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HoboMan
Nov 4, 2010

so i had a retention bonus set up with my company thats supposed to pay out in a few months. so we got purchased by another company who are now offering me a different retention bonus and i don't know if they expect me to get both or are unaware of the first one

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dragon enthusiast
Jan 1, 2010
even though the onsite seemed to go really well its still really nerve wracking waiting for the phone call

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

dragon enthusiast posted:

even though the onsite seemed to go really well its still really nerve wracking waiting for the phone call
burn off that nervous energy by hitting some job boards and sending out more resumes

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

FMguru posted:

burn off that nervous energy by masturbating like a caged, cocaine-crazed macaque

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

FMguru posted:

burn off that nervous energy by hitting some job boards and sending out more resumes

I mean this is a fine activity even when you are not waiting for an interview result

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Sapozhnik posted:

I mean this is a fine activity even when you are not waiting for an interview result
my theory of jobhunting is that you should keep sending out resumes and going on interviews right up until the moment your new job hands you your access badge

ive known multiple people whove have a job offer implode at the last moment and theyre back at square one of the job hunt because they shut down all their mid-process leads because they thought theyd landed their job and were done with it

Shaman Linavi
Apr 3, 2012

FMguru posted:

ive known multiple people whove have a job offer implode at the last moment and theyre back at square one of the job hunt because they shut down all their mid-process leads because they thought theyd landed their job and were done with it

this is the situation i put myself in since i stopped sending out resumes once i got selection notice from the feds (and then the offer rescind notice 2 months ago)
not going to make that horrible mistake again

edit: also make sure you apply through different channels. i was instantly rejected from a corporate site but applying to the same posting on Snack Overflow got me an interview request the same day

Shaman Linavi fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 3, 2018

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

some random recruiter posted:

Hi raminasi,

I am working with Citadel to find talented engineers to join their team in New York. Based on your LinkedIn profile, I think your experience would be of interest to the team.

This group is re-architecting Citadel’s entire post-trade processing system - Citadel is responsible for about 35% of the average daily volume of retail equity shares traded in the US. In this role, you will migrate the platform from WPF and .NET to modern JavaScript frameworks. JavaScript experience is not needed.

"we're migrating all our poo poo from .net to javascript for, uh, some reason. and in case you were wondering, nobody will have any idea what they're doing."

TimWinter
Mar 30, 2015

https://timsthebomb.com
To be fair, if I needed help re-architecting a post-trade processing system I would also consider JS experience a mark against.

Pendragon
Jun 18, 2003

HE'S WATCHING YOU
Citadel must be throwing around money like candy because I'm seeing recruiters hit me up as well for a different office

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

MononcQc posted:

If you are working on an actual remote team (with more than half of the employees also being remote), then you are not losing on chances to learn, you're probably getting more of them: technical discussions and decisions are likely all discussed and documented through some long-standing medium, whether through mailing list archives, issues, or whatever. Frankly, a good distributed team can operate a bit like an open source project would.

(emphasis mine)

congratulations, mononqc, you have located the problem

mentorship opportunities in a distributed team are similar to suffering through an open source irc channel. maybe you'll learn something. maybe you won't.

edit: remote employees are a weakness. a fully distributed team is just a second rate team, which will never accomplish what they could together. i'm sorry your time at heroku scarred you this way

Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 00:32 on May 4, 2018

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

ADINSX posted:

Don't hate the player, hate the game. Happy hour isn't all about work, but being that work is the only thing everyone is guaranteed to have in common, it comes up.

i hate drinking with my coworkers, and moreover, religious prohibitions on alcohol are so common that it's an exclusionary venue

i make a very, very big deal out of daily lunches with team members and others

it is an opportunity to get out of the office and socialize with much, much less exclusion or "boys club" atmosphere

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

HoboMan posted:

so i had a retention bonus set up with my company thats supposed to pay out in a few months. so we got purchased by another company who are now offering me a different retention bonus and i don't know if they expect me to get both or are unaware of the first one

that seems like something you should clarify asap

leaving it to the last minute, or dancing around the question, just makes it very likely you will get screwed

jony neuemonic
Nov 13, 2009

lined up another interview for next week, place sounds like the best kind of boring although i may have to touch a javascript. maybe this time i won't get annihilated at the whiteboard.

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

(emphasis mine)

congratulations, mononqc, you have located the problem

mentorship opportunities in a distributed team are similar to suffering through an open source irc channel. maybe you'll learn something. maybe you won't.

edit: remote employees are a weakness. a fully distributed team is just a second rate team, which will never accomplish what they could together. i'm sorry your time at heroku scarred you this way

I've learned more from online communities and open source projects than I have from most face-to-face interactions put together hands down. If you work in any kind of office that looks somewhat open plan, where folks have headphones to help focus and you ping them on chat or send e-mails rather than getting up and walking to their part of the office just to ask a question, congratulations, you have just replicated most of the remote experience except you commute to do it and likely are in a high cost of living area for it.

This is my 4th remote job now. Heroku was the third. I liked remote before, and I still like remote after. There are some teams or places where the work culture just isn't amenable to it, and there are places where it works fine. I can easily imagine an extroverted person who loves facetime hating the remote experience, but I tend to like being in calm and silence to focus on whatever, and being around larger crowds tires me out.

Any time I visit coworkers on-site, I end up doing nearly no work whatsoever and I am 3-4 times more tired than any other day anyway, and that's usually without even requiring a commute because I get a hotel nearby.

I get you consider remote teams to be second rate. I simply disagree and would think that a team for which it's impossible to work remotely probably has implicit communication patterns and power dynamics that turn out to be counterproductive in the long run, informally institutionalized within a circle of a few long-standing employees that just walk around and somehow turn out having untraceable impact on a fuckton of projects just because they hold some perceived authority or get to talk louder.

The teams and companies I worked at where alignment, processes and decisions were the clearest and best explained always turned out to be those that were remote-friendliest because this was the only way things could actually work fine.

The good thing though is that working remotely with someone like you on the team is probably what would make it a second rate experience for me as well, so as long as we don't get to work together, I bet we'll be fine.

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

i hate drinking with my coworkers, and moreover, religious prohibitions on alcohol are so common that it's an exclusionary venue

i make a very, very big deal out of daily lunches with team members and others

it is an opportunity to get out of the office and socialize with much, much less exclusion or "boys club" atmosphere

unless the company's footing the bill, lunches still require people to put money in to get social capital out, which unfortunately disproportionately affects the people who could use it the most, i.e. interns and juniors. this isn't a dismissal, i just think about how to square this particular circle a lot and i haven't come up with any answers.

DELETE CASCADE
Oct 25, 2017

i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003

raminasi posted:

unless the company's footing the bill, lunches still require people to put money in to get social capital out, which unfortunately disproportionately affects the people who could use it the most, i.e. interns and juniors. this isn't a dismissal, i just think about how to square this particular circle a lot and i haven't come up with any answers.

Uh I deal with this one all the time and the answer is actually really simple. If you go out to lunch with a coworker who is much more junior and clearly makes less money, then you insist on paying the bill. If you think this will make the other party feel bad, just tell them you want the credit card points and you’ll be expensing it as a mentoring activity, even if you can’t actually expense it. In that case just eat the cost, you can afford it

DELETE CASCADE
Oct 25, 2017

i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003
If it’s a group lunch that can’t be reimbursed then the seniors/leads/managers rotate the duty of picking up the tab. You’re not gonna split across tons of credit cards are you? This person then messages everyone with the amount they owe so they can settle up via Venmo or whatever. Whoops, looks like they conveniently forgot to message the intern

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

DELETE CASCADE posted:

If it’s a group lunch that can’t be reimbursed then the seniors/leads/managers rotate the duty of picking up the tab. You’re not gonna split across tons of credit cards are you? This person then messages everyone with the amount they owe so they can settle up via Venmo or whatever. Whoops, looks like they conveniently forgot to message the intern

i'm not sure exactly how to fit this into our existing routine, because we're not doing sit-down every day. what we do is go somewhere casual, pick something up, and take it back to the office to eat together. like "today we're doing sandwiches" or "today we're doing the greek truck." so putting it all one one card is actually more complicated than everyone standing in line and ordering and paying for their own thing.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

raminasi posted:

unless the company's footing the bill, lunches still require people to put money in to get social capital out, which unfortunately disproportionately affects the people who could use it the most, i.e. interns and juniors. this isn't a dismissal, i just think about how to square this particular circle a lot and i haven't come up with any answers.

i know how much the interns and juniors make and i am not worried about their ability to buy lunch haha

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

MononcQc posted:

I get you consider remote teams to be second rate. I simply disagree and would think that a team for which it's impossible to work remotely probably has implicit communication patterns and power dynamics that turn out to be counterproductive in the long run, informally institutionalized within a circle of a few long-standing employees that just walk around and somehow turn out having untraceable impact on a fuckton of projects just because they hold some perceived authority or get to talk louder.

this is how actual human cultures work. implicit communication. organic formation of working groups. informal institutions. overlapping circles. walking and talking.

you are a smart dude but when you describe a working office with rich, vibrant communication among its parts you sound like a robot describing an ant colony

MononcQc posted:

The teams and companies I worked at where alignment, processes and decisions were the clearest and best explained always turned out to be those that were remote-friendliest because this was the only way things could actually work fine.

i don't want my day job to be run like an apache project. clarity doesn't come for free

open source is hell. it's important work and i'm sure nearly all of us are engaged to some extent, but it is the most miserable part of my job

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

i know how much the interns and juniors make and i am not worried about their ability to buy lunch haha

comp is only half of the equation though. do you know who's got huge debt loads? who's supporting sick parents? maybe you do, idk, but i don't in my case and i don't feel comfortable making that judgment, especially when it's only the juniors (and the hard-core vegetarian) who bring their own lunch every day.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

raminasi posted:

comp is only half of the equation though. do you know who's got huge debt loads? who's supporting sick parents? maybe you do, idk, but i don't in my case and i don't feel comfortable making that judgment, especially when it's only the juniors (and the hard-core vegetarian) who bring their own lunch every day.

i try to build and support an inclusive environment but that does not extend to paying for the whole ticket

(for the hardcore vegetarians, there are vegetarian restaurants. and they are good.)

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


I can believe interns in america bring their own lunch to work since they're not getting paid in the first place.

If you really want to piss them off though, steal their glassware after they've washed it up.

Waroduce
Aug 5, 2008
Solutions manager

Integrated solutions manager

Integrated products manager

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

attn: long care post on communication patterns

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

this is how actual human cultures work. implicit communication. organic formation of working groups. informal institutions. overlapping circles. walking and talking.

you are a smart dude but when you describe a working office with rich, vibrant communication among its parts you sound like a robot describing an ant colony

This is how they work informally, but this is also how they break down over a long period of time.

The most informal level is nobody writes down anything aside from code. They talk it over whatever open space isle of desks they have and come to an agreement and move forwards. Done deal. Maybe they have a few post-it notes, But this has a scaling limit, and does not let you remember things for very long.

The moment you have enough devs to fill more than 1-2 rooms, these patterns start to break down. You get the same issues because not everyone is in the same room for the same conversations; employee X who is kind of essential to this has moved on to the platform team, on which you are not, and so they need to be dragged into every meeting even if theyre not relevant in case their help is required, or someone has to ping them and ask them to come (or leave their team's room to go meet them).
The points of contention in collaborative efforts in tech tend to break down according to the communication channels you have.

So you move on to the next levels of communication patterns, those that are more durable, because they make it simpler to work with all the folks in a growing org. Does your organisation not do retrospectives, postmortems, track projects on tools where people can see what happen, use bug trackers, CC important decisions to their managers, write onboarding documentation for new hires, procedures for operations and so on? If so, congratulations, you've dropped informal natural communications in favor of a more permanent kind. It starts to feel more enterprisey, and it is.

Do you go the level above and schedule meetings in calendars and then have someone take down notes of what happens and e-mail them to folks afterwards? You don't for some meetings probably (because who cares we're 3 devs on the team just loving do it and add a comment to the ticket) but do for others, in all likelihood.

Those are all traces that you leave through more official media in order that institutional knowledge doesn't get lost. Now imagine if instead of asking someone to take notes for a meeting to e-mail it later and then half the time forgetting to do it, you had a trace of these interactions: chat logs, e-mail threads, and the same reliance on all the other tools, etc.

My anecdotal experience is that teams that are super-local and never adopt these tools are great at moving fast locally, but whenever you try to make larger changes that requires the coordination of 3-4 teams, it's suddenly a total shitshow of nothing working right. Either you need to re-shape the org to fit the project better, and some people get the short stick of acting as communication emissaries that end up sitting in 18 hours of meeting a week across all teams to make sure they repeat the same info to everyone every day, or you change how you work.

Basically, my whole point is that as organisations grow and need to gain more permanence, they tend to automatically gravitate towards tooling that are remote-friendly. If you've been to a place where people draw a diagram on a whiteboard, then take a picture and e-mail it to themselves for archival purpose, that's a good place to improve tooling! Get one of these boards that tracks pens and automatically records the drawing session and images and it's better. Get something like a microsoft surface, or any drawing software that accepts working with a tablet (just project it on a bigger screen, which you should have anyway if you are doing code walks or just collectively check your progress in whatever tool you have), and chances are you now get collaborative whiteboard sessions across physical sites out of the box.

An organisation that is remote-friendly is also likely to be friendlier to cross-team projects of a larger size because they'll have similar communication needs.

If you do neither, you'll be almost guaranteed to land into this thing where nobody understands why this simple project that would have taken their team 3 weeks is now on its 6th quarter of allotted time and no closer to being delivered. The answer is almost never that the tech was bad, and always that communication patterns broke down.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

i don't want my day job to be run like an apache project. clarity doesn't come for free

open source is hell. it's important work and i'm sure nearly all of us are engaged to some extent, but it is the most miserable part of my job

I've never worked on an Apache project so I can't compare the experience there.

I'm working at a company that's a bit of the opposite right now. They are so married to local tribes that there are 3-4 key dudes that need to be dragged by the arm across campus buildings for every significant meetings because after 20 years in this company, they still only have oral communication patterns. Nothing gets written down unless it's been done by the technical writing department, or the project tracking because they check time budgets with it.

I've had to sit on meetings/discussions where 15 minutes breaks were taken as people were looking for that one person they need to ask a question to right now because none of them use chat nor use e-mail with any semblance of care in the world. They have the tools, but do not use them. It has been 100% impossible to work remotely with them because they're just not amenable to that, and I ended up pairing with most of their satellite offices because they feel the same problems with the main one, but are able to communicate with each other.

This organisation basically ended up having the big central set of offices that work on some kinds of projects, and all the satellite ones that collaborate on other ones, because it's been essentially impossible to get them to cross the gap and talk to each other well, mostly because the central one has a one-way communication channel where they receive information but let none out.

---

TL:DR; lax informal communication patterns are super fun but only work great for small local projects and teams. The moment you need to work on larger systems or products with bigger teams, you tend to naturally get more permanent communication media and those are usually good for remote anyway.

Valeyard
Mar 30, 2012


Grimey Drawer
I'm still fuxmonf deliberating over whether to accept this offer for a 12.5% increase

Valeyard fucked around with this message at 19:23 on May 4, 2018

Valeyard
Mar 30, 2012


Grimey Drawer
Due to pension match differences, id be losing out on over 2k just from decreased pensions

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

qhat posted:

I can believe interns in america bring their own lunch to work since they're not getting paid in the first place.

interns referred to in this thread would be paid ones

quite decently paid in some cases too

TimWinter
Mar 30, 2015

https://timsthebomb.com
Have you tried using slack

Shaman Linavi
Apr 3, 2012

updated on the Glider.AI coding assessment thing:
i didn't need a webcam after all but i did need to install a chrome extension so they could record my screen.
overall it was just as blah as any other online coding challenge thing and it seemed to run a lot slower, probably because of all the ~*~AI~*~ running in the background to judge me

in other interview news i accidentally hung up on or got disconnected during a phone interview but at least they called back!

HoboMan
Nov 4, 2010

i just did a c# test where all of the questions were multiple choice and revolved around stuff like remembering what order the arguments go method calls

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


"We're looking for a developer with experience in Java/JavaScript and Nodej.s"

Lol

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


I've got an online test thing with Amazon. The last online test I did elsewhere kicked my rear end so I'm a bit nervous about this one.

HoboMan
Nov 4, 2010

qhat posted:

I've got an online test thing with Amazon. The last online test I did elsewhere kicked my rear end so I'm a bit nervous about this one.

last amazon test i took i bombed it super loving hard because the instructions were unclear and didn't document the behavior of the predefined classes i had to work with so i resorted to guessing and compiling on the web portal but it was rate limited to running my poo poo once every 5 minutes.
with fifteen minutes left on the two hour test i realized you could scroll the instructions section and there was all the info on everything there just offscreen lol

Shaman Linavi
Apr 3, 2012

i guess if theres one thing i should be thankful for its that i have spent so much time over the years doing poo poo on HackerRank and LeetCode that i never have any problems with these online assessment things.
but put me in front of a white board....



HoboMan posted:

i just did a c# test where all of the questions were multiple choice and revolved around stuff like remembering what order the arguments go method calls

was that on something like Pluralsight? i took some "Pluralsight IQ" assessment things and it was all multiple choice about methods and keywords and poo poo

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

MononcQc posted:

This organisation basically ended up having the big central set of offices that work on some kinds of projects, and all the satellite ones that collaborate on other ones, because it's been essentially impossible to get them to cross the gap and talk to each other well, mostly because the central one has a one-way communication channel where they receive information but let none out.

this describes every successful business organization in the history of mankind. like this is the very heart of the theory of the firm

if you are willing to formalize most communication, and have most workers off site, you don't need to form a firm at all

if you are willing to put up with endless bullshit and leaving elaborate paper records, there is no reason not to subcontract everything

MononcQc posted:

My anecdotal experience is that teams that are super-local and never adopt these tools are great at moving fast locally, but whenever you try to make larger changes that requires the coordination of 3-4 teams, it's suddenly a total shitshow of nothing working right. Either you need to re-shape the org to fit the project better, and some people get the short stick of acting as communication emissaries that end up sitting in 18 hours of meeting a week across all teams to make sure they repeat the same info to everyone every day, or you change how you work.

my company has several skyscrapers in manhattan alone. this is not cheap, and it is not accidental

if i need to find someone, i go find that person

p.s. "communication emissaries" are more commonly known as "managers"

MononcQc posted:

TL:DR; lax informal communication patterns are super fun but only work great for small local projects and teams. The moment you need to work on larger systems or products with bigger teams, you tend to naturally get more permanent communication media and those are usually good for remote anyway.

process and formal communication are not free; they're not a tickbox on "we're a big boy company now"

they're expensive, stultifying choices that can make your business into a kafka-esque hellscape where it takes six weeks to communicate the new documents to overseas parties for committee sign-off

there is some correct amount of process in between "none" and "SOX-compliant ISO 9000 implementation of ITIL" but having huge numbers of remote workers and attempting to split software development across multiple contintents is definitely not the sweet spot

Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 02:24 on May 5, 2018

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

MononcQc posted:

I've had to sit on meetings/discussions where 15 minutes breaks were taken as people were looking for that one person they need to ask a question to right now because none of them use chat nor use e-mail with any semblance of care in the world. They have the tools, but do not use them. It has been 100% impossible to work remotely with them because they're just not amenable to that, and I ended up pairing with most of their satellite offices because they feel the same problems with the main one, but are able to communicate with each other.

lol i just noticed this bolded bit (emphasis mine)

inside your own loving employer you have discovered that "remote" is a weakness and source of difficulty, and you still want to try and spin this?

pro tip: the reason they are not "using" the "tools" is that they are the wrong tools. what they want and need is face to face time with the right people, not a slack session with a man half a world away

you are the problem, not the solution

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
this seems like a really salient point to inject conway's law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

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jony neuemonic
Nov 13, 2009

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

this seems like a really salient point to inject conway's law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

heh, i’ve seen teams fall into this hard when they decide to do microservices. the boundary of each service ends up being “whatever doesn’t require me to talk to my coworkers”

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