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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raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

a foolish pianist posted:

Yeah, the only times I've had to force anything, I'd hosed something up badly.

They're necessary if you ever do any rebasing.

Phobeste posted:

Why not just make another branch and clean that up locally before pushing it....

And what, open a new PR? That's way more annoying and confusing than just blowing away a private branch history.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 04:53

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# ¿ Jun 1, 2024 14:35

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

revmoo posted:

Rebasing is retarded. Force pushing is retarded. Git-flow is retarded.

You already have compressed history for added features, it's called a branch.

I've been using Git for the better part of a decade both in teams large and small, and all I've EVER seen the need (or benefit) for, is basic branching, committing, and merging. As a plus, you can onboard people by saying "here's our repo, make feature branches, merge them, go home at 5. Use PR's if you want.

If I added up all the time wasted by autistic engineers arguing about the proper Git process across all the companies I've worked at, it would far outweigh any sort of benefit that complex Git workflows might confer.

It's like watching the "making of" of a nightmare coworker/manager story :allears:

# ¿ Apr 17, 2017 18:49

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Mniot posted:

Kanban is its own methodology, not just Scrum with less restrictions. You're probably just Doing Agile Wrong, like most companies.

Under Kanban a developer has one (or maybe two or three) name-cards, and you can't assign work to a developer unless they have an empty name-card. If PM and QA are also using Kanban, they'd also have name-cards and you can't take a task out of your card until you're able to hand it off to a QA with an empty card. So the emphasis is on completing individual tasks rapidly and successfully at the expense of overall speed.

So if the QA queue is full, do I temporarily become QA, or just spin around in my chair until it frees up? Genuine question.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2017 17:19

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

leper khan posted:

There are some people I work with that regularly voice the opinion that they can't understand working on programming projects on nights or weekends. It's really sad to me because they very clearly don't like programming (one has even said literally that), but they're basically stuck doing it because it pays relatively well.

Most of the people I knew that actually enjoy it recently left, and it's making me think.

I spent a few years working with very small teams; 1-4 engineers at the company. Basically everyone loved programming if not the work they were doing on hours. It's quite surprising how many people working in larger orgs (~150 people here) just hate their career. How do they live with themselves?

I enjoy programming a great deal but am also a little confused by people who spend the day coding and then come home and spend their evening doing more coding.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 13:48

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

lifg posted:

Another great reason to interview at one of the giants is the confidence boost. You'll walk into every other interview knowing that you've faced the hardest and didn't crumple.

I dunno, knowing that I was too dumb to work at either Google or Facebook didn't exactly do wonders for my confidence.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2017 18:36

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Google, after rejecting me nine months ago, gave me a recruitment call today. I understand them being open to re-applications, but I didn't realize they'd actually come after you.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 03:39

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

rt4 posted:

This sounds completely unfun even without involving weird workplace poo poo

If you and your friends are of a particular mindset the good ones are a blast.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 02:15

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

And if you rename a parameter you might have to change the signature, and IIRC Pollyanna works in a language without static typing, so :allears:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 17:25

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Plorkyeran posted:

Most companies with 1099 employees are breaking the law. The IRS is very inconsistent about enforcing it; they cracked down on some companies a while back (10-15 years now?) and then haven't done much since.

A topical PSA: if you feel you're being 1099ed in error, you can file an SS-8 with the IRS to complain about it, and in my case, something actually came of it!

# ¿ Jul 18, 2017 12:24

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Volguus posted:

The rest is history now.

I'm not sure what lessons we're supposed to draw from the story, given that the history is Microsoft riding Windows to become one of the most successful companies ever created.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2017 13:56

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

MisterZimbu posted:

I'm not smart enough to figure out how to handle time/dates and handle all the conversions from/to UTC/DateTimeOffset from the browser to moment to knockout to newtonsoft json to webapi to dapper to sql and back.

Whoever invented time is an rear end in a top hat

It's not you, all the tooling is bullshit. None of the layers make it easy to just do the right thing.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2017 19:37

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

ratbert90 posted:

99% of the time, gotos are bad.

Faking exception handling in C is most of that 1% though.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2017 22:56

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Yeah why are you even on your work slack while on vacation.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2017 13:11

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

AskYourself posted:

What C# 7.0 bring is C# 7 Non-nullable reference types. IMHO it can be used real well to protect your own coder against your code base and to design more robust and standardised API/Framework/Librairies.

I have some bad news for you about which features actually ended up in C# 7.

redleader posted:

Jesus Christ. I assume you're looking for a new job?

That "technique" is absurd enough that it almost loops back around to being impressive!

# ¿ Oct 14, 2017 02:31

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

So, uh, what�s the point of Jira Portfolio? Because it feels like a convenient way to ossify any vaguely agile process. Our BA got ahold of it and now we can�t add tickets to the backlog without him whining about his timelines four months in the future getting messed up.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2017 18:12

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

lifg posted:

I spent so long in college learning about time v space trade-offs in programming, but software development is all about development speed v correctness of new features. This little fact is something that didn�t really sink in until just recently when I read the Google SRE book.

Do other professions have this weird chasm between school and work? Is this like how lawyers (according to My Cousin Vinny) learn theory in school, and expect their firms to train them in practice?

Medicine? Especially if you�re an NP.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 22:14

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Portland Sucks posted:

I just looked this up and had no idea this exists which brought me to a larger question.

How do you navigate the process of getting familiar with and using more of the constructs in languages like C# that just seem to be endlessly long? I'm pretty fresh out of my undergrad, I'm the only developer in my shop (I work at a manufacturing company), and the only tutorials I can find on .NET seem to just cover basic OOP principals. Sometimes it feels like all of the "best practices" everyone is aware of online are trade secrets handed down orally from person to person. Where's all the good info hiding?

Unironically: Follow the .NET thread here on the forums. I started my career in a very similar situation to yours (only .NET guy on a team) and did it for seven years with that thread as my only entry point into the ecosystem. I now have a �real job� on a team full of actual developers, and after a year of work my official review had a lot of �good at .NET� on it, so something worked. Make sure you follow up on new stuff you learn about there - google new language constructs and versions and whatever.

(Unfortunately, the thread�s educational utility is less now that one of the regulars who used to be on the C# design team quit it, but it�s still good.)

But no matter what, growing as a dev is hard without peer review. I�d say the desire to do it at all is a good sign, though.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 17:39

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Pixelboy posted:

Why on earth isn't your build system running the same tooling?

Should we move to the Coding Horror thread?

We have one of those - on just one of our build boxes, the metrics inspector (not the compiler itself!) doesn't know C# 7. Since "uh just rerun it on a good box" is an effective workaround and nobody wants to spend time digging around on something this stupid it's just lingered for months now.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2017 20:12

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

KoRMaK posted:

Whatever, I'll file the taxes. I'm allowed to make money.

It�s not a tax issue, it�s that any large transaction looks identical to money laundering, and you�re almost assuredly not worth that trouble to your bank.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2017 21:39

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Xarn posted:

For content, this list of interviewee questions from the 'POS is good:

---edit---
Note that it is primarily applicable to larger companies, ie as far as I know we don't have official values and the unofficial ones are something like "make $$$ while doing interesting research", but we are ~5 academics who are trying to move some of our research into real world

The values question is a weird one for a lot of companies, I think. My company�s �value� is �turn money into more money� but that has very little impact on how much I enjoy my day-to-day job.

Portland Sucks posted:

You've got to be really discerning asking an individual about how much time they take off or what their work life balance is. I wouldn't suggest asking this without also asking about the companies, or better the department that you will be working in looks like on average.

A good variant is �what�s the coolest thing someone on the team did with PTO.�

# ¿ Jan 18, 2018 20:49

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Ape Fist posted:

I start in an hour and I'm basically making GBS threads myself.

Sounds like you�re already fitting right in! :v:

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 14:42

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Anyone here have any YouTrack experience? I�m trying to figure out simply how to reorder a backlog in a way the shows up for other users. Googling has suggested that there are some gotchas but I�m unable to avoid them all. I can drag issues around, but it�s only for me, not other users.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2018 14:07

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

fantastic in plastic posted:

Scabs As A Service

Somewhere in the Mission a �serial entrepreneur� just got a boner.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 22:05

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

When you finally quit that horror show this thread is going to be glorious.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2018 19:59

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

You can definitely live in NYC on $75k, especially if you�re willing to put up with roommates and an hour-long commute to downtown and not saving much. I�m sure you can live better in Houston for that money, but $75k isn�t poverty-level in NYC.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2018 21:52

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

It's really something how the "advice" Shirec's boss gives is pretty much exactly 180 degrees wrong. Some people don't know what they're doing and are just kind of aimless and incompetent, but it seems like this guy is able to do the exact opposite of good management at every possible turn.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 03:57

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Xerophyte posted:

Also, if you're not living in one of the weird outlier countries with at-will employment then your employer has to both give some number of months of warning (3-6 back home, typically) plus provide a reason for your dismissal. It's not like they can just summarily fire you, who would agree to that contract?

But gosh, don�t you want to be able to quit at a moment�s notice without reason? Fair�s fair! :pseudo:

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 23:48

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Messyass posted:

For a competent software dev in a western country it sure as hell is.

There are a variety of crises that can make looking for a job on no notice a bad idea, especially in Freedomland where no job = no health insurance (or at the very least a shitload more money and bureaucracy to keep it).

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 11:20

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Taffer posted:

Probably sound like a broken record at this point but thanks again ya'll. The support has made me feel a lot happier and confident with my decision. I'm gonna mostly take it easy for a couple days to relax then start hitting the job search hard.

I believe that :yotj:

is technically the smiley for finding a new job but gently caress it, it feels pretty appropriate here.

:yotj:

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 03:36

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

I just work until I start making �ok it�s time to go home� mistakes. Sometimes it�s 7, sometimes it�s 4, usually it�s around 5:15.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2018 01:03

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

There are few things more annoying than a test that starts out green, because when I see that I know I'm about to waste a couple hours on some bullshit.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2018 15:39

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Shirec posted:

Question for y�all. I�m looking to develop better coding habits and also find a way to distinguish myself from the pack while also helping others (easy right?). There�s been a lot of talk about how poorly my company�s code is documented and understood because the code base is so large.

I figured one thing I could do to at least help a little is start putting way more comments in to explain the little bits I�ve touched so far (I�ve got one bigger PR in the works at the moment). Right now the code base is very hit or miss with it.

Or is this a giant mistake? If not, any preferred type of comments or styles?

Definitely run this past someone more senior. If one of our juniors started doing this we'd ask them why they were writing code that needed commenting.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2018 00:13

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

JawnV6 posted:

Okay, so you�ve got an argument against all stocks, not specifically diversifying from an employer.

Basically the odds seem ridiculously tilted towards your individual employment ending apart from a catastrophic moment for the stock. If it�s a big enough lay-off the stock is likely to bounce some. I�m sure there is someone that has actually seen this scenario play out, but I can�t think of any well known examples from this decade.

What about this: a single-name pick isn't inherently wiser just because it's with the company that employs you, right? If you really want to determine whether holding has historically been a good idea, you should examine the opportunity cost of it in each case, not just whether the stock itself went up or down.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2018 20:54

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Volguus posted:

Before you ask the manager, play with the technology at home, see how you like it. Make a few personal projects.

Alternatively: don�t do this, do the exploratory stuff on company time instead of training yourself for free in your spare time. If the company will benefit, the company should be investing.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 17:45

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

Also, bugs sitting unnoticed in production for long periods of time might turn out to be features, depending on the specific case.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2019 22:31

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

My Rhythmic Crotch posted:

our users will only use something if it slices, dices, and makes toast. They give no fucks about agile, release cadence, stories, etc. They want a 100.0% functional thing or it won't get used.

Oh hey, do we work together?

See specifically:
Users: �Ingest a shitload of data and present it to us�
Dev: �Here�s some of the data, is it right so far?�
Users: �We�re not going to look at an incomplete data set.�
~months pass~
Dev: �Here�s all the data�
Users: �Some of this is wrong, why did you do this wrong?�

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 13:47

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

We have some high level product manager-ish guy (I've been so far unable to determine what his job actually is) who literally rolls his eyes when developers ask for use cases. He thinks we're trying to dodge work or something. Which I guess we are, in the sense that we don't want to spend time and effor to build the wrong thing, but I guess I didn't pay enough attention in my mind-reading class in college.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 17:48

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

That reminds me of the time I told the BA that we wanted a few days in the plan to try out a new testing framework and he totally seriously said �Why don�t you just not write bugs?�

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 14:04

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

PederP posted:

Why is your BA responsible for planning development work?

Because my company is just that dysfunctional. "Product management" is the thing that developers whine about when they're trying to avoid doing work, apparently. But since it actually does have to get done, BAs get stuck with it because otherwise users would have to actually talk to..ugh...IT. And since they're not hired to be PMs and they're not valued as PMs, turns out they're poo poo at it!

a foolish pianist posted:

Are you sure this was serious? It's a fairly common joke, at least around my office.

100%, I've known this guy for a while. He was genuinely confused.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 20:05

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# ¿ Jun 1, 2024 14:35

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

PederP posted:

Yeah, absolutely. I have known a few BAs who turned out to be excellent PMs, so it's not an impossible transition to make. But I think it's crazy to combine the roles. I find it odd that your users don't want to interact with developers - I've always found that when developers are targeting users internal to the organization, the users will tend towards trying to circumvent project and organizational structures, directly asking developers for bug fixes, design changes, features, support, etc. Thus necessating that the BA, PM and/or product owner step in and filter/limit/prioritize the communication and wishlisting.

It's sad how many companies have absolutely terrible organizational integration and management of in-house software development. Once management and/or other organizational units lose trust in the developers, it's often a matter of time before internal development is shut down - instead being outsourced/contracted to an external partner. I digress, but I am appalled by how many executives think that such a move is good at "reducing complexity", "focusing on our core business" and similar mantras. Many modern companies and institutions have such intrinsic dependencies on their data, software and/or IT infrastructure, that it's completely insane to try and externalize it.

That ended up more of a rant than intended, but your mention of dysfunctional relations between IT and the rest of the business touched a nerve. So much time, money and effort is spent on process and technology - when there are often far bigger organizational and/or cultural problems poisoning the well and resulting in very dangerous strategic decisions.

We kind of have the opposite problem. The in-house development teams are in the same organization as the people who replace keyboards, and the business users don't really think of us as different groups of people. "My monitor is broken" and "I have no automated way to perform [business task X]" are considered variants of the same problem, and us asking them how they want software to work is received as well as someone in tech support asking what exactly is wrong with a busted monitor would be. A spec will consist entirely of something like "Write an application to parse these files" and any attempt to get color on why is like pulling teeth. When the resulting application doesn't do what they want (as is inevitable), they blame us for loving up. The guy hired as a project manager literally rolls his eyes whenever anyone says the words "use case." It's like they think we're a machine that you put quarters in and get software out, and if they're putting their quarters in and aren't happy with the result, then the machine must be defective somehow.

Anyway I'm expecting an offer for a new gig this week :yotj:

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 00:00

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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