fix it without them having to think of one, they will love you forever.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:24
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I agree with all of this, except for when there's people on the team whose primary role is supposed to be doing that thinking, and they still expect you to do the whole lot.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:33
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ratbert90 posted:I told him for a personal project I wrote almost 100 pages of engineering specification by myself just for my own project, and that if I can do it, there’s no way he could possibly convince me that our company can’t do it either. Whoa, why would you do this?
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Mar 4, 2018 16:34
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return0 posted:Whoa, why would you do this? To keep on track and for investors.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:38
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hey, great, you know how to write designs. Now you just need to gather the specs and you can write designs for work. The great part of this is that this is a key skill that will make you a lot more attractive to other companies. There's a lot more people of the "tell me what to do and I'll do it" variety than of the "I'll figure out what needs to be done, come up with a design that will achieve that goal, and then implement it" variety. Except that in my company, MARKETING is in charge of anything GUI related! (Yes I know this is dumb and bad.)
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Mar 4, 2018 16:40
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ratbert90 posted:To keep on track and for investors. And was it useful?
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Mar 4, 2018 16:47
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return0 posted:And was it useful? Actually yeah, so far I have used it as a checklist of things to do. It's good and cool.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:59
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What happened when assumptions, solutions, and timeframes you made during the specification turned out to be invalid or not be ideal, and things had to change?
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Mar 4, 2018 18:11
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Does anyone have advice on how to talk about work that never made it to production? I've talked to a few companies for interviews or pre-interviews, but one major roadblock that I keep running into is that due to some terrible planning, almost every bit of work that I've done in the last year was thrown away when a new architect came in and decided that the right solution was to rewrite from scratch. I don't have any real data on performance or revenue impact, because it never made it to the real world, and I feel like it comes off pretty bad to say "yeah, basically I spent a year on a team writing code that was never used". I'm sure someone else has experienced this, and I'm curious what you've done in this situation.
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Mar 4, 2018 18:14
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The Leck posted:Does anyone have advice on how to talk about work that never made it to production? I've talked to a few companies for interviews or pre-interviews, but one major roadblock that I keep running into is that due to some terrible planning, almost every bit of work that I've done in the last year was thrown away when a new architect came in and decided that the right solution was to rewrite from scratch. I don't have any real data on performance or revenue impact, because it never made it to the real world, and I feel like it comes off pretty bad to say "yeah, basically I spent a year on a team writing code that was never used". I'm sure someone else has experienced this, and I'm curious what you've done in this situation. Do you have any personal coding projects to fall back on? A blog or portfolio site? Open source contributions? While the code was never used, did you do or learn something clever while writing it? Any personal growth or perspectives you can demonstrate? Any references who can put in a good word for you?
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Mar 4, 2018 18:21
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The Leck posted:Does anyone have advice on how to talk about work that never made it to production? I've talked to a few companies for interviews or pre-interviews, but one major roadblock that I keep running into is that due to some terrible planning, almost every bit of work that I've done in the last year was thrown away when a new architect came in and decided that the right solution was to rewrite from scratch. I don't have any real data on performance or revenue impact, because it never made it to the real world, and I feel like it comes off pretty bad to say "yeah, basically I spent a year on a team writing code that was never used". I'm sure someone else has experienced this, and I'm curious what you've done in this situation. Most of my work experience has been in consulting, and most of the projects that I've worked on never made it to production. When describing a project that died before seeing production, I leave off the end unless it's directly relevant to the question that they asked. If they do ask, and the project has a funny story about how it ended, I tell that story; otherwise I just say that it was cancelled or that the client was responsible for maintaining it, or whatever else is true. I don't think anyone's ever reacted badly to that. It's not like developers have any control over those outcomes.
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Mar 4, 2018 18:33
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ratbert90 posted:Except that in my company, MARKETING is in charge of anything GUI related! (Yes I know this is dumb and bad.) Marketing can't code. They may be able to come up with ideas, like "user data should be saved to the cloud automagically", but that's not a spec. Someone has to go "okay, what happens if they aren't logged on? What should the authentication UI look like? What if they run out of quota? What if cloud is down?" et cetera, and for each of those questions, either work with Marketing to get an answer, or come up with one and then get marketing to approve it. Marketing is a super-useful org to have around, by they way, because they're the people you work with that know the users best. If anybody knows what users want, it's marketing -- probably even more than the users themselves do, since marketing sees a broader slice of users and is able to tell you what the users are trying to do instead of what random bit of weeds the users have gotten stuck in (users are awful at telling you what's going wrong or what they want).
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Mar 4, 2018 19:46
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The Leck posted:Does anyone have advice on how to talk about work that never made it to production? I've talked to a few companies for interviews or pre-interviews, but one major roadblock that I keep running into is that due to some terrible planning, almost every bit of work that I've done in the last year was thrown away when a new architect came in and decided that the right solution was to rewrite from scratch. I don't have any real data on performance or revenue impact, because it never made it to the real world, and I feel like it comes off pretty bad to say "yeah, basically I spent a year on a team writing code that was never used". I'm sure someone else has experienced this, and I'm curious what you've done in this situation. Talk around it. Why would the fact that it never made to production even come up? If they ask for revenue impact look at them funnily and say that financial data is confidential and surely they must understand that. I can't say I've ever been in an interview when someone would look at a feature I worked on and said, "So what did that do for gross booking?" And asking that certainly never crossed my mind when on the other side of the table. Performance impact? Surely you've done load testing on it? If not drop down to algorithmic complexity changes, or the design specs that were behind the changes.
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Mar 4, 2018 20:02
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More generally, you should be prepared to talk about why the projects you worked on mattered to the group that you did them for. That's true regardless of whether they went to production or made revenue.
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Mar 4, 2018 20:26
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So; 11 years into my career and this is my second knock-back for a team-leader position in 2 years. But first a bit of a background & showy-offy-bit: People love me where I work; i'm well respected and i'm often the point of contact for a technical/architectural opinion and I've been branching out now into budgeting, soft skills, influencing higher ups etc. It's a Microsoft/.NET place in the North West of England but I've been branching significantly into Linux/Go/Python/JS to stay relevant to the market. People are also fully aware of my ambition (senior management) now onto the knock-backs. - First team lead came up when my old one left. I had to interview for this with me vs another developer and by all accounts I excelled at this, but according to the development manager they had to "flip a coin" and chose the other person on the basis that they did a bit more mentoring than me. The thing that bugged me after this was an additional comment of "you're too strong technically for us to lose you in development" which I didn't take that well privately. I then moved into an SRE/DevOps role to grow my soft skills through working with a wider set of people, as well as gain a wider impact on the company which has worked tremendously for my appraisals so far. - Second knock back: In my DevOps role all the right noises have been made for me to become a team lead; director praise, management praise, peer praise, and I'm now doing job specs & interviews to hire for the team I'm in. I'm also taking off some of the load from my new manager in regards to managing people, proposals, meetings etc. And so new financial year I'd be given the title, consequent raise (4%) and responsibility over my team. Until this Friday where I was told that we need to hire more people to make my promotion make sense, instead I'm getting 0.9%, and the icing on the cake is this; I only get 0.9% for the full year now as if we can only realistically hire from May onwards due to our office being at capacity and needing to make room. I would get the title but the raise is deferred until April 2019, all the responsibility and none of the money. So now I feel stuck, cos I love the place I'm at, it's great for my family and work/life balance. My short term goal is to work out what the market needs and see what happens in 3 months. But I feel like I should just jump as soon as I can to a place that pays better and I can start on the role I want to be on. However, I feel like right now this is all very much raw emotion and annoyance at the about face I was given.
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Mar 4, 2018 20:57
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Start looking. By the time you get an offer, you'll have cooled down enough that you'll know whether it's a good idea to take it.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:01
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Marketing can't code. They may be able to come up with ideas, like "user data should be saved to the cloud automagically", but that's not a spec. Someone has to go "okay, what happens if they aren't logged on? What should the authentication UI look like? What if they run out of quota? What if cloud is down?" et cetera, and for each of those questions, either work with Marketing to get an answer, or come up with one and then get marketing to approve it. I hear you, I agree with you, the CEO has decreed that the GUI belongs to marketing. They design it, I just implement it.
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Mar 5, 2018 00:54
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Cancelbot posted:Until this Friday where I was told that we need to hire more people to make my promotion make sense, instead I'm getting 0.9% I mean if nothing else, given that inflation is running at about 3% in the UK right now, that is a real terms pay cut they are giving you this year. To do what should be a higher paying role. That is a downright insulting 'raise'.
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Mar 5, 2018 16:47
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First time for everything, I guess - I just rescinded accepting an offer for one company in favor of another. Sent an apologetic email to company A, but company B just had a more compelling offer and was a better fit for me. Still very excited to be there, and I am hoping that with this new opportunity I can push my career further than it has gone before. 
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Mar 5, 2018 16:50
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Chat in this thread about specs, separation of concerns, and responsibilities makes me reflect on both of my past dev jobs and realize just how poorly managed they were but in a different way. The last job actually had a really good process and people in place to do things that needed to be done right, in a varying degree of granularity at different levels of the pipeline, but had zero people making actual business decisions which lead to an extremely slow development process. In other words, we had very little, feature-wise, to do from the top level. When features did come through, they were fairly well-defined and we had at least an understanding of the implications to the business and the system. This job is the largely same as that with the added bonus of having a controlling VP who barks out orders in Slack about trivial performance improvements (we aren't even in prod yet, why are we optimizing at the finest level prematurely at the cost of cutting massive features?), commits code to our repo without us reviewing it (small things or large PRs). We get absolutely zero interaction with product, and even the team lead only gets his stories and stuff from meetings with VP and other engineering teams. These problems both seem completely unavoidable when thinking about taking a job. What can I do to avoid them? What can I even ask? My idea for what to ask gravitates towards: 1.) What is your flow like in terms of working on new features? Who makes business decisions, how are they communicated and discussed with the team? 2.) What phases do features and stories go through from idea to completion? Are there proper grooming sessions with product/feature owners? 3.) How long of a product roadmap does the team follow at any given time and what autonomy does the team lead have in deciding what team members are working on at each given time? If I see balking of any sort at these, I'd probably run.
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Mar 5, 2018 17:25
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Good Will Hrunting posted:These problems both seem completely unavoidable when thinking about taking a job. What can I do to avoid them? What can I even ask? My idea for what to ask gravitates towards: The team I'm on has incrementally added more and more process as we've gotten closer to production. When I joined we were still in an exploratory mode where process wasn't really helpful. So our answers to those questions might not have been helpful to you. I'd suggest also asking things like * How mature is the product you're working on? What's the target user base? * Who talks to the users? Who decides what you (the individual developer) work on? How do those two communicate? * Do you often find yourself having to change priorities at short notice? * What determines your deadlines? How often do you have crunch time?
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Mar 5, 2018 17:46
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Cancelbot posted:0.9% raise
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Mar 5, 2018 17:49
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Pollyanna posted:First time for everything, I guess - I just rescinded accepting an offer for one company in favor of another. Sent an apologetic email to company A, but company B just had a more compelling offer and was a better fit for me. Still very excited to be there, and I am hoping that with this new opportunity I can push my career further than it has gone before. Great! Good Will Hrunting posted:1.) What is your flow like in terms of working on new features? Who makes business decisions, how are they communicated and discussed with the team? I think I asked all of these before accepting the offer for my current job and basically received the shrug emoji in reply to all of them. At least I went into this one knowing it was probably going to be a big mess. I rationalized it by acknowledging that my then-current job was pretty much definitely a dead end, so I might as well roll the dice. So far, the answers are like this: 1) Sometimes my boss, but sometimes the people listed as "Project Manager" and "Champion" for the project make the decisions. But who knows when they'll do that or how word will get back to me, because there isn't a cohesive project tracker here. It's split between a list of projects in the company wiki and the list of tasks I made in GitHub that my boss consistently fails to flesh out. 2) Waterfall! Everybody keeps worrying about due dates, but nobody is able to sort the projects in priority/deadline order. Everybody keeps acting like projects that aren't 100% done are 0% done by definition. There seems to be no concept of milestones or iterative development. I keep saying stuff like, "Well let's just start with what we know and get moving." and people treat it like a revolutionary concept. 3) I'm a team of one. I keep telling my boss that I need to know what the next couple of projects in the pipeline are, so I can tell what to focus on. It keeps just…not happening. A few weeks ago, I got an email containing a signed work agreement that included a requirement to have a new version on Test the next day. When I told my boss I would have to drop everything to (try to) meet that deadline, she said, "Oh, don't worry about that. I mean, we only signed the contract today." So, 
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Mar 5, 2018 17:56
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The team I'm on has incrementally added more and more process as we've gotten closer to production. We've only very lately added process changes with the new team lead. Before that we had zero. Literally zero. And a lot of the processes we tried to introduce were hindered by controlling VP. TooMuchAbstraction posted:
Also same, which is what I'm scared of in taking a new role. TooMuchAbstraction posted:* How mature is the product you're working on? What's the target user base? I don't think my current gig would have been able to answer the last three conclusively whatsoever. Everything is a muddy gray area and I probably wouldn't have known to not accept that. But thanks, these all seem really helpful. I always end up asking about the tech stuff but I'm slowly realizing I don't give a poop about what tech is used, all else being strong.
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Mar 5, 2018 17:57
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CPColin posted:I think I asked all of these before accepting the offer for my current job and basically received the shrug emoji in reply to all of them. At least I went into this one knowing it was probably going to be a big mess. I rationalized it by acknowledging that my then-current job was pretty much definitely a dead end, so I might as well roll the dice. This is almost a carbon copy of my situation from interview stage to 13 months in. We're only now starting to have some semblance of organization with my new team lead who knows how important things are in terms of process improvements and communication. Oh also, //TODO: is treated like a story!
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Mar 5, 2018 17:59
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Good Will Hrunting, if you figure it out, let me know.
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Mar 5, 2018 18:38
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Employer found a new client for me! The words "...and those are the labs where we used to do animal testing. Your team is down the hall. Welcome to the company!" were uttered during my tour. Now I'm even more anxious to hear if my interviews yielded offers this week.
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Mar 5, 2018 19:13
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Jaded Burnout posted:Good Will Hrunting, if you figure it out, let me know. The only thing I've figured out so far is that even if you get """goood""" answers, they may be lies!!! I don't understand why interviewers lie about their company though. I'll figure it out sooner rather than later, I'm dumb but I'm not a moron without any sort of interpersonal or managerial skills and I am quite versed in sniffing out the political moves. Are you trying to fleece me into accepting because my technical skills are 10x that of Don Knuth (unlikely) or my experience is so insanely dank that you NEED someone who is a leet multithreaded RTB expert with 3.5+ years of "ad-tech" "experience" on your team (once again, unlikely) or maybe you're just super attracted to how loving handsome and cool I am and you desperately need to up the clout of the engineering team as a whole (more likely than the other ones tbqh) but at the end of the day I think I'm only getting these offers because I'm a pretty drat good power-hitting left-fielder in intramural softball.
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Mar 5, 2018 19:31
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ultrafilter posted:Start looking. By the time you get an offer, you'll have cooled down enough that you'll know whether it's a good idea to take it. Have done - 2 lead positions applied for! Feel a bit nervous as it's been 3 years now since my last interview (as interviewee) but secured the first telephone one almost instantly. feedmegin posted:I mean if nothing else, given that inflation is running at about 3% in the UK right now, that is a real terms pay cut they are giving you this year. To do what should be a higher paying role. That is a downright insulting 'raise'. Don't I know it! It really seems like our whole department is cutting back. But I think the junior members under my manager are getting 8-10% raises to counteract it. Just us senior folk getting shafted. Naar posted:Depending on exactly where you are in the NW, if you want to earn a decent amount I would seriously consider contracting. It's not really much less secure than a permanent job - I've recently renewed for another year on a government project and I have a month's notice period. Devops people are in especially high demand at the moment, from what I can tell! PM me if you want to chat about it, I'm Manchester-based and can give you an idea of what it's like around here. PM on its way. What makes me hesitate with contracting is my Wife gets jumpy about job security, but i'll see how far it can go! Cancelbot fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 20:00
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Do you have any personal coding projects to fall back on? A blog or portfolio site? Open source contributions? fantastic in plastic posted:Most of my work experience has been in consulting, and most of the projects that I've worked on never made it to production. When describing a project that died before seeing production, I leave off the end unless it's directly relevant to the question that they asked. If they do ask, and the project has a funny story about how it ended, I tell that story; otherwise I just say that it was cancelled or that the client was responsible for maintaining it, or whatever else is true. I don't think anyone's ever reacted badly to that. It's not like developers have any control over those outcomes. Hughlander posted:Talk around it. Why would the fact that it never made to production even come up? If they ask for revenue impact look at them funnily and say that financial data is confidential and surely they must understand that. I can't say I've ever been in an interview when someone would look at a feature I worked on and said, "So what did that do for gross booking?" And asking that certainly never crossed my mind when on the other side of the table.
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Mar 5, 2018 23:44
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The whole "focus on the impact" thing is really just a way of saying "you should be aware of the business implications of your work, not just a mindless code drone". But there are other ways to demonstrate that. Being able to describe the problem you're solving in a user-centric way is one. If you were involved in gathering specs, you can talk about that. Discuss how you had multiple options and had to choose based on how you think users would want the product to behave.
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Mar 6, 2018 00:16
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I really like a book called The Real Business Of IT. It's all about teaching technical people how to talk to business people and learning to tell them not about the neat software you built but how it's useful and how it makes the business better. Everyone in this line of work with career ambitions beyond "neckbeard with a paycheck" should read it.
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Mar 6, 2018 15:48
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rt4 posted:Everyone in this line of work with career ambitions beyond "neckbeard with a paycheck" should read it. Why is there anything wrong with "neckbeard with a paycheck" as long as the neckbeard understands goals of the team and works well alone and with others to meet them? I'd be perfectly happy making $XXX,000 to just code (whatever the salary will be 10, 20, 30 years down the line with inflation) as opposed to managing people. I'd probably like to be a product manager interface between devs and business owners, but I don't ever really want to have to deal with managing a team above a tech lead level. Not that I think I'd be bad at it, I just see that being a super uninteresting career path for me.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:16
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I guess when I think "neckbeard" I'm not thinking of someone who understand the goals of the team and works well with others to meet them.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:18
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There’s nothing wrong with it - everyone has their spot. If it’s in your purview it can be useful, if not it’s not. I do take offense to “neckbeard with a paycheck” as a pejorative cause that’s all of us and if you don’t think it applies to you then you are wrong as hell.rt4 posted:I guess when I think "neckbeard" I'm not thinking of someone who understand the goals of the team and works well with others to meet them. That’s a measure of product-level engagement and social skills rather than just engineering.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:21
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