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How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

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Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#111

Post by spaceseaman »

tcbawo wrote: post #37
spaceseaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

That's not an age or experience thing. People can be jerks at any age or level. Good engineers do not equate illiteracy of the codebase (unfamiliarity) with ineptitude. Good engineers educate without contempt. On the flip side, many people come into an organization questioning why or how things are done. Often, the current product is a ball of inperfection and compromises. Spend 2x more time reading the code than ask…

> People can be jerks at any age or level.

Good point, I was simply saying that in my experience it's the people with "senior" in their job title who do this most often.

> many people come into an organization questioning why or how things are done.

I think Chesterton's fence is a very important concept for new engineers to learn. But sometimes it's still valuable to understand for yourself why that fence is there in the first place rather than just take someone's word for it. The best scenario is an opportunity for a senior to guide a junior in the exact why.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#113

Post by spaceseaman »

IncRnd wrote: post #68
spaceseaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

Maybe I read your post wrong, but your post seems to complain that Senior Developers don't believe some Junior hires have minimum competency if they are unable to compile a file. That seems like something a Junior Dev should have mastered during their educational period.

> complain that Senior Developers don't believe some Junior hires have minimum competency if they are unable to compile a file.

You're definitely taking the wrong impression from my post then. Do you code in C / C++?

If you've never had an issue compiling a large codebase as a new developer then I should either bow before your greatness or mock you for your inexperience because in large, complicated projects with 1000-line makefiles included from various sources, on a platform with various skews, flags and options, even the most talented developer can have issues with compilation - especially in most corporate scenarios where the exact command line you need for the internal build tool Steve wrote in 1996 is passed down through email and IM logs. OH and don't forget that some of the objects we link with are actually dummy files to be filled in by a shared library on the target that's been precompiled... OH and some of our functions are actually programmatically generated by a Perl script that runs as part of the build script. These are just some of the things I was exposed to as a junior at various companies.

Building gets messy, quick. Should it be? Probably not. Is it? Hell yes. Download boost or blender or something and try and compile for a non-standard or multiple platforms. My sibling even gives a specific open-source example (although open-source projects are typically MUCH better about getting building to be simple)

More importantly, my point is not that the junior doesn't know how to compile. Compilation is just a place where things get very messy very quickly, and a precise explanation of what was done needs to be given so that the senior can guide the junior along a proper debugging path. Your attitude is precisely the thing I'm recommending against.

> a file.

Whoever needs to only compile one file? That's not the hard part :)

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#114

Post by throwaway7645 »

isostatic wrote: post #71
rntksi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember they used Perl for backend, and there was a resident Perl-guru. I'm not sure with all the new Zend engine refactoring whether Perl still lives inside the BBC ...

The BBC is bigger than just the online devs. In news we still have a fair amount of perl, mainly in Nagios checks and other bits of monitoring, but pretty much any news package you see coming in from abroad, and many in the UK, passes through a system with critical perl elements (JFE and davina). PHP is more prevalent for more recent developments - Raven is PHp for example - anything you see edited for the party conf…

Thanks for the explanation!

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#115

Post by spaceseaman »

whipoodle wrote: post #96
spaceseaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

Yes, I work with people who do this sort of thing to me a lot. They are younger than me, though.

As other posters have said I recommend talking to them in person if possible. It's worked for me to just get in front of them because they're a lot less likely to think you're lying, and you can more quickly shut down the paths you've already went down if you do know your stuff about that method (and if you don't, it'll be clear to them and they can alleviate the issue).

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#116

Post by isostatic »

k__ wrote: post #109
dozzie wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you basically sat on your ass and said "somebody teach me"? No wonder that your colleagues from university got so much better. I never got much help from other people. In the beginning, I didn't have anybody interested in computers around me at all, yet I managed to learn programming. Then, when I started studying IT and switched to Linux, and I didn't have anybody to systematically learn working with unix from. T…

Point wasn't that I was lazy, point was that I had the impression after university I'm a dev and get a job and work.

That's a great admission, to admit that to yourself let alone in a pseudo-public environment shows growth and maturity so many tech people often lack

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#117

Post by PoachedSausage »

isostatic wrote: post #73
DRW_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the author, but I recently joined the BBC as a software engineer and haven't found all that many contractors at all, the ones I have are in regular non-senior positions. It may be the case for 'talent' and management of TV projects (for example), but in the tech departments - your assertion, in my experience seems to be far from true.

I've been here 14 years which is just about long enough to not be a newbie any more. I now plenty of contractors, most are useless. After 5 years one of the few good ones has taken a staff job. We do seem to be getting better, the recent IR35 rules helped, but we still have contractors employing contractors. At a high level they're typically there to implement some bad idea and the fuck off so everyone can blame them…

One of your major contractors are the organisation that runs the TV and radio transmitters, Arqiva. An organisation absolutely bloated with middle management and contractors employing subcontractors.

The BBC would have been better off keeping transmission in-house.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#118

Post by isostatic »

gaius wrote: post #104

Didn't the BBC outsource all of their programming jobs to Siemens? I had a few friends there who were TUPEd.

No, they tried doing that - first into an external company (BBC Technology), then in 2006ish they sold that off for something like £500m. Some programming jobs went (Coledia, which was attempts to commercialise things like BNCS and Jupiter), but the software jobs that were really close to the business like the news website stayed in house. Since then things like iplayer were built in house, and obviously R&D were never moved out.

Other technology that moved included areas like networks, most commodity IT (domain controllers, file servers etc), and for some reason the main area that looked after satellite bookings, routings etc (analog video distribution and audio tag frames are fairly core broadcast technology). However the news area that did this stayed in house, as did most of the desktop support in news (but not elsewhere), and most of the broadcast support. Except in Glasgow where pretty much everything was moved to Siemens.

It was a total mess, and it still is a bit of a mess. Many of the people who were outsourced are still working for ATOS (who took over Siemens/SBS/SIS), in fact I think they even kept the final salary pension which everyone else lost a few years later. A few who had been moved out were moved back in too.

However that all seems to be changing again - I believe most of the Atos jobs are moving from Bracknell to Eastern Europe as part of the new contract, and the WAN connectivity which Atos held (through vodafone) has recently moved to BT

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#120

Post by isostatic »

PoachedSausage wrote: post #117
isostatic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been here 14 years which is just about long enough to not be a newbie any more. I now plenty of contractors, most are useless. After 5 years one of the few good ones has taken a staff job. We do seem to be getting better, the recent IR35 rules helped, but we still have contractors employing contractors. At a high level they're typically there to implement some bad idea and the fuck off so everyone can blame them…

One of your major contractors are the organisation that runs the TV and radio transmitters, Arqiva. An organisation absolutely bloated with middle management and contractors employing subcontractors. The BBC would have been better off keeping transmission in-house.

Oh yes, we outsource many departments that used to be in house, from transmitters to cleaning, I was referring to contractors working alongside full time staff - usually because we don't pay staff enough to fill the roles with the right people.
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