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Vulture Culture posted:500-level management is making a game out of discovering the deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities of everyone you meet, then making decisions about whether to use what you've learned to help people beat their worst habits, or to weaponize them nick/AV/post combo  Vulture Culture posted:I've seen so many teams be dysfunctional because they forgot to hire people who can do rote work without going 60 miles off into some insane tangent. For a lot of folks, the rote work is the really hard work, and it's where you need to get deep into details instead of waving your hands around and pontificating This. We have a small team exclusively made of post-docs due to the nature of our work. I've been pontificating the need for some 'regular' developers to supplement the team, because we develop and run quite a bit of our own tools. The stumbling block seems to be that the managers in charge of handing out the headcount just stone wall it with "you're not a tools team" and that's it. I got blank states when mentioning the "surgical team pattern". Isn't the mythical man-month required reading if you go anywhere near software project management?
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May 9, 2020 18:33
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Beef posted:nick/AV/post combo It's funny how you think that managers can read
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May 9, 2020 20:08
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Beef posted:I got blank states when mentioning the "surgical team pattern". Isn't the mythical man-month required reading if you go anywhere near software project management? Wouldn't that be nice? That said, the surgical team pattern made sense in the days when CPU cycles were very expensive and developers were very cheap. Now a lot of the stuff that Brooks wanted the supporting team members to do can be done by computers, and every reasonably good developer can do software surgery.
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May 9, 2020 20:09
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I work at a company where all the mistakes of Mythical Man-Month are taken as good ideas and when I suggested the director of engineering read the book he scoffed and said he didn't need to read it, he'd already understood it. My skip-level is a SVP that clearly has never even heard of the book or its core mistakes, and I'm being recruited as a team lead into this environment. Yes I'm trying to  .
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May 9, 2020 21:27
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ultrafilter posted:Wouldn't that be nice?
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May 9, 2020 23:59
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ultrafilter posted:Wouldn't that be nice? I honestly cannot understand the argument you are making here. I assume you mean that there was a high volume of menial tasks due to the technological limitations (e.g. punchcard or teletype line editor inputs)? Sure the nature of the support work changed, but the principle definitely has not. You can spend as much CPU cycles as you want, it's not going to make a computer program itself. You also still have expensive and cheaper developers, none of that changed. If anything, the volume of tedious poo poo has exploded even more because the 'free cycles' have allowed software to become sloppy and brittle as gently caress; cfr. worse is better. Developing complex software always has parts that are tedious. e.g. in game development, entry-level programming jobs are often the tool-devs or gameplay logic devs. Does it suddenly make sense to fill your team only with veteran lead developers because your CPU has more cycles?
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May 10, 2020 17:16
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Beef posted:Developing complex software always has parts that are tedious. e.g. in game development, entry-level programming jobs are often the tool-devs or gameplay logic devs. Lucky you, game dev tools and gameplay logic are probably more exciting than 99% of all software being written at any given time.
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May 10, 2020 20:55
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Not a game dev, but yeah it's relative. Even spending all day trying to find holes in the floor geometry to fall through in a game is more fun that writing yet another CRUD form UI.
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May 11, 2020 11:16
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Adhemar posted:Lucky you, game dev tools and gameplay logic are probably more exciting than 99% of all software being written at any given time. Shame about the whole treatment of devs thing though.
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May 12, 2020 07:33
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Volmarias posted:It's funny how you think that managers can read 
Beef fucked around with this message at 09:11 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 09:08
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Offshore guy is telling me the DigitalOcean droplet I have running our app for a QA environment is slow to upload video files. He tested the software on an EC2 instance and concluded the droplet I set up just needs an SSD to improve performance. The EC2 testing he did resulted in a response time of 600ms to 1 minute... which is on average worse than the droplet. Meanwhile I’m just sitting here like... the server is in New York. You’re in India. Yeah, you’re gonna see some network latency problems, especially when uploading several megabytes worth of video frames... And of course he throws out the “I don’t see the latency on local dev environment.” Because no poo poo you don’t have to deal with network latency when you’re working locally. Used to like these offshore guys, they’ve been dropping the ball a lot recently. Time to convince my boss to 
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May 14, 2020 16:04
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Protocol7 posted:Offshore guy is telling me the DigitalOcean droplet I have running our app for a QA environment is slow to upload video files. I don't even...... This is the same stuff as me having to tell my co-workers that no, when you run the executable of a shared drive it does not run on the server hosting the executable.
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May 15, 2020 06:18
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I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore  ), and I wanted to share my good news with folks!So I'm nearing my last days at my current job. In response to the pandemic, my job cut everyone's salaries (mine took 7%) and I was already underpaid and annoyed (a whole saga there) so I started looking. A goon referral at one place ended up being interested, and after much prep and studying, I'm getting a new job making 30k more in base salary and mid/regular/non junior level title. It was incredibly validating to have a place be so interested in hiring me  Now I have to learn Java8 though, and I'm only familiar with Ruby, so this will be a journey.
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May 15, 2020 16:50
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Shirec posted:I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore  I'm glad you're doing better!
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May 15, 2020 17:23
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Yeah, always nice to see another success story!
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May 15, 2020 17:31
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Shirec posted:I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore That's great, congratulations!
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May 15, 2020 18:04
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Shirec posted:I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore Congrats!
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May 15, 2020 18:16
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I apologize in advance if this ends up sounding like whining but I need a sanity check. When you're working on issues/technology outside the main focus of your team, how do you make sure that the knowledge gets transferred to the rest of the team? I often develop features that are outside our core webapp+server, e.g. printing labels, communicating with external software via our desktop client and more. But because there's no real handoff it means that all tasks for the ridiculous pile of stuff I've worked on over the years land on my desk instead of being distributed equally. I have talked repeatedly about this with my boss but nothing really has changed. I feel like this is a liability because when I'm sick or on vacation the work in these areas more or less just stops. I realize that with our small teamsize not everyone can know and do everything but shouldn't there be at least one backup?
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May 16, 2020 20:26
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When the list of things that only you know how to do grows too long you simply find a new job and enjoy being the dumb guy again for a while.
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May 16, 2020 20:36
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When you work on new things, make sure that you carve out time for documentation. You can try to present your work back to your team, but if they're not ever actually working with it, they probably won't retain all that much. Docs at least don't fade away like unused knowledge. When maintenance work comes up, push for a paired approach: someone else on the team takes primary and you set aside some time to walk them through any difficult parts. Same thing for any new integrations. This can be a good stress test for your documentation, and it should get them the hands-on time they need to be comfortable with it. If you have a bunch of bits and pieces scattered around, you'll probably never get to a point where every single little thing is covered by at least two people on the team. But, you're right that it's a big risk to have one person on the team who's got a bunch of core knowledge locked up in their head.
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May 16, 2020 20:39
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prom candy posted:When the list of things that only you know how to do grows too long you simply find a new job and enjoy being the dumb guy again for a while. Space Gopher posted:When you work on new things, make sure that you carve out time for documentation. You can try to present your work back to your team, but if they're not ever actually working with it, they probably won't retain all that much. Docs at least don't fade away like unused knowledge. I asked my boss to spread them around in the past but feel like I got nowhere, it's just not a priority as long as I'm at least theoretically available.
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May 16, 2020 21:03
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If you can't get your boss to distribute the work then it isn't going to happen as the other people on the team have no reason to do it. You need to get your boss onboard and the best argument for that is redundancy.
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May 16, 2020 21:09
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Pair programming is a really useful tool for that kind of thing, though it's hard to do well, and anyone who's had a bad experience with it in the past won't want to.
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May 16, 2020 21:18
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prom candy posted:When the list of things that only you know how to do grows too long you simply find a new job and enjoy being the dumb guy again for a while. This sounds a little snarky but has truth to it. Even if you really like that company, they don't like you, and you can expect some day to have to look for work without any industry skills but a whole lot of your company's trivia in your head. This is my personal hell.
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May 16, 2020 21:26
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I wasn't being snarky at all, those are my sincere thoughts. I stayed at my last job for 13 years, leaving was such a relief.
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May 16, 2020 21:49
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:This sounds a little snarky but has truth to it. Even if you really like that company, they don't like you, and you can expect some day to have to look for work without any industry skills but a whole lot of your company's trivia in your head. This is my personal hell. No, I totally understand. As part of my work of pretty much hacking other software for our desktop client to send and receive data from I learned dbase, both the database and the language. Or more recently signing PDFs via PC/SC. Outside of my company and maybe a handful others, beyond a line on my application it's simply useless.
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May 16, 2020 21:54
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scissorman posted:No, I totally understand. Do you feel like your not able to leave as easily because of that? Like others have said, getting a new job is pretty much the way to prune off all the responsibilities and baggage that come with a long tenure at a company. Especially if your boss is not willing to safeguard your time and utilize you properly.
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May 17, 2020 00:11
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Have you explained the concept of the Bus / Lotto factor to your boss? If you have and he's still doing this,  . They might be thinking that since this is the most efficient short term solution that it can continue indefinitely.
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May 17, 2020 00:37
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Shirec posted:I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore High five fellow learning-Java8-friend! I’m coming from a background in Go and boy is it different
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May 17, 2020 01:26
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Could always force the issue. Take a vacation that coincides with important work / maintenance that "only you can do." If it gets done, people were just being lazy so insist on a rotation going forward. If it doesn't get done and it was a big problem that it didn't get done, propose that the team take some time to spread knowledge around because "oh golly gee I didn't even think about this when I took my vacation, it looks like we're getting too siloed, and we should take some steps to ensure this isn't a problem in the future" - don't bring up the fact that you asked for this in the past, all that does is throw egg on the boss's face. Granted this presupposes your boss doesn't just nix all vacation time for you (in which case, you should immediately start gtfo process), and that you are comfortable taking the kind of risk that comes with throwing your weight around like that. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 01:39 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 01:37
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prom candy posted:When the list of things that only you know how to do grows too long you simply find a new job and enjoy being the dumb guy again for a while.
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May 17, 2020 03:35
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I did the frontend for our access policies. This was just the UI for adding stuff like user x can view or edit y for customer z. Suddenly I was the go-to guy for anything access related for anyone in business. The actual auth for even accessing the site before it even checks the policies? Business contacts me. Someone has insufficient access to the things they should have? They contact me, instead of the people who deal with the actual implementation and data. I understand that it's probably hard for them to understand what is what. But thankfully my team lead shields me now and redirects those things. Was spending like 4 hours a week giving access.
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May 17, 2020 13:19
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Sistergodiva posted:I did the frontend for our access policies. This was just the UI for adding stuff like user x can view or edit y for customer z. Suddenly I was the go-to guy for anything access related for anyone in business. It’s generally worth tracking that kind of toil in some way, although it can be hard to get a business to understand that piling interrupt driven work on an engineer is more disruptive than the ‘beep boop what’s it take five minutes’ of time spent on the interrupting task. Not that it will change anything but if they’re ever trying to wring productivity out of you, you can go ‘well first thing to do is take this menial work and hand it to someone where it will be less costly (time/$) for the business’. I’ve been on a team where we had exactly this type of toil and management never did anything to get it off our plate.
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May 17, 2020 14:16
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YanniRotten posted:It’s generally worth tracking that kind of toil in some way, although it can be hard to get a business to understand that piling interrupt driven work on an engineer is more disruptive than the ‘beep boop what’s it take five minutes’ of time spent on the interrupting task. work used to tell me "yeah i know it's not exactly your job description but we're shorthanded, would you mind doing it anyway" when i approached them to talk about that kind of poo poo. well, i stopped complaining and just did whatever stupid menial crap came my way. then, of course, i added an accurate description of that on my worksheet and exactly how much time it took me. i was inevitably asked why i wasn't pushing out enough tickets and then i just said "i wasted 9 hours this week on this support role". the problem magically disappeared after that. who'd have known!
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May 17, 2020 14:28
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Shirec posted:I realized it had been a super long time since I posted in this thread (or the newbie thread but I'm not as much of a newbie anymore Thank god. Gratz!
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May 18, 2020 13:14
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scissorman posted:What's the best way to push for my colleagues to take one of these tasks?
If you work as part of a team that does not measure impact and has no known performance goals, your operations will probably hum along fine in the wrong direction, but you're ultimately adrift without a rudder. It becomes very hard to steer the ship. And sometimes this is even fine, especially within a small company that's pivoting quickly. Keeping all the context local is much faster and less error-prone than distributing it. But if you're part of a maturing practice and you need to parallelize the load and ensure you have enough people to competently work issues, especially if a person is unavailable, this will lead to problems. As you start dealing with high-leverage problems instead of deep technical understanding that doesn't touch the business context, you need greater numbers of informed perspectives in order to get the impact you want. Your job is to identify these issues and start thinking about how the people systems contribute to them. Volmarias posted:Have you explained the concept of the Bus / Lotto factor to your boss? If you have and he's still doing this, Che Delilas posted:Could always force the issue. Take a vacation that coincides with important work / maintenance that "only you can do." If it gets done, people were just being lazy so insist on a rotation going forward. If it doesn't get done and it was a big problem that it didn't get done, propose that the team take some time to spread knowledge around because "oh golly gee I didn't even think about this when I took my vacation, it looks like we're getting too siloed, and we should take some steps to ensure this isn't a problem in the future" - don't bring up the fact that you asked for this in the past, all that does is throw egg on the boss's face.
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May 18, 2020 17:04
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Yeah I mean if your team is full of burnouts then you're just pushing a boulder up a mountain at that point and should probably spend your energy trying to leave instead.
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May 19, 2020 04:22
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Sweden has an emergency thing where you can let people work 40% with 92.5 salary. The government then pays all the salary over 40%. The issue is that this is probably more made for a factory being able to produce 2/5 days a week and stuff like that. So you have to apply this to everyone. This can be applied if more than 70% of employees agree. My boss basically told us that they would have to use this, renegotiate everyone's salary and lower them by like 30% or fire like 5 people in our sub 20 person company. Win-win for everyone right? The problem is that I am a full time consultant where we get paid for my hours. My boss was like "we can't force you to work more than 40% but we can't forbid you from working more". So the last 2 months me and a few other consultants are working full time and the rest of my colleagues are working 40ish% with all of us getting 92.5%. Feeling pretty screwed by my boss, but I don't really want to look for a new job in the middle of this crap. The worst part is that the client I work for hasn't been told we should work 40% so if I would do that and my colleague also working for this client would follow it would screw the client since we're the only frontend devs in this project.
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May 21, 2020 13:08
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if you're not willing to enact plan (a) (i.e. find new job and sever), it seems reasonable for you to start working at either 92.5% or 40% of normal - your choice. obviously your boss shouldn't be involved in and does not need to be informed of your decision
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May 21, 2020 13:17
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redleader posted:if you're not willing to enact plan (a) (i.e. find new job and sever), it seems reasonable for you to start working at either 92.5% or 40% of normal - your choice. obviously your boss shouldn't be involved in and does not need to be informed of your decision Yeah, not sure if it was clear, but I am a full time employee at my work, but I am working at our client as a consultant. We have a mix of in-house projects and a few of us work as consultants for clients. Vacation and other things changing my hours usually goes through my boss who talks to the client. This is a huge client for us and I assume this would screw up our relationship with the client if their whole projects frontend bandwidth went from 200% to 80% overnight. From what I understand it's basically us working av consultants for this client and a few others that are keeping us afloat. I really like my company and I am fighting with the feeling of getting screwed over on one hand and feeling responsible for us making it through this crisis.
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May 21, 2020 13:50
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