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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FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Since 99% of my coding is in the Linux kernel, it's not the code; it's bullshit stuff like clocks being over-written, terrible vendor drivers, and power supply management that give me the hardest time. :v:

That and naming things.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 14:05

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:34

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

revmoo posted:

Just got through to the end of the interview process at a company. Sat down today to sign the new hire paperwork and they shoved a contract in front of me that says if I quit within a year I have to reimburse the company's costs for the recruitment fee. That is a new low.

I got up and walked out.

My company only asks for a year contract if they help you move. Recruiters are part of the game and sure as gently caress don't fall on the employees.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2016 00:08

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

# ¿ Nov 21, 2016 20:18

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Bongo Bill posted:

Programming is hard.

Programming is easy.
Programming WELL is hard.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2016 04:08

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Working in Development: [internal screaming intensifies]

# ¿ Jan 11, 2017 15:32

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

leper khan posted:

Send an invoice to HR. If HR doesn't exist, the CEO. If it's not in your next check,

He shouldn't have bought anything with his own money at all. If he did and it's not on a company CC then he dun hosed up.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 17:56

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

At my company Marketing is in charge of "Anything customer facing."
This includes the GUI of our product. That's cool; I can deal with that. But the marketing director hates engineering (engineering was apparently awful to work with years ago and the marketing director still thinks it's like that.) Even worse is that the marketing director is very good friends with the CEO and nepotism is giving him super rose colored glasses.

five months ago:

:v:

Hey, the backend is almost feature complete, could you start working on a design for the GUI?

:downs:

Sure can!

Three months ago:
:v:

Hey, do you have a GUI? I am wasting a ton of time making sure all the features are working via front end api calls because I am forced to make a beta GUI and add these features temporarily.

:downs:

Oh, we haven't started on it yet, you haven't provided 100% of the engineering spec.

:v:

What? There is only one small issue remaining, there are 19 other pages you could have done in that time.

:saddowns:

No, we aren't going to work on it at all until you give us 100% of everything.

This lead to a huge argument, a meeting with the CEO, the marketing director calling engineering a bunch of code monkeys, one of our engineers threatening to quit, and in the end, the CEO told me to just wait on the GUI until I had 100% of everything working. 10 minutes later in a private meeting with him, he agreed with me and wondered why the marketing director couldn't work on all the other parts of the GUI. Too late now!
I sent a email confirming that he wanted marketing to wait on the GUI until I could fix the last hardware issue, he agreed.

Two weeks ago:
:downs:

We hired a guy to markup the javascript/html/css!

:v:

WHAT? Who is he?
:downs:

Oh, he's a senior web programmer we got from ROBERT HALF.

:negative:

Did he provide code samples?
:downs:

What are those?

:negative:

How does he know how to layout the pages so I can integrate our backend code easily?
:downs:

Oh, don't worry about that, we are paying him a lot of money, so he should do a great job!

:negative:

Why wasn't I consulted AT ALL?
:saddowns:

Marketing is in charge of the GUI, you don't need to worry yourself about any of that!

This lead to ANOTHER meeting with me telling the marketing director (politely) to take his head out of his rear end and please for the love of god just work with me. The CEO eventually just said, "well marketing didn't know they needed to do those things."

Two days ago:
:downs:

Here is a ROUGH DRAFT of the GUI, what do you think?

:negative:

Uh, I know it's a rough draft, but there are huge chunks of things missing that are in the spec. Why did this take so long? It's a simple bootstrap.js design, this shouldn't have taken almost 2 months.

:downs:

Look, we just need you to start integrating the draft.

:colbert:

No, you need to provide me with 100% of everything before I even start intigrating the GUI.

:saddowns:

YOU ARE BEING UNREASONABLE!

This lead to another argument, more emails, another director getting involved that I was being "too mean." and that I should "tone it down."

At this point, I moved the project deadline another month weeks because marketing hasn't given me poo poo that I can work with. This lead to yet ANOTHER meeting were I people tried to blame me for the delay because I refuse to work 80+ hour weeks to get this done. The CEO asked me what it would take to get it done on time and quickly decided to agree with me when I said overtime pay.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 18:30

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

piratepilates posted:

Get a new job.

I deal with marketing maybe 10 times out of the year. Those 10 times are absolutely awful but the other 99% of the time I love my job, coworkers, and bosses.

But when anything Marketing gets involved poo poo starts falling apart. Heck, I got RedWing suite tickets just a few days ago. It's loving awesome!

# ¿ Jan 26, 2017 01:58

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Gounads posted:

Hahahahahahahaha.

After years at a place with good policies, promotions, and negotiating I had 4 weeks off (20 days).

Please note, this is considered VERY good in the USA.

quote:

Starting, you usually have 2 weeks or less.
There's usually 10-12 set holiday days you get off.

Exactly this. I negotiated for 3 weeks at my current company to start. :smug:

quote:

Sick-time varies. Some places make you take vacation first. Some places have a set number of days. Good places just tell you not to come in if you're too sick and don't worry.

If you are talented and you take a job that falls into the first two categories, you should look for a new job.

BabyFur Denny posted:

The whole concept of having a fixed budget of sick time is so alien to me. How can companies get away with that??

To be fair, a fixed budget of sick times is *usually* reserved for terrible positions or terrible companies. Every company I have worked for as an engineer never ever had a sick time budget. My current companies policy is "If you are sick we will yell at you to go home if you come in, and if you refuse to we will fire you."

# ¿ Jan 27, 2017 14:53

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Docjowles posted:

Nah, truly terrible companies do the poo poo where you get one big PTO pool for vacation/sick/personal. So you're literally incentivized to come in sick and underperform while infecting everyone else too. Otherwise you're directly cutting time off that trip you had planned to Hawaii, or family time at Christmas, or whatever. Having sick time in its own bucket is leagues better than that.

Fixed sick pool doesn't bother me as long as it's reasonably big, and the company is cool with working from home if you're sick-but-not-dead. In practice these days I only use my sick time for days my kid is too sick to go to daycare. When I'm watching her, I can't do any work at all, and I have no problem "burning" a sick day in return.

If you think that's "a truly terrible company" then hoo boy have you been lucky.

Ah yeah; I forgot about one PTO pool. The only job I worked that had that policy was a call center gig I did for Verizon. It was great when somebody would come in with the flu and infect half the floor; then the managers would yell at us because the queue would go through the roof.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2017 16:38

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

So remember my rant about Marketing and how they refused to listen to me on creating a GUI?

Here's how they ended up doing it:

1) They made a lovely single page PSD of the web interface.

2) They handed it off to a random guy they got from Robert Half and told him to create the rest of the pages from the engineering spec at 125$/hr.

Now they are pissed when I refused to make a bunch of changes half-assed because it's not in the PSD which was half-baked and lovely.

They are also even more pissed that I hired my brother to recreate what the developer made in PSD form, and that I am refusing to do any changes until it's in the PSD and approved.
I have the CEO's approval on this, so the anger from the head of marketing is even funnier to me.

:allears:

FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Mar 1, 2017

# ¿ Mar 1, 2017 15:25

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Clanpot Shake posted:

That is bad. I guess I should be grateful our code disagreements are whether
code:
if (someBooleanVariable)
is strictly preferred to
code:
if (someBooleanVariable == true)
and whether ! or == false are more or less readable.

should just be:

code:


return someBoolean;

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 17:22

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

KoRMaK posted:

3d textured model meshes

Git-lfs is a thing.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 02:31

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

I migrated everything at my current workplace from svn to git/gitlab with git-lfs.

Feels good.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 00:04

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

HFX posted:

I find git much easy to deal with in everyday development. It is also usually easier for me to fix when a developer on my team does a force commit wiping out everyone's work for the last 4 months.

I also have to deal with svn at work. I've ran into so many headaches trying to merge things together over time. The worst case is when several developers create branches whole cloth without using the copy command. Bonus if they have merged these together several times. Trying to merge that back into trunk or a release branch ends up taking me a day or more withblota of praying I got it right.

Woah, you need to turn protected branches on! Don't EVER let ANYBODY force commit.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 13:40

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

If you don't push at the end of the day, every day, you are doing it wrong
I don't give a gently caress if it's a work in progress, it's a easy way to see what you did for the day, and to save it.
Everything in master better be in deployable shape and tagged.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 04:30

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

My entire project takes 40 minutes to build from scratch.
It's a complete embedded Linux build though.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2017 03:47

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

wilderthanmild posted:

.

I almost want to start pulling some malicious compliance crap and build things that look exactly like the last set of requirements I received, even if it means completely losing pieces and parts required elsewhere. "Oh, but I followed that wireframe exactly!"

You should. You have two choices:
1) continue to let these people pass the blame off to you because you actually give a poo poo about the product.
2) hold these assholes accountable to their jobs and tell them that they need to produce a coherent spec. Follow that up with demanding them sign off on the spec before any work is done. And then once they sign off on it, follow it to a T. However, if you see something, say something. This forces them to think about what their signing off on.

If they don't want to do the second part of 2, then follow the spec given to you to the letter.

As soon as you choose number two, life will be far easier for you.

FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Apr 22, 2017

# ¿ Apr 22, 2017 14:24

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

leper khan posted:

I had an interview the other day where they specifically went into what I did in high school. I'm 29.

My response would have been: Just like any teenager, I was a shitheel and dumb.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 15:16

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

My issue with PHP other than it being a terrible language?

I don't think any other server side language can just be as transparently mixed in with HTML as PHP can correct?

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 14:17

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

GutBomb posted:

ColdFusion (yes it's still around and yes it's much worse than PHP), ASP.NET, Classic ASP... I'm sure there are others.

ColdFusion is garbage as you said.
ASP is Microsoft, which isn't so great for embedded Linux work. :smith:

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 14:20

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

lifg posted:

Is Lenovo still the best windows laptop? I heard someone say it has fallen in quality.

Surface pro or surface laptop

# ¿ Jul 13, 2017 00:47

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Pollyanna posted:

"So why did the design team not think through the inconsistencies of this front-end design?"

"Oh, they're not really familiar with designing for digital."

"Wait, what? Aren't they in charge of the design for our apps and website?"

"Yeah, they're actually people from a totally different company, they used to do book publishing. This is their first foray into digital."

"Why the hell are people who have only ever done design for books and have never done design for digital solutions in charge of designing our front-end?"

"Their head of staff is an old friend of our new CTO and all the members are the people they left their old company with, so the CTO hired them to be the new design team for the entire company after they laid off a bunch of people over at the main office."

"So they're in charge of design because of-"

"Nepotism, yes."

Do you work for the same company I work for? :v:

Except for CEO instead of CTO.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2017 11:29

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

The amount of times I see:

code:


if (foo > bar){
	return butts;
} else {
	return other_butts;
}

Is going to drive me insane.

WHY IS THERE AN ELSE STATEMENT THERE?

# ¿ Aug 21, 2017 16:20

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Volguus posted:

Another popular approach in C code is to use goto. It does make the code more readable. Then again there are people who wouldn't use goto if their life depended on it.

99% of the time, gotos are bad.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2017 22:42

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

captkirk posted:

We use gitlab internally, it does a pretty good job of trying to be github.

It's better imo. The CI support is really nice, and the doxygen plugins are pgood as well.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2017 14:22

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

lmbo, I get in at 5 and leave at 1. I only have a 3-hour window when people can schedule meetings with me, and I am the lead architect of our main project right now at work.

:smug:

# ¿ Sep 5, 2017 15:08

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Volmarias posted:

Living the dream.

You have no idea how good it feels to smash "DECLINE" over and over again on meeting requests between 2:30 - 5:30.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2017 15:16

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

ChickenWing posted:

Except when your boss says everyone should head out a bit early before a long weekend, which ends up meaning 'leave when you normally do'

Yeah, but that's only like, 4 times a year.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2017 15:35

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

rt4 posted:

I occasionally think back to the job I was fired from in January for being a "poor fit." It was a remote job at a mainly on-site company and I remember that I had accidentally insulted the CEO over chat by saying that having beer taps in an office was "obviously loving stupid" only to find out quickly that they had beer taps in the office.

Anyway, glad I don't work at that obviously loving stupid company anymore. The main thing I've learned in my career is to be a dick and never apologize.

Every time I start working with a new person I tell them: "If my code is poo poo, tell me it's poo poo, I don't need people to sugar coat it for me. But if you do tell me it's poo poo, you better have a good reason as to why it's poo poo, and you better show me a solution to make it not poo poo."

This has worked out wonderfully for me. Others get to not worry about pissing me off, and I get to become a better developer as well.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 20:08

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Well, I have hit the point of feeling dread when I wake up in the morning. :smith:

Anybody need a embedded Linux guy? I am full stack baby.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2017 03:11

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Volmarias posted:

We're looking for growth adults not babies, sorry

# ¿ Dec 19, 2017 04:12

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

My convention for c++:

Local variable: camelCase
Class variable or function name: PascalCase.
Static functions: camelCase

Makes it real easy to know if something is from within the function or not.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2017 14:44

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

JawnV6 posted:

Cool, buncha application devs telling embedded folks to focus on unit testing, love it.

I am a embedded Linux Dev and unit test. I even set up kernel drivers to emulate hardware (as best as I can). All of my code works in x86 as well.

Now bare metal? Eh.....

# ¿ Jan 4, 2018 23:02

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Lmbo. The other engineer just put in his 2 weeks because the company was paying him 20k less than he is worth (citing not enough money to pay him 85k ), then magically found 85k for a 3rd dev.

Management had the balls to ask me to cover his work as well. The tone deafness from baby boomers never ceases to astound me. :allears:

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 17:28

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Keetron posted:

Look, we can give you a raise but then we would have to give everyone else a raise as well and we just do not have the capital for that. We would be sad to see you go but if you have to go, you have to go.

This was the argument they used almost verbatim.

They also got REALLY mad when I said "engineering is worth more than manufacturing."

*Edit*

I told them I talked to my friend who is the CTO and co-owner of TSheets over the matter, who built the company from scratch and is selling to Intuit for $324,000,000. They literally said him taking on debt at the beginning to pay for engineering was a bad business decision.

HE'S WORTH 300 TIMES WHAT OUR COMPANY IS WORTH.

Baby boomer stupidity knows no bounds.

FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jan 10, 2018

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 20:55

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Taffer posted:

Put in your notice immediately. That mistreatment is about to get a lot worse.

I've been applying for jobs for the last week. As soon as I have an offer I will bounce.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 21:25

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Volmarias posted:

I think I found your new employer

Nah, he's a friend, but I live 1,800 miles away in Michigan and he's in Boise. I'm embedded Linux and they are web.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 21:38

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

I found the job posting they put up for my coworkers replacement.

It's so incredibly vague, and in some places straight up wrong/lying by omission that I made a new Slack room with the director of engineering and the one other guy above me, and accosted them line by line with a "this is wrong, this is a lie, this is vague" rundown of the job posting.

I ended it with "If this is what you think my coworker did, it's clear you have no idea what he actually was doing."

They both logged off Slack and refuse to answer my calls (I am in another state right now.) :allears:

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 14:56

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:34

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

rt4 posted:

Highly recommend making a private Slack group with your fav coworkers and saying "look at what these assholes wrote"

Lmfao, my coworker said "they cried" at his resignation meeting.

Baby boomer tears are delicious. :allears:

(I guarantee they were fake)

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 15:29

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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