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1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.
2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.
3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.16 -
I want Gordon Ramsey to start a IT program in the same fashion as Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares
He'll sit at a desk with a laptop, examining code as if he's eating food, venting frustrations and screaming insults out loud
Then he'll have a talk with the team and see how they work on a day
After that he'll go into the freezer (server room) and scream at mold and cockroaches
Then comes the intervention where we discover that the PM is still grieving about the death of his original programming language and the team loves him but thinks he should move on
The next day the development studio is modernised and has a candy bar, tennis table and everyone is forced to use linux on their new macbooks
Then we experience a good day where everything is great and velocity is through the roof
Then Gordon leaves and everything is shit again17 -
Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.
I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.
If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.
Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.
But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.
Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.6 -
Manager: "If you need me, just @ me"
Me: "Can you look at this right now?"
Manager: "Sorry I'm at a tennis match, I'll be 30mins"
3 hours later
Manager: "Do you still need me?"
...
Me: "A device died. Playbook says we have to flash it and lose all data on it, but we could go to the vendor for a solution if their fast enough. I just need you to make the call to deviate"
Manager: "Uggghhh" (goes offline for 2 hours)
Wtf man?!11 -
Playing email tennis with a client trying to get to the specifics of a vague initial request. Difficult to do without being patronising and condescending. Having to read and edit my emails to make them believe that I don't think they are a useless fucking incompetent twat.2
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I am not a shy person, but I still like to keep to myself, I am just not that into socialization.
Everywhere I've worked I've only made friends with those that sat very close to me, like in the neighboring cubicles or whatever, even if I didn't have any project in common with them, but my relationship with those that were working on the same project as me was strictly professional.
Recently, my employer installed a rec-room with table tennis, foosball and pool table etc. And ever since then the whole office's morale has sky rocketed, especially mine. Now, I almost always spend at least 2-3 hours down there daily playing those games and I have gotten to know and have made friends with a lot of my co-workers, something that I wouldn't have done ordinarily ever.
Now my point here is that, I've always found socialization to be a bit out of my comfort zone, I always thought it to be a bit bothersome, but it would seem that all I really needed was the right environment, it is very hard to get to know others around you in a strictly professional environment, so having dedicated places in your office for things like group activities that can help relieve stress and allow people to get to know each other better outside the work environment can be extremely helpful.1 -
Fucking pain. Can't use my right hand anymore. Stretching it is painful. Bending it is painful. Think it's that tennis elbow, mouse elbow shit finally happening. Currently applying ice at 5am.
Seriously, I got stiff and pain on my left shoulder last few weeks. After a decade of using laptops and mouses in any posture, it is not my 8 years old laptop turning into potato only. This weak ass body is turning into a sack of pain.
Guys and girls take care of your arms and body just like your hardwares.4 -
!rant
What's your dream GSDR/GWDR setup?
(Get shit/work done room)
Spacious desk, three 21" monitors. MacBook Pro laptop and windows/ubuntu desktop.
A nice big dry erase or smart board on the wall.
Hardwood/hard carpet floors.
One empty wall so that I may bounce a tennis ball against it while I contemplate.
Electric piano.
A tough padded bench for naps and laying down to change perspective.
Very good lighting.
Close proximity to a gym.
I guess I'll have to move out of my parents first though 😅3 -
Always wanted to try this rubber duck debugging everybody is talking about. Sadly I do not have a rubber duck at my disposal, so this tennis ball has to do (the colors match, so thats close enough I think ッ).
4 -
1. When you are super busy, stuck at work, fixing codes with deadlines overshoot, and then, an intern comes to ask a question. Leaving all my important tasks aside, I turn to help him out and then he asks me:
"Where can I get the Table Tennis bat?"
Seriously, I gave all my attention to help him out since he is new and he ended up asking this..
2. Scene: My manager and me having a serious discussion regarding design reviews and future tasks.
2.a) An intern of my team comes and just stands near us. My manager asks him if he wants to talk urgently with anyone of us, and he says no. I am just standing and listening.
2.b) This time a step ahead. He actually intervenes to ask me about some stuff during a serious conversation between my manager and me. -
Not just a rant, also a call for help.
After 10 years using Git, I'm constrained to use Mercurial (company policy). It effing feels like playing tennis with one arm tied to my back.
Please, who knows a good GUI for Linux, or at least a command line tool to show a decent log?
Kill Mercurial!3 -
Why are companies so biased against employees those who come late and work late as compared to those who come early and leave early?
Why is it okay to leave early but not so much to come late instead?
After some of us ignored repeated warnings, we've been told that anyone come after 10:30am will be marked half day absent.
So, if they do so, I'll sit there in office playing Fifa or Table Tennis, and not work until the second half starts xD
The reason for such biasness is that the daily stand-up is at 10:30, even though more people wanted it to be after 11. They even took a vote. And yet it was ignored (funnily initially more ppl voted for 11 initially and somehow some of the votes changed for in favor of 10am... Now slowly, because half the team wouldn't be on time, it's shifted to 10:30am.
And funnily, I'm already serving notice period in this company.7 -
I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.
I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...
It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.
On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?
I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.
Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.
Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.
Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.
So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.5 -
I am working more effectively nowadays from home rather than from office.
At office, I end up spending most time in eating, playing table tennis and meetings.
The only thing I am missing at my house is my 2 big 27" 4k office monitors. -
"Meet the new 'Iphone Tennis'(XS) , or should i say 'Iphone excess'? XD"
"Meanwhile , we are also launching an iphone ten- Hour(XR) which we will completely validate google's point of having a single camera and uselessness of our over-hyped dual camera " -
The hype of Artificial Intelligence and Neutral Net gets me sick by the day.
We all know that the potential power of AI’s give stock prices a bump and bolster investor confidence. But too many companies are reluctant to address its very real limits. It has evidently become a taboo to discuss AI’s shortcomings and the limitations of machine learning, neural nets, and deep learning. However, if we want to strategically deploy these technologies in enterprises, we really need to talk about its weaknesses.
AI lacks common sense. AI may be able to recognize that within a photo, there’s a man on a horse. But it probably won’t appreciate that the figures are actually a bronze sculpture of a man on a horse, not an actual man on an actual horse.
Let's consider the lesson offered by Margaret Mitchell, a research scientist at Google. Mitchell helps develop computers that can communicate about what they see and understand. As she feeds images and data to AIs, she asks them questions about what they “see.” In one case, Mitchell fed an AI lots of input about fun things and activities. When Mitchell showed the AI an image of a koala bear, it said, “Cute creature!” But when she showed the AI a picture of a house violently burning down, the AI exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”
The AI selected this response due to the orange and red colors it scanned in the photo; these fiery tones were frequently associated with positive responses in the AI’s input data set. It’s stories like these that demonstrate AI’s inevitable gaps, blind spots, and complete lack of common sense.
AI is data-hungry and brittle. Neural nets require far too much data to match human intellects. In most cases, they require thousands or millions of examples to learn from. Worse still, each time you need to recognize a new type of item, you have to start from scratch.
Algorithmic problem-solving is also severely hampered by the quality of data it’s fed. If an AI hasn’t been explicitly told how to answer a question, it can’t reason it out. It cannot respond to an unexpected change if it hasn’t been programmed to anticipate it.
Today’s business world is filled with disruptions and events—from physical to economic to political—and these disruptions require interpretation and flexibility. Algorithms alone cannot handle that.
"AI lacks intuition". Humans use intuition to navigate the physical world. When you pivot and swing to hit a tennis ball or step off a sidewalk to cross the street, you do so without a thought—things that would require a robot so much processing power that it’s almost inconceivable that we would engineer them.
Algorithms get trapped in local optima. When assigned a task, a computer program may find solutions that are close by in the search process—known as the local optimum—but fail to find the best of all possible solutions. Finding the best global solution would require understanding context and changing context, or thinking creatively about the problem and potential solutions. Humans can do that. They can connect seemingly disparate concepts and come up with out-of-the-box thinking that solves problems in novel ways. AI cannot.
"AI can’t explain itself". AI may come up with the right answers, but even researchers who train AI systems often do not understand how an algorithm reached a specific conclusion. This is very problematic when AI is used in the context of medical diagnoses, for example, or in any environment where decisions have non-trivial consequences. What the algorithm has “learned” remains a mystery to everyone. Even if the AI is right, people will not trust its analytical output.
Artificial Intelligence offers tremendous opportunities and capabilities but it can’t see the world as we humans do. All we need do is work on its weaknesses and have them sorted out rather than have it overly hyped with make-believes and ignore its limitations in plain sight.
Ref: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/...6 -
It's insane that to get a phone with decent specs without getting one that's even bigger than what I have(a 5.5" asus that feels like a behemoth) I had to get a phone that was released almost two years ago. I figure sony will release a new compact some time soon, but the price was right on the XZ2, and it feels wonderful to use a phone with one hand again.4
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If they could pay me to:
Play video games - Counter Strike
Read good books
Play games such as table tennis, pool
High salary
Extra perks
Free food
Remote work allowed
Sponsored vacations
And may be, once a while I code something interesting, where they help me out in everything I need...
And that would be my ideal job :P -
My biggest regret is not becoming a programmer sooner in life. Ever since I saw the computer wore tennis shoes when I was 5 I wanted to be a computer programmer. But my brother discouraged me saying it was so difficult but no one did it. So I thought I guess if no one is doing it.... Then in both Junior High and High School they have computer classes but you had to be friends with the teacher to even know it existed in the first place. I was not on good terms with him.
Thanks to a very encouraging Teacher at Art School I finally I was able to pursue my lifelong interest in computers. -
Walk away get a break. Hit coffee or table tennis, than come back on the problem. I am assuming you already googled before leaving.
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