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AskYourself posted:This unfortunately a good idea if your boss keep being stupid… you are in total control of that number so if all he care about is the number then you know what to do… The fact that less real work is being done is irrelevant to people with no knowledge of how we do our work.  The guy should not be this dumb ... I guess until he is.
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Jul 15, 2022 21:24
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Sivart13 posted:if you give someone a number, they're gonna look at it next to their table of other numbers and do a contrast and compare (bigger, smaller, etc) i've heard of teams using t-shirt sizes for tickets (so you got your small/medium/large/xl) to avoid this. i don't know how they turn "ah, we have these sized tickets" into "this is how much work we will bring in this sprint" oliveoil posted:Unless your boss has your whole team do estimates and likes to pick values toward the middle. bully enough of your team mates. easy.
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Jul 16, 2022 01:03
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redleader posted:i've heard of teams using t-shirt sizes for tickets (so you got your small/medium/large/xl) to avoid this. i don't know how they turn "ah, we have these sized tickets" into "this is how much work we will bring in this sprint" Everything is just extra medium then ( my team stopped doing estimates because they are stupid ).
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Jul 16, 2022 01:39
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My team uses t-shirt sizes to somehow convince ourselves to commit to doing fifteen projects in a quarter on a team with like three FTEs. These plans are finalized by the third week of the quarter at the absolute earliest, already including obvious lies by the time they get a rubber stamp by upper management.
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Jul 16, 2022 13:39
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YanniRotten posted:My team uses t-shirt sizes to somehow convince ourselves to commit to doing fifteen projects in a quarter on a team with like three FTEs. Reminds me of a prior job where management really wanted to do a big project. When engineering told them how big it was and how it couldn't possibly be fit into our schedule until next year, management asked for new estimates instead of deciding to do something else.
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Jul 16, 2022 14:37
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Estimates for the same thing always go up on subsequent passes since you've obviously had more time to consider previously ignored tasks 
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Jul 16, 2022 14:44
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They just want you to say, "Don't worry. We'll take care of it."
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Jul 16, 2022 17:18
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Give me 9 reports and I'll take care of it
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Jul 16, 2022 18:39
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At least they asked for estimates instead of kicking off a project and saying its due next Tuesday
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Jul 16, 2022 21:35
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I'm wondering if anyone has any tips on how I can think about my situation more positively. At the start of the year i went from a small to huge company and changed just about everything like programming language used, tooling, architecture, full stack to back end, etc. It feels like I'm in a weird spot because while I've learned a ton so far this year I'm a long long way from being as productive as my teammates. I do a bit of professional development daily (mostly reading relevant programming books on my commute) and work an average of 8h per day. I don't have any immediate pressure from management or anything but it just kinda feels like piss to be the worst on your team. I find the hardest part is writing code that will fit in with the 25 other related files and classes in the mish mash of new and old code. I spend most of my time daily reading and searching code. I like my team and the work and want to stay for a long time and become an expert in this area but it sucks to be the noob all the time and I also don't want to get pip'd. I'm at somewhere around 4-5 years experience. Performance review is coming up at the end of year and has been weighing on my mind a lot.
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Jul 17, 2022 20:32
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ask your manager how you're doing. if they say everything's fine then everything's fine. if not they can probably help you get on track sounds to me like imposter syndrome
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Jul 17, 2022 20:38
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Do you have regular meetings with your boss? They should provide feedback so review time isn't a surprise. If that's not happening, your boss sucks and you should ask for regular checkins.
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Jul 17, 2022 20:39
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Fair enough about it sounding like imposter syndrome. I appreciate your thoughts. And yes I have weekly 1 on 1s with my manager. Feedback has been positive but I also sort of got a pass with being new and ramping up. More expectations to execute well on my project this half.
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Jul 17, 2022 20:47
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Being the worst person on a good team is only bad if you're being punished for it and/or not learning. If you're learning and your boss is ok with your progress then it's a great place to be other than the imposter syndrome. Talk to your boss about the upcoming review if it's bothering you. They should be able to give guidance about how you stand so far. Being PIP'd should not be a surprise. If it is management is garbage and you should be finding a new job anyway.
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Jul 17, 2022 21:06
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It takes about six months to understand how everything is wired together and find out all the really bad decisions made before you got there, particularly with a large established company with lots of speghetti code. There's a reason why companies keep a close eye on employee turnover The fact that they have you working on a large project solo is a good sign. Useless people just grind out baby tickets all day until they improve or leave
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Jul 17, 2022 21:19
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God I hate grinding baby tickets all day. Glad that stopped. Now I grind baby projects all month. Starting to take my Adderall again so hopefully I'll be able to start grinding projects all quarter instead. Though I sometimes wonder if I got a project to self-lead for a year or so on my last team because it was low priority. Maybe if it was important they would have had a senior instead of a junior on it.
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Jul 17, 2022 21:28
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That helps, thanks all. I'll ask my manager some questions on these topics and if he says all good then I'll try to believe that haha
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Jul 17, 2022 22:10
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The more senior you get, the longer it takes to spin up for a new job. That's life, and good managers understand that. From what you've said, it sounds like your manager does get it, but I think it will be better for you to hear it from him than from us.
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Jul 17, 2022 22:38
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I agree on asking the boss, but as a mega company man, I will bring up some other stuff: 1. Actively seek out pockets of tribal knowledge including who to know. If you are not getting fed that already, multiple people are doing you a huge disservice. If you cannot just get that stuff told to you, pay attention to peculiar people and things that keep coming up over and over and try to reach out about them in particular; it is always easier to get a specific answer in reaction than a general initiative to keep you informed. 2. Find yourself a technical mentor. A decent one--not even necessarily a good one--has an incentive to actively mentor somebody. They can even be at the same or lower level for what it matters. In this case, you do not want them to be directly in your team. The first thing they might say is "wow I am glad to see you serious about this. The past five people that joined that team just seemed to wash out for some reason." And now you know something. 3. At a smaller scale you can combine 1 and 2 if you saw somebody do something really skilled: ask them how they did it and if they could show it off. This also is a incentive to them to present that stuff even if it is just at internal conferences. 4. Annotating source is usually a great way to find a person who has context on some source that can tell you about it. If they no longer in the team but still at the company, they may spill some of the tea to you.
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Jul 18, 2022 01:06
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:They just want you to say, "Don't worry. We'll take care of it." Yeah I've gradually learned that this is what you do in planning, and your team only ever works on the top two or three things which are the only things anyone asks about. You blow through the deadlines on those as well, but the deadlines are arbitrary and as an engineer you're fine as long as you get enough done to hang your hat on in a six month review cycle. As in, you were a major contributor to one of those big things and it shipped. The fact that it came in a quarter late and your team didn't do any of the other stuff didn't matter too much. The Aristocrats!
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Jul 18, 2022 01:51
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I call it "Anxiety-Oriented Programming."
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Jul 18, 2022 03:58
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Back in December, this happened:hendersa posted:- I did a preliminary technical screening interview with Meta, but the feedback I received was that they didn't get a "clear signal" on my ability from the interview and wanted to do a second tech screen. I politely declined and withdrew my application, stating that I was already past the on-site interviews with Google and that I probably wasn't what Meta was looking for if it wasn't immediately apparent in their tech screen. The recruiter seemed somewhat hurt that I'd say such a thing, since they are in dire need of experienced embedded people for their AR/VR initiative. Oh well. I also wasn't worried about backing out because I've had several people tell me that Meta is toxic as all hell. Today, I got a mail from a Meta recruiter (straight to my personal mail, so it was from my pre-existing applicant profile): Desperate Meta Recruiter posted:One of my colleagues was in touch with you earlier this year before we filled all of our openings, but now there's more! The team I'm sourcing for is seeking a Sr. Embedded Software Engineer to build and execute strategies and plans across all our current and future AR/VR products. This is an exciting time to get involved as we currently have a very limited number of open roles within our Embedded pipeline. These are high priority openings, signed off by our executive leadership. I responded by saying that, since I didn't even pass their technical phone screen last time, I take that as a pretty clear indicator that I'm just not the type of candidate that Meta is looking for. Then, I wished him luck on finding the right people for his positions. Will he swallow his pride and mail me back, asking me to at least try? We shall see. 
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Jul 19, 2022 22:47
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hendersa posted:Back in December, this happened: Should have said you'd be happy to accept a principle level position given your performance in the last round of interviews.
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Jul 19, 2022 22:52
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Ignore this
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Jul 20, 2022 01:03
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I'm disabled. I set my LinkedIn position to "Reading, writing, and thinking". Last week I got mail from a recruiter who was very excited about my experience at Reading.
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Jul 20, 2022 01:17
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I had the same Meta thing and the recruiter claimed they were different but couldn't elaborate.
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Jul 20, 2022 02:50
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Always amazed by how people perceive things differently. Been doing some more interesting, more vague, larger-scoped work. My mental health has been bad. I haven't felt like a functional thinker for a while. As a result, I feel like I've been doing some of the worst performance of my career. My manager keeps praising my work in 1:1s, though. Yesterday he actually said most people here wouldn't be able to take on the work I have and run with it the way I have. I was shocked. Every day I'm paranoid they're going to realize I barely feel functional half the time and then I hear this stuff and I'm baffled.
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Jul 22, 2022 22:02
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oliveoil posted:Always amazed by how people perceive things differently. Most programmers are very bad and can barely get anything done without serious hand-holding. It's amazing any software works at all.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:10
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Kilson posted:It's amazing any software works at all.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:14
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Oldie Programming: It's amazing any software works at all
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Jul 23, 2022 00:19
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Kilson posted:It's amazing any software works at all. It really is. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
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Jul 23, 2022 00:23
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For real. I've recently come to appreciate the engineering culture of the prior company I worked at. They're a huge defense contractor with tons of bad baggage but I can say the (mostly) structured approach to process and problem solving is a lot easier to work under versus the clusterfuck that is software.
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Jul 23, 2022 01:31
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The only good programmers are programmers who realize nothing works and are very skeptical when it does.
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Jul 23, 2022 01:41
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I knew I had some sort of virtue!
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Jul 23, 2022 01:55
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LLSix posted:It really is. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks This part really hit me in the feels quote:Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge.
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Jul 23, 2022 02:55
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LLSix posted:It really is. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks There's a Russian proto-meme on a similar topic that predates this by a good 20 years that's still relevant as ever. Someone on Reddit did a very good translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/9160d0/a_group_of_russian_programmers_get_a_new_project/
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Jul 23, 2022 03:04
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ultrafilter posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Oldie Programming: It's amazing any software works at all
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Jul 23, 2022 07:11
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oliveoil posted:Always amazed by how people perceive things differently. Everybody is winging it
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Jul 23, 2022 13:31
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Yeah that tracks with basically everyone I know. It’s…a thing.
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Jul 23, 2022 16:29
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Yeah and when you can wing several things at once you get promoted to senior. Maybe at principal / staff level people actually achieve with intentionality but I can’t personally confirm.
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Jul 23, 2022 16:54
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