Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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

sink posted:

Please don't. Go is about as awful as nodejs. I hope it goes away as soon as possible.

I really hope Rust takes off soon because it has basically everything that makes Go good but also isn't awful in every other way

# ¿ Sep 21, 2015 16:28

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:40

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

Progressive JPEG posted:

I've been told before that to break even, a contract position should pay twice as much as a salary position.

Benefits make up ~31 percent of someone's total compensation on average, according to the BLS, so it's really more like an extra 50% to break even.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2015 10:16

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

Cicero posted:

They may be factoring in job instability. You can't necessarily count as much on a contract position continuing indefinitely.

That's true. Bottom line: it's circumstantial, and it's universally better to understand the reasoning behind people putting certain numbers out there instead of going by an arbitrary rule of thumb.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2015 19:13

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

mrmcd posted:

So this recruiter setup a 1st round interview and the company sent me all this information about how it was a tech screen using HackerRank and how VERY IMPORTANT it was that I have access to a computer with internet access and could talk on the phone at the same time, blah blah blah.

Then the guy calls me and goes "oh yeah we're not going to do that, HR sends that to everyone but we don't really care about it." Also the job isn't even really development, more setting up and babysitting servers for this organizations bold new push into using Jenkins, Jira, and Github.

I think I'm gonna have to dump this recruiter.

He/she might not have worked with this company before. It's worth at least having a conversation about what your interview experience was like. I've been put on lots of bad interviews by recruiters with new relationships.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2015 16:55

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

Cryolite posted:

It's for a position using Scala too. I would have thought the esoteric stack would command a higher salary.

The real nerds are the ones completely lacking the he-balls/she-balls to get paid a market rate

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 14:56

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

Pollyanna posted:

See it sucks cause I do have a lot to say on software design theory and best practices, but I never got a chance to exercise any of that and have no clue how to spin it into a job on its own.

You're educated and interested in learning. That speaks volumes.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 23:52

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

Hadlock posted:

Oh hey there is an Oldie thread as well.

What is the likelihood that a 4-year old Silicon Valley startup with 30 employees (10 of whom are sales people apparently) and ~10 million in A-round VC funding last fall will still be around in 2 years? 5 years?

$10 million with 30 employees at $100k each comes out to about three years worth of salary. I know they have some income on top of that. But I'm curious what the raw statistics are that they will sell out to a larger company, get B-round VC funding, etc?

They say 9 out of 10 businesses fail, but presumably you're doing something right if someone writes you a big fat check. Then again $10 mil isn't a whole lot when you're paying Silicon Valley salaries.

Trying to get some perspective here.

The overall failure rate for startups is cited at somewhere between 75 (WSJ) and 92 (Startup Genome Report) percent. Fortune did an aggregate analysis of startup post-mortems, and the main reason startups fail isn't running out of cash (though that's a close second), it's that the company is attempting to meet a market need that doesn't actually exist. In the Startup Genome Report done by Steve Blank and his contributors, 74% were listed as failing due to premature scaling; I interpret this finding as being completely in line with both the product-market fit and no-cash reasons in the Fortune article.

I think that overall statistics on successful outcomes (exits, large public valuations) are worthless because the causes of success are much harder to pin down than the causes of failure. That said, the most recent statistic I saw put the chances of a five-year-old VC-funded startup of becoming a unicorn (a company with a $1bn+ valuation) around 1.28%.

If a startup has been around for 4 years, it's safe to say they've found a product-market fit, and their Series A backer is confident that they've found a product-market fit. If this is a question about prospective employment, I hope the salary is worthwhile, because the remaining options are usually poo poo by the time the company has been around that long.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 06:02

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

Hadlock posted:

Yeah it sounds like they probably have ~1-2 million in revenue? I guess I should have asked that. Whoops. They have some name brand customers including my current employer. How big is a big startup?

I have been using the Buffer open compensation spreadsheet as a (very, very) rough guide to raw startup numbers in a competently run startup.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1

It looks like last year they were doing about $4 million annual revenue with 30 employees. Is 30 a lot?

I guess I'm trying to get a big picture of employee salary vs revenue vs likelihood of going under. I've worked for two companies under 30 employees before, both in the same industry; one was ~15 employees and had about $15 million in revenue with almost no fixed costs, another had ~25 employees and $8 million in revenue but a lot of fixed costs.

Currently I'm sitting pretty in a high pay, low cost of living situation with no debt lots of vacation (~21 days a year) and a fairly good career track, although at ~30 I've mostly topped out within three years as a Senior Analyst until someone in their late 40's quits or dies which could take 20 years, and even then I'm not guaranteed a management position.

Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k.

I really want to head out there and live the Silicon Valley startup dream, but want to make sure this is a calculated risk before relocating 1500 miles across the country in a place where I can't afford to buy a house.

Like you've pointed out, there's no good definition of what's the right number of employees versus revenue. Instagram had 13 employees when they were acquired, while many others will number in the several dozens or hundreds of employees (especially if they have large sales or customer service channels). 30 employees at a 4-year-old company sounds like pretty decent growth, but it could easily be too much or too little -- you can't say without details.

Annual revenue might not matter either. Lots of companies look to build user traction before monetization, and will just burn their VC funding until that happens. It's a tradeoff that results in faster growth at the cost of dilution to VCs. It's a decision the owners have to make for the company.

There's lots of healthy startup scenes in other places too. NYC is great right now. Boston, Philly, and Portland are all seeing a startup boom in recent years. There's also the opportunity for remote work with lots and lots of companies located all over the world.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Oct 2, 2015

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 06:40

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

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Even if they go under, it's not like you wouldn't have another job within a week or so.

Probably with a new company from the same founder, with angel money from the same partner. SV is weird.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 18:48

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

Whatever language represents the monoculture of 98% of freshly-graduated computer science students is going to get an awful, awful reputation.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2015 04:32

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

Dog Jones posted:

Does anyone have advice going to a place that has a ton of awful legacy code / really bad software engineering practices? I'm getting offered a job at a company that does really cool work that I'm interested in, but their code base is looks to be god awful and it seems like they do lots of stuff that blows (manual testing of poo poo / bad source control practices / etc). Now I'm being told that I'll be enabled to make whatever sweeping changes I deem necessary, but I'm still worried. Just wondering if anyone might have some advice for me, this is my first chance to be a 'big fish' at a place. Are there any books about this?

Unless your job title is three letters and starts with "C", or has "VP of" in it, there is precisely zero chance of you having any ability to change this company's culture with respect to their bad habits and general laziness.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 16:03

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

I'm going to refine that prior statement, because I don't like how I put it. If it's a fast-growing company and you have the ability to fill lots of new positions with people who get it, that's basically the one other circumstance where you may have a fighting chance.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 17:06

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

Noam Chomsky posted:

Cross-posting this from the newbie thread since it's probably more applicable to this thread:

Gender's important here. Women tend to get pushed up and out into management roles as soon as possible for reasons that nobody really understands. Men can typically stick with the engineering stuff as long as they want, though some companies are more limited in what that actually means in terms of opportunity.

Our newest senior developer has been a senior engineering director for some very major companies. She just got tired of all the bullshit and wanted to write code again.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 16:29

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

in_cahoots posted:

I'm always a bit weary of those dual-track ladders. They may seem equivalent on paper, but if you consider a front-line manager to be at the same level / salary grade as a senior engineer, most companies have an order of magnitude more senior managers, directors, and VPs than they have staff and senior staff engineers. The tracks may look the same, but one is clearly easier to climb than the other.

Companies that are R&D-focused, like IBM or Cisco, often have titles like "Distinguished Engineer" that carry every bit as much prestige and compensation as their management counterparts. You're right that these positions don't exist in most organizations.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 16:32

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

in_cahoots posted:

They exist, I just don't see many people in those roles.

You shouldn't see them, because if a distinguished engineer is wasting their time interacting with customers, management isn't doing their job. :v:

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 20:01

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

sink posted:

I think his point is that a a purely technical position is an illusion if you want to get anything done.

For varying degrees of "get anything done." Principal/distinguished engineers should be in what are essentially R&D roles; spending time on things like figuring out how to make something into a product or fix some piece of organizational minutia is a waste of time. Organizations that don't get this are doomed to lose great engineers.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 05:42

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

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Well you have to use TDD with ruby because you need unit tests or ruby falls apart. With typed languages unit tests aren't as useful as they are in dynamic languages.

Truth. In languages with very strictly enforced type structures, like Haskell or Rust, you spend most of the time on getting your program to compile that you'd spend on writing those tests anyway :shrug:

# ¿ Oct 22, 2015 06:06

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

Hadlock posted:

Uh, so update

They're going to put me over Software QA as 'lead QA engineer', and once I figure it out in about six months, I guess, put some people under me to create a department. So that's cool I guess. I'm working with the cool kids on the engineering team who seem to run the company, rather than the customer success team who live on the other side of the building with marketing and sales etc, so I'll be part of the process, rather than peripheral to it. They made that pretty clear early on.

I have full access to the source code and will be making some small commits but I guess I'll just be big picture and finding systemic failures in the dev process, regression testing, etc? I want to stay out of dedicated software testing, I guess that's what the other hires under me would be for. They've known me for over a year and so they must have a lot of faith in me but it was ...interesting for them to be so open to getting me books and out to conferences to get me up to speed on the topic. I guess I'm one of the world experts on their software so I probably have a much better grasp of the topic than bringing in some college grad. It's been interesting.

Stock and equity too I guess. Didn't have to ask for it. Hashing out the details on Friday.

Also the team is full of geniuses, hooray! No lamers to worry about.

Still trying to decide if I should live in SF or somewhere on the peninsula.

Yeah, there's a lot more to software testing than just writing and running test suites. I found Rex Black's Managing the Testing Process to be super-useful at framing the way I approach QA, regardless of the fact that I will likely never in my life actually manage a QA team.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 07:19

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

Hadlock posted:

Also I have designs on buying a sailboat and keeping it near downtown, so I would like easy access to it.

Are you a billionaire?

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 19:48

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

Hadlock posted:

So let me run the numbers

$125k salary
$30k state and federal taxes
$37k housing
$24k fixed costs (utilities, food, gas)
$12k savings

Leaves $22k disposable income

I have no outstanding debt. Which of those ballpark numbers sounds the most insane?

Edit: obviously I'm going to finance the car ($8,000) and boat ($35,000)

You also need a slip for the boat, unless you plan on sailing it on the roof of your apartment building.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 20:39

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

Hadlock posted:

I had a new experience of watching a woman pee standing up for the first time last weekend in the subway station at ~22nd and Mission in SF. Girl wasn't even drunk or homeless, just really had to pee, and doing it in on the floor of the subway seemed like a good idea I guess? I've been in metro stations of probably 30 one million+ population cities in the last year, from cities Paris to Casablanca to Shanghai and Cartagena and never seen anything like that before.

Obviously New York wasn't one of them or you would have seen someone poo poo in the middle of Times Square

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 03:42

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

Hadlock posted:

Closest I've been to NYC in 17 years was Newark airport almost four years ago, I have no desire to go back (that is unless someone offers me a job out there and I can find a place for under $1900!)

What do you guys think about these, general comments, etc.

$2500/850 sq ft - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5268766803.html
$2795/650 sq ft(?) - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5258619434.html

Bad neighborhood, overpriced? Too close to freeway (noise) too far from public transit?

The first rule of San Francisco apartment hunting is that the owner is going to get multiple offers and all of them are going to be above the asking price.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 03:58

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

Hadlock posted:

Oh gently caress. By how much?

I wasn't able to find information on rentals, but on sales, someone on Quora said:

"In March 2014, 44% of homes sold in SF went for more than 10% above asking price, and 21% went for more than 20% above asking."

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 04:37

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

Steve French posted:

That appears to be about home sales, which I would not really expect to be the same as rentals in that respect.

The pricing pressures exist for the same reason: there's more demand to live there than there are homes to accommodate everyone. Everything is a bidding war. I'm just having trouble finding the numbers on rent, because that information isn't public record.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 06:08

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

borkencode posted:

How hard is it to jump professionally from one language to another? I feel like I got onto the PHP railroad because I'd messed around with it in college, and now 7 years later I'd like to get off. I like working with Python, but my professional experience is limited to writing a handful of small scripts to do random tasks. No real big projects to show for it.

The key questions are things like: what have you actually developed? How do you approach testing and quality management? How do you work with others? What kind of development methodologies or styles have your team used?

PHP and Python are similar enough (compared to, say, PHP and Erlang) that it most likely won't hurt you long-term. Lots of big companies like Facebook and Etsy are still PHP-first with their development. Getting another job hinges more on your experience with Joel Test factors than anything else.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2015 21:23

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

Urit posted:

Remote jobs. Let's talk about finding them.

I've got a few resources so far:

Stack Overflow careers seems to have a lot.
Angellist has a bunch because I like startups.
http://remoteok.io/ is a nice little aggregator.

Anyone have any other resources I should be looking at? Right now I'm in Arizona for the winter and I should probably get a job by the time I leave in February. I certainly don't want to move to San Francisco, so a lot of wild and wooly fun startup jobs are out, but remote seems like it might work okay.

You nailed the big two. Beyond that, try Twitter (seriously).

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 20:54

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

Urit posted:

Holy poo poo, Twitter. I suppose #whateverrole #hiring #remote is what you'd search for? I really don't use Twitter except for joke accounts like @erowidrecruiter and @PHP_CEO.

Here's a search for "remote developer"

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 22:40

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

Skandranon posted:

Regardless of how badly you think you did, THEY clearly think you did well enough to warrant flying you out for an in person interview. That's 2 plane trips and at least 1 night in a hotel just for the chance to talk to you in person. They are invested in you. They mainly now want to see if you are an insufferable goon or a cool dude they can work with. Don't ruin it by being too neurotic.

What's a tech job if you don't have crippling impostor syndrome before you even start it?

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 01:28

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

Che Delilas posted:

Jesus, this. You're feeling the same thing that all the fresh grads who come into the newbie thread do, which is "oh my god there's so much I don't know." They generally react by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo before I start applying to jobs or I won't be able to compete with the other fresh grads," and you're reacting by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo as early as possible or I won't be able to compete with the other people who have 2-5 years (or whatever) of experience." It's the same poo poo.

Listen. Your new job will have problems for you to solve. Some of them won't be easy. You will need to be creative and you will need to research things, and by doing so you will learn things and therefore develop yourself professionally. It won't feel like it from day to day because everything is incremental improvements, but there will be a significant difference between you now and you a year from now, in terms of your skills. This is what experience IS.

Settle into your job and try not to worry so much about it in the context of your entire life.

This is true. I've never once had a job I've been qualified for. Learning is fantastic -- it's the most important part of basically any knowledge work job, really -- but your time is going to be much better-spent if you look at the problems you need to solve, and then become an expert in the ways to solve them, instead of having amazing breadth of knowledge at nothing in particular and then never using 90% of it. Over the course of your career, you will forget more than most people will ever know.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 19:26

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

Yeah, I've given 90-minute talks on things I didn't previously know about at all (comparative study of distributed filesystems) with about two days to prep

You clearly are not a procrastinator :shobon:

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 02:59

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

necrobobsledder posted:

I've had mostly the opposite experience in many respects - I've been pretty overqualified for most of my jobs and only getting worse (which is why I'm just quitting and just focusing on projects to make up for the sheer bullshit of bad enterprise employers). It is important that you actually fail some interviews on raw technicals - if you aren't, you aren't aiming for high enough tiers of companies probably. This is a pattern that is pretty much career suicide for an industry that demands its professionals constantly learn something new and where the primary value of senior persons are from relevant, pretty technically deep ways that form the foundation of the body of a technology company's "secret sauce."

Oh, sure. But I've extracted better value from less-experienced engineers who have taken a few months to learn something really, really in-depth than I have with the people who futz around with technology for technology's sake, people who can tell me about every configuration option in Conky but can't think through any real problems because they give up and move onto something else when they get frustrated or bored. That's not to say there's a dichotomy, necessarily, but they're distinct axes and shouldn't be taken to mean the same thing.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 02:48

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

mrmcd posted:

Did a Google on site yesterday and this morning I'm worried it wasn't hard enough. I think I just leveled up in neurosis and imposter syndrome.

Unless their hiring practices have changed, they'll probably call you in another three times over the next six months before making a decision :sigh:

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 16:54

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

mrmcd posted:

The interview coaching session I went to the presenter said that they really don't want to do more than one onsite unless they screwed something up on their end. The example he gave was they once forgot to check if the candidate actually spoke English conversationally (???) so they had him come and have lunch with a few people (turns out he did) before giving an offer.

Also it's funny how many other companies are now trying to clone the Google method but in their own half assed broken way. Anyone looking for a job now enjoy doing HackerRank style online code pad phone screens, followed by 6 hours of whiteboard coding graph and recursion problems.

DigitalOcean wanted me to write a web crawler that output a site map of assets. I told them I didn't have time for that poo poo.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 00:48

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

Skandranon posted:

If setting expectations that way was accepted in any significant way, wouldn't it completely invalidate the concept of whiteboarding? At that stage, you might as well just not bother with the entire exercise for anyone.

Honestly, whiteboarding software architectures is a super weird concept in Agile shops anyway. It's useful for demonstrating algorithms, or for hashing out details of user stories, but I almost never see them used this way in an interview.

Cicero posted:

Of course you can live in a nearby city for quite a bit less and commute via BART.

Just push a family out of their duplex in East Oakland

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 03:35

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

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

You guys did see that article about a Google employee that decided to buy a truck and install a camper shell to live in, in the Google parking lot, rather than get an actual proper home, right?

Only in the Bay Area climate could you get away with that.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 06:04

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

Steve French posted:

It was, IIRC, a truck camper, not just a camper shell, which you can definitely get away with in many climates.

The camper guy you're thinking of

is a totally different person. This guy lived in a box truck:

According to this post, the truck was not insulated.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Feb 5, 2016

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 07:49

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

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

I can never believe when I hear frontend developers talking about rewriting everything every couple years. What a tremendous waste of time and money.

It's not a zero-sum game. Especially in web, where many larger sites have been officially supporting IE6/7/8/9 until the last couple of years, it doesn't make sense to stick with those legacy codebases full of dumb workarounds and hacks when you can start replacing the whole thing with something modern and sane. It's 2016, you can generally depend on the CSS box model now.

The people that follow every trend and hop from Backbone to Ember to Angular to React on every iteration so they can check boxes on their resume can gently caress right off, but I think modern development is closer to Brooks' "build one to throw away" than to a model of continuous improvement and refactoring. Lots of people have concluded (some for the right reasons, some for the wrong ones) that code is a liability, not an asset.

piratepilates posted:

Probably not that much. Sites go through brand changes and redesigns pretty frequently so there's always a good chance to just start ripping parts. Combine that with browsers becoming a lot more standardized and the change in how people use a front-end of a website (mobile has become a lot more popular, more webapps, faster internet, ~~the cloud~~) and it's not that big of a deal having to write things again.

I've been working on the same product for about two years now and I can only think of one area of one service that hasn't been completely gutted and replaced, and I know people are working on refactoring it right now. Most code doesn't live anywhere near as long as the things you learn from users touching it.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Feb 6, 2016

# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 03:38

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

Doh004 posted:

I've been out in the professional field for 5 years now and am primarily focused on iOS development. I was just promoted to a engineering lead role and we're starting to build out our team. This is my first leadership role (outside of running a summer internship program) and I'm looking to hit the ground running. Any advice for folks who've made the jump?

You're a force multiplier now. Especially when it comes to junior developers, and double-especially when it comes to code that you originally wrote, your instincts are going to be a) to micromanage the other developers on your team, and b) do the hardest parts yourself. Both of these are bad instincts that will hinder the long-term prospects of your team and the people on it. Your success or failure will be determined by your ability to trust people who may not have earned that trust yet, by how much you're willing to let things slide when they aren't up to your exacting standards of quality, by how much you're going to let people make their own mistakes.

Being a good leader or manager takes much more than good instincts and people skills: it takes the courage to reject impulsive behaviors that cut to the very core of your being and your identity as a great developer. It means being mindful and introspective constantly. Most of all, it takes confronting that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Read Rands in Repose and Making Things Happen (dated technically, but full of great advice).

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Feb 13, 2016

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 21:20

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

necrobobsledder posted:

I'm currently a team lead and spend at least 40% of my time doing work for my team directly because they don't trust their own judgment or over-estimate (then proceed to fumble over how to write basic poo poo you can Google instead of asking me about it directly) and we're responsible for keeping things stable in operations, not to write code exactly (but I try to hire for those that know software enough to at least understand application development challenges). If you are constantly being asked to do things that you have tried to delegate, you're likely in the situation that your subordinates are just not very good at taking initiative. Imagine trying to be a team lead of an Indian software outsourcing center where people can barely write a for loop to save their life but people expect you to deliver crazy fast code. It's not all that different for me despite trying to hire the best I can with the salaries I can offer, but I basically can't retain decent people because the job is an incredible waste of time in practice while the customer wants top talent for middling salaries. So be careful about your position and resources as a leader and make sure you're not signing up for mission impossible. I did my due dilligence and expected this but I hoped that things could get better or that my subordinates would have risen to the challenges I've given them. But alas, smart people learn to get out and the leftovers tend to be stuck for various reasons and will not be engaged.

There's many reasons I'm quitting in a month though. Yeah...

These are common feelings over common situations to run into as a team lead. While they aren't applicable to all situations, teams, or people, I'm going to share some of my thoughts on how I've dealt with similar situations in the past, because even if they don't apply to you, they might be helpful to others in the same spot who are commiserating with what you're going through.

I've worked with a few people who kept coming to me for situations that I felt they could Google pretty easily. These turned out to be the reasons:

A lack of confidence in their abilities (impostor syndrome) made them keep getting discouraged when they hit minor stumbling blocks, causing them to stall, digress into something else or gently caress around on the Internet until the specific issue blocking them was identified and addressed (sidebar: confidence building is probably the absolute most important thing a manager has to do, and it's almost never talked about by anyone. I'm livid at how few books really address the topic, aside from Bob Sutton's The No-rear end in a top hat Rule which kind of dances around why it's so important.)
I was a very exacting manager, which led people to over-ask how I wanted specific minute details done.
They understood the parameters of the problem but were lacking an understanding of some dependency that kept them from being able to properly troubleshoot something
In one case, the employee seemed to be outright missing the capability to see complex, multi-step projects through to completion and they were ultimately let go from the team

In only one case was it, at least in my head, the inability of someone else on the team to perform rather than my shortcomings as a lead, manager, or mentor. With the right approach we were able to work through those problems and the people on the team formed a really competent, cohesive unit. But it takes real work to build the trust to get into people's heads -- this is the reason being an individual contributor on top of a manager is a really, really hard thing to do.

Back when I worked at Time Warner, a very experienced project manager gave me a piece of advice I never forgot: never, ever assign a unit of work to a group. In the absence of pressure, they will never self-organize around it. Let people volunteer, but in the absence of a volunteer, pick people to make accountable for the success or completion of something. If you're already following this rule, and you're trying and failing to delegate things, one of two things is happening: a) you aren't actually delegating anything at all, you're hoping your employees will magically self-organize and self-manage, or b) they are preferring the fun work to the necessary work, and this is a motivation problem that needs to be dealt with.

Being in a position where you're expected to provide the very best with minimal salaries is very stressful, to say the least, but by taking on the work yourself and burning yourself out you reinforce the idea that the organization can get away with paying these salaries -- obviously they can, because the work is getting done. Beyond that, recruiting requires a lot of creativity. I once hired a desktop support engineer to run enterprise backups for a 5 PB enterprise storage environment despite the fact that the candidate had minimal experience with servers and networking, and no experience whatsoever with storage or backups. He turned out to be one of my hardest, most diligent and detail-oriented workers and overall best hires of my career. Often, you'll have to take chances on people much more junior than you're comfortable with and trust that they're smart enough to learn. Taking people who otherwise had little chance and giving them a shot at a real career builds loyalty, and that loyalty translates into retention. It took me close to a year to assemble the right team -- it took some very clever techniques like A/B testing job postings and monitoring impressions on job boards -- but I was able to execute flawlessly despite being able to pay maybe 60% of what these people were worth.

And when it comes down to it, and all else fails, sometimes you've just got to get rid of people to make room for people who are grateful for the opportunity. This ties into the above. A smart, motivated person looking to learn is worth way more than a burned-out subject matter expert with a lovely attitude.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Feb 14, 2016

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 08:00

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

pigdog posted:

I see where you're coming from, and the advice seems quite valid in most areas of life. Software developers may be an exception though, as the Scrum methodology, which is rather successful these days, advises exactly the opposite. A team is the only unit that work is assigned to, and magically or not people can self-organize to fulfull them. There are necessary components to the framework that allow it to happen, among other things the fact that the team decides the velocity and estimates (among themselves as peers) how much time something ought to take, and the ordered backlog which ought to ensure people are working on things that do matter. Only the Sith deal with absolutes, so just wanted to point out that among programmers, assigning work to teams is something that does routinely happen, and successfully so in the proper context.

But if people aren't doing the right work, and they aren't self-organizing, then they aren't actually doing Scrum. At the end of the day somebody's got to actually be accountable for making sure the right things ship on time. If you don't have the right team and the right incentives, you need to regroup until you find something that actually ships product.

This comes back to what I said originally: people should absolutely have the capability to volunteer for the work, but someone should be watching to see that the work is actually getting done. If nobody on the dev side has any intention of correcting the mismatch between the business's expectations and the development team's expectations, someone further up the org chart has to move that ball downfield.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Feb 14, 2016

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 22:13

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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