IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT · Oct 25, 2024

I like the idea of training up juniors. But the reality is that the ones you need to train aren't worth training in most cases. I have one guy I have been mentoring for 2 years now. He has soared to the levels of mediocre. He misunderstands things constantly and then blabs about irrelevant nonsense he heard somewhere not realizing it isn't relevant to what we are talking about. He is extremely personable and affable though so I do make him do all the "customer facing" stuff as he is good at that.

Contrasted by the good hires who simply pursue whatever challenges you give them and figure it out. Thus requiring no training or mentoring outside of basic things regarding infrastructure unique to the organization.

moonarchia · Oct 25, 2024

TJT said:
I like the idea of training up juniors. But the reality is that the ones you need to train aren't worth training in most cases. I have one guy I have been mentoring for 2 years now. He has soared to the levels of mediocre. He misunderstands things constantly and then blabs about irrelevant nonsense he heard somewhere not realizing it isn't relevant to what we are talking about. He is extremely personable and affable though so I do make him do all the "customer facing" stuff as he is good at that.

Contrasted by the good hires who simply pursue whatever challenges you give them and figure it out. Thus requiring no training or mentoring outside of basic things regarding infrastructure unique to the organization.

The good ones don't stay long because they also figure out the corporate game quickly. Corp wants me to do all this obscure shit that's mission critical, but doesn't want to have decent pay increases? *poof* To the next job!

And since most tech companies are realizing they hired a lot of useless shitters during the boom it's time to clean house for the bust.

In the telecomm world we call this reorg season since it happens pretty much every fucking year.

Noodleface · Oct 25, 2024

TJT said:
I like the idea of training up juniors. But the reality is that the ones you need to train aren't worth training in most cases. I have one guy I have been mentoring for 2 years now. He has soared to the levels of mediocre. He misunderstands things constantly and then blabs about irrelevant nonsense he heard somewhere not realizing it isn't relevant to what we are talking about. He is extremely personable and affable though so I do make him do all the "customer facing" stuff as he is good at that.

Contrasted by the good hires who simply pursue whatever challenges you give them and figure it out. Thus requiring no training or mentoring outside of basic things regarding infrastructure unique to the organization.

Believe it or not, most college grads don't even want to work in firmware..

It's not FAANG, which is what everyone cares about.

TJT · Oct 25, 2024

Noodleface said:
Believe it or not, most college grads don't even want to work in firmware..

It's not FAANG, which is what everyone cares about.

That's something that rustles me in general. It's what faggot Foler does in here when he links that levels salary site in every single comment he makes in this thread.

Talk about regular people jobs and someone will, 100% of the time, mention dumbass unicorn $600k developer jobs in FAANG and try and make this sound like its a salient thing to discuss.

ShakyJake · Oct 30, 2024

I wanted to get some opinions on whether or not I should email our new director of software engineering about something that’s been on my mind. He’s made it clear that he’s open to feedback, and he seems like a good guy, so I figure now might be the right time to address a potential issue—just don’t want to come off as *that* developer who thinks they know it all.

Basically, there’s talk about developing a new software app, and I want to make sure we’re on solid ground with the software stack we choose. Flashback to a few years ago: when we had to rebuild our core app from Silverlight (which was becoming obsolete), they put together a team to research new frameworks, and they came back with Angular and .NET Core, which were both barely out of beta. Our engineering team wasn’t experienced with client-side JavaScript, and now, nearly eight years later, we’re left with a pretty janky product. No one really had the playbook for best practices back then, so a lot of it was trial and error.

Looking back, a simpler choice like React or ASP.NET MVC with light JavaScript would probably have suited our needs better, especially since our app mainly shows tabular data. But it felt like we went with the newest, trendiest stack just for the sake of it.

So, my question for the new director would be, “If we’re getting serious about this new app, could we make sure there’s a solid research process to evaluate all options, instead of just grabbing onto whatever’s shiny and new?” What do you guys think—is this worth emailing him about, or should I hold back?

Noodleface · Oct 30, 2024

Personal opinion is it's absolutely worth it, but you may want to be careful how you frame the question - i.e., the way you wrote that quote sounds a bit combative

Control · Oct 30, 2024

ShakyJake said:
I wanted to get some opinions on whether or not I should email our new director of software engineering about something that’s been on my mind. He’s made it clear that he’s open to feedback, and he seems like a good guy, so I figure now might be the right time to address a potential issue—just don’t want to come off as *that* developer who thinks they know it all.

Basically, there’s talk about developing a new software app, and I want to make sure we’re on solid ground with the software stack we choose. Flashback to a few years ago: when we had to rebuild our core app from Silverlight (which was becoming obsolete), they put together a team to research new frameworks, and they came back with Angular and .NET Core, which were both barely out of beta. Our engineering team wasn’t experienced with client-side JavaScript, and now, nearly eight years later, we’re left with a pretty janky product. No one really had the playbook for best practices back then, so a lot of it was trial and error.

Looking back, a simpler choice like React or ASP.NET MVC with light JavaScript would probably have suited our needs better, especially since our app mainly shows tabular data. But it felt like we went with the newest, trendiest stack just for the sake of it.

So, my question for the new director would be, “If we’re getting serious about this new app, could we make sure there’s a solid research process to evaluate all options, instead of just grabbing onto whatever’s shiny and new?” What do you guys think—is this worth emailing him about, or should I hold back?

A quick informal chat might be better to open the conversation and get his brain working in that direction. Framing it as something like this would probably make it sound pretty reasonable: "We had some issues with this other thing that ended up eating way more resources than expected. I think we could avoid that this time by doing x."

TJT · Oct 31, 2024

ShakyJake said:
I wanted to get some opinions on whether or not I should email our new director of software engineering about something that’s been on my mind. He’s made it clear that he’s open to feedback, and he seems like a good guy, so I figure now might be the right time to address a potential issue—just don’t want to come off as *that* developer who thinks they know it all.

Basically, there’s talk about developing a new software app, and I want to make sure we’re on solid ground with the software stack we choose. Flashback to a few years ago: when we had to rebuild our core app from Silverlight (which was becoming obsolete), they put together a team to research new frameworks, and they came back with Angular and .NET Core, which were both barely out of beta. Our engineering team wasn’t experienced with client-side JavaScript, and now, nearly eight years later, we’re left with a pretty janky product. No one really had the playbook for best practices back then, so a lot of it was trial and error.

Looking back, a simpler choice like React or ASP.NET MVC with light JavaScript would probably have suited our needs better, especially since our app mainly shows tabular data. But it felt like we went with the newest, trendiest stack just for the sake of it.

So, my question for the new director would be, “If we’re getting serious about this new app, could we make sure there’s a solid research process to evaluate all options, instead of just grabbing onto whatever’s shiny and new?” What do you guys think—is this worth emailing him about, or should I hold back?

I am an ultra blunt person and I don't waste time with corporate sugar coating. To my detriment probably but I just can't do it.

Just say straight up that we did X back then and it caused these issues. Can we evaluate more closely this time because I hope we can learn from our experiences and not create the same problems again.

TomServo · Oct 31, 2024

TJT said:
I am an ultra blunt person and I don't waste time with corporate sugar coating. To my detriment probably but I just can't do it.

Just say straight up that we did X back then and it caused these issues. Can we evaluate more closely this time because I hope we can learn from our experiences and not create the same problems again.

Is your new boss a pajeet? If yes don't do it. If white, sure go for it

Phazael · Oct 31, 2024

TomServo said:
Is your new boss a pajeet? If yes don't do it. If white, sure go for it

This. Also, how you frame the language makes all the difference in the world. I would suggest this as a working lunch or after shift at the bar conversation, at least initially. Using past history as a guide is a good foundation for making this case, but you really need to choose your words carefully.

ToeMissile · Oct 31, 2024

Phazael said:
This. Also, how you frame the language makes all the difference in the world. I would suggest this as a working lunch or after shift at the bar conversation, at least initially. Using past history as a guide is a good foundation for making this case, but you really need to choose your words carefully.

Also, are there any layers of management between the director and if so any company norms to keep in mind?

Noodleface · Oct 31, 2024

This project I've been discussing the past few pages took a really humbling turn the other day. One of my counterparts on another team has always been stoic, always has an answer and is always super professional. We've all been feeling the stress with this project.

We have 3 sync meetings a week for a 'scrum at scale' thing. The chief architect asked them about schedule, she started to talk and then broke down in tears and excused herself from the meeting.

I felt pretty bad because it was evident the stress had taken a toll and she became overwhelmed. I messaged her after to just offer my support and say I hoped she was ok and she was very thankful but told me it was the first time in her career she's felt completely hopeless and overwhelmed.

100% think she'll leave the company after the discussion. We're going to lose so many good people because of this bullshit.

TJT · Nov 2, 2024

Noodleface said:
This project I've been discussing the past few pages took a really humbling turn the other day. One of my counterparts on another team has always been stoic, always has an answer and is always super professional. We've all been feeling the stress with this project.

We have 3 sync meetings a week for a 'scrum at scale' thing. The chief architect asked them about schedule, she started to talk and then broke down in tears and excused herself from the meeting.

I felt pretty bad because it was evident the stress had taken a toll and she became overwhelmed. I messaged her after to just offer my support and say I hoped she was ok and she was very thankful but told me it was the first time in her career she's felt completely hopeless and overwhelmed.

100% think she'll leave the company after the discussion. We're going to lose so many good people because of this bullshit.

What is the key cause of stress on this particular project? If there is any one thing.

Kithani · Nov 2, 2024

TJT said:
That's something that rustles me in general. It's what faggot Foler does in here when he links that levels salary site in every single comment he makes in this thread.

Talk about regular people jobs and someone will, 100% of the time, mention dumbass unicorn $600k developer jobs in FAANG and try and make this sound like its a salient thing to discuss.

Some of those smaller companies don't look so bad on levels.fyi to me...

I don't work in IT/software but this thread is basically my grass-is-greener career thread where I sometimes wonder about if I had taken a different path. I guess it's good to know those FAANG jobs you hear about are indeed unicorns.

Noodleface · Nov 2, 2024

TJT said:
What is the key cause of stress on this particular project? If there is any one thing.

It's not just our project. It's everything.

Because AI is so big they keep designing new platforms for it, saying it's the most important thing ever, and pushing aside this project because of priority. They keep doing this over and over again. But this project still needs to be launched.

It's just madness here right now and I don't know how it will play out.

Foler · Nov 19, 2024

Love how software managers love getting us engineers to push shit out the door with zero testing despite us telling them it’s a bad idea. Then it causes a giant customer impacting issue and then we have to spend 10 months fixing it.

Icing on the cake is when those same managers want us to push the fixes out the door with the same “no testing” urgency mentality.

Best part is over the past 2 years management has either driven our best engineers out of the company or to other teams because of no WLB, get shit out the door yesterday mentality. So now myself and 2-3 other tenured engineers are stuck with a bunch of new grad potatoes who are completely helpless and lazy. Gen z is retarded.

Foler · Nov 19, 2024

TJT said:
That's something that rustles me in general. It's what faggot Foler does in here when he links that levels salary site in every single comment he makes in this thread.

Talk about regular people jobs and someone will, 100% of the time, mention dumbass unicorn $600k developer jobs in FAANG and try and make this sound like its a salient thing to discuss.

Those jobs aren’t unicorns and they aren’t just FAANG. Outside of Netflix, other FAANG doesn’t even make up the top ten highest TC companies..

Highest Paying Software Engineer Jobs | Levels.fyi

View a live leaderboard of top paying companies across the United States and around the globe.

www.levels.fyi

TJT · Nov 19, 2024

We have another reorg going on. 2025 is going to be a huge shitshow.

Earlier this year we had a VP retire who had been with the company since it was founded (~15 years). He was replaced with a jeet. This jeet almost immediately fired two directors under him that both had >10 years of experience at the company and replaced them with jeets. The trouble of this was the two he replaced were in positions that relied heavily on institutional knowledge of which they were the primary keepers.

Fast forward a year and the jeet VP is now being fired and replaced with a different VP on the application engineering side who is also a jeet. The overall cause here is that the org those two directors ran has extremely high customer impact and they were apparently fired for something like "not automating fast enough." At the same time the archaic healthcare technologies they were tasked with are at best highly resistant to heavy automation or they would have done more of it in the decade they had been here if that was not the case. The replacement jeet directors have been totally lost in the sauce and made zero headway on automation while also being unable to solve customer issues even half as fast as the org previously did.

My own director is doing everything he can to totally distance ourselves from that aspect of the company. But who knows how it will play out.

lol.

Noodleface · Nov 20, 2024

Foler said:
Love how software managers love getting us engineers to push shit out the door with zero testing despite us telling them it’s a bad idea. Then it causes a giant customer impacting issue and then we have to spend 10 months fixing it.

Icing on the cake is when those same managers want us to push the fixes out the door with the same “no testing” urgency mentality.

Best part is over the past 2 years management has either driven our best engineers out of the company or to other teams because of no WLB, get shit out the door yesterday mentality. So now myself and 2-3 other tenured engineers are stuck with a bunch of new grad potatoes who are completely helpless and lazy. Gen z is retarded.

All the new grads we've hired have been straight up retarded. I haven't had a single one worth a damn

Foler · Nov 20, 2024

Noodleface said:
All the new grads we've hired have been straight up retarded. I haven't had a single one worth a damn

Pretty much my same experience. It’s really bad. I’m constantly handholding new hires who are 6 months in and can’t even write a single unit test without needing hand holding. I’ll say this, our work environment has been awful for new hires this year. We’ve been constantly putting out fires for 8 months and everyone is stretched thin. One of the managers is a complete retard and just throws random tasks at new hires with zero context. He constantly context switches them too which doesn’t help.

To make things worse we’re pushing out all sorts of internal AI tools for everything from personal assistant to code generation. In the right hands this is useful but I foresee a new crowd of engineers using the “this is what AI told me to do” excuse for their crap code being “best practice”.

IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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