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This is the best one, IMO: https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter/status/597823511919398912 So, I've actually got a career advice question. My background is 8 years of IT ops/automation. I've just recently left a startup because of burnout and moral issues with what they were doing, plus a feeling that they were going to run out of money and fail hilariously in the next couple years. I'm not sure what to do next. I like doing what I've been doing, but IT operations is a dead end unless you're at a huge company, and even then it quickly peaks out and goes into management if you want to keep progressing career wise. I also enjoy doing software development-type stuff (that's what automation is after all - writing software to deploy servers/software) but I have no career background in software development and while I know a ton of practical stuff and can pick stuff up fast, I don't have enough of a background in dev that I get picked up when applying for jobs doing it. I'd rate myself as having about 2-3 years experience as a dev but without all the background in algorithms/data structures that a CS degree teaches.
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# ¿ Oct 5, 2015 20:46 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:33 |
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sink posted:Give it a shot and start sending your resume out. Applying for a job is a low cost operation and there is no consequence for not getting it. All the while you gain good feedback. I kind of already addressed that - I've tried applying for a few dev jobs and been screened out at the resume submission stage because I don't have prior software dev experience (that was the feedback) despite having "here's a project I did where I wrote code in the language you want" type statements on my resume. Maybe I will have to interact with recruiters.
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# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 00:23 |
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Shrimpy posted:Maybe I'm thinking of something slightly different than what your experience is, but if you're in the DevOps world and still want to do that and reasonably up on recent technologies (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc. etc.) then literally just include the word "DevOps" on your resume and people will start knocking your door down, especially in the Bay Area. My last job title was "Senior DevOps Engineer", and I basically get recruiters falling all over themselves because I've got the word "DevOps" in my resume. I'm probably just being a grump, but I loving hate the term and all the connotations that come with it because every single "devops" job I've seen is secretly "Operations and Automation". There's nothing that a devops engineer does that actually influences in the development of the code in a meaningful way to make it easier to operate in most companies. In my opinion, if you have a "DevOps team", you’re doing it wrong. It's the new Agile. That's why I'm trying to figure out how to transition more to an official software development type role, because I love the part where I'm solving the problems, but I hate the part where the problem is just "how do I get some lovely code to behave just long enough to work" with no way to fix it. sink posted:This isn't an overnight fix and it's hard to directly quantify the value but having some projects on Github is a really good idea. When I screen candidates I am overjoyed if they link to their Github, and I always check out their projects. I do actually have a GitHub account with multiple contributions to open source projects and a bunch of my own stuff. I think my biggest barrier to entry for this is figuring out where to start - I have plenty of ideas and the knowledge to make something happen but get bogged down in bikeshedding before I even start rather than just hacking together a quick prototype and building from there. That's just something I need to work on on my own though.
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# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 18:11 |
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Shrimpy posted:Maybe I'm missing something, but I've always been under the impression that the "Dev" portion of "DevOps" was developing the automation? Ithaqua's post has it right. It has nothing to do with who develops what - it's very much more a culture thing. Ithaqua posted:Wow no. It's a culture that fosters communication between dev team and the ops team. It's not about shifting work from one to the other, it's about clear communication and better understanding of the big picture. I've worked in places where software was developed in a bubble, and then installed/run on QA/staging/prod servers in a bubble. Things went horribly wrong all the time and took ages to fix because no one was communicating. The places I've worked at and have interviewed at all have viewed DevOps as a fancier version of the traditional Ops - developers still threw everything over the wall to Ops, Ops didn't get a say in how anything was built/set up for deployment, Dev never asked if Ops could actually do a thing or knew an alternate way to go about something (e.g. one place I was at built this huuuuuuuuuge complicated event processing and parsing framework that stored logs in SQL when what they really wanted was Elasticsearch and Logstash and Kibana - and when showed that, they agreed that it was much more what they wanted but the cost was sunk already so it wouldn't be deployed). The platonic ideal of DevOps is very nice and I'd probably enjoy working at a place where that was practiced. However, I'm taking 6mo off and moving out of Seattle for now - I want some time off and tech salaries as a single person leave plenty of cash in the bank.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 01:04 |
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Remote jobs. Let's talk about finding them. I've got a few resources so far: Stack Overflow careers seems to have a lot. Angellist has a bunch because I like startups. http://remoteok.io/ is a nice little aggregator. Anyone have any other resources I should be looking at? Right now I'm in Arizona for the winter and I should probably get a job by the time I leave in February. I certainly don't want to move to San Francisco, so a lot of wild and wooly fun startup jobs are out, but remote seems like it might work okay.
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# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 20:50 |
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Humphrey Appleby posted:I don't know if this site is good, but I see it mentioned occasionally for remote jobs: https://weworkremotely.com/ Yeah, remote.io aggregates that one too a lot. Vulture Culture posted:You nailed the big two. Beyond that, try Twitter (seriously). Holy poo poo, Twitter. I suppose #whateverrole #hiring #remote is what you'd search for? I really don't use Twitter except for joke accounts like @erowidrecruiter and @PHP_CEO.
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# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 22:39 |
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Cool, thanks.
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# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 01:39 |
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wilderthanmild posted:New question. Two of the places I am looking at request available copies of any non-disclosure or non-compete agreements, even if aren't necessarily relevant. I have existing ones with my company. Is there a subtle way of asking for something like this without tipping them off that I am looking elsewhere? I was thinking of just asking for copies of everything I have on file and trying to frame it as me getting my life organized and cataloged. You should have gotten a copy with your signed employment papers. If not, you can always frame it as that - "I didn't get a copy of the NDA I signed when I joined the company, and I'd like to have it for my records".
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# ¿ Nov 20, 2015 00:17 |
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I need some goon advice. I have an offer for a 6-9mo contract at $hilarious/hr rates for a fairly decently sized online services company. It's remote, but it's poorly defined - they want to hire me for PowerShell knowledge but it's more networking automation with VMWare + building CRUD apps in mongodb/angularjs from what I can tell, none of which I've really done before. They're also pushing really hard to get me to accept the offer too. I've got the offer on hold until after I interview with the other company but it won't keep forever of course. I have an onsite interview with A Large Software Company based in Redmond WA (no points for guessing this one) scheduled. I doubt it pays as well, and it's not for a terribly prestigious team, but it's an actual Software Engineer job doing C# for online services management tools (I should note I've never actually held the title Software Engineer/Developer/whatever, I come from an Ops background so getting that on my resume would be a fairly big thing for me in terms of future jobs). It's full-time, and the commute isn't very bad from my apartment. I doubt it pays as well as the other one but they won't give me a salary number because "we do the levelling after the interview." I also don't have an offer yet since I haven't been interviewed yet. I'm not in dire need of money, and consequently I'm not in dire need of a particularly stable job, nor do I have a ton of ~career aspirations~, but I'm also trying to figure out which one I won't be hating in a month and how to not shoot myself in the foot re: offers. Remote sounds kind of cool, but the poor definition of the actual job makes me really nervous especially since the company in question just acquired another company and the contract is because they didn't acquire half the people so they need help fast. I also don't want to drop a concrete offer just to get an interview for a more stable job with no guarantees. I already emailed the recruiter for the Large Software Company letting them know that I have another offer but I'm still interested, so hurry up please, but no response yet because it's the weekend. Any thoughts on how not to gently caress myself over? I'm mostly aiming for job satisfaction right now, since I've been off for a few months after burning out at a startup.
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2016 23:35 |
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Ithaqua posted:Things to keep in mind: That is why it is a hard decision. Remote is awesome but is the rest worth it? That is my dilemma. Oh well, the recruiter replied and said they could make a fast decision after my interview so I should be able to try for both.
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2016 23:56 |
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FamDav posted:I've never worked for Microsoft, but why would you expect their salaried offer to not be competitive with the remote position? I'm familiar with the pay band concept (I think this was just the recruiter loving with me), but it's mostly because the contract is $70/hr. I'm expecting $100k-120k from MS because historically they pay slightly low compared to most of the other companies in the Seattle area. Maybe not anymore, though? I've been out of the MS bubble for about 3 years now. necrobobsledder posted:I have to disagree that large company implies stability - two of the places that I've had the most budget and retention issues were with Fortune 100s. One of the worst things to hear is "start-up in a large company" - this has invariably meant "all the cons of a start-up, all the cons of a large company." Don't try to play hero and think you can really make a difference at a large company unless you are under a celebrity-status executive more or less. God yes, I quit a company after 3 months after being suckered into one of those. The 26-year career admins had absolutely NO desire to have their environments touched even by the Hot Young Startup-Like Department if it means they have to do less (it was doing Chef stuff). No, this is just management tooling/deployment automation for one of the many SaaSy MS teams.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 00:35 |
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B-Nasty posted:If you want to break into SW development and you are inclined to do it in the Microsoft stack, it's an easy choice. If you got 2+ years of FT experience working in C#, at MS, that should set you up for any future .NET dev jobs. Even if working there sucks, that's a nice resume pad for the future. That is an interesting point and I already sort of have that problem - I keep getting hired for Windows admin jobs because I don't have the same quality of Linux skills. I suppose it would be fairly difficult to find jobs on another stack given enough time doing C#. I don't mind C# particularly, but I would like to pry myself out of the MS stack eventually. Go just doesn't have the same market penetration though. I think I've gotten a pretty good handle on the goonsensus in that it's more worth it to stop worrying about the ~imminent offer~ and think about career aspirations. Thanks!
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 01:11 |
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Rurutia posted:$70/hr isn't going to be more than 100k-120k from MS because MS will give you bonuses on top of that salary and because you won't have to pay payroll taxes on your W-2. I meant 70/hr W2 through the contract agency. It's not a 1099. But good call on the bonuses too.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 01:32 |
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Skandranon posted:C# is no longer bound to Windows. Microsoft open sourced the entire .Net framework, and recently bought Xamarin, so C# will soon be a very viable language on Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. I've been working on converting an API I wrote in C# to DNX Core or whatever it's called now (It was up to 3 renames last time I checked) and it is extremely hard to use. They've renamed all of the stuff or just randomly removed portions of APIs all over the place. The conversion story is painful at least - maybe it works fine if you're writing new software, but renaming stuff like System.Http to Microsoft.Http and moving classes into different namespaces with no decent mapping between them is a nightmare to use, especially if you want to also support "legacy" (.NET 4.5) as well as the new stuff. #IFDEFs all over the place like it's going out of style. FamDav posted:the math on 70 an hour for the full 9 month period at 40-50 hours per week is 100-125k. i believe that your annual income (not just base pay) from working at microsoft will match or exceed that, and at the extreme worst will not be sufficiently lower to be a lifestyle change. It's more "make $n in 9 months vs make $n in 12 months so then I can be a lazy bum for 3 months" but the rest of your points are valid too. Urit fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Feb 28, 2016 |
# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 02:13 |
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metztli posted:Remote is great, BUT you are also trying to become a software developer; IMO, being able to work with people, in the same space, and sharing that general office context is HUGE for improving your skills. I know you have some skills already, but will you get to work with other developers who will help you improve them in the remote gig? That's exactly it - I certainly would just be doing more of the same sort of ops-automation type of work I have been at the contract job. The MS job is almost certainly better for my ~career~ and actual software dev skills given that I'm trying to get out of the Ops world somewhat. I think I've got it under control now though - I'll just put off the contract offer until I get a yea or nay from MS and then dump the contract if I get a MS offer. Otherwise, making money is pretty nice.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2016 22:57 |
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AskYourself posted:I'm curious to know what's bothering you about ops jobs. I'm finding myself setting up build and deployment automation for .net apps and so far I like the challenge. Probably if I spent 100% of my time maintaining such system it would get tedious. I've been doing it for 9 years and every single "ops" or "devops" job description has blurred into one. Ops has become as easy as pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel with all the tools and services out there, but I am tired of stringing together a wobbling pile of the same 8-12 tools again and again for companies that want to pretend that their app is a special snowflake that is totally different than every other company's app, plus the traditional "Systems Administrator" role is basically going away at all but the largest, oldest, most unchanging companies, and it's being replaced by software developers that know how systems work and build tools to automate everything. Urit fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Feb 29, 2016 |
# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 03:57 |
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All this interview chat + my nightly reading of Cracking the Coding Interview is really making me nervous because I keep discovering stuff that is "easy comp-sci degree stuff" that I absolutely do not know and have never even heard of in some cases (e.g. AVL trees) and I've got a software engineering interview on the 9th. Hoo boy!
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 04:44 |
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I recognize the difference between "basic concept that probably will be asked about in an interview that I might be asked to implement or use" and "complicated memorization thing that probably won't be asked to implement" but it's more the fact that I keep finding extra stuff to learn (even if I don't actually memorize implementation) that makes me nervous. Oh well, I can only do the best I can and try to learn what I can in the meantime.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 05:35 |
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Well, after this sequence of interviews with MS, I can sure say that Cracking the Coding Interview is 100% accurate as to the kind of questions you get asked. In fact, the first question I got asked was a verbatim of one of the questions in there. Not sure how linked list and matrix iteration questions demonstrate actual programming ability, but I certainly hate writing code on paper/on a whiteboard. I'll probably get rejected (certainly didn't feel like I did particularly well, even if I "successfully" completed all the questions as in the code would do what was requested) but it's been educational. I just need to figure out how to practice basic data structure stuff in a way that isn't rote memorization that I'll forget as soon as I have to apply it.
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# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 00:44 |
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leper khan posted:My favorite part of those questions is that in 90% of cases an array is faster than whatever twee data structure due to less overhead on the memory bus. Second favorite part is that in 99.99% of the remaining cases you'll be using an abstraction library for it anyway. Hell, I could have solved 2 questions with "use the System.Collections.Generic version" but hell no we can't have that. Ithaqua posted:Chances are you'll never have to apply it, and just having enough memory of it to be aware that it exists and that it's good at handling a specific type of problem will be sufficient. When I say "apply it" I mean "use it in an interview." I was glad I did do implementation once, I had an implementation question that was "write a basic b+-tree structure + pseudocode for the insert/read operations" that I was damned glad that I actually knew since I wrote one for giggles. Basic algorithms mess with me too: I had a couple questions that boiled down to "in a matrix, find the values that are boolean true, and do a thing to the matrix" (first one was set row/col to 0 if natural value is 0, see page 48 CCI5e , second was find the area of all connected "on" pixels in a grid of pixels). The one that hosed me up hard though was "delete a node in a circular singly linked list". It's not conceptually hard but I got too bogged down in list head deletion and basically duplicated my code, once to handle head and once to handle rest but doing the same thing, then ran out of time. Urit fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Mar 15, 2016 |
# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 02:04 |
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Channels are just Lock<Queue<T>>. Implementation-wise that's all they are, a lock wrapped around a queue of items. Select is super cool, but also can make you hate life since you can't, say, select over an array of channels. [ASK] me about switching to Rust because I wanted generics that badly. Factious question: Should I put C#/Java on my resume with my C/C++ experience? Serious question: Assuming I want to stay out of CRUD/Webapp hellholes, what's a well-used, well-regarded language to learn, assuming I have a fairly decent background in programming and already "know" C#, Python and 2 C-like hipster languages (rust and go)? I kind of want to learn JS just so I know it, but dynamic languages make me want to because I can't tell how crappy my code is until I try to execute it, and where are my loving types?
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# ¿ May 18, 2016 02:32 |
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mrmcd posted:Maybe the golang tutorial is a bit wonky, but it seems the only way to shutdown many-to-one channels is convoluted two channel boilerplate code, WaitGroup (not covered in the tutorial despite giving you a problem that does exactly that), or just YOLO and let your code panic and die once your computation is done. I assume when you say "many to one" you mean multiple producer single consumer. If you want to be safe, Channels should only ever be closed by the producer side. Never close them from the consumer because of the problem you just described. If you have to close from the receiver side, then yes, a closeChannel, waitgroup on a different goroutine to close the sending side, or build your own reference counting . Channels are really bad once you start hitting the simplest of edge cases, and Go doesn't have even simple monomorphized generics so you can't build your own generic channel using an atomic and a ringbuffer or something that's not poo poo. Also they're slow, the stdlib doesn't use channels at all.
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# ¿ May 18, 2016 03:19 |
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Skandranon posted:Learn TypeScript then, you get all the type checking at compile time C# has to offer, but you can turn it off if you'd like a dynamic JS experience for certain areas. I can't believe I forgot TypeScript exists, especially since it seems pretty popular. Thanks!
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# ¿ May 19, 2016 15:33 |
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canis minor posted:Java running on Javascript code:
necrobobsledder posted:To explain the NixOS and NixOps side, NixOS is a Linux distribution (optionally, a runtime layer and system layout convention itself somewhat similar to a wider-scope apt or yum) that supports immutable infrastructure concepts as first-class citizens while NixOps is meant for cross-instance management and orchestration - CoreOS is... decidedly not caring about those concerns. If you like Hashicorp's Terraform and Puppet's DSL isn't idempotent enough for you while you are obsessed with keeping images and running images match as closely as possible in prod as your management code, NixOS and NixOps are worth an evaluation if you're an ops-obsessed developer like me. Holy poo poo NixOS looks cool, I'm a big fan of immutable ops type stuff so that stuff is like candy for me. I'm kind of the reverse of you - a Dev-obsessed Ops person.
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# ¿ May 21, 2016 00:31 |
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rt4 posted:Cracking The Coding Interview is a great book, but it's almost all about algorithms. I don't think I've ever interviewed at a place that asked me the sort of difficult algorithmic questions that were in the book, but I also don't live in a "tech hub" type of place. I got asked questions that were directly out of CTCI when I interviewed at Microsoft so YMMV. I personally think it's a great resource and should just memorize it for easy wins in interviews, because no one has any imagination and they all ask you how to reverse a doubly linked list or something silly.
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# ¿ Jun 23, 2016 00:26 |
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Comb Your Beard posted:It's primarily PHP though, which is nice. Kinda over Java. b0lt posted:wat But enough about languages that suck, let's talk about PHP. So I finally got a job doing what appears to be actual development work. It's in Java though, and I primarily know C#. I've read a few "Java for C# programmers" things but is there anything else I should watch out for other than Java just being a shittier C#?
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 19:34 |
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Is == not aliased to obj.Equals(other) like it is in C#? It sounds like it does pointer equality instead from what you said.
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 23:07 |
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Serious question: what do I do when a recruiter requests my LaTeX resume in Word format lol I just say "I don't use Word to build my resume - I can only provide it as a PDF file." and if that's a problem for them, then you didn't want to work with them anyway. aBagorn posted:Big fat nope. My experience (from seeing it on the hiring manager's desk) is that they want to replace the header with their contact information and company's logo, but I've been forcing them to use PDFs so I haven't seen any egregious editing past a very poorly formatted/stretched logo pasted atop my email address/phone number.
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# ¿ Jul 6, 2016 18:01 |
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I quit a job 3 months ago because they started a 2-month construction project on the building around our offices (above/below, in a 3-story building with me on the 2nd floor) and wouldn't let us work from home during the noise. After the third week of jackhammer and circular saw duets I said gently caress it. Now I work from home (100% remote) and make 10k more/year because someone uses one of my projects that my 2nd previous company opensourced (I did it on the clock for them when I worked there and still vaguely maintain it on github, it's just kind of my pet project at this point even though they hold the copyright). It's so easy to change jobs and be picky enough to get a decent one in the current market for programmers, it doesn't make sense to stay in abusive or boring positions.
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# ¿ Jul 23, 2016 04:43 |
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What's the best way to handle a super promising job that turned out to be utterly bland and in which I'm powerless? I got hired by a guy whose Surveillance Economy startup uses one of my open source projects with some song and dance about how I'd be doing a bunch of automation and dev work and helping modernize their operations and take them from "A bunch of shell scripts" to all the latest magic. It instead turns out to be half-rear end IT Ops in which I'm on-call in very weird and lovely schedules, the existing ops folk do not share the dream of automation (since shell scripts work fine what do you mean it takes 4 hours to deploy), and I've gotten to write precisely 5 lines of code. Oh and they want to use Docker for some reason even though precisely none of their services would benefit from it, and don't bother any of the existing ops or dev people, they're busy keeping the existing house of cards running and cranking out ~features~. I'd rather not just immediately quit since I started just a few months ago after an 8 month break in employment for some family stuff, but god drat I have no idea how to make them realise that scalability and reliability are features too, and I can't just magic up some Docker and poop out a perfectly formed infrastructure on their plates.
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# ¿ Oct 4, 2016 08:25 |
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To me it sounds like they wanted a file.ext.metadata.txt file (or something like it) side-by-side with the actual file itself in each backend that you then read when the interface was asked for metadata. That doesn't address deletes etc. though. Still, implementing a distributed storage system with no SPOF as a test as dumb as heck. I could see if they gave you a half-finished one and said "add a feature", though.
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# ¿ Nov 17, 2016 22:31 |
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I think it's getting time for me to move on too, though this one is more of a "lies and damned lies" thing. I got hired as a remote engineer and was told "oh we won't have you travel, just to orientation and a couple events", and it's been a week of travel every month for the last 6 months I've been with them for various poo poo. Now it's getting "worse" - fly to places for 1 day, then turn around and come home. Couple that with micromanagement and being told to do vague stuffl like "implement docker" when the actual team that would be using it is extremely resistant to the idea (left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing) and I'm fed up. Any tips on interviewing the company? I can never get a good read on whether they're a bunch of jerks or not.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2016 19:34 |
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This is a serious post - or as serious as one can get on an internet comedy forum. I'm burnt out as hell and opening my editor to work on code makes me feel physically sick to my stomach. What do I do?
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# ¿ Jun 27, 2017 16:59 |
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I've taken a bunch of vacation and even taken 4 months off to try to recuperate once, it didn't help. But yeah, it's not coding itself, but the people and the work I'm doing that's making me feel lovely, and every job seems to be exactly the same template of awfulness, so I'm not sure how to break the cycle.
Urit fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jun 27, 2017 |
# ¿ Jun 27, 2017 19:23 |
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:This was me a couple of years ago. Literally opening Eclipse made me sick. I think that's it - when I'm on vacation or when I was taking a few months off, a lot of my time was consumed by work-type stuff and I don't really stop thinking about it. I also hate what the company I'm working for is doing (personal information groping) and I've quit companies in the past that got too much into that space, so it feels disgusting to contribute to their code anyway. Ah well, guess it's time to bail!
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# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 17:58 |
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Arachnamus posted:One other thing that other people have hinted at is depression. I feel it's worth saying that sometimes burnout leads to depression, but sometimes depression mimics burnout. I mean, I was having straight up suicidal thoughts this time last year, so I know what that feels like, but I've started fixing that and come a long way but the problem (and solution) comes with its own set of depression-like symptoms. Pretty sure that this is burnout this time. At least I'm not pretending to be a guy any more! (hi trans tech peeps in this thread!) ratbert90 posted:Things that made me 100% more productive at my job: Working from home for a company across the country really screws with your perception of what "job time" is, I will say that. I kind of wish I was in an office 2-3 days out of the week. Urit fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Jul 2, 2017 |
# ¿ Jul 2, 2017 07:47 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:33 |
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minato posted:Here's a good talk about burnout. It's ostensibly about Ops and burnout, but it applies to programmers too. https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa14/conference-program/presentation/lehtonen I am ops (I just write code no one wants to use because they didn't write it and thus don't understand it) and I've watched this talk but I'm gonna watch it again. Thanks!
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# ¿ Jul 4, 2017 08:58 |