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pr0zac posted:So I'm looking to see if anyone has any experience making this kind of transition and what their experience was? Is the management side of things fun and challenging? What are people's opinions on the better decision for long term career outlook? In 5 years am I going to have a harder time finding a job if I move to management? Theres no financial reason to do it or not, my company has good equal promotion tracks for both engineers and managers, so its totally a career style choice. Management is a different challenge at every new company and with every new team, which sometimes correlates with every new project or milestone. I'd take a serious evaluation of what kind of management style you have (are you hands off or hands on, micro or macro, etc, etc) and judge for yourself how well you think that achieves the goals of the team and your personal goals. Then you'll want to deeply consider the kinds of management tasks you are enjoying, what you do NOT enjoy, and what other tasks you might inherit. Are you assigning tasks and making sure they're being done? Are you helping resolve disputes? Are you filling a role that might be more HR than Team Lead? How do you feel about the politics? I will say that personally I got back out of management (though I will be project lead) for two reasons. First, I didn't want to build a team and product just so someone else could get rich, and I wasn't getting paid a whole lot more. Second, middle management is a huge amount of politics where you straddle the interests and perspectives of two worlds, often at odds with each other (they shouldn't be, but I work in the real world). I find that all frustrating and dull, I just want to get some awesome things done. Maybe you enjoy the nuances of diverting emotions and politics to get people working together. That's up to you. If I'm missing the question a bit here, let me know. Open ended questions get my foot in my mouth sometimes.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:29
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bartkusa posted:My first boss out of college was an amazing umbrella. This exact issue is why I prefer to look at good management as a poo poo filter instead. Basically, your reportees are adults and should be given all the information they want in an adult format, and they should be expected to act on that information like adults. You have a lot of people out there that cannot for any reason act like an adult, and you should either get rid of them or make the rest of the team immune to their tantrums by being a poo poo filter the other way, too, so that management above you gets as much info to know that such a problem child will be annoying as much as the busybody old lady on your street that gets angry when your lawn isn't trimmed to her expectations. If someone like that is your manager, well, gently caress.
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Feb 28, 2014 04:40
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:It means they hire me as a contractor before hiring me full-time. I knew one of the founders from college, and basically talked to them for an afternoon before they said "okay we'll try you out." The pay is very reasonable and the cofounders are reputable. I can offer two bits of advice having worked for a variety of startups for the last decade. First, expect to wear a lot of hats. If you can't do a thing, you should be the kind of person that can learn to do that thing if nobody else already knows it. Someone else might be willing to learn it too, that's fine, but start from the assumption that you will do everything. If every employee doesn't have that attitude, your startup is doomed, so part of pulling your weight is taking responsibility for all of the things you can. Obviously this doesn't mean you must do the accounting, but it might, and it certainly means you'll want to know that the accounting is getting done, and done right. Second, and akin to the first, is that your communication is going to have to be very different in a startup, especially early-stage. Do NOT have meetings about everything, or long discussions about anything. Make decisions and get on with it, somebody has to. Learn what to bother others about and what not to. If it affects them, learn what to ask their opinion on and what to simply inform them of. Do not be afraid of arguing points with anyone, but never argue people. If you are going to take it personally that someone questions your every idea or choice, even if they're not going to literally do that, a startup may eat you alive. If the person to get eaten is one of your coworkers, better find that out quick, as you'll be taking a lot of responsibility for everything they can't handle. This is where you separate people from what they can or can't do. Don't argue people, but if someone can't do their job, you have to address it. It doesn't have to be personal, it shouldn't be, but it does have to be addressed. Everything else I could possibly relate to you is built off of that. Tread quickly, lightly, and get up every time you trip. Hope it works out well =cP
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Mar 2, 2014 08:45
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I hate the rand5/rand7 question because it's less about programming and more about math. If you want a mathematician, hire a mathematician. If you want a software developer, hire a software developer. If you want someone that can think, ask questions that demonstrate thinking ability, not specific exposure to mathematics or software development concepts. I typically start with a modification of fizzbuzz that won't evoke a simple regurgitation of a fizzbuzz (change fizz and buzz to something else, change the divisors and range, see how they do). If they immediately recognize it as a fizzbuzz style program, that's a different kind of intelligence and I think that passes my initial requirements of basic intelligence. If I want someone really smart I have more options. 3D graphics programmer? Get them a blacksmith's puzzle (one of those metal things that are combined and you have to figure out how to get the loop off or whatever). Want to know how organized they can be? Talk about marbles. Cats eyes of different kinds, mottled painted, shooter marbles, solid colors, clear, different weights, etc. See how they would organize them into small cups, make sure to have some categories that won't all fit in one cup (there are 3 cups worth of solid blue marbles, for instance). It's open ended, doesn't have a "right" answer, and will show you how they think about organizing things just like they'll organize code (at a rudimentary level). My favorite is to get something fundamental like how to program an ant on a 2D plane to find the sugar in a maze, report the location to its colony (at a wildly different location), and find a reasonably direct path. There is no way someone can spit that out in an interview, but it will teach you about their ability to think. The downside to this is you have to be as smart as you expect them to be at the very least. If you don't want to be as smart as the people you hire to do a thing, a good general style of question is general concepts that software engineers have to think about when defining their work. Talk about tradeoffs in algorithms, talk about the advantages and disadvantages of depth of knowledge in a specific language, or how it gets from the text you have into the thing that runs on the target hardware and how that actually gets affected at what stages (the code, the compiler/linker, the runtime, the processor, etc). Interviews can be fun or they can be petty pissing contests about how "field X" is somehow important. Minimal knowledge is required to be smart, so I despise people that want to know more about your academic memorization instead of your ability to think about problems and their possible solutions. Personally I prefer people that can do the latter, especially since it applies to all fields, not just software dev. My previous HR manager could think better than half the devs at my current job.
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Mar 6, 2014 18:00
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Grocer Goodwill posted:If someone asked me to solve one of those interlocking toys in an interview, I'd walk out. First, A* is only going to help if you know your destination. You don't know where the sugar is. Second, I used the word "fundamental" for a reason. It doesn't matter if they happen to know A* or they don't. Seeing how they approach the problem and identify that A* (or whatever they might make up) is applicable, that's more useful in determining their skills in problem solving, NOT programming. It's also not an algorithm that's commonly known outside games or AI. If I were in either of those industries I'd probably make up a different problem. I made up the ant one as I wrote the post, so I'm sure I could do it again in wildly different directions.
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Mar 7, 2014 09:01
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:I'm not going to tell you how to run your interviews but whipping out a toy puzzle sounds infantilizing. So your position here is that because it is physical in nature, it must be for children? Examples: http://www.tavernpuzzle.com/ http://www.mrpuzzle.com.au/category65_1.htm If you would prefer, one could see their approach to something akin to Sudoku, so long as you can produce something they likely haven't seen before. For the 3D space thinking that the original intent was for, you could ask them to think about implementing Escher stairs or something if you just want to have a chat.
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Mar 20, 2014 14:10
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JawnV6 posted:I don't think physical objects imply infantalization. I think admitting you have no germane test of the actual skill under consideration and must make a leap over to a close-but-not-quite children's timesink game is the objectionable bit. Not really, I used them in my description mostly as example of the goal. I've used puzzles twice, and I didn't go into the interview planning to use them. Both interviewees got the job, but they were both entry level and struggled to sell themselves and their abilities to problem solve. I brought the puzzles in to help them show their ability to think through a problem and it worked well for both us and them. I also prefaced that it was weird but that I thought it would help them show off. I'm not going to stick to propriety if it will squander someone's potential for not reason. The last senior level developer position I interviewed someone for we talked shop with for a while and we talked about problem spaces he enjoyed and I came up with a couple code excercises in that general space. He was fantastic, but we didn't hire him, because that company is stupid and can't make a decision in under a month. He found someone else within a few days.
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Mar 21, 2014 04:40
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Arachnamus posted:- Ruby is no longer the shiny new thing in web dev, but it is really hitting its stride in terms of getting yourself paid, at least in London. Senior Rails devs are getting regular contracting offers of £450+/day on 12 month contracts. Competent permanent employees are being snapped up within hours of quitting. No idea how many more years this'll last. Could someone in the states chip in on the state of things there? I can't speak for the whole US, but for the western half, Rails is mostly a startup language. If you are not willing to have most of your pay be in stock options, you probably don't want to go that route. Though the contracting bits are accurate, I don't think they're as prevalent here. Most of the contracts I've seen on the likes of Dice for Washington and Utah have been maintenance/integration pieces. Getting picked up quickly though, that's very true if you're in the right area. In Utah valley (around Salt Lake City), there are a LOT of startups, so you can hop quite a bit. +1 on lacking responsibility. I can get paid just as much to dev with expertise as I can get being middle-management or "team lead" or whatever they want to dress it up as. I just want to make awesome stuff, not herd cats and make management feel good about it. I may or may not be a little bitter about that right now. *ahem* But yeah, don't stress unless it's a project you really believe in. It's just not worth it.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:49
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shrughes posted:Uh yeah I'm pretty sure this is false. I thought it was just a generalization, never presented as some sort of "fact." I'm assuming you mean the piece about taking stock options, as opposed to being a startup language (It's not even a decade old, how do you see it as an established production business tech?) Obviously your anecdotes will be different from mine (care to share?), and how you would generalize the startup world is going to be different as well. Hell, I've worked for startups most of my career and I only took stock options once (hahaha they're worthless now), so even in my own experience it's not "true." That doesn't mean I didn't turn down a lot of jobs paying peanuts + stock. Still, we make generalizations to communicate this poo poo as usefully as possible. Java is verbose. Obviously not true, but if you look at most Java code, you're going to run into a hell of a lot of verbosity, especially on the job. Can you make a lot of money as a musician? Sure, but you'd be silly giving that advice to someone asking, because it's not the norm.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:49
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