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Pollyanna posted:…yeah that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it. You got 2 years in at a MANGA and you're able to self reflect on the problems, how they're out of your control, and what it could mean for your career. That alone puts you in the upper tier of devs. It might suck now, but sometimes a year or two at a dumpster fire teach you some really valuable things. Good luck!
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Jun 25, 2023 15:39
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luchadornado posted:They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant "You make $250k/yr bro why are you complaining?"
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Jun 25, 2023 15:42
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biceps crimes posted:i worked way harder in my food service jobs than I ever have in software development 
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Jun 25, 2023 15:50
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oliveoil posted:"You make $250k/yr bro why are you complaining?" Yeah. Problem is that you will change jobs eventually, and if you just sit and collect a check, you’re hosed as soon as that happens.
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Jun 25, 2023 15:58
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i dunno that dude specifically calls out google as an effective IT org, and, uhh. lol. more to the point, the rest of his and other writing is all about making this industry into an insane pressure cooker that produces an endless stream of burned-out people. it's probably more applicable to a startup kinda deal (or games maybe), but there's a general bias towards that and towards web stuff that i've noticed in hiring threads on blind and otherwise that really miss what's happening in the 90% of the industry that's "only" paying low six figs to work with legacy software. (sorry, not aimed at you, just something that bugs me that I've wanted to talk about for a bit)
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Jun 25, 2023 16:05
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luchadornado posted:You got 2 years in at a MANGA and you're able to self reflect on the problems, how they're out of your control, and what it could mean for your career. That alone puts you in the upper tier of devs. It might suck now, but sometimes a year or two at a dumpster fire teach you some really valuable things. Good luck! The one thing I haven't learned is how to not land in a dumpster fire. Every time I think I've figured it out, I've just learned that there are new materials that burn in similar but different ways from all the other dumpster fires I've seen before. I've most recently been thinking about trying to take VC money and explore new ways to _start_ dumpster fires. Evidence has shown that can be more lucrative than either cooking in one or trying to put them out.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:07
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If you are unable to find tech companies that aren’t dumpster fires, maybe the problem isn’t you  leper khan posted:I've most recently been thinking about trying to take VC money VCs have wised up and are now shutting off the money faucet, sooooo yeah. luchadornado posted:You got 2 years in at a MANGA and you're able to self reflect on the problems, how they're out of your control, and what it could mean for your career. That alone puts you in the upper tier of devs. It might suck now, but sometimes a year or two at a dumpster fire teach you some really valuable things. Good luck! Yeah, for sure. I will say this: I really grew as a person and in some ways as a feature/project deliverer here. Just not the way I thought I would  Lyesh posted:i dunno that dude specifically calls out google as an effective IT org, and, uhh. lol. I’m sure Google wasn’t a dumpster fire in 2008 at all, riiiiight?  quote:more to the point, the rest of his and other writing is all about making this industry into an insane pressure cooker that produces an endless stream of burned-out people. it's probably more applicable to a startup kinda deal (or games maybe), but there's a general bias towards that and towards web stuff that i've noticed in hiring threads on blind and otherwise that really miss what's happening in the 90% of the industry that's "only" paying low six figs to work with legacy software. People go for high figgies uber alles because the truth is, none of us actually trust this industry to last until we retire. If we can’t rely on it as a lifelong career, our next best option is to grab as much money as we can as early as we can. That’s what I’ve been doing: tech will end, it will lose the money train, and jobs will dry up. There’s no running away from that reality, so I must accept and prepare for it. It’s horrid and I wish society wasn’t so hosed up that this happens. But…welp 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 16:09
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I don’t think the principle here is inherently wrong but the statement that the “more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave” is pretty much the definition of confirmation bias. Just because a person is less comfortable with trying to affect organizational change doesn’t mean they’re talented and effective, it only means they have less tolerance for a certain type of work; and that’s ok! It also means that the contrapositive is also ok and fits a certain type of personality irrespective of talent or effectiveness.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:14
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Lyesh posted:i dunno that dude specifically calls out google as an effective IT org, and, uhh. lol. 2008 goog is not 2023 goog and websters schtick is being expert witness to vast lawsuits over gigantic project fuckups by the so-called legacy companies. he doesnt touch startups, startupland doesnt deal with this poo poo in that way in a way they would call him. you call webster when the pressure cooker explodes and you're getting pelted with lawsuits by the debris bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 16:16
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Maybe I should ask this Webster guy what he thinks of my situation.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:21
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hes also 90% retired. "making IT work since 1974" and using his retirement to be... extremely, incredibly mormon bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 16:22
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Pollyanna posted:People go for high figgies uber alles because the truth is, none of us actually trust this industry to last until we retire. If we can’t rely on it as a lifelong career, our next best option is to grab as much money as we can as early as we can. meh, i came into the industry from college in 2002, which was three years after the dot-com implosion made me and everyone else think that the tech industry was a doornail. i doubt there's going to be another capital infusion into the industry along those lines (unless quantum or AI pan out), but there's probably enough room maintaining yesterday's state-of-the-art code for another decade or two. I definitely wouldn't get into entry level stuff at this point though! If I gotta go be a nurse or something, that's cool tho 
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Jun 25, 2023 16:30
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Blinkz0rz posted:I don’t think the principle here is inherently wrong but the statement that the “more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave” is pretty much the definition of confirmation bias. It's definitely true that more talented people have better options for leaving, and that correlates to some degree with them exercising those options.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:37
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I don't overthink the Webster article. It's just a useful analogy to frame the conversation of whether an area is being infused with new life, is stable, or is accumulating salt. If you wouldn't recommend good people come to your area, it makes sense that others might not do that either.leper khan posted:The one thing I haven't learned is how to not land in a dumpster fire. Every time I think I've figured it out, I've just learned that there are new materials that burn in similar but different ways from all the other dumpster fires I've seen before. Every place has problems, I just look for the most palatable dumpsters.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:37
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only durable reliable way ive found is backchannels and buying peeps coffee and lunch outside of work
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Jun 25, 2023 16:40
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bob dobbs is dead posted:2008 goog is not 2023 goog i'm talking specifically about that article, which repeatedly calls upon his "grueling four-year period" at a company that sounds like it was doing greenfield dev for a NeXTSTEP application, which I'd consider a startup. at least in spirit.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:40
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luchadornado posted:I don't overthink the Webster article. It's just a useful analogy to frame the conversation of whether an area is being infused with new life, is stable, or is accumulating salt. If you wouldn't recommend good people come to your area, it makes sense that others might not do that either. true dat
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Jun 25, 2023 16:41
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Pollyanna posted:This response is…not quite what I expected! It really is that bad, huh? Yes. Trying to enact change before leaving will look a lot better internally than just leaving. Having a story of "here's what was wrong, this is what I tried to fix the systemic issues, this is why that failed, that's why I'm looking to move" is a lot better than "my coworkers suck, can I come work on your team" One team I was on, I later found out that the current manager got the job via attrition as the previous manager quit without notice to go to travel in Vietnam. The manager previous to that also quit out of frustration. Dead Sea is a great analogy. I left after a little over a year as well.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:47
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Next steps are pretty clear - bounce. Either to a different team, or just hit da bricks.
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ultrafilter posted:It's definitely true that more talented people have better options for leaving This yes quote:and that correlates to some degree with them exercising those options. This unfounded It presupposes that talent is incompatible with focusing your career on affecting organizational change and kind of comes back to the "there's only one right way to be an engineer" attitude that's imo pretty rife in the industry.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:58
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general ordinary technical skill, up to and including programming, has been declining in recent years. dunno the strict cause but my old profs and buddies of mine who became profs and adjuncts and such are pretty unanimous about it. so i dunno about the demand side necessarily but the supply side is favorable for already-skilled touchers, and i can't say that portents of permanent doom are apropos now, doom for the 15-25 months starting last november when the big layoffs started hitting in earnest? i could see it. but doom for 15 months is not permanent doom bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 17:05
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It seems like people are mystified by some of the things my team and our larger organization does, so if you want I can try and explain some things further. I can talk about the ACLs, the testing devices, the release/versioning strategy, the codebase I got upset over, the reasons I think our codebase and engineering excellence are crap, and the kinds of people I’ve worked with, but I won’t share any confidential information. (If I even have any, cause I tuned poo poo out once it started becoming clear that I thought it was all mediocre engineering.) bob dobbs is dead posted:hes also 90% retired. "making IT work since 1974" Oh. gently caress ‘em then. Lyesh posted:meh, i came into the industry from college in 2002, which was three years after the dot-com implosion made me and everyone else think that the tech industry was a doornail. i doubt there's going to be another capital infusion into the industry along those lines (unless quantum or AI pan out), but there's probably enough room maintaining yesterday's state-of-the-art code for another decade or two. I definitely wouldn't get into entry level stuff at this point though! Maybe I’m just paranoid and/or mistrustful of tech. Or maybe I’m just missing this kind of longer-term insight on what the industry is like. IDK, I’m just anxious and scared sometimes I’m far past entry level, yeah. But I’m also worried that I’m not far enough. I’m genuinely upset that I followed up a four-years-one-time experience with the equivalent of a one-year-two-times experience (at best and probably worse). I hoped this would be a launch pad to becoming a real senior engineer 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 17:22
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Hadlock posted:Yes. Trying to enact change before leaving will look a lot better internally than just leaving. Having a story of "here's what was wrong, this is what I tried to fix the systemic issues, this is why that failed, that's why I'm looking to move" is a lot better than "my coworkers suck, can I come work on your team" I…I dunno. I’m tired. I’ve talked about how dissatisfied I am over our process and team position with my TL and my manager multiple times in the past, and they know I have opinions. But thanks to a combination of the things I find valuable to work not not being high priority, and me just being sick of it all, I‘ve lost interest in putting effort into making things better. There’s just not enough interest on the other side. I could write docs, I could do 5-minute talks, I could start discussions but like. I just don’t think it’s worth it. Not for this team - maybe for greener pastures.
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Jun 25, 2023 17:34
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bob dobbs is dead posted:general ordinary technical skill, up to and including programming, has been declining in recent years. dunno the strict cause but my old profs and buddies of mine who became profs and adjuncts and such are pretty unanimous about it. so i dunno about the demand side necessarily but the supply side is favorable for already-skilled touchers, and i can't say that portents of permanent doom are apropos Yeah; I think the days of VCs handing ungodly amounts of money to hucksters to hire people with no experience for 250k a year is probably past us, but there an actual delivered promise underneath the hype for a lot of 'boring' IT stuff, so I also don't buy the whole 'oh yeah tech's gonna evaporate'. I think we might see wages flatten out and I definitely am not as big on it for folks to drop private college degree money on unless that's what you REALLY want to do, but at the end of the day there's a huge efficiency gain to basically every single industry by including tech stacks; either managed (at which point you're just paying someone else to maintain and write it for you) or in-house, where you'll need your own devs. Salaries might flatten a bit but I don't see it turning into a minimum wage job any time soon, gods willing.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:03
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we're not back to 1980s interest rates, we're back to 2006 interest rates. which, peeps were doing vc in 2006, just less of it. and the late 70s and 80s actually saw the first big vc successes, in apple and burroughs and dec and poo poo
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 18:05
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bob dobbs is dead posted:we're not back to 1980s interest rates, we're back to 2006 interest rates. which, peeps were doing vc in 2006, just less of it. and the late 70s and 80s actually saw the first big vc successes, in apple and burroughs and dec and poo poo Nah I don't mean there won't be any VC funds, I just think the bar has risen quite a bit. But tech isn't all vultures looking for profits, there's a lot of actual product around tech that isn't entirely speculation driven.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:15
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Lots of very talented people get entrenched too. Two buddies of mine could work wherever they want, but one is happy to work at his current job forever even though the pay is not great since they mostly leave him alone, and the other reached the pay ceiling for engineers while things were great and switching would almost certainly mean a pay cut.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:23
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Pollyanna posted:We are slow. Let's take one of my first owned features for the big new non-production project thing as an example: ACLs. This part in particular caught my eye. It reads as a tremendous failure of communication between stakeholders and the engineering team, in particular with respect to timelines and feature expectations. Managing precisely this is an entire profession (product management). Now, good senior+ engineers understand product management, and as you ascend the ladder your job looks more like a PM's job and less like a code toucher, but it's a discrete skillset that needs to be trained and cultivated and practiced. It sounds like your org just pushed you into the deep end without teaching you how to swim and then blamed you for drowning. (This is a very common problem in the industry.)
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Jun 25, 2023 18:26
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Blinkz0rz posted:This unfounded I don't think it does - it kind of answers that other poster's question about what types of dumpster fires to avoid IMO. If a good developer wants to be a source of organizational change and they're in an area with poorly defined responsibilities, no agency, poor recognition, etc. why wouldn't they look somewhere else where they can actually get poo poo done? Being a "savior of the dumpster fire" is a thing, but most people don't thrive in or enjoy those situations from my experience. thotsky posted:Lots of very talented people get entrenched too. Two buddies of mine could work wherever they want, but one is happy to work at his current job forever even though the pay is not great since they mostly leave him alone, and the other reached the pay ceiling for engineers while things were great and switching would almost certainly mean a pay cut. Yep, always exceptions to any generalization.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:38
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I am too smart for dumpster fires.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:40
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says toucher, from within burning dumpster (no offense)
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Jun 25, 2023 18:42
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It's really something that I've only been in one truly horrible dev job and I did my thing for a year and bounced with no mental issues. But from 15 years ago when I worked in retail, I still have nightmares from some of the toxicity making like 1/10th of the money.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:45
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bob dobbs is dead posted:says toucher, from within burning dumpster hey i never said i was any good at avoiding them  luchadornado posted:It's really something that I've only been in one truly horrible dev job and I did my thing for a year and bounced with no mental issues. I will give Google one thing. This job isn’t quite as bad as the job at the startup that hired me as a remote worker then let me go after like a couple weeks for extremely vague reasons and then folded a few months later under the weight of their nazis-and-worse problems.
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Jun 25, 2023 18:48
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biceps crimes posted:i worked way harder in my food service jobs than I ever have in software development
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Jun 25, 2023 18:58
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I think the dead sea effect is a good explanation of how talent death spirals happen, but it should not be interpreted as an argument that death spirals are inevitable.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:16
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My team I joined a few months ago at a FAANG company is in an interesting position of being post-death spiral, but only for one of our three locations. We do basically a shared devops sort of thing where we're doing platform style support (hundreds of services) but with actual devs and our own tooling/etc. Apparently the previous manager of my location was a nitwit (Don't have the full story, but apparently it was a combination of just incredibly poor management and some minor racism), and it lead to basically everyone except for one lone dude quitting the team and the other two sites having to work a lot of extra time to cover our time slots while we rebuilt. (That lone remaining guy is very, very smart but definitely falls into the entrenched category.) The good news is that management went 'wow uh gently caress that's a real problem' and hired some new folks in management that are a lot less lovely, and recent conversations among the leadership team have actually addressed tough questions like 'how do we promote people for reasons other than New Shiny Project that we will immediately abandon once that dude gets a promo' and 'how the gently caress can we balance maintenance with operations and whittle away at our decades of tech debt'. The team is also ancient, like basically as old as the company in one form or another, so we have a lot of accumulated cruft. The upside is I'm at least reasonably confident we're moving in a generally good direction, and we rehired a guy that left to go off to another company because he thought the old direction was poo poo, and he's a real smart dude with some very good ideas, and came in as a principal engineer so he actually has enough clout to get poo poo moving. The downside is that we definitely still have the '2x the work for the staff' problem, so...y'know, there's that.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:23
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Come to think of it, is it a good idea to tip my hand at all here? If tomorrow I give my reasons and request a transfer and instead I get stonewalled, I’ll be in a position where management will know I’m checked out and unhappy and the natural decision will be to say “eh gently caress it” and kick me to the curb, leaving me with a zero BATNA. If instead I wait to say anything until I have an offer for a better team (inside or out) in hand, then it doesn’t matter what they say, do, or think - I’m already primed for a better position. It kinda seems like when an employee does not have confidence in their organization, their best option is neither to immediately accept the terms, nor immediately reject them. It’s to play along and distract the org while quietly getting into a defensive position. So in theory, if I want to change teams, I shouldn’t talk to my manager or his +1s at all.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:58
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I don't have a lot of experience with bigger orgs but I'm not liking what I'm seeing at my current place and I'm keeping my mouth shut and playing along while I work my network. My situation is nowhere near as hosed as yours though.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:02
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Pollyanna posted:Come to think of it, is it a good idea to tip my hand at all here? If tomorrow I give my reasons and request a transfer and instead I get stonewalled, I’ll be in a position where management will know I’m checked out and unhappy and the natural decision will be to say “eh gently caress it” and kick me to the curb, leaving me with a zero BATNA. Given what you've told us, if I were your boss I'd assume you were already looking for a new job. I'm not gonna fire you, but my incentives to go to bat for you are pretty low unless I have a personal connection with you.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:07
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Pollyanna posted:So in theory, if I want to change teams, I shouldn’t talk to my manager or his +1s at all. Checks out.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:09
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In the end it doesn’t really matter. Either outcome is better than remaining on my team.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:15
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