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Anyone have successful coping strategies for coping with stress? My usual coping mechanism is to work harder until I feel depressed, then switch it to scaling my effort back down until that doesn't happen -- rinse and repeat. This is a headache for me because besides driving me crazy for a period of time, it makes my productivity switch between "very effective" to "a week or two of slow progress"*. I'm almost at that low point now, yet have a hard deadline coming up really soon. Games aren't working. Help? * For reference, I have contributed almost 15x as much code in my current project as my coworker on it, but it comes in bursts.
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Mar 29, 2015 20:24
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Che Delilas posted:As has been discussed, the deadline is not your problem either. If your management has created a situation in which you are the bottleneck, it is their responsibility to plan around the fact that you are a single human being with a life and needs like sleep and food and free time and weekends. What if the board has created a situation in which I am the bottleneck?
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Mar 30, 2015 06:31
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Che Delilas posted:Ugh. I just discovered that the resume I've used to apply to a few jobs lately has the phrase "storing data in a the cloud" in it. Quite a the mistake, that is.
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Mar 30, 2015 23:28
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On the flip side, if you're enjoying your situation as a manager, that's worth a lot. There's a lot of risks and maybes in moving to a new city and hoping for management in 6 to 12 months if the company grows. Especially because it's growing. Hard decision. Could depend on how much you want to move, how risky you think it might be, how stable the business is, and whether you're willing to face the possibility that you end up not being a good fit – and get fired after moving, before your apartment lease is even close to done.
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May 13, 2015 09:44
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I suppose a good start might be to familiarize yourself with coreutils? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Core_Utilities --- In other news, I've just finished separating myself from one of the most toxic working relationships I've ever experienced, or even heard of secondhand. Sucks too, because it was one of the first jobs where I liked the work and the people a lot, and people liked me back.  Honestly don't have a clue what to do with my career now. I put in an honest effort and got burned, and I got burned hard. What's good?
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Jun 6, 2015 13:19
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Progressive JPEG posted:My last job was pretty terrible, though I now feel like it's just given me a better perspective on what to look out for in the future. And the stories I get from people still working there (for now) are pretty hilarious. Also you gotta dish out more than that, cmon! Hughlander posted:Stop and evaluate your life. Full stop. In the two and a half years I've been aware of you this feels like the third or fourth really bad break. (Not sure if android hell was crunchy roll or not). That's not remotely normal or healthy. Most engineers your age have far less number of job changes and from what I've seen are just happier. Basically, I'm looking for stability and a decent manager, and have been for a long time, but at this point I think my heuristics for determining what to look for are somewhat broken. So to restate my question in a different way, what signs should I be looking out for / how do I identify people/situations/companies that give me a favorable chance of settling down and just working for a couple of years?
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Jun 6, 2015 21:04
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kitten smoothie posted:Latest in my burnout saga: signed an offer and turned in my two weeks today. I'm #7 to bail out from my team in the last two months. Congrats! Any more details?
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Jun 27, 2015 03:34
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kitten smoothie posted:After some soul-searching I concluded I'm totally ok doing Android development work, and I am definitely ok with the paycheck that comes with being a competent Android developer. I'm just not cool with toxic work that happens to be Android development. Also, my gut tells me that the company you're describing is not unlike Adobe, for what it's worth.
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Jun 27, 2015 07:49
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Vulture Culture posted:Outside of weird niches, salaries differ a lot more by company than by particular technology. That said, a lot of mobile products are making a lot of money right now. On the hiring side, though, finding a competent Android developer seems a lot harder than finding a competent iOS developer, and they seem to like it a bit less. So I think there might be incentive for a lot of companies to pay more for Android devs, if they're desperate. I recall one dev (who didn't get hired) asking for 33% more than the salary cap at the time.
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Jun 27, 2015 18:27
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Vulture Culture posted:Sure, but technology-specific salaries are fleeting. By the time you see a high salary across the board in an industry and say to yourself, "wow, I've got to get in on this," it's probably too late to catch it on the upswing. I mean, I already spent three years doing Android, but both companies I did that at also underpaid the poo poo out of me, so I didn't actually know if there was a salary differential. I wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks to catch up, max. I started mobile around iOS3 and Android 1.6.
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Jun 28, 2015 18:23
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At a previous job where we had 'unlimited' vacation, I repeatedly deferred my travels for half a year because we were in perpetual crunch on account of deadlines. Deadlines which were so aggressive absolutely everyone involved agreed the deadline wouldn't be met. I was never *not* pressured to take vacation, especially after a coworker got dinged for (extenuating factors, but still). When I left that company, they of course didn't owe any liability for vacation, because "unlimited" means "zero except when we're feeling generous". I'd probably consider making 'unlimited vacation' an explicitly disqualifying factor when deciding whether to accept an tech industry job. Seems like yellow or red flag.
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Jul 1, 2015 19:36
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I find myself regretting signing my non-disparagement clause recently – I don't want to trash talk, but my fear of retribution for saying anything is weighing really heavily on me right now to the point I'm troubled even talking to my friends about it. I imagine not everyone has the same priorities, but I would probably drop that offer.
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Jul 4, 2015 20:53
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No Safe Word posted:If it's that hard to bite your tongue for a year then yeah I guess it'd be worth passing. I've had been subject to one and whenever it came up you just say "I can't talk about it". If you're particularly snarky you can make implications that get the point across because nobody's going to sue over that unless you're doing it to the head of legal of the company you're not supposed to disparage. I think one of the main ideas is that after a year you'll be over it enough that you won't say anything. I did anyway (tactfully of course). Going back to brosmike's issue, if they have that clause upfront, that's a bad sign for them. Do you trust the people you've talked to enough to believe it won't be much of an issue?
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Jul 6, 2015 17:54
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down with slavery posted:This gulf doesn't exist Besides skill, I think there are spectrums of caring about professionalism, prioritizing code quality, and critical thinking – not exhaustive, of course. I dealt with someone once who I rated very low on professionalism, prioritizing code quality, and critical thinking, but produced code quickly and had raw skills better than what I initially evaluated them at. ...but on the other hand, while they wrote code faster, made more visible progress, and could write almost anything they were asked to, they never did so without fundamentally destabilizing either the entire codebase or the entire subproject they were working on, so they were well-suited for producing demos but nothing they produced was ever close to production-quality. (Aside: I found myself at one point using timing of vacations – to be clear, not my vacation time – to write and land a major rewrite which was later praised for its dramatically improved performance and stability in a project...against their vehement opposition while they were in the office. This felt pretty dirty, and I've heard a similar situation instead caused an internal meltdown in another company.) Another person I worked with was really high on critical thinking, and freely adjusted and traded professionalism for code quality to meet a deadline. Another hit professionalism/quality/critical thinking but traded mental health for it in the process. Good luck evaluating any of this on a linear scale. Vulture Culture posted:These are not the inborn traits of a Programmer God, and while these skills can be mastered in an individual setting, they are best learned and fostered through team structures and dynamics that foster growth and personal development. Show me a team with a 10X Developer on it and I'll show you a broken team that doesn't know how to mentor or delegate. Sorry to relay anecdotes again, but I once found myself at ~15X in a project going by line count (after excluding all generated code and data files), and it was not really the result of realized or unrealized ability, but unhealthy human dynamics that were very poorly handled by everyone involved. That engineer could have been ridiculously useful in a different role but was instead grossly misplaced to their and that company's detriment. If everyone is a 1X to someone's 10X, then perhaps there's a systematic problem making a lot of people 1/10X. ProSlayer posted:There is also a need to distinguish between people who understand data structures very well, and those who can write good code. Also: those able to mentally model simple threading issues in their head. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jul 23, 2015 |
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Jul 23, 2015 19:52
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Jo posted:I haven't learned a new language in a while. Go seems like the new hotness, but I'm not overly keen on it. Julia is a possibility, but I'd really like a compiled language. Rust might be a good option, but something with slightly higher level constructs would be great. Learn Swift since it'll ship with Linux support when it gets open-sourced? 
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Aug 3, 2015 21:23
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If I have a hole of a couple of months in my resume due to bereavement, is it better to say so, or to omit the time period, or to list "contracting"?
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Aug 6, 2015 03:49
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Munkeymon posted:I don't think I'd want to work for/with people who'd look askance at an honest explanation of that. My question was more about do I put that upfront on the resume or leave it out, and (secondarily) if I leave it out, do I substitute "contracting" or not. It might be in poor taste to put "death in the family" as an entry on a resume, just sayin'.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:14
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kitten smoothie posted:Does anyone experienced go to hackathons? Or really, is it the sort of thing that anyone over 30 is going to feel welcome at? There's an event going on in my city soon and the organizer has been putting the full court press on me to attend. I organized a couple of hackathons before they were trendy in Silicon Valley. For hackathons with a small judging pool, judges often suck and use awful criteria (or a particularly forceful one pushes criteria tailored to their particular agenda) or are critically ignorant about the technology used. There's always at least one team which cheats by taking an ongoing project and adding a little bit of polish then presenting the entire whole as their hackathon project. The level of ageism is dependent on the location and the people who come; that's not a universal property of hackathons IMO. Going home and coming back sounds fine if the hackathon spans more than one night. Do it if you have your expenses covered and you like coding enough that you can treat it like a vacation. That said, out of all of the developers I was friends with back in college who participated in hackathons, I think there's only one who still goes, and a good number who went the other way and hate the idea.
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Sep 8, 2015 19:02
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Munkeymon posted:Huh, that describes my experience in my first job pretty well. Holy crap, that describes three out of my last five jobs.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:04
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piratepilates posted:With a .600 batting average I think it's time to think about if it's really the luck of the draw. 
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Sep 10, 2015 00:07
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Pollyanna posted:So how exactly do you schedule an interview, phone or in-person, during the work week? I can't imagine saying "hey, I'll be out from X to Y on Thursday, I've got an interview to go to" going over particularly well, and I'm worried I'll get caught if I do it in some random meeting room at work. I'd take a personal day or work from home, but I'm already in hot water for doing that too much for my manager's tastes, and I don't want to get fired before I'm hired elsewhere. Pollyanna posted:I've also started thinking about what I want to do for my next job. Something I really wanted to do during this job was to get more front-end experience (data viz, etc.), but unfortunately that front-end experience was Angular which I've subsequently sworn off ever working with (don't try and convince me otherwise). What kind of skills should I build as I progress in my career? Higher level skills like how to plan an application, how to refactor, how to write specs and documentation, and architecture and all that come to mind. I've got a bunch of books to read! Also, maybe I'll look into remote work, or consulting, or freelancing. Or, I dunno. Some sort of change. Pollyanna posted:He's also said that he's trying to balance giving me guidance on how to solve a problem vs. giving me harder and harder problems to solve on my own - but the guidance he gives me is really...well, almost brain-dead. He asks me a lot of questions after I look at code with him - "do you understand?", etc. - and I appreciate that he wants me to keep up with it, but I can't really do anything but go "yep" cause the things he asks me about are pretty straightforward, especially when it's about how functions work and what a particular controller does and all that. I can figure that out by staring at the code for a bit. That's not really want I want guidance on - it's more about things like what the code means in a larger context and how I should approach improving the code and all that. I don't know if he really gets that that's the kind of guidance I'm looking for. Pollyanna posted:It sounds like they think I'm too junior, and that it will take a considerable amount of time to "ramp me up" long enough for me to be useful. That...totally sucks, and I don't think I agree with it. Maybe he does mean well, and maybe I'm the real rear end in a top hat here - but I still don't really feel happy with where I am right now, and I don't know if the problem has been solved per se or if things will be okay even if it is solved. I guess it just comes down to bad luck. Also, holy poo poo at this being ultimately an issue of trust. Talk about a recurring theme in my life. Pollyanna posted:Also, Doctor w-rw-rw-, I only just now got the joke in your name  Pollyanna posted:zero, but I do not want to because 1. manager's already pissy about me working from home too much according to him (then again, if I'm leaving, might as well take what I can get) and 2. gently caress am I gonna do with vacation time? I wouldn't really do anything I wouldn't do on the weekend. I don't have kids or...people to go on vacations with...let's talk about something else 2. Walk or drive around, eat food (familiar or new), browse the internet, and distance yourself from stress? Taking zero vacations is not good.
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Sep 11, 2015 02:50
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Yep. Par for the course.
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Sep 14, 2015 00:39
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Pollyanna posted:No one is offended by a thank you email. Someone might get offended due to the lack of one, and whether you find that reasonable or not/a person worth working under, is up to you. This is just anecdata, a friend of mine (I don't want to name the team, but it was non-engineering) swore off tech companies completely when she quit Twitter (SF). It sounded really bad, but it is a big company. If you get an offer, it might be a good idea to talk to and get a good feel for whatever team you'd be joining.
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Sep 14, 2015 20:22
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Edit: nevermind
Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Sep 16, 2015 |
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Sep 16, 2015 06:27
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Pollyanna posted:If I can just get rid of the paranoia and worry over feeling like everything I do disappoints my manager, my job is pretty much perfectly fine otherwise.
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Sep 18, 2015 03:05
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pr0zac posted:Don't know where you've worked but you are getting screwed if you think this is even close to true. Seriously you're suggesting it's reasonable for people to take on more responsibility on the promise of potential benefit at some unknown point in the future? Anyone who takes on more work without more pay is getting taken advantage of. The only company I've worked at other than FB that even implemented performance reviews implemented them poorly, and the execs got super pissed at me for pressuring them for improvements.
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Sep 18, 2015 16:53
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pr0zac posted:Facebook isn't my first job and while I'll admit its better than most places I would never take treatment like that anywhere. The idea that its considered normal to not get a raise when you get a promotion in an industry where companies are spending millions lobbying the government to create more VISAs cause they can't hire enough people is kind of ridiculous. I fought for a raise at one workplace of a year and got a 5% raise (from way below market rate to just below market rate) despite being vital enough that it took years after I left to recover in the area of the thing I was working on. On the other hand, switching jobs has netted me a 35% increase in salary. Another company I worked at decided my salary was too high, so it gave my coworkers big raises to equalize and denied me one, saying I was getting too much. I was at least one or two levels above those coworkers, but we had started at about the same time. The thing is, when I started, I had sacrificed a ton of equity for a higher salary, and once I let them know, they told me they had no clue, but the budget was already set and there was nothing they could do. I played hardball and got an additional couple hundred dollars per year. Not that I stuck around long enough for that to matter. I think that the company that doesn't gently caress their employees on compensation over a long time period is pretty drat rare, and I'm sticking to that. Even playing it smart, you still can't jump too many times lest your resume show how uncommitted you are to long-term employment, even if you actually are and you've just chosen companies poorly. Salaries are predictably irrational - once it's decided, the arbitrary value you're set at becomes the baseline for your worth to the company, even if you're actually worth more. Getting re-appraised by another company, so to speak, is easier than getting the same company to realize despite itself that it should pay you more, and then to actually pay you more. IMO companies which don't implement good leveling standards and process (a lot of them) cannot and will not be fair to employees in the long term. Also: not posting on work time. Currently recovering from multiple lovely situations converging into a couple of months.
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Sep 18, 2015 19:07
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Yes, hardware mocking is definitely as easy as downloading a framework and plugging it in /s I wouldn't count on an embedded system to necessarily have a lot of extra hooks or extra memory to make it as easy as you say.
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Sep 18, 2015 21:59
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You linked to a testing framework, not a mocking framework. I'm saying that hardware with a bunch of debug hooks and sensitive timing won't always respond well to splicing test hardware in. FPGAs have that option if they've got space, but still have to be re-laid-out. ASICs don't, unless you built and fabricated in the electronics to do so. So for embedded systems, the difficulty of "just build something that acts exactly like the real module only it feeds fake data" can range from "exceptionally easy" to "virtually intractable" depending on how deeply you need to insert that fake data. No, embedded C and desktop C aren't necessarily the same. Memory management, interrupts, and error handling aren't necessarily the same. You might have those for a particular device, but for an embedded system, without prior knowledge of the particular processor, you can't rely on it being true. EDIT: I misunderstood the context and thought that he was ssh'ing into a server rather than the device, and was talking about testing the device.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:56
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Yeah, you're right. I was irritated from something completely unrelated and was being a smartass. Sorry for that.
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Sep 19, 2015 00:34
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Pollyanna posted:You know what, I think I need to actually learn more about this. It's clear that I don't quite have the background for working with big data. Where do you suggest I start learning? What do I need to know about? What resources are good? Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Sanjoy-Dasgupta/dp/0073523402 Vazirani's got the PDFs numbered by chapter on his site: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms/chap0.pdf Full version found via google: http://beust.com/algorithms.pdf EDIT: If you meant something different than asking for a text going over algorithms, then that's my mistake. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 08:52
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sink posted:Totally. Rust is what Go should have been. It's doing fairly well considering how it doesn't have the backing of an enormous conglomerate. At least it has captured the imaginations of PL nerds. I dunno, Java is the easiest answer. None of the good new languages are actually stable yet, and are missing some combination of good tooling, mature package management, and a good library ecosystem. I can forgive Java for a lot of sins because of that. But then again, college is lovely and instead of teaching students how to make the most of their IDEs, some of them teach javac with emacs with no libraries (or even Collections – yes I mean List and Map) allowed,, which is the stupidest crap ever.
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Sep 22, 2015 00:00
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Looking to apply to a VR company before expanding my search parameters. Can I get some resume feedback, please? Resume 1 (first variant) Resume 2 (second variant) (Names and companies minimally anonymized.)
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Sep 26, 2015 22:14
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Pollyanna posted:Welp, I'm being let go. Commence the "told you so"s. s/blame/responsibility – you didn't necessarily do something wrong; maybe their expectations and your way of working just didn't match. If you pick yourself up and think hard, you'll definitely do better next time. All things considered, giving you a couple of weeks to land on your feet is pretty considerate of them. It could have gone way, way worse. Pollyanna posted:If impostor syndrome is supposed to improve as I continue my career, this only cemented it. It's really making me reconsider whether this career is a good fit for me, since I've struck out twice already, regardless of circumstances. Unfortunately, it's all I have.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:44
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Hay, Java can be pretty interesting and fun  though admittedly I bet a lot of companies are boring or bad and those companies just happen to use Java.
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Oct 1, 2015 18:35
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Pollyanna posted:More places need to use Clojure, IMO. Because I like Clojure.
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Oct 3, 2015 18:54
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MeruFM posted:the illusion of having no clout is because you as a person have no clout for whatever reason, whether that be bad luck or charisma or whatever. I think that companies in which low-level employees can gain significant influence might also be vulnerable to marginalizing certain people unfairly depending on how bro-y their hires are. Realistically, people with power existing outside the explicitly encoded power structure are an indicator that some part of that power structure needs to be worked around. Not that I'm advocating for strict top-down decision-making, but embracing and celebrating a free-for-all is probably going to mask an otherwise solvable problem every so often.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:10
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Blinkz0rz posted:I've got stock options at my new company but really have no idea what that means or how I take advantage of them. What sort of stuff should I know? Anything I should be careful about?
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Oct 20, 2015 03:34
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One of my biggest regrets at my previous job was not directly talking to a coworker who caused a lot of friction in the team and talking through issues that desperately needed to be addressed. The situation became unsalvageable and ended in disaster. I don't know whether it's the right answer for you, or generally, but I might ask them for a couple of minutes when he's in the office (i.e. "Can I talk to you for a couple of minutes?") and a) asking if everything is alright and b) letting him know that you think he does good work, but your work is impacted when you need to communicate with him and he's only available 60% of the time. If he gets defensive, perhaps I'd move on to "Other people have taken notice too, and people are going to start asking questions" or something, to give myself cover to escalate to my manager in private if necessary (it's truthful, but it also makes it harder for them to later blame you for mentioning it, because people were already noticing it anyway). Just my two cents. Would also be very curious how other people would handle this.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:47
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ultrafilter posted:Talk to your dev manager and let them know that it's an issue. It's their responsibility to decide what to do, and they may have information that you don't. Valid point, though if that's the case then, at this point (manager is around + employee is still not showing up), either the other employee is irresponsible for not letting their boss know (even something vague), or whoever is managing schedules is doing a bad job letting the relevant people know their schedule is affected. I mean, the fact that he's had over sixteen no-shows (2x8 weeks) and neither the dev manager nor product manager sound like they have anything meaningful to say about it is way more awkward than a "are you okay?" and "sorry, don't want to talk about it". Sounds like he's been working part-time hours at a full-time job, if that, and if nobody appears to know why, he's kind of in the wrong by default, unless he can excuse it in some way that someone in his reporting structure accepts. But yeah, all else being equal, it probably is safer and more professional to just talk to the boss, and let it work itself out. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Oct 23, 2015 |
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Oct 23, 2015 01:56
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