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If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

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Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#121

Post by [deleted] »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #39
closeparen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mature IT departments tailor solutions to different classes of users with different needs. If they don’t do that for engineering, that tells you everything you need to know about engineering’s stature in the company.

To an extent, and as allowed by whatever particular constraints exist for that business. Letting you run whatever IDE you want, usually OK. Letting you install whatever operating system you want, well... there’s lots of reasons you may choose to not support that choice, that have nothing at all to do with maturity. If your jobs was improving developer experience, there’s only so many times you can come up with soluti…

[deleted]

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#122

Post by [deleted] »

_y5hn wrote: post #89
AmericanChopper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, and as allowed by whatever particular constraints exist for that business. Letting you run whatever IDE you want, usually OK. Letting you install whatever operating system you want, well... there’s lots of reasons you may choose to not support that choice, that have nothing at all to do with maturity. If your jobs was improving developer experience, there’s only so many times you can come up with soluti…

This is more related to how organizations work. That larger organizations tend to need to streamline more in order to scale up number of employees, and do more to maintain acceptable security simply because there's that many more people on board. If policy is install whatever you want, and if you get hacked, you're fired! This just won't stand in court. So policy is that IT department is responsible for installations…

[deleted]

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#123

Post by closeparen »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #90
_y5hn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more related to how organizations work. That larger organizations tend to need to streamline more in order to scale up number of employees, and do more to maintain acceptable security simply because there's that many more people on board. If policy is install whatever you want, and if you get hacked, you're fired! This just won't stand in court. So policy is that IT department is responsible for installations…

Lower down the tread I mentioned vendor due diligence, specifically because I’ve done so many vendor security reviews. But there’s more to it than that. You might also need to be threat modelling it, legal will need to review the ToS and privacy policy. You probably need to figure out the impact on other services too. If you’re in a regulated organisation, there could be any number of other things you have to do, and…

Yes, you need to do all those things, and it is expensive. The organization's choice not to pay those costs to provide an environment suitable for engineering work (not every single one someone could ask for, but one) reflects its views towards engineering.

It may be correct for them. But for you, as a candidate, it's a good indicator that you'd be happier in the kind of company where engineering has the power to get that done.

Between jamfcloud, osquery, munki, etc. there are plenty of companies and tools out there catering to IT departments that take this seriously.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#124

Post by jaggederest »

rsify wrote: post #80
jaggederest wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, every person I know who excels at their career can say "Wait, no, this was a bait and switch" and bow out gracefully in the first couple weeks and take one of their backup offers. I've also worked for extremely corporate companies, and a lot of the saner people backed away slowly during the interview process, but some people took a week or two at the company to register "yes it's really that bad" and bail.

Well senior engineers won't work at entry level positions, but medium skill ones might. Replace skill with working conditions and it'll be the same thing, people that have a lower tolerancy for working conditions will leave quickly, but some will stay and that's still a win for the company. Especially compared to advertising how corporate and annoying their processes are.

I'd say it's a loss. The best people leave, the worst people stay, repeatedly, dragging the entire company down.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#125

Post by AmericanChopper »

closeparen wrote: post #123
AmericanChopper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower down the tread I mentioned vendor due diligence, specifically because I’ve done so many vendor security reviews. But there’s more to it than that. You might also need to be threat modelling it, legal will need to review the ToS and privacy policy. You probably need to figure out the impact on other services too. If you’re in a regulated organisation, there could be any number of other things you have to do, and…

Yes, you need to do all those things, and it is expensive. The organization's choice not to pay those costs to provide an environment suitable for engineering work (not every single one someone could ask for, but one) reflects its views towards engineering. It may be correct for them. But for you, as a candidate, it's a good indicator that you'd be happier in the kind of company where engineering has the power to get…

This has no impact at all on an organisations ability to provide an environment suitable for engineering. If they have an engineering practice, then you could be sure they’ve invested resources into making sure they do have a suitable engineering environment. The issue at hand relates entirely to personal preferences. The problem is that an individual can not necessarily use whatever tools they prefer, not that they don’t have suitable tools available.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#126

Post by mattbillenstein »

invisible wrote: post #108

I'd love to hear if anyone has an example of a great dev experience/environment/workflow? It seems like they are all hacky or bad in one way or another. Some general things I'd quantify as making a "good" environment: - The time from saving a file and seeing the change should be low - Running the environment is complete, just like production/staging - Database schemas are reproducible and in a single location - Inter…

I've built it a few times for smallish startups.

1. Build tools/dependencies from source on macOS and Linux

2. Use an OS agnostic init (supervisord)

3. Automate machine setup and deployment in something like Ansible or Saltstack

This allows you to bootstrap a bare macOS or Linux system with a smallish shell script and run all the necessary services in the same way they'd run on production. You have very little specialization between production and dev -- like in the cloud you just run Postgres, you don't use RDS on Amazon.

Coincidentally this makes supporting multi-cloud or bare metal very easy since you don't use anything that's really special in any cloud. Like I would run our main thing on ec2, but CI/dev workloads on Linode where I can get cheap VMs.

Most of the piecemeal automation - migrations, cron were just tools written in python - some were daemons, others just scripts that ran during a deploy.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#127

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #116
my_usernam3 wrote: post #42

I find it hypocritical that developers preach "languages don't matter, a good engineer is a good engineer", while also being very specific to work environments. Personally, I want the environment thats most similar to my coworkers to create the least amount of friction during on-boarding and documentation based learning. Don't get me wrong, there are bad dev experiences that can be had. However, from my experience it…

Maybe those talking about how languages don't matter are the bad devs, whose ~0 experience in one language is equivalent to ~0 experience in any other language they wrote "hello world" with. Once I had an interview with a guy who claimed to be fluent in several languages, so as a warm-up question I asked: "tell me any difference between Java and PHP", choosing two languages he claimed to have most experience with. Af…

At my last job, we weren't allowed to interview anyone until we had either been trained in interviewing, or were doing the interview with someone who was trained.

When I took the training class, I assumed it was all about not asking questions we could be sued for, but that probably took up about 5 minutes of the class. Instead, the instructor created exactly the scenario you described. Someone who sounded really, really great and who you'd like to work with, until you thought about what you heard and realized he hadn't told you anything at all.

Good con artists are really good. Even if the average interviewee isn't trying to pull a con, digging into their real experience isn't something we're all good at. Training helps.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#129

Post by alexeiz »

Company M: you're given a machine. In fact, multiple machines. It's your job to setup them properly, install the OSes that the company provides (sometimes they are betas). You've got full admin access to your machines, of course. You sync the source code repo. It takes half a day, but you get all the dev tools with it. You run a full build. It takes another several hours. Hooray! By the next day, you're ready to do development work, run tests, commit code.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#130

Post by 8589934591 »

My company isn't that big. I work for one which is a vendor for a bigger one. I was a fresh grad when I joined. The clients complained about echo during skype calls. We didn't use headphones at the time and we'd have to constantly switch between mute and unmute. Some (senior) people didn't bother muting themselves unless someone superior to them was present on the call.

I talk to my manager, get an approval for a headphone and email IT. IT refuses. Since I persisted it got raised to the IT head. IT head calls me in for a quick chat and told me we cannot cater to the whims of every employee. I got told off that I should know my place as a new grad. I offered to use my own headphones, but requested an adapter since the mic/audio were on separate ports. Adapter costs Rs.300 ($4) on amazon. Headphones cost Rs.1000 ($14). Now my keyboard and touchpad sucks too. Overall I have invested more from my own pocket to work with this brick. What I learned from talking to others was that they just recycle laptops and give to employees. Say Emp N and Emp N+1 complain about laptops, they give them laptops which belonged to N-1, N-2. Basically the last laptop they received goes to the next person.

And yes I am stuck with a 4GB i3 Windows 7 (no budget to update windows) with an Ubuntu VM. Good luck running docker on windows. Not to mention the daily rite of passage (BSOD) after 10 mins of booting up.

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