I get the rage

But did anyone else get 5/5?

People can have very different ideas about grades.
Just talked to some people about how they rate restaurants and one said ”if there’s no problem my default is 5/5. The other day I was a place that was rude and gave me the wrong food. So I just gave it 4/5”.

The other said ”if it’s solid it’s 3/5. Most local places here are not above 3/5. To get 4/5 I want something special, a unique experience. 5/5 means it’s one of the best ever”

Never really thought of em to be totally different like that. I guess it’s true.

But to me if I talk ”functional programming” it would be something like Haskell or F#. Or If I talk ”OOP” it would be a large custom business layer.

It is possible - to use both react and vue mostly as declarative programming

I can imagine that must suck. 😓

Both for you and for the person hearing it.

Cause if I was the touchy type - I would feel so awkward if I thought I was bonding with someone - and tried to gave em a pat on the back or a shake or something - and then heard ”I hate physical contact”

I agree it seem rude.

But it has to be said: this is part of the reason why some companies are reluctant to hire employees that don’t speak the native language - for a company in Iceland this is a non-issue as long as everyone speaks Icelandic - as soon as they hire a few people that don’t this becomes a potential concern

There might be ideas of hiring english speaking devs are desperate to be hired - but this is a concern. Companies are afraid spontaneous conversations will be lost if everyone has to speak english

If you feel social lunches drain your energy - it could just be that 9/10 of your coworkers are like that - but if you keep trying you might find 1/10 that suits you.

It seems unthinkable at first. But I’ve had experiences like that. I hated certain types of workshops lead by designers - went thru 5 lead designers in my company and started declining all workshops. Until I the 6th one which was amazing and changed my mind entirely.

For me - variation is key.

I work from home at least 1 day per week and will eat alone.

Most days I go out of the office building with a group to eat at nearby restaurants.

Some days I eat in the office cafeteria.

I agree it sounds like a low effort job

But I sometimes view this a a doctor health check: if the doc says nothing is wrong - was it a waste? Nah, sometimes you want a pro to assess if there are any problems or not.

Like if you run a Lighthouse check on your site and get a perfect score - the check was worth it even if it concluded there’s no relevant change necessary

But yeah - sounds like a bad effort. Cause branding and design is usually something designers wanna change according to trends or experiments - every X years - even if there’s nothing wrong with it

If I was you - I’d be honest and tell them up front you don’t wanna work with WP. Then maybe ask to speak to a member of the dev team - to get a sense of what they really spend most of their time on in daily work.

PM:s can have an overview of a large team - but can be really poor at describing where most work is done and how it is distributed.

For example I worked in a team of 7 devs where 2 maintained a soon-to-be-obsolete dotnet site and 5 worked on a nodeJS site and once heard them say ”It’s a mix of dotnet and js” and I had to interrupt to correct that dotnet was entirely irrelevant for any new hire

@bad-practice Probably a good thing. When you’re job hunting and you feel bad vibes from a company you sometimes wanna keep them around as option B but keep searching. That can be difficult though. Some companies are so urgent once they make a decision they will go ”you’re accepted! Let’s negotiate tomorrow” and then it becomes stressful to say ”I’m not sure”

If youre undecisive - that can stress you out for a few days

I would feel uninterested in a job if the interviewer was dead serious

Unless the interviewer was an external recruiter I would try not to care - and wait until I met someone from the actual company

If you don’t leave - at least start job scouting. There are many companies who really care about Work Life Balance.

(To the point where some want to work more - but are encouraged to go chill out)

This will surely influence many other european nations - but it might take a very long time.

I think many types of national laws are very specific to the political tradition of that country, and to a large extent immune to influence from other countries.

2 examples: In Sweden, Norway and maybe Finland you cannot sell beer above 3.5% in supermarkets, only from a govt store with limited hours. This has persisted for decades despite most other european countries not doing it that ay.

Example2: Norway. Pro boxing was banned from 1982-2016 because they did not like sports that encouraged people to knock each other out. And there's a law that prevent large stores from being open on Sundays. Even large grocery stores are closed on sundays (with a small amount of exceptions)

@Lensflare Yeah. I think in many cases it is willful ignorance. Or basically just a confession that the deadline dates do not really matter - it's just a part of bureaucracy that they need to insert some date into a Roadmap for their next presentation. And it doesn't really matter if that deadline date is missed. The presentation just has to be written.

A classic example that comes to mind is whenever it's close to christmas a bunch of deadlines will be set to "week before christmas" - and they will not be updated even if conditions change.

(But sometimes they are nice enough to say "Either we make the deadline or we don't. We'll see")

Follow up: sometimes I prefer tickets with 'fuzzy' requirements.

If a ticket is the top priority and "should be worked on until it's done" I'm fine with it being poorly defined and the team can just say "Let's just have a dev, a designer start working on this and talk to a stakeholder to define where it needs to go"

Because I dislike all the meta-work around backlog refinements, pre-planning tickets, all the guesstimates. I love just "work on this until it's done"

From what I hear: some stakeholders are fully aware that they ask for arbitrary deadlines - but they do it intentionally to start a discussion - assuming that this will ”get the discussion going faster” and force the dev team to think about it and respond saying if it is not possible and why - ans suggest a new date

In these situations I find it helpful to ask if the team has defined a strict policy that tickets should be properly defined before they are placed in a sprint.

I have been in a team where all us devs were under the impression that this was the case, but stakeholders thought that requirements in a ticket were just some "initial ideas" that would "probably have to be revisited/revised/rewritten whenever a sprints starts and someone actually starts looking into the ticket in detail"

After this we had a discussion and started using 2 different labels for tickets: a) well-defined b) fuzzy

Why? Because it technically translates to "Respond, if it pleases you" - but it's used as if it meant "I demand that you to respond with yes or no"

-----

Personally I've let go of my hangup on this, and just accepted that any mention of RSVP now colloquially means "I demand a response".

Heck, even wikipedia's definition mentions that a possible translation can be "Please respond"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSVP

RSVP is an initialism derived from the French phrase Répondez s'il vous plaît" meaning "Respond, if it pleases you", or just "Please respond", to require confirmation of an invitation

This code-feedback: what kind of project was it?

a) An assignment you did specifically for this job interview?

b) You sent them a project you worked on before, or your GItHub profile or something like that

My opinion:

* For job interview assignments I am very tolerant of mistakes

* If a candidate sends me their entire GitHub profile with a dozen hobby projects that do not matter I am also very tolerant of mistakes

* But if a candidate sent me a specific project and it seems this was the work they are most proud of and wanna highlight and have worked on semi professionally...I would be alarmed if the first thing I see is obvious mistakes. A few slip ups is fine but if it seems they misunderstood an entire concept and the code is littered with mistakes I'd be worried.

I feel your pain 😞

Was this in speech or text?

I would say that if it is in text form - it shouldn't be a problem if people use unique words like "retrofit" anyone can easily look them up while reading the text.

Regarding calling you outside of work hours:

You can probably argue this is something they need to pay extra for.

It might seem normal and something that just "comes with the job" but you can argue it shouldn't be that way. When I joined the company I'm at today - initially they had a list of all developers phone numbers and the rule was "if the entire site somehow dies during out-of-office hours - a boss can call any dev". Since that never happened I thought it was acceptable.

But then we got an employee knew about on labour laws who said "No - if the company wants to be able to call devs outside of office hours - we need to be paid extra" and after that things changed. We (the team) got to pick if we wanted to get extra pay for being 'on call' during certain hours or if we wanted to make sure no one called us

"PM made it clear that they expect to be able to call us an hour before and two hours after"

Expecting to be able to call an employee BEFORE they begin work in the morning sounds very unusual.

With remote work - it's normal for people to wake up like fifteen minutes before their work day begins

Yeah, just the other week I was asked to vote on an approach for building some kind of video feature

Which 3rd party provider would easiest to work with based off glancing at vague docs or demo websites

When I asked how the videos would even be selected (Some CMS? Automated feeds?) they had no idea

...But at the same time I can't complain cause I always say they should "involve devs earlier in the process" to prevent insane decisions which are technically unfeasible

Legit answers:

FrontendMasters.com is really good, we pay for it at work

Egghead.io is free and also good (at least last time I checked, 3 years ago)

There are many others too, these are just my top2

But overall if you're not already a programmer - I think a real computer science education is the best. You learn so much more in a class where you can ask and learn from others than only being alone watching videos. (A mix of both is good)

I've always been surprised by how the incompetence of Managers and Designers when it comes to writing specifications or even just casually describing requirements in words without graphics

Some designers I work with seriously cannot comprehend ideas like describing in words what should happen when you click a button

We often forget to do the maths on how much an annual % raise can amount to

If you earn 70K and get a 5% raise you'll end up with 114K after ten years

This is a blessing and a curse - people talk about expecting a % increase but they kinda forget that the amount per year becomes HUGE

And then we have the situation where some people were hired during eras where it was hard to hire and the company was desperate to start new projects so they overpaid new hires and then lowered starting salaries other years

Using comments sparingly is the way to go for me.

Good code can be mostly self explanatory

Exceptions are

* Business decisions that make the code worse than normal

* Stuff that has to be done a certain way due to a 3rd party lib, like "This index starts at 1 because lib-x demands it"

* Describing expected return data of weird 3rd party services which cannot be looked up easily

LOTS of comments is not ideal imo. Then you will not "see the forest for the trees, and people will miss critical comments in a tirade of insignificant comments.

But yes - I hate when people want to forbid comments entirely.

What are we even talking here? Was this discussing what would be included in the next Major Release?

Some guesses of the top of my mind

1) They have been burned before. For example - this year my team had 3 issues caused by people adding code to the end of functions and not noticing some nested condition with a `return` in the middle of the function. So I now advice against those `return` placements

2) Code review culture. Some devs have the idea that they approve a PR if it works. Some struggle to just approve a PR and seem to actively hunt for some detail to object to. This is probably also because they have been burned some time in the past - for example they might have complained about some old code and someone did a git blame and said "LOL - you moron - you approved this code!" so now they feel super-protective over every line of code that goes into master. At this stage you should have a discussion about how your want your PR approvals to work and say "Please consider if your suggestion really is CRITICAL or just a stylistic detail that's a matter of opinion"

Don’t do it

Even if i 100% agreed with this statenent

I’d look at this commit and think ”what kind of loose cannon wrote this as a commit? We know shit sucks right now but you fucking up git history will make it worse”