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Mid level here. I'm working for a disorganized, older corp that has recently grown like a weed seemingly overnight and has decided to not waste money on terrible poo poo by contractors or a C-level's kid, so they're building a team and ran off the no-effort lazy people who were roosting here before. They even hired on a VP from Deutsche Bank who set up business continuity, devops, and other things like "handling disasters" or "handling changeovers that lead to outages." So far he's still working on it. Personally, I'm just a dev, but I'm the more people-oriented one among the new team. There are a few immediate problems I'm finding, and they all center around a lack of organization, a lack of people being on the same page - multiple divisions grabbing at resources like a game of hungry hungry hippos with no real central authority over who has what running on which server - and a lack of clear responsibility for certain people. Every morning we have a standing room only meeting that lasts nearly 30 minutes, and sometimes 45. This is not a 'scrum.' The manager for "MIS" does actually keep us clued in, though the lack of room and standing for that long to just have a chummy meeting is kind of a pain in the rear end. Then about an hour later, the PM for a project I'm working on has me go to her floor, sit down, and then have another babble session about the project I'm working on, which is a 'scrum' that runs 15 minutes or more. Said PM also often asks me what to do about things and I haven't been here long enough to know poo poo - not even two months! I'm now wondering what exactly a PM does and doesn't do, since she basically got promoted from Senior Dev to PM and decided to keep her crazy workaholic attitude. so she apparently is trying to do everything but write it herself. Being an old company they just DO that, apparently, but haven't considered that PM training might go with the promotion and bigger office. Another thing is that she has a thick accent and she's often very hard to understand, Peruvian spanish is apparently quite different from the other accents I've heard before. I really hope she becomes more distant and just gives me poo poo in writing eventually. I've since started selling a BA/Scrummaster I know to the business, since we're basically doing not-even-waterfall and terribly disorganized. I keep hoping that CIO will restructure poo poo so we have a team or a person in charge of the servers, so we don't have one division's sandbox hosting another's production stuff. I've also tried to explain to the PM what agile is, and in 40 minutes we're going to try to shirt size a sprint over two hours. I do not look forward to this but I hope it will pay off. Assuming that BA/Scrummaster comes by and helps clean things up, things will improve quickly, since she's good at that. If that doesn't happen, though, what can I do? Note: This is just a pit stop anyway. Unless I'm given a huge raise and the authority to really fix poo poo, and meet the love of my life, I'm moving to a big tech market by the fall, so this is just to learn the hard way if this is worth trying to fix.
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May 5, 2015 14:29
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fritz posted:Fall's not too far away, just roll with the punches and start getting some bullet points for your resume, and maybe learn how to nap standing up. Hiding phone behind my knee during useless prattling about how/why or triplicate, detailed explanations of what a thing I know how to do does? Already got that down. I'm gonna try to sell the scrummaster I know on one of the needlessly needed managers, but like you said, roll and get the bullets then go. One thing I am curious about is how to tell a PM to distill down info to developers in a tactful way. The reason we have a PM is so that they can gather info and tell us what features to do and decide what features we are to do, not tell us all of the info you collected then tell us what we need to know, then ask if we agree with your decisions - right? Right? TWO HOURS to go over every little useless factoid about "hey make some DDLs, wait on me to do X,Y,Z to the database and keep making sure you understand $API_ENDPOINT" and then schedule a 4pm to 5pm "ok now we're just gonna do time estimates!" final sprint planning meeting seems a bit, well, bad.
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May 5, 2015 18:41
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Amazon jiggled the bait again and I bit. What should I watch out for? I'm to speak to the team responsible for the APIs and such for outside vendors that use amazon to sell their stuff.
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May 18, 2015 21:54
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Vulture Culture posted:Amazon's well-known for being a very high-pressure environment that uses stack ranking as the driving mechanism for performance reviews, so be aware of that going in. "Free ride to Seattle to interview at a few other places," gotcha.
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May 18, 2015 22:25
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Hey Shrughes why not give us a quiche story?
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Oct 1, 2015 07:43
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I've done .NET full stack web for 4 years. How much of a corner am I painted into right now? I can't help but get attention for "HEY DO A C#!!!" or "FIX MY OLD WEB FORMS WRITTEN IN VB.NET", but it's kind of meh right now. I could stand to see another side of things. Besides throw poo poo on github in another language, what's a good thing to do? Just apply for junior positions in other stacks and hope people can put two and two together? If it matters, I'm in Austin, and I'd move with a relo tomorrow. Lease is even up soon.
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May 26, 2016 04:20
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Besides "I was starting my career in a kinda crappy place where this was the only way to get paid and that's why I came to this nice place," how do you explain why one wants to go from contracts to FTE? Or is it probably worth just getting some exchange obamacare and keeping up with contracts until you get old? Also never, ever get too comfortable. Being monkey in the middle between two leads can quickly result in a "bad fit" pat on the back out the door. ALWAYS CYA. Why the gently caress are some people so disagreeable and hard at just cooperating? EDIT: Also, what's the correct way to gracefully dodge the question and not badmouth a prior employer besides "bad fit," particularly when your employer's policy is to not discuss anything whatsoever except time of employment?
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Jun 11, 2016 01:17
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No Safe Word posted:In my opinion, you can say negative things about a prior employer as long as it's a fact-based assessment. What happened was "$priorJob signed a huge contract with NDA so a lot of people ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, CTO dancing around humming zipadeedoodah, I just did what was told instead of CYA-ing, and communication/management breakdown bit me in the rear end. I think. Nobody actually told me poo poo and the only fact is Monday contract signed Tuesday I'm gone. I have no idea if anyone else left as I was all but snuck out and on linkedin my coworkers were shocked." If I say that I'm going to look whiny or resentful. I honestly don't care but someone's gonna ask why I was at a place only 8 months, especially when the first job in town had layoffs after only 3 months. That first job will happily explain it all, but the second won't say poo poo when HR answers, per their policy, and all I was told was "bad fit" and "I wouldn't even worry you are a good dev." I'm moving again (Denver from Austin) and I might be able to say "lease up, didn't like Austin, but my gf has sold me on the place and she took me home with her" (which is actually very true) but I don't want this to be a thorn in my side for the next few years. I want to find a good place and stay put, not get lowballed out the door or go back to contractville and be locked out of a good long term full time job. I really want stability. Edit: I'd honestly rather just tell the truth, but since everything is a drat kabuki show of manners and ritualized non answers I figured I'd actually start paying attention to CYA so this doesn't happen again.
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Jun 11, 2016 01:37
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Che Delilas posted:I really feel like you're over thinking this, contract vs. perm is really just a matter of personal preference and opportunity. Yeah. I'm getting interviews very quickly. Sigh. I just thought I was in the place I'd be for several years already and now I'm looking again.
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Jun 12, 2016 03:01
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Munkeymon posted:You answered your own question right here because, as long as you blame yourself, it's OK. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
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Jun 17, 2016 21:13
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Can you get locked into contracting? If so how the hell do you break out besides shop for fulltime while contracting? Edit: I look for FTE but I've had a bad run where people hem and haw, and when the bills start coming due a contract is waved in front of me so I take it. Having felt the burn of "heh you're disposable but thanks for the help!" one times too many I'm about ready to just say gently caress it or even settle for something lovely just to get some goddamn tenure and know people for more than one holiday at a time. Space Whale fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Apr 15, 2018 |
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Apr 15, 2018 00:12
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I'm at the point I have to think about if I'm just "senior dev" forever, team lead, architect, or whatever I'm not thinking of. Or another industry entirely? 8 years of experience this fall, and arguably I got started because of you wonderful goons telling me to get an internship. THANK YOU. For anyone who is lurking who is just starting out, GET AN INTERNSHIP. I've spent my time in the .NET space, and while the language, tooling, and so forth are great, I'm finding that management wise, a lot of the places I've worked at are poo poo. Biz people making judgement calls they are not equipped to make, being penny wise and pound foolish, using agile to meddle, micromanage and nit pick, nobody willing to actually improve how things are done process wise, and everyone balking at the thought of addressing tech debt, even if I drop the strangler (fig) pattern and martin fowler and all that jazz. I feel stagnant. For reasons beyond my career - coronavirus response as much as amenities, weather, landscape, and crap - I really want out of the loving south, and will be moving myself out ASAP. I want to work in SoCal, and that doesn't seem to be very good for someone who does C#. So, what do I pick up along the way? Python? Something else? I'm trying to optimize getting my first job out of this stack. How do you get that, besides "have a github 4head" or go to meetups and impress someone enough, and be able to interview CS fundamentals? And whether or not I use a particular language, how do you figure out what path to take as far as being a team lead or an architect? I find myself increasingly more concerned with and frankly more interested in how the people around me work, be it how they organize and the processes used, as much as making sure people are able to communicate, understand things, and getting the support they need to keep improving. At the same time, architecture and why it matters is coming into focus for me, and I'd rather at least try to take responsibility for it than just go "hey here's an idea" and find back "yeah but we don't have time!", or worse, if I offer to do it on my own time outside of business hours, "but the off shore people will complain."
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Apr 29, 2020 15:56
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I'm now wondering why the Irish accent is particularly sticky. Even lamenting it seems to make it creep up on me.
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May 15, 2020 14:53
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