Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'm not an oldie - I just started my career, as a web developer. Although I just started my first job, I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't wanna just be like "welp, got a job, guess I'll just play video games on the weekends!", I want to be able to advance my career and get more experience/better positions/ :10bux:

. But...I don't know what to do next. I'm mostly doing web dev (e.g. Rails and front-end/static design), but I'm also interested in iOS/Android development as well, so I'm also using some of my time here at work to learn it. Still, I took this step, and I'm not sure what the next one should be.

Oldies in this thread: what were your first two or three years as a developer like? What did you do that you suggest I should do? What missteps should I avoid? What would you do over again? Any advice for someone literally starting out?

Edit: To elaborate: I can identify a step to take and take it. I can learn and grow on my own. I just want to make sure that I know how to take the right steps. Maybe there aren't any "right steps", but there can at least be some sort of approach I can take to give myself some safety.

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 30, 2014

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 16:49

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 01:01

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I think that's what I needed to hear. Knowing that I can't go wrong regardless of what I do is reassuring. Seems like the bottom line is, don't worry over what to do. Do anything. If something doesn't involve programming, shiv it in. Practice and produce, and you'll be fine.

I'll cool it on the posting.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 17:57

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'm not exactly an oldie, but I need some advice. I'm currently implementing an upgrade to our servers, and it's mind-numbingly awful. The service we use for them is unintuitive and frustrating, and makes upgrading a huge pain. It's impossible to debug provisioning issues because of how goddamn long it takes to bring servers up. It also fancies itself a clone of git, yet it's nowhere near as (relatively) usable. Tracking changes to server templates is nigh impossible as a result

Reason I came here to complain is that I'm getting pretty disillusioned by it, due to a mix of feeling somewhat railroaded into this responsibility (whole other story) and just plain hating the work. Additionally, I see other people who started in the same group after I did move on to other groups while I'm still here, and it makes me feel like I'm somehow worse than them.

I'm afraid of burning out early and I really want to be able to branch out and do different things, and I'm worried about this putting that in jeopardy. How do I prevent getting crappy jobs like these given to me in the future?

# ¿ May 5, 2015 00:07

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

wins32767 posted:

Two points:

You're always going to have to do some amount of crappy work. So the first thing I'd tell you is learn how to find value in the crappy work you're doing. Is there some nifty tool that is tangentially related to the problem that you could try to use to improve the process? Can you make a solid business case for switching off of this tool entirely? Your mindset about the work is responsible for a good chunk of your misery.

The second piece depends on how valuable the work is to the business. Is this something where if you screw it up real dollars are on the line or is this just a "this needs to get done" type of project? If the former, you have it because your boss trust you. You can leverage that to get interesting projects down the road. If it's the latter, it may mean that you just drew the short straw or it could mean a lot of other less fortunate things. It's hard to say with what you've provided.

I don't resent the work per se, or anyone who gave it to me; it's just that I'm running into a whole lot of frustrating roadblocks and inefficiencies that make it a chore to work with and that's leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. It is a pretty important fix/upgrade (read: $ on the line), so it will certainly get done, and I'll make sure it's done well - but holy poo poo do we need to move onto another system pronto.

Ultimately, I'm annoyed at the roadblocks and frustrations with the lovely-rear end server architecture as opposed to anyone or anything in particular. I understand and appreciate the level of trust placed in me to handle this, but man, I can't wait to get onto a more engaging feature crew (or at least on a project that isn't a huge mess).

# ¿ May 5, 2015 03:27

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Reality is just not in the cards for most of us.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 13:37

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'd like to get some opinions on my current job situation and what it means for my career. Alongside the fact that I'm likely to leave soon, I suspect that the position I'm in and the people who are in charge of providing me opportunities are at best ineffective and at worst detrimental to my advancement.

I started with a cohort of 2 or 3 peers of similar skill levels to me. Within the next 4 months or so, we hired a good 8+ people of the same skill level. Most of these people started in the same team I started at, alongside me, and eventually were moved to other more interesting feature crews and teams. They've also been noted in email chains and all-hands for helping out on serious improvements to our product and process. I, on the other hand, have not really moved teams and haven't been given the chance to involve myself in things like those. I feel like the rest of my cohort advanced while I have remained stagnant, and I'm not quite sure why.

I do feel, however, like I'm not being supported in this manner by any senior devs or mentors. They're not giving me the opportunities to really tackle something and prove myself, and they either don't trust me enough to let me do that, or they're just not interested or don't care. I feel extremely limited here and like there's no real way to improve that situation, and I'm disappointed enough to not do that anyway - so I'm going to leave.

I think what pisses me off the most is that they profess to be serious about, but I have seen none of that from them. Maybe I'm asking and expecting too much, but still, they don't have it.

What a disappointment. My next opportunity will be something that I'm glad to be working on, and something that will appreciate me as well.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 16:59

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

"Hey, my Kanban board is looking a little empty, is there anything good I can take up? Also, on what I mentioned during the last one-on-one, I'd love to maybe work on the SDK, or the data platform, or even on the front-end UI side, maybe."
"Well, see, I kind of see you as someone I can really delegate to whenever there's <specific application> support to be done..."
" :geno:

"

So, yes and they're more interested in grooming me for something specific.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 17:43

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

JawnV6 posted:

1) Look up "set up to fail" and read last decade's MBA's describe your situation
2) Don't put any more effort, be it typing or emotional, into this job. Focus on the next one.

I am incredulous at how accurately Set Up to Fail describes my exact situation. Like, holy poo poo, this is exactly how it feels - doesn't matter if it's objectively happening or not, I don't want it to loving continue anyway. It's also a great reminder that the reason I feel like poo poo is because my situation is poo poo, and if I improve it my mood is likely to improve too - it's not inherent to me being me.

The part about subordinates either withdrawing from their bosses or going to them for everything is particularly hilarious to me - both happen in my case, it's just that the second was a reaction to negative feedback about the first, and it's still clearly annoying to him! I can't win, so I'm not gonna play the game.

There's still one thing left to do, and that's figure out what I've learned from this job. I can tell you that one thing I've learned is that if you're not excited to work on something, you're probably gonna hate it, so make sure you enjoy what you do. I don't want to do Rails janitoring and crappy bug fixes because I feel like that's all they think I'm good for - I get bitchwork that amounts to "change the text in this HTML here please", and I don't care enough to suggest integrating an outside service to handle marketing updates and poo poo.

Oh, yeah - I've also learned to have more confidence, or I won't ever get confidence. For example, my manager has outright expressed disliking my manner of speech - his words! - and I think that's plain bullshit, so I'm not gonna let that gently caress me up again. I'm not going to apologize for my personality, just cause someone doesn't like it. (And I know the difference between personality and having a lovely attitude/being a plain rear end in a top hat, trust me.)

Man. I got a lot of thinking and email writing to do.

Edit: And I don't resent poo poo work - I resent only getting poo poo work.

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Sep 9, 2015

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 19:43

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Vulture Culture posted:

I would suffix this by saying that different rules apply to interpreting this kind of feedback if you're a woman, also. Women routinely receive personality-oriented complaints, particularly about tone and communication style, in performance reviews -- very significantly more than men do. Women should consider the difference between real issues with communication style versus systemic bias in the workplace.

I've already gotten dinged for somehow being both "too meek" and "too aggressive" at the same time, so at the risk of disturbing the shrughes, this is a real thing and is already a concern.

I already have a therapist and she is somehow even more horrified at the situation than I am, so I don't think that's the case anyway.

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 9, 2015

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 22:33

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

So how exactly do you schedule an interview, phone or in-person, during the work week? I can't imagine saying "hey, I'll be out from X to Y on Thursday, I've got an interview to go to" going over particularly well, and I'm worried I'll get caught if I do it in some random meeting room at work. I'd take a personal day or work from home, but I'm already in hot water for doing that too much for my manager's tastes, and I don't want to get fired before I'm hired elsewhere.

I've also started thinking about what I want to do for my next job. Something I really wanted to do during this job was to get more front-end experience (data viz, etc.), but unfortunately that front-end experience was Angular which I've subsequently sworn off ever working with (don't try and convince me otherwise). What kind of skills should I build as I progress in my career? Higher level skills like how to plan an application, how to refactor, how to write specs and documentation, and architecture and all that come to mind. I've got a bunch of books to read! Also, maybe I'll look into remote work, or consulting, or freelancing. Or, I dunno. Some sort of change.

Speaking of my manager, he responded to a few concerns I raised on our feedback tracker. I brought up the conflicting messages I was getting, and got a response from him. I think he's misinterpreting my concern about being "too aggressive" as relating to me requesting PR reviews (which are required for the code to be merged and for me to know if I didn't gently caress something totally different up, and which to be fair I get a little whiny about sometimes) and being blocked on progress, rather than my actual concern which was about the feedback I got when I asked people filing tickets to separate exploration tickets from bug fix tickets from dev tickets, which was "don't be so aggressive". That's what really bugs me.

He's also said that he's trying to balance giving me guidance on how to solve a problem vs. giving me harder and harder problems to solve on my own - but the guidance he gives me is really...well, almost brain-dead. He asks me a lot of questions after I look at code with him - "do you understand?", etc. - and I appreciate that he wants me to keep up with it, but I can't really do anything but go "yep" cause the things he asks me about are pretty straightforward, especially when it's about how functions work and what a particular controller does and all that. I can figure that out by staring at the code for a bit. That's not really want I want guidance on - it's more about things like what the code means in a larger context and how I should approach improving the code and all that. I don't know if he really gets that that's the kind of guidance I'm looking for.

Then again, I don't know if he thinks I'm really capable of thinking that way, anyway. My next concern boiled down to "I don't feel like I'm in a position to handle design decisions because I don't feel like I'm trusted enough to tackle them without having my hand held/my choices questioned" - and "questioned" here is less about my code's correctness and more about my sanity�and about confidence in my ability to get things done. The response was that I was probably feeling frustrated because I'm "not at a level where we can delegate independently to you". They seem to think the fault relies in my raw skill and ability to "handle things", it sounds like they think "poo poo, that problem's too hard for her, get her to change the text in this HTML block here". And, in general, they just don't think I'm up to the task. They can think what they want, but it certainly doesn't make me feel good to hear it, and I don't feel on track to improve in that sense with where I'm going right now. (Keep in mind, though, that this is just the one guy. I have no idea if it's more than one person with this viewpoint.)

It sounds like they think I'm too junior, and that it will take a considerable amount of time to "ramp me up" long enough for me to be useful. That...totally sucks, and I don't think I agree with it. Maybe he does mean well, and maybe I'm the real rear end in a top hat here - but I still don't really feel happy with where I am right now, and I don't know if the problem has been solved per se or if things will be okay even if it is solved. I guess it just comes down to bad luck. Also, holy poo poo at this being ultimately an issue of trust. Talk about a recurring theme in my life. :shepface:

Our one-on-one is tomorrow, so we'll see if that clarifies anything. In the meantime, I still wanna do something else, somewhere else, so I'm still focusing my effort on the future. Ideally something that involves neither Rails nor Angular. (Sorry, Rails. I'm just sick of you. Not sorry, Angular. Better luck next time.)

Also, Doctor w-rw-rw-, I only just now got the joke in your name :doh:

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 01:26

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

kitten smoothie posted:

"Hey, I'm going to be out from X to Y on Thursday."

With maybe a "I'll catch up on anything I missed later tonight, so if you've got anything in particular me, just shoot me a mail."

Well, it seems to work just fine if I say I'm gonna be out of the office or taking a personal day. Maybe I will just go ahead and do that.

Skandranon posted:

Doctors appointments are a good one. Imply it's about something serious or sensitive so they don't ask for details. Dentist works as well too, especially since you can follow up with "have to go back to get cavity filled" or something, without much hassle.

Edit: PS, you are totally missing out on Angular, it's great and 2.0 will be the bestest evar!

I have doctors appointments (actually therapy) every other Tuesday from 9-10 already, so they might get suspicious. Then again, not my problem. Also I dunno man, Angular already carries a lot of baggage with me...

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Don't you have a specific number of PTO days? Or is this one of those "unlimited vacation" places.

How many days have you taken off this year?

Unlimited vacation, and zero, but I do not want to because 1. manager's already pissy about me working from home too much according to him (then again, if I'm leaving, might as well take what I can get) and 2. gently caress am I gonna do with vacation time? I wouldn't really do anything I wouldn't do on the weekend. I don't have kids or...people to go on vacations with...let's talk about something else

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 02:37

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

No one is offended by a thank you email. Someone might get offended due to the lack of one, and whether you find that reasonable or not/a person worth working under, is up to you.

What do we know about Twitter, and their Boston campus in particular? They seem to be looking for engineers to join their teams, and I'm curious if Twitter has the same standup-y environment as other places, re: work-life balance, PTO and benefits, whatever's important for 401k stuff.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 15:37

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Good to hear. I'm surprised to hear such a negative review of Twitter's teams, so I'll keep an eye out for that.

I have a phone call with Twitter in about 20 minutes. Been a while since I interviewed, so I'm pretty nervous. :ohdear:

At least I can't end up in a worse position by having it.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 15:25

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Twitter phone call went well! They're working on some pretty cool stuff, and I definitely want to move onto the phone/code screening part. Fingers crossed.

The hard part is moving on from my current company, if this pans out. I feel a little bad for leaving so soon, especially since my manager seems to have clarified his position - he does want to see me be more independent and make my own decisions, but on the other hand he feels like I still need more time to ramp up and doesn't yet trust me to handle things like that. I'm also not really feeling the position anymore, for various reasons. The people are really cool and I made a good few friends I'd like to keep in touch with, but I just don't feel comfortable or stable at the place anymore.

So, I'll probably be moving on...in which case, I need to start thinking about how to work my interviewing in with my weekly schedule. It's still a little awkward to be working this sort of thing into my day-to-day job schedule, since interviewing tends to be very ad hoc in terms of scheduling. I took a personal day off today partly to recover from stress and partly to get errands done, but I did manage to get this phone call down - I don't want to push the personal days thing much, though, because I don't have an offer in hand right now. Let's just hope I manage to balance everything.

---

Thinking about whether I'm a junior or senior engineer, I've come to the conclusion that it's not really about titles in any way. What matters is the responsibilities and expectations given to me:

Take ownership of projects and products
Be self-motivated and self-managing (always my weakness)
Be able to make higher-level decisions and handle delegation without freaking out or freezing up

I'm genuinely interested in becoming a better engineer and a better employee/team member, so hearing about what other things I should add to this list would be really appreciated. I've kinda been burned by the feedback I got from my current manager...

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 16:55

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Oh poo poo, I'm actually kind of terrified of the coding screen for Twitter. I don't know what they'll be quizzing me on, and I'm imagining it being all in Scala...although I don't think it would be. Online posts about Twitter coding screens are neutral to negative. :ohdear:

Well, I tried. Might as well go out as best as I can.

Flat Daddy posted:

Points in favor of junior
- Relatively new to industry

Points in favor of senior
- Told to stop posting in newbie thread so much by mod.

To be fair I'm pretty sure shrughes has had the second happen to him as well :v:

I guess that's a good metric as any. Maybe I'm a mid-level engie.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 17:27

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'll brush back up on my Ruby skills, then. I've been in maintenance mode (read: Rails and Angular triage) for too long.

Vulture Culture posted:

And if they don't, were they a stable workplace to begin with?

I highly doubt they'd collapse if I wasn't there. I don't feel anywhere near essential enough for that. I can think of three or so people who would cause the company to collapse if they left, though.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 19:56

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Ithaqua posted:

You can just be a "developer". No junior/senior modification.

I'd say the distinction is (roughly):

Junior: Not expected to work without guidance on anything except very simple tasks. Needs to be watched fairly closely to make sure everything they're doing is good. Juniors may not know enough to know when they're doing something wrong or badly, so they need a higher degree of supervision. Does not participate actively in architectural discussions, although may be included to observe for learning purposes.
Mid-level: Expected to work without guidance on moderately complex tasks. Needs less supervision; they can be trusted for the most part to do things well. They should be expected to know when to ask for clarification or guidance. Expected to play a role in architectural discussions.
Senior: Expected to be able to work without guidance on most tasks and work largely unsupervised. Has a bigger role in architectural decisions.

What is "complex" in this case? I consider something like adding a new feature to be complex to moderately complex, depending on the inherent complexity of the codebase. Making a sweeping architectural change, though, is pretty complex. I've also been told that there is complexity in going with best practices and "things that senior developers just pick up on over time" which was very vaguely described and I have no idea what it refers to anyway.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 20:20

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

If I'm a junior, I'm a junior. My problem with my current position is that 1. I'm in a catch-22 regarding those very skills you mention and 2. I do not have any interest in what I'm working on anyway. It's not about my seniority or skills, it's about being quite frankly poorly managed.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 18:34

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I have that coding exercise for Twitter this afternoon. I have absolutely no idea what will be covered or what skill level they expect me to be, so I'm pretty nervous. :ohdear:

It's a team that supports a mobile app but also appears to handle the back-end as well, so it could be anything.

Is Twitter like Google in its coding exercises/interview questions? Or is it closer to startups in that sense?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 13:31

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

poo poo, that's a much better idea than saying I have a medical appt halfway through the day. (Which is partly true, but still.)

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 13:53

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Hey, you know what's worse than HackerRank and using its terrible code pairing application? Using its terrible code pairing application while juggling a cell phone.

The Twitter code screen was awful. First off, the guy had a very thick accent, and it was hard to understand him. Fair enough, but in a situation where you need to communicate with the interviewee, that can be a real problem. It also wasn't just his accent - there was constant noise coming through the phone which caused him to keep breaking up and for me to only half understand the instructions. He also said he didn't have my resume or anything and didn't know what my expertise was in - or anything about me at all. Strike 1.

Turns out the phone call was also the coding exercise. As in, they sent me a link to HackerRank and asked me to write out a solution to the problem, live, while speaking to me on the phone. Do note that this wasn't Skype or Google Hangouts or anything - this was my loving cellphone. I ended up either typing all my code one-handed while speaking, or having to focus on typing instead of speaking at all. Are developers expected to do this often? Because in my experience, poo poo no. Also, HackerRank is a buggy piece of poo poo. Strike 2.

The code exercise was a copy-pasted Python question (it wasn't even PEP compliant), and I haven't worked in Python for a long time now. The prompt (very lightly paraphrased here) was to implement something along the lines of A*:

code:

def getPath(start, end, lines):
  -1
    
def simpleTest:
    lines = ["...",
             "xx.",
             "..."]
    6 == getPath((0, 0), (2, 0), lines)

def test:
    simpleTest()

test()

There's no way I'm figuring that out in an hour. Also, I had no real choice on what language to code in, and I ended up having to translate the program to Ruby by myself. The guy was completely unhelpful, and in fact, he was silent the entire time except for "try running your code" every once in a while. Overall, it took me an hour to get absolutely nowhere. Strike 3, you're out.

Needless to say, I didn't pass. This may be presumptive of me, but I'm actually kind of insulted. It was extremely unprofessional and it feels like they don't have a drat clue how to interview someone. I choked, definitely, but it really feels like this was stacked against me. If working at Twitter is anything like interviewing for Twitter, I dodged a loving bullet.

I sure do have a lot more appreciation for my current job now. :sigh:

Nice reality check for me, too. I'm less and less sure of being able to pull off finding a new job without getting fired first. Oh, and yes, I know speakerphone is a thing. I switched to that eventually. But holy hell, who the hell expects someone to talk on the phone and type on a keyboard at the same loving time? Christ.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 20:37

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Okay, imagine that, but the signal is noisy and breaking up and also you have one hand on your keyboard.

Not to get all goon-in-the-well here, but I think I'm going to bide my time a little longer before trying to get a new job. For one thing, I clearly need more experience if today's any indication. For another, I don't have any concrete proof that I'm about to get fired, it just feels that way - but then again, I have a feeling that's still proof enough for our purposes.

If I can just get rid of the paranoia and worry over feeling like everything I do disappoints my manager, my job is pretty much perfectly fine otherwise.

I now understand how the string question could be a graph problem, but I'd need some more time to figure out a solution. Also, I don't know how to do graph problems and pathfinding. I have never had to do that in my life and do not find it relevant.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 02:57

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I figured out that I wanted to do something like BFS right as I was walking to 7-11 after the interview ended. :shepicide:

2D arrays are basically graphs and holy gently caress I am a goddamn idiot.

I think I'm gonna work through Skiena and SICP when I get a chance. It's been long enough that I need to review. And by "review", I mean actually learn DSA.

genki posted:

As a general note, this is a terrible attitude and a huge red flag for any interviewer. The fundamentals of computer science may not always be applicable in every situation, but you'll never know the situations where they are applicable if you don't know how they work. For larger companies, questions will generally test for overall knowledge and problem solving because not knowing basic CS approaches for a given problem means that you can't put this new hire in front of any arbitrary problem and expect an optimal solution. You never know what kind of problem might need to be solved, and you should strive to have as many tools as possible (basic principle of CS is that you're always learning, I swear you had a good post about that in the newbie thread at some point).

There are many areas of Twitter in the technical back end that could and probably do involve graph problems and pathfinding.

When interviewing at larger tech companies, I'm pretty sure there's no area of CS that will never come up. In a lot of ways it's weighted towards recent grads just because they have the most recent broad exposure to CS fundamentals, but generally speaking if you know you're going to be interviewing, you should be studying for these types of problems.

In the case of the problem you were given, 1. knowing about A* is a good start and hopefully you were vocal in your response to the interviewer about how you wanted to approach the problem, and 2. it's not necessarily a matter of actually implementing the most optimal solution as it is observing the way you approach the problem and how you think you might solve it. That's the area that will give the interviewer the most information to make a decision with. If most of your response is "I can't do this in an hour", there's not much reason for him to think "this person might succeed in this position", as opposed to "if I had time, I would implement A* with the following methods, and it would work this way, but I don't think I can finish in an hour", and then preferably you either come up with an implementation that you think you could finish within an hour, or you state that you can't think of a simpler/faster approach and offer to implement as much as you can in the time allotted.

Hopefully your experience in this interview will help you moving forward! Doing more interviews might make sense just so you have a better idea of what sorts of things you might run into when you really need to find a new job.

edit: oh and also, always remember that any one interview is never the end of the line, and just keep doing more interviews. it's not like you can never interview at twitter again, and it's not like you'll never be able to pass one of these interviews. just a matter of getting to know how you should prepare and how to best present yourself.

I did make a post like that, yeah. As for venting over the question, I was really pissed and frustrated because of how much of a pain in the rear end that interview was, and I was also way too worked up about it - combination of being a big name to interview for, and wanting a backup in case I get fired for taking a day off or some poo poo. (I need to get over that.) I'll try again someday.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 05:12

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

piratepilates posted:

Who cares, your job seems to suck, just find a better one you'll be happy at. Why worry about your future at a company you don't want to work for when you can worry about your future at a company you definitely do want to work for.

Basically the same thing happened at my last job. I started off doing lower level development stuff (kinda support-y) for less money than I was hoping, and when I got promoted I got a very small raise. That made me really want to start looking for a new job -- so I did and even though leaving still kind of sucked I am far happier here and getting paid much much more. I'm in a much better position for not worrying and just finding a better opportunity now.

edit: Anyway, if you're getting new responsibilities and this position is a step upwards then I don't see why there shouldn't be a raise for it, especially if it's not market competitive. Go for trying to negotiate it but in the end who cares find a new job.

Always Be Job Hunting. There is nothing wrong with being a mercenary.

Vulture Culture posted:

Maybe it's all my time in startup land jading me here, but I'm having a hard time understanding how this happens. Are all your coworkers completely incompetent at their jobs? Does the company literally run out of things for you to do? The project team I'm working on is constantly cutting user stories from the roadmap because there will absolutely never be enough person-hours in a week to get done everything that we want.

Yeah, seriously. What kinds of tickets are these? I fully trust that your code is up to par and well-tested, but if you were getting things done within 10-15 minutes where I work, people would 1. notice because we have mandatory PR reviews and 2. be extra hard because they'd think you were half-assing it to get it done quick (not what you're doing).

Does your company use version control? If so, who contributes to it? Just you, or everyone? I wonder if this isn't a problem with the company itself, and its engineering process. Either way, enjoy your flexible work week, seriously. It's a rare thing to get.

School of How posted:

Is it possible to find a job that where I can come and go as I please as long as I get all work done?

No. Butt-in-chair is how managers and higher-ups know that you are being productive and stops them from freaking out thinking that you're wasting company time. There are some people who have flexible hours and work days like yours (being able to work from home etc.), but they're people who have been with the company for years and/or are way too important to fire, so they'll do anything to keep them on. Hours and privileges like those come with seniority, even in startups.

If you start at a new company, you'll likely raise eyebrows the first time you try to work less than 40 hours a week in your chair in the office. "Unlimited vacation policy" and "no vacation policy" in particular mean "as much vacation as we will let you have", which can be less than average or plain ol' 0.

Not bitter.

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Sep 18, 2015

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 14:44

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

fritz posted:

At one point twitter employed the guy who wrote graphchi (https://github.com/GraphChi/graphchi-cpp) and any company that's in anything like a social network business is gonna be doing a ton of graph analytics.

One of the things I've been pushing for at currentjob is to get our db of real-world data fleshed out so that we can run it thru our tests, and I think we're just about to the point where we'll be able to get jenkins to run our tests on real data. (I've also been pushing for us to hire somebody to manage all this infrastructure, but: w/ever)

You know what, I think I need to actually learn more about this. It's clear that I don't quite have the background for working with big data. Where do you suggest I start learning? What do I need to know about? What resources are good?

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 08:02

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Algorithms by Vazirani, U. and Papadimitriou, C. and Dasgupta, S.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Sanjoy-Dasgupta/dp/0073523402
Vazirani's got the PDFs numbered by chapter on his site: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms/chap0.pdf
Full version found via google: http://beust.com/algorithms.pdf

EDIT: If you meant something different than asking for a text going over algorithms, then that's my mistake.

That is actually more or less what I was asking for :shobon:

But also a kind of tip on where to look for learning how to work with graphs and make algorithms from them, and how big data uses them, and what big data is concerned with anyway.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 20:55

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

How much suffering is actually caused by paying the new guy more than the more senior employees? I can't think of a reason why they'd deny that to you, unless they just plain ol' don't have the money.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 12:41

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Welp, I'm being let go. Commence the "told you so"s.

Their main concern is that I didn't have the independence and reliability they needed from their engineers, which translates in my mind to "you're too much of a fuckup". They cited missteps like using my own credit card to test CC payment and needing too much back and forth on my PRs and them not feeling comfortable with giving me production access, and made it clear that it was a pattern of these occurrences that led to the decision. At this point, I don't really care if I was set up to fail or what - its clear that the blame ultimately lies with me, and I'm tired of fighting it. They're going to work with me for a couple weeks to help me find a new place, which is infinitely more than I deserve, so I'm not totally screwed over. Just gotta work fast.

If impostor syndrome is supposed to improve as I continue my career, this only cemented it. It's really making me reconsider whether this career is a good fit for me, since I've struck out twice already, regardless of circumstances. Unfortunately, it's all I have.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2015 23:35

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Yeah, I think I'd be happier at a larger company. Any place that recognizes I'm junior/early in my career would work, really. I just want support in that sense, and my current workplace completely failed at that. They are not in a position to take on juniors at all - they're barely hanging on to seniors as it is.

One of the things I want to get done is a postmortem on my employment here. It will be good to see what I did well and where I need to improve. It will also give me a relatively unbiased document to point to when people ask me what happened. Is this a good idea? We do blameless postmortems all the time at this company, so there's no reason we can't do it for someone who's leaving.

Also, it's time to go job hunting again. Means I gotta brush up on my Algorithms and Data Structures, and bullshit interview questions. Also means I gotta start talking to people. Luckily, this will be much easier with a network in place.

I also need to start thinking of what I want to be working on. Rails and Angular maintenance was boring as poo poo and I wanna do something new and engaging. I've thought about getting into machine learning or mobile dev, maybe even embedded. I think I need to branch out away from All Rails All The Time or I'll go insane. Hell, I'd be happy just working on React apps. I wanna do something interesting, and I didn't get that here.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 16:38

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Yeah, we finished Q3 yesterday. I'm sure that played a part in it.

Re: the postmortem, yeah, they'll probably bullshit the entire thing. I'd like to think they'd respond honestly, but I doubt it.

triple sulk posted:

The truth is that you're doing yourself a disservice by working with Rails/companies that are very invested in it, because in 2015 they just about all expect a someone who has been working with Rails for years and is borderline obsessive about TDD/BDD and knows those paradigms well. In most cases you're probably expected to be very comfortable with every part of the stack. It's a toxic community at this point and incredibly unwelcoming to new developers and the knowledge gap is becoming greater by the day, causing a vicious cycle. In all honesty it's probably not your fault that you were treated the way you were.

Goddamn. Yeah, I've had much more happiness working outside of Rails than inside it, and I do want to work with something else. I'm still fond of TDD/BDD, but it's got its limits, unfortunately. I think being unwelcoming of new developers is more because Rails is the new Java when it comes to "5+ years of experience with the Ruby over Rails language"-level bullshit. I'm getting pretty tired of Rails.

I want to work in Elixir or Clojure. That'd be pretty cool.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 17:48

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

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.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 23:44

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I ended up seriously stagnating in my current job, so I'm out of the loop on what skills are competitive and sought after. I'm seeing a lot of Go and Python these days, as well as Java and Scala. I'm also wondering if there's non-programming language skills that I should learn. Machine learning and data science are big things, right?

I'm also getting a lot of Senior-level matches on LinkedIn and AngelList. I'm way too scared to take them, but that's practically all that's being offered.

I don't think I can consider myself anything other than Junior or entry-level, still.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2015 00:22

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

More places need to use Clojure, IMO. Because I like Clojure.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2015 18:21

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

JawnV6 posted:

I don't understand this.

I have a lot to say, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2015 20:52

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Dessert Rose posted:

The only way anyone can ever teach you anything new is if you show them what they need to teach you.

I spend a lot of time being loudly wrong, it's the best way to get people to explain why you're wrong.

I've spent a lot of time being loudly wrong at this soon-to-end job, and it has actually helped me learn quite a bit - unfortunately, it had the side effect of making my manager go "I've received complaints about you asking people too many questions" and poo poo like that, sooooooo :shepface:

Whatever. I'm moving on from there. And quite frankly, given where it looks like the company is going, I think that's a good thing.

mrmcd posted:

https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter

Don't know if this is old hat to the thread or not but I cannot stop laughing.

https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter/status/646377435802435584

# ¿ Oct 5, 2015 19:17

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

RE: team member not being available much, maybe they're looking for another job? I know that now I'm changing jobs, I'm not as engaged as I used to be (not that I was all that engaged in the first place). Maybe they're already planning on leaving.

That's also something I want to avoid at my next attempt at employment. I worked from home often (~1 day a week) prior to being "let go", and I think that was a symptom of my lack of engagement and interest. It's shot up to 2 and even 3 days a week these days, although last week was an outlier (we had a week-long hackathon).

I'm still super disappointed, but I don't think I want to work with a manager that never had faith in me in the first place anyway. :shepicide:

What a mess. Next time, I'll be smarter and more assertive.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2015 11:39

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I gotta give props to AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers, Linked In and Indeed for being good resources re: job opportunities. I'm actually getting calls and messages from recruiters now! I've got a handful of in-person interviews under my belt already, and I've got at least two this week as well. Everything's coming up Milhouse :unsmigghh:

# ¿ Oct 26, 2015 17:48

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'm thinking about what it is I want out of my next dev job (I've got 2-3 weeks left at this one) and I'm thinking that what I want is support and growth. That's what I really lacked in this one: I wasn't given new and interesting opportunities, even when I asked for them; I was told I would receive mentorship, guidance, and professional development, and I got ignored instead; when I tried to put forth my opinions and ideas, I was shot down or told to stop being aggressive. This wasn't just a case of "put in your shitwork dues" - because that's all I ever got, and everything I had hoped would come in the job never did, and that's a huge disappointment. So, I'm thinking that my next job has to have me:

1. Calling some sort of shots, or at least having some sort of freedom and independence,
2. Working on new and interesting things, and having the mobility to move on,
3. Receiving support in what I do, understanding of how early I am in my career, and some sort of respect that I know what I'm doing and am being given that chance.

I'm still assigned tickets as part of my team. I still get things like "holy poo poo our customers' subscriptions didn't get renewed" which is annoying when I'm in the middle of interviews and phone screens. It's really hard to care at this point, and I hate how jaded I feel and how little I care about the work this company gives (or does not give) to me.

:sigh:

Not long now. I'm in the final stages for a few companies, and I'm likely to accept an offer by the end of the week at earliest, and end of next week at latest.

I hope things get better.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 15:57

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I got asked questions during today's interview that all ended up looping back to what's going on with my job right now, so I failed you there already. This is consuming me and turning me insane, I swear.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 23:27

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 01:01

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Starting my new job today. :yotj:

Impostor syndrome is setting in, but I'm trying to remain positive. It's a new place! And it's the holidays soon, so I won't immediately disappoint them.

Now that this is my second job, I need to start thinking about developing myself professionally for the long-term. Are there good books to read in this vein?

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 13:21

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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