Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ithaqua posted:

That only gets you so far when your team is colocated across the world and you have devs on the East Coast, West Coast, Europe, and India.

Replace "turn around and say something" with "say something in slack". The details change, but the general idea of prioritizing making communication easy over creating process to solve problems resulting from poor communication still applies.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 21:06

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:35

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Hughlander posted:

The inverse is just as bad. There was a group of leads/architects who insisted that all code should be self-documenting and therefore there isn't a need to comment the code base. One of them for some reason didn't see the irony of saying that at the same time that he's scratching his head over what two functions do and why they're invoked in the order they are. During the code review of said functions that he himself wrote the week before.

Code review is the best way to find out what needs to be commented. If a reviewer has a question about the code, then there's a good chance that future readers of the code will have the same question, so you should probably add a comment with the same information as you gave to the reviewer.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 04:13

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ten times as much money and more of an expectation that you're an expert at something (that something may be "convincing people to give you money").

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 20:59

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

I've been on three different teams now "making the transition to Agile," and every one was a poo poo show. I'm curious to know whether anybody has witnessed "a transition to Agile" being accomplished successfully.

A proper transition to Agile takes like a week (followed by a few months of ironing out the quirks), so pretty much by definition any team in the middle of a drawn-out transition is going to be a shitshow.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 00:20

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

If you're specifically trying to evaluate how microservices would work for you it actually makes sense to purposefully go overboard with it. A single microservice won't do a very good job of exposing you to the downsides of having to deal with coordinating a whole bunch of services, but you also don't want to start by porting over a bunch of big critical things, so a small thing split into far too many pieces is a good first test.

If they actually think it's good design, then you have a problem.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 19:04

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

I wouldn't have the slightest clue what you meant if you told me we were going to refactor the backlog.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 19:21

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

In practice most people seem to end up with a bunch of tightly coupled services that have to all be updated in lockstep.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2016 19:33

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Unlimited vacation is super hit or miss. It often actually means zero vacation unless your team has a culture of harassing people who take too little vacation.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 02:43

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Achmed Jones posted:

My employer has unlimited vacation. I was very nervous about this when I accepted the position. Even though they don't have minimums, they do email people saying "Hey don't forget to take vacation" every so often, and I've never had vacation denied. I generally take off a week per quarter, random days as needed, and of course the standard 'Hey it's MLK day, office is closed' stuff.

It's been a pretty good experience, but I do have to watch myself to make sure I actually take off.

Yeah, this has been how it's worked for me. We don't have a formal minimum, but I do get prodded into taking some time off if I go a while without it. It helps that half the company is in Denmark and so have a legal minimum of five weeks.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 18:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Not getting any sort of advance notice or severance package for anything but getting fired for cause is super unusual and lovely.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2017 19:54

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

I make changes that cause tests which were originally added to repro a bug to fail all the time. It's really nice having a test suite that's extensive enough that it can be used to test hypotheses about changes, and adding tests as you encounter bugs is a decent way to incrementally get there without specifically dedicating time to expanding your tests.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2017 06:32

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

code:

try {
   serviceCall();
}
catch (Exception ex) {
    TwilioClient.Create(to: new PhoneNumber("developer's number")).Say(ex.GetMessage());
}

# ¿ Apr 26, 2017 01:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Steve French posted:

Cucumber is pretty stupid, IMO, with the disclaimer that the only time I used it was on a team with only developers so it made especially no sense. Someone writes the test as plain text, and then someone else has to write the logic of the actual tests anyway, and then also an extra layer of regular expressions to map the text to the tests. I would dispute that "developers love it," on that basis.

The silliest thing is that it requires that each line start with one of those 5 or so words, but they have absolutely no impact on the test whatsoever; it's a totally arbitrary limitation on what text you can write.

I have never seen an example of how Cucumber could be used that wasn't blatantly insane and useless which always makes me assume that I'm just misunderstanding it, but then I read yet another blog post that assumes that the actual implementation of the tests is just magicked into existence...

# ¿ Apr 28, 2017 22:13

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Volguus posted:

I found that I do a lot more coding at home when what I do at work is boring. When I do cool stuff at work, the home-coding time is almost non-existent.

Yep. I've found that I can spend maybe 6 hours a day working on hard and interesting problems before I'm fried. When I had a boring job that involved two hours of actual work a day I'd come home and spend a few hours working on personal projects all the time. Now I only do when I'm taking time off from work.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 17:27

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

CPColin posted:

The best is when you release a widely anticipated feature and get all excited for the positive feedback to start rolling in and the customer just goes, "meh." Never quite learned my lesson on that one.

Yeah, it's always a little offputting when you finally ship a feature that people have been regularly asking for for years and the only reaction you get is people no longer complain about it not being there.

The upside is that sometimes 6 months later you'll hear that it was the most amazing thing ever and you didn't hear anything at the time because they were busy actually using the awesome new thing rather than talking about how excited they are to maybe be able to use it in the future.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 18:44

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Google doesn't hire for specific positions, so no.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2017 23:12

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Carbon dioxide posted:

google.com is still not valid html. Never has been afaik.

Almost like having valid html may not be the most important thing.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2017 17:56

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Yeah, I know a few people at Amazon who really like it there.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2017 23:37

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

We have zero people dedicated to testing or QA and I would estimate that 75% of my coding time is spent working on tests as a result, but I've literally never gotten any sort of pressure to skimp on that to get features out.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2017 21:25

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

The ability to take as long as I feel I need to get something into a shippable state with only rare deadlines is definitely one of the things I really like about my current job.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 00:11

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

hailthefish posted:

For half a second I wondered if there actually were people who show up to an interview and spend the entire time bagging on the company's language/stack choices and then I realized of course there are.

I had an interviewee jump straight to telling me we were idiots for picking C++ and that we would have to rewrite in C if we didn't want our codebase to inevitably turn into an incomprehensible mess the instant I asked a C++-related question.

The guy who said we should rewrite in Rust was a little more tolerable since he at least skipped calling us idiots for not picking it in 2011.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 07:42

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Volmarias posted:

In what world would "hey let me check your work before we accept it" be grounds for classifying a contractor as an employee?

To actually be a contractor they should be working independently and delivering some form of completed work. This obviously doesn't mean that you can't review that completed work, but having them integrated in the same workflow as your FTEs is the sort of thing that makes the IRS suspicious, and a good routine code review process does involve more direct collaboration than is really appropriate.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2017 04:12

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Most companies with 1099 employees are breaking the law. The IRS is very inconsistent about enforcing it; they cracked down on some companies a while back (10-15 years now?) and then haven't done much since.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2017 06:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Code coverage as a tool for finding code that you forgot to test is useful. Code coverage as a tool for forcing other people to do things is not.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 00:38

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Blinkz0rz posted:

Or, and my guess is this is more likely because goons, they're the kind of people who can only work in perfect silence and take that deficiency out on coworkers.

Yes, I do work much better in complete silence and I complain when I'm asked to work in a lovely environment that doesn't work well for me.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2017 19:04

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Abolish time zones in half the countries of the world, then reinstate them in a different, incompatible way 25 years later.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2017 00:15

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

The Fool posted:

I wonder if that's directly related to the Wordpress post.

The wordpress post itself was a response to FB announcing they were going to stick with the current license, so either they coincidentally pulled a 180 two weeks later or they didn't want to lose WP.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2017 06:44

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Ironically just in time for Google to start allowing search results to have a paywall.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2017 16:18

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

geeves posted:

I don't like how draconian TDD and some of its supporters can be. I think a mix of TDD and regular unit testing work well for a lot of how we work.

Today and yesterday we had two meetings to design a component with everyone in the room. The first one was discussing everything that was needed. The second was writing tests from the notes on the first one with everyone involved.

Congratjorbations! In 45 minutes we had a simple Button Component with required properties designed and tested and passing. And yes, most of this was done in TDD way designing the first tests before coding the component.

I think TDD is rarely the best way to write software, but getting people in the habit of writing tests for everything is one of the things that it's really good for.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2017 06:09

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

I'm thankful that there are enough broken people out there that vim bindings exist for nearly everywhere I might want to edit text, but it sure would be nice to not have to flail around helplessly when faced with a normal text box.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 20:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

It's okay to occasionally say that you didn't get much done yesterday.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2018 03:11

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

vonnegutt posted:

one time I worked on an API that was required to return 200 for every http request. If it was an error we were required to return 200 with a body of {error_code: 500, error: foo}. We asked the client why and they acted like we were the weird ones.

This is usually because of terribly designed "rest" libraries that treat 200 and non-200 responses completely differently. I once had to work with one which just outright didn't give you access to the body of non-200 responses.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 21:27

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

You have a form with a bunch of fields. The user edits one, then clicks the save button. You send off a PUT request with the new value of the one field the user edited.The server sends back some acknowledgement that the PUT was accepted. What should that acknowledgement contain?

There's a few potential options:

1. Nothing at all.
2. A status message of some sort.
3. The new values of the fields that were modified.
4. The full new state of the object being worked on.

204 is the first case, where there just plain isn't anything to report to the client beyond that their request succeeded. You could of course send a 200 with an empty body, but that's more confusing when looking at request/response logs, or a 200 with a body that says "hey nothing to report", but that's just reinventing a 204 response.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 20:38

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

It really is, yeah.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2018 22:14

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

One person writing tests while another person works on the implementation isn't an inherently terrible idea, and can help ensure that the tests and code don't both fail to handle some edge case that didn't occur to you. Ideally it's more of async pair programming, though, and would involve just two people and switching between roles on a regular basis.

An entire team writing tests that an entirely separate team in a different time zone is making pass just sounds hilarious.

# ¿ May 31, 2018 16:58

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

A "hostile work environment" means something fairly specific in the context of employment law, and a stupid rear end in a top hat boss does not come remotely close to it.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2018 16:06

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Protocol7 posted:

I just thumbed through that thread.

Good lord people she works at Google, I think she can handle git. Notwithstanding that it's a joke...

Obviously it's a joke, but working at google and not having the slightest clue how to use git are not at all mutually exclusive.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2020 20:26

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Protocol7 posted:

I guarantee the average google engineer knows how to work git probably better than I do, and probably better than most of the people commenting in the thread.

The average google engineer is not meaningfully different from the average engineer at any other software company. Since google does not use git internally, I'd expect the average google engineer to be below average at using git simply because many of them simply don't use it regularly.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 01:06

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

"This person works for company X therefore they are automatically masters of every single technology that has ever existed" is dumb even when it's not a company that has 100k employees.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 01:08

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:35

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Xik posted:

You can follow the twitter OP's profile to their github page where they have a bunch of non-trivial projects released.

So at this point you're just running to the defense of a bunch of twitter users that likely saw she was a woman, then smugly posted ~~have you heard about git rebase~~.

I'm not sure what's unclear. I complained about the claim that working at google means that she must know how to use git because that's a dumb statement. It's safe to assume that 98% of the responses she got on twitter were even dumber than that statement because people can never pass up an opportunity to "correct" obvious jokes, and there's plenty of reasons that aren't dumb to assume that she knows how to use git. Neither of those things are related.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 06:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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