211–220 of 424 posts
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I’m sure I read something similar in some sort of manifesto...
And many companies filled with employees with "Agile" in their job title have probably never read it.
Edit: This is a genuine question, I'd be very keen to hear concrete ideas on how to work better.
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It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
Would you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
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companies investing in training is real. Be it pushing for certification, mooc, internal training credit. All of that was part of my review for instance. It does work.
Ugh, reviews, another part of employee life I haven't missed! That stuff re: training was not something that was part of my life as a perm worker, in the UK or Australia. The companies certainly liked to pay lip-service to employee development, but I didn't see much evidence of it actually happening.
I guess the exception was one quiz about bribery I had to take at IBM. It asked me what I would do if I were offered a cook to go with my lodgings where I was staying during an engagement. This woke me up to the possibilities of bribery I didn't know people were getting. I'm not exactly looking for bribes, but my the hypotheticals had me thinking way too small.
I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me. 1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating. 2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figur…
For me, having a Windows (Server) environment is enough to kill my interest. I know several shops in my area (mostly medical field adjacent tech) that are entirely Windows. That's probably more because of my extensive *nix background than anything. Language doesn't matter, but platform can/does to some
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>With those 1 or 2 percent raises being a norm almost everywhere, it's hardly a reason to actually leave the company. But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs. >occasional hiring and training costs. Hiring and training costs are enormous, and they aren't occasional when you're talking about software companies with very high turnover. If you're incentivizing job hop…
>But it is a reason to leave the company because you can easily get 10% or more switching jobs. Depends on the company. Mine is 100% remote since COVID, has generous benefits, a strict 9-5 M-F culture, and plenty of interesting work to do as much (or as little) as I have an appetite for. I make maybe 10% under market rate, but it would take at least a 50% raise to get me to leave. That's never happening, as it would…
* respect during the interview process. i've had interviewers repeatedly fail to answer/make calls for initial phone interviews, send emails about rescheduling a 9AM interview at 6AM, demand i sign NDAs during the interview, lie about what the interview process will consist of.
* comparable coworkers. if you're going to hire me as an X level engineer, every other X level engineer i meet had better come across as being on my level. don't call everyone a senior engineer when some folks are unqualified to operate a text editor. it shows that management doesn't know who is competent and who isn't, which has bad implications for raises and work assignment.
I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :) I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc. Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-o…
I think the walkout is a symptom of the problem you're pointing out, not the cause. People started to think of it as a dead-end job working on someone else's toy.
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That largely is a case-by-case decision I think. Perhaps via open source work, perhaps via a short take-home assignment. Since work in most of the US is “at will”, it’s an easy problem to solve if it turns out someone has exaggerated their abilities. My problem is not with _any_ coding to be clear. It’s mostly the Google gotcha questions designed to make the interviewer look smart, and where the primary takeaway is t…
I always find this argument of "Google gotcha" questions weak. I agree 100% that tricky questions around dynamic programming, linked lists, etc. are a terrible choice. However, I think a lot of these questions do a good job of measuring how well the candidate understands basic data structures. It amazes me how many "seasoned engineers" do not understand when to use things like hash sets/maps (just look at the monthly…
I think you misunderstand my notion of a "google gotcha" - I'm not proposing that interviews do not into rigorous technical detail. I'm proposing that interviews that test knowledge of easily-looked-up trivia rather than an understanding of engineering pragmatism and trade-offs are fundamentally flawed and yield markedly worse results than those that do not _regardless_ of company.
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> it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it. How? What do you put on your resume ? I am genuinely curious. Forget about sales, how do you prove that you can now implement their machine learning projects.
Contractors can be let go immediately with almost no repercussions, so the bar for engaging them is much lower than the bar for hiring a full-time employee. When I was contracting, companies would generally contract me for a week or 2 based on nothing but me telling them I could do something. If I delivered on that initial result, they'd come back for more.