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hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

qhat posted:

- Sales setting hard deadlines without any consultation because they oversold a product, and then blaming software for not delivering on time.

do you not have a product management team or are they the problem?

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big shtick energy
May 27, 2004


qhat posted:

Working at my current company has been a real eye opener, in the sense that every possible inefficiency a software firm can have exists. For example:

- Sales setting hard deadlines without any consultation because they oversold a product, and then blaming software for not delivering on time.
- QA overwhelmed because developers actively refuse to write unit tests, and then QA being blamed as a bottleneck in the release cycle.
- Infrastructure projects which should be high priority, such as CI and dependency management, never happen because it does not contribute directly to the fastest possible next release. Instead developers do stupid poo poo like checking binaries into git, using recursive submodules (this is just so inherently dumb it's not worth elaborating on), manually copying around binaries on disk just to get their project to build, etc.

All of these things honestly come down to incompetent management. I'll be making sure to ask questions related to these things next time I go for an interview.

recursive submodules? like a git repo somehow having itself as a sub module?

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
artifacts that have dependencies on each other either directly or transitively.

Workaday Wizard
Oct 23, 2009

by Pragmatica

this would make me *very* grumpy

do you have access to the ceo? just walk in there and tell them they’re poo poo is garbage

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


Shinku ABOOKEN posted:

this would make me *very* grumpy

do you have access to the ceo? just walk in there and tell them they’re poo poo is garbage

one (1) crazy hack to be unemployed that housewives absolutely hate

Workaday Wizard
Oct 23, 2009

by Pragmatica

Pollyanna posted:

one (1) crazy hack to be unemployed that housewives absolutely hate

qhat is already quitting tho.

or am i thinking of someone else?

PIZZA.BAT
Nov 12, 2016


:cheers:


qhat posted:

using recursive submodules (this is just so inherently dumb it's not worth elaborating on),

i didn't even know this was possible hahahaha

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


got an offer today for a startup in the area that has an interesting product but ive also reached out to companies nearby that sound pretty cool too but am in the early stages with

whats the protocol for this? tell them thank you so much for the offer, but ive got a couple other companies im interested in and can you give me time to speak to them?

also what does "with xx%" mean? e.g. "compensation is $XXk with xx%"

and how do i know i should negotiate for a higher comp

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Pollyanna posted:

got an offer today for a startup in the area that has an interesting product but ive also reached out to companies nearby that sound pretty cool too but am in the early stages with

whats the protocol for this? tell them thank you so much for the offer, but ive got a couple other companies im interested in and can you give me time to speak to them?

also what does "with xx%" mean? e.g. "compensation is $XXk with xx%"

and how do i know i should negotiate for a higher comp

bonus target probably

as a startup i bet as a company you won't hit bonus targets

feel free to ask, you have nothing to fear by pestering HR - the hiring manager wants you

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


DuckConference posted:

recursive submodules? like a git repo somehow having itself as a sub module?

Not necessarily, it's more about checking out submodules recursively. It's possible to get yourself into a loop and git then proceeds to check out submodules until you run out of disk space.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


hobbesmaster posted:

bonus target probably

as a startup i bet as a company you won't hit bonus targets

feel free to ask, you have nothing to fear by pestering HR - the hiring manager wants you

email sent, wish me luckkkkkk

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Shinku ABOOKEN posted:

this would make me *very* grumpy

do you have access to the ceo? just walk in there and tell them they’re poo poo is garbage

Yes. Me and my boss have for the past several months been banging on about everything to him and unfortunately it usually falls on deaf ears. To him the company has been doing okay for the past 15 years so no need to change anything.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


hobbesmaster posted:

do you not have a product management team or are they the problem?

Nope, we don't have that. We have one director guy who sits at the top and very rarely pushes back against sales.

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

My job is similar to that, where best practices and safe choices are thrown out the door in favor of speed and corner cuts. It's bad.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

qhat posted:

- QA overwhelmed because developers actively refuse to write unit tests, and then QA being blamed as a bottleneck in the release cycle.

lol this is my favorite

i have worked so many places with this pattern

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
tbh i think buck-passing is a time honored tradition almost everywhere

The Leck
Feb 27, 2001

qhat posted:

- QA overwhelmed because developers actively refuse to write unit tests, and then QA being blamed as a bottleneck in the release cycle.
"but unit tests just slow down development because 1) you have to spend time to write them, then 2) you have to change them when the code behavior changes!" - my (thankfully former) architect and multiple team leads

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

NVIDIA at 6pm tomorrow and Apple at 5:30pm on Monday

My brains gonna be so fried before those
well the former didn't feel like a train wreck. we'll see what Monday holds

champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER


Notorious b.s.d. posted:

lol this is my favorite

i have worked so many places with this pattern

neighboring team has this issue

hell they just now hired a dude to do automatic testing and the specs they give him to test change every two weeks meaning he gets basically nothing meaningful done

edit: should have added they don’t tell him the spec is different it just suddenly shifts and the nothing works

champagne posting fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Feb 24, 2018

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

The Leck posted:

"but unit tests just slow down development because 1) you have to spend time to write them, then 2) you have to change them when the code behavior changes!" - my (thankfully former) architect and multiple team leads

if the behavior keeps changing so often writing tests is a major slowdown rather than a crucial safety net you might just be writing a prototype that's gonna be pushed in production.

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


qhat posted:

Yes. Me and my boss have for the past several months been banging on about everything to him and unfortunately it usually falls on deaf ears. To him the company has been doing okay for the past 15 years so no need to change anything.

Personally I have found that I can not work for a person who is both incompetent and thinks they're not. One job offer I declined mostly because the interview with the CEO convinced me that 1) he has a strong vision and will to execute it but 2) "bitcoin and blockchain are popular so we must try to use them".

I think there are poo poo aspects in every company and stuff or procedures that do not work well enough. Because you are immersed in the environment, you are mostly focused on what problems there are in your day to day experience. If everything was smooth sailing all the time, I would become suspicious because there is always a catch - either the poo poo has been externalised/outsourced somehow (i.e. the poo poo could surface out of the blue one day) or the company is busy resting on laurels (see Galapagos syndrome).

With that said, I think I'd jump ship as well if the company does not want to adapt industry standard practice, because in the long run it will be more stressful and you will lose out on valuable experience working and using industry standard software development practices. And besides, it should be a huge red flag if reasonable improvements to productivity and process are stonewalled like this.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


MononcQc posted:

if the behavior keeps changing so often writing tests is a major slowdown rather than a crucial safety net you might just be writing a prototype that's gonna be pushed in production.

Hey if it builds and it works on the few correct cases I put through it then what's the problem

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Penisface posted:

Personally I have found that I can not work for a person who is both incompetent and thinks they're not. One job offer I declined mostly because the interview with the CEO convinced me that 1) he has a strong vision and will to execute it but 2) "bitcoin and blockchain are popular so we must try to use them".

Lold at this because this describes my CEO perfectly. He randomly one day wanted to discuss a blockchain idea of his with me because of course an expert in SQL databases is also an expert in cryptographic ledgers.

dividertabs
Oct 1, 2004

I like most of the questions from that list but this one:

quote:

- what are the company's primary values? what characteristics are you looking for in a candidate in relation to those primary values?

translation: if they say 'uhhhhhhhhhh' here it's a red flag. if they throw gibberish at you it's not a red flag but it's not a good look either. this should get a human bean answer
is really strange to me. I don't see how it has any correlation with how much I'll enjoy a job. Amazon talks a lot about Leadership Principles but (in the org I worked in when I was there) any decision could be spun as following one of the principles, even if it was harmful to customers or to other teams. 'Customer obsession' sounds great but putting it on a list doesn't make it true.

I enjoy my current not-at-Amazon job but don't remember what's on the list of company values (I know there's an official list); if I was asked by a candidate today I'd say 'uhhhhhhhhhh.' I don't think that should be a red flag to candidates. I still get to build useful stuff, work with people smarter tham myself, and make deece figgies without stress.

FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

dividertabs posted:

I like most of the questions from that list but this one:

is really strange to me. I don't see how it has any correlation with how much I'll enjoy a job. Amazon talks a lot about Leadership Principles but (in the org I worked in when I was there) any decision could be spun as following one of the principles, even if it was harmful to customers or to other teams. 'Customer obsession' sounds great but putting it on a list doesn't make it true.

I enjoy my current not-at-Amazon job but don't remember what's on the list of company values (I know there's an official list); if I was asked by a candidate today I'd say 'uhhhhhhhhhh.' I don't think that should be a red flag to candidates. I still get to build useful stuff, work with people smarter tham myself, and make deece figgies without stress.

yeah for any company greater than 50-100 people the implementation of whatever values your company has are going to vary quite a bit team to team. I'd probably ask a list of questions like

"What are your team's primary values?"

"How much would you say those values are shared with other teams? leadership?"

"How often do you ignore those values?"

prisoner of waffles
May 8, 2007

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

MononcQc posted:

if the behavior keeps changing so often writing tests is a major slowdown rather than a crucial safety net you might just be writing a prototype that's gonna be pushed in production.

prototype to production is our culture, please do not shame

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

prisoner of waffles posted:

prototype to production is our culture, please do not shame

The MUMPSorceress
Jan 6, 2012


^SHTPSTS

Gary’s Answer

prisoner of waffles posted:

prototype to production is our culture, please do not shame

I wish anyone would ever give me time to prototype in my whole life but my experience so far in my career is that prototype to prod is a result of external pressures from people up or downstream

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

cis autodrag posted:

I wish anyone would ever give me time to prototype in my whole life but my experience so far in my career is that prototype to prod is a result of external pressures from people up or downstream

prototype to production is the industry norm hth

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
yeah people like to poo poo on programmers for being useless and never getting anything right etc etc but ultimately software development fuckups are political, not technological

a highly profitable gold rush market like software is gonna see investors demanding that it be piled into as fast as humanly possible, and preferably faster thanks

it's amazing that software works as well as it does tbh

why don't we build software the way that we build cars and houses gee idk maybe because there isn't a trillion loving dollars chasing 30% yoy returns constantly asking WHY ARENT YOU DONE BUILDING THIS RIGHT THE gently caress NOW in the automotive and construction industries

actually wait what am i saying that's exactly the situation with our current real estate hoarding and market cornering bubble so surprise surprise new construction is loving dogshit and everything to do with the regulatory and oversight process is deeply, nakedly corrupt

:capitalism:

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Sapozhnik posted:

it's amazing that software works as well as it does tbh

There are some modules of our main product where our active priority is to change as absolutely little as possible because any change at all has the potential to break the whole thing in extremely obtuse ways. This is the result of over a decade of bad inexperienced programmers implementing features in the most lazy way possible without any tests and all compounded with heavy unrealistic deadlines. There's a bunch of new features that sales keep asking for but that it would be utterly impossible to implement without completely rewriting the whole thing which I estimate to be about 3-6 months of effort. The CEO, who's not a software guy btw, actively refuses to approve of this though because "refactoring should only be done to speed up an algorithm" lol.

qhat fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Feb 25, 2018

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

Sapozhnik posted:

actually wait what am i saying that's exactly the situation with our current real estate hoarding and market cornering bubble so surprise surprise new construction is loving dogshit and everything to do with the regulatory and oversight process is deeply, nakedly corrupt

:capitalism:

fyi construction has always been bad, worse than now even. but you don't see most of that because it's long gone, and all that's left is the tiny fraction that was done well or that was fixed later on at great expense

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

cis autodrag posted:

I wish anyone would ever give me time to prototype in my whole life but my experience so far in my career is that prototype to prod is a result of external pressures from people up or downstream

the way I try to counter this kind of pressure is by figuring out what the big uncertain stuff I know too little about in the project, and what I feel confident about. The uncertain stuff is what I test in the prototype and take measures for (and probably write tests to even make sure it works). The stuff I'm more confident on, I half-rear end and make sure it's below acceptable when finishing the code. I try to couple that with frequent progress reports so nobody has too bad of a surprise.

So the ideal situation once the prototype is done is "we've got this thing that is just not good enough to go in prod, but the good news is we figured out the hard parts and can possibly keep them." Hopefully by then you get the time to extract that critical stuff (or rewrite it) and wrap it up with the rest of the code you should already be more comfortable writing.

I'm probably arguing that iterative development shouldn't be done with an end-to-end prototype that then gets improved, but with a uncertain-bits-first approach. If what you're the least certain about is whether customers will even want the product, then 'prototype to prod' may be entirely reasonable as an approach because that's the biggest risk to tackle and figure out at that point, but I think it's usually good to put a fatal flaw in the prototype that prevents it from being possible to make prod-ready without some big reorganization.

prisoner of waffles
May 8, 2007

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.
I like it. Your prototype exists to work out and reduce the risk of the most uncertain parts of the production version while containing flaws to make taking the prototype directly into production obviously risky.

KoRMaK
Jul 31, 2012



I held an interview where I asked the canidate to do a fizz buzz (lay off I'm new to being the interviewer), and he heard it as "two five". I felt insane wondering if I had actually said those two words as criteria


When I tried to clarify, he went "ohh!" And changed the five to "dud"

The well known programming interview whiteboard question "TwoDud"

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Not knowing about fizz buzz as a professional software engineer is grounds for immediate removal from the premises.

TimWinter
Mar 30, 2015

https://timsthebomb.com
Whenever interview questions come up, I use fizz buzz as a reference point that everyone should know.

No one knows it. It's been years of interviewing, years of talking with other interviewers about how to get better at it, years of trying to talk to interviewees about interview questions and how stumping people that don't know the modulus operator is stupid but a problem where you can talk through an approach is what I'm interested in-

and when asked "Have you heard of the interview question fizz buzz?" no one has ever answered "yes, of course".

akadajet
Sep 14, 2003

jizz buzz

The MUMPSorceress
Jan 6, 2012


^SHTPSTS

Gary’s Answer

akadajet posted:

jizz buzz

I like to call it *~jazz~*

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The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

qhat posted:

Not knowing about fizz buzz as a professional software engineer is grounds for immediate removal from the premises.

there's probably a lot of senior level people who haven't. if you started your career before interviewing became the pile of quiz-show bs that it is now and either stayed at the same place the whole time or are specialized enough that you don't have to play the trivia games that regular people do to be hired it's possible to have never heard of it.

i doubt people like carmack, torvalds or raymond chen ever had to care about fizz buzz.

The_Franz fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Feb 26, 2018

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