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Bongo Bill posted:There are benefits to developers having direct exposure to customers through the support process, but doing it as a matter of course is wasteful. Thanks for reminding me to put a "I will never do ops" clause in my future contracts!
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Sep 17, 2022 21:23
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35% is way too much, but spending like 10% of your time on direct support as a software developer can be very beneficial. Ideally you have at least some sort of triage in front of you so that you're not just telling people to RTFM, though.
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Sep 17, 2022 21:46
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Plorkyeran posted:35% is way too much, but spending like 10% of your time on direct support as a software developer can be very beneficial. Ideally you have at least some sort of triage in front of you so that you're not just telling people to RTFM, though. 9/10 it's gonna be you reading an error message back to a person and asking "did you do as the error said to do?" and you will learn nothing except for contempt for your fellow man
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Sep 17, 2022 22:14
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champagne posting posted:9/10 it's gonna be you reading an error message back to a person and asking "did you do as the error said to do?" and you will learn nothing except for contempt for your fellow man Pfffff like I need to learn to have contempt for my fellow man lol
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Sep 17, 2022 22:15
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It was a kubernetes startup. Support had no triage or tiers, just two engineers staring down 40 slack channels and a repo issues board waiting for all hell to break loose in some unmanaged cluster. We offered 12 hours of full kubernetes support regardless of cause. There is no worse hell on earth.
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Sep 17, 2022 23:45
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champagne posting posted:9/10 it's gonna be you reading an error message back to a person and asking "did you do as the error said to do?" and you will learn nothing except for contempt for your fellow man Ideally you have at least some sort of triage in front of you so that you're not just telling people to RTFM, though.
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Sep 18, 2022 00:08
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I hear this kind of thing from time to time and from my perspective the desire to implement something like this is a symptom of a broken company culture. It's always the same message: give developers an idea of the problems end users deal with every day. Okay so if users are having a problem every day, why is this not being communicated to the development teams in some way, or if it is, why isn't it being fixed? Are they UX/UI annoyances or bugs? Trends should be communicated to the product manager/owner who should be prioritizing fixes or changes if warranted. Are they backend failures or outages? If the developers don't already know about them from altering and monitoring, why not, and if not, at minimum their product manager again should be getting told so that they can prioritize fixes (and introducing those scenarios into the monitoring and alerting if there was a hole there). I say these things because mostly I haven't had direct control over the things I work on, and the people who are in control have been inclined to say "no, add this feature instead of working on that bug." It doesn't matter how much theoretical time we spend talking to customers, dealing with their daily problems, feeling their pain; we aren't allowed to fix it. So spending 5x the money on help desk one week out of the quarter really doesn't do anything except waste money and piss off developers. I have a better idea: put product managers on the help desk. Let the people who make the decisions experience the consequences of those decisions, see if that drives real change.
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Sep 18, 2022 03:13
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You're right that product managers definitely need to be involved with the help desk. The goal of getting folks involved with the help desk is to get a better understanding of how the customers use the product, and with that understanding developers can have more control over what they're working on and how it is implemented. If the developers don't understand the customers, then feature requests need to be more specific so the feature is useful to the customer. I've definitely seen situations where a feature was accessible through a GUI or a JSON system, and the developers wanted to improve and optimize the JSON because that's what they use, but the actual customers all use the GUI. I actually like helping on the help desk because the customer's questions tend to be easy and it feels good to just get something done.
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Sep 18, 2022 17:08
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StumblyWumbly posted:I actually like helping on the help desk because the customer's questions tend to be easy and it feels good to just get something done. This can be true, but also sometimes there are customers that you wish a thousand stubbed toes upon.
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Sep 18, 2022 20:33
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Che Delilas posted:I hear this kind of thing from time to time and from my perspective the desire to implement something like this is a symptom of a broken company culture. [...] I say these things because mostly I haven't had direct control over the things I work on, and the people who are in control have been inclined to say "no, add this feature instead of working on that bug." I will take the opposite position: if talking to users as a developer is not useful, then that is a sign of a dysfunctional working culture. Obviously it is not useful to get ideas on how to make something better if making it better is not something that your org cares about, but that doesn't mean that the problem is in the first half of that.
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Sep 18, 2022 21:04
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Wrong thread
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Sep 18, 2022 21:06
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Volmarias posted:This can be true, but also sometimes there are customers that you wish a thousand stubbed toes upon. One thing my company does is the CS folks are go betweens between engineering and developers, so when I ask them to send me their log file, and they send a picture of them looking at their log file with a description of their intense feelings about the log file, then the CS handles the back and forth about how to do this very advanced activity.
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Sep 18, 2022 22:19
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On one hand I'm glad my new job has such an in-depth onboarding process. On the other hand I'm *so* bored. I guess it's not all that bad, I've gotten a chance to tidy up the home office and practice some guitar riffs while listening to all the orientation videos.
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Sep 20, 2022 17:13
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All tech jobs should be remote if possible. Death to commuting, death to being forced to live in high CoL areas in exchange for competitive pay.
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Sep 20, 2022 20:42
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Is there anything more fun than asking a team to do something that only they have the power to do, listening to them ask you to make a ticket, watching that ticket go 1 month out of 2-week SLA despite reminding them weekly about it, only for them to say it's out of their scope, re-assign it to yet another team, listen to them say we must now wait for their SLA, and then assign it to a person on their team who's on vacation this week¿ Also the other team's SLA is 3 weeks. Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by scam artists.
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Sep 21, 2022 16:21
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Love Stole the Day posted:Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by scam artists. Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
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Sep 21, 2022 16:31
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Great post + av combo
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Sep 21, 2022 16:33
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Reminds me of the emails I get about tickets belonging to other teams. I think I get these questions because I'm the only one in the company who pretends to give a poo poo about anything.
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Sep 21, 2022 16:34
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Yeah I'm kind of in the same place. People love to send things directly to me because I can wrangle a lot of poo poo and get it working, but at the same time I do have a core set of responsibilities I have to tend to, sorry.
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Sep 21, 2022 16:36
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Love Stole the Day posted:Is there anything more fun than asking a team to do something that only they have the power to do, listening to them ask you to make a ticket, watching that ticket go 1 month out of 2-week SLA despite reminding them weekly about it, only for them to say it's out of their scope, re-assign it to yet another team, listen to them say we must now wait for their SLA, and then assign it to a person on their team who's on vacation this week¿ Also the other team's SLA is 3 weeks. If it was a high priority ticket then why did it keep getting pushed into the backlog?
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Sep 22, 2022 00:29
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downout posted:If it was a high priority ticket then why did it keep getting pushed into the backlog? At least in my experience it's because there's an infinite stream of critical tickets getting created.
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Sep 22, 2022 00:56
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downout posted:If it was a high priority ticket then why did it keep getting pushed into the backlog? your high priority isn't my high priority
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Sep 22, 2022 01:03
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JawnV6 posted:your high priority isn't my high priority Oh I don't give a poo poo, it was Love Stole the Day's priority.
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Sep 22, 2022 01:08
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 are y'all really too dumb to keep 2 loving posts of context around?
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Sep 22, 2022 01:12
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I'm not dumb! I'm smart!!
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Sep 22, 2022 03:16
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I guess I'm just venting here, but whatever... I was promoted to VP of Engineering about 18 months ago and hiring dev talent is one of my responsibilities. I did quite a bit of hiring before, but now it's actually in my job description. The company is only 60-70 people, but has competitive compensation and the CEO, CTO, and CHRO all understand that good benefits help keep people around. Aside from extended medical, stock options, flexible hours, and generous vacation, we offer permanent WFH with a decent home office budget if you want it, and everyone is committed to working no more than 40 hours a week. Heck, the company even sent a bunch of people to a music festival a while back and picked up everyone's wristbands and drink tickets. No investors to gripe about stuff either. People seem happy and turnover is very low, except that we've lost three developers to recruiters on LinkedIn in the last year and a half. Like it's always the same, a young developer who is a year or so into their career and hitting their stride will get contacted out of the blue by a recruiter. Before too long they'll make an offer for a remote position that's comes with a pretty large pay increase and they expect an answer very quickly. These aren't companies I would consider competitors either, they're like some platform that gonna vaguely disrupt something or don't have a distinct product at all. I always figured that places hiring this way would be lovely places to work. Turns out that one of the devs we lost this way has reached out about re-applying with us and they don't have nice things to say about their new company: Long hours, disorganized, high stress, high turnover, no direction. She disliked it enough that she's willing to take a pay cut to come back. People should be able to pursue whatever job opportunities they want, I'm at a loss about how to prevent this.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:19
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Turnover is never going to be zero, so it's not clear to me that you really need to fix anything.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:22
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Start by assessing how much that kind of turnover is actually affecting your company's operations. Is there loss of institutional expertise? Weakening of culture? A fear that the ship is sinking? Low morale? If you determine that it is actually a problem, then see if there are any trends to the most harmful departures. Is it truly the case that it's mostly juniors who are offered more pay elsewhere? We live in a chaotic world, and most people leaving is simply due to random life events. But if there are particular qualities that correlate with the likelihood of leaving, that can give you some indication of where to focus your efforts. Anyway, the answer is probably that you should pay more.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:28
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Happy engineers rarely waste time responding to recruiters. It's far easier to ignore it. Your people at 1 year are seeing something they don't like. Maybe it's a tiny thing and they don't have the experience to know how small of a deal it is. Maybe it's a big thing that longer tenure folks grow comfortable with and never talk about. Maybe they have poo poo going on at home and the extra pay is worth a sacrifice in quality of life. Turnover will never be zero. But if you're seeing a pattern, keep going until you find the root cause.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:30
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Pay a competitive salary in addition to good benefits. I know you say you have "competitive compensation", but the fact that you're getting outbid by enough that already-hired folks are consistently jumping ship for higher pay suggests that that's not entirely true, or even if it's competitive in the local market it's not competitive with remote positions from companies in high-paying markets.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:31
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It's interesting you say one year. How are your raises and promotions? Are you taking junior developers, bootstrapping them to a senior level in a year of exercise, and throwing 6% and a "we don't really have junior/senior here" attitude at them? I've left jobs over lovely raise cycles before.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:36
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steckles posted:Aside from extended medical, stock options, flexible hours, and generous vacation, we offer permanent WFH with a decent home office budget if you want it, and everyone is committed to working no more than 40 hours a week...[snip]...Like it's always the same, a young developer who is a year or so into their career and hitting their stride will get contacted out of the blue by a recruiter. Before too long they'll make an offer for a remote position that's comes with a pretty large pay increase and they expect an answer very quickly. The stuff you've listed is great if you've seen what happens when you don't have it. I'm a 15 year-ish electrical/software engineer. I would've made a jump like that in my first few years of working too, I was focused on maximizing income. Now I value the things you're listing more than the final dollar figure. I don't think it's a "solvable" problem. Especially in a work culture that trends towards expecting positional/job movement, I think it's just a fact of life.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:43
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Judge Schnoopy posted:It's interesting you say one year. How are your raises and promotions? And a reminder that anything below 7% this year is a pay cut and an invitation to jump ship, thanks to inflation. And exactly 7% is a 0% experience/merit raise and also an invitation to jump ship.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:46
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Yeah, I know we’re never gonna keep people forever. The first dev that you’ve personally hired who leaves kinda hurts. So does the first person you need to fire. Well, for me anyway. After that, eh. I’ve just noticed this one way we’ve been losing juniors has picked up in the last little while. It’s a drag when we’ve got really productive people who seem happy and get along with their team just leave. HR usually doesn’t have anything to say, so if they’ve got drama, it’s not getting reported. They aren’t saying anything in their exit interviews either. Like I said, I’m mostly just venting. Perhaps when you’re 23 more money at a sketchy company is more appealing than I think it is now. CPColin posted:And a reminder that anything below 7% this year is a pay cut and an invitation to jump ship, thanks to inflation. And exactly 7% is a 0% experience/merit raise and also an invitation to jump ship. Oh I'm well aware. Our last round of raises earlier this year averaged over 20% and it's on people's radar that the next round is gonna have to be much larger in total dollars to account for inflation. steckles fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Sep 22, 2022 |
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Sep 22, 2022 04:47
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Anyone know of a good generic data dashboard service that I can send whatever events or other data I want to? For example I want to write code like pre:Dashboard.log_event('orderCreated', { ...someMetadata })I looked at Sentry's performance monitoring but I don't think it's quite what I'm after since it seems more based around how long things take rather than how often or how many times they happen. Also looked at Tableau but it looks really powerful and I don't want to have a second job managing this thing. Not looking to self-host either, i just need a low friction way to get better insights into the stuff my app is doing. Anyone have any suggestions?
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Sep 22, 2022 05:22
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We use chronograf for making dashboards of time series. I'm not sure that it does aggregation of timestamped events on its own, though, if that's what you want - you send it a scalar value like orders per week with a date/timestamp, not dates of individual events. Also, the only part of it that's low friction is the dashboard generation aspect; everything else is probably more effort than you want.
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Sep 22, 2022 05:35
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steckles posted:I always figured that places hiring this way would be lovely places to work. Turns out that one of the devs we lost this way has reached out about re-applying with us and they don't have nice things to say about their new company: Long hours, disorganized, high stress, high turnover, no direction. She disliked it enough that she's willing to take a pay cut to come back. People should be able to pursue whatever job opportunities they want, I'm at a loss about how to prevent this. I see this happen for one of three reasons: • Compensation • Passion • Opportunity Compensation is really straight forward. Are you actually paying competitively? Someone offered me a senior position doing .NET work for $110k and they insisted they were paying competitively. Make sure you actually know that Passions is also really straight forward. Someone working in Finance gets an offer for Games or whatever and they are willing to take a pay cut to go work in the thing they REALLY want to work on. Not much you can do there. Opportunity is the sneaky one that everyone seems to forget. The current wisdom in the industry is to not get married to a company because you should be looking to jump ship as soon as your skills are developed for 'the next level'. Waiting for a promotion and a reasonable raise is a fools errand. With that said, what's your policy for promotion and raises? Are you actually promoting people based on their skills and not based on their time employed? Do you have a good way of recognizing those who are contributing the most, and avoiding promoting those who are just sucking manager dick? These are hard problems to solve and they frequently go un-solved because it's generally expensive to solve them and the hedge here is that the majority of people won't be willing to uproot their life to get a promotion by proxy. Employees are not blind to what the promotion schedule and policy actually is in practice, and people talk. I recently did this to my employer, jumped ship, and then came back and got a way bigger pay increase then I ever would have if I just stuck around. This was very expensive for the company and a huge waste of my time but 'Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.'
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Sep 22, 2022 06:15
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steckles posted:Like I said, I’m mostly just venting. Perhaps when you’re 23 more money at a sketchy company is more appealing than I think it is now. It's also just that at 23 you have much less ability to judge how sketchy a company is. Even if you're a distinctly above average employer some junior employees simply won't realize that because they don't have any point of comparison. They may know that they're going to a worse company but their idea of how much worse a company can realistically be can be very incorrect.
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Sep 22, 2022 06:15
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Do you do exit talks? That is, if someone hands in their notice, plan a meeting with them and ask them to not hold back and honestly tell all the reasons they're leaving? It's not like they have anything to lose anymore by giving harsh criticism to your workplace so they might be more honest than in any other company review thing. Might be a good way for you to learn about anything that might be annoying them about the company. Just don't repeat the error the CTO at my previous workplace made - he arranged an exit talk, I gave my reasons (the work was dull for me and I wanted a new challenge), then he went on to fully ignore what I said and instead asked several times in a row if giving me a lease car couldn't have convinced me to stay.
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Sep 22, 2022 07:12
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Carbon dioxide posted:Do you do exit talks? That is, if someone hands in their notice, plan a meeting with them and ask them to not hold back and honestly tell all the reasons they're leaving? It's not like they have anything to lose anymore by giving harsh criticism to your workplace so they might be more honest than in any other company review thing. Might be a good way for you to learn about anything that might be annoying them about the company. At least you were attempted bribed with a car. Last time I had this conversation the things on the table were pizza on fridays or a table football table.
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Sep 22, 2022 08:00
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