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Pollyanna posted:push me into going back to school/the military via getting an infosec job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk&t=30s
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Nov 2, 2016 02:33
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Pollyanna posted:My parents are skeptical of my job (which has improved quite a bit recently!) and are starting to not-so-subtly push me into going back to school/the military via getting an infosec job (long story). What the heck? "Child, please give up your job in one of the most highly paying professions in human history to join an organization where other people actively want to murder you in order to eventually wind up with a job which severely restricts your future options into a narrow track where the largest customer is the federal government." "Child, please give up your job in one of the most highly paying professions in human history to pay other people mid-five-figures a year to teach you something so that you may eventually have a job where the average entry level pay is less than what you currently make."
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Nov 2, 2016 03:51
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Cyber. Cyber cyber. Cyyyyber!
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Nov 2, 2016 06:18
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Why would you listen to your parents? Chances are that they have no idea about the current state of education and employment, especially in our sector. I don't think any of my mom or dad's career advice has ever been remotely close to passable, let alone "good". A bit off topic, maybe the wrong thread, but I figure a lot of people here work at places with unlimited PTO. How much time do you end up taking off? i've taken 9 vacation days and 3 sick days thus far. My manager has taken 27 vacation days so I feel like I should take more?
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Nov 2, 2016 14:33
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Why would you listen to your parents? Chances are that they have no idea about the current state of education and employment, especially in our sector. I don't think any of my mom or dad's career advice has ever been remotely close to passable, let alone "good". I believe that the last career advice I received from my parents for something like this (at least 15 years ago or so when I was laid off from a dotcom startup that was being purchased) was that I should hand-carry my resume into a large corporation and then ask to speak with a manager to personally deliver it. This is how "you get them to remember you and you get the job." 
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Nov 2, 2016 14:46
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hendersa posted:I believe that the last career advice I received from my parents for something like this (at least 15 years ago or so when I was laid off from a dotcom startup that was being purchased) was that I should hand-carry my resume into a large corporation and then ask to speak with a manager to personally deliver it. This is how "you get them to remember you and you get the job." The useful version of this idea is to go drinking with an important person after they present their project/company at a meetup. Don't bring a resume though
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Nov 2, 2016 15:09
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Why would you listen to your parents? Chances are that they have no idea about the current state of education and employment, especially in our sector. I don't think any of my mom or dad's career advice has ever been remotely close to passable, let alone "good". Unlimited vacation is a scam in part for exactly this reason. Your boss has the right idea. If you're taking less than five weeks off you're letting them take advantage of you (calculating based on a relatively average 20 days vacation plus five extra days for them not considering vacation days a payable benefit they need to pay out at the end of your employment). For exact numbers I've taken 34 days off so far in the seven months I've been at my current employer, but fifteen of those were traveling to South Africa when my mom died.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:09
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Alright so this is interesting. I'm now a month in to my new consulting gig and have been doing the standard 'just read as much as you can about the company's product and wait for an assignment' routine. Boss calls me up this morning telling me that they've got a billable job for me- scrum master. This totally came out of left field but I guess it sort of makes sense since it gets me into a billable role where my lack of experience with the product won't matter too much. Apparently the consultants I'll be leading are sort of rough in the people-skills category so my primary role will just be keeping them in line. Any advice? I've worked in agile environments before but I've never formally studied it. If this actually goes through I start on Monday.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:36
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Necc0 posted:Alright so this is interesting. I'm now a month in to my new consulting gig and have been doing the standard 'just read as much as you can about the company's product and wait for an assignment' routine. Boss calls me up this morning telling me that they've got a billable job for me- scrum master. This totally came out of left field but I guess it sort of makes sense since it gets me into a billable role where my lack of experience with the product won't matter too much. Apparently the consultants I'll be leading are sort of rough in the people-skills category so my primary role will just be keeping them in line. Try not to let the sprint schedule change after it's set. Understand how to make good and bad estimates and be able to discern whether someone is saying a thing will take a long time because it's difficult or because they're being difficult. I hope you enjoy middle management. Try not to let the sprint schedule change after it's set.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:56
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Yeah my biggest concern is that the whole point of this company's product is it massively slashes development time so this being my first project with said product is going to make it difficult to accurately make predictions. However our primary role for the first few weeks is going to be training so that might not be too much of a problem.
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Nov 2, 2016 16:08
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Good Will Hrunting posted:A bit off topic, maybe the wrong thread, but I figure a lot of people here work at places with unlimited PTO. How much time do you end up taking off? i've taken 9 vacation days and 3 sick days thus far. My manager has taken 27 vacation days so I feel like I should take more? Figure out how much time you'd expect a normal place to offer and take 1.2 to 1.25 that. A normal place would be cashing out your unused PTO when you leave, you won't here so make sure to enjoy it more. Are there any mandatory shut downs? (Week between christmas and new years for instance?) If not add in another week for that. 25-30 days should be right for a year. Looks like your manager has done the same math.
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Nov 2, 2016 16:27
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hendersa posted:I believe that the last career advice I received from my parents for something like this (at least 15 years ago or so when I was laid off from a dotcom startup that was being purchased) was that I should hand-carry my resume into a large corporation and then ask to speak with a manager to personally deliver it. This is how "you get them to remember you and you get the job." Meanwhile, even people I know among the Greatest Generation seem to, ironically enough, have a better idea of what's going on than most baby boomers. I hear them normally comment something similar to "Young people today have to be so competitive; it's how it was when I was little during the Great Depression and you had dozens or hundreds for every job opening at the coal mine." Necc0 posted:Any advice? I've worked in agile environments before but I've never formally studied it.
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Nov 2, 2016 16:39
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Necc0 posted:Apparently the consultants I'll be leading are sort of rough in the people-skills category so my primary role will just be keeping them in line. - Pay attention in meetings with your stakeholders for deadlines, requirements, and priorities. Theoretically, you are not supposed to have any deadlines, but stakeholders almost always have expectations, and you need to be able to identify them and prioritize them accordingly. Likewise, stakeholders have stated requirements and priorities but there are often unspoken ones - it's your job to draw those out into the open and make sure they are correctly scoped and assigned. These often include behind-the-scenes type tasks. - Make sure your stories are complete before the sprint starts. 'Complete' means that any dev can pick up a story and understand any the reason for the story, the prerequisites, and the scope of changes needed. Arrange these in order of priority, and tell your devs how many of them you expect to have done. It should never be 100%, but it should be ~75% so that the sprint doesn't seem ridiculously long, but that there are some backlog items in case all the requirements get finished. - Do a postmortem each sprint of which goals were met and which goals were left behind and adjust your expectations accordingly. If your team is not accomplishing as many as you set out to, you need to reduce scope until you meet your goals.
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Nov 2, 2016 17:23
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vonnegutt posted:- Pay attention in meetings with your stakeholders for deadlines, requirements, and priorities. Theoretically, you are not supposed to have any deadlines, but stakeholders almost always have expectations, and you need to be able to identify them and prioritize them accordingly. Likewise, stakeholders have stated requirements and priorities but there are often unspoken ones - it's your job to draw those out into the open and make sure they are correctly scoped and assigned. These often include behind-the-scenes type tasks. quote:- Do a postmortem each sprint of which goals were met and which goals were left behind and adjust your expectations accordingly. If your team is not accomplishing as many as you set out to, you need to reduce scope until you meet your goals.
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Nov 2, 2016 21:24
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people posted:Looks like my instincts were right. I'll handle my parents, thanks for the info!
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Nov 3, 2016 11:52
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Destroyenator posted:A lot of this is really the responsibility of the Product Owner/Product Manager, the scrum master definitely shouldn't be setting priorities. But you should be there making sure it happens and helping them if they haven't worked like that before. Yes, exactly. I have been in far too many product meetings where the Product Owner(s)/Manager(s) had multiple competing priorities, and without dragging that into the open and making them argue amongst themselves about it, it became the fault of the team when these various features were "late" or "not prioritized correctly". Paying attention to a Jira board is one thing, but you should also be actively listening to what they talk about needing the most, what comes up a lot, and what seems to inspire heated debate. Point it out, and ask where that thing fits on the priority list. Make sure everyone knows and agrees about what your team is going to do this sprint.
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Nov 3, 2016 13:33
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quote:RE : Scrum Master As other have pointed out, you'll be dealing with politics in that role. This might make a few people here gag and honestly it is dated and has to be taken with a grain of salt but... I still suggest this classic read if you've never had to deal with a more politic/person oriented role : How to Win Friends and Influence People Alright blast me now !
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Nov 3, 2016 15:35
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Scrum master is a position that varies wildly across employers. Some employers you are a glorified meeting runner, others will have you driving the project forward as a whole in a position considered somewhat over the development team(s) and product owners.
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Nov 3, 2016 17:21
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Good Will Hrunting posted:A bit off topic, maybe the wrong thread, but I figure a lot of people here work at places with unlimited PTO. How much time do you end up taking off? i've taken 9 vacation days and 3 sick days thus far. My manager has taken 27 vacation days so I feel like I should take more? Unlimited vacation is such a crapshoot. I worked at such a company; when I was in the interview pipeline and my boss called me to present the offer he said "I'm from Europe and I fully expect to see you take 5 weeks off a year." He actually held me to it; at one point he told me I didn't take enough time off and I needed to fix that. Then that boss quit to found a startup, I got re-orged, and my new boss didn't see things the same way. In a year's timeframe I was able to get like 8 days out, and I had to dodge said boss' lunatic release schedule to be able to do this. In your situation though, if your boss is taking 5 weeks off then you should be doing that as well. edit: couple blog posts that sum up how i feel about unlimited vacation in general http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-only-what-you-need.html http://blog.danlew.net/2016/02/22/unlimited-vacation-policies-are-inherently-unfair/ kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 04:22
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If you're not taking advantage of the unlimited PTO, you're being taken advantage of. One of the psychological things that happens is that since you can take as much as you want, most emoloyees end up taking drastically less because there's no fear of losing your PTO. This is of course poor thinking given that they no longer have to pay out PTO. Most companies aren't going to make you use your PTO, please take care of yourself.
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Nov 4, 2016 14:38
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I put in my days for the end of the year and I'll be at something like 15 vacation and 5 sick days for the span of the year. I would take more but I'm interviewing as well and hopefully after 1/1 I'll have more interviews and stuff lined up. That is if I don't just straight up come in and quit on or around the start of the year, which is a pretty likely thing.
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Nov 4, 2016 14:51
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withoutclass posted:If you're not taking advantage of the unlimited PTO, you're being taken advantage of. One of the psychological things that happens is that since you can take as much as you want, most emoloyees end up taking drastically less because there's no fear of losing your PTO. This is of course poor thinking given that they no longer have to pay out PTO. Most companies aren't going to make you use your PTO, please take care of yourself. The thing about unlimited vacation is that it trades "use your days or lose them" FOMO with fear of being perceived as using more vacation time than is acceptable. And of course companies deliberately do not issue guidance to managers as to how much vacation the company deems to be acceptable, which ends up feeding this fear. I assume that to do so would put them in danger of having their PTO policy being construed as offering a specific bucket of days, and the legal liabilities that come with it. That and it would result in people in general taking more PTO, which is not in the company's interest, so better for them to stfu about it and keep it hazy.
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Nov 4, 2016 15:51
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Minimum PTO would be a much better policy if your goal as a company is getting people to use it. If you haven't used your X days on 365-X then don't come back until January.
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Nov 4, 2016 15:59
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I don't like "unlimited vacation" for all the reasons others stated, plus, I'm unable to quantify the value to compare with other firms that offer a more traditional vacation structure. For example, if you make $100K a year, that works out to about $50/hr or $400/day. If I get 15 days of vacation, that's effectively a benefit worth $6000. Also, not using your allotted days (assuming use-it-or-lose-it), it's easy to feel that I'm basically handing the company $400 for every day I don't use. With "unlimited", it doesn't really feel like you're losing anything by not taking the days.
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Nov 4, 2016 16:05
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Jose Valasquez posted:Minimum PTO would be a much better policy if your goal as a company is getting people to use it. If you haven't used your X days on 365-X then don't come back until January. I heard a policy at one place that you could cash out your PTO at any time as long as you took time off in a 1:1 ratio. Want an extra week of pay? Take a week off!
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Nov 4, 2016 16:18
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Had anyone tried to negotiate language for specific amounts of an "OK" number of days to take off when working for an unlimited company?
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Nov 4, 2016 17:56
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Jose Valasquez posted:Minimum PTO would be a much better policy if your goal as a company is getting people to use it. If you haven't used your X days on 365-X then don't come back until January. This is actually a mandated thing in many financial firms, where you're forced to take time off and they cut off your vpn/email/etc. They do it as an internal controls rule, because it's harder for you to keep a scam from unraveling if you have to disconnect for two weeks.
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Nov 4, 2016 19:10
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Last job had unlimited vacation and a vacation bonus -- once a year you'd get $1000 for going AFK for a week straight. Unlimited vacation I think generally comes from a good place, but yeah it does play mindgames a little bit with people. Whatever, just be a grown up and take the PTO you need and want, don't gently caress with the mindgames of it. I'm not sure I could handle having that stuff strictly tracked -- I'm pretty bad at taking major vacations, but I am constantly taking a day or half a day here or there for random stuff. I would be hosed if I only had 10 of those a year.
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Nov 4, 2016 19:17
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My place has unlimited vacation and HR hounds you if you don't take at least 3 weeks. Not gonna lie, it's loving awesome.
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Nov 4, 2016 23:03
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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:Last job had unlimited vacation and a vacation bonus -- once a year you'd get $1000 for going AFK for a week straight. Unlimited vacation I think generally comes from a good place, but yeah it does play mindgames a little bit with people. Whatever, just be a grown up and take the PTO you need and want, don't gently caress with the mindgames of it. It doesn't come from a good place in any circumstance and claiming so is blatantly naive. It's the policy so that the company doesn't have to carry vacation as a liability on their balance sheet. If the company was coming from a good place as you claim they'd just give everyone the max allowed under the unlimited policy so that the policy is consistent across the company instead of being nebulous and manager dependent.
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Nov 5, 2016 00:38
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asur posted:It doesn't come from a good place in any circumstance and claiming so is blatantly naive. It's the policy so that the company doesn't have to carry vacation as a liability on their balance sheet. If the company was coming from a good place as you claim they'd just give everyone the max allowed under the unlimited policy so that the policy is consistent across the company instead of being nebulous and manager dependent.
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Nov 5, 2016 03:24
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The place I interviewed last week wants to do 1 more call for "team fit" (I interviewed with two teams) but they said all the feedback was positive??? I totally felt like I bombed the interviews and felt remarkably under-skilled coming out, to the point of almost feeling like I'd even turn down an offer cause of how mismatched I felt my skillset was. Imposter syndrome strikes again.
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Nov 5, 2016 03:49
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When my team was let go suddenly from a previous job, the company had actively denied my requests for vacation for months. I had been working my rear end off, and the CEO offered me a "generous, because it was so sudden" severance package of roughly what I thought I should have been owed in PTO liability. We negotiated, and one of the ways they argued they held up their end of the bargain was that it was on me to take time off.
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Nov 5, 2016 03:57
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All of this is probably just consulting.txt and I've been in it too long but serious  - no actual requirements just out of date wireframes - changes made in phone conferences that are never written down - no stable data, can't actually develop something that goes from 22k to a 3.8mb JSON file - hate this goddamn poo poo but they've paid me enough not to care for too drat long 
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Nov 5, 2016 04:07
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Less Fat Luke posted:We actually do carry the liability; we encourage 3 weeks as that's the payout you'd get if you were ever let go. People often feel comfortable taking a couple past that too so it's generally in favour of the employees. I'm also not really sure I'd ever qualify it as manager dependent; I'm in that position and have never once turned down a vacation request. Maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding, but how on earth is the fact that you, as one manager, have never turned down a vacation request, evidence that it is not manager dependent?
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Nov 5, 2016 04:20
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Necc0 posted:Alright so this is interesting. I'm now a month in to my new consulting gig and have been doing the standard 'just read as much as you can about the company's product and wait for an assignment' routine. Boss calls me up this morning telling me that they've got a billable job for me- scrum master. This totally came out of left field but I guess it sort of makes sense since it gets me into a billable role where my lack of experience with the product won't matter too much. Apparently the consultants I'll be leading are sort of rough in the people-skills category so my primary role will just be keeping them in line. I am Officially Certified in Scrum thanks to my company and IMO you could basically set aside an hour and get just as much out of it.
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Nov 5, 2016 05:05
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What is the ultimate career goal of Scrum masters? It seems like PMs are shooting for middle/upper management, and the only good Scrum Master I've known was laid off and then hired elsewhere as a senior PM. Not trying to judge, this is totally outside my experience.
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Nov 5, 2016 06:11
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I've seen it used as a junior PM role/a fig leaf for people wanting to move from dev into PM.
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Nov 5, 2016 06:48
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Less Fat Luke posted:We actually do carry the liability; we encourage 3 weeks as that's the payout you'd get if you were ever let go. People often feel comfortable taking a couple past that too so it's generally in favour of the employees. I'm also not really sure I'd ever qualify it as manager dependent; I'm in that position and have never once turned down a vacation request. Your company pays out three weeks of vacation if someone quits regardless of vacation taken? I want to be clear here that this is if someone quits, not if they are laid off which is completely seperate and called severance. Your last sentence pretty much loving proves my point about it being manager dependent.
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Nov 5, 2016 07:06
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Steve French posted:Maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding, but how on earth is the fact that you, as one manager, have never turned down a vacation request, evidence that it is not manager dependent? asur posted:Your company pays out three weeks of vacation if someone quits regardless of vacation taken? I want to be clear here that this is if someone quits, not if they are laid off which is completely separate and called severance. Your last sentence pretty much loving proves my point about it being manager dependent. And yes, severance or quitting. In our HR system we mark the vacation days used and it first goes against the three week standard we have. These are legit interesting questions and I'm happy to answer them - I joined as a developer and also was super skeptical about the vacation since I have a friend at Netflix who takes about 4 days vacation a year with his "unlimited" vacation and we seem to do it pretty well. That being said we bust our rear end to have really good benefits and it's an amazing place to work. Less Fat Luke fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Nov 5, 2016 |
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Nov 5, 2016 13:43
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