191–200 of 464 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I call this achieving Enterprise Zen. You have to let go of your attachment to productivity and ponder on kohns such as "If a task is accomplished but no one sees it on a report, was that task accomplished?"
we call this :PASOK:
You should probably accept this as a fact, and figure out what your next startup will be. Join an existing one, start something with some equally frustrated coworkers?
You have some time to figure it out. Just like it takes them 6 months to do your simple code change, it'll take them as long to fire you if you stop working.
Sad but true: that company will only kill your startup culture in the favor of their boring enterprise corporate model, and you (rightfully) don't want that.
> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer. Your simple task, which you think would only take a few days to implement, is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with. That means they won't be able to start on it for a long time. That team probably set up t…
Somewhat ironically, I just left a FAANG where people constantly had this behavior of expecting me (or other members of my team) to drop whatever and prioritize their request.
I kept mentioning this to my manager as an issue because we needed to figure out a way to prevent this, maybe change it, etc. But basically it's a "company culture" thing (some people might be able to guess which company).
A lot of people have talked about the issues with this post, but I wanted to call out one specific thing: The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever. This is definitely not odd. The whole point of managers is that they're there to protect their engineers from getting off track with every random request that comes up.…
You raise a fair point here - good managers protect their employees’ time, however in this case, the the task was not a “personal task” but rather an initiative handed down from the parent company, without giving OP the proper resources and guidance to complete the task. If that’s the case (and having found myself in that position many times, it likely is), this a failing of the parent company. I’d expect those manag…
Of course, it's entirely possible that you're right, and if this was a more important issue I definitely agree with you that it needs to have a dedicated resource assigned from the deploy team and it needs to be scheduled into their roadmap somehow. Ultimately we're just all speculating based on the small details the OP gave us.
However, I think my core point still stands—even if OP is right to feel that the deploy team is making the wrong decision in general about prioritization, they need to at least consider that the deploy team has other, competing priorities that they're juggling, and that the actual change might be more complicated in "at scale" (code review, QA, interaction with other options, documentation, long-term maintenance, etc) then OP is willing to believe.
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> This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I believe the manager explains it right after that. They have compliance reasons that not just anyone can access this codebase. It's also possible that the manager has acquiesced to types of requests before and it was a mess — new engineer doesn't understand they system, requirements of its scale (note that this is a new engineer f…
There is no compliance reason why OP couldn't have read access to look at the source. If there is a compliance issue with someone looking at source, then either (a) their source control is misconfigured, (b) their source control is being misused, or (c) they have no policy to guarantee appropriate use and detect improper use. Any organization that uses compliance as an excuse for opaqueness, creating silos, and guard…
Companies can have whatever compliance terms they like, whether they map to ISO27001 controls or not.
> Any organization that uses compliance as an excuse for opaqueness, creating silos, and guarding projects like treasure is toxic, especially if people there are so institutionalized that they think that's a valid reason, and OP should begin looking for another job ASAP.
Or they believe it's a reasonable control. Let's imagine this is a company working on self driving cars. Your source code is probably something you want to protect very carefully.
Large companies view your day-to-day activities through a very different lens than a startup, and they want you to use a very different lens as well, and you'd need to get the right combination of manager and mentor and team and teammates and yourself to get the payoff.
I'd roll into another startup; since you haven't, I'd assume you have reasons for not rolling into another startup, but it's getting kind of abstract at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Take this as a learning experience: don't assume that you are at a startup where people will drop everything to handle a request from you right away. This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I've been in the same situation multiple times. Sometimes I've been allowed to do the work and sometimes not. In the cases where I was allowed to do the work, I certainly took longer…
> This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I believe the manager explains it right after that. They have compliance reasons that not just anyone can access this codebase. It's also possible that the manager has acquiesced to types of requests before and it was a mess — new engineer doesn't understand they system, requirements of its scale (note that this is a new engineer f…
A lot of people have talked about the issues with this post, but I wanted to call out one specific thing: The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever. This is definitely not odd. The whole point of managers is that they're there to protect their engineers from getting off track with every random request that comes up.…
> This feels like a rant that comes from someone who doesn't have a lot of experience deploying and maintaining complex systems over long periods of time. Agree. Also: > Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app) If migrating the app to the new platform is a priority, why not escal…
EDIT: I felt bad enough that I went and edited that sentence, in case anyone reading this later is confused.