It is the practice of very subtly persuading employees to seek employment elsewhere when their "growth" has stagnated. https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263... You will see it mentioned in context of poorly performing staff, but it can also be used when you have someone who is perfectly capable at their role but has no desire to climb the ladder. In many corporate environments that is viewed ve…
Thanks for explaining. That's awful.
I wonder how common this is in tech companies where IC is a valid career path and terminal levels exist?
And why is that necessary knowledge? Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision…
You have to understand that float are negative powers of 2 and that conversion from decimal is not as straightforward as for integer: conversion from decimal often leads to loss of precision contrary to what happens for integers.
You don't need to know anything about how they're represented to know they can't represent all decimal values.
In 2 days time I'll mark my 27th year as a professional programmer (and just over 40 years since I started programming). I've worked in small companies, big companies, and mega-corporations. I've been a programmer, manager, team lead and CTO. And in doing so I discovered that I don't like managing people, I don't like meetings, and I don't like paperwork. I like long periods of focus. So I'm a software dev/architect…
I used to love the long periods of focus in my 20s, but ever since more life started happening, I can't do those anymore. It turns out my stress tolerance is incredibly low and when the life outside my work is not completely in order (like it rarely is after the 20s), being able to get into the flow state gets very difficult. I wish I was one of those people who could just forget the problems at home, etc. when they…
I also think that having a messy personal life that you CARE ABOUT is really important for fostering good people management skills. I’ve never had a good boss whose primary identity was work.
What I've seen in the past two years, a lot of people who have seemingly no fit to a life of a programmer have joined software industry. In my experience the best devs were the people who self-taught programming for pure joy of building a software, making a glimpse of imaging to something real through writing code. The others who were on this job because the compensation was hefty - they were likely to opt out to a m…
In my experience as a non programmer, the best devs are hobbyists. Having taught myself Python so I could empathise with my team I can confirm that the passion and enthusiasm for programming as a hobby can be strong indicator of a high performing engineer.
I think there's a number of hours a week I want to spend writing code, but while it's more than 10 it's less than 40. Above and beyond that, I love software, but I don't love Zoom calls, on-call shifts, unnecessarily annoying processes that I'm not allowed to automate, Slack messages, KPIs, objectives that combine vagueness about what we're doing with strict rules about what we're not allowed to touch, horrific dynam…
I work for 40 hours a week but I'm pretty sure only 2 are writing code. That's the problem. I'd happily write code for more hours
I think in this career it’s possible to optimize for 3 levers - WLB, money, and fun work. If you truly want to code a lot, a startup is the place, but you will earn less money and work more hours. Big tech offers big money and good WLB but often at the sacrifice of interesting work.
And why is that necessary knowledge? Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision…
Because not caring how FP values are stored and what the implications are (or even not realising that you favorite programming language uses FP by default) is a particularly fast way to become the "minus 10 times programmer". Storing monetary values as FP is one thing, but I've seen phone numbers and other numeric identifiers (long time ago before PCI-DSS even credit card numbers) stored as FP values, with predictabl…
As long as you know the implications, you don't need to know how the values are stored.
You may say it's easier to know how they are stored, then you can derive the implications anytime you need them. Maybe that works for you, but most people who I know that got this wrong do actually know how FP values are stored, they are just drawing the wrong conclusions. So better focus on the implications, cause it's those that matter.
I already expressed this in the GP comment, and it's a little shocking to see all the replies that didn't actually pick up on that.
I find it surprising (in a good way) the author could be a programmer for 26 years at Apple. A lot of corporate places I've worked at are always pushing you to progress in to leadership positions; if you aren't moving upwards then you are "managed out" which I always find really sad, the idea that simply being good at your job is now no longer enough. Good on Apple if they don't follow this type of thinking.
Programmer at Microsoft (still) for 27 years here. The pressure to "grow your career" (usually by moving into management) was and is ever-present. I've never been managed out, but have had numerous conversations with managers over the years along the lines of "look, I just love to write code and work with other people who love to write code too." I consider success to be defined by me in the feelings I derive from the work I do, the simplicity of the code I write, and the knowledge that its valuable in solving problems that my employer wants to see solved. Yet, the culture seems to still be fixated on measuring success by steady progression of increasing levels or changing titles. Whatever... it's for each of us, corporate ladder climbers included, to define what success means for ourselves and how to go about achieving it, I suppose.
I used to love the long periods of focus in my 20s, but ever since more life started happening, I can't do those anymore. It turns out my stress tolerance is incredibly low and when the life outside my work is not completely in order (like it rarely is after the 20s), being able to get into the flow state gets very difficult. I wish I was one of those people who could just forget the problems at home, etc. when they…
I also think that having a messy personal life that you CARE ABOUT is really important for fostering good people management skills. I’ve never had a good boss whose primary identity was work.
Really interesting point, looking back it holds true for me as well. My last two bosses were single dudes with no partner, family or even dog and their management style was impersonal and difficult. It was like working for an AI trained on the most popular management books.
Those kinds of managers may not be coders but assuming they are actually good at managing (and know their limitations), they play an important role. It’s important to respect that other people are bringing different things to the table. Everyone’s got different strengths and weaknesses.
> Those kinds of managers may not be coders but assuming they are actually good at managing (and know their limitations), they play an important role. What role is that?
Adding on to ambicapter:
Get the high-performing devs their good ratings and promotions. Get the low-performing devs moving better or off the team. Bring in more good devs.
Oh, wow! This is the creator of Glypha (https://boredzo.org/glypha/). I spent countless hours playing that game in the mid-ish 90's. Like so many games back then, you could tweak things with ResEdit. Nobody would believe my high score because they knew i could modify it.