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

TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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For my chosen area of data engineering I have only partially felt this. I have a lot of exposure to the older architecture and a lot of the new. My team is mostly old people who spent the 80s and 90s working on enterprise Oracle/MS database solutions and stuff. There is an absolute fuckton of that shit still running enterprise operations. While it is not hard to learn per se the specific ins and outs of it are harder to find. As people simply aren't fitting it into every edge case. Combined with modern tooling that straight lols at the old principles of data architecture.

Just a simple example, you used to have to be cautious about things like varchar length on everything. As your resources were limited and tuning was very important. Today? Lol fuck that shit just juice up the processor for a few more seconds don't waste your time diagnosing performance unless its an issue for some other reason.

That is just the nature of distributed architecture now. The older people have a hard time getting ahead on that and platforms like Snowflake update on a weekly basis. I can't keep up with it. But I am 1000 times faster at moving to new stuff than they are. They fail even at using GIT. On the other side of that coin its like I mentioned earlier. The new generation is fundamentally lacking in what would have been foundational elements of your computer science education 10 years ago. That is only going to get worse as the next wave is legit going to be Vibe Coders. So far I can't say I've felt like an imposter. My coworker certainly has. Even after I beat knowledge into him over the past few years.

Finding jobs just sucks absolute dick now if you aren't using the bro network you've formed over the years. A combination of foreign competition and the pervasive use of mass job applying/resume making trash that flood all jobs with resumes and waste time. An pajeet will have 5 resumes for the same job or slightly different ones and just throw them at any position that even vaguely meets criteria.

There is a staggering amount of FOMO with AI right now though. It's tainting everything.
 
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ShakyJake

ShakyJake

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Our engineering team recently got trained in SAFe Agile. We’ve been doing agile for a while, but our new director pushed for SAFe because our feature planning was pretty weak—think vague feature definitions, mostly due to product owners and marketers not digging deep enough. That led to developed features missing the mark on whatever needs they dreamed up, and they’d flop hard.

The big change now is that Product Owners and BAs have to write super detailed user stories for each iteration. The catch? Our POs and BAs don’t know much about the nitty-gritty. They’ve got a basic grasp, but it’s really the engineers who understand what our software can actually do. So, we end up with feature requests that are either totally unrealistic or would need a massive overhaul of our app’s architecture to pull off.

Another issue is the time sink. Writing these stories takes so long that development time gets squeezed. Developers often end up twiddling their thumbs, waiting for POs and BAs to make decisions and finish writing.

Anyone else dealing with this? Is this just how it goes, or are we messing something up? I’m starting to think our POs and BAs might not be up to the task—maybe they were hired for other reasons. They’ve been around a while, so it’s like their roles shifted under them, which isn’t totally fair. Still, this is where we’re at.
 
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pwe

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ShakyJake said:
Our engineering team recently got trained in SAFe Agile. We’ve been doing agile for a while, but our new director pushed for SAFe because our feature planning was pretty weak—think vague feature definitions, mostly due to product owners and marketers not digging deep enough. That led to developed features missing the mark on whatever needs they dreamed up, and they’d flop hard.

The big change now is that Product Owners and BAs have to write super detailed user stories for each iteration. The catch? Our POs and BAs don’t know much about the nitty-gritty. They’ve got a basic grasp, but it’s really the engineers who understand what our software can actually do. So, we end up with feature requests that are either totally unrealistic or would need a massive overhaul of our app’s architecture to pull off.

Another issue is the time sink. Writing these stories takes so long that development time gets squeezed. Developers often end up twiddling their thumbs, waiting for POs and BAs to make decisions and finish writing.

Anyone else dealing with this? Is this just how it goes, or are we messing something up? I’m starting to think our POs and BAs might not be up to the task—maybe they were hired for other reasons. They’ve been around a while, so it’s like their roles shifted under them, which isn’t totally fair. Still, this is where we’re at.
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Sounds familiar. I got trained in SAFe too, what a (release) trainwreck. In my experience, describing what needs to be done is always the weak link. It felt like SAFe exacerbated all the pain points of software development. Better sorry than SAFe. To be fair, user stories are always somewhat of a problem imo, no matter the method.
 
Khane

Khane

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I have a hard time motivating myself to stay current these days as well because it just doesn't seem like knowledge and effort mean much anymore. My company has this ridiculous "recognition" program where you can recognize coworkers and it gives them "points" and they get listed in a weekly newsletter.

Nobody serious or good at their job ever uses this program, only blow hards and dipshits do (because serious people realize that the "recognition" is your fucking paycheck). The problem is almost all of the management here are those kind of blow hards and dipshits, so I have to read about people that make my life harder by being bad at what they do and it falling on me to fix, congratulating themselves and each other ad-nauseum every week.

Over the years a lot of talent has left and our current PSMs don't understand technology at all. I work in healthcare and I specifically do most of the integration work with our partners which, if you know anything about healthcare, is irrationally antiquated and deals way more than it should with flat files to trade data. And these files often need to be encrypted. Well, these PSMs are so inept they cannot figure out how to send our partners our public encryption key so instead they generate new key pairs EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. And then they are shocked when the partner sends files to us encrypted with new keys that our systems are not using and they can't decrypt and the files fail. I used to fight back and try to make them learn how this shit works and to stop doing this but kept getting overruled so now I'm like a battered wife just adding these new secret keys to our keyrings over and over and over. And then these drooling retards thank each other for fixing problems they created and making the customers happy with no mention of yours truly, ever.

This is a hole I kind of dug for myself by just chasing money and now I'm reaping the rewards of my own indifference over the years but fuckin hell I never thought my career would turn into THIS.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Khane said:
Over the years a lot of talent has left and our current PSMs don't understand technology at all. I work in healthcare and I specifically do most of the integration work with our partners which, if you know anything about healthcare, is irrationally antiquated and deals way more than it should with flat files to trade data.
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The reason why I have the above project and absolutely everything is in Kafka now is explicitly due to this.

We just implemented Kafka with absolutely no guidelines so its its own hell.
 
Noodleface

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ShakyJake said:
Our engineering team recently got trained in SAFe Agile. We’ve been doing agile for a while, but our new director pushed for SAFe because our feature planning was pretty weak—think vague feature definitions, mostly due to product owners and marketers not digging deep enough. That led to developed features missing the mark on whatever needs they dreamed up, and they’d flop hard.

The big change now is that Product Owners and BAs have to write super detailed user stories for each iteration. The catch? Our POs and BAs don’t know much about the nitty-gritty. They’ve got a basic grasp, but it’s really the engineers who understand what our software can actually do. So, we end up with feature requests that are either totally unrealistic or would need a massive overhaul of our app’s architecture to pull off.

Another issue is the time sink. Writing these stories takes so long that development time gets squeezed. Developers often end up twiddling their thumbs, waiting for POs and BAs to make decisions and finish writing.

Anyone else dealing with this? Is this just how it goes, or are we messing something up? I’m starting to think our POs and BAs might not be up to the task—maybe they were hired for other reasons. They’ve been around a while, so it’s like their roles shifted under them, which isn’t totally fair. Still, this is where we’re at.
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This is why I prefer technical product owners/managers.

On the topic of impostor syndrome, I'm trying to get out of coding and just being a tech lead (which i am, but doing both). Not only am I not as good as the new guys coming in, I can't also handle the bullshit I deal with and shield them from all day. It makes me look double bad when it takes me forever to delivery any code changes.
 
Khane

Khane

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TJT said:
The reason why I have the above project and absolutely everything is in Kafka now is explicitly due to this.

We just implemented Kafka with absolutely no guidelines so its its own hell.
Click to expand...

I should just dig into Kafka. This is the kind of thing that I used to do all the time throughout my professional career, just take a few weekends and learn new shit. I just cannot find the motivation to do it anymore.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Khane said:
I should just dig into Kafka. This is the kind of thing that I used to do all the time throughout my professional career, just take a few weekends and learn new shit. I just cannot find the motivation to do it anymore.
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The principle isn't real complicated. It reduces data flows to JSON payloads and the idea is that it's constantly sending them. For the Healthcare use case, for example, its taking Claim data for a client and simply processing that data as it comes. Rather than in massive batch jobs with many steps and layers of processing in the old ETL format.

So rather than getting a nightly load of say today's claims for X. You instead get each claim by itself and it flows through your systems.
 
Khane

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Yea it's a pub-sub message broker/messaging engine. BizTalk is the same concept though it's old, outdated, and deals in XML payloads which are large and cumbersome.
 
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Khane

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ShakyJake said:
I miss WCF.
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giphy.gif
 
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Foler

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I’m so tired of these new grads (within last 6 years). They all seem so lazy. My company is huge and has numerous internal resources such as wikis, slack channels and more. Yet these junior engineers can’t bother researching a topic before asking me. I literally just go pull the wiki on the topic, send it to them, ask them to read it and then schedule a meeting with me. They also seem to be too afraid to ask questions in our slack channels. They ask me how to test something and I don’t know. I say “ask in the slack channels” and they never do… It’s ok to ask for help, we are all new at some point.

Most seem to just be doing the bare minimum to cash in on lucrative pay. Granted my company has done A LOT to drive off the best engineering talent over the last 3 years so it’s not surprising the people who remain are the ones who didn’t have the performance to move elsewhere.

I’ve been working with maybe 10-12 junior engineers the past 8 months. The only one who has had any promise is a pasty white dude who’s favorite music genre is country. Shit he’s better than most engineers a level above him. He’s thorough, autonomous, shows ownership and delivers. Of course all the other engineers are Indian/chinese/korean.

New team I just moved to is pretty much all Indian/chinese/korean. It’s amazing. I’ll be in a standup of 20 people and be the only white person. Mind you these people are all in the US too. All H1B1. Dreading the day I have to lead standup and pronounce some of their whacky names.
 
Foler

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pwe said:
How do you distinguish between impostor syndrome and just sucking? I get it all the time when there is something relevant I don’t know. Enough to make me wanna quit some times. I have tons of experience, so I feel like I should just know stuff by now.
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How do you do relative to others? Where do you stack in performance reviews?

Honestly the people most concerned about imposter syndrome are probably the least likely to be the imposter. The imposter is the dude who isn’t worried about it because he knows how to game the system by talking about work instead of doing it. Try to spend some time recognizing patterns of your stress.

One thing I’ve found is that I get usually get imposter syndrome on new projects. However, I always end up performing very well. I think it’s just the initial spin up giving me anxiety.

Try to focus on your strengths. I’m not the fastest at delivering results but I am an autistic level deep diver. My entire team knows that if there’s anything that requires careful attention to see sharp edges then they come to me. Yeah, my performance reviews regularly highlights how I’m great at deep diving stuff but not the fastest at delivery and I should learn to balance the two. I don’t care tbh, most people I see don’t do near enough research and it bites them in the ass near delivery.
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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I am going to quit my second gig. I've decided it. The moment I pay off my other house in a few months I'm out. Not worth dealing with these people and management who thinks everything is a crisis and I should work all night on the drop of a hat over nothing. Even if the money is a boon of course.
 
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pwe

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Foler said:
How do you do relative to others? Where do you stack in performance reviews?

Honestly the people most concerned about imposter syndrome are probably the least likely to be the imposter. The imposter is the dude who isn’t worried about it because he knows how to game the system by talking about work instead of doing it. Try to spend some time recognizing patterns of your stress.

One thing I’ve found is that I get usually get imposter syndrome on new projects. However, I always end up performing very well. I think it’s just the initial spin up giving me anxiety.

Try to focus on your strengths. I’m not the fastest at delivering results but I am an autistic level deep diver. My entire team knows that if there’s anything that requires careful attention to see sharp edges then they come to me. Yeah, my performance reviews regularly highlights how I’m great at deep diving stuff but not the fastest at delivery and I should learn to balance the two. I don’t care tbh, most people I see don’t do near enough research and it bites them in the ass near delivery.
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I don't get performance reviews, but all evidence says I'm doing good. Better than good, even. But when I look at old code or think about mistakes in the past, I just feel like I suck.
 
Noodleface

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pwe said:
I don't get performance reviews, but all evidence says I'm doing good. Better than good, even. But when I look at old code or think about mistakes in the past, I just feel like I suck.
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So what you're saying is you've grown as an engineer
 
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TJT

TJT

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If you look at year old code you wrote and aren't disgusted with yourself you've stopped learning.

Even if clunker code you wrote 5+ years ago is still running critical operations like some of mine does. I just ain't got time to update it and it keeps chugging along but I hate it.
 
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Khane

Khane

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I've been at this company since 2007. I look at some of the code I wrote back then and I turn into Gordon Ramsay.

giphy.gif
 
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