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Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#31

Post by vsareto »

_bxg1 wrote: post #15
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #10

It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…

I generally enjoy Rachel's posts and I never support vitriol, but I read the first couple paragraphs of the original post just now and my impression was, "all of this sounds very normal". I don't know if that holds for the entire thing or not, but I would guess that many of us have gone through much of this stuff and barely even been annoyed by it. So I think maybe that's the difference. Now, whether that comes down…

That sounds like a pretty bumpy on-boarding, least of all the group activities, but most importantly: disparate systems that seem like a ball of mud with a bunch of rituals attached.

I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day.

I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on.

Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#32

Post by mola »

mola wrote: post #29

Who is rachel? I keep seeing her on the front page here, and I mostly find the blog entries boring or just weird. Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.

May I ask why the down votes?

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#33

Post by walshemj »

_bxg1 wrote: post #15
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #10

It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…

I generally enjoy Rachel's posts and I never support vitriol, but I read the first couple paragraphs of the original post just now and my impression was, "all of this sounds very normal". I don't know if that holds for the entire thing or not, but I would guess that many of us have gone through much of this stuff and barely even been annoyed by it. So I think maybe that's the difference. Now, whether that comes down…

Not normal in my experience and spending hours cloning a dev environment sounds just broken. This is obviously a large co - they should have a standard build they hand out and all the credentials should be ready to go.

Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this.

My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office.

Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#34

Post by networkimprov »

toyg wrote: post #26
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #21

Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave. Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of…

Maybe supply is still way lower than necessary, considering that proficiency requires several years of training and practice on technology that changes very often. Maybe the supply pool is still effectively limited to certain “socioeconoethnic” groups, and often companies self-sabotage by requiring candidates to live in certain areas. In my experience, the attitudes of software developers, as seen all over the web, a…

Ask Susan Fowler whether you "cannot threaten or bully a tech employee" in a tech hotspot.

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

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

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#35

Post by vinceguidry »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #21

Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave. Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of…

Very very few people writing software knows how to do it well. I'm talking from a cultural perspective, not from a technical one. Young people are either hungry enough or not jaded enough or both to put up with it.

By the time you hit your late thirties you're already too tired for this crap. By your forties you're looking for an exit. By your fifties, you're one job loss away from semi-retirement.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#36

Post by ken »

> What's odd is that at some point, I managed to stumble onto the Google spreadsheet (yep) they were using to track feedback for the process. There were dozens of entries, and they were all gushing about it, like oh it was so good, and so fun! Please do more!

> Part of me wonders if this is genuine, like these people actually enjoyed being gaslit

100%, yes.

I once took a class from someone who was, let's say, not my favorite professor. He was one of those young "fun" types. Despite being a science/engineering class in a department with a reputation for being rather tough (with the previous instructor, just retired), it was not particularly deep or rigorous. All the other students loved him because he was "cool".

At one point, we had to do a standardized Scantron survey about the course and the professor. I looked at each question and answered truthfully: "Did the professor provide a syllabus?" Easy: no. "Did the professor make it clear how you would be graded?" Haha, definite no. And so on.

Normally that's the end of it, but the next week, he was chatting with some students before class about the survey. "I think someone answered all the questions backwards just to mess with me or something. Funny!" "Yeah, that's weird, dude!"

Apparently when you're giving feedback on a popular leader, the correct response is to ignore the questions and simply give them the maximum score in every category. And when you're a popular leader reading feedback, if there's any responses that don't match this, you can safely ignore them.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#37

Post by probably_wrong »

mola wrote: post #32
mola wrote: post #29

Who is rachel? I keep seeing her on the front page here, and I mostly find the blog entries boring or just weird. Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.

May I ask why the down votes?

As someone who did not downvote you: both points (well, one and a half) are addressed in the post itself. I bet that's why.

Quick, incomplete, and mostly wrong version: she's simply an engineer whose writing tends to resonate with the HN crowd.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#38

Post by kiawe_fire »

swiley wrote: post #11

The team player thing was a huge lesson I learned recently. If you just defer to what other people say you’re likely to get things wrong, people hire you as a software engineer because they expect you to share your thoughts and that sometimes means disagreeing with the team.

"Team player" is one of those things that seems to go along with other, almost contradictory things like "self-starter" and "takes ownership".

In theory, they can be good things.

In practice, it feels like they're often just used to justify poor decisions while "blaming the victim".

If someone wasn't willing to work long hours for free to build better tooling to support the project, then she's "not a self-starter".

If someone feels strongly about using a certain tech stack or architecture on a project and doesn't just go along with the old PHP 5.x or Python 2.x stack the company has always used, then she's "not a team player".

To some extent, caring enough about your projects that you're willing to work the occasional weekend means ALSO caring enough about your project to have a say in the choices that are being made, or being unwilling to accept something as it is when you think it could be much better.

It means getting frustrated when the feedback you are presumably being paid to provide goes unacknowledged.

You can just not care, and show up, do the minimum amount of work and go home, but presumably managers don't want that out of their top tech talent.

I'm not saying traits like "team player" and "self-starter" are mutually exclusive traits, but they also have consequences. They shouldn't be code for "just do what we ask of you".

What I find a bit annoying from this article's feedback, though, is how many engineers seem happy to ALSO take these terms and weaponize them against their colleagues' opinions.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#39

Post by stavros »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #21

Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave. Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of…

I can relate, I'm in my late thirties and I hate tech. I love technology, mind you, I hate "tech", the SV culture of "we're changing the world" (when it's very often for the worse) and all the patronizing stuff Rachel describes in the article.

Sure, it's not like that in every company, but I don't really care enough to try and find one that's fun. I'd rather hang out with my family, and make outlandish devices and services I'd like to use.

Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

#40

Post by toyg »

networkimprov wrote: post #34
toyg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe supply is still way lower than necessary, considering that proficiency requires several years of training and practice on technology that changes very often. Maybe the supply pool is still effectively limited to certain “socioeconoethnic” groups, and often companies self-sabotage by requiring candidates to live in certain areas. In my experience, the attitudes of software developers, as seen all over the web, a…

Ask Susan Fowler whether you "cannot threaten or bully a tech employee" in a tech hotspot. https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fowler

"I had a new job offer in my hands less than a week later."

The minute her boss actually told her she was "on thin ice", she was out. Despite her being effectively outside the preferred "socioeconoethnic" groups that most companies self-restrict to, she was practically free at all times to walk out and get an equivalent (or likely better) job. That's a massive privilege.

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