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Shirec posted:Question for y'all, in regards to working with sales or customer facing people. At my current job, my boss tells me to treat our point of contact with customer engagement/sales in a very hostile manner. I'm supposed to: only ask for one answer at a time, word it like he's not very bright, don't ever list options, and never offer help or anything we aren't currently doing. I think there's good points to most of those things, at least in the abstract. Asking one question at a time is a good idea in general, because otherwise you risk overwhelming the other person. The best form of "word it like he's not very bright" is to avoid technical jargon and to use simple, direct language and sentence structure wherever possible. (Expressing that as "word it like he's not very bright" is how an rear end in a top hat would say it, but I already know that about your boss from the other thread.) I'm not sure what's meant by "don't ever list options". I'm guessing this is to prevent someone saying something like "Well, we could write a patch for this or we could [completely redesign feature X]" and then Sales is like "great, let's completely redesign the feature!" and suddenly the department is on the hook for it. "Don't offer help or anything we aren't currently doing" can be a good idea because engineering management needs to be able to plan and estimate workloads. It can't reliably do that if developers are spending hours a week helping another department with its bullshit on an ad hoc basis. There's no reason to not be friendly and personable in your communication style, though, as long as you can still be friendly and personable while telling someone no, you can't/won't do this thing they want you to do.
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May 11, 2018 21:53
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fantastic in plastic posted:There's no reason to not be friendly and personable in your communication style, though, as long as you can still be friendly and personable while telling someone no, you can't/won't do this thing they want you to do. That's exactly it. At a small company I worked for, one of the two owners would be told something he didn't like by the guy who actually ran our department, so he'd then wander around the office and have "casual" hallway converations with random developers until there was a contradiction of what he'd been told. Then the owner would latch onto that and constantly bring up, "But so-and-so said..." We were instructed to politely feign ignorance. The answer to the question, "How hard would it be..." is always "Gee, I'm not sure, we should probably talk to [the guy who ran the department] about that!"
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May 11, 2018 22:08
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smackfu posted:IBM being one notable example. Kill WFH and close offices and now you either move or quit. And conveniently the older employees are less likely to move. Scummy. IBM had a pretty explicit strategy to get rid of older employees and replace them with younger people. ProPublica did a great writeup of it. fantastic in plastic posted:I think there's good points to most of those things, at least in the abstract. To summarize: be friendly, but don't commit the team to anything beyond what you're already doing, and be aware that the salespeople don't need that much from you to take it as a commitment.
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May 12, 2018 00:34
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If the sales people start getting crazy ideas from little conversations with programmers, that means they're in need of technical sales gatekeepers that approve proposals. Trying to stifle communication just isn't going to get the job done.
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May 12, 2018 01:48
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fantastic in plastic posted:I think there's good points to most of those things, at least in the abstract. From frequenting the general IT threads, I have a less charitable interpretation for the first advice: One question per email, because average email user is somehow only capable of sending one answer in one email. Sometimes you even get a "yes" in response to multiple open-ended questions.  Anyway, when used well, the other parts of the advice is pretty sane if you filter out insane bossman. "Word it like he's not very bright" -- If you are communicating with someone on the outside, he does not know your jargon, he does not have your multiple years of context on the problem and so on. We are regularly giving similar advice when presenting a paper at a conference: "If you think your presentation is insulting the intelligence of your audience, dumb it down again, the absolute majority of them has not just spent X years working on the topic." "don't ever list options" -- If you have multiple options beyond simple yes/no, listing them can lead to analysis paralysis and anchoring the answer. Maybe if you didn't provide options, the customers would come up with something saner and nicer. As fantastic in plastic said, no reason not to be friendly though
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May 12, 2018 07:11
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Our bitbucket instance just went belly up, there is a ton of devs now hogging the foosball table. Not me, I stayed behind to do productive poo poo such as posting on these dead gay forums.
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May 14, 2018 12:19
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What should happen during sprint planning (or mid sprint) if QA is at capacity, but development is not? What about vice-versa?
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May 14, 2018 23:51
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Ither posted:What should happen during sprint planning (or mid sprint) if QA is at capacity, but development is not? Wip limits kick in and dev jump in on in progress stories than those in QA to get everything possible over the finish line.
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May 15, 2018 00:08
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Hughlander posted:Wip limits kick in and dev jump in on in progress stories than those in QA to get everything possible over the finish line. Also, if "QA is at capacity" is a common problem (it always is), then it's time to start heavily investing in automating. If QA commonly finds bugs that weren't caught by unit, integration, and/or functional tests before a build ever got in front of them, then you have a problem. Also. if QA isn't at capacity, they should be doing one of the following activities: - Automating manual tests - Fixing flaky automation - Writing new tests cases, then see above If QA doesn't have the skillset to automate, that's a whole different problem. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 04:02 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 03:58
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Finding QA or even SDETs in some places can be super difficult - possibly more difficult than hiring for good developers. Most of the folks skilled enough to automate aim for full blown development jobs, and the remainder are mostly people that just do manual clicking around and reporting bugs because they haven’t had the motivation / direction to automate QA tasks. At my last job QA regression tests used to take 2 MONTHS before I got there. They had spent 7 years doing manual QA with a team of dozens of people that could barely do more than ssh into a machine and run a command that someone else came up with (not sure why they never tried to outsource it given the sheer lack of skill made the team about the same as a low tier firm in India). Learned helplessness seemed to be common.
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May 15, 2018 12:41
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My career path went from "Manual QA" to SDET to Software Engineer and the key reason was that working in QA is so loving unthankful that by the time I figured out how to build software, I sold myself as a developer with a strong feeling for quality. Another thing is that a SDET has a lower hourly rate than a SE. So now I work as a spring boot developer and I am glad to say that after about 8 hours of digging, I added a total of 4 lines of code and the thing did what was needed. This is a weird feeling and I am told it goes away but it feels so unproductive.
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May 15, 2018 13:10
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Just accepted a new job making nearly twice as much as my old job. Feels good, man.Keetron posted:spring boot developer 
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May 15, 2018 13:37
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necrobobsledder posted:Finding QA or even SDETs in some places can be super difficult - possibly more difficult than hiring for good developers. Most of the folks skilled enough to automate aim for full blown development jobs, and the remainder are mostly people that just do manual clicking around and reporting bugs because they haven’t had the motivation / direction to automate QA tasks. At my last job QA regression tests used to take 2 MONTHS before I got there. They had spent 7 years doing manual QA with a team of dozens of people that could barely do more than ssh into a machine and run a command that someone else came up with (not sure why they never tried to outsource it given the sheer lack of skill made the team about the same as a low tier firm in India). Learned helplessness seemed to be common. The transition I'm seeing and hearing a lot of these days is going from having devs, SDETs, and manual QA testers to just having devs. All testing is automated, and the entire dev team is responsible for the automation.
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May 15, 2018 14:35
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Are you guys using the new Reactor framework or are you doing the older Spring Boot stuff?
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May 15, 2018 14:56
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Sagacity posted:Unironically I think stuff like this and all the related drama is becoming a bit of an issue in open source. Ugh this poo poo is now in open source code repos? quote:But free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations. How black do our dependency injection containers need to be anyway? Do we need 50% black maintainers? How black do they have to be, is it OK if they're 1/2 black? 1/4th? Do I count as a minority if I'm white but from a sub-population in my country? Is a woman a minority? Are poor white people OK? What happened to the concept of the individual lol.
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May 15, 2018 14:59
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In the end developers will do everything. Everything. And somehow only get paid for doing one job.
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May 15, 2018 15:01
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Pedestrian Xing posted:Just accepted a new job making nearly twice as much as my old job. Feels good, man. New Yorp New Yorp posted:The transition I'm seeing and hearing a lot of these days is going from having devs, SDETs, and manual QA testers to just having devs. All testing is automated, and the entire dev team is responsible for the automation. withoutclass posted:Are you guys using the new Reactor framework or are you doing the older Spring Boot stuff?
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May 15, 2018 15:04
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amotea posted:Ugh this poo poo is now in open source code repos?  please don't be a discrimination-enabling rear end in a top hat, tia
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May 15, 2018 15:06
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amotea posted:Ugh this poo poo is now in open source code repos?
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May 15, 2018 15:25
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amotea posted:Ugh this poo poo is now in open source code repos? You seem very mad about people saying that others should be treated with respect, maybe you should find a safe space while you calm down.
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May 15, 2018 15:44
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Keetron posted:I guess the older one as the only thing we have with React in it is the front end. But you mean this is old? It feels so new and shiny and like such a huge leap forward compared to the Java 1.7 Spring monolith I worked on the previous project. Well, Spring Boot is the same thing as spring, just with sane defaults and dependencies added in there for your convenience. The only thing it does is make life easier (which is no small feat). You can have a spring boot monolith or a plain spring micro service. That's the old part of Spring Boot (which has been there since its inception). Since spring boot 2.0 we have Reactive Spring (https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/wiki/Spring-Boot-2.0-Release-Notes) which provides a lot of reactive libraries: WebFlux, Reactive Spring Data, Reactive Spring Security.
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May 15, 2018 16:18
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amotea posted:How black do our dependency injection containers need to be anyway? Do we need 50% black maintainers? How black do they have to be, is it OK if they're 1/2 black? 1/4th? Do I count as a minority if I'm white but from a sub-population in my country? Is a woman a minority? Are poor white people OK? This is the exact argument that is used to screen out POC, women, and LGBT folks from tech companies. Do you "not see color"? It doesn't matter to you if people are blue, green, or purple? No one said minority until you did either. What we, people that are marginalized in the tech industry, want, is to feel like we are not going to have to deal with assholes that say we don't have the same rights that they do. To feel safe at work. Individuals still exist but, haha, isn't it crazy that they all ended up being straight white cis men? Craaaaazy
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May 15, 2018 16:29
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loving lmao “why do I have to deal with minorities lol. what is this diversity bullshit, if it’s white it’s white get over it lol”
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May 15, 2018 16:36
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I just never think about the gender or skin color of any nickname I see on e.g. Github. The fact that people feel the need to write these long manifestos about it seems obsessive and racist in itself. Why divide people based on their skin color? What does it matter if you're male or female when writing code? Judge people based on what they do, not what they look like. How can we even know there's racism going on when most of the time you can't even tell the race of any of the contributors? And I probably didn't use the word 'minority' right, I thought it's what people normally say, but English isn't my first language.
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May 15, 2018 17:06
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Sure, you wouldn't, then somebody starts complaining about a discount rate agency from India or there's booth babes and suddenly it becomes pretty awkward to work in computing if you're not a white man, to say the least. I don't really think codes of conduct are a good way to handle it (I prefer unapologetic surprise bans) but you've got to set a standard of behavior somehow or you end up with Twitter.
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May 15, 2018 17:20
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In online communities it is not always about whether this person or that person is black/white/woman/man/trans/etc, it's about the attitude and culture of the community being actively hostile (racist jokes, misogynist comments, etc) towards other groups and making other feel uncomfortable at best, and ultimately ends up driving them away. An inclusive community culture makes it more likely that a diverse community will develop.
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May 15, 2018 17:21
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amotea posted:I just never think about the gender or skin color of any nickname I see on e.g. Github. The fact that people feel the need to write these long manifestos about it seems obsessive and racist in itself. Why divide people based on their skin color? What does it matter if you're male or female when writing code? Judge people based on what they do, not what they look like. Oh my god are you a strawman? I swear it's like you're copying example "problematic ideas" from every diversity talk ever
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May 15, 2018 17:23
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rt4 posted:Sure, you wouldn't, then somebody starts complaining about a discount rate agency from India or there's booth babes and suddenly it becomes pretty awkward to work in computing if you're not a white man, to say the least. I don't really think codes of conduct are a good way to handle it (I prefer unapologetic surprise bans) but you've got to set a standard of behavior somehow or you end up with Twitter. A podcast I listen to did an interview with a woman startup CEO. She talked about going to a conference while she was pregnant and a well-known VC was presenting. He said something along the lines of "I take all of my funding meetings in my hot tub with a beer." On it's face, to me (a middle aged white dude that drinks beer) that sounds pretty cool. But she felt super excluded because she wouldn't have been able to participate in a "meeting" like that.
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May 15, 2018 17:25
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Contrary to popular belief, software development is a social activity. Software is made by people who exist in societies, and when they participate in making software they bring their societies with them in various capacities. Societies are unfair in ways that we'd prefer they were not, and which software making does not need to be or benefit from being. Denial and inaction are ineffective, when not outright counterproductive, as correctives. For more information, consult a sociologist.
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May 15, 2018 17:27
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The Fool posted:A podcast I listen to did an interview with a woman startup CEO. She talked about going to a conference while she was pregnant and a well-known VC was presenting. He said something along the lines of "I take all of my funding meetings in my hot tub with a beer." On it's face, to me (a middle aged white dude that drinks beer) that sounds pretty cool. But she felt super excluded because she wouldn't have been able to participate in a "meeting" like that. This probably gets real weird real fast for a lot of women who aren’t pregnant.
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May 15, 2018 17:30
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amotea posted:I just never think about the gender or skin color of any nickname I see on e.g. Github. The fact that people feel the need to write these long manifestos about it seems obsessive and racist in itself. Why divide people based on their skin color? What does it matter if you're male or female when writing code? Judge people based on what they do, not what they look like. Your argument is "I'm not discriminated against and I don't actively discriminate against others, therefore discrimination doesn't exist". Maybe you're the One True Developer that only sees people for what they write and would never try to hurt others, but also the same time other people exist who are in fact being hurt, discriminated against, and kept out. These code of conduct agreements generally boil down to "don't be an rear end in a top hat, don't reflexively get defensive if someone says that you're being an rear end in a top hat, call out others for being assholes, and consider that the person using your product or viewing your work isn't you" which is a super low bar to trip over AND YET.
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May 15, 2018 17:34
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fourwood posted:This probably gets real weird real fast for a lot of women who aren’t pregnant. Yeah, that was touched on too.
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May 15, 2018 17:34
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amotea posted:I just never think about the gender or skin color of any nickname I see on e.g. Github. The fact that people feel the need to write these long manifestos about it seems obsessive and racist in itself. Why divide people based on their skin color? What does it matter if you're male or female when writing code? Judge people based on what they do, not what they look like. You shouldn't have to hide your identity online so that people won't know anything about you. You may say that you don't notice, but that's probably not true, considering humans are shown over and over again to have all sorts of implicit biases. You don't see those things because you are speaking from a place of privilege. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github quote:So the student researchers were surprised when their hypothesis proved false – code written by women was in fact more likely to be approved by their peers than code written by men. But that wasn’t the end of the story: this only proved true as long as their peers didn’t realise the code had been written by a woman. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/tech-industry-sexism-racism-silicon-valley-study quoting the tech leavers study quote:Tech workers most frequently cited “unfairness or mistreatment” as the reason for leaving, a factor that was mentioned twice as much as recruitment for better opportunities. Underrepresented men of color were the group most likely to leave due to unfairness, with 40% citing that reason. A total of 78% of employees said they experienced some form of “unfair behavior or treatment”. To bring this back around to the very original thing you posted, someone is pointing out that a contributer to an open source library is openly transphobic on their social media. This has a very real impact on trans people, it's not just drama. Just like we wouldn't accept someone openly saying women don't deserve to be programmers (like James Damore), we shouldn't tolerate people sayings trans folks are "denying reality"
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May 15, 2018 17:35
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Claiming you don’t see color is the same as sticking your fingers in your ears and going la la la la la la la la la la la la. You can’t just ignore a problem to make it go away.
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May 15, 2018 17:39
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rt4 posted:Sure, you wouldn't, then somebody starts complaining about a discount rate agency from India or there's booth babes and suddenly it becomes pretty awkward to work in computing if you're not a white man, to say the least. I don't really think codes of conduct are a good way to handle it (I prefer unapologetic surprise bans) but you've got to set a standard of behavior somehow or you end up with Twitter. The Fool posted:In online communities it is not always about whether this person or that person is black/white/woman/man/trans/etc, it's about the attitude and culture of the community being actively hostile (racist jokes, misogynist comments, etc) towards other groups and making other feel uncomfortable at best, and ultimately ends up driving them away. OS culture isn't necessarily very attractive to me either by the way (and I'm a man), I can't see how you'd combine working on OS in your spare time with living a healthy life. I also don't really like typical 'geek' culture and all that comes with it. And I agree the language some companies use for tech job ads is dumb as hell (the author of that site also rebels against this). What I don't agree with though is this stuff: quote:But free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations. ChickenWing: don't reply if you're just gonna be a dick, your behavior is the kind of stuff these codes of conducts are meant to prevent.
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May 15, 2018 17:45
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Volmarias posted:Your argument is "I'm not discriminated against and I don't actively discriminate against others, therefore discrimination doesn't exist". Maybe you're the One True Developer that only sees people for what they write and would never try to hurt others, but also the same time other people exist who are in fact being hurt, discriminated against, and kept out. Shirec posted:You shouldn't have to hide your identity online so that people won't know anything about you. You may say that you don't notice, but that's probably not true, considering humans are shown over and over again to have all sorts of implicit biases. I'm not saying I don't have biases by the way, everyone has them, it's just that on communities like Github you can't really tell the gender/race. I guess on mailing lists this is more obvious, but I'm not sure they're used all that often anymore. And I definitely agree with that part of the code of conduct. And good that that guy was called out on it (I couldn't really find his original tweet, but I'll just assume it was bad). The James Damore thing has become poisoned as hell I guess, but I don't recall he said 'women don't deserve to be programmers' right? Wasn't it more like 'we shouldn't necessarily try to enforce a 50/50 ratio if women don't find the work as appealing as men do in general'? This doesn't seem so bad when you turn it around and apply it to e.g. being a nurse or whatever. Pollyanna posted:Claiming you don’t see color is the same as sticking your fingers in your ears and going la la la la la la la la la la la la. You can’t just ignore a problem to make it go away.
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May 15, 2018 17:57
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amotea posted:(I'm a man) I'm going to sue you for the damage to my jaw when it hit the floor in shock as I read this.
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May 15, 2018 17:59
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amotea posted:ChickenWing: don't reply if you're just gonna be a dick, your behavior is the kind of stuff these codes of conducts are meant to prevent. you're not my dad
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May 15, 2018 18:07
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amotea posted:The James Damore thing has become poisoned as hell I guess, but I don't recall he said 'women don't deserve to be programmers' right? Wasn't it more like 'we shouldn't necessarily try to enforce a 50/50 ratio if women don't find the work as appealing as men do in general'? This doesn't seem so bad when you turn it around and apply it to e.g. being a nurse or whatever. That was how I interpreted it but there was a lot of  bullshit in there, too.However, I'm a straight white guy who identifies as the sex I was born as so I just kind of cautiously back away from any of these conversations without voicing any opinions. Just like I'm doing right now.
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May 15, 2018 18:09
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amotea posted:I'm not saying I don't have biases by the way, everyone has them, it's just that on communities like Github you can't really tell the gender/race. I guess on mailing lists this is more obvious, but I'm not sure they're used all that often anymore. And I definitely agree with that part of the code of conduct. It presupposes that women, with their tiny emotional brains, tend to not want to be developers because which is why he got excoriated.Imagine if he wrote that Jews, with their tiny, greedy brains were more suited towards banking and maybe tend to not want to be developers. Or really, just pick any other non dominant group. Maybe the Roma, if you're European? quote:This is not what I said at all though, of course I can see color, but not by looking at a nickname. Unless the nickname actually identifies ethnicity, gender, etc. or the user has identified themselves elsewhere. I'm glad that you're super super definitely (definitely!) not a bigot but maybe you can accept that bigots exist in the world and there's a reason we want to call them out, and also not want them to be accepted?
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May 15, 2018 18:13
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