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Rudest Buddhist posted:Hey Gang, taking over as lead on a medium-large-ish legacy project today. I was thinking of diagramming everything out in UML in order to get a better understanding of how the thing is built so I can start seeing where to make changes. My thinking is I don't want to go brazenly making changes without having a decent understanding of how this thing works. Working Effectively with Legacy Code is genuinely good. You have a ball of knots. Drawing arrows everywhere strings touch won't help you untangle it. You have to grab strand at a time and untie or cut the knots as you go. That book is a bunch of techniques for cutting knots.
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Jul 19, 2017 03:23
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Touching on the non-English workplace posts from a few pages back, I'm having some real regrets about my current position. Six months ago, I took a job to move to Bangkok doing Microsoft and Hadoop B.I. for an American-run company. My interviews were in English with a variety of nationalities, and I was assured over and over again that English is the work language. What I found was that while that's true for almost all divisions (Web development, Mobile development, etc.), it is absolutely not true of my own. I am one of 2 non-Thai speakers in a 90 person Data team, and the only non-Thai speaker in about a 100 foot radius of my workspace/my direct team. This is especially obvious as we have the dreaded open concept office, and I am literally smack dab in the middle of gossip I can't understand 10 hours a day. While meetings are always held in English for my benefit, they tend to run through many sidebars in Thai, and the end result has been that I'm falling way behind in my work. Changes are made to systems I'm working on or need to know about, and I only find out if I directly ask coworkers what's going on, or if it's major enough to warrant an e-mail. While learning the system I was put in charge of, I have to interrupt raucous conversations every time I had a question, and the result is I've tended to spin my wheels in situations where I'd normally be rapidly asking small questions. I have to stay in Bangkok for another 6 months (surgeries I can't afford in the states), but I'm having trouble getting my rear end to work in the morning. I brought up some of my concerns with my (Thai) manager, and she moved me between teams still within Data, and put me on a loving performance improvement plan, which has solved none of the actual issues. I'm thinking about asking for a transfer out of data, but that's where my entire career has been - I haven't touched any kind of non-SQL/MDX programming since college. Anybody been in a similar situation? They invested a lot to bring me here, but I'm nervous about pushing for a major change like that, especially when my performance has been going down hill. Edit: I don't begrudge my coworkers for speaking Thai - I took a job in Thailand after all. I just wish I hadn't been lured here with the promise of an English speaking workplace. Loutre fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Jul 19, 2017 |
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Jul 19, 2017 09:40
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Sounds like they lied to you and your company has poo poo policies or lovely enforcement. IMO, work conversations in an officially English-speaking workplace by policy need to be English even if even all but one person who needs to know what's going on is fluent in some other language. If it's not by policy then they need to not promise that it's an English speaking workplace.Loutre posted:Edit: I don't begrudge my coworkers for speaking Thai - I took a job in Thailand after all. I just wish I hadn't been lured here with the promise of an English speaking workplace.
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Jul 19, 2017 11:02
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Loutre posted:Touching on the non-English workplace posts from a few pages back, I'm having some real regrets about my current position. Six months ago, I took a job to move to Bangkok doing Microsoft and Hadoop B.I. for an American-run company. Maybe it sounds a bit crazy, but how about putting effort into learning Thai? I can't think of a better opportunity to learn it that this. Maybe your company will sponsor tutoring. It's hard to learn, but it's kinda neat to know, and it's not like Thai and Thailand is a tiny niche. You could perhaps scoot a bit over the very-hard-to-learn writing system, and focus on the actual speaking, through tutoring of course.
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Jul 19, 2017 12:00
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I started Thai lessons as soon as I got here - it's just not going fast enough for me to understand the brutally fast pace of fluent chat. I even started a club at work to exchange language lessons with Thais. If I knew I could handle this for say, another year, I think it would pay off. Unfortunately I'm reaching a breaking point in handling the work in this environment. It sucks because I actually love living here, and do want to become fluent.
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Jul 19, 2017 12:24
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I suppose this varies from company to company, but I'm curious about looking for a job where you work remotely full time. Do companies typically pay a wage 'typical' for where they're physically located, or do they usually scale it back a bit? I live in a very poor city, and while I do decently well for myself lately I've been very interested in trying to find a full time remote job for some SV company. Would be sweet if I could double my salary and keep my current living situation. I suppose all I can really do is interview and see what they offer, but I thought I'd see if any of you guys have experience with this. I graduated 5 years ago and have been steadily employed ever since, if that matters.
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Jul 19, 2017 14:57
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return0 posted:At least in some places, this is mostly not true. I maintain you cannot "fail" a lunch unless you do something extremely bad, that would likely get you fired or cautioned if you were actually working anyway. You're being evaluated for team fit and personality. Soft skills that don't get surfaced in a tech interview. Making sure that despite (potentially) being technically qualified, you won't be a corrosive drag on the team morale.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:57
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Thanks for the feedback guys. Picked up a copy of Working Effectively with Legacy Code and I'll take this one chunk at a time.
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Jul 19, 2017 19:16
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Rudest Buddhist posted:Thanks for the feedback guys. Picked up a copy of Working Effectively with Legacy Code and I'll take this one chunk at a time. My only advice is to keep the Pareto principle in mind. Even in unarchitected legacy code there's still gonna be just a few functions that everything relies on. You can often identify these important functions by their size. (If you're working in ecommerce, one of those functions will be named "checkout()".)
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Jul 19, 2017 19:47
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Sab669 posted:I suppose this varies from company to company, but I'm curious about looking for a job where you work remotely full time. Do companies typically pay a wage 'typical' for where they're physically located, or do they usually scale it back a bit? Remote first workplaces tend to pay just south of SF or NYC salaries (like 80%-100%). Some places try to cost of living you down, but they can gently caress off and usually indicate the place is poo poo IMHO (see gitlab for example).
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Jul 19, 2017 20:06
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Companies with remote workers are subject to market forces same as everyone else, and while they've increased their supply pool by accepting remote positions it's still a heck of a market to hire anyone in, and their ability and willingness to pay will depend on their demand and how much money they have. So "varies from company to company" while true is probably less relevant than "varies with head office location and sub-industry". If people doing the specific work you do are widely available across the country but maybe tapped out locally they're going to be able to undercut you. If it's a relatively rare skillset they're usually fighting over then they'll probably relish the opportunity to pay full price. SV places tend to have lots of cash and lots of competition for staff so I fully believe VOTE YES ON 69's claim of 80-100% of their normal local salaries. If you pick a large one they might also have a fixed or banded salary policy that doesn't distinguish between on-site and remote. lifg posted:(If you're working in ecommerce, one of those functions will be named "checkout()".) And a god object called `Product`.
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Jul 19, 2017 20:27
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The company I'm at is hiring for full time remotes on SO, which I only know about because I got ads for it while using SO (heh), and we advertise local rates on there. Caveat is that it's basically for a front end developer, which is pretty common/fungible nowdays, I guess?
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Jul 19, 2017 20:33
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Pixelboy posted:You're being evaluated for team fit and personality. Soft skills that don't get surfaced in a tech interview. Making sure that despite (potentially) being technically qualified, you won't be a corrosive drag on the team morale. I understand the notion, just stating that where I work it isn't considered. Our onsite consists of four tech interviews and a lunch. The lunch attendees do not come to the hiring decision meeting, unless the candidate makes such an enormous faux pas it torpedos the standard process.
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Jul 19, 2017 21:06
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return0 posted:The lunch attendees do not come to the hiring decision meeting, unless the candidate makes such an enormous faux pas it torpedos the standard process. I think that was the missing detail. If they come to the decision meeting then of course what happens at lunch matters. That said, this seems pretty strange. Why does the lunch attendee not come to the meeting? You've got so little information to work with when making a hiring decision that I can't see why you'd throw some of it away.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:04
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Mniot posted:That said, this seems pretty strange. Why does the lunch attendee not come to the meeting? You've got so little information to work with when making a hiring decision that I can't see why you'd throw some of it away. I'm not privy to the design decisions behind the hiring process. But, as the lunch period is unstructured conversation, requesting feedback from the "interviewer", especially a yea/nay hiring opinion, is far more likely to create decisions based on unconscious biases rather than something more objective. With the other interviews, you can point to "I asked them to do X, they were unable to come up with a solution even after I provided Y and Z hints". With the lunch interview, what're you going to say, "they had trouble making small talk?" They just got out of 3+ hours' worth of programming interviews, of course they're gonna have trouble making small talk. Most people, most software devs even, don't behave like goons in real life. Sure, if someone jumps onto the table, drops trou, and waggles their rear end in your face, you can create an exception. But instituting a rule that the lunch interviewer should give feedback is opening you up to all kinds of influences that you don't want to have subverting your hiring process. It causes more harm than good, basically. At least, that's my guess.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:51
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm not privy to the design decisions behind the hiring process. But, as the lunch period is unstructured conversation, requesting feedback from the "interviewer", especially a yea/nay hiring opinion, is far more likely to create decisions based on unconscious biases rather than something more objective. With the other interviews, you can point to "I asked them to do X, they were unable to come up with a solution even after I provided Y and Z hints". With the lunch interview, what're you going to say, "they had trouble making small talk?" They just got out of 3+ hours' worth of programming interviews, of course they're gonna have trouble making small talk. Then why bother doing the lunch part at all? Just do the 4 interviews and skip the lunch if you think it is so corrupt and unreliable.
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Jul 20, 2017 02:17
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Free lunch though.
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Jul 20, 2017 02:20
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Yeah why bother feeding the fucktards spending all day interviewing at you dumb company. Make em show a little fortitude.
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Jul 20, 2017 02:35
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Unless you're looking to hire people desperate for any job they can get their hands on, the candidate is evaluating the company just as much as the company is evaluating the candidate.
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Jul 20, 2017 02:41
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Skandranon posted:Then why bother doing the lunch part at all? Just do the 4 interviews and skip the lunch if you think it is so corrupt and unreliable. It's an opportunity for the interviewee to ask questions and hang out with potential future coworkers in a somewhat relaxed environment
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Jul 20, 2017 02:41
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Skandranon posted:Then why bother doing the lunch part at all? Just do the 4 interviews and skip the lunch if you think it is so corrupt and unreliable. Yes having a candidate from 10AM to 4PM without feeding them will: A) lead them to have a good opinion of you. B) ensure they are doing their best and not crashing from low blood sugar. Clearly you cracked the tech code.
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Jul 20, 2017 02:46
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During my last lunch interview, the other people there carried on a continuous conversation with each other with no places for me to butt in and never asked me anything. Also the manager seemed like a dingus. Then we took a tour around some of the places their software runs on campus, but did not tour the actual work area. Then they offered me less than I made ten years ago. It was an easy No!
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Jul 20, 2017 03:13
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My interview with lunch went well. The lunch was with my potential boss, and it was obviously judged, but casual, and more a chance for me to ask questions than to sell myself. It was nice, and I got to skip the lines.
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Jul 20, 2017 03:58
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I had two lunch interviews when I was last shopping around for jobs. Both times were with an engineer and we had polite conversation and I got to ask a few questions about the company. Then they asked if I wanted the last 20 minutes to just chill and decompress by myself after a morning of interviewing and I said "OH GOD YES PLEASE"
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Jul 20, 2017 04:22
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I've had a mixed bag with lunch at interviews. I appreciate the "lunch with random" approach, assuming the random is sociable. The worst interview lunch I had was with an entire team, at a rectangular table, and I was seated in a corner seat across from the team's new manager and next to some other non-technical member of the team. I had no way to listen in to my potential future coworkers' conversation or join in with it other than by awkwardly yelling down the table.
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Jul 20, 2017 05:06
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Skandranon posted:Then why bother doing the lunch part at all? Just do the 4 interviews and skip the lunch if you think it is so corrupt and unreliable. we do the lunch meeting mostly for the benefit of the candidate. they can ask questions free of worrying about how it will impact their evaluation and they can possibly decide to bail on the process if they think the position would be a bad fit for them
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Jul 20, 2017 20:15
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Similar to the other answers, we do a lunch interview to: - be nice to the candidate so they want to work here - let them ask questions and evaluate us - feed the candidate so they perform better in the afternoon sessions - frame the experience positively in their mind, so when they talk about it with their programmer friends they say good things Maybe some other places do it differently but that's the take at my place.
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Jul 20, 2017 20:18
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return0 posted:Similar to the other answers, we do a lunch interview to: Yes, feeding the candidate so their brain doesn't crash from low blood sugar is nice. 
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Jul 20, 2017 21:29
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And I got the job. Laid off from healthcare job in May, got another healthcare job in June. I guess healthcare is what I do now.
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Jul 21, 2017 01:17
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lifg posted:And I got the job. Laid off from healthcare job in May, got another healthcare job in June. I guess healthcare is what I do now. What kind of work do you do? I'm in Boston, and healthcare is a huge component of our market, yet I haven't really seen much compelling crossover between dev and healthcare. Maybe I'm just missing it.
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Jul 21, 2017 01:22
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Pollyanna posted:What kind of work do you do? I'm in Boston, and healthcare is a huge component of our market, yet I haven't really seen much compelling crossover between dev and healthcare. Maybe I'm just missing it. You may have heard of Electronic Medical Records; making doctors irate and some idiots in Wisconsin rich. Not to mention various business systems, embedded devices, all the things that go boop and make squiggly lines.
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Jul 21, 2017 01:40
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Pollyanna posted:What kind of work do you do? I'm in Boston, and healthcare is a huge component of our market, yet I haven't really seen much compelling crossover between dev and healthcare. Maybe I'm just missing it. It's AthenaHealth, which is all about being healthcare into the 21st century. I don't know any specifics. But dev work in healthcare is huge. Everyone's trying to modernize these ancient, lumbering processes. My boss at my last job said that he'd be happy if healthcare just got up the state of the art of the 90s.
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Jul 21, 2017 01:54
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PCjr sidecar posted:You may have heard of Electronic Medical Records; making doctors irate and some idiots in Wisconsin rich. I've heard that said companies and products are hellish to work with, and I actually interviewed with one of said companies years back and was kind of put off by how old and backwards it was to work with. It would be...interesting to work with getting people off those systems. quote:Not to mention various business systems, embedded devices, all the things that go boop and make squiggly lines. That poo poo rules though. I used to do bioinformatics and had a BME degree, but never leveraged it into a health job...mostly cause I got burned out on biology/medicine. lifg posted:It's AthenaHealth, which is all about being healthcare into the 21st century. I don't know any specifics. AthenaHealth I've heard is pretty good. I think they've reached out before, but that was a while ago. Maybe I'll go looking specifically for health care places, if they're in need of devs I'm up for the challenge. It'll depend a lot on work conditions and how un-stupid the dev process is tho (honestly though I'm reaching the point where it's probably better to just deal with the stupidity and keep at something for a long time).
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Jul 21, 2017 02:06
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Pollyanna posted:I'm in Boston, and healthcare is a huge component of our market, yet I haven't really seen much compelling crossover between dev and healthcare. Maybe I'm just missing it. AthenaHealth handles billing between practices and insurance companies. This is apparently a nightmare since you have to do (practice billing software)x(insurance plan)x(state laws). Imprivata makes single-sign-on for hospitals, so your doctor's Windows session follows them around the hospital and they can log in without touching the computer (reduces nosocomial infections). Vecna makes a system for signing in (instead of a clipboard) and also an app so you can send your doctor infected-dick pics from home. Those are just ones I've interviewed with, but I feel like all of those are compelling?
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Jul 21, 2017 03:22
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Mniot posted:AthenaHealth handles billing between practices and insurance companies. This is apparently a nightmare since you have to do (practice billing software)x(insurance plan)x(state laws). And Optum is the tech arm of UnitedHealth Group, and provides a place for UHG to stash their profits. They have an office in Fenway.
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Jul 21, 2017 04:00
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Pollyanna posted:AthenaHealth I've heard is pretty good. I think they've reached out before, but that was a while ago. Maybe I'll go looking specifically for health care places, if they're in need of devs I'm up for the challenge. It'll depend a lot on work conditions and how un-stupid the dev process is tho (honestly though I'm reaching the point where it's probably better to just deal with the stupidity and keep at something for a long time). I thought I could put up with stupid too - the problem is that if you look at a company and think immediately "oh boy, something stupid is going on," you don't know the understand the depths. Stupidity is fractal - you may think you immediately grasp how stupid a company process is, but as you zoom in and gain more understanding, you'll learn more and more how stupid something can be. I have seen things so stupid that I have seriously wondered whether or not the company I worked for was some kind of psychological experiment and questioned the nature of reality (although mental health leave is pretty sweet if you can swing it.) Don't work for stupid companies as a FTE for extended periods of time or you will go crazy.
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Jul 21, 2017 05:24
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Or worse: stupid!
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Jul 21, 2017 07:20
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Being a contractor can by psychologically dangerous sometimes, the feeling that every day off has such a hefty price tag. Today's the first day I've had off this year, and only then because I was on the brink of losing it.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:13
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Oof, a company a recruiter floated by me has absolutely garbo reviews and ratings on Glassdoor. Something about poor management and high turnover. I'm wondering if recruiters are more commonly associated with companies and positions that are hard to fill cuz they suck so bad.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:15
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Pollyanna posted:Oof, a company a recruiter floated by me has absolutely garbo reviews and ratings on Glassdoor. Something about poor management and high turnover. I'm wondering if recruiters are more commonly associated with companies and positions that are hard to fill cuz they suck so bad. This is definitely a thing. Working with external recruiters is usually really bad.
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