Pollyanna posted:

...Yeah, I think I did. Thanks, rubber duckies!

Skandranon posted:

If you want a definition of junior vs senior, consider this: Junior can't make decisions, follows technical direction of senior people on how to solve things. Senior has more decision making powers around technical matters.

lifg posted:

So what I'm hearing is the lunch portion is more a casual talk than heavily judged interview. So I should be myself. Unless myself is a poop-flinging neckbeard, then I should be someone else.

mrmcd posted:

Protip: Try working on not being an insufferable rear end in a top hat at life in general. This drastically cuts your risk exposure to temporarily forgetting you're in a work situation.

Pollyanna posted:

Anyone here have experience working remotely with a company, particularly an across-US-coast setup? I'm advancing to the late stages for a company over in SF while I'm in Boston, and I'm a little unsure about how well they can support a remote employee. Has it been a positive experience, a negative experience? Any potential pitfalls? Any questions to ask of the company re: remote dev support/integration?

I worry that my role as a remote employee would make it easier for me to end up marginalised or isolated somehow, leading to the position seeming unstable. It's something I've seen happen before.

Doghouse posted:

Am I going to be totally stuck? Is there any way I can break into web and mobile development? I would start doing some side web projects on my own, but I honestly don't think I have the time, really, with a growing family, friends, and all that other "life" stuff. I think I'll have to try anyway, but is there anything else I can that would help?

Doghouse posted:

Haha thanks. I'm not as young as you might think, I got into software development a bit later than most, so I'm 32 now. But the point stands.

I don't need to work from home or part time. I'm fine with my current job as far as everything but the work itself - the pay is fine, the benefits are fine. But it is excruciatingly boring.

Loutre posted:

Quit my job this week. On Monday there was a meeting held in Thai, and on Thursday I found out that that meeting had basically cancelled my current project - but no one bothered to tell me until I went to my manager and forced her to tell me what the meeting was about. I only realised it pertained to me when I overheard a conversation in Thai about my project. Someone out there can handle that kind of communication, but I can't. Working on a cancelled project for 3 days and only finding out by getting in a yelling match with your manager isn't a loving workable arrangement for me.

lifg posted:

Becoming like this guy has been one of my personal goals. How do I get there? How do I, as a developer, get to a point where I'm *that* helpful to the company and to people around me?

More specifically, what books can I read to get some solid knowhow on the world of SRE? (Or what learning paths in O'reilly Safari?)

Jaded Burnout posted:

Edit: The only silver lining being when I inevitably leave when my contract expires in April I'll do so having been paid to learn kafka and java pretty well.

Pie Colony posted:

I've never worked with separate testing and quality teams but in every company I've been at (which admittedly is only a handful), QA has been a bottleneck. I was very hesitant about continuous deployment but with a decent base of tests (unit/component/integration/end to end) it actually works very well.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

This is your problem, yeah. You don't have buy-in from the devs; they see no reason to not write lovely code, and ops is getting stuck with the consequences. You can fix this to an
One of my mantras is "code that is not tested does not work". It is just shy of universally true. A corollary to this is that sufficiently complex systems are impossible to adequately test by hand; it's too easy to make a change that breaks an unstated assumption that causes an edge case to break -- an edge case that you didn't think to test, but that nonetheless affects 1% of your user base (i.e. a gigantic number in absolute terms / an untenable amount of lost revenue). Consequently, you need unit tests. And functional tests, and integration tests, and so on. You need code that thoroughly exercises the code that you write, and that runs every time someone makes a change, to ensure that the contracts your code offers are not broken.

minato posted:

I personally agree with this, but others didn't. They complained that such tests:
- increased the amount of code changes required to produce a feature, which delayed deployment
- were of low utility because they caught few bugs. (But ignored that this was because the tests were low quality: few edge cases, hastily-written & perfunctory)
- required significant class refactoring to allow testing "seams" (e.g. supporting mock injection)
- were difficult to maintain test fixtures for because the product changed so fast. (e.g. if a test mocks an API request and someone adds a new parameter, all the mock test fixtures may require updating too).

Pollyanna posted:

Stuff like this is why I only count direct compensation, i.e. salary, as worthwhile. The rest is vague and contingent on stuff going perfectly, whereas with salary I know for drat sure what I'll be getting.

Ralith posted:

I assumed his point was that pay in the US is higher in part due to lower job security.

wins32767 posted:

I'd generalize the responses to #2 to learn how to effectively delegate. It's taken me a few years to really get it down, but for literally everything that comes across your desk you should be thinking "Is there a way I can give this to someone to do to help them grow?" and "What kind of support should I be giving (if any) to the person I delegate this to?" Needing to keep things is a sign you haven't done enough to grow your people.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Just had what I thought was a good technical discussion about why $coworker made the decisions they did in some code I was reviewing...and it turns out that $coworker's takeaway was that I wasn't respecting their experience and technical knowledge.

LeadershipInterpersonal relations is hard, yo.

Pollyanna posted:

Happy new year! What’re your career resolutions this year?

sink posted:

I agree. And to add to that: For better or worse, tech can be very hero-oriented. But it's good to know that the reality is: at BigTechCo, $AmazingThing was probably a large project involving multiple teams and roles, and more than a few non-tech folks. It was likely an iterative improvement on someone else's research or product. And it might have taken a long time with a couple of false starts and dead ends. It was hard for the celebrities, so it's okay if it's hard for you too.

Munkeymon posted:

She said this year, not today. Now you don't have anything planned for the next 363 days!

Jaded Burnout posted:

Outsourced teams are even harder because you have us vs them issues.

friendbot2000 posted:

I kind of fell into the career path of being a Test Automation Engineer and I am being groomed to become a lead of a new Automation Team in the near future. I still can't shake the feeling that my niche could be dangerous to my long term career health if Test Automation goes away. Do any of the more experienced old timers have any advice on where I should start branching off too as a contingency? I do a lot of work with frameworks (I built the one we use for automation) so that was my first guess, but I am looking for some outside input.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Damnit, speaking to HR and management is less exciting than my boss updates. They're too nice and our conversations are too normal. It's almost like when two people who are kind and proficient communicators speak to each other, a lot of very uninteresting things happen.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Is there nothing more to life than being "all right financially" and focusing on life outside of work cause if so I'm never going to make it in this world

B-Nasty posted:

I'd argue that even in companies that don't have directly technical products, the 'only viewed as a cost-center' idea is starting to shift.

It was certainly true in the 2000-2010, but now, with almost everything being done with software, and much of it offered as SaaS, there's no turning back the wheel. Things like: complexity with integrating all these services, sharing important data, and business-specific intranet/LOB apps all directly add a ton of, very visible, value to most businesses. 15 years ago if you told a random, manager-level worker in a F500 that his laptop would be broken for the day, he would maybe be slowed down a bit. Today, he might as well go home, because he's so dependent.

That boring, intranet, CRUD app you're writing is probably saving the company tens of thousands of dollars every year. A good engineer can easily add value and increase profits that are measured in multiples of their cost. I mean, there's a reason why even non-tech companies are paying Jr. SE salaries that probably equal or exceed what they pay their middle-managers with decades of experience.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

While it is of course absolutely right to say that most programmers have an objectively good life, it is worth remembering that programming sucks.

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Roadie posted:

If they're all out of candidates and you're the only option, it sounds like you should raise your price by at least 10% and probably more than that.

Jaded Burnout posted:

Sounds like a giant vat of bullshit awaits. Though that said many orgs can't do hiring for poo poo and it doesn't always carry over to the day to day.