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New Yorp New Yorp posted:I'm mostly remote -- I do consulting, but I'm currently on a long-term engagement with a client over 1000 miles away from me. I go visit them for a few days or a week a couple of times a year. This right here is why I will have to be paid probably double to ever move back to an office. Once you've done it for a while, you can really work at your own pace and carve out giant blocks of time to pursue hobbies and other interests, in a way that's impossible in an office. For example I go to the gym everyday at the least busy time, which allows me to shave probably fifteen minutes off my workout between traffic and waiting around on equipment. All appointments are easier. Errands too. Even car costs get reduced because you don't have to sit in rush hour ever. I also like to keep a constant stream of household chores happening which means my weekends are entirely my own and not the rush of laundry and cleaning in order to get things ready for Monday. It's not even like I'm spending a lot of time cleaning during the day, I can toss in a load of laundry during a CI build and not miss anything at all. As for the social life aspect, I was lucky to have one outside of work before I started. I try to have lunch with a friend at least once a week, and I Skype with my coworkers fairly often to pair, usually between 1-3 hours at a time. Communication at my company is all remote so that's never been a challenge but it would be a huge problem if that were not the case. I was offered the chance to move to a much larger salary, but at a no-remote company with frequent late hours. I turned it down, because why even bother getting a pay bump if I have less free time to use any of it? vonnegutt fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 18:19
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I'm absolutely terrible at motivating myself to actually work when I'm sitting remotely, so I frequently turn out very unproductive when I work from home. I force myself to go into work, even though I have a workplace that would be fine with me being partly remote.
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Jul 3, 2018 00:53
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I need a separate space for work and leisure or I don't get anything done, and a home office isn't separate enough. Remote is tough.
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Jul 3, 2018 01:01
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Bongo Bill posted:I need a separate space for work and leisure or I don't get anything done, and a home office isn't separate enough. Remote is tough. Same.
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Jul 3, 2018 01:17
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Shirec posted:I've always been curious about remote work. My best friend has been remote 100% for three years and loves it, but I think it makes him afraid to ever look for a new job (he's also a finance analyst so less collaborative work besides the 100 million meetings he has a week). Also I like socializing so I think I'd miss that. Is it ever hard to put your heads together on issues or is it more that the office atmosphere needs to support/have tools for that type of mixed work environment? I've done remote for 5 years now, and I've done it for three companies. I would not have it any other way at this point. The companies I've worked for have either already had lots of remotes, or had the teams geographically split across different offices. My most recent two teams were based in NYC, which means that on any given day, 20% of the team has discovered their subway line is hosed and decides to work from home instead. At that point, you've got to communicate like everyone is remote, even if only a few people "technically" are remote. So when we have a problem, we just throw up a screenshare and talk it over. Tools like Slack or Hangouts get rid of all the friction in doing that. I recently built a new house, so I was able to carve out part of the house as an office. Nice sit/stand desk, good chair, 4K monitor, and gigabit internet. I need separation to say "I'm going to work now" and "I'm not at work now," and having the office on a corner of the house (away from bedrooms or the living room) helps. While I like my job, I do want to make sure I can land the next remote gig. I travel into the office quarterly. When I do, I try to attend or speak at a tech meetup or two, just to talk shop and learn what companies are remote-friendly/remote-first.
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Jul 3, 2018 06:39
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Welp, big ol' priority shift with a laughably short deadline for the requirements that we heard about late last week (with no input from the devs before the deadline got set, naturally) got shortened again by 25% today (yeah that's indeed about 2 business days between those two events). Meanwhile, interrupted with "hey can you look at this bug" all day. Deadlines are lawn dart thrown with a blindfold on at best, and that's when devs have input on the amount of work before they're decided. These guys are dreaming, and no we aren't going to be putting in unpaid overtime for any of this poo poo. This is years and years of picking the cheapest dirtiest hacks every single goddamn time and never letting us pay off any of that debt. Well it's come due now motherfuckers and the interest is going to make you cry and I'm going to sit here laughing at you while you do. I had hope earlier this year. They made some hires that made me think they were willing to change direction, and those new hires have been trying, but like clockwork, as soon as the pressure is on they go back to the only method they really understand: pressure us for the cheap and dirty hacks and start lecturing about the "realities of business" when we try and push back. My favorite reason, the reason they go to most by far, is "But it's <whatever customer is shrieking loudest at this moment>. We HAVE to!" I need to find a place to work where they don't do this 100% of the time. 80% of the time would be fine, seriously. I don't expect management to fully grasp what technical debt does or why it matters that we spend time coming up with a good (note: not necessarily perfect) solution. I just want them to trust me when I tell them that we REALLY NEED some maintenance programming or that we REALLY NEED to not go with the first bullshit hack the junior devs come up with, and then back me up when I make that decision. I'm not going to do it all the time and I'm not going to randomly refactor something on a whim just because I learned a cool new programming thing.  Sorry for the rant. I like a lot of the things about my job and I don't want to leave for those reasons. But this poo poo is starting to eclipse it all.
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Jul 3, 2018 09:17
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Che Delilas posted:Welp, big ol' priority shift with a laughably short deadline for the requirements that we heard about late last week (with no input from the devs before the deadline got set, naturally) got shortened again by 25% today (yeah that's indeed about 2 business days between those two events). Meanwhile, interrupted with "hey can you look at this bug" all day. Years ago, I was a lot more willing to do things like rush implementation or write stuff without unit tests just to make management happy. Here's what I found happens: 1. You look like a hero... then you have to maintain that poo poo. 2. It does not look impressive to anyone if you say there's technical debt - that sounds to management like you hosed up, even if it's nobody's fault. 3. The people who made you work sixty hours a week to make a customer happy get promoted. You get to keep fixing the poo poo hacks you wrote forever and get 2% raises while doing it. I mean, yeah, that place is hosed up. But when you go to the next place, show some backbone, and go at your own pace.
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Jul 3, 2018 11:45
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We've basically resorted to just taking some of each sprint for projects we know need to be done. It's just that we get poo poo for it; you can only operate so long as the (perceived) roadblock before you just get exhausted. Don't worry though, we aren't going to death march. If that's what it looks like we'll be facing I'm going to force product to make a choice of which feature is priority 1 and which is priority 10, and if I know the team they'll cross their arms and wait for that decision. We all have our own lives.
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Jul 3, 2018 12:38
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I did remote exactly once (not counting WFH days), and I was actually kind of miserable. I didnt get a chance to socialize, work time bled into non-work time, I didnt feel like I was well supported or involved, and getting anything done via extracting information and domain knowledge from other engineers and product owners was like pulling teeth. Gimme a short commute (max 15min) any day.
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Jul 3, 2018 13:52
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When I first started FT I was still taking a half load of university courses, so I had to work remote one day a week in order to be able to make it to class and I think that was perfect for me. It was a great day because I could sleep in, make a pot of actual drinkable coffee, and be twice as productive as a day at the office by about 1pm. Then I'd spend the rest of the day lazy-working combined with catching up on chores and slacking a bit until class. I haven't been able to have a regular remote schedule since, but both my current and previous job are very intermittent-remote-friendly, and I make as much use of that as I can. Can't overdo it though - I don't have the self-control for being able to WFH for too long, eventually the allure of not-working is too great and I throw my extra productivity out the window.
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Jul 3, 2018 14:39
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I like the transition that commuting provides at the end of the day. When I work from home, I'm expected to just flip a switch and go from "work mode" to "family mode" and I have a hard time with that. I've stopped trying to read or listen to music on the way home. Just staring into space and letting my thoughts go where they will (even on a crowded train) leaves me in a much better state once I get home.
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Jul 3, 2018 15:03
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good jovi posted:I like the transition that commuting provides at the end of the day. When I work from home, I'm expected to just flip a switch and go from "work mode" to "family mode" and I have a hard time with that. I've stopped trying to read or listen to music on the way home. Just staring into space and letting my thoughts go where they will (even on a crowded train) leaves me in a much better state once I get home. I try to end my day with a transitional activity -- I go for a walk, go to the gym, or something that involves me not being in the house. Of course, there are also the occasional busy day where my day ends because my fiance says "okay, dinner's ready, stop working"
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Jul 3, 2018 16:14
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ChickenWing posted:When I first started FT I was still taking a half load of university courses, so I had to work remote one day a week in order to be able to make it to class and I think that was perfect for me. It was a great day because I could sleep in, make a pot of actual drinkable coffee, and be twice as productive as a day at the office by about 1pm. Then I'd spend the rest of the day lazy-working combined with catching up on chores and slacking a bit until class. This is exactly me. My current workplace is pretty comfortable with intermittent WFH time (we have a lot of actual-remote workers), and I like to take a day every week or two to work from home. It prevents the distractions of the office, helps me focus on a specific problem, get chores done while I listen-in on an hour long meeting (every monday morning....  ), and so on. Sleeping in a little bit and the real pot of good coffee are definite bonuses too.Buuut... I've also done remote-only work, and it sucks bad. I really struggle hard to separate work time from home time, I definitely get low-key depression from social isolation and a strong feeling of being unproductive (whether it's true or not). Ironically, it also makes me less inclined to take part in social activities that have nothing to do with work. Overall it's just really unhealthy. Gimme a day here and there and I'm a happy camper.
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Jul 3, 2018 16:16
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Bongo Bill posted:I need a separate space for work and leisure or I don't get anything done, and a home office isn't separate enough. Remote is tough.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:02
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I think I'd prefer flexible WFH (weather, appointments, subway problems) than true WFH after reading y'alls experiences. I think I fall into the camp of using the commute to decompress or gear up for the day. Although the benefit of meal prep, casual chore doing, and whatnot sounds awesome  3 days left and I'm feeling great. My co-workers and boss have reverted to 60+ work weeks, as I got a bunch of new issues assigned to me at 11 pm last night (  ) and noticed a bunch of wiki updates/pushes late last night. I leave on 5 at the dot every day and don't check my work email at all anymore. I did have to put up with my boss talking out his rear end at me about our HTML templates for email and explaining how containers work. It was so condescending. I stared at him and thought about my Six Ages game on my phone and what Hero Quest I was going to do next.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:12
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Shirec posted:I think I'd prefer flexible WFH (weather, appointments, subway problems) than true WFH after reading y'alls experiences. I think I fall into the camp of using the commute to decompress or gear up for the day. Although the benefit of meal prep, casual chore doing, and whatnot sounds awesome these updates continue to be great, and you sound like you're already in a much better state of mind than you were pre-notice. I hope that place is burning down as you walk out on your last day
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Jul 3, 2018 17:34
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Bongo Bill posted:I need a separate space for work and leisure or I don't get anything done, and a home office isn't separate enough. Remote is tough. I don't have the space and I work on my gaming rig so I have the processing power, multi-monitors, etc., BUT this is a super important concept called stimulus control. Since I can't physically relocate, I just alter my environment another way to clearly signal "I'm at work" vs. "I'm doing my own thing", specifically I have completely separate partitions I boot into for work or other with very different wallpapers, taskbar layouts, etc. When I "clock out", I reboot and select the other partition, put away anything else work related (some notebooks and stuff), and actually physically walk out of the room (sometimes the entire apartment, I'll go take a walk to check the mail or something) and come back so I can sort of pretend I'm "going home" after work. It seems silly, but it's really effective to have even the most superficial barrier around my work. That might not be enough for everyone, but it's something I highly recommend trying to anyone working at home.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:52
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I have no problem with working remote but I grew up learning how to program at home versus in a lab or whatnot. I wonder if that affects things, I am actually more comfortable getting into hard stuff at my home desk.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:07
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I'm 100% self-taught as well, I hadn't considered that that might be a factor. Sitting in a cube is really unnatural to me and I can never feel comfortable, which leads to me wandering off task more.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:13
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Today I got to spend my day at refactoring the testcode for one of our micro services. It felt super good to remove all Thread.sleep(2500) and replace it with conditional waits or smart refresh things. This alone saved me about 40 seconds on a run. Next up is testing classes not through the API but by directly instantiating said class or, using Spring Boot stubbing and mocking. Also make a real separation in unit and integration tests. After the tests run in seconds, I can pick up the actual code refactoring in a TDD fashion. Having tons of fun! Do others feel this way about cleaning up a mess? If you do, we are hiring.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:54
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Removing sleeps from tests and testing API-related functionality without real or mock HTTP requests is pretty ace.
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Jul 3, 2018 19:09
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i worked remote on a team of five that were all remote. it was great and i was very productive despite working very irregular hours. then we had a management change and all new hires were in office and i got reorged to a team where six of the eight people on it were in office and i did effectively nothing for six months because i was constantly out of the loop and all of my time was spent in pointless skype meetings working remote is great if your company gets it, terrible if it doesn't
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Jul 3, 2018 21:16
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the talent deficit posted:working remote is great if your company gets it, terrible if it doesn't Pretty much, yeah. I've worked for several clients for whom the normal method of collaboration is "physically go to the person's desk and interrupt them", because IMs and emails were never answered. I think it was a chicken-or-egg problem. Being too busy to respond means you have to interrupt them which means they're too busy to respond which means...
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Jul 3, 2018 21:55
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ChickenWing posted:these updates continue to be great, and you sound like you're already in a much better state of mind than you were pre-notice. I hope that place is burning down as you walk out on your last day Haha I'm glad it's still enjoyable that I post here and not "Oh god, please stop quoting Shirec whining"  The only cloud left of this job is that I worry a tad that somehow my boss will find a way to sabotage me in the future. The NYC offer didn't need references and is doing a background check, which I'm used to. Any other job though, if they want to check my dates of employment, may end up talking to my boss, and I have no idea what he'll say. Especially after my glass door review goes up.New Yorp New Yorp posted:Pretty much, yeah. I've worked for several clients for whom the normal method of collaboration is "physically go to the person's desk and interrupt them", because IMs and emails were never answered. I think it was a chicken-or-egg problem. Being too busy to respond means you have to interrupt them which means they're too busy to respond which means... I worked with a dude that would email, IM if I got the email, and then walk over to discuss the thing, all within about 3 minutes of each other. It was maddening. He also used very passive aggressive smiley faces (not that my online communication is great, I'm a big fan of ! and I always have to go back over things to make sure I don't sound insane)
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Jul 3, 2018 22:38
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Shirec posted:He also used very passive aggressive smiley faces (not that my online communication is great, I'm a big fan of ! and I always have to go back over things to make sure I don't sound insane)
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Jul 3, 2018 22:54
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Shirec posted:Any other job though, if they want to check my dates of employment, may end up talking to my boss, and I have no idea what he'll say. Especially after my glass door review goes up. Hang on to your W2s and final pay stub. If you can still get a copy of your first pay stub to establish a start date, grab that too. I had a background check vendor accept redacted paystubs or W2s, because I wouldn't let them contact my employer at the time. I just blacked out my SSN and the dollar amounts.
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Jul 3, 2018 23:06
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Shirec posted:Haha I'm glad it's still enjoyable that I post here and not "Oh god, please stop quoting Shirec whining" Not to say he wouldn't be dumb enough to duck it up, but most places will only confirm start and end dates, and MAYBE whether you're eligible to be rehired. Anything past that would give you an opportunity to sue them for Slander if they potentially caused you to not get the job
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Jul 3, 2018 23:23
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Shirec posted:I worked with a dude that would email, IM if I got the email, and then walk over to discuss the thing, all within about 3 minutes of each other. It was maddening. He also used very passive aggressive smiley faces (not that my online communication is great, I'm a big fan of ! and I always have to go back over things to make sure I don't sound insane) or calling me, wtf, Im a millennial, I cant handle phone calls
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Jul 3, 2018 23:41
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kitten smoothie posted:Hang on to your W2s and final pay stub. If you can still get a copy of your first pay stub to establish a start date, grab that too. This is good advice, even in this era of automated background checks. My bg check hosed up a little because my former employer's legal name changed during a merger, but none of the branding/publicly advertised name did. Most importantly, my company transferred everyone to the new legal name in the system they used, so it reported that I was not employed by the company when I claimed to be (because I used the original legal name). My paystubs were enough to clear it up, but it was a bit of a scare.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:23
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One of my former employers was originally named something a little goofy like "Awesome Code People" (not the real name) when it was founded in a dorm room. They had been given a contract to build something for a big name company, and they just wanted a legal entity to hold it. Then they realized the thing they built could be turned into a core product to sell, so they reincorporated in Delaware like six months later with the name they used later. But that original name followed them around forever in certain situations, like on the official documents for the 401k plan. So I fully expect that some day I might have to prove to a background check person that yes I really did work for OldCorp but it was also formerly known as Awesome Code People.
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Jul 4, 2018 15:45
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I once worked as an embedded contractor for a bank that was bought out by another bank while my contractor company was acquired twice during the same time period. On my resume, I just say "<Latest Bank> via <Latest Contractor>" and get asked about what that means, but it has never caused any issues.
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Jul 4, 2018 18:39
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Through a long and complicated ordeal, I inadvertently convinced one of our other engineering managers to use "butt" as an HTTP user agent from our core application
Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 14:42
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Holy poo poo... The difference in attitude and work culture at my new job is like loving night and day. I'm pretty excited about this. Nicest part is that management doesn't seem to be breathing down my neck and I'm not dreading my manager walking into the office every morning. People went out for lunch together yesterday... Because they like spending time together??? I'm confused and in part just waiting for the hammer to drop where one day everything just ends up on fire and people are crying under their desks or something. Maybe this new job is actually good? Also the guy who sits next to me brings in his dog every day and I love the job dog at my new job. bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 14:53
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I'm working in a startup and oh boy is it a challenge. My boss, the CTO, has apparently sold a system which does not exist. He sold it at the beginning of June. He notified me in July it needed to be delivered 1st of August with the instructions: "just it architect and implement it, they need access to everything", then promptly went on vacation. My entire career is one year old. My boss if possible the worst of sales. 
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Jul 5, 2018 14:56
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Boiled Water posted:I'm working in a startup and oh boy is it a challenge.  Tank that company ASAP.
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Jul 5, 2018 15:11
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Boiled Water posted:I'm working in a startup and oh boy is it a challenge.
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Jul 5, 2018 15:11
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Boiled Water posted:I'm working in a startup and oh boy is it a challenge. Working at a startup seems bad in every single way other than learning a shitload just from having to put out fires every single day.
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Jul 5, 2018 15:11
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Working at a startup seems bad in every single way other than learning a shitload just from having to put out fires every single day. Its like an intensive course in everything at the same time
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Jul 5, 2018 15:19
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Vulture Culture posted:Through a long and complicated ordeal, I inadvertently convinced one of our other engineering managers to use "butt" as an HTTP user agent from our core application A while back we had a problem where we needed a fresh session/cookies from the backend and our temporary solution was a /fart request. We were referring to it as the fart problem during standups and meetings.
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Jul 5, 2018 15:47
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Working at a startup seems bad in every single way other than learning a shitload just from having to put out fires every single day. Boiled Water posted:It’s like an intensive course in everything at the same time Yup! I think of it as being thrown in the deep end of a pool. Hope you can swim! Boss pulled me off of a task to write complicated enough reports so that's what my last two days are going to be. Totally don't care. I did notice that both he and another co-worker of mine did a full day of work yesterday though, while on holiday. I feel super bad for the guy sometimes, first job and he doesn't know to set those boundaries, but also gently caress him for saying it's not that bad. He also, once when I was addressing sexism in the industry, brought up how unfair it is that woman can hit men with no repercussions/can't hit them back, so he might just be a turd. As a random aside, I think I'm going to go through my posts here and in the Newbie thread, save them and flesh them out a bit more coherently, and save it for later use. I know I personally want to help encourage other women/minority devs in the industry, and speak at conferences in that vein, and maybe those experiences will be useful later. Or maybe not? I'm not sure but at least I can do some groundwork now edit: everyone in my office is gone now  I think my boss took them somewhere? His car is gone, they are all gone. Curious but I guess whatever?
Shirec fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 16:38
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