101–110 of 239 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From being warned I'd be terminated to a promotion in less than six months, with no change in my work, but simply it becoming visible. Whee big company fun. They probably deduced from this that their warning system worked as expected.
I think the probability of you being right is definitely above 50%.
Also a lot of video chat apps.
At Google, there are too many complex systems and too many team dependencies to break tasks down into granular chunks, or to shoot from the hip in a pair programming session. Google runs on design docs. You define the problem, dependencies, risks, end state, etc, in a 20-page doc, and then you drive its development for 1-2 quarters. Google doesn’t do extreme programming, we do extreme ownership. I really prefer it to…
When that awful Design Patterns book was off the hype train but the new devs had heard about it and asked if they should read it, I would tell them No, read Refactoring twice instead, because it tells you why and when to use this stuff, which is much more valuable. Like feature work, if you know why you are doing something you can often reason out the gaps in the “what” on your own.
We sort of take a bunch of XP processes as a given and forget that this was Agile for most people at the time of the manifesto. Scrum pretends it’s separate but is essentially useless without half of XP.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
I watched a new hire recently lynchpin himself into a critical part of the software, make larger then life promises about new “cutting edge” tech in presentations, constantly post articles in Slack, and finally stop showing up or being online much at all other than to do some lip-service and make the occasional PR. I am a little envious of how little he does and how much praise he receives for checking all the boxes with higher ups.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
I'll never understand why, in such a hot market, people put up with such B.S. Every single company is looking for software engineers. you're leaving money on the table by not being on the market.
I've switched companies every 2-3 years and with a big salary bump each time that I use as leverage to negotiate the next.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I would caution against trying to paint "developers at Google" using broad strokes.
There's a lot of irony in saying that about "developers at Google" and then immediately turning around and classifying everyone else as "the masses". Talk about broad strokes!
I personally think that it is all matter of risk. The risk of contract work (which is what the agile manifesto writers were facing most of their careers [they are all consultants), is building something that the customer do not want or did not intend do. The actual tech risk is very low (e.g. ruby on rails on postgres) since most of them use mature technology. In this case the agile manifesto make sense - I.e. we can…
Even without mature technology, you want to shake down the new tech early to find out if it’s going to crumble around your shoulders at the worst possible moment. While Agile is not perfect for this kind of work, it does have a lot of facility in this area. Now if you could just get any two people to agree on what constitutes the last responsible moment... And with new tech you often have to do it first or do it bett…
I think that Agile is good after the market is captured. But when developing the core tech (usually with no customers beside product managers and based on research), it might be too constraining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not a derogatory term.
That wasn't the implication. The issue is an hypocritical assertion. If treating a large group as a unified actor is improper, then giving another group another label and doing the same thing...because it's that group is in a different classification, is also improper. The fact these views live in the same comment, is ironic. ie > I would caution against trying to paint "developers at Google" using broad stroke > a l…
I think this is the logical leap that people aren't understanding. Generalizing means assuming things about individuals based on their group membership: OP wasn't saying it's a moral failing, but that it leads to inaccurate assumptions when applied to the heterogenous group in question.
What's the analogy to using the term "the masses"?
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
A new manager we had deliberately did this to us. Few of us got marked as "under-performer" levels at random times - risk of being terminated by the bell-curve justification and then within 6 months (not at the same time) we all were "exceeds expectations". The few of us figured out what the manager had done - after 2.5 years. By then she went from being a manager to a senior director with a decent portfolio - and that too pretty quickly. Oh why not! she created "stars" and "performers" out of under-performers.
I ended up "deliberately" underperforming for the next 1-1.5 years after they first tagged me. How hard can it be to NOT work? Well it is hard. I invested in learning lot of stuff. But management always figured out I was more than meeting expectations, got me raises and promotions. May be forwarding emails did the trick. But then I got bored, frustrated and quit.