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Ask questions during interview.
Ask about trainings - it's usually a good sign when company offers training budget. Ask about specifics - sometimes it's a shared pluralsight account, and nothing else, which means that that had an idea and half assed it into existence.
Ask tech recruiter about overtime, a good sign is when they have no idea or say that it must be budgeted and scheduled - it means that it does not happen often.
Ask if it is possible to select and change projects, and how often it happens - if often, it may be bad low level management, or people learning new things and jumping between projects.
Also make sure to ask about rules for promotions and pay rises. Good company wił have a clear set of rules in place.
All of the above apply to mid to large companies.
For small company, i'm sure it will be different.3 -
My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.
Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.
Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.
- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.
- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)
- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.
- Feedback is consistently ignored.
- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.
- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.
- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.
This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:
- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.
- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.
- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)1 -
Before new years eve I prepared a sheet on google sheets that allowed people to add drink recipes and order drinks (specify how many of each drink they want), calculated part of budget each person had to cover and generated shopping list of drink components with exact amounts needed.
It was more fun to make that thing than to attend the party.2 -
First company I worked for, overall it was a good experience, but at one point they promoted a consultant to project manager, and their planning skills were about as good as their people skills, which is to say, appalling.
We had a project update for a huge client, that required, for political BS reasons, that most of the team spend several weeks on-site, 300km away from home.
Go-live was approaching, and the plan was: migration starts Friday night, shortly after midnight (so actually, Saturday) once the client’s IT confirms DB is backed up. Expected duration: 5 hours.
- So, you expect me to work from midnight to 5am on Saturday? And when do we start working on Friday?
- 9am, of course.
- 9am!? So you actually planned a 20 hour work day? (Note: legal maximum here is 10 hours in a day, 40 a week)
- And we have to be there on Saturday 1pm to recheck everything is running smooth.
wtaf were they thinking?2 -
Picture a small product team, the dev side of it has 1 tech lead, 1 recently promoted senior dev, 1 junior dev.
1 - Offer your tech lead a severance package
2 - Hire a mid-level and a junior dev
3 - Give the product lead role to someone in their mid-20s that has no tech or project management background
4 - ???
The next 6 months are going to be interesting ones...3 -
What's your worst experience with "not invented here syndrome"?
In the recent past I've been dealing with custom made JS datepickers, autocomplete boxes and various other widgets that were purpose made for some feature. Almost every single widget the app uses is built from scratch.
Now there are new features that need these widgets to behave differently, and needless to say, none were built with customisation or extendability in mind.
Hardly shocking, I know, but I'm the one that has to spend several hours to get these widgets to work for the new features instead of using some of the many open-source, tested, mature and customisable solutions that are out there.3 -
Started a new job last week. Pays a tad below average for position, but i get training time and budget for anything i want.
So far i have had few days of company introduction, and now a week for training courses related to position.
I have not seen any code yet, brought no value in, just joined.
Massive green flag to me. -
Company i work for just posted updated pay rates.
It's good. They went from lower end of spectrum to a little above the average in terms of pay, and benefits stay the same - solid. -
Netflix and YouTube Music, and whatever paid, are missing an important part of the fun.
...
Comment sections9 -
Just got a request to print the new Tesla truck.
I think it wasn't that hard for the Designer to implement the low pol. Design for the 3d print :')4 -
Not leaning on unit tests. I usually write them after testing my code manually, and lose time for testing feature by hand.1
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I stumbled upon series of stories about serial killer/system administrator addicted to lager and onion bahjits who hates users, managers, beancounters and sales people.
I'm just gonna leave it here https://theregister.com/data_centre...1 -
During the company's Xmas event, we were off-site at a place that does events to do a team-building event followed by dinner party.
An error report came up, it wasn't a showstopper, but it was fairly serious, and the perfect excuse to sit out the BS improv team-building exercises that the powers that be thought would be a good idea to have.
Probably my favorite bug ever. -
I basically hate anything that IDEs aren't smart to fix typos.
- JavaScript, but usually not TypeScript
- Python
- SQL, mostly.4 -
Embedded database is so lack of choice. SQLite, might be best, if you want stability / ACIDity.
Again, SQL means normalize everything, if I've ever want to index it...
Then, ON DELETE CASCADE? TRIGGER? Also, MANY-to-MANY kills.6 -
I spent ~12h working on a simple issue/bug.
7h was spent on rebuilding local dev environment which is a clusterfuck of maven profiles, tomcat, some autogenerated degeneracy, and 2 different build systems for JS.
5h spent on actual bug fixing, code reviews and so on.
FML2 -
Send an email.
Or, more seriously: invite only people who must be there, and can add something to the discussion, have an agenda, stick to it, and plan the meeting so that it ends at the start of lunch break. That way everybody will be interested in finishing on time or earlier. -
given Mossad's recently demonstrated brilliance in supply chain attacks, I'm leaning to believe that they were behind the liblzma backdoor.8
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Best free softwares don't work for greater good.
They work for politics and benefits.
And even if you pay, it might not help. The world is full of scammers.5 -
Rails views are not meant to have a ton of logic, local variables and 3 or 4 levels of if/else nesting. That's what presenters, view models and assorted other patterns are for. Or helpers, if you really have to.
Yes, this codebase is so packed with legacy it still runs Rails 2.3, and there's no plans to upgrade it, but that's no excuse to keep writing code like it's 2008. MVC does not mean all code must fit in a model, a view or a controller, ffs.1 -
Get to know the new company better (Changed job shortly before Christmas).
Learn some DPs, DDD, k8s, finish introduction to hacking course, start doing htb and thm machines, finish and defend my thesis, finish books clean code, thinking in java (reading it to fill in gaps on knowledge), a few books about pentesting.
Among non tech goals: pass drivers license exam for cars, another one for motorcycles, go back to learning russian. -
Got pissed that my story delayed the whole project by 3 weeks (major story, lots of changes, and management decided to put me in a few extra activities outside of the project).
Stayed up until like 23:00 to deliver PR.1 -
ORM feels like, I can do better than that, with more predictability (like naming, table creation, and stuff).
The only pro, is hopes for inter-dialects interop (SQLite-Postgres-MySQL-MariaDB).
OK, I also want SQLite-MongoDB interop, because of the cheap price; but this is difficult. -
When I normalize a database, it always feels like I cannot predict Cascading, leaving broken relationships and trash queries.2
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Alias git commit to git stash.
Write a script that opens this page in fullscreen mode after a few minutes of inactivity https://fakeupdate.net/win10ue/ -
I thought I had to VARCHAR in non-SQLite RDBMS. I was wrong. There is TEXT.
1. PostGres seems to work better with TEXT.
2. There is an ORM that forces VARCHAR (255) by default.
3. But you can go over the limit without throwing errors.1 -
Update of previous post
I just got assigned to a project.
Project-specific training is designed to take up to 20 days.
I got materials, videos, and a person who is in this project for a long time to supervise training and introduce me to the project.
Only problem is that the project apparently uses 5 years old version of base framework.
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