What do you do?

Skimming through this thread made me certain of one thing: I was born in the wrong country (and in the wrong time, but that's another story). Fuck.

Move to america, glue your hair up, and get hired by mtv to go clubbing.

Crone_sl said:

Currently in the job hunt, but still employed for a financial services company. What I've found is the benefits for Banks, and other financial companies are crazy good. My job keeps referring to being a "premier" employer. Having looked at benefits at other companies like Edward Jo
nes, Wells Fargo, Raymond James, etc, it all seems to be pretty damn good. Wall St. gives them bene's!

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Edward Jones benefits are abysmal, like bottom of the pack awful. Not sure where you heard they had good benefits. My wife was a manager there and she was on my benefits. They don't even have maternity leave, it is short term disability. High deductible medical, almost no 401k match, etc.

I guess I'm officially old. I always prefered cash. Most companies in my industry pay well but restrict befefits to insurance only and some you will pay a large portion of it.

This new job that I'm relocating for is in a similar industry but slightly different. They offer profit sharing, full insurance premium coverage, a match on the 401k up to X% I forgot what it was. I asked for and reviewed the profit sharing payouts for the last 10 years and they averaged just under 10% of gross pay. They also are paying for temporary housing, full moving expenses, and a bunch of stuff more related to families like school placement assistance that I had no use for.

Another bonus I'm suprised nobody mentioned to me (I already knew since I lived in that state previously) was no state income tax. It adds up when the top marginal rate where I am moving from is 6% over 50k, when figured out with the lower rates it comes to $1750 +6% on whatever you make over 50k.

After meeting with the president I apparently left some stuff on the table. He was suprised I didn't ask for a country club membership....next year.

Anyone want to school me on PMI certification. I have been a "project manager" for a number of years but in my new job that title is now a subset of my official job. I'm curious if anyone has it and do you think it was worth it?

It's not a requirement for my job and in fact none of project managers have it and I will be their boss. Just thinking down the road.

I work with tons of people who love to slap their "PMP" next to their name in their email signatures, and I swear to god they're all fucking idiots.

Thanks. I really don't know anyone in my industry that is certified. Most of us came up thru the school of hard knocks so to speak with lots of on the job training over the years. I'm just looking ahead to have in my pocket so to speak. I still need to look into what exactly is required and what stages they have of it so to speak.

I am doing PM on these now and implementing an in house engineering department while that transistions still doing the PM thing.

Electrostatic precipitators, bag houses, heat exchangers etc...Not bad for someone with a GED if I say so myself. Tho I did go get a degree later that has less than zero to do with any of this.



Totally unrelated note I will say it's still possible to get a job (a really good job for me) via a snail mail resume. Sent it in blind with no job posting and the HR lady was out for the week. The president of the company read it and decided to come up with a posistion that fit me because he had been thinking about it for a long time. Right time right person I guess.

stupidmonkey_sl said:

I did the PMI-ACP, which is for Agile certified practitioner and more software development related. It is newly added within the last two years. The test was somewhat of a joke and you could pass just from getting a couple books online. The PMP is supposed to be much harder, however I somewhat doubt it, and I had qualified for that as well but haven't taken it yet. I do see a lot of people in the field with it listed though.

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[email protected]/* <![CDATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */Also known as what large companies try to implement without understanding it doesn't scale to big teams.

PMP more or less means you are an obnoxious process driven person who shouldn't be hired.

Vinen: "Agile just means permanent crunch time"

I just took some Agile training.. it was the stupidest shit I've ever heard and I feel like we already implement some aspects of it on a personal level anyways.

Just something to get management fired up about.

Noodleface_sl said:

I just took some Agile training.. it was the stupidest shit I've ever heard and I feel like we already implement some aspects of it on a personal level anyways.

Just something to get management fired up about.

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If Agile doesn't work at VMware it sure the hell won't work at EMC. I just love how our company (EMC owns 80% of VMware) is like AGILE IS THE SOLUTION TO ALL DEVELOPMENTS PROBLEMS LOLOLOLOLOL.

I just program things and let the bosses deal with that stuff, that stuff ensures I'll never want to be management.

Noodleface_sl said:

I just program things and let the bosses deal with that stuff, that stuff ensures I'll never want to be management.

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Ahh, Engineers are involved in this shit in our org. I more or less Rally against it alongside some of our senior leadership.

We have some Program Managers who will be "Don't use that word, it's too waterfally." To which I call bullshit in meetings.

In the job hunt after moving from Phoenix to Portland area, and it really sucks to realize that the last 7 years of experience that I have boils down to customer service in a call center. Feels bad bros.

Hindsight is always 20/20... maybe would have pushed harder to get into different departments to learn SQL, or make a bigger push into IT to learn more agile/waterfall (our IT uses those ways). Would have had more to put on the resume at this point.

stupidmonkey_sl said:

It's basically a marketing term now. Something to sell management and companies on. It's not meant for double digit teams and if used as such no bueno.

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Yep, people fail to realize that Waterfall and Spiral methodologies exist for a reason. They aren't evil.

I looked into it more today and I'm not sure it would really be all that helpful or apply to what I do. I know project management seems to be a hot topic and lots of people get titled that for a variety of reasons. I help bid a project including estimating the labor. Then once the project is awarded I have to sub out to engineers and then coordinate with the customer (normally power plants) to answer the 100's of RFI's involved and then when they are finished I coordinate and schedule that with the in house drafting department to make shop drawings. Then schedule the purchase of materials, fabrication in the shop (100 or so employees) and handle all the contract stuff that comes up like revisions which can be 50% or more of the final cost. Sometimes I have to explain our cost changes in revisions to the customer who subbed out the engineering so they have no clue the labor and material required to make 1 change that cascades thru 1000 parts. Then schedule delivery normally by barge.

Lots of the stuff I looked up today looked interesting but it didn't seem that related to what I do. Most of the people who do what I do, do it because they understand our sector from top to bottom. Not because they are great managers. You could be the best PM but you really couldn't have a conversation with 90% of our sector.

I wish I knew someone in my industry that had it and see if it paid off for them.

Celestein_sl said:

I've seen the most success with spiral for larger teams personally. For agile to really work at larger levels you need good team division. i.e. divide a 300person company into groups of 10 people, who are all working on essentially independent components/modules/whatever and treating the other teams implementing them like customers.

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More or less.

Agile tends to fail in large teams due to dependencies on other teams.

BrotherWu_sl said:

Agile project management, at least as I understand it, is, by definition, not intended for large teams. For example, you can't do a daily stand up with 50 people. That would defeat the purpose. What you can do in come cases, however, is break the team down into subteams and manage them with scrum or whatever.

Agile vs. Waterfall, each have their own strengths and the real point is to not try to be dogmatic on either one. For example, the pure Agile notion of putting off detailed requirements and embracing change at any point in the lifecycle absolutely would not fly on a NASA program, as well it shouldn't.

Some ideas, like pairing, may or may not fly depending on the individuals. Other concepts, such as test-driven development (I think) are a good idea no matter what paradigm you're using.

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You can break down 50 people in 8 scrum teams or so. This will enable you to have right sized teams.
THAT SAID, once the teams have dependencies on each other (Lol intersprint-dependencies) it all breaks down... very fast and amazingly.

TDD can be a complete clusterfuck as people stop focusing on actually releasing a product. In addition, all TDD does is verify someone can code to a spec... just coding to a spec does not a good product make.

/I am Software Architect working within a Quality Organization
//Giant fan of having a QE team member (or another team member in general) review code on the developers machine prior to check-in
///People need to practice defect avoidance. Checked in defects are expensive to track
////More slashies
/////Considers Quality to be a more difficult and technical job then Developing. Won't hire anyone who can't code at a Software Engineer 3 or above level.