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2nd Rate Poster posted:Anyone have any reading recommendations or opinions on what quality product management looks like and how that flows into dev team level planning? This isn’t a direct answer but I enjoyed this post: An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage. It is long af otherwise I’d demand that everyone I work with read it. (I’m a dev not a PM, so maybe it’s full of poo poo, I guess I wouldn’t necessarily know.)
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Jan 22, 2018 03:08
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Portland Sucks posted:This perspective isn't ever helpful though. It's like telling a homeless man that his hunger doesn't matter because his belly isn't distended like "KIDS IN AFRICA" yet. I find it helpful. I doubt it’d bring me back from the brink of misery, but it can turn a stressful day of work into "nah, wasn’t so bad".
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Jan 31, 2018 00:09
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Does anyone have any particularly useful links and/or anecdotes about peer reviews? I’ve never worked somewhere that did them and I’m wondering if I should start them where I work. For possibly relevant context, I’m one of about 10 devs in a company of 20 people. Devs are a fairly even mix of seniors/intermediates/juniors. HR/management consists of one person, and we have project leads but otherwise no real management structure beyond CEO <- everyone. I feel like we all have frequent opportunities to give feedback to one another, e.g. during code reviews or weekly planning meetings, but I’m curious about something more formal and with a wider lens than "this particular changeset in front of us". We don’t have any kind of formal performance reviews. I’m imagining something like: once every six months, for each dev in the company, you write down at least one positive thing and at least one thing they could improve on. You submit these to one otherwise uninvolved person (CEO?) who collates and makes sure nobody says anything egregious. Then each dev receives an anonymized list of feedback blurbs from their colleagues. Is "peer review" the right term for what I'm imagining? Does it look anything like how I describe? Does this work particularly well/poorly if there’s a direct connection to compensation? Is this just a terrible idea?
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Feb 8, 2018 05:25
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Thanks for the peer review info. 360 review is a new term to me, thanks for that. I think I’ll skip trying to implement anything formal, it’ll be hard to get people to submit any feedback in a timely manner and it probably raises way too many issues to be worth anything in the end. I do like the idea of having 1-on-1s with someone who you don’t directly report to. We kinda do that but it’s a small place so you can only get so far away in the org chart. Part of why I was thinking about peer review was something my grade 6 teacher did, they called it "tributes". Sometime late in the school year we all had to write one nice thing about each other person in the class. Didn’t matter how much you hated someone, you had to at least come up with a half-assed "you sure are good at throwing that dodgeball". Then the teacher collected everything, collated it, and you got a little book of Tributes of nice things said about you. I think it was up to you whether you signed your note or left it anonymous, most were anonymous. It was kind of a pain at the time, but the result was surprisingly touching, even all these years later. Anyway, I’ll content myself with making an effort to praise people more often. Baby steps.
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Feb 9, 2018 00:52
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rt4 posted:Try writing pure-ish functions in whatever language you already work in. No reason to ambush yourself with a new language and a new style of programming all at once. That is, unless you're working in a language that depends too heavily on loving with state... One example I’ve run into recently is when a helper function is written as an instance method despite using zero or just a couple members of the instance. Consider moving that poo poo out into a static method or a free function or whatever, passing in the few parameters you actually need. Now you can reason about the function without having to consider all the possible states your instance is in during its execution.
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Feb 9, 2018 00:57
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Pollyanna posted:Ugh, the more I think about it the worse I feel that I'm coming up on 3.5~4 years of experience. I feel like I'm not nearly good enough to claim that I'm that experienced, cause I'm not that great even with that # of years. Years measures time, not quality or experience.
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Feb 26, 2018 04:26
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What the hell is going on in here
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Mar 8, 2018 04:01
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For non-junior dev positions we ask for a code sample and/or offer a take home simplified version of a problem we solved in one of our products. For the take home we accept anything from a couple paragraphs describing how you’d solve it and what issues you might run into all the way to a working implementation. So you can spend 30 minutes on it or take a whole week if you enjoy it for some reason, whatever you like. And we’ve had successful submissions that ran the gamut. We make it clear that we don’t expect more than 30-60 minutes' effort, and it’s pass/fail so there’s no bonus marks for spending extra time. (For juniors we don’t require a take home or sample code, though it’s welcome if available.) I'm not sure if this is a good or bad process, but it seems to miss some of the land mines by being a brief time commitment, not looking for a trick answer, and is a literal example of something we’ve built on the job. It gives something to talk about in the interview too, if that starts getting awkward.
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Mar 17, 2018 01:09
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strange posted:So that's settled then, a DSL in Racket. Trying to get work to pay for learning new things is always good. But there's a balance between doing that and making the one-off unmaintainable project that will have your name cursed forevermore by your successor. Maybe scale down the "new tech" bit. Instead of introducing new language into your org, maybe pick a new coding style/paradigm/framework/whatever to try. It’ll let you learn something new while keeping hope alive for future maintenance. You might even be able to pawn it off as beneficial to the company, a lil pilot project to see just what is that reactive programming thing and is it useful on the main product. As for positioning, I dunno. Some people hear generalist and think "master of nothing". Probably depends how you sell it in a conversation or an interview.
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Apr 12, 2018 03:40
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withoutclass posted:Do you guys leave yourselves breadcrumbs to help counteract context loss? If so what is your system for helping remember what you were up to before you left work/went on vacation? It’s extremely rare that I leave myself no notes whatsoever. I employ all of these with varying frequency (and there’s probably patterns behind when I use what, but I haven’t paid enough attention to figure them out): Commit message of the form "WIP doing the thing, got to the point where the doohickey works, next step is to whatever ALSO WRITE SOME TESTS GENIUS". Before continuing I’ll back out of the commit. Make a reminder in the iOS Reminders app (with a due date, always set a due date). New document in text editor, write notes to self, leave untitled document sitting atop everything. (This is a text editor that restores all open documents on relaunch, so a reboot or whatever is ok.) Update my checklist in the iOS Notes app. Update the Trello card. Write a note with a pen on some paper and stick it somewhere I'll see it (atop the mouse and/or keyboard are good bets). Write some // TODO: comments. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Write a plaintext comment into my source code, outside of a comment block. The code won't be syntactically valid until I remove the comment, so it's a good way to say "no dummy, you can't get any work done until you read me." Gonna add this to my arsenal.
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May 2, 2018 00:54
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Pass.
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May 12, 2018 02:03
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zwnj
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May 25, 2018 17:24
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:At today's team meeting I mentioned that as the new TL I wanted to set up 1:1s with everyone, to which the response was "wait, you're the TL now?" We never sent out an announcement email after the old TL left. I've been on my boss's case about forgetting to make some recent announcements. It’s not a big deal but it’s awkward seeing a new username in slack and diplomatically asking "hi are you new who are you?". In our most recent 1:1, boss starts with "last time you mentioned poor team announcements, I think we’re doing better?" My answer was "who's Nicole?"
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Jun 5, 2018 01:09
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fashionly snort posted:Why give them as little information as possible? There’s no upside and potential downside, easy risk analysis. I mean, feel free to talk with people you trust about why you’re leaving. But writing down a list of grievances or inadequacies? Nah.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:02
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Agreed. Major negative signal my rear end.
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Jun 14, 2018 18:23
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feedmegin posted:Also...homebrew is nice and all, but it's not like genius level software? It's a package management system. Making a working package manager seems to be shockingly difficult. Anything remotely resembling a success should be lauded. (Lauded doesn’t necessarily mean hired though, I agree.)
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Jun 28, 2018 23:24
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JawnV6 posted:I made it in and everyone here thinks I'm awful, so Hey now, I think you’re merely curmudgeonly!
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Jul 18, 2018 00:59
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Keetron posted:What is leave of absence? Isn't leave that you are absent ? Sorry but English is my second language. You could also just say "on leave", but that welcomes the follow up question "what for?". "Leave of absence" does not welcome the follow up question.
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Jul 19, 2018 12:23
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This would be illegal lol Has that ever stopped anyone
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Jul 28, 2018 20:31
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redleader posted:I really don't know what to think or consider or look out for. What are the odds you could come back to your current job if the new job disappears? You said you’re tired of current job, but if they’re still happy with your performance I’m sure they’d put you top of the list if you came back in a year.
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Nov 21, 2018 15:13
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leper khan posted:Depends the level of assumed knowledge of the reader. There are definitely things that a random practitioner may not know that everyone in a sub field should. I wonder about this kind of thing when someone leaves a comment that describes a lesser-known, but still well-documented, facet of a language or library. It may have been a surprise to them, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise to someone more familiar with the language/library. Can’t think of a good example so here’s a dumb one: someone hadn’t used the ternary ?: operator before so they leave a comment above it explaining // if test ? do this : else do that I would find that comment actively unhelpful because I’ve internalized ?:. If someone puts a comment like that then I slow way down and reread the code because I assume the comment is pointing out something weird or unexpected. And it was, to the novice. Like always there’s a balance, but it can happen outside of a specific sub field too.
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Jan 16, 2019 13:47
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Steve French posted:Why does it seem like everyone is talking about code coverage like it is only a metric? It's entirely possible and reasonable to use it to find and identify gaps in test coverage without also having some target number required for merging or using it as some sort of success measure. I’m guessing it's because they’ve worked places that treated code coverage like it is only a metric? "Management gloms on to metric, uses incorrectly, ignores practitioners' protests" is a common story.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:06
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I doubt anyone wants to explain to a prospective employer what the Something Awful Forums are, so this is probably not very useful, but: I’m always more than happy to help anyone interested in contributing to the Awful iOS app. Doesn’t matter how basic the questions are. And the Awful Android app crew are pretty nice if that’s more your style. Both projects are up on GitHub and have threads in IYG, so post (or PM) away if that sounds interesting. It might not make it to your portfolio, but it might get your ability and/or confidence to the next step? At least it fits the bill of a convoluted, years-old codebase! And your efforts will be appreciated by a few thousand goons.
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Jan 27, 2019 16:56
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Steve French posted:False negative rate, to be fair, has nothing to do with whether it weeds people out successfully, which is more about what it's false positive rate is (which can and often is mitigated by multiple interview sessions with a variety of different angles) I know what you mean, but now I'm picturing a battery of otherwise identical whiteboarding sessions where you ask the candidate "turn a little to the left, please" before they begin.
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Feb 3, 2019 06:36
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leper khan posted:I’m trying to move a team to a more methodological team-oriented approach instead of just immediately shoving their first thoughts into an editor. Have them come up with a plan and run that plan by another developer before they start implementing it. Basically the aforementioned "write a document" answer except don’t write a document because now you have incorrect and largely unhelpful documentation sitting around once the task is complete.
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Feb 4, 2019 03:47
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Grump posted:Anyone here interview as a front-end engineering manager or have been interviewing candidates for that role? What’s an "any other JavaScript interview" like? Is it useful tailoring interviews so much to a particular language beyond a couple questions to see if they’ve actually used what they say they’ve used?
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Feb 23, 2019 15:53
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pokeyman posted:What’s an "any other JavaScript interview" like? Is it useful tailoring interviews so much to a particular language beyond a couple questions to see if they’ve actually used what they say they’ve used? Oh whoops I completely misread the question. Ignore me!
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Feb 24, 2019 00:28
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Could also seek out places that treat applicants like adults 
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Mar 23, 2019 05:27
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I don’t have any brilliant advice to share, but good on you for recognizing it and realizing you need to make a change of some kind.
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May 29, 2019 14:47
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vonnegutt posted:One really good contribution a new developer can make at a company is updating their READMEs / documentation / etc. Try to follow (any) documentation they have to get your dev environment set up, and update it as necessary. This, so much this. The first time perspective is almost impossible (for me, anyway) to fully empathize with. Don’t just "figure it out" and move along, fix the doc and you’ll be my hero.
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Jun 15, 2019 04:13
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Yeah, the Spectator one sounded like it might actually bypass the usual bullshit. Whereas a console.log(“hey there bucko you know about web inspector! Apply today”) or a math problem on a billboard seems like it just puts you in the same funnel as when you reply to a recruiter’s mass-email.
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Jun 27, 2019 20:41
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Vulture Culture posted:This is also debatable in the wake of Cambridge Analytica, CatholicVote/Steve Bannon, etc. but obviously election cycles alone aren't enough to sustain that business I thought the issue was that they had so much personal information, not that they found a way to wield it effectively?
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Jul 22, 2019 14:22
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ultrafilter posted:The stuff that Cambridge Analytica was doing was actually illegal. That's a crucial difference between them and the adtech people. Ah, the "it’s technically legal" defence.
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Jul 23, 2019 00:26
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Lengthy unpaid take-homes are bullshit though. Find something short or pay for your candidate's time.
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Aug 6, 2019 16:24
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Pie Colony posted:Is this the hilarious How poster of yesteryear? I forget his exact name, just that he was wrong about every single thing he said. Oh poo poo I didn’t even notice their username. I like how!!
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Aug 6, 2019 17:01
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how!! brings out the best in these forums. Who else could bring rotor out of retirement?
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Aug 7, 2019 01:00
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CPColin posted:Are you suggesting that the market for School of How's posts has become oversaturated?
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Aug 14, 2019 01:18
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Cuntpunch posted:My spicy take on this is a discussion with a newly hired 'senior' who made the argument that we should avoid using anything in the project that hadn't been taught to the various team members in school. Like....LINQ. A cornerstone feature of our use language for over a decade. Was that their literal take or were they aiming for the less objectionable "let’s stick largely to the parts of the language understood by the people here who write in it"? Which I don’t totally agree with (people can learn!) but it has a kernel of truth. i like how!!
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Aug 15, 2019 13:52
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Well with a recommendation like that how can I not! edit: ugh pokeyman fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Sep 1, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 01:37
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You could always just not deduct your guest room "home office".
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Sep 10, 2019 05:13
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