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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

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Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#11

Post by throwanem »

ktbwrestler wrote: post #8
throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about opportunity cost, and the framework itself is a dead end that peaked in 2011 and has had about as many "renaissances" since then as there've been years of the Linux desktop. If I want to go live under that kind of rock, I'll do it with Salesforce, where the pay is better and no one thinks they're cool for poking at a keyboard all day.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#12

Post by __s »

ktbwrestler wrote: post #8
throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out

I'm glad static typing came back

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#13

Post by denkmoon »

Good article. Very grounded. Sometimes a job sucks, but not enough to justify immediately job hopping and you just check out and take the payslip each month. Agreed it takes about a week for my gut intuition to work itself out, then if it's bad you just need to decide whether it's something you can stick out for awhile or if you need to leave ASAP.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#14

Post by homeonthemtn »

I've suffered so many fools that I just consider that to be a practical part of standard work.

Question is what is the value of suffering these fools? New skill? New perspective? What's the result of this transaction?

That to me is what defines staying power. If there's just no value, or a bad imbalance of toil to value, it's time to go.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#15

Post by throwanem »

__s wrote: post #12
ktbwrestler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out I'm glad static typing came back

Ruby is a fine toy and an awful tool, the other Perl that Python killed.

Rails should have incurred some kind of criminal indictment.

I wish I hadn't mentioned either, because now no one will talk about anything else.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#16

Post by amackera »

throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

Can you expand on why you avoid Rails? I'm legitimately curious!

Edit: I see your other replies, nvm!

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#17

Post by datadrivenangel »

throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

Rails is so good that all the issues become political until you get to stupid large scale.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#18

Post by gleenn »

throwanem wrote: post #11
ktbwrestler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about oppo…

Strongly disagree. I've seen bad code or maintenance in all the languages. Sure, some ecosystems seem to attract worse practices, but the absolute best software engineering principles I ever learned in my multi-decade career were at a Rails shop. Everything was extremely well maintained, tested, CI/CD were great even before that was a thing. Not to start flame wars about refactoring or what it means to maintain code more, but that place was absolutely full of people who cared and kept those projects at the highest of caliber grade. You can find good, bad, and ugly in every ecosystem but I personally don't think Rails was ever even remotely bad. You can have an amazingly well-maintained setup and still be super productive. It's really about the people and the company spending the time, money, and energy to care. (Edit: typo)

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#20

Post by danaris »

throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

I dunno; maybe I'm hopelessly naïve or out of touch, but I'd pay attention to the compensation, benefits, work environment, and colleagues to know whether this is a place I'd actually like working at long before I pay attention to whether this is a job that always uses the latest cutting-edge tech so I can make sure my resume has the best words in it for the next job I look for...
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