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Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

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Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#161

Post by zaptheimpaler »

noman-land wrote: post #127
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over the last N months and summarize the content and surface any "red flags", which in a corporate setting would be incredibly broad.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#162

Post by gls2ro »

QuercusMax wrote: post #156
noman-land wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest comm…

This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big.

Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.

If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.

Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.

Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#163

Post by stuffn »

> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.

Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong. If you feel like you work better non-remote then do it. Don’t shill it as a panacea. I’ve been remote for 11 years now and if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have been able to take care of my family, go back to school part time, work on my health with better meals and reasonable gym hours, etc. even IF in office was better for the employer (even though all data says it’s not in terms of productivity) it is unequivocally better for the employees life to work remote as much as humanly possible.

This hot take is just simply insane. Humanity had no problem coordinating massive projects over IRC and mailing lists. It’s clear the author is a “nu-coder”.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#164

Post by devmor »

redrove wrote: post #159
devmor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the author’s primary reasonings for why remote work sucks is apparently that they find it difficult to treat other people like human beings without close proximity to them. That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.

It's a big problem especially if you haven't met the people you're working with. It's easy so think one dimensionally about a person, I catch myself doing it all the time and I can't say I'm wise enough to always stop it dead in its tracks.

I can’t say I have ever experienced this problem after conversing with someone more than a handful of times.

Sure it applies to things like random people on social media and such, but after a mutual exchange or two you should be over it.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#165

Post by stuffn »

gedy wrote: post #121
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I think it's largely that as this became more of a business, the "yappers" who want to talk things out got more leverage as PMs, etc. It sounds like a caricature, but they honestly seem to get super antsy only typing and sitting in one spot.

It is exactly that and it’s clear the author is one of these “yappers”. I like that term. These people are also absolutely obnoxious irl and completely fail to read the room. I once had a PM like this who went into a near mental health crisis that the team of engineers were not “engaging” enough with her (in her head) witty “engineer” banter.

Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day. There’s a subset of people who have weaseled their way into tech coming from the world of hyper-anxious very public social media engagement that simply make life miserable for everyone else.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#166

Post by anshulbhide »

The majority of these hidden truths are due to senior engineering management in their 40s and 50s who have not coded in decades, and yet pick up the latest trend or fashion and impose that on their teams.

The monolith to microservices trend was one great example of this.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#167

Post by QuercusMax »

Kerrick wrote: post #28
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote. I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams. I wonder…

It's much easier to get a feel for how urgent things may be when you can yell down the hall.

I'm currently in feeling things out phase with my current team, and people seem really laid back about responding to messages - but it also seems like we're getting stuff done. Hard to figure.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#168

Post by sedatk »

another_twist wrote: post #152
sedatk wrote: post #118

I can relate about OP’s comment about OOP. On a similar note, I had written about re-discovering visitor pattern: https://ssg.dev/are-interfaces-code-smell-bd19abc266d3/

That blog post is a poor example. It replaced a simple straightforward if-else loop with a hard to understand abstraction spaghetti. A few unit tests and you'd be well on your way to shipping rather than messing around with beautiful patterns.

Obviously, because it was a fictional, simplified example for the post. My real use case was more complicated and involved multiple developers working on different parts of that flow.

The problem with if-else chains is it's easy for a programmer to forget to handle a case that another developer added in the called component. Unit tests can't help a spec miscommunication. But, visitor pattern can as it forces the handling logic to be complete.

Hence my example at the end using discriminated unions and exhaustive pattern matching in F#. Much, much simpler with the same benefits.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#169

Post by Aurornis »

_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it.

IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.

I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.

The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)

Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.

I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#170

Post by jrnng »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #161
noman-land wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over th…

We have slack integrated with glean and anyone in the company can do this, not just managers.

It also has access to our internal wikis, GitHub, and other internal tools.

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