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Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.
We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.
I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...
After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.
I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.
Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?
I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.
I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.
So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.
Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...
Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.86 -
its 2016, and they still believe that office skillz are enough for CS101..
boy u have to allocate memory in runtime without leaks by end of semester, not just make a text bold with a fancy font..2 -
My first work was a paid internship.
My first couple weeks on the job I was supposed to be working on the same machine with another dev to get the gist of the process and everything. Kind of pair programming mixed with mentorship. Sounds cool?
Yeah... Problem is my fellow dev was more interested in spending around 80% of her time chatting around with her boyfriend and friends on Microsoft Chat.
Anyway, I soon got bored of having to look to the other side all the time, and went to our boss and asked for some other stuff to do "because I'm better learning by doing than by example".
Almost 20 years later, I'm still in touch with this dev... But she soon left the job and pursued a career as a translator and interpreter. She was always more interested in talking than programming 😃1 -
Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?
To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜7 -
Deep Thought Rant
It's funny how the world works these days...companies only looking for "senior *something*" developers to work...
Mentorship and internship also do matter. What's happening?...sure you can contribute to open source but having a mentor also helps. Working as an intern allows one to see not only tech bit but workplace environment. How to deal with deadlines, feeling good and wasted at the same time when one bug that took a 3 minutes to fix but 3 hours to find, presenting your work; well what's working only, being bashed when it's your fault or not (even though that sucks), learning from your mentor and so on
Are their companies that still do this?3 -
The company I'm working at is treating interns like full timers while not actually paying them that much. I've been working as a full timer, doing similar tasks, working alone and without mentorship since I joined. This feel so wrong!10
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I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.
One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!
I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.
She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”
When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!5 -
@Owenvii made a post over at (https://devrant.com/rants/2359774/...) and I want to write a proper response.
The biggest thing you have to look out for as a new dev is the jobs which you accept to begin with.
This isn't minimum wage no more, this is "big league", well, maybe not apple or google big league, but it's not $9.25 an hour either.
Basically you don't want to work anywhere where 1. your labor will be treated as a highly disposable commodity. 2. where the hiring manager doesn't know how to do the job themselves.
The best thing you can do is, if you're new, and just breaking through (and even if you're not), is ask them common questions and problems/solutions that crop up doing the work. If they can answer intelligently that tells you the company values competence (maybe), enough to put someone in place who will know ability from bullshit, merit from mediocrity, and who understands the process of progressing from junior dev to a more involved role.
It also means they are incentivized to hire people who know what they're doing because the training cost of new hires is lowered when they hire people who are actually competent or capable of learning.
Remember, an interview isn't just them learning about you, it's your opportunity to interview *them* and boy, you'll be making a BIG mistake if you don't.
Ideally you want them to ask you to pair program a problem. If your solution is better than theirs then they aren't sending their best to do interviews, and it tells you the company doesn't fire incompetents. The interviewers response can tell you a lot too, if they critique your work, or suggest improvements, and especially if they explain their thinking, that is an amazing response to look for, it says the company values mentorship and *actual* teamwork (not the corporate lingo-bingo 'teamwork' that we sometimes see idolized on posters like so much common dogma).
Most importantly, get them to talk about their work and their team. If they're a professional, it'll be really difficult to pry anything negative about their co-workers out of them, but if they're loose-lipped and gossipy thats a VERY bad sign, regardless of what they have to say.
Ask to take a tour and do a meet n' greet of who you will be working with. If they say no, then it's no thank you to a job offer. You want to take every opportunity to get to know everyone there, everyone you'll be working with, as much as possible--because you'll be spending a LOT of time with these people and you want to rule out any place that employs 'unfireable' toxic assholes, sociopath executives, manipulative ladder climbing narcissists, and vicious misery-loving psychopathic coworkers as quick as possible. This isn't just one warning flag to look out for, it's the essential one. You're looking for the proper *workplace culture*, not the cheesy startup phrase of "workplace culture", but the actual attitudes of the team and the interpersonal dynamics.
Life is really short, and a heart attack at 25 from dipshit coworkers and workplace grief can and will destroy your health, if not your sanity, the older you get.
Trust and believe me when I say no paycheck is too grand to deal with some useless, smarmy, manipulative, or borderline motherfuckers at work constantly. You'll regret it if you do. Don't do it. Do you fucking do it. Just don't.
Take my words to heart and be weary of easy job offers. I'm not saying don't take a good offer that lands in your lap, I AM saying do some investigating and due diligence or the consequences are on you.1 -
Hired by large prestigious company to do web development. Understanding at the outset, I was not a web developer, just wanted my foot in the door with the company. 2 days after orientation, I am placed on a $20 million contract expansion with 3 other developers. All new to this contract. So: new language, new technologies, new team, no leadership, no mentorship. 2 months later after a month of asking for help, I'm asked why I'm not delivering solid code by the project exec and moved to the testing team. Testing team lead introduces me to people on the contract and answers questions or tells me vaguely where to loom. Spend last 4 months building a professional fuck you by making myself a yes man to everyone and their mother. Left the contract and have been getting regular hours with them since (including developing for them). New contract loves me and despite the project execs attempt to torpedo me, I have an excellent reputation and am positioned for career advancement already.
I couldn't give him the finger, but I made him regret lettimg me go. Original team lead has since been released for unrelated HR complaint. -
Don't think too big at first. You'll definitely get there if you play it smart. Babysteps, kiddo, start with the babysteps. We've all been there, we've all started with all the hello-worlds.
Never trust a sole source of information. Always have doubts and double-tripple check with other sources. Some tutorials are misguiding, others could be solving slightly different problems than they appear to at the first glance
listen to the seniors/mentors. Seek for mentorship. This field is too vast to absorb it on your own. Mentors will help you there.
Before diving into coding make sure you know what you want to build, how it'll work. "I'll make it move somehow" is the straightest path to disappointment. Think it through, ask mentors for help if you need
If you're building an elephant, start with his front left feet's toes. Don't start with the elephant.
Always test.
Most importantly - have fun! -
Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:
So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.
Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.
Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.
Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂 -
I am gonna toot my own horn a little in here and say that the best mentorship experience I've had comes from me being the mentor.
I have trained interns at work, and they both said that I was able to teach them more than all their programming teachers combined. I was a TA at uni and got the same remarks and i help friends in their uni level courses at a local uni all the time. The remarks are always the same.
I like teaching. And don't know why some people hate it so much yet still decide to take in a paycheck. I want this industry to get better, I want my city to get better(because I loathe it) and I really get a good feeling from seeing other people succeed and be happy.
I really want to teach. Thinking about getting more years under my belt, earn a master's degree and then I would really want to teach professionally.
My biggest issue, here in the U.S education is ridiculously expensive. Teachers that don't give their best and yet make that paycheck are a disgrace to our industry. I want to show passion to others and if possible transfer a lil bit of it.
I just want to teach man. Already work at a school and I want to make that transition one of these days.3 -
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
I want to understand things well enough that I can mentor those who want to learn what I’ve already learned, maybe making it easier for them than it’s been for me.
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What ever happened to the teachable moment? It seems to have been replaced by the insultable moment. I was fortunate enough to have mentors who didn’t immediately assume the worst of my intelligence when I asked a question. I’m going to try do the same.1
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!rant
Recently got selected for Facebook's Open Mentorship Program.
Super pumped about it!
Does anyone here have experience with it? How did it go? What did you work on?
It doesn't start till April, and I cannot wait. Just trying to get some taste of what's in the box!1 -
I've been for the last year mentoring two employees from 0 knowledge to now working on QA development. However, they tend to get back to their starting point every couple of months and lack confidence. Do you have any advice on how to mentor someone and keep them on growing their confidence in their skills?6
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Junior Dev about 18months in my current job and I've got a problem
Started to feel not wanting to code at work, despite working on a greenfield project thats critical and using new tech. I get a little defensive about PR's over stupid small things (PR was once rejected due to auto indentation "not to standard").
Talked with boss (who I get on well with and like) and thinks my problem is I've lost confidence coding. Trys to get more senior Dev to on side to help me out more.
Same senior Dev is really close with other junior on my team - pair on alot of stuff all the time, have lunch and spend free time together, and will work way past working hours just to try and finish something that day (even though it's not due that day).
(Probs working ~60h weeks, where as I'm ~42h and contracted for 37h. I'll work on if I need to but tries to have balance)
Senior and other junior tend to ignore tickets on the board, do the work and then when I pick it up they say "I did that last night". No docs, no PR for me to ask about how it was done (as they merged it themselves). (They have previously completely refactored my branch in the past overnight then not told me atall)
I'm not saying its favouritism here, but I'm not happy with the situation. I feel I can't ask questions as they are always together or they discuss the problem themselves and just give me the answer (not really acknowledging my points). I dont tend to ask for help from this senior Dev now as I don't feel it's worthwhile learning wise for me.
Other people in the team are great but working on other aspects so not a direct one-to-one alignment (others are DB Dev & principal senior dev)
Furthermore I'm wanting to possibly work on full stack web or more architecture stuff, both which are not in my current teams remit (backend up to API).
So - what do I do? Try and remedy the situation in the current team as best as or look for a new teams as cut my losses.
I'm torn between the 2 and I'm unsure how to get out this rut. I feel I need to find a solution to this soon though
(Sorry for the long rant folks)4 -
I have a problem. I can't do anything.
I can't really get started with the new path of software development. I have lots of stuff (like *tidying the room* or *exercise* or something good for my life) do but in the end all the things I have to do are tangled up. So learning usually gets in the pile of tangled up shit.
I try to use organisational tools. But my focus is zero.
Mental health issues don't help.
I think I would put at good use a few coding buddies, mentors, whatever... Self paced courses dont work for me. Bonus point of notgettingshitdone if online course.
I have low self esteem and I'm not trying to hide it.
I hate myself to the fucking core.7 -
Hello guys,
TLDR;
leave a company where I have big influence with less technical challenges for a big company where I am challenged but jus as an individual contributor
I am working for a good company as a DevOps engineer, made a lot of achievements and literally moved the company to a whole new level, however I am working all alone, no mentorship but I get to lead everything and take initiatives
You can imagine the stress working a lone with a big scale in terms of production and other teams that I should support
Have been promised that we will get a team but it has been 15 months and nothing happens
I feel that technical I am not growing enough since I don't have time to improve or any mentorship
Now I am offered a senior position in one of biggest fashion/retail companies in Europe
And I am not sure if I should leave or not, btw it involves relocating1 -
Well I might be asking too much, but is it possible to get a mentor for free in learning android development and perhaps get help from him/her to land a job?
About me: I'm an undergraduate student, currently unable to get a job because of COVID-19. I have experience in Programming problem solving. I also do android development for about 2 years and have 2 apps published in google play store.4 -
Does anyone have solid advice on getting a mentor early-on in my coding journey?
Networking and events etc. Is already part of my plan. -
Dev goals: building and deploying four apps (kotlin, flutter, unity) ; getting better at tdd; deeper understanding of core compsci principals ; mentorship; teaching; reading through at least one software practices book a month ; attending at least one local tech event monthly ;and prepping for finally getting out and speaking at conferences in 2021.
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