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Technical debt is the difference between "This particular piece of code has to be rewritten so it's more flexible and can handle some variations that I expect will be needed later" and "gently caress it, copy + paste givefucks2.php and make some slight tweaks because the boss needs this by tomorrow". Then you incur more debt when invariably you have to make givefucks3.php and givefucks4.php, and you get to make a big ol' interest payment on it when something fundamentally changes and you have to reconcile a particular required change against 4 slightly-different disasters instead of one. (Meanwhile, fixing them will require both undoing all the links to those files, and rewriting it so that it can handle the very specific changes you've made without breaking any of them.) 
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Mar 28, 2017 05:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Isn't that also kind of the point of design patterns and encapsulation? You can never, ever plan for every possibility but you can get an idea of what the program is meant to do, pick an appropriate architecture, and build from there. Sure and then oops if you'd spent another week on it you would have designed that high level architecture entirely differently. No worries in 10 years it'll probably get redesigned if not just obsoleted.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:00
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Steve French posted:Yes, that's a totally reasonable interpretation. He's a person that considers Google a startup, and interviewed at every other of the startups that weren't Google. I did interview at a lot of startups, maybe people thought this was actually plausible? ultrafilter posted:One approach that I've found very useful for big decisions is to imagine that it's a year from now and I'm perfectly happy having stayed in whatever situation I'm thinking about getting out of. I then ask how I went from thinking about leaving to wanting to stay. If there are no plausible scenarios, then it's time to get out. If there are plausible scenarios, then it's time to start thinking about how likely they are, and make decisions based on that. Skandranon posted:Write it all down too, this will help you solidify your thought process. I'm just going to do the bare minimum to collect a paycheck until management takes more of an initiative and stops being so pass-aggressive and toxic. At the 6 month mark, I'll start looking. I'm not currently mentally capable of conducting a job search again. Circumstances will likely never change at the parent company to be honest. Coupled with my 25% committed boss who comes into Slack, spews some pretentious PhD know-it-all bullshit, and exits the conversation while we try to decipher what he was saying only to come back later and have an attitude but contribute very little, not a whole lot is going to get done and it seems like blame will fall on me and my peers. Edit: MY PEERS AND ME. SORRY GUYS. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 16:00
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This is going back a ways, but with regards to perf reviews:Munkeymon posted:Writing an essay about how great I am sounds like an exercise designed to make me uncomfortable though it's probably something I should learn to do because otherwise I'm probably dead-ending my career :\
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Mar 28, 2017 16:19
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What's the difference between a typical employment role and a contractor role? I got a message asking if I was interested in a "contract web development role" for a "2 year contract", but I have no idea how that's different from what I've got right now. Is it worth going after "contracts" like this, or should I stay away if I have less experience?
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Mar 28, 2017 19:02
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Pollyanna posted:What's the difference between a typical employment role and a contractor role? I got a message asking if I was interested in a "contract web development role" for a "2 year contract", but I have no idea how that's different from what I've got right now. Is it worth going after "contracts" like this, or should I stay away if I have less experience? As a developer? Probably no difference. As an employee, could be a big difference, in terms of provided benefits & tax implications. If it's interesting, and you are fine with looking for another job in 2 years, you should consider it.
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Mar 28, 2017 19:07
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It's a React/Elixir thing, so I'm up for it. I'm more concerned about getting screwed over as an employee and what a contractor status means for paying taxes, health insurance, total compensation, etc. What kinds of questions should I ask re: that?
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Mar 28, 2017 19:21
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Pollyanna posted:It's a React/Elixir thing, so I'm up for it. I'm more concerned about getting screwed over as an employee and what a contractor status means for paying taxes, health insurance, total compensation, etc. What kinds of questions should I ask re: that? It means your hourly rate should be 2-3x your FTE rate. Questions: who are you working for (an agency, or direct for a company)? How much are they paying you? What other than cash are they compensating you with? (Note: probably nothing) How do you take PTO? What are the terms of the contract, how long, who can break it when, etc.? IMO working as a contractor is a bad idea unless you want to make a life of contracting and work for yourself (which is fine, fun and lucrative.... but requires  )
Mao Zedong Thot fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 19:48
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Pollyanna posted:What's the difference between a typical employment role and a contractor role? I got a message asking if I was interested in a "contract web development role" for a "2 year contract", but I have no idea how that's different from what I've got right now. Is it worth going after "contracts" like this, or should I stay away if I have less experience? You can google the details but generally as a contractor you're working through your own company which can mean a lot more money if you can find the work (not hard in this market) but also requires a lot more admin work and no paid holidays / sick days / pat/maternity leave, pensions, health insurance, etc etc except those you choose to give yourself. return0 posted:I would find this interesting. It's 2012 and there's two really poo poo central government websites called DirectGov and BusinessLink and thousands of websites for all the departments and agencies etc. Some people wanted to replace it with something modern and good, but flying in the face of IBM and Accenture and their government procurement mates meant they had to get an alpha up and running really quick and cheap. The basic citizen-facing bits got done first (what are the bank holidays this year, how do I pay my car tax) with a not-great central publishing miniservices backend. It worked well enough to hit the deadline. But there's no time to go back and fix it now! Because they've been given a chance to turn the alpha into a real thing but they have to migrate the 24 ministerial departments and their 200k documents over and fast. Some people wanted to integrate it into the existing system, others felt there was too much tech debt there and it'd be too slow. So they built a new monolithic web application called Whitehall which shared none of the services in the original and added a bunch more. But it got done in time! And the team was launched for real and all was good. This is where I joined. We got two months to try and pay down some debt and then the next political deadline dropped; 312 agencies and their 1000+ websites had to get merged in and only 18 months to do it. They all got merged into the giant monolith as best we could which was slower than it could've been because tech debt. We put aside some time to start on a new pipeline to replace the other two as we went. It got done, we didn't introduce any more tech debt, but didn't really pay any down either. But now we can fix it, right? No, because it's January 2015 and there's an election in June and the last one was in 2010 and the site was only created in 2012 so what the gently caress is going to happen. Also literally every parliament since the invention of the internet to that point had dealt with the problem by deleting everything from the last government and starting over. Patches, changes, new apps, refactoring, new features. We hit the deadline. Now can we pay down the tech debt? Yes we can. July 2015 through to now has been almost exclusively paying down the tech debt accrued from 2012 to June 2015. If you've been following along that means merging three separate publishing platforms into one without breaking anything and maybe fixing a few things along the way. I left in October and they're still going. But if they'd not taken it on at any of those crucial stages the project would've been scrapped and used as proof that modern development just isn't cut out for government work. Jaded Burnout fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 20:21
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I did interview at a lot of startups, maybe people thought this was actually plausible? Yeah my bad I misunderstood, was tired reading it.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:52
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Pollyanna posted:It's a React/Elixir thing, so I'm up for it. I'm more concerned about getting screwed over as an employee and what a contractor status means for paying taxes, health insurance, total compensation, etc. What kinds of questions should I ask re: that? Contracting is basically starting your own company where you sell business services to clients. This is different from an employer/employee relationship in many ways -- you have a lot more freedom, but you have a lot more responsibilities (and among those responsibilities is to stand up for yourself, since clients try to do unacceptable poo poo all the time). They're going to cut you a check and you're going to have to do all of the bookkeeping yourself regarding giving the government its tax money. You're also going to have to pay self-employment taxes. Hiring a bookkeeper/accountant will save you money and grief here. You can have whatever health insurance plan you want (* that you can actually get) because you'll be paying for it. You can have as much time off as you want, because you won't be getting paid for any it. You can work from wherever you want, because you'll be paying for your own equipment. And so on. It can be more money if you don't mind being a mercenary and having to drum up business. On the other hand, it can be a lot less compensation if you're bad at negotiating or let the company walk all over you. (Cautionary tale: I once worked with a contractor who was charging less per hour than I was making per hour in salary as a FTE. On top of that, they paid extra tax, their own health insurance, had no PTO, no 401k, nothing. They had far more technical experience than I did. Don't be that guy.)
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Mar 28, 2017 20:59
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There's a big difference between working for a contracting agency and being a consultant for yourself. Sounds like Pollyanna's thing is from a recruiter, so almost certainly an agency.
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Mar 28, 2017 21:12
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No idea on whether it's an individual thing or part of an agency, probably gonna have to ask the recruiter dude. If it's an agency, I'm game. If it's individual, less so, cause that's a lot of overhead...
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Mar 28, 2017 21:24
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I read the last couple of pages and this jumped out at me with how true it rings.mrmcd posted:My European team members showed me a slide deck they all got as part of a "be better at perf" training that basically boiled down to: "We know it seems gross and uncomfortable and so horribly American to write long documents praising yourself, but it's ok, learn to ignore it. Promo and calibration committees won't be able to accurately assess you if you write vague accomplishments in the passive voice." I am from (almost eastern) europe and writing self-praise does definitely feel disgusting and weird. 
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Mar 28, 2017 22:16
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I do wonder how you're supposed to do a globally-calibrated (i.e. you get the same evaluation for the same skill/impact regardless of where you work) perf without either requiring self-evals to be explicit about everything they accomplished, or perf evaluators to do a ton of research to get context on what the self-eval actually means in terms of impact. If you only use perf evaluators that have context on your accomplishments, then your "cell" is going to get miscalibrated compared to other "cells" in the company. I guess what I'm saying is, how would you solve this?
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Mar 28, 2017 22:41
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I do wonder how you're supposed to do a globally-calibrated (i.e. you get the same evaluation for the same skill/impact regardless of where you work) perf without either requiring self-evals to be explicit about everything they accomplished, or perf evaluators to do a ton of research to get context on what the self-eval actually means in terms of impact. If you only use perf evaluators that have context on your accomplishments, then your "cell" is going to get miscalibrated compared to other "cells" in the company. Google has already solved this. Release projects like mad then drop support as soon as possible.
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Mar 28, 2017 23:22
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I do wonder how you're supposed to do a globally-calibrated (i.e. you get the same evaluation for the same skill/impact regardless of where you work) perf without either requiring self-evals to be explicit about everything they accomplished, or perf evaluators to do a ton of research to get context on what the self-eval actually means in terms of impact. If you only use perf evaluators that have context on your accomplishments, then your "cell" is going to get miscalibrated compared to other "cells" in the company. Set standards and then calibrate across relatively small groups, say several hundred engineers, and select outliers to calibrate against groups. I know Google does the former, I'm not certain they do the later. In theory will rating plays into promo it shouldn't be a deciding factor and Google is more concerned with promo than rating. For perf that is targeted for promotion, you do have to be explicit because the evaluators don't know your work and aren't expected to do research outside of what you provide. This is why they explicitly tell engineers outside the US to adapt to American expectations and claim credit for what you did because its likely that the promotion committee will be mostly Americans.
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Mar 29, 2017 00:17
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Anyone work in Berlin (or Germany in general)? I'm planning on moving there later this year and my German isn't up to a business level. Are there tech companies that conduct their business in English or am I going to be better off looking for remote / freelance work?
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Mar 29, 2017 16:02
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Makeout Patrol posted:Anyone work in Berlin (or Germany in general)? I'm planning on moving there later this year and my German isn't up to a business level. Are there tech companies that conduct their business in English or am I going to be better off looking for remote / freelance work? I work with people from Berlin a lot. They always seem to want everything planned out way in advance in meticulous detail, not sure if that's a cultural thing or if I'm working with a waterfall 2006 cult. They mostly speak English, but I think they prefer German internally.
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Mar 29, 2017 16:49
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Wuh oh, recruiter dude wanted a word version of my resume. Sorry man, not happening. Not very high hopes for the rest of the process now, but we'll see. Is there a good resume template out there? LinkedIn PDFs are kinda dinky apparently.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:41
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Pollyanna posted:Wuh oh, recruiter dude wanted a word version of my resume. Sorry man, not happening. Not very high hopes for the rest of the process now, but we'll see. I think I use resume-cls or similar to format my TeX document.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:46
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I like the Google Docs resume templates, Swiss and Serif in particular. I use the Serif template for my own resume.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:46
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I distribute my résumé in the lambda calculus along w/ a compiler that I wrote. If they can't figure it out that's their problem tbh.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:47
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Pollyanna posted:Wuh oh, recruiter dude wanted a word version of my resume. Sorry man, not happening. Not very high hopes for the rest of the process now, but we'll see. What's the deal with a Word version of a resume? When I had to drop one somewhere Google Docs was more than happy to produce docx and pdf versions of it. 
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Mar 29, 2017 22:11
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Zamujasa posted:What's the deal with a Word version of a resume? When I had to drop one somewhere Google Docs was more than happy to produce docx and pdf versions of it. Word documents are easily editable. Can't believe I didn't think of writing my resume in latex. Might as well learn it now.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:13
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Zamujasa posted:What's the deal with a Word version of a resume? When I had to drop one somewhere Google Docs was more than happy to produce docx and pdf versions of it. Word documents are code for "reviewer will replace your contact info with their own, and add skills and experience to your resume that you don't actually have." I use a LaTeX resume that I only distribute in PDF format, but I've still shown up to interviews and been shown a badly copy-and-pasted hackjob that the recruiter sent in rather than my nice, pretty resume. Always bring hardcopies of your resume to interviews, folks.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:36
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People added JavaScript Expert instead of just Javascript to mine once lol I saw it reposted online and laughed
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Mar 29, 2017 22:38
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So about a year ago I was "promoted in name only". They didn't have any cash to give me so instead they gave me an extra package of options. I followed up on it today after getting an email about them. Everything was in line except for my options from last year. They didn't vest until 2027. They expired 2026. I got it squared away, but it gives a whole new meaning to options are as worthless as toilet paper 99% of the time.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:40
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If promoted in name only didn't let you know you were getting hosed over, getting options that vest or grant in or over 10 years should have.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:48
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Pollyanna posted:Wuh oh, recruiter dude wanted a word version of my resume. Sorry man, not happening. Not very high hopes for the rest of the process now, but we'll see. I only send PDF versions of resumes built in Illustrator (why because it's fun and they look good with a little bit of effort). When they ask for word, I say that's the only version I make available. (they only want it to parse into a DB) What I've found most effective with resumes is the same thing for self-reviews. Keep a list of "what cool things I did today". 80% will be every day tasks, but from that you'll be able to bullet point out what actually was a good thing. I take that then put in some jokes to see if recruiters, hiring managers or the person for whom I'm working actually read it.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:54
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I used the output from StackOverflow's timeline thing this time around, but I also mostly applied over SO, so  but my rate of application to callback on SO wasn't very good. Maybe they get a lot of spam or maybe my resume sucks rear end IDK.geeves posted:I take that then put in some jokes to see if recruiters, hiring managers or the person for whom I'm working actually read it. Like what?
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Mar 30, 2017 18:15
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geeves posted:
It's a fantastic way to prepare for interviews. I really can't stress this enough. I also condensed it into two sections: what new problem did I solve and what problem did I solve that we keep seeing but thought about/attempted to fix in a new way. Working with a poo poo-ton of external web services made the second one provide some very good talking points in interviews.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:38
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Had that phone screen today. Recruiter clarified that it was in fact a 2-year contract through his own company (some Genericorp-sounding name) but I'd be handling the taxes, getting my own benefits, etc. I told him that my contracting rate would be $150/hr or more, and I'd be taking a hit otherwise. The conversation basically ended right there.  Did I ask for too much? I worked out the numbers, and that seems to be about 2x~3x what I make as a salaried employee at my current job.EDIT: My math may have been wrong. Whoops. Probably good to get a base number on this anyway, though.
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Mar 31, 2017 02:57
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Much better to err high than low, honestly. Plenty more jobs where that one came from. And I don't think you were that far off. $150/hour, 40 hours/week with no holidays, sick days, or vacation days is about $310k/year, which is probably around 2.5-3x what a salaried dev would be making with your experience level, depending on where they live and who they work for.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:04
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I thought the standard was closer to 1.5x? The main costs are paying both sides of FICA, healthcare and other insurance, and the lose of vacation and those don't seem like they'd add up to $50k much less $100k+.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:00
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I understood it as 2-3x if you're doing true freelance stuff, like week to week you may or may not have a client. A two year contract gives you a bit more stability and you don't have to cover for a week off between clients. I've not been through the maths though.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:47
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Destroyenator posted:I understood it as 2-3x if you're doing true freelance stuff, like week to week you may or may not have a client. A two year contract gives you a bit more stability and you don't have to cover for a week off between clients. I've not been through the maths though. You'll still want a bit more for employment tax, healthcare, etc though. But yeah, a long term client like that is basically just a job with known end date.
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Mar 31, 2017 13:14
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So I could use some advice. We have developers in-house working on (mostly) big and complicated stuff and we also use offshore developers working on (mostly) more minor changes in order to free up the in-house people to work on those big and complicated projects. The offshore devs are contracted through an agency and are thus are constantly changing - any time someone skills up enough to be more good than harm, they get taken off and moved to other clients. The offshore people are grouped into teams, and we have one of our in-house team leads act as the team lead for those offshore teams - code reviews, technical analysis, sign-off is part of that responsibility. Nobody in-house is happy with this, largely because we feel that any time we train someone up they get taken away. So, it's just a chore. Among team leads, all of us feel like the correct thing to do would be to hire a large number of less-than-junior devs (interns, or maybe code academy types), distribute one or two to each internal team, and then we will happily train them and hopefully get them up to speed quickly. This would probably be cost neutral compared with offshore, would hopefully yield a few solid developers, and would in general lead to higher quality output. The cons of this are that it would be disruptive - skilling up new people will definitely mean a productivity hit for each team, filling our intern pipeline would take some time and require substantial interviewing effort. Among management, the thing being suggested is we change the current system and have one of our team leads handle all of the offshore teams and no in-house team, as maybe then that person would be able to see ways to improve performance since they have a more comprehensive view and might be able to more efficiently handle problems that come up. The cons of this are that the offshore teams will still rotate talent, the lead will likely wind up in a position where they don't care about the people they're supposed to be leading as a result, and in general it seems weird to devote resources to helping another company get better employees which we will not get to benefit from. I'm the team lead for one of these teams, and I'm being considered for the overall offshore lead role. On the one hand, it would be a step up and an opportunity to take on a larger leadership role in the company, establish myself as a person who can work well with teams globally, and generally, if I don't gently caress it up, be a good career move that is in line with my long term goals. On the other hand, I don't think it's the best idea - it may work a little bit, but I think there are better strategies that would provide more benefit to the company as a whole. So anyone with experience want to chime in here? Are there other options we aren't seeing that have worked for other people? And anyone had experience in a role similar to the one I'm being considered for? metztli fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 14:13
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Pollyanna posted:Had that phone screen today. Recruiter clarified that it was in fact a 2-year contract through his own company (some Genericorp-sounding name) but I'd be handling the taxes, getting my own benefits, etc. I told him that my contracting rate would be $150/hr or more, and I'd be taking a hit otherwise. The conversation basically ended right there. When I review my budgets at $BIG_COMPANY, approximately 1/3rd of a project's budget goes to direct labor. The other 2/3rds goes to indirect (overhead, benefits, contracts, travel, your share of company IT and janitorial, etc.) and a built-in profit margin of 8-10%. A dev making $150k is approximately $75/hr of direct labor, meaning that it costs the company about $225/hr out of the funds for a particular program. My general rule of thumb when consulting on a long term project is to charge an hourly rate twice what your direct labor rate would be as a salaried worker. If you're making $150k a year, an hourly rate of $150/hr is reasonable, as it is 50% lower than what it would cost that company for a salaried worker with benefits ($225/hr). Roughly half of what you make is going to go to taxes, and then you need to figure benefits on top of that, so charge more than twice the DL rate if consulting is your only business (or accept that you're making less per year in exchange for the If you have a short-deadline, high-pressure contract dumped in your lap, though, charge more. I've gone 4x my salaried hourly rate for one-shot contracts for organizations that have grabbed me out of the blue and need an evaluation of ABC running under Linux on XYZ within the next five days for an upcoming VC meeting...
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Mar 31, 2017 14:24
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Seems like any and all benefits and overhead would be on my own, and neither the client company not the subcontractor/recruiter company would give me anything other than a flat hourly rate. I don't think I'd feel comfortable enough in that situation to have accepted the job anyway. Oh well, at least people are actually looking for Elixir devs now.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:37
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