Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

You either leave your company on a high note or stay long enough to see it become a shithole.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2018 05:10

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:06

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1044905355933876225

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 14:57

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1068569128506728448

# ¿ Dec 1, 2018 01:17

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Yeah, if you care but you're not allowed to spend time on fixing things, GTFO ASAP.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2018 18:18

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Politics is what happens whenever there are multiple people involved in something and their interests don't exactly align. What's in the company's interest is a bit of red herring, because people always act to benefit themselves (the famous principal-agent problem).

# ¿ Dec 26, 2018 04:34

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

That's often the result of someone higher up the food chain not understanding the difference between software development and manufacturing.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2019 16:37

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

CPColin posted:

Yep! Both places went "beep boop we're Scrum now" and didn't actually solve any of the problems that made everybody realize a change was necessary.

90% of scrum organizations.txt

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 01:15

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/PPathole/status/1100406765156327427

# ¿ Feb 27, 2019 06:16

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Submit a very enthusiastic resignation letter.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 00:50

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Not every cell in semen is sperm, and I think the others would have your full set of chromosomes.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2019 19:28

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

shrike82 posted:

There's probably some domain of academia that has researched this thoroughly but my experience is that once an organization grows beyond a certain size, the management, engineering teams, and clients are more often than not groups with interests that are fundamentally in conflict with each other.

The stuff with the 737 Max has been an interesting recent example of this.

This is strongly related to the principal-agent problem and is getting attention.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 05:03

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

I met someone from Google whose job largely involved meeting with different teams and explain why they shouldn't be using machine learning.

# ¿ May 24, 2019 15:00

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/deech/status/1131701210979930112

# ¿ May 24, 2019 15:35

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Subjunctive posted:

We�re trying to figure out levels for our ML roles and looking at peer companies is a disaster because �ML position� can mean anything from �has an excel formula set that nobody understands� through �used SGD once� to �Jeff Dean blows me every Thursday�.

No one's really figured this out yet, but the industry seems to be standardizing on two different roles. One is the ML engineer, who is basically a software engineer that knows the basics of machine learning. The other doesn't have a standard title, but is often referred to as an ML researcher, and they're the ones who know a lot more than just the basics.

For the ML engineer, you can pretty much just reuse whatever levels you already have. These people aren't expected to be anything more than basically knowledgeable. Some of them will learn more than that and that's a good thing, but the bar is low here. What's more important in most companies that have these roles is knowledge of how to do things at scale.

The ML researcher is a different story, and where exactly you set expectations is going to depend on your company's structure and needs. At the entry level I would expect someone to be comfortable with the various algorithms and the basic theory around them. If they have experience in TensorFlow/Keras/whatever the flavor of the week is, that's great, but it's not something you should really be screening for (and for God's sake don't hire someone just because they know one or two of those packages!). As they get more senior, I would expect them to be able to discuss more of the following topics in depth:

ML projects they've worked on and how the real world differs from what's in the textbooks
How to discuss ML solutions to the business and other nontechnical stakeholders
How ML fits into a larger system and what has to be done to make it work
How to keep up with the research literature and to decide what's relevant
How to estimate out-of-sample performance when data isn't actually iid
How to deal with problems where none of the off-the-shelf algorithms work well enough
Statistical methods outside of ML and when to use them

These are roughly ordered by how fundamental I think they are, but again, it'll vary by organization.

The hard problem that no one has solved is how to build out an ML organization if you don't already have one. You really have to get the first few hires right, but it's not clear how to do that when you don't have the in-house expertise to make those assessments. I don't have any good advice there.

# ¿ May 25, 2019 16:55

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Hollow Talk posted:

We're currently "adding" a Data Science segment to our company and offerings (we're a small data consultancy that is roughly split into analysts/consultants and engineers), and this is what drives me nuts at the moment. The lady who is tasked with this has a math background and comes with a background in ML, but her technical expertise is nonexistent. However, since she currently falls in the "engineer"-category, it is kind of assumed she will be able to do the software architecture and development parts just the same, because "it's all programming, duh".

It's a really tricky problem, because ideally, you'd get people who can do at least two of those roles at the same time, i.e. data science/ML + engineering, engineering + analysis, ML + analysis. But since it's hard enough to find people who are even half competent in any single one of these things, good luck. And if you then consider that we are doing consulting, i.e. you might actually have to engage with customers, and you are in for a lot of fun.

I feel that this overlapping of skills is the really hard problem, because otherwise, ML-people build models that cannot be run, engineers build systems without purpose, and analysts build analyses without technical merits.

Yeah, you definitely need some breadth in each of those roles. I think that hiring for that is hard, so you just have to focus on developing it in the people you get.

# ¿ May 26, 2019 18:44

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

shrike82 posted:

Speaking of which, what viable production ML systems have you guys seen in the wild?

Natural language understanding is big in finance right now. It's used in trading to predict how people are going to react to an article and place bets first, but there applications elsewhere too.

Demand forecasting at big retailers (Walmart, Amazon, Target, etc.).

Pretty much anything looking at genomic data.

# ¿ May 27, 2019 16:21

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Hollow Talk posted:

This is actually an interesting problem that fits well with thread title. I've spoken to somebody recently who is a fairly high-up manager for Risk Management at one of the major investment banks in the City, and they obviously come via the Quant route outline above, since that's what they have either way. We were talking about Agile and Project Management, and he said that while they are trying to become more agile, "Agile" doesn't really work for (financial) modelling. You cannot deliver that in increments. Either the model is finished and correct, or it isn't. You can't deliver half a risk-assessment, with the other half "coming real soon".

I believe you see something similar with ML and, more generally, with BI and Data Science in general. Incremental analyses also mean that they only contain half the story.

This is something we are also kind of fighting with (apart from that whole expertise-thing) -- we started with Scrum and subsequently got rid of big parts of it, since Scrum in a massively multi-project environment, with variable load, with rather short-term requests, and in consulting, was...not a great. Now, we do something somewhere between Scrum and Kanban, and that works well enough for the engineering side of things, but it's still tricky for analysis. You face the same problem for modelling and thus for ML. Oh, your web tracking data/industrial process capturing processes/CRM/ETL processes/whatever had a bug, or partial data? Well, good thing we reported those numbers anyway in that previous sprint/meeting/report.

edit: On the other hand, incremental refinements are the only way to get a better understanding of your data and to build your pipelines and processes. And the same goes for models. However, you can't really have both an evolutionary approach and one that ensures correctness.

One of my big accomplishments at my current job was convincing my management to not try to use Scrum for research projects. They're loving up everything in other ways, but by gum I saved us that particular heartache.

# ¿ May 27, 2019 21:50

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

PageRank is unsupervised learning.

# ¿ May 30, 2019 04:03

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1135981075086266368

Thread is worth a read.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2019 05:05

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

No one knows how to interview but everybody thinks being too easy is bad. As a result, most interviews are very hard and not particularly informative.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2019 23:39

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Every generation of developers and project managers will rediscover things that are spelled out in The Mythical Man Month. It's just tradition at this point.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2019 22:52

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

I can't remember whether I posted this here, but it's relevant.

America�s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End

quote:

Alley, a co-working space in New York, seeks a social-media and marketing manager at the company who is �one part visionary, one part online warrior, one part pop-culture guru, a dash of precocious energy, mixed with a little lyrical whimsey, and served with a shot of espresso.� A listing for an Atlanta-based �customer support hero� at the software company Autodesk wants to hear from you if you�re �a ninja with your keyboard� who has �a passion for incredible customer service.�

For some employers, even elite warrior skills aren�t enough. �If a sense of humor isn�t your sixth sense, then even certified marketing ninjas need not apply,� asserts the description for a marketing director at an upstate New York paper company.

These listings weren�t hard to find. A short scroll through a popular job board revealed thousands of results with similar keywords. More than ever, it seems, hiring managers are looking for extremists: You can�t just be willing to do the job. You must evince an all-consuming horniness for menial corporate tasks. In an American labor market where wages are stagnant and many workers feel their jobs seeping into their personal time, such demands only create even more anxiety and dread for Americans looking for a new gig.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2019 01:19

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

People don't read things. It's sad but true. Are you discussing your changes with people before you submit the PR? If not, try that out and see if it makes a difference.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 16:48

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Volmarias posted:

Based on what we've heard so far, no they don't.

No, but they could imagine what it would be like.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 23:32

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

If you have product owners who understand the difference between an estimate and a commitment, never leave your job.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 03:45

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/_rockt/status/1155174213742997505

# ¿ Jul 28, 2019 01:28

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

CPColin posted:

While digging through a file cabinet the other day, I found an old employee review that said I was too picky about people not updating their ticket states in JIRA. What a thing to put in a loving annual review.

I wish I'd told my boss at the time, "You know, if you can't think of any real issues to put down, you could just leave it blank."

I have a colleague who once got penalized on his annual review for spending too much time building reusable components instead of just throwing together some crap to fix whatever the pressing business need of the moment was.

I'm not 100% sure why he's still here.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2019 00:16

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

SAFe can't fail, it can only be failed?

# ¿ Aug 1, 2019 00:42

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

ChickenWing posted:

Same but DS colleague passed up for promotion because she spent too much time writing good code and not enough time coming up with flashy data science

Ugh. Data science makes development look like a sane and reasonable place to work.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2019 23:54

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The vast majority of people calling themselves data scientists are completely statistically illiterate. No one cares because they know how to make pretty graphs.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2019 01:11

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Data science is knowing how to find the patterns. Statistics is knowing how confident you can be that those patterns will generalize to the next data set. Data science is definitely something different from traditional statistics, but it's not as different as a lot of people think it is. Anybody who's interested in the topic should read 50 Years of Data Science.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2019 04:38

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The problem isn't how to build good software. The problem is how to get the business people on board with what it takes to build good software.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2019 01:46

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: I have been lied to

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 14:57

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

My bash-fu is weak at the moment. What exactly does that do?

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 04:59

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

raminasi posted:

I thought Product Managers and Project Managers were different but none of the good ones I�ve known in either category had development backgrounds.

In theory, the difference is that product managers are responsible for making sure that the product meets business requirements, and project managers are responsible for getting things out the door on time and under budget. At any given organization, the roles might be different in arbitrary ways.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 16:30

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

A bad question is a bad question regardless of the tools used to ask it.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2019 01:27

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

prom candy posted:

What I really want is full e2e tests of every feature but it feels so time consuming to set up and maintain.

Doing that in the short term is probably counterproductive, but you can definitely come up with a plan to improve test coverage. Figure out what unit and integration tests you want and start doing those. Save the full e2e tests for when you have more people and more bandwidth.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2019 17:28

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

Pollyanna posted:

Got a ticket to add some functionality to match a piece of info to a record in our database. Turns out some entirely separate service is connecting to our DB read-only slave and running queries on it without our knowledge, instead of going through an API endpoint that we�ve sanctioned.

I�m torn between telling their current solution to gently caress itself and adding a real API call, and just adding onto the pile of so I can move on.

Change the schema.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2019 00:09

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

Replace Blackboard with Jira and you'll understand something.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2019 00:13

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:06

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

It's not clear how much of a difference that actually makes if the bias is already baked into the interview summaries.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2019 03:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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