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It also gives you a great answer and reason for it to last 6-12 months.
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Jan 21, 2018 16:34
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Pollyanna posted:The idea of having to clock out to pee and eat is weird and bullshit and I don't like it so I sure as hell hope that's not the case. I don't believe this is a realistic concern. I've never heard of places tracking by the minute except at call-centers and other slave-labor jobs. Some contracting jobs ask you to track your time, but that's like at the end of the day I say "I spent 30 minutes on project X and 6.5 hours on project Y and 1 hour on clerical work" and if I'm off by 15 minutes (or 30 or 60, really) nobody cares much. Extraordinarily awful workplaces exist, but when you come into the job search expecting them you're setting yourself up for failure. Like, there was a story on the "Ask a Manager" blog once about an office where the top 5% performers were paraded around the office and then given checks for $500 and the bottom 5% were paraded around and made to wear dunce caps. That's awful, but if you go into a job interview and try to suss out if this workplace has the same system you'll come off as some kind of weirdo and you'll waste time that could be used for important questions like "what's the health-care plan like?"
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Jan 21, 2018 16:38
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The questions I'd be asking interviewing these days would be around team staffing, codebase quality, quarterly roadmaps for the relevant business units, because it's *that* poo poo that really hurts when it goes bad with no hope of recovery, even things like lovely managers are secondary if if it's being driven into the ground from the top. The number of times I've taken a job in the past without even asking what the team size was seems nonsensical to me now.
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Jan 21, 2018 16:46
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Pollyanna posted:That is one of the concerns, yeah. Whether or not it's a well structured environment depends on if/when I go see it, but it still wouldn't be permanent and I'm not sure I'm cool with that. The big things going for it are 1. tech stack that I'm interested in 2. job that isn't dependent on finding customers that may or may not even exist. It's more money than usual for me, but so was the last one... Just apply at the goddamn MBTA if you want to solve interesting problems and work for the state.
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Jan 21, 2018 17:29
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OK I'm all about helping people as much as possible but Pollyanna it might be time to take a break from posting in this thread. Based on your posting for the last long while you seem to be falling into a habit of using advice from this thread in place of your own research, judgement, and experience. Asking other people's opinion is a good way to sense check your own decisions and explore options, but SA is not an oracle and we can't make your decisions for you. I've done the same thing in the past because, lacking a good internal compass for the matter, it's easier to have someone else take the responsibility. The problem is that there's a limited number of decisions we're really able to help with, so much of it is down to you, or down to the behaviour of people even you haven't spoken to yet, let alone us. "Look before you leap" is good, but most problems you're not going to be able to foresee. Sometimes you've gotta do some critical thinking, look into your heart, make the best decision you can, and jump.
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Jan 21, 2018 17:46
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Alright, alright, I get it. I'll figure this out myself.
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Jan 21, 2018 17:55
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Mniot posted:I don't believe this is a realistic concern. I've never heard of places tracking by the minute except at call-centers and other slave-labor jobs. Some contracting jobs ask you to track your time, but that's like at the end of the day I say "I spent 30 minutes on project X and 6.5 hours on project Y and 1 hour on clerical work" and if I'm off by 15 minutes (or 30 or 60, really) nobody cares much. I've mentioned this before but my ex was an engineer at Ratheon, and they had to fill out timesheets to the nearest 1/10th hour on a daily basis. (6 minute increments.) And yes restrooms and filling out the time sheets themselves were accounted for. This was the requirements for a military contract.
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Jan 21, 2018 19:03
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Anyone have any reading recommendations or opinions on what quality product management looks like and how that flows into dev team level planning? All the PMs I've dealt with have been not good and I want to see if it is me, the orgs I deal with, or the function itself.
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Jan 21, 2018 19:33
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2nd Rate Poster posted:All the PMs I've dealt with have been not good and I want to see if it is me, the orgs I deal with, or the function itself. This may come off as arrogant or obnoxious but I haven't ever worked with a good PM. Not even passably good, to be honest. It's a hard role in many organizations and for me there has never been a balance between technical enough, assertive enough with respect to pushing for decisions to be made on both the business side and our side, and being an efficient communicator. I feel like this is a pretty big problem in the industry though.
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Jan 21, 2018 19:40
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This may come off as arrogant or obnoxious but I haven't ever worked with a good PM. Not even passably good, to be honest. It's a hard role in many organizations and for me there has never been a balance between technical enough, assertive enough with respect to pushing for decisions to be made on both the business side and our side, and being an efficient communicator. I feel like this is a pretty big problem in the industry though. I’ve worked with one fantastic PM in my career, then my project shut down (successfully; it had run its course). He has “technical enough”, “assertive enough”, and “efficient enough” in spades. We were in a team with a superlative director, and basically everything we did had a clear purpose, concrete goal, reasonable timeline, and flexibility for when poo poo hit the fan with: our partnerships, people took vacation, stuff was harder than expected, or people switched teams. Miss that team. Facebook, though so I still get to say hi from time to time. Oh, and also, I had an awful PM at reddit who didn’t know poo poo about the tech, community, appropriate scope, or priority of features. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 21, 2018 |
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Jan 21, 2018 20:44
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I've worked with 2 good ones and 4 or 5 absolute poo poo ones. The good ones were good because, they hit most of the criteria below: Their work: - included mocks of UI, the exact text they wanted to appear in warnings or whatever else - had clear, logical and reasonably comprehensive acceptance criteria - used terminology consistently - ex: coupon everywhere instead of coupon in some places, voucher in others, discount in others, etc. - didn't put half-baked stories in the sprint - kept the backlog prioritized - understood that a good idea for a feature is not enough - they have to put in the work to flesh it out When working with devs: - described outcomes rather than implementations/stayed in their lane - provided context on why a particular story was good, who the audience was, and basically providing context - collaborated with engineering when things needed to be tweaked - understood what technical debt is and that it's worth paying down - always notified us if any of the acceptance criteria changed for a work in progress, and discussed it with us if it could potentially blow up the story - got back to dev quickly if questions came up mid-sprint/met their commitments/gave very fast feedback - didn't whine that something they thought was easy was estimated above their hope - didn't try to strong-arm us into overcommitting In general: - were actually creative and informed about best practices/what the competitive landscape looked like - understood the value of experiments and metrics, and how to start small with a PoC and build up on success rather than wasting resources on building out poo poo that hadn't been proven - weren't personally invested in a specific experiment working out, but rather in the best experiment working out The bad ones were all bad in their own way. My two worst ones were the guy who kept on blowing up every. loving. meeting with brainstorming and would get pissy if you told him to knock it off, and the guy who gave super vague requirements ("I want a thing to show up asking the user if it's them or their parents who are gonna pay") and then would get really lovely about being asked to provide more info, and who would yell at you when you failed to read his mind ("I wanted the modal thing, not the loving inline thing!").
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Jan 21, 2018 23:27
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Hmm. I'm actually transitioning into doing some PM work at work (mainly eng work though). Anyone got suggestions for reading or watching material?
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Jan 21, 2018 23:49
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2nd Rate Poster posted:Anyone have any reading recommendations or opinions on what quality product management looks like and how that flows into dev team level planning? This isn’t a direct answer but I enjoyed this post: An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage. It is long af otherwise I’d demand that everyone I work with read it. (I’m a dev not a PM, so maybe it’s full of poo poo, I guess I wouldn’t necessarily know.)
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Jan 22, 2018 03:08
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Hmm. I'm actually transitioning into doing some PM work at work (mainly eng work though). Anyone got suggestions for reading or watching material? https://speakerdeck.com/rooreynolds/good-product-management Actually this entire thread: https://twitter.com/kjvalentine/status/953815519622176768
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Jan 22, 2018 08:23
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Neat, thanks.
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Jan 22, 2018 10:07
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Pollyanna posted:Supposedly it's a requirement but I'll be damned if I understand how local government works. They're probably not legally allowed to hire people at market salaries, but there's always a contractor budget that was probably intended to be used for short-term work like you'd want a contractor/consultant for. Alternatively, they might be required to have open bidding for hourly rates for projects that they expect to end eventually.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:07
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Not sure how it is in the US but in the UK government it's much harder to hire permies than contractors because budget and headcount are different. Budget means money spent this year, headcount means civil servants which means long careers and pensions and hiring procedures and a different set of reports up the chain. Hiring a contractor takes 3-6 days, hiring a civil servant takes 3-6 months.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:19
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I would be willing to take a 2-3 year contract and deal with the details of contract work for local government if it was for tech that I enjoy and a product that I'm interested in. This assumes that 1. they're interested in hiring me 2. the work environment is good 3. the deal is fair, so let's cross our fingers. I wonder how local government is affected by a federal government shutdown, though... Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 22, 2018 |
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Jan 22, 2018 16:27
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Hughlander posted:I've mentioned this before but my ex was an engineer at Ratheon, and they had to fill out timesheets to the nearest 1/10th hour on a daily basis. (6 minute increments.) And yes restrooms and filling out the time sheets themselves were accounted for. I worked at Lockheed around 2008 and had those exact same "requirements". You had to use this poorly-coded web page and they'd send emails asking you to fill it out at the end of each day but you only had to do it before 9am Monday of the next week. I had three regular meetings each week, so at 4pm every Friday I'd write out something like code:
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Jan 23, 2018 04:41
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Jaded Burnout posted:https://speakerdeck.com/rooreynolds/good-product-management The one saying he'll "drop many thoughts tomorrow" and then never responding is about my experience with product managers yeah
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Jan 23, 2018 08:55
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Cirofren posted:The one saying he'll "drop many thoughts tomorrow" and then never responding is about my experience with product managers yeah nice
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Jan 23, 2018 08:59
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Hughlander posted:I've mentioned this before but my ex was an engineer at Ratheon, and they had to fill out timesheets to the nearest 1/10th hour on a daily basis. (6 minute increments.) And yes restrooms and filling out the time sheets themselves were accounted for. i did timesheets as a contractor and came up with one timesheet that looked good and then just copied that and changed the date for the next couple of years. if you get caught doing that and you're really working the 40 hours, you should probably look for another job because the people who hired you have mental issues.
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Jan 23, 2018 14:39
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My last job also required us to fill out hours 'n poo poo, though it wasn't how we got paid - it was just for tracking how much work got done on what projects. I also did the copy-the-past-timesheet thing with that one (with weekly edits), and it was never an issue cause it was all true. 
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Jan 23, 2018 15:00
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This was similar to my experience at Lockheed as well, although our contract only required us to track time in 15 minute intervals. All my poopin' time and talking with coworkers time and reading the forums time was still charged to the contract and nobody ever questioned my timesheets.
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Jan 23, 2018 15:19
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Seems like someone needs to disrupt the timesheet industry. I'm thinking neural receptors that can measure levels of hyper-focus hours per day and charge based on that.
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Jan 23, 2018 15:35
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Seems like someone needs to disrupt the timesheet industry. I'm thinking neural receptors that can measure levels of hyper-focus hours per day and charge based on that.
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Jan 23, 2018 15:39
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:We measure your employee's efficiency down to the second with deep learning and blockchain. ThoughtCoin The block chain allocated transactions based on whether someone exhibits Good Think.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:44
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We are looking to disrupt and become the leader in trash and the trash industry by leveraging AWS, machine learning/NLP, and blockchain. We are currently dependent on angel and VC funding and are in our exploratory phase for finding a market. If you sign on now you get to be employee #3 and get a whole 0.5% equity! I get the other 99.5%.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:51
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The problem IMO with timesheeting software is that the decision to use one or another is predetermined by the high level contracts with the hiring agencies and such, the actual software is irrelevant to the decision since most places aren't seeking it out on its own.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:52
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leper khan posted:ThoughtCoin Well, there goes humanity. I hope you are happy.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:53
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CoinCoin, a blockchain for blockchains.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:54
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Pollyanna posted:CoinCoin, a blockchain for blockchains. I know life isn't going great for you, but that's no reason to destroy the world.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:59
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Jaded Burnout posted:The problem IMO with timesheeting software is that the decision to use one or another is predetermined by the high level contracts with the hiring agencies and such, the actual software is irrelevant to the decision since most places aren't seeking it out on its own. The problem with {any business software} is that the decision to use one or another is predetermined by {people who are completely separate from the ones who end up using it}
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Jan 23, 2018 17:16
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Cirofren posted:The one saying he'll "drop many thoughts tomorrow" and then never responding is about my experience with product managers yeah So busy they have to deprioritize or completely drop non-essential action items? Sounds about right.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:57
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vonnegutt posted:The problem with {any business software} is that the decision to use one or another is predetermined by {people who are completely separate from the ones who end up using it} Agreed, but in this specific case it's also bundled as part of a larger and (to them) more important business decision so there's no point in trying to compete on quality or features.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:59
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Seems like someone needs to disrupt the timesheet industry. I'm thinking neural receptors that can measure levels of hyper-focus hours per day and charge based on that. excuse me that’s ableist how dare you /sf On a serious note though, I read this recently: https://jasminecollinsfiction.wordpress.com/2018/01/19/over-reliance-on-the-zone-as-an-adhd-creative/ I bet a number of other tech workers would resonate with this.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:40
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pokeyman posted:This isn’t a direct answer but I enjoyed this post: An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage. It is long af otherwise I’d demand that everyone I work with read it. (I’m a dev not a PM, so maybe it’s full of poo poo, I guess I wouldn’t necessarily know.) This is a really great article, thank you for sharing it.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:57
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:excuse me that’s ableist how dare you /sf I keep quoting things in this article with "yep" and "yep" and "hits too close to home" so I'll just delete them all and say "yes, this is incredibly good and incredibly relevant to me". My therapist pointed out that I've been so successful in school environments (even in lovely classes with bad professors) because even though it's clear that I have a genuine interest in tech, I need the combination of that and even the tiniest spark of organization or structure to help me in my crusade against my ADHD and light a huge fire under my rear end, giving me something to run with. Even PoC stuff at work gets me going but the downtime and waiting between tickets and features absolutely slaughters me and trying to pick a personal project just overwhelms the poo poo out of me. It's not that I don't want to do the work or I'm lazy, it's that my brain struggles and goes in all different directions without a bit of focus. Stimulation doesn't help. I should read less SA and Tweet less.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:25
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I used to spend several hours a day scrolling horrible opinions on Facebook. Several attempts at staying logged-out failed for me until I blocked it in my hosts file. 
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Jan 23, 2018 19:30
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vonnegutt posted:The problem with {any business software} is that the decision to use one or another is predetermined by {people who are completely separate from the ones who end up using it}
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Jan 24, 2018 03:05
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