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Java 8 is pretty great - the only major problem I have with it is that Ivy/Maven/Gradle feel terrible and slow and confusing (compared to npm or cargo, for example). I've been working as a Java dev for a year now and I don't get the feeling that Java is dying at all. As for junior devs being interested in Java, I'm currently in my second year of uni, and I can't even count the times people in my classes have asked if they can use Java for simple assignments (instead of Python) just because they want to have more experience with Java. I don't know if it's because they feel like they need to be good at Java to get a job, or if it's just interest in the language in general, but I don't think we'll be running out of junior java devs any time soon.
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Feb 28, 2016 17:21
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Time tracking loving sucks. A huge reason for me taking my current job was that they don't do time tracking. All the teams here are doing agile very seriously, and it's actually working out (surprisingly) quite well. A big thing that I really love is that as long as my team finishes all the stories we agree to do in a sprint, our PO and our clients are happy. This means that I can work on whatever schedule I want, so sometimes I sleep all day and work in the evenings, some days I just can't get in the zone at all and just read books all day, but then some days I'm super focused and just work 12 hours straight. This might sound terrible to some people, but it's really amazing for me. My girlfriend's company is the exact opposite - she has to live-log every second of her day. She always has this timer running, she can select which issue it's ticking for or pause it if she needs to leave her computer. Just recently, her team was told that they're not doing enough work, because they're logging less than 95% of their workday. In Estonia, we actually have a law which says that if you work on a computer, you need to take breaks for 10% of your workday (included in the 8 hours you work), so the 95% thing is bullshit, but her team is doing it anyway now.
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Feb 2, 2017 12:52
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Doghouse posted:Does anyone do some freelance dev work on the side? I'd love to do 10 hours a week and make a bit of cash on the side. I would also be interested in any experiences with this, as I've been trying to do this for about half a year now and I just finished my third contract. So far my own experience has been pretty good. I made a company with a friend who handles all the paperwork and stuff (which is great because I don't want to worry about any of that) and I got all three contracts through my network. Finding more work seems to be a problem though. At this point it seems like I've run out of people wanting stuff developed for a reasonable price in my own network and I don't really know where to go from here. I can find a bunch of people looking for developers to work for almost nothing, and I can also find a bunch of huge projects which are clearly meant for big companies, but what I want are some reasonable sized projects for a 1-2 man team at something like 50€/hr rate or better (which is definitely not unreasonable in my country or in Europe as a whole as far as I know) and I'm not finding anything. I think it might help if I used social media or something to advertise my services, but advertising is not the type of work I want to be doing out of my free time.
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May 2, 2019 13:41
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In my previous team, we had a system where something like 5% of revenue of each project we worked on each quarter was given to us as bonus money, and then our manager decided (based on performance reviews etc) who got how much of that money. I convinced our team/manager to just divide the money equally between all developers instead, it ended up working great. My main reason for not liking individual performance based bonuses is that it can be very difficult to accurately evaluate someone's contribution to a team, especially for a manager who isn't really in the development process. Also, having individual performance based bonuses can create motivation to just maximize individual performance reviews instead of maximizing team performance (maybe even at the expense of team performance) and this is really hard to deal with because good luck explaining to managers that the guy with the best performance reviews is actually slowing down the team. Of course on the other hand, equal bonuses for the whole teams can create motivation to just let the rest of the team do all the work while you chill, but people who do this are much easier to get rid of in my experience, as long as the rest of the team cares.
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May 3, 2019 08:00
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Doghouse posted:How in the world do I figure out how much I should be making in my local market? I live in St Louis and make 88k wth 5 years experience. I just got a LinkedIn message from a recruiter about a local position that would pay 120k with a 10% bonus, which has me thinking maybe I'm underpaid. Go to interviews, don't tell them how much you're earning right now, look at what offers you get. By doing this you're also getting some free interview practice and maybe even a chance to learn something interesting about how things are done at other companies. I think it's a good idea to do interviews all the time, even if you have no interest in changing jobs.
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May 8, 2019 20:49
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dantheman650 posted:Do you use vacation time for all these interviews? I just checked, I went to 5 interviews in 2018, 4 of those were an hour long and I did them during lunch, only the fifth required me to shuffle my working hours around a bit, and I've definitely never used vacation time for interviews. Are you implying that doing interviews is some big thing that requires a lot of invested time? I've heard about FAANG etc having insanely long and involved interview processes, but I've never experienced anything like that myself. Maybe that means I only get invited to interviews at crappy places.
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May 8, 2019 22:01
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The only time I've had to write actual code for an interview was when I was applying for my first job as a junior dev, and even that was a take-home thing. After that, I've interviewed at startups, small and medium companies (the place I work at right now has 5000 employees in 17 countries, I guess that's medium?), and none of them have ever asked me to write code for interviews. The most common interview scenario for me has been something like ~15 minutes of me elaborating on my CV and answering questions about myself and my experience, ~10 minutes of somebody telling me about the company, and then ~30 minutes of free-form discussion about the team I would be joining, where basically both myself and the interviewers are trying to figure out what the other side thinks about culture/technologies/processes etc that are relevant to the team. Usually I'm interviewed by 2-3 people at a time but I've also had interviews where the whole team was present. A few times, I've been invited back for more 1-hour interviews before getting an offer, but mostly I seem to get an offer after the first interview (usually along with an invitation to meet the rest of the team). Is my experience unique here then? I can't imagine investing a whole day just on interviewing somewhere unless I already know I really want to work there.
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May 8, 2019 22:58
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Same, I'm from Estonia, which is not exactly the Silicon Valley of Europe, so maybe it's just a question of lower standards. On the other hand, I myself also think that "coding challenges" during interviews aren't really good at predicting how much somebody will contribute to a team. I would much rather use the interview time to try and figure out what *high-level* concepts a candidate is familiar with and what his opinions are on those concepts (like can the candidate think for himself or is he one of those robot-developers who needs somebody else to write a detailed analysis before he writes any code, or maybe if I'm hiring for a .net team, I'll try to figure out if the person is even OK with using Windows daily, etc). There's a standard 4-month trial period at the beginning of every employment, that's when I would check for more low-level knowledge and skills. If somebody actually can't write code then it's rather simple to get rid of them during the trial period. I think that for most companies, it's much more expensive to prematurely filter out otherwise good candidates because of weird interview coding challenges than it is to let go of truly bad candidates during their trial period. sunaurus fucked around with this message at 09:41 on May 9, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 09:36
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I agree, but surely you can assess that based on high-level discussions of past experiences? Like if somebody has years of experience as a developer and can fluently talk about their past projects and the technical decisions they made and the consequences of those decisions, would you still assume by default that they can't actually code?
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May 9, 2019 14:26
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I've worked at a place where you have to bring your own milk if you want cappuccino. I later found out that this could be normal in non-IT offices, but as a developer, that was definitely the weirdest office kitchen experience I've ever had.
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May 25, 2019 11:43
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Does anybody have any insight into developer compensation in different areas of the EU? I've been getting some relocation offers recently, and I'm having a hard time evaluating the offered salary. I always thought that the salaries in my country (Estonia) were really low compared to the rest of the EU (senior devs generaly top out at around ~70k/year), but I recently got an offer from another country for 100k/year, which seemed great, except after taxes, that's more or less the same as having a salary of 70k in Estonia, because I'm only taxed about 21% here. What's worse, the cost of living here is much lower than it is in western Europe, so even though my yearly salary would go up 30k before taxes, my actual purchasing power would decrease a lot if I took that offer. Another crazy thing is that the 100k offer was the best I've gotten so far. I've been in touch with several companies from different countries (Sweden and Spain for example) who have straight up told me that the very best senior candidates get offers of around 60k max. That sounds like bullshit to me - you're clearly in desperate need of good developers, because why else would you be looking for people internationally, but you want to pay less than employers pay in my eastern European country? I guess I'm trying to figure out if these guys are actually just lowballing me, or if my understanding of EU salaries has been wrong all this time. Does anybody know what the best areas for developer compensation are in the EU (accounting for taxes and cost of living)? Can Estonia really be one of them? sunaurus fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 10:25
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Wow, I always assumed that I've been taking a substantial salary hit by not moving to a wealthier country in Europe, but it seems I was way off.Keetron posted:If you happen to have a EU passport, I consider being a one-person company hiring yourself out as a developer and based in the Netherlands being a super comfortable life. This sounds awesome and I would love to do this, I already have a company registered, but I have no idea how to actually find work. Are you advertising yourself somehow?
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Jul 17, 2019 15:55
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School of How posted:Dude, I worked as a professional developer from 2010 to 2017 and have never once had a problem "working on a team". That's just something this thread made up to try to marginalize me because they don't want to accept the reality that the market is oversaturated, so they desperate cling to any explanation that denies the obvious reality. Uhhh 1) You're having a hard time finding a job, the other devs in this thread aren't 2) You think you're a good at "working on a team" (did you put it in quotation marks because you were quoting somebody or because you think it's a not even a serious issue?), other devs in this thread disagree Do you think maybe you could be wrong, or is this one of those cases where you know the one correct way of doing things and everybody else is wrong?
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Aug 7, 2019 07:55
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School of How posted:The point I was trying to make was in regards to basic qualifications. If you can code, you can contribute to a software company. This has been brought up a few times but I haven't seen you respond to it: what's your take on people who can code but are are either extremely socially abrasive, or write code that works but is unmaintainable? Surely you can see that people like this can easily make your productivity go down (hiring them would be a NET LOSS to your company), so even in an under-saturated market, you wouldn't want to hire them. How would you propose filtering out these people during the interview process? Edit: drat, my bad, you did address this already some posts back: School of How posted:I don't believe this. I think most candidates are perfectly capable of being a programmer at most jobs. Maybe 1% are incompetent. America is the largest economy in the world. It didn't get that way by 99% of it's workforce being completely incompetent. Disregard my question, I think this quote actually tells me everything I need to know about your perception of the dev job market sunaurus fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 10:14
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I can't believe our professional experiences have been so vastly different that we both feel the exact opposite way about things that I would consider straight up facts at this pointSchool of How posted:I much much prefer code silos. I would never want single individuals to only be responsible of some specific parts of a codebase, this seems horrible to me for so many reasons, including things like: * not being able collectively iterate to reach better implementations * getting stuck in your own bubble and never learning from others * losing perspective on what even is readable code (if nobody else is constantly reading your code, how would you know for sure?) * "oh crap the maintainer is on vacation, guess we're blocked for 3 weeks" School of How posted:On the other hand, if the codebase is a code silo, then there is accountability. If a coworker writes lovely code that is unmaintainable, that programmer is responsible for maintenance, and it has no effect on me. Putting the blame ("accountability") on a single person in a team when something goes wrong seems absolutely awful, what even is the point of a team if it's "every man for himself" anyway? School of How posted:If a certain member of the team is not productive, it's not hard for management to figure this out quickly and let that person go. It's not exactly rocket science to tell someone they're fired. In my experience, gauging an individual's effect on team productivity can be extremely hard, ESPECIALLY for management types who aren't doing actual dev work with the team. There are so many factors at play here. For example, the ability to produce working code can be worthless if your team morale is poo poo (maybe because of an rear end in a top hat in the team? maybe because you're missing a key person who can lift everybody else up with their positivity? etc). Only relying on something like programming productivity (how do you even measure that? "speed of completing tickets"?) misses a lot of important things. My friend, I'm not convinced that you're not just trolling, but if you're really not, then it's pretty cool to hear about such an extremely different experience from my own. sunaurus fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 17:33
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Pie Colony posted:Actually how is right, code silos (aka multi-repos) where developers exercise operational oversight (devops) over their micro-services are a good idea for a lot of companies. You would still want small teams to handle microservices though, right? Like I've actually fought back against being assigned to some microservice alone, because working without mutual code reviews and without regularly bouncing ideas off somebody seems almost guaranteed to result in lower quality code
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Aug 8, 2019 21:29
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I get why it's important to management that devs look busy most of the time, but I had a year when I was fully remote with very little visibility a few years go, and I firmly believe that that was both the most productive I've ever been, and the least busy I've ever looked. I had a ton of freedom: I hit the gym in the middle of the workday pretty much every day (haven't been in shape since I left that job), I took long breaks whenever I felt like it, I basically ignored business hours and decided when to work by how fresh and motivated I was feeling. I wasn't completely invisible - I was actually the tech lead of a small team with 4 devs, so I had a weekly meeting with my team, and of course I was in contact over slack with individual team members (sometimes sync, mostly async), and I did code reviews constantly. But nobody really knew when or how much I was working - I reported directly to the head of a large department, and he really didn't care about my individual work as long as our team was doing good. Turns out our team did really well - we made the deadline on a pretty complicated project (which everybody else had assumed would go over deadline by at least another year), we did it without tons of technical debt, and we made all of the higher-ups really happy. I ended up leaving that job for a higher salary, but man, it was a really hard decision letting go of all that freedom. I still work remotely at least one day a week, but I need to be in the office most of the time now, and every time I have one of those day where I'm pointlessly browsing the web in the office because I can't get in the zone, I start thinking about finding another job where I can worry less about looking productive so that I can actually be more productive.
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Aug 9, 2019 20:47
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Do you guys think that the junior-mid-senior scale is going to be changing (in an actually noticable way) at some point in the future? The idea that somebody with 5 years of experience is a "senior developer" in a whole lot of companies is totally nuts.
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Aug 15, 2019 07:57
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:How many years should it be? Or are you suggesting more that there should some other measure instead of just time? I'm with you there I don't know what the measure should be, I don't even really care about what actual titles people use, I'm just a bit confused at how the scale can be so short (at least at every place I've ever worked and most places I've ever interviewed at) that you reach the "highest level" after just 5 years as a professional.
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Aug 15, 2019 08:08
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School of How posted:I have the skills to always figure out what's going on, but I understand not everybody has those skills. 
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Aug 15, 2019 20:46
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Imagine if there was an actual real person posting in this thread who believed he was an awesome developer because he knows what `print` does
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Aug 15, 2019 20:48
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I just recently got a job offer from a company in a Scandinavian country, the recruiter said it was around "75th percentile" for senior dev salaries over there. I declined, because the amount of money I have left over after taxes and normal cost of living expenses would have decreased to about 10% of what it is right now (taxes over there are about 2x higher and CoL in that city was also much higher than it is for me right now in Estonia). The recruiter seemed quite surprised at this - he actually sent me an e-mail asking if it's really true that I'm declining because of the salary. I wonder if he thought I was being unreasonable.
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Sep 6, 2019 17:45
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I wanted to rewind the tape a little... Not exactly take home money, I made a rough calculation like (offered salary - taxes - (housing + car + regular shopping + internet + phone)), and the amount left over after that calculation was ~90% lower than what it is with my current salary in my current city. It's not as big of a deal as take home, but it's still quite an insane difference.
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Sep 8, 2019 19:38
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