171–180 of 347 posts
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> And this is not a matter of pay, e.g. airline pilots are paid more than programmers here yet they are heavily unionized. [Citation needed]
here you go: * https://centreforaviation.com/news/pilot-union-accepts-emplo... * https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/klm-clears-path-to-bai... VNV is the pilots union of KLM, the Dutch national airline. IIRC they were the very last of the unions to sign up to the 'commitment clause' the Dutch gov required as part of their bail-out during Covid. Not a union without teeth.
I was contesting that pilots are paid more than developers. If you have data that supports that, please share. It seems like an absurd claim.
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It is extremely stressful some of the times even. But it's the reality we live in. People don't change. Companies change extremely rarely. If you are smart enough to reverse-engineer software systems -- a necessary skill during onboarding -- then you are smart enough to see nobody will change things to a more positive environment, and hence you should leave. I hate it with all my heart but if I have to, I'll do it 50…
> I am never allowing myself be held hostage. So, you navigate this quagmire begrudgingly, yet don't favour unionisation?
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And still too busy smelling our own farts to unionize.
Well, question is which part of the world you live in, of course. But I don't need to unionize. If I am not satisfied in my job I can switch. Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay, better benefits and sometimes a better job (sometimes it was equaly shitty as the prevous one but for better money). This does not happen for unionized workers. Maybe in the future we will have to unionize. Definitely no…
I can't work out what "this" is that does not happen to unionised workers? Unionised workers can switch jobs to get more pay too.
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>8hr "planning" sessions One place I was at had quarterly 3 day planning sessions. That was something else.
Wait that actually sounds awesome. What we’re your issues with this practice? A 3 day code freeze while everyone works to solidify a “meeting of the minds” followed by 87 days of heads down progress sounds like fucking heaven to me compared to the weekly planning meetings on top of daily stands up I live with now.
Plus a planning every sprint and daily stand ups.
sigh
Honest question, does anyone have some examples of an acquired company thriving post-acquisition? It seems like they just all burn out or stop doing cool things. I’m thinking of examples like Nest and Tumblr, but I haven’t noticed any where I think “wow, they’re really doing amazing things now after being acquired”. I get that many are acqui-hires or done for the IP portfolio, or as favors to founders or other invest…
PowerPoint originally was an acquisition by Microsoft and by all accounts it seems to have been a “perfect” acquisition.
> As soon as Sphero completed the acquisition, bringing Kelsus in as an app developer, two things happened: 1) Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room. 2) Sphero spent the first two of those six months organizing a team on their side and hashing out requirements for the new apps. This exact pattern has preceded every mismanagement disaster I've ever…
The story fills in all the reasons why ‘management’ start at #1. Company A buys company B for a product it believes in. Company A knows that company B was incapable of getting product to finish line, which is why they sold out. No problem though, company A has done this before… The managers at company A are assigned to ship product, just like they have before. Managers can’t say “its all good, we’ll give them a coupl…
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So how many women do we need, like 15? Maybe a Scrum master who knows the Lamaze method?
If you hire enough women, one of them will produce a baby within a month.
Once they've shown they can do it once it's perfectly reasonable to bet the entire business on them doing it the next month.
Oh, and also, the diversity team have noticed we have hired a lot of young people so we're only hiring over-50s this year.
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Dealing with exactly 1 & 2 right now. #3 doesn't really apply in my case because 80% of the devs are budget staffing agency hires. But on that note, I'd add a 4th point: Management panics when they realize they won't make the self imposed deadline and start throwing bodies at the problem. In our case, we went from 2 teams to 8 over night. The very few engineers who actually were capable of shipping features became sw…
Fred Brooks encountered a similar problem as a project manager at IBM in the early 1960s, working on the software for the System/360. In 1975 he wrote The Mythical Man Month about the experience. He said "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". The increased communication needed was one reason. About half a century later, most businesses have still not learned these lessons.
As soon as someone hands you the check it's no longer "your" company and you should stop thinking of it as such. Only misery lies on that path. I see this on a smaller scale where ICs leave a company and take a copy of "their" code (ask Sergey Aleynikov [1] if that's a good idea). It's not yours. If you ever use it you could face legal consequences. And there's no code I've ever written that I wasn't convinced I coul…