Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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Guinness: Sep 15, 2004

At the risk of sounding like old man yelling at clouds, anecdotally many of the 20-something devs I work with are unfamiliar with a lot of concepts we used to take for granted. Things like using a command line and common tools, shell scripting, generally how OSes work, anything close to hardware at all, stuff like that. I don't claim to be expert but it used to be nearly unavoidable that you picked up some things along the way.

A small piece of me dies watching their mostly GUI-based dev workflows, and then when they do need to stumble through something on the cli it's like a foreign language. And I'm not even a diehard terminal guy. I primarily use JetBrains IDEs! But I'm still in and out of the terminal all the time.

A little while back when MacOS switched its default from bash to zsh I made some comment about how I spent like an hour moving over some stuff from my bash profile and blinged out zsh with p10k and all the whippersnappers looked at me like I had a third eye. "Okay, old man, who even uses that stuff?"

I'm 36 :corsair:

# ? Aug 30, 2023 06:21

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# ? May 12, 2024 18:30

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

hendersa posted:

Do any of you receive unsolicited e-mails from students or junior engineers that are asking for a job?

I was gonna say never, but then I remembered that I actually did, back when I worked for university -> they were looking for a PhD positions though. Pretty much always some Indian dude.

Never after that though.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 08:59

Mega Comrade: Apr 22, 2004; Listen buddy, we all got problems!

prom candy posted:

Is this poo poo gonna go the way of the trades where we don't let any new blood in and then in a few years when we're all old and retiring companies go "wait gently caress how come nobody knows how to do any of this stuff"

Its fine AI will save us!

# ? Aug 30, 2023 09:41

Ralith: Jan 12, 2011; I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn't for your misfortune
I'd be a heavenly person today

Guinness posted:

At the risk of sounding like old man yelling at clouds, anecdotally many of the 20-something devs I work with are unfamiliar with a lot of concepts we used to take for granted. Things like using a command line and common tools, shell scripting, generally how OSes work, anything close to hardware at all, stuff like that.

My team's several recent new hires seem very comfortable on the command line, at least.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 16:59

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.

Mega Comrade posted:

Its fine AI will save us!

one of my biggest use cases for chatgpt is command line stuff. i wrote a little script (actually i asked chatgpt how to do that and copied the code) that talks to the chatgpt and tells it to pretend to be a command line expert that i can run from the cli, and if i get stuck i just run that script and ask it what i want to do. i'll be able to file my cli knowledge along with my knowledge of how to write modem initialization strings soon.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 17:13

ZShakespeare: Jul 20, 2003; The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose!

Just got through another technical interview where they "don't judge you based on if your code works (It did), but based on your thought process (your vibes)". At one point one of the interviewers pointed out that I said one of the words/phrases they were looking for. I think it was "scale" in the context of "how does this algorithm scale for extremely large inputs". Anyways, feeling super confident I'll be getting an offer soon.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 18:09

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

ZShakespeare posted:

Just got through another technical interview where they "don't judge you based on if your code works (It did), but based on your thought process (your vibes)". At one point one of the interviewers pointed out that I said one of the words/phrases they were looking for. I think it was "scale" in the context of "how does this algorithm scale for extremely large inputs". Anyways, feeling super confident I'll be getting an offer soon.

Thought process isn't just vibes, it's a way of showing how you think through an issue. Sure, it's not a totally objective measure either but I've interviewed on vibes before and it's a very different approach.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 20:54

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

if i get stuck i just run that script and ask it what i want to do. i'll be able to file my cli knowledge along with my knowledge of how to write modem initialization strings soon.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 21:58

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

Falcon2001 posted:

Thought process isn't just vibes, it's a way of showing how you think through an issue. Sure, it's not a totally objective measure either but I've interviewed on vibes before and it's a very different approach.

code:

* candidate breaks down problem into sub-problems (how many?)
    * sub-problems can be iteratively completed to generate full solution
* candidate identifies and discusses decisions/compromises made wrt. maintainability in written code
    * candidate mentions idiomatic vs. newbie-friendly language usage
* candidate identifies and discusses decisions/compromises made wrt. scaling in written code
    * candidate discusses different axes of scaling, perhaps including: memory, cpu (incl. cache), horizontal vs. vertical if scaling is for applications and not algorithms
* candidate mentions edge cases

whatever the delta between my previous post and this one is, is how long that took. make a rubric!

edit: five minutes.

edit 2, ok now im gonna put it in a pre block because the forums messed up my formatting

# ? Aug 30, 2023 22:03

gbut: Mar 28, 2008; 😤I put the UN🇺🇳 in 🎊FUN🎉

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

one of my biggest use cases for chatgpt is command line stuff. i wrote a little script (actually i asked chatgpt how to do that and copied the code) that talks to the chatgpt and tells it to pretend to be a command line expert that i can run from the cli, and if i get stuck i just run that script and ask it what i want to do. i'll be able to file my cli knowledge along with my knowledge of how to write modem initialization strings soon.

They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 22:03

ZShakespeare: Jul 20, 2003; The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose!

Falcon2001 posted:

Thought process isn't just vibes, it's a way of showing how you think through an issue. Sure, it's not a totally objective measure either but I've interviewed on vibes before and it's a very different approach.

You are, of course, correct. It's not vibes. It's your grasp on the english language, and your ability to spew out overly verbose gpt summaries of "cracking the coding interview".

# ? Aug 30, 2023 22:30

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

ZShakespeare posted:

You are, of course, correct. It's not vibes. It's your grasp on the english language, and your ability to spew out overly verbose gpt summaries of "cracking the coding interview".

As it turns out, being able to discuss engineering concepts, such as why you picked a solution, how you're going to implement it, and discussion around it is extremely relevant to being a developer on a team of any size and any maturity. Sure, a totally junior hire, or a mid-career hire at a company that can't afford higher standards might be willing to skip on it, but are you seriously going to say that 'being able to talk about code' is somehow an arcane anti-pattern of development interviews?

I'm not asking an candidate to be eloquent or write poetry. Almost my entire team speaks english as a second language and every single one of them should be able to talk about their code. If your grasp of whatever language is used in the workplace is so low you can't discuss your work, that's a real problem at any company or position. And the higher up you get in seniority the more important all of those points are, because a senior's job is mostly about explaining concepts to people.

Achmed Jones posted:

code:

* candidate breaks down problem into sub-problems (how many?)
    * sub-problems can be iteratively completed to generate full solution
* candidate identifies and discusses decisions/compromises made wrt. maintainability in written code
    * candidate mentions idiomatic vs. newbie-friendly language usage
* candidate identifies and discusses decisions/compromises made wrt. scaling in written code
    * candidate discusses different axes of scaling, perhaps including: memory, cpu (incl. cache), horizontal vs. vertical if scaling is for applications and not algorithms
* candidate mentions edge cases

whatever the delta between my previous post and this one is, is how long that took. make a rubric!

I'm a little wary of rubrics as rules but yes, I agree you have some pre-determined categories of what is good vs negative about a candidate. The reason I'm a little wary of rubrics is that they can turn into the sort of a hidden list of problems to solve, which I'm not a fan of, but I think they're useful for trying to remove personal bias. Ideally I'd prefer to tell the candidate everything I want them to show up front as much as I can without spoiling it. 'Oh gently caress I need to talk about horizontal scaling now'; the other way I'd approach this would be to ask questions like 'How would you adjust this if it had to run concurrently 100 times or more?' or some other way that brings up the topic without giving the answer.

It's not easy, obviously, and part of the reason it's not easy is that it's not 100% objective...and if it was, people would game it immediately, the same way that resumes are all gamed and terrible.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Aug 31, 2023

# ? Aug 31, 2023 01:16

biceps crimes: Apr 12, 2008

rubrics alone are a great way to codify your biases, and bin otherwise good candidates because they didn't tic the hidden check boxes and use the right shibboleths.

everyone can pat themselves on the back for being objective, however.

I agree it's best to be upfront with the candidate and direct in the question. If some marker is on the rubric as a pass/fail, maybe blow it out into 3 pass/fails and ask questions regarding each category until they pass or it's clear they won't pass it

# ? Aug 31, 2023 02:16

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

when the rubric is insufficient, you update it.

it is not a replacement for giving a poo poo. if you justify stupid crap with your rubric, or the rubric itself is crap, that's kinda on you. and if you can't give the rubric to the candidate, well, that's probably not so great either maybe work on what's going on there.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 02:29

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Had an interviewer who appeared to be walking on a treadmill today

# ? Aug 31, 2023 02:51

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

spiritual bypass posted:

Had an interviewer who appeared to be walking on a treadmill today

Perhaps a cryptic way of warning you you'll go nowhere in that company

# ? Aug 31, 2023 05:18

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

prom candy posted:

Perhaps a cryptic way of warning you you'll go nowhere in that company

"Can you tell me about your most aspirational Greek mythical figure, and why it's Sysiphus?"

# ? Aug 31, 2023 05:45

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

The internal recruiter told me tgis would be a Python centered interview where I'd need to collaborate and think ahead about performance. Instead, I got a system design interview where my every attempt to think ahead and design for capacity (asking about next year's revenue goals, etc) was shot down with "no, we just need a design we can have ready for market in 2 weeks."

The interviewer seemed like he had no idea how to run the process and I keep getting madder about it as I dwell on it. Ended up with a monolith backed by a relational database, which isn't exactly my maximum design knowhow.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 22:56

luchadornado: Oct 7, 2004; A boombox is not a toy!

spiritual bypass posted:

Had an interviewer who appeared to be walking on a treadmill today

I know a guy that takes all his meetings on a treadmill, wouldn't be shocked if he did interviews that way as well. He got really sick, then got serious about getting healthy and walks like 30k steps/day. If you can manage it without being a distraction go for it IMO.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 23:21

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

spiritual bypass posted:

shot down with "no, we just need a design we can have ready for market in 2 weeks."

Containerized python + ecs + Redis + mongodb drat the performance or tech debt, and a couple of lambdas as bandaids

# ? Sep 1, 2023 02:09

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

Today was my last day at a job that moves around a shitload of data for some of the biggest entertainment brands on earth and the backend was Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Redis, and lambda bandaids. I was the entire tech department for the past year and it was mostly still running ok although definitely I was losing sleep over scale issues. I solved the problem though (by quitting)

# ? Sep 1, 2023 05:36

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

What is seed stage salary for a senior engineer in the bay area these days? Like $175-225 sounds about right?

# ? Sep 1, 2023 06:47

Hiowf: Jun 28, 2013; We don't do .DOC in my cave.

Achmed Jones posted:

when the rubric is insufficient, you update it.

it is not a replacement for giving a poo poo. if you justify stupid crap with your rubric, or the rubric itself is crap, that's kinda on you. and if you can't give the rubric to the candidate, well, that's probably not so great either maybe work on what's going on there.

One of the conundrums with rubrics is that sometimes a candidates' responses will want you to update the rubric, but or course if you do that then you could hardly call the rubric the fixed objective measure it's intended to be.

I remember presenting a candidate with an impossible situation requiring various tradeoffs, and their first reaction was to ask if they could get help getting it done. I don't know what it says about us that none of the interviewers nor any of the past candidates had considered that answer.

# ? Sep 1, 2023 08:45

Harriet Carker: Jun 2, 2009

prom candy posted:

I solved the problem though (by quitting)

New thread title

# ? Sep 1, 2023 15:20

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hadlock posted:

What is seed stage salary for a senior engineer in the bay area these days? Like $175-225 sounds about right?

You can probably negotiate up to this by implicitly giving up equity, but I'd probably benchmark the cash base between $165k and $185k today. It's still good but isn't the ~2012 golden years matched to inflation good

# ? Sep 1, 2023 16:10

StumblyWumbly: Sep 12, 2007; Batmanticore!

Can anyone recommend books or blogs on best practices for coming up with and documenting software architecture?
Not necessarily design patterns or anything, more in the area of "here's a good format for the documentation" "Guidelines for how detailed is too detailed" "Here is what reviewers should be looking for".
Something geared more towards large desktop Python applications would be great, but hopefully it would be fairly platform agnostic.

# ? Sep 3, 2023 14:44

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

That sounds a lot like an architectural decision record

https://adr.github.io/

# ? Sep 3, 2023 14:58

luchadornado: Oct 7, 2004; A boombox is not a toy!

spiritual bypass posted:

That sounds a lot like an architectural decision record

https://adr.github.io/

Seconded. ADRs are great.

# ? Sep 3, 2023 15:02

StumblyWumbly: Sep 12, 2007; Batmanticore!

spiritual bypass posted:

That sounds a lot like an architectural decision record

https://adr.github.io/

This looks like just what I was asking for, thanks!

# ? Sep 3, 2023 16:12

jemand: Sep 19, 2018

jemand posted:

I also am burned out and disengaged. I've been at my place for ~3 years, prior to that had a decade experience in a heavily quantitative academic field.

My org traditionally hired career shifting PhDs moving to DS, then situated us at the center of a very large enterprise. We could generally quickly get up to speed on open source DS models and use our system analysis skills from our various experimental/academic backgrounds to translate vague business desires to something solid enough to put into concrete metrics & run some training algorithms to get a solid, useful result.

Our group is growing rapidly and will soon be about a hundred people strong total, organized in a large number of smaller, agile teams. I'm a senior DS on the team, and most teams just have 1, (or zero) DS on them plus several SWEs. I started managing one of the junior employees at the end of February.

My manager has always been pushing interchangeability on our team, for example expecting absolutely instant domain transitions for employees who have worked on text for years to image models or vice versa. Multiple team mates have been chided for not producing on an aggressively optimistic product timeline regardless of having been moved to entirely new agile teams, with new business partners, new data types, new library packages, etc.

We are also being pushed to be more "delivery" minded, which basically means we are expected also to instantly pick up & perform masterfully at a variety of MLOps, DevOps, & other production-oriented SWE tasks, because the engineers who picked up our hastily written out of domain code had occasionally had longer than expected transitions to get it running at scale.

Within two weeks of getting management duties to my direct report (my first EVER official management experience), my own manager started explaining how deeply dissatisfied he had been with my direct's performance, & how I was expected to be turning this around immediately or, preferably, managing him off the team. I assessed my direct as primarily being disengaged and confused. He was also one of those employees who had been assigned, a month prior, to a totally new team, as the only DS, in a data type he had never worked on previously, EVER, & in a business domain he had never interfaced with. In addition he was being expected to perform extremely senior design-level tasks, but as a very junior employee had no intuition for what this would look like and had received no concrete direction on what it would entail. I put my foot down when my manager raised the idea of PIPing him, & instead I have worked with product and we've designed a much more achievable "next step" project scope that a junior employee can actually deeply engage with but still provides incremental value to the business. Four months in, and it appears that my direct is now very deeply engaged and I ( and product & business partners ) are very pleased with his performance.

However, just because I'm able to help his disengagement doesn't really touch anything of my own. GenerativeAI hype has reached absolute catastrophic levels, & our org is under constant attention from the c-levels as the place that is supposed to 'deliver' on this.

Traditionally, there had been speed pressure, but we were able to ship things that felt solid and that we could vouch for on performance & value. Now we're shoving out the door langchain demo level poo poo, & not really caring to consider conflicting business desires. Example: Csuit wants this chatbot poo poo to sound more colloquial and fluid, legal wants it more factual & grounded. Vs reality, we don't have any actual measurement of any of those directions, someone just hit it with a couple dozen qs and we're pitching it towards prod on the strength of vibes & hype. I've been told explicitly by a senior member of the SWE team that he's not terribly worried about whether any given thing works, & my own manager has explained that in the next few months we aren't to worry about anything except just "swimming in the code" & learning what the SWE are doing with the demo-langchain poo poo. Longer term, the idea seems to be for the DS team to be either 1) gatekeepers of idea feasibility, or 2) eventually evaluating LLM performance. But, reading the tea leaves & organizational power here, that's setting us up to be the bearers of bad news without any org cred to be able to back it up, & against a lot of excitement and energy that honestly doesn't care about functionality anyway.

I'm extremely frustrated.

Update on this: I've accepted a verbal offer of promotion to be peer to the manager I was describing above, & the overall structure will be adjusted so that at least a couple additional people would be moved over to my side. Talk is of our group inheriting a whole new IC team in the new year that would go to me, as well, so the team split at the moment is not 50/50.

This promotion process has been incredibly insightful. It's been run as a full-posted new position structure, & the interview process has clarified quite a lot about what my current skip level (soon direct manager) really values (talk/actions differential, y'know.)

Have a lot more understanding now how, while my manager absolutely was doing a pretty poor job in several ways, he was doing so in a complicated context that explains a lot more where he was coming from & why.

# ? Sep 5, 2023 22:49

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

An unexpected success story. I'm glad you made things work out for you.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 03:13

jemand: Sep 19, 2018

BTW, my new direct manager will be an SVP, & my first ever managing experience started this Feb with 1 person & will be growing from there imminently.

I'm fully aware our group would very greatly benefit from more actual layers and that I'll realistically be getting very limited amounts of coaching & feedback from my manager, but I also don't have high hopes for anything changing anytime soon with this structure. Does anyone have advice for how to operate in such a situation in the meantime? Currently, I'm planning on building a more wide network of contacts, coaches, & mentors from around the organization more generally that might help me out with any specific gaps in the direct channel. I have a start on that, but need to be a bit more deliberate to add some new perspectives. Other options are less clear to me & I would appreciate any ideas from this thread.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 18:03

wins32767: Mar 16, 2007

jemand posted:

I'm fully aware our group would very greatly benefit from more actual layers and that I'll realistically be getting very limited amounts of coaching & feedback from my manager, but I also don't have high hopes for anything changing anytime soon with this structure. Does anyone have advice for how to operate in such a situation in the meantime? Currently, I'm planning on building a more wide network of contacts, coaches, & mentors from around the organization more generally that might help me out with any specific gaps in the direct channel. I have a start on that, but need to be a bit more deliberate to add some new perspectives. Other options are less clear to me & I would appreciate any ideas from this thread.

Find a mentor and hire a leadership coach. My first leadership role was reporting to a VP and it sucked. No support and high expectations of what I could do independently which I wasn't in a position to match for obvious reasons.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 18:31

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Do you have clarity about what outcomes are expected?

# ? Sep 6, 2023 20:38

jemand: Sep 19, 2018

wins32767 posted:

hire a leadership coach.

This strikes me as a fantastic idea that wasn't really on my radar. How do I find such a person? Any thread experiences here for what people generally look to get out of this?

Thanks so much, btw, your perspective was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear.

spiritual bypass posted:

Do you have clarity about what outcomes are expected?

No. Transmitting this sort of info was one of the things my (current, soon former) manager was absolutely horrendously bad at. SVP mostly relies on transmitting this info personally and having it pass second hand. He very much does NOT address the whole 100 ish person org on the direction he wants. He also thinks of himself as incredibly transparent on vision and direction, but I'm less sure about that myself. Might feel better after some time without a communication black hole in between us.

jemand fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Sep 6, 2023

# ? Sep 6, 2023 20:39

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

If you post something on social media or LinkedIn about wanting to get in contact with one, they will generally come out of the woodwork

jemand posted:

. SVP mostly relies on transmitting this info personally and having it pass second hand. He very much does NOT address the whole 100 ish person org on the direction he wants. He also thinks of himself as incredibly transparent on vision and direction, but I'm less sure about that myself.

A lot of SVP are hired (and stay employed) based on their ability to execute and add to the bottom line. Some SVP exist as leaders of people but it turns out a lot of the executive suite exists as jobs with unlimited potential as they have direct access to levers of power to make money appear. Having direct reports is often looked at as a chore secondary to their primary job which is making money

If you report to an SVP you're effectively a director and expected to meet KPI but how is up to you. Good luck with that

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Sep 6, 2023

# ? Sep 6, 2023 20:51

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

Hadlock posted:

If you post something on social media or LinkedIn about wanting to get in contact with one, they will generally come out of the woodwork

dont do this get a referral from someone you trust

# ? Sep 6, 2023 20:53

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Yeah go through a referral you trust. I guess I was just surprised at how big of an industry this is. My wife's boss has been hiring coaches for years (on the company's dime no less) and apparently going into business for herself as one now

# ? Sep 6, 2023 21:02

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

Hadlock posted:

Yeah go through a referral you trust. I guess I was just surprised at how big of an industry this is. My wife's boss has been hiring coaches for years (on the company's dime no less) and apparently going into business for herself as one now

Leadership is a skill, or rather a complex set of skills, so unsurprisingly most people are pretty bad at it without training.

... I've been in leadership roles for over half my career now and I'm still just guessing a lot of the time.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 21:19

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# ? May 12, 2024 18:30

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

What does Oracle RTO situation look like, and are all their bay area engineering offices in Santa Clara or do they have a satellite engineering office in SF proper? I guess they're winding down their redwood city HQ building (formally in austin now) but I'm guessing that facility is mostly focused on management, sales, gov relations etc

# ? Sep 6, 2023 22:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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