Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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steckles: Jan 14, 2006

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

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

We used to keep up with local rates but since 2020 we do our best to stay competitive with global rates. It's really amazing how fast stuff has gone up, though. We can't match the absolute ceiling that you'd find at Google or Apple or whatever, but I think we compare pretty well overall.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

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.

After random personal reasons or significant others getting job offers on the other side of the world, just looking for a change is the most common reason people leave I've found. Understandable too, the particular niche we cater to isn't super sexy from the outside. People do have the option of switching teams internally if they're getting bored working on one area of the software, but sometimes they just want to do something completely different, and that's fine.

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

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?

This is something we're kinda struggling with. I always try to promote from within rather than hire into a position based on people's overall contribution and skills, but our ladder is pretty short. Typical track is Junior, then I dunno Regular, then Senior, then Team Lead. Promotion from Junior is pretty much automatic once I feel that somebody knows the ropes well enough. We've also created an "Architect" position for a couple of our most senior devs who didn't want to become Team Leads. You will get a decent bump when you get promoted, but if you're already a Senior Dev and we don't need any more Team Leads at the moment, it's not gonna cap your salary and you'll keep getting raises.

We've got a process for fissioning teams when they get above a certain size, which creates more horizontal openings, but some more vertical spaces might be nice.

Carbon dioxide posted:

Do you do exit talks?

We do! Definitely informative and something that every company should do. This happened before my time doing them, but a few departing devs mentioned that one of the senior guys could be kind of an rear end in a top hat. Like that wasn't the reason they were leaving, but they thought it was worth mentioning. To his credit, when this guy learned what people thought, he actually tried his hardest to change and is now quite well liked.

The devs getting lured by recruiters claim to like working for us, like the team, like the benefits, but the other company is offering 30k more and wanted a yes or no answer by Monday kind of thing.

I do think WFH has made the idea of switching jobs seem like less of a hurdle. Used to be you'd have to clean out your desk and have an awkward going away party, now you just get a new laptop in the mail and you're on your way. It's a great thing, that developers have been able to leverage WFH and (virtual) mobility into higher wages across the board, but oof I'm trying to build a team here.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 08:23

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# ? May 10, 2024 08:28

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

steckles posted:

We used to keep up with local rates but since 2020 we do our best to stay competitive with global rates. It's really amazing how fast stuff has gone up, though. We can't match the absolute ceiling that you'd find at Google or Apple or whatever, but I think we compare pretty well overall.

After random personal reasons or significant others getting job offers on the other side of the world, just looking for a change is the most common reason people leave I've found. Understandable too, the particular niche we cater to isn't super sexy from the outside. People do have the option of switching teams internally if they're getting bored working on one area of the software, but sometimes they just want to do something completely different, and that's fine.

This is something we're kinda struggling with. I always try to promote from within rather than hire into a position based on people's overall contribution and skills, but our ladder is pretty short. Typical track is Junior, then I dunno Regular, then Senior, then Team Lead. Promotion from Junior is pretty much automatic once I feel that somebody knows the ropes well enough. We've also created an "Architect" position for a couple of our most senior devs who didn't want to become Team Leads. You will get a decent bump when you get promoted, but if you're already a Senior Dev and we don't need any more Team Leads at the moment, it's not gonna cap your salary and you'll keep getting raises.

We've got a process for fissioning teams when they get above a certain size, which creates more horizontal openings, but some more vertical spaces might be nice.

We do! Definitely informative and something that every company should do. This happened before my time doing them, but a few departing devs mentioned that one of the senior guys could be kind of an rear end in a top hat. Like that wasn't the reason they were leaving, but they thought it was worth mentioning. To his credit, when this guy learned what people thought, he actually tried his hardest to change and is now quite well liked.

The devs getting lured by recruiters claim to like working for us, like the team, like the benefits, but the other company is offering 30k more and wanted a yes or no answer by Monday kind of thing.

I do think WFH has made the idea of switching jobs seem like less of a hurdle. Used to be you'd have to clean out your desk and have an awkward going away party, now you just get a new laptop in the mail and you're on your way. It's a great thing, that developers have been able to leverage WFH and (virtual) mobility into higher wages across the board, but oof I'm trying to build a team here.

Where are you situated? Keeping up with global rates is nice but if you're in the Bay Area it may not be sufficient. Alternatively if you're in the UK oh boy!

As for your juniors getting lured, it is ok to take a junior dev aside and give them fatherly advice on how to tell if another workplace is a good place to be. How to look out for red flags such as very tight deadlines for answering and getting them used to pushing back. Not sure how it would go considering the rank difference but it may be worth a shot. On the other hand it's difficult to argue with $30k if you're making maybe $70k?

# ? Sep 22, 2022 08:48

steckles: Jan 14, 2006

champagne posting posted:

Where are you situated? Keeping up with global rates is nice but if you're in the Bay Area it may not be sufficient. Alternatively if you're in the UK oh boy!

Canada, but our dev team pretty evenly mixed US and Canadian with people in a few different states/provinces. We've got some people in Europe and Oceania as well. The overall compensation for US devs is higher if you factor in the absolutely bonkers cost of medical down there. Oh, we also started offering a travel allowance for all women plus a significant other in the states with bad abortion laws. I guess that counts as a particularly morbid kind of compensation. I wonder if anyone has added up all the money that companies have started to earmark for that, I bet it'd be a lot.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 09:10

Trapick: Apr 17, 2006

Maybe I'm crazy but losing 3/70 over 1.5 years sounds like super low turnover, I think you're doing fine.

steckles is your business not very "sexy"? Could be these junior devs are seeing a decent pay increase, they probably don't care that much about benefits yet, and it's some exciting startup that's going to be the next big thing. Sounds like they'll come back.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 09:12

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Carbon dioxide posted:

It's not like they have anything to lose anymore by giving harsh criticism to your workplace

If you do rehires this isn't true.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 13:50

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

eXXon posted:

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.

Thanks, this looks cool but I'm definitely looking for a turnkey SaaS type solution. I don't want to self-host.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 14:08

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

Trapick posted:

Maybe I'm crazy but losing 3/70 over 1.5 years sounds like super low turnover, I think you're doing fine.

steckles is your business not very "sexy"? Could be these junior devs are seeing a decent pay increase, they probably don't care that much about benefits yet, and it's some exciting startup that's going to be the next big thing. Sounds like they'll come back.

yeah that seems like a completely fine turnover, especially when you consider the crazy high demand for software people

# ? Sep 22, 2022 14:09

Love Stole the Day: Nov 4, 2012; Please give me free quality professional advice so I can be a baby about it and insult you

prom candy posted:

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 })
and then later be able to go to the dashboard and tell you how many orders were created last week. We don't actually create orders so I'm not looking for an e-commerce dashboard, I actually am more interested in logging the occurrence of smaller transaction type things that our system does so we can kinda see when one of our little sub systems might be processing more or less data than usual, that kind of thing.

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?

SignalFX is cool and good https://dev.splunk.com/observability/reference/api/ingest_data/latest

# ? Sep 22, 2022 14:15

downout: Jul 6, 2009

steckles posted:

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.

This doesn't sound like high turnover. Also, common wisdom is it's a good career move to leave after the first year if they can swing a big pay bump. It sounds like your company gives out pretty generous raises, but at the end of the day if I'm one year into my career and staring down a 20% pay raise to stay or 50% to leave, welp the math kind of speaks for itself.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 14:51

Macichne Leainig: Jul 26, 2012; by VG

I love when someone goes in and decides to add columns in Jira for their team but the way we have our Jira set up, it affects everyone, so now the team I manage has three extraneous columns we're never going to use on our Agile board

I politely asked them to discuss and accept any changes to Jira with the team as a whole before they do anything else

# ? Sep 22, 2022 15:21

Harriet Carker: Jun 2, 2009

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.

Exit interviews are nearly always pointless. The prevailing wisdom is to keep it simple and say something like �I found an opportunity more aligned with my interests� and avoid anything spicy.

I�d say the vast majority of the time if there is something actually wrong you�re not going to learn about it in an exit interview.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 15:54

Judge Schnoopy: Nov 2, 2005; dont even TRY it, pal

I blew up my last exit interview, but I had already expressed every concern with the director of engineering already. It certainly wasn't a surprise to anyone.

I also wanted to make sure I would never consider going back.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 16:06

Cup Runneth Over: Aug 8, 2009; She said life's
Too short to worry
Life's too long to wait
It's too short
Not to love everybody
Life's too long to hate

champagne posting posted:

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.

You guys got bribes? My manager was powerless to offer me anything without the approval of people way over his head so he just said that I couldn't be sure that the new place would be a better work environment.

It was.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 16:33

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

Love Stole the Day posted:

SignalFX is cool and good https://dev.splunk.com/observability/reference/api/ingest_data/latest

Thanks this looks interesting

# ? Sep 22, 2022 16:34

lifg: Dec 4, 2000; <this tag left blank>; Muldoon

Macichne Leainig posted:

I love when someone goes in and decides to add columns in Jira for their team but the way we have our Jira set up, it affects everyone, so now the team I manage has three extraneous columns we're never going to use on our Agile board

I politely asked them to discuss and accept any changes to Jira with the team as a whole before they do anything else

Jira requires a director-level manager to manage it, whose only job is to say �no�.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 17:16

steckles: Jan 14, 2006

Harriet Carker posted:

Exit interviews are nearly always pointless.

We've never learned anything too dramatic from exit interviews, but I've found people are often more willing to share quality-of-life stuff in them. Some people are just worried about being perceived as whiners, or not being team players, and a quick no-stakes chat before they leave can be a good way to capture their thoughts.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 17:22

chglcu: May 17, 2007; I'm so bored with the USA.

By the time I'm in an exit interview, I've completely checked out and just give whatever answers I think will get me out of there fastest.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 17:59

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

lifg posted:

Jira requires a director-level manager to manage it, whose only job is to say �no�.

I had one of those but they said no in slightly more words: �we can�t change Jira Thing or all the previous reports will be incompatible�

# ? Sep 22, 2022 18:15

thotsky: Jun 7, 2005; hot to trot

steckles posted:

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.

Switching jobs, especially that early in your career, comes with huge pay increases that most companies would balk at giving as a raise. Hiring developers cheaply straight out of university and trying to keep them near that pay grade as long as possible is a a common tactic; it's how most of the really big consultancy companies make their money. Staying more than two years in your first job is kind of sus if anything.

Even if you had a policy of giving pretty decent raises after every year spent, like 20% or something, it's not like the developers working under you have a guarantee that they will receive one, whereas having an offer in hand is concrete. I think the only way is to match the offer if a good worker approaches you with a genuine one. Of course, you might risk encouraging people to go looking for offers that way, but if this company is as good a place to work as you say, they will want to stay, compensation being equal.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Sep 22, 2022

# ? Sep 22, 2022 18:31

Macichne Leainig: Jul 26, 2012; by VG

champagne posting posted:

I had one of those but they said no in slightly more words: �we can�t change Jira Thing or all the previous reports will be incompatible�

All of our reports are terrible and meaningless anyway! We have somehow figured out how to make Worse Jira.

# ? Sep 22, 2022 18:44

champagne posting: Apr 5, 2006; YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

Macichne Leainig posted:

All of our reports are terrible and meaningless

# ? Sep 22, 2022 19:12

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: All of our reports are terrible and meaningless

# ? Sep 22, 2022 20:02

Wallet: Jun 19, 2006

Macichne Leainig posted:

All of our reports are terrible and meaningless anyway! We have somehow figured out how to make Worse Jira.

Reports are supposed to be terrible and meaningless. It's the only way to keep management busy so work can get done.

# ? Sep 23, 2022 00:18

Votlook: Aug 20, 2005

I'm the only one in my team doing Java en Kubernetes stuff, the other guys are all greybeard database devs.
Our overlap is skillset is minimal, soon we will share on call duties, what could possibly go wrong?

# ? Sep 24, 2022 21:14

smackfu: Jun 7, 2004

I got promoted at work and foolishly updated my LinkedIn and I guess I am now at the level where I get cold call recruiter emails trying to get random people jobs. Like �Mark led the team who did a complete site redesign at Chewy.com and is looking for his next opportunity.�

So that�s great.

# ? Oct 1, 2022 18:42

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

smackfu posted:

I got promoted at work and foolishly updated my LinkedIn and I guess I am now at the level where I get cold call recruiter emails trying to get random people jobs. Like “Mark led the team who did a complete site redesign at Chewy.com and is looking for his next opportunity.”

So that’s great.

Welcome to this level, it's occasionally nice, but mostly involves heckling bad recruiters.

# ? Oct 1, 2022 22:47

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Volmarias posted:

Welcome to this level, it's occasionally nice, but mostly involves heckling bad recruiters.

My problem is I get 3 chats/requests a day trying to sell me services.

# ? Oct 2, 2022 00:37

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

E: misread

# ? Oct 2, 2022 01:09

steckles: Jan 14, 2006

smackfu posted:

I got promoted at work and foolishly updated my LinkedIn and I guess I am now at the level where I get cold call recruiter emails trying to get random people jobs. Like �Mark led the team who did a complete site redesign at Chewy.com and is looking for his next opportunity.�

So that�s great.

When I updated my profile, I started getting an endless stream of people who'd really like to tell me about all the offshore talent they could hook us up with. That and sketchy VC and PE companies who want to talk about investing.

# ? Oct 2, 2022 21:00

qsvui: Aug 23, 2003; some crazy thing

I've lately started getting contacted by Anduril recruiters, which looks like an unholy combination of defense and Palmer Luckey :barf:

# ? Oct 2, 2022 23:30

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

I have ended up in the spam lists of someone who has decided "FAANG employees would definitely want to invest in getting some kind of restaurant franchise license no one has heard of" and it's just weird.

# ? Oct 3, 2022 00:39

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Volmarias posted:

I have ended up in the spam lists of someone who has decided "FAANG employees would definitely want to invest in getting some kind of restaurant franchise license no one has heard of" and it's just weird.

I mostly get vacuum cleaner company franchise spam. It's bizarre.

# ? Oct 3, 2022 01:18

AgentF: May 11, 2009

qsvui posted:

I've lately started getting contacted by Anduril recruiters, which looks like an unholy combination of defense and Palmer Luckey

Yeah I've got a couple of those two and wondering if I should send a "hell no" response

# ? Oct 3, 2022 07:11

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

What the gently caress even is that company name?

# ? Oct 3, 2022 09:04

AgentF: May 11, 2009

Same evil Lord of the Rings poo poo as Palantir

# ? Oct 3, 2022 09:17

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

I know where the name is from, the question was how do you think "yup, that's a good name for a company". :v:

# ? Oct 3, 2022 10:47

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

smackfu posted:

I got promoted at work and foolishly updated my LinkedIn and I guess I am now at the level where I get cold call recruiter emails trying to get random people jobs. Like �Mark led the team who did a complete site redesign at Chewy.com and is looking for his next opportunity.�

So that�s great.

As a complete random albeit senior IC at a startup, I got a recruiter email once trying to shop someone to be our CTO.

Dude, even if I had hiring authority for something like that, who in a tech startup picks their CTO from a cold-call email? There tends to be one already, kind of thing, and if there isn't you're in trouble.

# ? Oct 3, 2022 12:00

ThePopeOfFun: Feb 15, 2010

Is there a modern agile source out there that doesn't read like California Yoga Gurus Teach LEAN? ModernAgile.org has some decent content, but it spends very much time assuring the reader of its own genius. Though I suppose digesting this stuff is a good skill to have.

# ? Oct 3, 2022 19:20

Love Stole the Day: Nov 4, 2012; Please give me free quality professional advice so I can be a baby about it and insult you

The buzz word right now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrumban afaik

# ? Oct 3, 2022 19:24

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# ? May 10, 2024 08:28

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

ThePopeOfFun posted:

Is there a modern agile source out there that doesn't read like California Yoga Gurus Teach LEAN? ModernAgile.org has some decent content, but it spends very much time assuring the reader of its own genius. Though I suppose digesting this stuff is a good skill to have.

The good ones these days tend to focus on something more specific than overall agile development. Because it's been exhausted and co-opted to death on the negative side and more positivity; there's just a greater body of knowledge and perspective.

So what aspect do you want to focus on?

# ? Oct 3, 2022 20:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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