Live data from Hacker News

Don't Get Stuck

stitcher.io

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#41
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks black to me. Could you have a settings issue?

It's a lightish medium grey for me--probably one one of those greys that can look too light or just fine depending on display gamma and ambient lighting.

For me, text comes back as #333 in inspector which is near black (and visually looks black). Firefox v79 on MacOS, uBlock + pihole.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#42

Hmmm....but what if you are "stuck" in a job that pays decently (enough to cover needs) extremely flexible hours and unlimited vacation and awesome work life balance (sometimes less than 40 per week). But the actual work is pointless and boring. Is that time for a change? Some people say yes, but often these are the people who are the "high achieving" tech workaholics who love to go home and code for fun. Other peopl…

Truth is, in most of the tech companies you can find something wrong with the tech or it can get boring pretty quickly. Probably, only the biggest and/or most innovative ones have something really interesting to offer learning/career wise.

If you are a web dev, most of the time you are gonna deal with MVC and similar patterns that you're gonna reuse daily. It's obvious that it gets dull. And when you hear about a new toy that you haven't used yet? You get excited and you want to change a job to get to work with it. But guess what? You are gonna get bored with the new toy after a few months too.

Programming is pretty repetitive and most of the problems aren't that challenging after a few years of experience.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#43
post #9

I tell you one thing. If you think that a company will be offering you new tech after every X months or Y years then you are wrong. Tech world does not like that. Think of the investment a company does to bring in a tech stack. It is not all about downloading a new tech, it is about finding and hiring resources. If they all start changing tech based on wish list then they never can progress. I remember something my e…

Rewriting existing code in a new shiny language just to keep employees happy is a pretty stupid thing, sure. But when you're just solving problems and maintaining old software, there's a lot to be gained from thoughtful, measured inclusion of new tech, transition to new libraries and such. This is technical investment in the company's future: improving developer's velocity and code's performance, reduce bug rate and…

> If the company never adopts any new tech ever, it's a sign that it's lost its way.

So you're telling me I wasted last week installing the VB6 IDE on Windows Server 2016?

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#44
This echoes a sentiment I saw recently on a career review site:

One thing that is pretty common across companies is the possibility of being pigeonholed. If you take responsibility for some aspect of the job and do it well, your contributions and successes can go unnoticed. It reminds me of the scene from Futurama where Bender meets God, who tells him, "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." I've seen it happen to colleagues and have had it happen to myself. This isn't just a software developer's problem, though. It's ubiquitous.

Spotted on this page: https://www.pathviz.com/careers/software-engineer?review_id=...

This seems pretty true for anyone who I've seen leave a job. They will say that they were offered more pay somewhere, but usually it's because they haven't been doing what they wanted to be doing for some time at their current jobs.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#45
Brings to mind a famous quote attributed to Thomas J Watson (the real creator of IBM):

Watson: we should be investing in ongoing training in new skills for our staff.

VP: But what if we train them and they leave?

Watson: What if we don’t and they don’t?

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#46

Fuck, man. I felt like I just read my own blog post. I've been contemplating leaving for a long time, but I feel like somehow I'm the problem—like I can do something to fix this. I've got this chronic resistance to believe it's anyone else's problem which USUALLY serves me well and keeps me honest. Sometimes though it just makes me stay longer than I should. I feel so stagnant. My company has been bug-fixing non-stop…

I see I'm not the only one in this special hell. I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse. I'm on my way out now, thankfully.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#47

This echoes a sentiment I saw recently on a career review site: One thing that is pretty common across companies is the possibility of being pigeonholed. If you take responsibility for some aspect of the job and do it well, your contributions and successes can go unnoticed. It reminds me of the scene from Futurama where Bender meets God, who tells him, "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anyth…

Thanks for the link, that was quite useful to read :)

I'll be rummaging around pathviz for a while.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#48
If you want to continually stay up to date on new tech and have many opportunities to use it in new projects, go work for a consulting firm.

At a consulting firm, many of your projects will be new projects that you will have a hand in architecting. You won't be doing a lot of maintenance programming.

I'm sure some firms do take over maintenance projects, but at least that has not been my experience and it seems like something you can find out ahead of time.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#49
post #2

I know so many people who are in this exact position. Trying to change the practices of their companies for the better but never getting anywhere. A client is paying for a refactor but the manager says "we don't have time to write tests, the client is not paying for that" (when indeed they are in the end).

Well, I have seen both sides of this story by now: at my previous job, we had lots of developers who are happy to throw the whole code base over board every two months as they discover a new test framework, spend a month on refactoring simply to satisfy a single dev‘s pet peeve for functional programming... it’s especially frustrating to watch as a team lead from another department, actually understanding what’s happening, but unable to do something.

Re: Don't Get Stuck

#50
post #9

I tell you one thing. If you think that a company will be offering you new tech after every X months or Y years then you are wrong. Tech world does not like that. Think of the investment a company does to bring in a tech stack. It is not all about downloading a new tech, it is about finding and hiring resources. If they all start changing tech based on wish list then they never can progress. I remember something my e…

Rewriting existing code in a new shiny language just to keep employees happy is a pretty stupid thing, sure. But when you're just solving problems and maintaining old software, there's a lot to be gained from thoughtful, measured inclusion of new tech, transition to new libraries and such. This is technical investment in the company's future: improving developer's velocity and code's performance, reduce bug rate and…

There is something called tech debt and I can understand it but just replacing a Bootstrap/jQuery based app wit React/VUE just because it is new does not make sense. I will not mind upgrading from Python 2x to Python 3x but I will always resist to replace Flask with Django, unless there is some really genuine reason behind it.
Post reply on HN