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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:"The position was substantially different than originally presented" "It was not a good fit" What's the code for "reorgs turned the management poo poo and the environment toxic"?
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Feb 28, 2017 21:31
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AskYourself posted:From what I've heard of charities or generic non-profit (not NFL non-profit), budgets and resources are tight so while maybe more human in their nature, they usually make up for lack of funding by extracting as much as they can from their resources. I've worked at a nonprofit and they're only "more human" when they're asking you do them favors in service of the mission. Pollyanna posted:What's the code for "reorgs turned the management poo poo and the environment toxic"? There's a lot of turbulence and I'm not really comfortable with the direction we're going or some generic crap like that. RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 22:25
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Pollyanna posted:What's the code for "reorgs turned the management poo poo and the environment toxic"? Reorg.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:36
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Yeah, something like, "Between when I was being interviewed and when I started, the company went through a significant reorg that heavily impacted the team I joined."
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Feb 28, 2017 22:45
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Good Will Hrunting posted:They're.. much in the same boat. We're asking a lot of questions from the "managers" and getting different answers from different people or vague answers, then being asked in the stand up "so what are you working on?". We say "this but blocked by x, y, z" and they say "Lets sync up on that" or "I'll add to the spec" and never do, and we just keep trying to spec things with very little business context or very little idea of what the gently caress the architect is rambling about in his spec diagrams (he's a PhD and they're all obnoxiously verbose). I'll break with some of the others here if you're looking for advice. Keep your head down and just increase your tenure. If I recall you had a hard time getting a position due to total time in industry and salary expectations right? Increase the time in industry while collecting a salary. Don't get invested in the work and let things fall out where they do.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:37
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Hughlander posted:I'll break with some of the others here if you're looking for advice. Keep your head down and just increase your tenure. If I recall you had a hard time getting a position due to total time in industry and salary expectations right? Increase the time in industry while collecting a salary. Don't get invested in the work and let things fall out where they do. That sucks, though. Sure, you'd build up time, but it'd be in exchange for sanity and the chance of burnout. Remaining detached is easier said than done.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:43
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Pollyanna posted:That sucks, though. Sure, you'd build up time, but it'd be in exchange for sanity and the chance of burnout. Remaining detached is easier said than done. Yeah, your sanity is in much shorter than supply if you have any talent in this field. If you have to optimize, optimize for your long term hapiness/sanity. If that literally is more $$$ than do that, but I think most people here will find that isn't really as satisfying as they think.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:49
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Pollyanna posted:That sucks, though. Sure, you'd build up time, but it'd be in exchange for sanity and the chance of burnout. Remaining detached is easier said than done. You're gonna burnout a lot quicker trying to right every wrong at a lovely company than you are just trying to learn as much as you can and gain experience without trying to fix everything. Sure, fix what you can, but you're one person with no tenure and little experience, people aren't really going to give a poo poo what you think, especially at a bad company
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Feb 28, 2017 23:57
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Hughlander posted:I'll break with some of the others here if you're looking for advice. Keep your head down and just increase your tenure. If I recall you had a hard time getting a position due to total time in industry and salary expectations right? Increase the time in industry while collecting a salary. Don't get invested in the work and let things fall out where they do. Well, salary expectations less so. I could give a gently caress about money right now and besides, as engineers we already get compensated fairly well. It was more about my last position turning into an absolute cluster gently caress for the last year and a half I was there. It took me about 4 months to find a job while I was working full time. That said I'm making well into 6 figures with 3 years of professional experience, but 1.5 of that was solid and the rest was mostly fuckery. I'm not even looking for a huge salary or perfect fit or lots of hand holding. I just want somewhere that has an active stream of work and a good manager or product person that can actually loving do their job.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:03
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CPColin posted:Yeah, something like, "Between when I was being interviewed and when I started, the company went through a significant reorg that heavily impacted the team I joined." Something like this happened to me once. In the two weeks between being interviewed and my start date, they completely scrapped all plans for Java for C# because they hired some random manager who wanted C#. He ghosted the job, and nobody could get in touch with him. But we were stuck with C#. I left pretty quickly.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:12
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geeves posted:Something like this happened to me once. In the two weeks between being interviewed and my start date, they completely scrapped all plans for Java for C# because they hired some random manager who wanted C#. He ghosted the job, and nobody could get in touch with him. But we were stuck with C#. I left pretty quickly. C# is good though
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Mar 1, 2017 01:00
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Pollyanna posted:That sucks, though. Sure, you'd build up time, but it'd be in exchange for sanity and the chance of burnout. Remaining detached is easier said than done. Sanity and burn out only happen if you give a poo poo. From the description of the situation there's absolutely nothing to give a poo poo about. Either the situation will resolve in which case he'll engage, or it won't in which case he can 
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Mar 1, 2017 01:28
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Doghouse posted:C# is good though I'm not really complaining about the technology stack, it would have been good to learn. But everything in that company was in disarray and nobody could agree on what to do with me (they basically had hired through a sourcing firm a bunch of middle management to build a new team from scratch and had too many cooks). I ended up being some sort of middleman between some consultants who were rebranding the company and the CEO/CTO/CMO. Basically I sat in a bunch of meetings. I hated it. They wanted to see "results" but weren't giving me any tangible work. Most of the time it was me and the CMO bullshitting about cars and football.
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Mar 1, 2017 01:49
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vonnegutt posted:The way I've heard this presented is that everyone gets 1-2 of these "get out of jail free" cards in their career. If you leave after a month, after your next job you don't even have to bother listing this one on your resume. A gap of a month isn't really that much. Yeah. I've had bad poo poo disrupt my career way more than twice, and with time, some luck, and the good fortune of getting help from people like Subjunctive, I've bounced back to employment at a big/profitable/good company. Exiting a bad situation does some damage, but probably less than people think, and a good year or two of continued employment afterwards does a lot to put the bad stuff in the past IMO. Probably is a net positive, accounting for future career progress and mental health.
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Mar 1, 2017 10:15
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Hughlander posted:Sanity and burn out only happen if you give a poo poo. From the description of the situation there's absolutely nothing to give a poo poo about. Either the situation will resolve in which case he'll engage, or it won't in which case he can Speaking as someone who stayed in a toxic and unhappy situation for months longer than I should have for $vesting_reasons: This poo poo can very easily infect and poison your entire life and mental health. Saying "lol nothing matters get paid YOLO" is usually easier on paper than practice, especially since you still have to show up and stew in it for 8-10 hours a day. OTOH now that that's done and I'm in a much happier place that extra $70k is pretty nice.
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Mar 1, 2017 13:58
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An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend?
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Mar 1, 2017 14:42
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Pollyanna posted:An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend? Usually very protocolar and well-defined roles and responsibilities. Come with lots of red tape. but.... They ARE working with new tech so that's a plus. Again, the most important IMHO is your colleagues and your immediate supervisor, if you know someone working there ask them about how it is. If you don't know anyone then probe for it in your interview.
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Mar 1, 2017 14:59
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All this comes from the Midwest so I have no idea if this would be different in Massachusetts, but: In my experience working with and for government: local is better to work for than state is better to work for than federal. A city's transit authority is likely to have fewer THIS MUST APPLY TO EVERYONE rules, and even if it doesn't, EVERYONE is a much smaller set than the EVERYONE at a broader state or federal levels. If you would truly be a city/county/state employee then you're probably going to have public salary bands and the job you'd do would be defined in terms of those bands. If they say "The position is a G12" or whatever the hell, you can look up what the salary band for a G12 is and there you are. You may not have a lot of success negotiating outside of that band but of course it's still worth the ask.
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Mar 1, 2017 15:40
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Pollyanna posted:An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend? could it be worse than what you are doing now?
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Mar 1, 2017 15:49
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Pollyanna posted:An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend? I think given what you've said about your preferences and working style, it might be a good fit.
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Mar 1, 2017 15:52
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Pollyanna posted:What's the code for "reorgs turned the management poo poo and the environment toxic"? vonnegutt posted:The way I've heard this presented is that everyone gets 1-2 of these "get out of jail free" cards in their career. If you leave after a month, after your next job you don't even have to bother listing this one on your resume. A gap of a month isn't really that much. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 16:53
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Pollyanna posted:An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend? I was half-way through the application process for that very job when I accepted my current role. I'm not sure I made the right choice. It seems like they're doing exciting work there, and the MBTA is badly in need of good workers everywhere. One thing to ask about : that job was classifying everyone as consultants to get around the strict, out-of-date salary bands.
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Mar 1, 2017 16:55
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mrmcd posted:Speaking as someone who stayed in a toxic and unhappy situation for months longer than I should have for $vesting_reasons: This poo poo can very easily infect and poison your entire life and mental health. Saying "lol nothing matters get paid YOLO" is usually easier on paper than practice, especially since you still have to show up and stew in it for 8-10 hours a day. I agree with that. However I don't think Hrunting is really in a toxic situation. He's not being asked to crunch. He's not being yelled at demanding why costs are being overrun. He's just not being given anything to do due to missmanagement. And the reason why I'd even say as you put it "lol nothing matters get paid YOLO" is because that's the situation as he came in It's not that he's invested in a place that's now going to poo poo. It's just that the place is a non-starter. Basically my advice isn't to stick around for everything, but for this case as shown by the conversations in this thread. Get your paycheck and see how it plays out.
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Mar 1, 2017 17:13
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Vulture Culture posted:honestly, this, phrased exactly this way This was presented as a rule of thumb for any kind of career, not just tech - it seems like the tech field regards "job hoppers" differently in general. I've heard of some hiring managers in tech looking at people staying in a position longer than 5 years as a negative, thinking they haven't kept up with modern tech, and some who even recommend that new devs always switch jobs after 3 years in order to build their resume, even if they're happy where they are. Still, I would personally be wary of someone with the majority of their jobs being very short stints without a compelling explanation, and I don't think that's an unpopular opinion.
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Mar 1, 2017 17:24
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I'm getting a paycheck big enough to cover my monthly expenses +20% or so twice a month, so that rules and I'm saving a considerable amount. I'm also discovering the two Senior engineers on my side (start-up) have zero experience in this domain (we come from transitional Java backgrounds and are working on a new data pipeline with Spark and Scala) versus my little bit of experience so we're all in this mess together. Also I should be able to work from home once or twice a week so things aren't quite toxic just a bit scary in terms of career growth and learning.
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Mar 1, 2017 17:34
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One of my former coworkers sent me a link to an open position on her team at her new job. She says the work/life balance is good and the pay and benefits are "great for SLO" (classic). She goes on to describe that most of the company is using waterfall and there's a substantial design and review process whenever her team needs to requests changes in the common code. This is the part that concerns me, though: "The international team in SLO are mostly senior leads; most of the actual developers are in India." Has anybody in this thread worked in a setup like that? How'd it go?
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Mar 1, 2017 17:44
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I've worked on a team of contractors hired to supplement another company's team of Indian contractors and it was pretty bad. I think it would be different if the Indian team was in-house rather than contractors, so that would be a good question to ask. Problems we had: - Time difference meant that ANY feedback took at least 24 hours to get a response. This meant that 3 rounds of emails would take a week, which lead to meetings either very early in the morning or very late at night in order to have a useful conversation. This has been the case with every overseas team I've ever worked with and it's always been frustrating. - If it wasn't in the contract, it didn't exist. The hiring company specced out everything from a sales perspective, asking for certain features. These had to be VERY VERY specific, or when given feedback, the overseas team would argue that it wasn't contracted and therefore they weren't responsible for it (I actually kind of admire this, as the hiring company was known for being vague). However, there was never any spec about code conventions, style, or documentation. A lot of the work from our team was cleaning up and organizing "feature-complete" code that was nightmare spaghetti code. Also, this was supposed to be an Agile product, which completely clashed with this arrangement. - On one project, where we had no access to the backend, we were only allowed to talk with the project manager of their team rather than the actual devs, which meant that everything technical had to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Many times we were told that API features were complete only to start building a frontend and discover that the feature was barebones and lacking many of the endpoints or database fields that would be required to have a functional feature. Combined with the "spec first" approach, this meant that we would have to find our project manager to draft up a new spec request to send to their project manager. So, in short, timezones make communication hard, and if it's hard then everything is hard.
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Mar 1, 2017 18:54
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vonnegutt posted:This was presented as a rule of thumb for any kind of career, not just tech - it seems like the tech field regards "job hoppers" differently in general. I've heard of some hiring managers in tech looking at people staying in a position longer than 5 years as a negative, thinking they haven't kept up with modern tech, and some who even recommend that new devs always switch jobs after 3 years in order to build their resume, even if they're happy where they are. It can be luck-of-the-draw on who reviews your resume, even within the same company. When I review resumes, I don't care how long the average tenure of a candidate at a job is unless there's a compelling reason to (ie, if I know the candidate is going to be assigned to a project with no end in sight). On the other hand, one of my non-developer colleagues has bounced candidates for not sticking around at past jobs long enough for their taste. CPColin posted:"The international team in SLO are mostly senior leads; most of the actual developers are in India." vonnegutt's experience mirrors my own. I would run screaming.
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Mar 1, 2017 20:02
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CPColin posted:"The international team in SLO are mostly senior leads; most of the actual developers are in India." No way. I did a short stint in a similar setup after a startup I worked for was acquired by a F500. Vonnegutt summed it up almost exactly. I felt like a babysitter for the Indian devs, often spending more time cleaning up and extending their code than it would have taken me to do the feature in the first place. The necessity of the waterfall approach (vs. a better, iterative approach) meant features were implemented however they were spec'ed, even if another approach would've been more efficient, cleaner, or more useful to the users. Whenever a bug/feature request was reported that dealt with the area of the system they were primarily responsible for was assigned to me, I felt my gut tighten up with fear of what I was walking into. I actually started 3-4xing my estimates automatically when those areas were the focus.
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Mar 1, 2017 20:16
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the talent deficit posted:could it be worse than what you are doing now? fritz posted:I think given what you've said about your preferences and working style, it might be a good fit. I know, right? lifg posted:I was half-way through the application process for that very job when I accepted my current role. I'm not sure I made the right choice. It seems like they're doing exciting work there, and the MBTA is badly in need of good workers everywhere. Huh. Is that so? I sent a response offering to set aside some time for a chat, so it's a lead worth chasing at least. I'll let you know how it goes. AskYourself posted:Usually very protocolar and well-defined roles and responsibilities. Come with lots of red tape. Yeah, I'll be grilling them about the work environment. I hope it's good. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 21:34
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Speaking of reorgs, I finally learned the truth of what's been happening to my division over the last month. It wasn't a reorg, it was an execution.
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Mar 1, 2017 21:34
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lifg posted:Speaking of reorgs, I finally learned the truth of what's been happening to my division over the last month. It wasn't a reorg, it was an execution. Hell, same.
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Mar 1, 2017 21:37
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CPColin posted:One of my former coworkers sent me a link to an open position on her team at her new job. She says the work/life balance is good and the pay and benefits are "great for SLO" (classic). She goes on to describe that most of the company is using waterfall and there's a substantial design and review process whenever her team needs to requests changes in the common code. All of the code is a dumpster fire and is probably better off being dropped.
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Mar 1, 2017 21:38
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lifg posted:Speaking of reorgs, I finally learned the truth of what's been happening to my division over the last month. It wasn't a reorg, it was an execution. That sucks. Does this mean you're back on the interview circuit then? 
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Mar 1, 2017 21:46
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Not to invite comparisons to the Goon in the Well allegory, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to send my resume along and meet with my former coworker's boss anyway. If nothing else, it's more experience with talking about stuff professionally over lunch, right?
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Mar 1, 2017 22:06
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That sucks. Does this mean you're back on the interview circuit then? I really don't know. It's a contract-to-hire gig, so you'd think they'd just let my contract quietly expire. But everyone keeps telling me that they like me and will find a home for me somewhere. But it's also obvious that I'm always the last to know what's going on. I just wish it had lasted long enough to give me real experience for my resume. The best I have now is, "almost worked with big data," and, "almost built micro-service-based reporting platform."
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Mar 2, 2017 00:35
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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:"The position was substantially different than originally presented" "It was not a good fit" Good name post combo
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Mar 2, 2017 01:47
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CPColin posted:"The international team in SLO are mostly senior leads; most of the actual developers are in India." Echoing what everyone else said. In all likelihood the engineering is garbage. The fact that they're offshoring means they're treating engineering like a cost center. The only way I've seen an offshore arrangement even sort of work was like this:
Even then, it wasn't great. No way around timezones and communication issues.
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Mar 2, 2017 02:19
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I worked with an offshore team last year. Code reviews alone took several days of back and forth, and most of the time their code never got to be acceptable and I'd end up just rewriting it for them anyway. My productivity dropped to near 0 because all my time was spent babysitting the offshore team and cleaning up after them.
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Mar 2, 2017 02:27
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Jose Valasquez posted:My productivity dropped to near 0 because all my time was spent babysitting the offshore team and cleaning up after them. I sympathize with the general problem, but realize that your overall productivity wasn't 0, even if you weren't directly producing any code. Your job just changed from software developer to tech lead/facilitator. It's important to be able to phrase these things in a positive way. 
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Mar 2, 2017 02:34
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