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Pollyanna posted:I was told that was more or less what the project managers expected in term of hours logging. Your project managers are idiots. Take this as a chance to learn how to better deal with idiots, maybe. I could see if there were big problems with productivity they might want you to account for everything, but still, assuming 8 actually productive hours on tasks is dumb. When do meetings happen? Are meetings stories in your sprints? How would that even work? Is taking a bathroom break a story? "As a human, I need to poop so that I can continue to live." My previous employer assumed something like 4-6 hours/day of "heads down" time (be that coding, creating diagrams, researching new tools) with the rest being eaten up by random poo poo like meetings, people bugging you for stuff, pooping, etc. The estimate of "heads down" time would change based on the level - junior devs were expected to be closer to 6 hours, senior were considered lucky if they got 4. metztli fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Mar 9, 2016 |
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Mar 9, 2016 14:16
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It's not how I would do it at all, but I've given up on fighting it - I can't help them change their behavior by myself, especially since the company is a glacier of a dinosaur w/r/t project management policy. They have to be the ones to change, and they won't change within the decade.
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Stinky_Pete posted:You need to sign up for a lot of different job search sites, with your resume, and a recruiter will find you eventually. Simply exist on linkedin, have anything related to tech in your profile, and they will be in constant contact.
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Mar 31, 2016 11:31
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Our code review process is anyone/everyone is encouraged to check out and comment on a pull request and it doesn't get merged until at least 2 people sign off on it. Some approvals are worth more than others, of course, but it tends to work pretty well. If your code reviews are at all like meetings, you're doing something terribly wrong.
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Jun 3, 2016 13:28
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FamDav posted:IMO I think q4 freeze is rude and unnecessary in 2016 but I do understand it as it's hard to incentivize having sufficient preparation for q4 such that it's no big thing. For businesses with exceptional volume and potentially huge consequences at this time of year, a freeze makes perfect sense. We want to minimize the chances for something to go wrong in production, and no feature we might release is worth the potential headache. We don't release anything but critical hotfixes until after the peak. It's been pretty nice getting to burn off some tech debt these last few weeks, too.
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Nov 24, 2016 11:32
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Today two things that aren't particularly bad happened back to back that caused me to start sending out feelers for a new gig (and I've already got some nibbles, hooray): 1) There was a meeting during which 8 people spent an hour deciding on whether or not an image in an email that maybe .5% of a quarter of our userbase ever even opens should be increased in size by, I poo poo you not, 2%. People in this meeting had opinions other than "who gives a gently caress?" 2) A DBA asked everyone in the company to please stop doing anything more complex than a simple select in Entity Framework because, even though the queries being generated by EF were still quite performant, they "looked weird." We told him to stop looking at them, then, and only pay attention to them if they are not performing well. He said that is not a solution because he will know they are there. The most banal less-than-good elements of my job got to me, while working on a horrible, bloated, terribly constructed legacy codebase wherein daily I have to delve into the minutia of technology that's been replaced 2x over in the last 10 years wasn't enough to do it. Working with what is arguably the least capable product management team ever who are literally incapable of coming up with an interesting idea nor a coherent way to state it wasn't enough to do it. Working in an open office with acoustics so bad they're probably a war crime, with 150 VERY LOUD PEOPLE WHO NEVER LEARNED ABOUT INDOOR VOICES AND REALLY loving LOVE TO TALK ALL DAY and who will constantly try to get your attention about irrelevant poo poo when you've got your headphones on and are trying to get into the zone wasn't enough to do it. Nope, it was a loopy DBA saying something dumb, and a meeting about a loving 5 pixel increase in image size in an email that almost no one ever looks at that finally made me break. Plus side, I'm in no rush, and I've never had a problem with interviews. Minus side, uuuuuuugh, new job at some point in the near future.
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Jul 11, 2017 03:12
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Vulture Culture posted:The most brilliant web developer I ever worked with wasn't a great coder, and he wasn't a great designer. But when he was designing for stakeholders who always find something to bikeshed in a meeting, he would turn in designs that purposely had something visibly off by just a tiny bit. People would point it out in the meeting, agree that it should change, and move on to more pressing issues. He did this time after time after time and they kept buying it hook, line, and sinker. I wish this were that. It wasn't so much that anyone felt they NEEDED to change something, it's just that someone pulled up that particular email in order to see what language we used about something, someone else noticed that the image looked pled a tiny bit weird on the gigantic, super lovely flatscreen in the room, and asked if we could tweak it. Then someone else got involved saying that if we tweak it what about people who use different devices to see it and well let's just limit any changes to something that couldn't cause a problem and oh we don't really own that email anyway but let's bring a few options to the person who does so they can make a decision and really should it just be adding some padding or resizing it a little and oh god loving kill me. Iverron posted:At least Entity Framework and all other ORMs including Dapper haven't been labeled as "not performant" by one guy and parroted by the rest. I really need to vet this sort of thing out more in interviews in the future because I don't know that I can deal with this. I wish we had only that guy. Instead we had the guy who decided that rolling our own ORM was better than LINQ to SQL because "who knows what it's actually doing" and created this horrific pile of poo poo that uses unparameterized in-line SQL and stored procedures to do a 10th of what you can do with LINQ to SQL in only 5x the time, but at least now we kind of can sort of figure out what is happening to our data during CRUD operations by looking at code instead of the code being hidden! As of last year, all new data access stuff is required to use EF, mainly because our bespoke shitshow of an ORM often caused things like crashes because someone forgot to version one of the sprocs that abortion uses. 90% of our code base still uses it though. On the plus side, the people I work directly with are pretty nice and often bring in treats to share, so, uh, I got that going for me.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:05
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Do you prefer OSX over Windows? If so, go with MBP. Are you working with .Net? If so, whatever you get, install Windows on it. Will you be doing much in the way of travel/outside the home or office or just leaving the machine on your desk at home/office? If traveling, go with MBP; the build quality, durability and MagSafe are essential, IMO. Otherwise, go with whichever one looks prettier to you.
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Jul 12, 2017 23:49
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I loved my old open office because it was filled with adults who understood how to have a conversation with the person standing next to them without yelling at the top of their lungs, and who were conscientious about having an impact on other people. I hate the open office at my current place because there are about 5 dudes, out of over 100 who work in it, who never seem to have mastered the idea of an indoor voice or concern for other people. These guys literally yell when speaking, even to someone standing right next to them, so loud that you can hear it clearly one floor down. Talking to them doesn't help - they will pout and go quiet for a minute or two but then immediately ramp back up. It took suggesting we would resign over it, but eventually myself and a number of others were moved into a quieter space and things have been substantially better.
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Jul 22, 2017 22:03
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hailthefish posted:Pretty sure that qualifies as a justifiable homicide in any reasonable jurisdiction. At least a tazing. loving animals.
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Jul 23, 2017 01:08
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Keetron posted:My experience is that people take headphones as a sign that you cannot hear and will touch you shoulder, arm or hand or wavo in your face. In no place yet will I be left alone. The people I am complaining about speak so loudly that you can hear them clearly through isolating headphones with music cranked. And they will touch you. That is not good.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:31
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Doom Mathematic posted:I agree wholeheartedly with this. I had someone new at work asking the whole department, "What are good tutorials for <framework we use>?" and my answer was "Let's just work together for an afternoon". loving yes, this. Have the person being taught drive, tell them what to type and why, and they will learn so drat fast. Worst is when the person teaching drives and it's like watching someone do magic, in the worst way.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:23
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geeves posted:I can't bring myself to do this at the office. Usually when I'm at the point that I need to do this, I just message someone and ask to bounce ideas off of them. They know me well enough it will take about 5 seconds before I talk myself into the answer. It's usually just the process of organizing my thought train for someone else and stepping away from my desk that reveals the answer. Force yourself to have a conversation with an object, or if you can't do that, write something to yourself, or even just go somewhere and pretend to have a conversation on the phone. Messaging someone else, even if you figure it out in 5 seconds or just by walking away, still disrupts the flow of other people unnecessarily, which is why rubber duck debugging is so great.
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Jul 27, 2017 11:23
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Dirty Frank posted:I write detailed emails to one colleague whose opinion I respect and end up only sending < 20% of them because just writing it all out often lets me see the issue. And I feel like an email is easier for him to ignore until he's ready than IM or whatever, also I can search it later if it actually turns out to be something complex and ongoing. Not a bad idea - that way you still have it written out if you need it. Does anyone else find that actually verbalizing helps you differently than writing? I find verbalizing works best for me and writing it out is less successful at triggering the aha moment. Conversely, having to write out something that I already understand and need to explain to someone else is vastly easier for me than verbalizing it.
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Jul 27, 2017 22:58
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necrobobsledder posted:I've been team lead before and because I got tired of being asked the same questions repeatedly I spent more time writing docs than coding so that I could delegate as much of my decision-making to others My habit has always been to document and make available things when they are explained to me, and now that I'm in a position to be explaining things to other people, I have them document what I'm telling them and put it in confluence with good indexing. If someone else needs more info than what is in confluence, they update the page, and so on. Eventually we get reasonable documentation and team leads don't have to keep explaining the same things over and over.
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Aug 11, 2017 12:41
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Use whatever makes the code more readable and maintainable. If using guard clauses with early returns makes the code more readable and maintainable, do that. If using single return makes the code more readable and maintainable, do that. If your coding standards are such that they don't allow for the judicious breaking of the rules in service of readability and maintainability, they are bad standards. If your code reviews don't catch violations of the standards that are obviously unnecessary, they are bad code reviews. Personally, I tend to like guard clauses and early returns, but that's mostly because usually it's pretty easy to read and the time spent looking for a more readable single return option isn't going to be so much cleaner that it justifies the extra time. I'm lazy.
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Aug 21, 2017 23:58
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At one gig we had a manlet of a product manager like that - we would be in sprint planning, or retro, or daily stand, and suddenly he’d get an idea for something and completely derail the meeting. If you called him out on this not being the appropriate time, he would accuse you of being lazy and uncreative and send an email to your boss about your attitude. He was a massive kiss rear end - his lips were locked tightly to the rear end of our director of product, and she liked having a toady, so she would go to bat for him. I think he’s still there, despite being worse than worthless. I escaped by becoming lead on a new team in a remote office with a different and awesome PM (then leaving a year later after they fired that awesome PM because the director of product didn’t like him) but the remaining people on my old team basically had to threaten to quit rather than work for the manlet. The only person who liked being on his team was the designer because she was freelance and his stupid loving details during every meeting were almost doubling her billable hours.
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Jan 16, 2018 15:24
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ratbert90 posted:Also ask the interviewer how their work life balance is. I would ask them for examples of how the company promotes work life balance and how they’ve taken advantage of it themselves. Basically take that approach to everything important to you. “Can you give me specific examples of foo? How have you personally experienced foo while at bar co?” A nice side benefit of that approach is that the interviewers tend to see you as more personable and engaged, which translates into liking you, and can influence an offer. metztli fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 00:25
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Questions are good. The willingness of people on a dev team to ask questions, listen to and learn from the answers, is the single biggest productivity boost I can think of for a team. You get more work done because you go down fewer blind alleys. People who don't ask questions for fear of seeming dumb need to be broken of that habit. People who try to make other people feel bad for asking questions need to be broken of that habit or let go if they can't get over it. I follow a 5/5/5 rule for questions. Spend 5 minutes on the problem and if I don't make ANY progress at all, I ask someone. If I do make progress after 5 minutes but still haven't found a solution, I keep going for another 5 minutes. If I haven't found something workable, then I spend 5 minutes rubber-duck-debugging and it MUST be out loud. If I still don't have an answer, I ask someone and we talk it out. If it's an institutional knowledge question that I couldn't possibly find or figure out on my own of course I'll ask straight away. The other time I love questions - the more basic, dumb, naive as possible - is during workshopping meetings when talking about upcoming stories - we find so many obvious hidden requirements and defuse so many bombs from that stuff, it's great.
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Jan 24, 2018 13:15
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In an ideal world, open offices are fine. In a world with people they trend towards horrible because there are always those assholes who don’t know how to speak at anything less than a full shout and nobody wants to have to police them all the time. I can deal with normal to loud workplace chatter no problem. I can’t deal with constantly feeling like poo poo is about to jump off because people are yelling at one another all loving day.
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Feb 11, 2018 19:42
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Xarn posted:How many companies have you worked for, again? It's kind of amazing though. Like, lots of people are inexperienced, but Pollyanna goes that extra mile to make "inexperienced" her brand and calling card. Brain Candy posted:It's not just the team that itself that needs that good communication, but also the next level up has to have metrics that aren't butts in seats. Communication within the team is important, yes but communication from the team to that next level up is equally important. Keeping management well apprised of the contributions of remote workers - and naming the remote workers specifically and individually - can sometimes be an effective proxy for "butts in seats."
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Feb 12, 2018 09:54
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Cancelbot posted:gently caress open plan - Especially when the team behind you has a Bluetooth speaker, and instead of having a constant background level of music you can tune out; they will pick a random time and volume and just play some Hocus Pocus as their bipolar team lead is on a high note for that 5 minute period. This morning it was "Friday" by Rebecca Black. I don't even know what irony is anymore. Team rooms can be pretty sweet. At one gig we had a team room where everyone on our team (engineers, QA, BA, APM) worked about 80% of the time, and each of us had very very high-walled cubes we could go and retreat to if we ever needed pure focus time and headphones weren't cutting it.
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Feb 15, 2018 10:19
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comedyblissoption posted:Unlimited vacation means that the employer does not have to pay an employee for unused time off if they are laid off or fired, especially in jurisdictions requiring them to pay for unused time off. It's a cost-cutting measure to gently caress over the employees dressed up in Orwellian language. As a bonus you encourage more brown-nosing and groveling toward managers! Except when they pair it with a policy of a minimum amount of time off per year and other sanity checks to make sure the policy is actually humane. Uncommon, but not exceptionally so.
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Aug 10, 2018 14:43
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phenomenon since the US federally requires a minimum of 0 days of paid holiday or vacation while civilized societies like austria require a minimum of 35 days.