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

autoformat or die

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 23:59

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 06:09

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

PhantomOfTheCopier posted:

Oh no you too?

Yesterday (Wed) I watched a manager hop in a task and claim that, no, engaging a member of the Beijing team was not necessary to perform manual validation after a one-time scheduled script executes for an important customer tonight (Thu). Our Beijing team is generally engaged, engineers trade code reviews back and forth almost daily, and it will be 2pm their time (Fri) when the script runs.

I have no idea how the manager is planning to address this today (Thu) because there's no opportunity to plan ahead with Beijing beyond just dropping it in their lap. Meanwhile the script runs tonight at 11pm, the local team obviously won't be around, and the company is closed Friday for a three day weekend because they decided to celebrate Employee Appreciation Day this year.

I foresee a lengthy conversation with ggaanntt and calendar charts drawing little lines until they realize they have resources that can operate during standard business hours.

Ggaanntt sounds like a guy who's been making visual kei music since the '80s

# ¿ Feb 29, 2024 18:04

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

I've hit a point in my career (Staff+) where I can churn out a day's worth of work in about two hours of focus time, and people are actually very happy with that level of commitment to my big rock project since it means there's basically zero chance of overcommitment or slippage. You really don't want to go faster than your coworkers across the business have attention to spare you, either. You'll end up with a bunch of stuff that's nominally important but has no ability to gain traction whatsoever

The rest goes to generic developer advocacy stuff and randomly making the company smarter, and sure, I'm good with all my least productive work hours being undirected cultural contributions or popping up once per hour-long meeting with a recommendation that saves someone a few hours

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 13:47

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

Pollyanna posted:

Am I senior now????

The bad news is the good news: focusing here is how you move from staff to principal

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 20:25

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

Just catching up on the last few pages of this thread, and wow, there's a lot of people confusing their burnout coping strategies for general approaches to well-being, and you might want to reflect on why the two aren't different to you

# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 18:18

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

Most documentation is only useful if people read it, and companies like Atlassian make it very hard to understand how people are engaging with content on their platforms. Think about why, even though tracking views is one of the easiest and cheapest features they could possibly implement, it's in their best interest not to surface this information

# ¿ Apr 1, 2024 13:53

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

Sagacity posted:

Confluence has this feature though? So not sure why you're singling out Atlassian here.

You need to be on the plan where you pay double. So if you're on the standard plan, you need to commit to upgrading first before they'll show you how unused all your content actually is (and how little value your wiki is actually bringing you)

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Apr 1, 2024

# ¿ Apr 1, 2024 16:12

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

Lemma: only support-centric teams have documentation in their wikis that's both useful and necessary.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2024 18:45

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

xiw posted:

as a sysadmin i have access to the jira master admin account but i am not allowed to use it to give myself the perms, so instead i slack the head of engineering for every release setup, update, typo fix, and date update.

have you tried getting it right the first time and not making so many mistakes

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 15:04

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

I had this aha moment this year where I realized that to get to a certain level of leadership, you have to either be the least curious person imaginable or manage your curiosity by being an rear end in a top hat to people trying to bring you fascinating problems. You cannot afford to be in a meeting and hear something so deeply engaging and interesting that it occupies your headspace, turns your gears, and makes you tune out the soul-crushing, boring poo poo that's important to the operation of the business

CEO skills are like being a distance runner: conceptually, there is virtually nothing hard about the job; you put one leg in front of the other, a lot of times. But doing it half competently requires a level of persistence that I hope to never need or have

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Apr 18, 2024

# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 15:05

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

PhantomOfTheCopier posted:

Our engineering VP goes on sabbatical soon, but as yet the team leads are still in the stone age. The new manager gets that workload and was very clear that the teams are answerable for fixing broken processes, lack of clear project goals, deadlines, estimates, it's on the teams to make something work. Engineers on one team took the initiative, used this chance to share ideas about what to improve in the next few months.

Yesterday the lead told one of the 5yr engineers on the team that they had to change how they reviewed code. Production libraries, one off simple scripts, prototypes,... after four weeks of being told to focus on what matters, the highest priority for the team: Code style according to a manual checklist that the lead doesn't even follow.

I asked the engineer if they agreed that was the highest priority. Naup. Enough is enough. Lead won't listen to or engage engineers on the team, doesn't trust them, give them space to grow, doesn't even seem to know role responsibilities in the org.

I'm not sure if this is just ranting or looking for advice, but here's my thoughts:

a) Why is one person, being asked to make lightweight and modest changes to their operating process, a problem that demands understanding of prioritization?
b) Why does any person in your org, lead or otherwise, need to behave perfectly and avoid being seen as a hypocrite in order to make or suggest improvements?

I ask my kid all the time to clean up her plate when she leaves the table, sometimes while my own plate is still at the table. This is sometimes frustrating to her, but there shouldn't be a situation where the first person to do the wrong thing (for some person's definition of "the wrong thing") becomes accountable for taking care of it for every person that follows. You clean up your place now because you're still where the mess is, and that's how we do it here. I'll come right back and do mine. Mea culpa.

Honestly, it comes across that the problem is that you, your coworker, and potentially other folks don't like working with this person. That's okay. But focus there and have the conversations about that, not about some made-up prioritization reason.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Apr 19, 2024

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 15:53

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

Most people don't quite grasp the gravity of the situation where product is bottlenecked so badly that engineering teams are asking, "What do I do next?"

Healthy teams quite often have backlogs that are months long and not nearly enough time to do all the work they need to ship high-quality software. Teams having to stop work because of missing requirements means that product has been dysfunctional at keeping the pipeline full of work for at least several months.

# ¿ May 1, 2024 17:41

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

abraham linksys posted:

ive only ever worked places where product managers are literally just Tom from office space. itd be cool to meet one who's good at their job someday

My org has, for a long time, had one extremely good product manager and a bunch of other PMs who stare at him while he singlehandedly absorbs every product

# ¿ May 2, 2024 01:39

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

Hughlander posted:

We switched to cloud confluence in the last year, and recently it got the AI learning turned on...

Until someone noticed that it doesn't respect access restrictions and will gleefully provide answers / snippets of content you're not legally allowed to see.

That was a fun 4-6 hours.

If you had PHI in there (Atlassian offers and signs BAAs), how would you even determine if there's been a reportable breach?

# ¿ May 5, 2024 18:48

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 06:09

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

We're in a Reagan 2: Electric Boogaloo era of deregulation where the regulations exist on paper but everyone basically just ignores them because every politician wants to see econometric go up. I've interviewed with a number of health tech startups over the past few years, and you'd be stunned what companies are getting away with even with HITRUST, ISO, etc. auditors coming around every few months. Having real-world experience in one of these compliance areas is something that will actually make new companies not hire you, because they will absolutely not invest in it, and they will lose plausible deniability when something happens. The auditors are slowly doing their jobs in a more and more lax way because there's huge financial incentives to be invited back for the next audit.

HIPAA in its current form offers the possibility of jail time if there's another Jussie Smollett situation where hospital employees are literally selling access to health records for profit. For most companies that are garden-variety negligent, breaches don't affect stock performance and the penalties are never costly enough to really impact operations. The fines are just a cost of doing business, like how NYC contractors' estimates pad for anticipated parking tickets. From a CFO perspective, the best way to manage the financial risk is to move fast and grow grow grow, because if you don't, someone else who will is going to monopolize the market and eat you.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 14:02 on May 6, 2024

# ¿ May 6, 2024 13:51

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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