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My team is the absolute best at sprint planning.
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Apr 18, 2018 16:23
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Keetron posted:Your burndownchart has a heartbeat, means the process is alive but on life support. The last team I worked at also had this, sprint after sprint. Not sure how it is now, I guess the same. Yeah I just laugh because this is the third sprint now where we have more points than we started with halfway through. We're having a recurring QA problem where bugs are slipping through constantly and we had 2-3 hotfix releases a day for a while. It's not minor poo poo like missing a weird corner case, I'm talking not testing the core functionality of a new feature at all; e.g. one story was about fixing image orientation for uploads, and it broke the ability to even upload an image.....so wtf did QA even test (or that dev who said it was ready for testing...)? It's about to plummet this afternoon now that all my PRs that have been scaring people are finally merged in. I changed our docker deployment process and no one else understands it so they've been afraid to touch it.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:39
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BurntCornMuffin posted:You're right. I'm trying to manipulate the poster into thinking about the things he should say during the sprint retro every time a dumb bug surfaces in prod, citing how much time was lost during each incident as a result, not to mention product reputation and effects on users. We just had a retro last Thursday and most of this came up. I kind of kicked off a massive effort to document all of our processes in Confluence when I started a few months ago because I kept asking everyone for docs on everything and nothing existed. I wrote the document on how to spin up your local test servers myself after flailing around to get it to work in my first week (and I also rewrote poo poo to use docker-compose to make it easier). I just have a sneaking suspicion QA was kind of slacking and trusting that the devs were submitting code that worked and not actually testing EVERY story that passed through their queue. I think they're spinning up checklists for testing this week to have more accountability and clarity, since devs finally spoke up and called them on it.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:46
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withoutclass posted:IME having points added to sprints occasionally is pretty normal but if it's regular or lotd of points it points to a problem in the process. Whether it's requirements not being well defined, requirements changing, or stories not being sized properly due to the aforementioned problems or unexpected code changes that need to be done to properly complete the story. Or last minute hotfix situations where things aren't pulled from the spring when bugs and things get added. Yeah I think all of that's normal. I have NEVER had a sprint where we finished everything. We're just not even coming close, because every day has been spent on emergency hotfixes for dumb poo poo QA missed. The only things getting done are little 1-pointer copy changes, zero features getting done. A normal sprint has plenty of added subtasks or bugs, but we usually hit at least 50% of the target. But I'll give my team credit, they do recognize all of this as a problem and are working to correct things (we just hired a new scrum master, and my team lead was fired a couple weeks ago...unsure if that was related, but kind of feels like it is). Today, at least, testing served its purpose....kind of. We caught a major bug caused by a one line tweak to a local settings file that should never be imported anywhere else (but is). Ironically, it would not have been a bug in production, since it would have overwritten the inherited problematic variable.
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Apr 19, 2018 01:31
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Update for mine....it jumped up another 12 points yesterday  I did fix everything that broke on our staging server, though, so theoretically the 25 or so points worth of poo poo stranded in there should be completed today.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:44
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I'm pretty sure an interview question I had to get my current job was deliberately presenting a scenario I would have no idea how to solve, then asking what I'd do to figure it out. They wanted to make sure I wouldn't waste a ton of time and knew when and where to find help.
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May 17, 2018 17:22
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HOLY poo poo! I'm a loving prophet. I changed jobs just over a year ago because I was severely underpaid. That company got bought out a few months later and I spent the day they announced it polishing my resume instead of doing work. They knew this for months, and people like my supervisor lined up new jobs to quit the day the deal happened. The rest of us were in the dark and in fact found out 4 days after the fact that our insurance was canceled; the new policy was shittier, more expensive, and most important for me did not cover domestic partners. They're owned by giant corporation Raycom Media who gives zero fucks. They promised all employees at the old company would be kept on, including those of us working remotely. gently caress them for the insurance nonsense in the first place, but that also sounded fishy to me. I lined up my current job in about 2 months and quit. Now today my inbox is blowing up from former coworkers: They came in today after the long weekend and were pulled into a meeting where they were told ALL PYTHON DEVELOPERS HAVE BEEN LAID OFF, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY! When I quit 8 months ago, I said in 6 months' time they would find an excuse to give us the boot, once the old company was fully absorbed and no longer existed at all on paper and/or any promises made to get the buyout deal to go through expired. I was off by 2 months, but otherwise my instincts were spot on. Such a shady company. But it feels so good to be able to rub this in the face of people like my father who were on my rear end saying I should just suck it up and tolerate a place treating me like poo poo because "you change jobs every other week" (never mind that I've had all of 4 programming jobs in my career, he had a job handed to him when he graduated and coasted and never even advanced for 30 years and thinks that's normal). Had I not seen this coming and taken control, I would be so hosed right now.
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May 29, 2018 18:51
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Shirec posted:I'm feeling really behind on my skillset atm, I really need to buckle down and learn more front/back end skills. I'm thinking I'm going to learn React and Python, but is there any other backend that I should consider first? Another vote in favor of Python. It's actually growing in use and really lends itself well to heavy data applications (Pandas will be your best friend), and as noted above you can just plug in the front end of your choice. Lately I've been learning Vue.js, which seems like a great entry-level framework. It's not quite as formidable as Angular, and I loathe React.
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Jun 11, 2018 18:07
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Pedestrian Xing posted:~~the Agile way~~ The only Dilbert that has ever accidentally made me laugh:  I found out yesterday we hired 38 new people so far in my department this year. Including myself, I can only think of about 6 new developers. Everyone else has titles like "scrum master" or various middle management whose only function appears to be to make scrum look like it's working better for its own sake. It feels a lot like if a hospital wanted to treat more patients but didn't have enough doctors, so they kept hiring more full-time wizards to perform various empty rituals to supposedly make the existing doctors just work faster. The more I experience it in an enterprise-level environment, the more I'm growing to despise the cult of scrum. Maybe it has a purpose in a startup pushing to get a proof of concept and score some funding, but not in a stable company that should be thinking more long-term and has no need to be at red alert every week for no reason. Keetron posted:To top it off, the PO basically told me to ignore all quality gateways to make some artificial deadline because after that we have another artificial deadline to make. The technical debt is growing, the interest we pay on it increases and there is no plan to ever pay it off. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
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Jun 13, 2018 17:01
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poemdexter posted:I don't understand what a full time scrum master can do all day. Pretty much. It came up in another development thread, but I just read the book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and a full time scrum master falls perfectly into the author's category of "taskmaster" (a middle management position that only exists to manufacture and assign work to underlings but doesn't actually produce anything that helps get that work done). I had a decent experience with agile at my last job, probably the only positive thing I can say about the company. We had senior developers as pseudo-managers, then one CTO overseeing them. There were no arbitrary deadlines (/sprints), there were no elaborate grooming ceremonies. The team leads discussed the backlog with the business side and decided priorities, ordered them accordingly, and we just grabbed whatever was next in the queue. We also had true CI instead of scheduled releases, one of my first big projects was actually setting up all the automated pipelines for it. At first I was wary, but I grew to love it. It's so much easier to pin down what caused a bug and roll back a single merge instead of having to pick apart huge release branch PRs or scramble to push out half-assed hotfixes.
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Jun 13, 2018 17:55
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Shirec posted:I've always been curious about remote work. My best friend has been remote 100% for three years and loves it, but I think it makes him afraid to ever look for a new job (he's also a finance analyst so less collaborative work besides the 100 million meetings he has a week). Also I like socializing so I think I'd miss that. Is it ever hard to put your heads together on issues or is it more that the office atmosphere needs to support/have tools for that type of mixed work environment? I've been doing it for about six years now, minus a brief return to a hellish cubicle environment for 3 months or so. My experience has been pretty varied. At my last long-term company, it was 100% remote, we didn't even have a hq office. They had numerous problems, but managing remote teams was not one of them. We had Slack open at all times, used google hangouts regularly, and of course nonstop emails and managing tickets and requests via github, but otherwise we all just enjoyed being able to go do our own thing. I think my favorite thing about remote is having that autonomy, and the prevailing attitude that works best is, "As long as you're meeting your deadlines and getting your poo poo done and we can get a hold of you with questions or emergencies, who cares when you're doing it or any of the specifics of time." Contrast this with the last job I quit, which was also fully remote (for development anyway, sales and stuff were at HQ in Miami): There were very strict "office hours" where you were expected to be at your desk and be able to hop into meetings with zero notice. There were arbitrarily imposed deadlines by business instead of being set by devs. There were non-loving-stop meetings about every minor thing. Every meme about sitting through an hour meeting that could have been a 2 line email hit home hard. Then they got bought out by a massive parent company which had never had remote employees. I took this as my cue to leave before I even saw how little interest they had in supporting us. There was very little effort to include us, and after a while they basically had all of the Python devs remaining remote and segregated into our own isolated team, while the non-Python devs were all given relocation packages to move to Atlanta to be at HQ. I had no interest in moving to Atlanta even if they offered, but that just confirmed my suspicions.....sure enough, almost 6 months to the day after the buyout, every Python dev came to work after a holiday weekend and their morning scrum was taken over by HR and it was announced that they were all terminated effective immediately. My first programming job ever was remote, and it was a poo poo show. It was a tiny startup, and the owner had no boundaries. He bought me an old-school pager (apparently those still exist) because I would turn off my phone ringer so I could sleep, because he would honest to god text me nonstop at all hours. I tried introducing a scale for "is this actually an emergency or not", but he just labeled everything, including requests for style tweaks, as the highest emergency priority. I go to competitive MTG events, and I had to carry my laptop with me and would be expected to forfeit my round and/or drop from the event if he called with an "emergency", so I stopped going to those altogether. I was actually secretly relieved when he replaced me without warning. I just woke up one day and was locked out of everything; turns out the non-compete his old lead dev signed expired a year to the day after his old contract ended (which finished with training me), so he rehired him that day and dumped me. I couldn't justify quitting no matter how miserable I was, so after I stabilized in a new job I was so glad for the way out of that mess. My current job, which I thankfully found 3 months before that "surprise" layoff, is with a company that's somewhat new to remote, but is doing a decent job at it. They had some offshore teams, but hadn't really done remote individuals in the states (the remote teams are all in single office locations, just not at HQ, in places like Belarus or India). Part of it is on you as the worker, though, to make it all happen. I treat working from home as the biggest job perk I could possibly get, and I work accordingly to make sure I never lose that. I make sure I communicate constantly almost to the point of being annoying about it, and I try to periodically check in with my team to make sure I'm not either overdoing it or ghosting them. It's important to get very clear expectations laid out, and to make sure you are doing what they want you to be doing. I've run into trouble where they change business priorities and don't bother to tell me that what I'm working on is no longer a priority. I do have to travel to HQ periodically for absolutely no reason (I have to go next week actually  ). It's dumb, they block any private devices on their wifi, so I am forced to use the mac they gave me against my will. Add to that not having my usual multi-monitor setup, etc. and my productivity plummets before you even factor in travel time and shifting time zones. Seems like a lot of money for very little benefit.Don't get me wrong, it IS nice to see real human beings now and then, but the frequency is way too high and I go there for no specific reasons, I just continue my normal work. The first remote job I mentioned just had us travel twice a year: once for our organization's annual conference (this was pointless, they had IT staffing registration booths when it would cost 1/10th of our salary + airfare + hotel + food to hire a few temps), and once for the annual staff retreat. The latter was a nice idea in theory, but in practice 90% of our company was crunchy vegans, so we literally stayed at like a quaker compound in the woods somewhere that only had air conditioning in the gender-segregated sleeping barracks that had all of one outlet to let you charge your phone (and no wifi). It was nice to see everyone and hang out outside of the context of doing work (drunken karaoke was great), but I feel like that's a time to splurge and reward your employees with nice things, not to stay in spartan barracks eating twigs and leaves for a week. Anyway, that's my incoherent rant about my experience. Overall it's amazing. When I lost the job with the boss with no boundaries, I worked for GFS for a few months and returning to a cubicle in a corporate environment was a major shock to my system. My girlfriend noted the contrast in my morale and energy level at the time; it was night and day. I probably work more hours remote, but I still have more time for personal projects and just relaxing because I'm not commuting, and I'm also not forcing myself to be up at the rear end-crack of dawn to conform to other people's ideas of what a sleep schedule is. I have narcolepsy, so this was a MAJOR factor; I'd come home from work at 4 (because of course they can't even do 9-5, it had to be 8-4) and just nap for 2 hours before I could function again. I had all of maybe 3 hours on weekdays to fit in the rest of my life, whereas today I'd say that's closer to 8. But in closing, I am obligated to mention the absolute best perk of remote: Pants.....specifically, not having to wear them. Also cats. It's such a nice way to recharge to walk away from a frustrating meeting and go play with our new kitten for a while and decompress.
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Jul 2, 2018 17:21
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Bongo Bill posted:I need a separate space for work and leisure or I don't get anything done, and a home office isn't separate enough. Remote is tough. I don't have the space and I work on my gaming rig so I have the processing power, multi-monitors, etc., BUT this is a super important concept called stimulus control. Since I can't physically relocate, I just alter my environment another way to clearly signal "I'm at work" vs. "I'm doing my own thing", specifically I have completely separate partitions I boot into for work or other with very different wallpapers, taskbar layouts, etc. When I "clock out", I reboot and select the other partition, put away anything else work related (some notebooks and stuff), and actually physically walk out of the room (sometimes the entire apartment, I'll go take a walk to check the mail or something) and come back so I can sort of pretend I'm "going home" after work. It seems silly, but it's really effective to have even the most superficial barrier around my work. That might not be enough for everyone, but it's something I highly recommend trying to anyone working at home.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:52
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I'm 100% self-taught as well, I hadn't considered that that might be a factor. Sitting in a cube is really unnatural to me and I can never feel comfortable, which leads to me wandering off task more.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:13
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I actually had some fun today helping to set up a new code challenge for interviews. It's nice being on the other side of one of those things for the first time.
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Jul 18, 2018 21:42
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Apparently a few tens of thousands of dollars of computer equipment was delivered to the lab today and no one seems to know who the gently caress ordered it. This should be fun to watch....
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Jul 31, 2018 17:50
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Depressingly accurate.
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Aug 23, 2018 15:17
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 There was an argument in retro today: Devs have had nothing to do for almost a week because of an abrupt change of priority that invalidated our project and there was nothing written up about the new one we're supposed to shift to (wasn't supposed to happen for months). One dev brought this up in retro saying, "Well, we should just grab some of the infinite bugs in the backlog or that we've noticed on our own. Or start on stuff for next sprint and get ahead of the game." There was major pushback because THE POINTS! THE POINTS WON'T BE ACCURATE! We won't "capture" that work that way! What I heard: "But guys, you can't just do WORK without me facilitating it....otherwise why am I here?!" Exactly  It made my realize how top-heavy we are.....we have FIVE layers of management: Team Lead, Feature Teams Manager, Scrum Masters/BAs, Engineering Manager, Technology Department Manager (/CTO). We're a bit shorthanded on devs, we were outnumbered by people whose entire job is justifying its existence (and QA sides with them, since it makes their jobs easier). It's just gotten to such a ridiculous point now.....we're literally blocking productivity for the sake of a process that is supposedly helping increase productivity? This is insane to me. Also, once again, arbitrary 2 week sprint deadlines being eliminated would take care of 90% of the problem here since we could just constantly move on to the next thing and keep moving. We're down to like 4 actual coding days in a 2 week sprint thanks to a growing "code freeze" period (QA demand). I've just given up, though. Whatever, gently caress it, you want to pay me to read or go take a nap, that's your choice I guess.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:30
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Sadly not really an option for me. I'm already the only remote dev (I don't count our overseas devs, who seem more like contractors to handle busy-work like copy changes and fixing minor CSS display bugs and poo poo), I can't just go rogue and stop showing up for meetings.....sorry, CEREMONIES, because Scrum isn't enough of a cult already.
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Aug 30, 2018 17:10
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Volmarias posted:Done correctly, it effectively buffers the developers from the management and business layers that slow everything down. Yeah this is the one thing that they do do well, or at least the BA on my team does (my other team I was shunted over to for 2 months was godawful and the BA didn't even know what was going on). My last job they did the exact opposite: There was no management layer, just a team lead to coordinate standups and poo poo, and it worked REALLY well.....except for the lack of insulation from business, leading to me having to communicate directly with product owners and even customers. Cue the usual bullshit that comes from a way-too-democratic design and planning process, and nonstop OMG EMERGENCY  requests for poo poo like minor copy changes or altering the color of a button.The biggest problem I have with the whole paradigm is that it's based on absolutely nothing. There is no research that says this is effective in any way, it's based on one dude's gut feelings from 20 years ago or something. It's entirely made of buzzwords and specialized lingo that is catnip for management types, but doesn't actually add any observable benefit. It can accidentally work, but most of the time it just gets in the way and spawns entire careers centered around managing imaginary nonsense. It seems most effective in a small start-up environment where your goal is just to produce something, ANYTHING, to get a proof of concept to attract investors. This artificial, constant, panic-mode mentality is inappropriate for an established company with a steady revenue stream.....if you can hire a dozen managers for ten devs, you don't need scrum. I've been slowly working on ideas for any kind of alternative that's based on something actually measurable that can be used as a real metric for team performance. My best concepts so far are things like number of hotfixes or rollbacks required, number of requests for changes required on PRs, and accuracy of time estimates.....all of which work far better in a continuous integration scenario rather than arbitrary 2 week sprints for no actual reason. Hell, this makes it easier to pick apart what breaks something upon release, rather than having to tease apart and try to revert a tiny piece of a monolithic release where none of the pieces actually need to all be tied together like that. Programming is a very fuzzy process, something I've had to explain at length to my gf who has been fascinated to watch this train wreck (she is doing a doctorate in Applied Behavior Analysis, so that's where all of this is coming from): It's not an easy process to break down into easily defined tasks, or to know exactly what's going to have to be done to fix a given bug or add a given feature. You could at least look at overall trends to gauge performance; if you're off on 2 or 3 stories in one release, that's normal. If your team is consistently under-(or over-)estimating on these deadlines every release, then that's a clear indication that something's amiss. Pay for performance (which would be the end goal) is such a hard concept to tie into such a field that is very hard to pin down, but I feel like at least picking out things that are actually observable and tied to measurable products would be a vast improvement over everyone trying to collectively agree on imaginary numbers. It's just a matter of figuring out what those actually are....and then convincing an entire industry to stop drinking the agile kool-aid, which will never happen. I'm trying to fight back in a low-key way, but it's going to take a while to change minds when you have an entire class of employee whose entire job is to keep this process in place who will literally be fighting you to save their own job. Side note: I actually love this job! It's by far the best position I've had (though admittedly that's a low bar to clear after the startup owner who expected me to be on call 24/7 for over a year straight, the nonprofit that underpaid me by almost 50% but I tolerated since the schedule let me go back to school, and the last place that sold us out to a megacorporation that cut my insurance and didn't tell me until 4 days later). I love my fellow devs, we work incredibly well together and have a ton of fun. My BA is actually amazing, she is SO loving fierce in protecting us from business demands and I love her for it ("If ANYONE tries to pull you off of this story to work on something else, message me, I will hunt them down and put and end to it."). It's just so frustrating to see so much inefficiency holding us back from kicking even more rear end, and I'm so sick of sitting through endless, pointless, tedious "ceremonies" that distract me from doing what I actually enjoy doing: writing code. Point of perspective: I have written zero lines of code since last Thursday. In four days I've spent upwards of 20 hours in meetings about this sudden shift to the new project (we're expanding into Canada, so the few actual dev meetings to brainstorm implementation of poo poo like currency conversions are actually necessary and interesting). Pie Colony posted:Why would the points not be accurate? Are estimates only made in big, slow meetings (bad) or only by the "scrum masters" (worse)? We have a once-a-week "grooming" meeting and it's clear no one but the scrum master has any investment, we all just want to get it over with so we can get back to what we're simultaneously being told has to be in before the ever-earlier code freeze (currently we release on Wednesday night, code freeze begins Friday). Something something work done outside of the sprint not being accurately captured bullshit bullshit nonsense? I have no idea. I am truly baffled by a dev going, "Hey, we can totally knock out these bugs," and being met with GUYS STOP DOING WORK! But yeah, like I said in my first post about this, I honestly stopped caring and fighting with them over it, it's just really frustrating to watch happen. If they want to pay me to go take a nap, I'm not really fighting all that hard to change it. I'm delivering my work and meeting my deadlines, they're happy with what I produce, so I call it good and just rage about this outside of work because I have an unhealthy obsession with efficiency and elegance (hasn't been said yet: my degrees are in physics, so this is a deep-rooted obsession for me). It truly, deeply bothers me to imagine just how many resources and man-hours are wasted nation-wide if you think about how many companies are incorrectly implementing already-flawed processes, and my brain doesn't stop itching until I find some way to fix a problem I find. e: Pie Colony posted:e: There's basically 2 use cases for points. The first is prioritization before work: "I have a capacity of 5 points per sprint, so I can't do both 3 point stories." The second is retrospection after work: "I typically do 5 points per sprint, but I spent 2 points worth of time being on-call/fixing critical bugs (so let's adjust our expectations for next sprint)". One company I was at briefly actually said a point is an actual hour of work. We'd make estimates, but we weren't held to them. You finish the story, you update the points to reflect the actual time worked, or we had two fields for estimate vs actual or something (it was a long time ago). There were no sprints, just CI, release poo poo as it gets approved and tested, then grab the next card in line, and the managers just managed the priority of things. By far the most efficient and easy-to-manage system I've ever been a part of. Everyone knew what they had to do and just did it. BaronVonVaderham fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Aug 30, 2018 |
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Aug 30, 2018 18:34
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:That sounds like Kanban. THAT was the word they used for it. I couldn't remember it for the life of me, thank you!
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Aug 30, 2018 19:59
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hailthefish posted:Regular blue-collar factory laborers fought and loving died for the 40 hour week and the 8 hour day. I went from being a teacher to being a programmer. What's a 40-hour work week? Seriously though, this is something I argue with conservative relatives constantly. Our country has been trying its hardest to undo a century of labor progress and do the exact opposite of every other developed nation on the planet. See also: Lack of mandatory vacation time, no requirements of family leave for a new baby (both for mother and father), how our insurance is tied to our jobs...... Don't even get me started on "at will" employment.
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Sep 26, 2018 17:48
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Keetron posted:I pretty much lied my way into my first coding job but can learn new stuff super fast so they never really found out. Fake it till you make it.  I lied my way into my first programming job. I had dicked around with C++ in high school, and then I had barely fumbled my way through writing some simulations and such in the course of my research in undergrad and grad school, but looking back I had no idea what I was doing. NO ONE should have ever hired me, but I lucked out having an eerily similar educational background and interests as the owner, so he gave me a chance I didn't deserve. In my case it was "I've been unemployed for 6 months and am already on food stamps and poo poo, if I don't land this position I have nothing left to sell to make rent....gently caress it, even if I get caught I'll get a couple paychecks to buy time for other apps to process." I get it, sometimes you're desperate enough to lie your way in over your head. The difference between me and that guy is I knew I lied my rear end off and didn't want to go back to being on food stamps (I got laid off as a math teacher before that, because Florida), so I worked my rear end off over my first year and learned my poo poo. I put in long hours to fumble my way through work projects if I struggled with them, and in what few off hours I had I got a bunch of books and watched tutorial videos. Since my degrees are in physics, I at least had the mathematical and analytical tools to pick things up quickly. I did and now I've moved up in the world over 5 years to a senior level dev role at a great company  .
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Nov 19, 2018 23:47
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Carbon dioxide posted:It's absolutely crazy that this kind of bullshit is necessary in your country. One of the biggest reasons I work so hard today: I never, ever want to lose working remote. Not only is it the greatest perk any job can have, but it makes the prospect of moving next year a lot less horrifying. Tying that into what I quoted above, we've been heavily researching immigration procedures for a few countries to gtfo before we go full on Handmaid's Tale over here. We're just waiting on my girlfriend to finish her PhD in the spring and we'll see where she gets offers, get married, and flee; I can just take my job with us. But it turns out both of our educations and job fields qualify us as the highest possible tier candidates for expedited entry almost anywhere. At minimum we're getting the hell out of Florida and fleeing to a blue state, but we're really leaning toward going whole hog and moving to Canada, Denmark, Germany, etc.
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Nov 20, 2018 17:20
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Volmarias posted:Your career has ground to a halt, find a job at a company where you'll have a chance to learn and grow This. I left my last job (I don't count the 7 months at my actual last job I had to leave because they sold to a competitor and hosed us big time) because my boss left and there was now an opening to lead the department (granted there are only like 4 of us, but still). The more senior developer than me explicitly said "I have zero interest in taking on more responsibility", so I said I was interested. I was asked to submit a formal application, then immediately told they were going to hire externally. They had also been promising "compensation analysis" was ongoing for almost a year. They wanted a "flat" organization, which is a good idea on paper, but the reality is generally a programmer with years of experience and education and specialized skills and knowledge is worth way more than someone in sales. This continued to drag on and we were being paid in promises, essentially. I loved that company. I was underpaid, but it was a non-profit whose mission I believed in and I worked remote with freedom to make my own schedule, they were really chill if I needed to take a random Friday off for an event, etc. I loved my coworkers. As much as I hated that they were all crunchy vegans so our annual retreat was at a Quaker compound that only served twigs and leaves for meals, they were good people. But I had to move on. If they're hiring externally, in such a small company I had zero chance to advance to the next logical step in my career....plus, yes, I would really resent having to work under someone paid more than me who was brought in from outside the company (makes no sense, if you want the change to be as minimally disruptive as possible, why not hire someone for the bottom rung developer role and move me up so you have someone who knows all of our projects and goals and such to interface with the other departments). If you haven't increased pay for IT by now after 2 years, I have no confidence you ever will. At a certain point, you just have to analyze it rationally and make the best move for your own well-being.
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Jan 26, 2019 19:33
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Double post but today marks exactly one year since I got on a plane to Nashville to spend my first week at this job at headquarters. I think the easiest way to sum things up is to note that my resume is still a year out of date.
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Jan 29, 2019 01:46
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Having similar QA woes with our massive overhaul of the discounts system. What originally started as an ask to make discounts only work in a single country, selected upon creation, turned into rewriting the entire system because it was so unbelievably stupidly written that it was not actually possible to do that (we had distinctions between two separate models, which we called "old discounts" and "new discounts", and also each area of the site and type of product checkout, depending on phase of treatment, did things a completely different way). It was actually faster to just rewrite everything and gut all usage than it was to wrestle with the existing crap. Anyway, it's finally done, and QA gets their mitts on it.... First, every bug was duplicated by default, because, since they were testing the original story use-cases (i.e. per-country discount functionality), anything that had a bug would get one for a US discount, one for using a Canadian discount. We eventually gave up trying to explain to them that this is literally the same bug and you just triggered it twice and it has absolutely nothing to do with country-specific work; in fact, they actually confirmed that feature was working just fine since they triggered the identical bug both ways! But then they ran into some overlap with tickets in progress on other teams who were working on language stuff (I loving warned them day 1 of the Canada push we had to provide French if we offered service in Quebec, I'd been through a Canadian internationalization push at a previous job, but did anyone loving listen? NOPE! Now we're doing double the work to go back and add that in). Cue nonstop "bugs" which are really "we were testing poo poo that literally has not been integrated yet because another goddamn team is working on that". I really wish we would stop contracting with a group in India to do overnight regression poo poo. I have great relationships with some of those guys, but the language barrier and just cultural differences in how they approach the work are incredibly difficult sometimes, it's impossible to get them to go beyond "I executed this test scenario and the precise outcome expected did not happen, therefore write 4 bug tickets and stop testing until that is fixed, even though no other test scenarios depend upon this functionality". It's been an ongoing battle that's really slowing us down when this is already behind because the discount system was so utterly hosed to begin with But on the positive side, my code has had only THREE ACTUAL BUGS! One was a minor flaw in logic for our retail kits (I called the wrong service method once), and two typos. I'm pretty goddamn proud of that, considering it's a few thousand lines of code worth of work slammed out as quickly as possible, and I ended up taking over some work at the last minute from two others on my team who were dragging their feet.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:59
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Gildiss posted:This brings up an issue though. How many loving times do we have to sever. Jesus Christ i'm so tired of updating my resume and sending it out every 1.5-2 years. This is the primary reason I'm really trying my hardest to get back to my original field (astrophysics) after I'm out of Florida, beyond wanting to work on something I actually care about. I had this same existential crisis when I realized it's considered normal and expected to move around every few years in the development world, and realizing that's what the rest of my natural life looks like gave me flashbacks to the opening cutscene from Stardew Valley. Current plan A is: 1) Girlfriend finishes PhD and gets a job in Baltimore and we gtfo of FL, 2) Get job with Space Telescope Science Institute at Hopkins who I interviewed with in 2011 and was told I didn't have enough programming experience yet, 3) Hope JWST doesn't explode on the launch pad, 4) Work on processing that thing's epic data stream for the next 25 years. Plans B-F are the same thing but in various other cities and not quite as epic or as sure a thing (I figure with STScI if I almost got the job with no experience 8 years ago, I should have no issue with my current resume).
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Mar 21, 2019 16:06
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Protocol7 posted:I like to vent about my job a lot. I still love it, even if my coworkers are dinguses. But that's a problem you'll encounter literally anywhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk But yeah, I never want to give up remote, even if sometimes it's a pain that you don't get noticed as much for what you do (dealing with everyone lining up to jerk off the new guy on my team for this latest huge project...that I did 2/3 of the work for ). It's so nice to not have to deal with people coming over to my desk and ignoring that I have headphones on, the universal sign for "gently caress off I'm concentrating", to just be able to take off for a while to run errands in the middle of the afternoon when poo poo isn't busy, etc.That said, I just wish I could work on something I cared about. This is not what I went to school for, it was a desperation move when I graduated into the worst job market imaginable, let alone with a degree in a field that had its funding slashed as a result. The upside is all this experience means I can probably make the transition back to at least doing development for scientific applications really easily once I get out of this god-forsaken state.
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Mar 21, 2019 20:34
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Rubellavator posted:Story points and velocity are dumb as gently caress.
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Jun 25, 2019 16:22
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Today I found out this existed and one just opened up a few miles from me c/o our community newspaper: https://www.codeninjas.com/ I still run the other way whenever I see "code ninja" on a job ad. Same goes for "guru" or "superhero".
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Jun 29, 2019 22:28
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EDIT: Wrong development thread.
BaronVonVaderham fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 15:23
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mweb posted:For anyone working remotely, do you ever reach a point where you just crave and need some kind of external validation about what you are doing?? Even if the answer to some issue maybe should be obvious you reach a point where you just need some kind of interaction to solidify it. This is part of why I'm leaving my current company (hopefully soon). I've worked remote exclusively since 2012, except for 2-3 months back in 2015 which reminded me I am just not built for sitting in a cubicle. It's amazing IF that's what works for you. A lot of people see that I work from home and how much money I make and pester me to find out how to learn to "do what you do". They're always surprised when I start by warning them that it isn't that glamorous and it is sometimes harder than working in an office because 1) You need to stay focused and motivated, 2) You need to have a support system in place to not ruin your normal life at home where you always think you're "at work" all the time, and 3) You need to make sure others at your company are seeing your productivity so they don't think you're slacking all the time. The key is #2, really. You need to not underestimate the pitfalls and plan things out. I have a separate SSD that contains a linux partition I use for work (I'm not going to use the lovely macbook they gave me when I have a behemoth desktop with 4 monitors and enough power that our test suite doesn't take 40 minutes to run). When I "go home" for the day, I reset my machine and boot into one of my other "home" partitions (either Linux for personal projects or Windows for gaming), which all have very different themes and wallpapers. I will also physically walk out of the room while this boots so there is a sensation of actually "leaving work". Stimulus control is powerful poo poo. My gf is about to finish her PhD in applied behavior analysis, so this stuff rubs off on me. That said, the company also needs to do their part to support remote work properly. At my current company that is not the case. It was, for my entire first year, but ever since we hired this new toxic department head, remotes are being left out of decisions and conversations constantly, forgotten on meeting invites (or they'll invite us but not bother to attach a Teams meeting to the event for us to join). The recognition for my work bottomed out around that same time, since this toxic boss has his golden boy who was on the same project as I was. Golden boy got all the credit despite my writing 80% of the thing (he even went in to "clean up" the epic branch and now his name is on every commit). The fact that I'm remote and he is the boss' lapdog means I am now invisible. I'm bailing for so many reasons, but their exclusion of remotes like this is a big factor. One of the big things I've been asking during interviews is about exactly this: How many of you work remotely full time? I worked at AASHE a few years back and I'd go back instantly if they paid even close to competitively. They were a 100% remote company, with a couple people based in Philadelphia and a token office space there for meeting with third parties, but otherwise we were all over the world! A company like that not only knows how to handle remote work, but everyone from the top down is committed to it since we're all in the same boat. I just submitted a code test for another place like that. They do remote learning systems (I didn't actually study CS, I come from academia and was a math teacher, so that's a mission I can totally get behind), and the company is 100% remote like AASHE was. That is the biggest point in any company's favor for me, the best indicator that I won't have to deal with a lot of the bullshit at my current job, not the least of which is constant travel to HQ for no reason; I have to leave again on Sunday for what I really hope is the last time, I loving hate Nashville at this point (food's great, but I don't like Farm Emo so there's nothing for me to do). PhantomOfTheCopier posted:I've felt old and cranky for... ever? I started as a college instructor and even students older than me were flippant, ungrounded, unstable messes. I had better personal finances than them, more control over my life and pursuit of happiness (not that these things weren't perfect, nor free from depression, but I had coping mechanisms). Aaaand my masters is in mathematical logic, so I guess some similarity to Aristotle is unavoidable. I went back to school in 2016 to finish my PhD at 30 when most of the incoming grad students are what....21? 22? I could not deal with them turning every assignment or project into a drama-fest. gently caress you guys, I was working full-time and had my dissertation research starting (most of them didn't even have advisors yet), and I still got my poo poo done on time without issue. I notice a lot of the same attitude among junior devs. I get it, I WAS them back when I was 21, I bitched about everything in undergrad I'm sure, but I guess with some perspective after working in this industry.......those homework assignments were nothing compared to some of the deadlines I've had to meet or all-nighters to fix fatal bugs. Plus, I was just grateful to be getting back to the field I love, so I actually enjoyed doing the work because it wasn't work to me, that spot was filled by my actual work. EDIT: Just saw what your degree was in. My masters is in astrophysics 
BaronVonVaderham fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 16:17
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vonnegutt posted:I saw a post on HackerNews about downsides of working remote, and one poster said they needed to go back to an office environment because they "didn't have a social life anymore". My dude, apparently you never did. Part of that is down to the individual company. I've interviewed a few places that made it very clear that they think remote employees are desirable because we're "always at work" since we work from home. In fact, my first position was garbage for this exact reason, I just put up with it since, in hindsight, NO ONE should have hired me with no actual experience or even knowing some basic poo poo (fake it until you make it applied there, and I worked my rear end off to not waste randomly getting my foot in the door). The owner of the company assumed we were "always on", so he'd call at all hours; at one point he got so frustrated that I turned my ringer off at night (he tried calling at 1am) that he bought me an old-school pager. I've actually found companies that explicitly mention "work-life balance" repeatedly are the ones who don't understand what that is and/or don't care and want to use remotes to get around an 8 hour day, whereas the ones who don't mention it just assume it's a given and are great. By far the best part of remote work is that flexibility. I usually roll in around 10:30, attend some meetings, write a little code, go knock off for lunch and running errands for 2-3 hours in the afternoon, come back and work some more, knock off to make dinner. It's nice to be able to just duck out for appointments or to hit the post office when it's empty (I'll never get why they stick with 9-5 hours when that's when everyone else is working and can't come in....at least here in the south). I'll also work some longer days to just take off a Friday to pop up to Universal for the day or go to a MTG event. I really don't see how this is miserable unless you actively make work your entire life.
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Jul 17, 2019 17:27
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Myself I hate working from home. I'm not set up for it and we have to use the work laptop. I'm not bothering with reconnecting keyboards and monitors, so it's not ergonomic. I have a desktop at work for a reason. (I'm more healthy at work, better/extant AC, I drink more water, take more frequent breaks, etc.). Yeah if I was forced to use this lovely mac I'd quit. They ask me all the time why I don't....it's not really feasible to swap my quad monitor setup and keyboard and junk constantly, so why would I limit myself to a laptop with one screen and 1/4 of the power? I miss when I was in high school and did computer repair for extra money. I had a cool set of big mechanical switches that let me connect the client's PC to everything my personal PC used (much easier back in the day when that was literally just keyboard, mouse, and one VGA monitor). That sort of thing doesn't seem realistic now with how many cables i have....tripling that is a bit much.
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Jul 17, 2019 23:08
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vonnegutt posted:I was like "skip w3schools...skip that...skip that...look for the MDN result". To be fair, w3schools is great for idiots like me who never bothered to learn CSS and are constantly googling the most basic poo poo when we can't get out of front end tickets. Just not for actual bugs.
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Jul 24, 2019 14:59
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