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My Personal Creed of Employment

devjac.dev

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#31
> you can’t become worse off than when you started.

Well, having experienced ageism in software engineering the last three plus years I entirely guarantee you this point #1 is totally untrue. I am at my best, at leadership, management, architecture, security, compliance, SRE, testing... And my salary is worse than 12 years ago (and way worse than a few years ago) and my workload way higher.

So, I stopped reading.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was afraid that one would sound too arrogant. But, I figured, society frequently implies that management or the CEO are "above" the workers, and everyone seems OK with it. Personally, I want a different mindset, although it's hard to maintain.

Is something wrong with treating other people as equals in a partnership, instead of cultivating a superiority complex?

People aren’t the same thing as a company.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#33
> Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.

Unfortunately, for salaried employees, early delivery is usually rewarded with more work, often with no compensation.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#34
Found many of the points helpful. Does anyone know what "Don’t rewrite. Go to the problems." would mean? There wasn't a way to contact the author. Because I think rewriting is essential in a lot of cases.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#35
There are some good points in there, especially "none are above me". Not just at work, but in all aspects of life, treat others with respect as equals. It doesn't matter if it's the janitor or a CEO or the homeless guy selling newspapers in front of the grocery store. Try to at least meet everyone at eye level, understand them and empathize with their situation and motivations.

As for the workplace, be loyal to people, never to a company. The company will kick you out at their unfeeling convenience, but people can and will respect you and support you.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#36
post #34

Found many of the points helpful. Does anyone know what "Don’t rewrite. Go to the problems." would mean? There wasn't a way to contact the author. Because I think rewriting is essential in a lot of cases.

I've never seen a big rewrite succeed. I've seen rewrites used as an escape from facing the hard problems of an existing system, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. This point is a reminder to myself to address the problems of the existing system rather than avoid them with a rewrite.

"Face the problems" might have been clearer, but this point is inspired by a time where, in hindsight, I should have got up from my desk and physically gone to another building to talk to the people who could fix the problem. I also should have spent more time reading and and changing legacy systems instead of avoiding them. It means, to me, to get close to the people and systems involved with the problems (or who are causing the problems). Sometimes the problems aren't that hard to fix, but to fix them you'd have to learn a legacy system written in another language, or contribute to another team's project, etc, and so I think of it as going to the problem, you just need to be where the problem is.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was afraid that one would sound too arrogant. But, I figured, society frequently implies that management or the CEO are "above" the workers, and everyone seems OK with it. Personally, I want a different mindset, although it's hard to maintain.

Is something wrong with treating other people as equals in a partnership, instead of cultivating a superiority complex?

Thought precisely the same thing and I think the author's disposition is deeply ethically for this reason. Other convictions expressed in the piece are similarly flawed. For me, many of the views expressed are anathema to how to be a good professional.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something wrong with treating other people as equals in a partnership, instead of cultivating a superiority complex?

Thought precisely the same thing and I think the author's disposition is deeply ethically for this reason. Other convictions expressed in the piece are similarly flawed. For me, many of the views expressed are anathema to how to be a good professional.

cannot edit my comment above but left out the key word: deeply ethically FLAWED.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#39
post #34

Found many of the points helpful. Does anyone know what "Don’t rewrite. Go to the problems." would mean? There wasn't a way to contact the author. Because I think rewriting is essential in a lot of cases.

It means identify & fix the specific problems of the existing asset, rather than foolishly trying to rewrite.

Source: Much experience with surgical refactoring/ re-engineering/ rearchitecture.

Plus observation of the after-the-fact results of many less experienced teams "writing" or "rewriting" software.

Re: My Personal Creed of Employment

#40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was afraid that one would sound too arrogant. But, I figured, society frequently implies that management or the CEO are "above" the workers, and everyone seems OK with it. Personally, I want a different mindset, although it's hard to maintain.

Is something wrong with treating other people as equals in a partnership, instead of cultivating a superiority complex?

I read it as a partnership to begin with: I am above the company and step down into a role. The CEO is also above the company and steps down into a role. The fact that their role is higher than mine on an org chart doesn't make the company more important than me, nor does it make the CEO more important then me. We're equals as human beings, he just has more authority in a specific narrow context.
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