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Volmarias posted:"We're doing that right now It scared me how natural that was for someone who was not the OP.
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Apr 30, 2020 18:54
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lifg posted:I don’t have an ending to this rant. My boss is a brilliant programmer and architect, but really shouldn’t be anywhere near management or project management or any of it. People get confused when I tell them that I am a career engineer and never ever ever ever want to become a people leader. This is why. I did babby project management for half a year and not only did I have a significant amount to do with the project failing, I spend the entire time stressed out of my goddamn mind. Just let me be Person Who Makes Technical Decisions And Is Otherwise One Of The More Competent Engineers and go away
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Apr 30, 2020 19:11
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Same here. Why anyone would want to be responsible for multiple people’s careers and workload on top of their own is beyond me. At the moment I don’t even want to be a senior engineer again, because I had enough of seeing other people ignore my suggestions/explanations, cause a problem, and then tell me it’s my fault because I was meant to be the adult in the room. Being punished when other people get it wrong is incredibly stressful and builds up so much resentment on all sides. I don’t like telling people what to do. Now I get to shrug and do whatever dumb thing I’m told if I don’t feel like arguing - not on my head be it. It feels a little weird to see people who I consider less experienced/skilled than me getting titles like “senior architect” while I’ve dropped from lead back to “software developer”, but the tradeoff is worth it.
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Apr 30, 2020 19:42
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I don't think anyone ever really intends to start managing people in this line of work. There's just that weird thing where everyone seems to go "Oh, you're good at programming, so I'm going to promote you into this managerial, non-programming role."
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Apr 30, 2020 20:27
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Part of the reason I left my last job was because I got promoted into management and I hated it. I don't want to be in more meetings and I'm certainly not comfortable being anybody's boss. I'm happy to do mentoring and stuff but I don't want to sit down with someone and build personal goals with them or whatever.
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Apr 30, 2020 21:26
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ChickenWing posted:Just let me be Person Who Makes Technical Decisions And Is Otherwise One Of The More Competent Engineers and go away Exact same here. Fortunately, leadership here is cool with that.
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Apr 30, 2020 21:29
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the reason why senior tech people end up going into management is that, aside from tech focused companies in silicon valley, management is the only track to getting paid the big bucks
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Apr 30, 2020 22:56
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We don't have anything like project managers around here so yeah basically the best developer on every team spends 50% of their time doing non-development work On the other hand I work with a few people who are frankly not good at development at all, but are generally eager, hardworking, and organized and would honestly be better at project management tasks than me but they spend 100% of their time doing development
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Apr 30, 2020 23:41
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DELETE CASCADE posted:management is the only track to getting paid the big bucks At some point, your ability to write code as a single IC maxes out, no matter how good it is or how much you can write in a single day, and being able to say you lead n coders on a successful project carries more value, whether you really enabled that success or not.
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May 1, 2020 00:23
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On the other hand, you can avoid management by becoming a speaker, inspiring n engineers by giving good talks internally and at conferences and tweeting about development values, and get distinguished/fellow/consultant positions
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May 1, 2020 00:26
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What matters is convincing the manager class to hand you enormous bags of money in relation to the success of people who are not you.
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May 1, 2020 00:39
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yes that's very well put
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May 1, 2020 19:18
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DELETE CASCADE posted:the reason why senior tech people end up going into management is that, aside from tech focused companies in silicon valley, management is the only track to getting paid the big bucks That is why I’m doing it right now...
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May 2, 2020 15:50
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My old advisor liked to highlight the absurdity of the situation by comparing it to rewarding a surgeon that reaches the pinnacle of his skilled profession by giving him a desk job where he will never touch another knife again. But as already said: a skilled engineer/programmer cannot scale. You can, however, get into a technical lead track where at least you can put your insights to good use. Looking at the senior PEs in my hierarchy, they really struggle to keep up with any technical work, with everything being essentially back-to-back meetings 60 hours a week. I have mixed feelings about such a technical track leadership position, because there is a huge difference between knowing a technology through reading and knowing it because you actually had hands-on playtime with it. If you don't have the time to keep up with the practical aspects, you're being set up for a Peter Principle; not through promotion, but through the time dimension.
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May 4, 2020 13:34
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Smugworth posted:What matters is convincing the manager class to hand you enormous bags of money in relation to the success of people who are not you. I'm gonna frame and hang this one up.
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May 4, 2020 13:37
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Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough but when being a regular joe programmer is enough to get you into the top 5%+ of earners (in the UK at least), I don’t see the point in scrambling to be in the top 3 or 2 percent by pivoting into talking or managing if you don’t enjoy either of those things.
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May 4, 2020 13:52
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough but when being a regular joe programmer is enough to get you into the top 5%+ of earners (in the UK at least), I don’t see the point in scrambling to be in the top 3 or 2 percent by pivoting into talking or managing if you don’t enjoy either of those things. but how will i validate my worth as a human if number not go up????? I definitely agree that value as an individual contributor doesn't scale past a certain point, but I also think that you can have a leader who is not a manager. You don't have to be in charge of a team to give the value of your experience to one - I hadn't heard of "Staff Engineer" before my current workplace put me on that track. I'm not sure what the case is for other places (having only worked at 3 at this point) but I think having what is effectively a full-time consultant on hand is a good idea if you've got more than a single team.
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May 4, 2020 14:15
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough but when being a regular joe programmer is enough to get you into the top 5%+ of earners (in the UK at least), I don’t see the point in scrambling to be in the top 3 or 2 percent by pivoting into talking or managing if you don’t enjoy either of those things. Yeah I make more than enough money as is, I still can't believe I get paid to be on my computer all day. Why would I want to mess that up?
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May 4, 2020 21:36
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i assume that, due to the underlying ageism in this industry, you cannot simply become a solid and experienced IC, and will need to go into people and/or technical management sooner or later to avoid being marginalised?
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May 4, 2020 21:46
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I'm just going to do the Steve Buscemi "how do you do fellow kids" thing
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May 4, 2020 22:11
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redleader posted:i assume that, due to the underlying ageism in this industry, you cannot simply become a solid and experienced IC, and will need to go into people and/or technical management sooner or later to avoid being marginalised? Ageism isn't as big a problem outside of Silicon Valley as it is in it. It's still a problem, but it's not a complete dealbreaker at older established companies outside of tech as it is in those circles. The bigger problem is that the marginal value of a year of development experience flattens out pretty hard somewhere around 15 years, and it's really hard to justify the sort of salary you'd want for your experience unless you're bringing something really special to the table.
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May 4, 2020 22:16
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yeah, but at that stage you're earning pretty decent computer toucher dollars, so you can just aim for reasonable compensation and take CoL bumps
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May 5, 2020 00:41
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redleader posted:i assume that, due to the underlying ageism in this industry, you cannot simply become a solid and experienced IC, and will need to go into people and/or technical management sooner or later to avoid being marginalised? ageism isn't really that big a deal in my experience. not keeping up with trends and tech is really harmful to your career tho. always be learning
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May 5, 2020 01:34
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unless you work in embedded in which case you can go your entire career knowing nothing but C
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May 5, 2020 01:42
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the talent deficit posted:ageism isn't really that big a deal in my experience. not keeping up with trends and tech is really harmful to your career tho. always be learning Which becomes harder and harder as you get older and have more duties and expectations outside of work. Weird.
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May 5, 2020 02:18
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Gildiss posted:Which becomes harder and harder as you get older and have more duties and expectations outside of work. Weird. You can do all you need by stealing 15 minutes a day from work for some directed learning.
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May 5, 2020 03:03
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lifg posted:You can do all you need by stealing 15 minutes a day from work for some directed learning. IMO this isn't stealing and should be built into your weekly work hours
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May 5, 2020 04:11
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Gildiss posted:Which becomes harder and harder as you get older and have more duties and expectations outside of work. Weird. so do it at work the reason changing jobs every 18 months is optimal isn't just for the money (tho this is a really good reason); it's also so you can constantly be learning new things from new people. if you're in like year seven of working on the same rails application you're already hosed but otherwise you can just go get a new job using hot new things and you're good
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May 5, 2020 06:26
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The IC track at tech companies still involves more people and less typing code as you go up. It just keeps the focus much more on technical guidance than administrative things. AFAICT the ageism in the industry is strongly correlated with dumb bullshit jobs and often comes down to that someone with 20 years of experience isn't going to believe you when you try to convince them that your fart app is going to change the world and can't spend half an hour genuinely expounding on how much they love the javascript framework du jour even if they like it and know how to use it. With the current job market it's not a big deal because you don't want those jobs anyway, but it could become one if jobs dry up and you have to settle for something to pay the bills.
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May 5, 2020 07:10
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the talent deficit posted:ageism isn't really that big a deal in my experience. not keeping up with trends and tech is really harmful to your career tho. always be learning well gosh there's no problems up thru my mid 40's, what could possibly happen beyond that point qsvui posted:unless you work in embedded in which case you can go your entire career knowing nothing but C 
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May 5, 2020 20:18
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JawnV6 posted:assertions like this should come along with an age and the oldest dev you've worked with I’ve worked with programmers in their fifties or sixties (I don’t ask) in literally every job I’ve had over the last 15 years, except at that 2-person web dev company. But I’m not in Silicon Valley or at a FAANG.
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May 5, 2020 20:52
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Beef posted:My old advisor liked to highlight the absurdity of the situation by comparing it to rewarding a surgeon that reaches the pinnacle of his skilled profession by giving him a desk job where he will never touch another knife again. How many surgeries do you think a Chief of Surgery is doing on a weekly basis? It's the nature of meritocracies. My personal input is I went to the management track to have a larger effect over the projects that I work on. I saw too many good projects fail because of decisions outside my power. So I sought to increase my power so now if they fail it's on me and not in spite of me. Over time I learned how critically important personal development is of your people, but I'll be lying if I said I had that empathy when I first started.
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May 5, 2020 23:24
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lifg posted:I’ve worked with programmers in their fifties or sixties (I don’t ask) in literally every job I’ve had over the last 15 years, except at that 2-person web dev company. But I’m not in Silicon Valley or at a FAANG. I really only have two jobs to look at, and my old job had plenty of older guys working there. I think I saw two retirements at my stay there. I don't think I have anything bad to say about their programming skills or anything, though they both did like to talk your ear off if you'd let 'em.
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May 5, 2020 23:33
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Hughlander posted:Over time I learned how critically important personal development is of your people, but I'll be lying if I said I had that empathy when I first started. How do you develop people? What even is personal development? I can’t say I ever got any useful goals or advice from a manager, and my experience has been that good programmers continue being good and bad programmers rarely improve. The whole management and development thing is, as far as I understand, really just a necessary bit of paperwork so when you want to fire someone you can say you tried to help them. Also do any of you guys have to do peer reviews to appraise each other? loving awful idea. Yeah let’s make everyone on the team write personal comments about each other, this couldnt possibly go wrong 
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May 6, 2020 07:38
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If you don't think personal development is important you're going to be in the "bad programmer" (or perhaps the "crusty dude stuck maintaining some legacy system that nobody likes working with") bucket at some point. Personally I've found the feedback received from my peers to be really helpful, both in pointing out areas to improve and affirming stuff that I do well. While the best feedback comes from outside the formal systems, having a mechanism that prompts people to actually give their peers feedback is pretty useful to make that actually happen. Stack ranking can go to hell though.
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May 6, 2020 07:47
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:
I had this in my old company and it was incredible useful. I learnt a lot about myself via anonymous, mandatory peer reviews. It made me realise that I'm actually drat good at my job and gave me the confidence to take my career into my own hands.
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May 6, 2020 07:51
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Jabor posted:the "crusty dude stuck maintaining some legacy system that nobody likes working with" This sounds pretty great to me honestly. Job security (well, you’ll have plenty of notice before they manage to replace it), probably well-enough paid since nobody else wants to do it, nobody else bothering me, working on something that’s actively used and not a pie-in-the-sky rewrite that will take years to complete... I AM a crusty old dude at heart vv yeah this. It’s useless or hostile. It’s like some kind of prisoner’s dilemma. If you’re the only one who writes negative feedback you look like a dick. If everyone writes positive feedback it’s all useless, except maybe to the insecure new grad who needs a boost. If everyone writes negative feedback and you don’t, you look naive/stupid. If anyone writes negative feedback it’ll end up being used against you. People obviously write nicer feedback about Bob who goes to the bar with them after work than about Alice who doesn’t. Its just a nightmare. Prism Mirror Lens fucked around with this message at 08:16 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 08:01
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The first company I worked at did a ton of layoffs that used what people had gotten in their reviews, so I never say anything bad in peer reviews.
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May 6, 2020 08:06
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Protocol7 posted:I really only have two jobs to look at, and my old job had plenty of older guys working there. I think I saw two retirements at my stay there. I don't think I have anything bad to say about their programming skills or anything, though they both did like to talk your ear off if you'd let 'em. I love the olds at my company. They're incredibly helpful to help find out issues in legacy.
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May 6, 2020 13:21
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y'all need to find some less toxic companies, peer review is great if your workplace isn't a toxic hellhole.
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May 6, 2020 13:42
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