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Search - "recommendation"
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#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.13 -
So the new robot (Dingo) arrived yesterday. Today I did the unboxing, and damn was it disappointing. I realized the university purchased it not from the company I recommended, and they messed up the delivery.
The robot controller was missing, and the charging cable did not match the charging station input. Like dude, you had one job!
Since the lady in administration decided to disregard my recommendation and order from a random shop, she might as well assemble the robot herself....15 -
I think I'm completely burned out on being a dev. It's so frustrating and hard to do even the simplest thing. I don't mean it's hard as in it's hard to do the code, I mean it's draining my soul to sit through 4 hour meetings and code reviews.
The other day I had someone dictate a code change to me for a bug they introduced on a ticket I took. Can you just take the ticket yourself or at least just give me a push and not drag me into a 2 hour meeting where you dictate code to me?
I'm an introvert and I've never in all my years in tech worked with a more gregarious group of programmers. It seems like all they want to do is talk and I just want to get requirements, code the requirements, and be done.
There are days where I don't even write a single line of code because I'm scheduled for 2 hours worth of meetings that actually take 5 hours because no on respects anyone else's time and would rather interject with their feelings or opinions on some technology or code instead of just getting things done.
On top of this, everyone is an architecture astronaut who doesn't want to just start working.
We need to switch our frontend and I can't even start because as soon as I make a recommendation "That's not supported enough, it only has 1 maintainer!" "I think we should make it an SPA" "I think we should make it static pages".
Can we just write a native god damn gui? This isn't even customer facing who gives a shit.
Why am I trying to get a democratic consensus with these dudes when no one has even asked the actual users what they want.
Are you still a programmer when all you do is listen to other people talk in meetings all day?6 -
📚What book would you recommend to software developers and why? 1 book per reply so people can ++ them.15
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Learning Java Spring, their official documentation is a fucking mess. Can't get any useful information other than got dumped with loads of confusing terms/packages references/libraries.
baeldung blog site is better than the docs to some extend, but still, very fragmented information.
Ok enough ranting.. Any good learning resource recommendation? Forum?5 -
when a senior recommends you rewrite some code with their example snippet (which doesn't work), for the 3rd time, on a different ticket
i guess i should've called them out on the 2nd time this happened, instead of silently not doing so think i'd save them some dignity after telling them the first time they did this, their recommendation didn't pass automated tests4 -
How do I push a hiring offer to later and say no?
Context:
I work at company A and the manager, let's call her Jane, who hired me at company A, left shortly after to join company B at a senior executive level (very high up the ladder in a public company).
After few months, I decide to quit company A and started my job hunt. I received a job offer from company C.
Now, my relationship with Jane was super awesome. Jane was very supportive and thought very highly of me. She offered to write a LoR (letter of recommendation ) for me whenever I needed it.
Now, out of courtesy and maintaining the relationship, I mentioned to Jane that I quit company A and will be joining company C.
To which she immediately mentioned that she could hire me and setup my connect with one of the hiring managers in her team. We had our initial conversation and they skipped second stage (since I got a very high reference) and moved to final stage of the interview.
Now, I am not really keen on joining this company B as it will also require me to move outside of the country to a different timezone.
At the same time I don't want to sabotage my relationship with Jane and make sure I keep my options/doors open for some collaboration in future.
How do I go about telling Jane (and the team) that for now, I am focusing on joining company C and would like to explore the opportunity with her company/team in future, without damaging my professional image?11 -
Let your friends play youtube music on your account during party, get them all drunk and play some random shit and suddenly all your music recommendations are fucked up, that’s how this super expensive and amazing AI works in a real world where there is more than one person.
I need to skip 10 songs now to get to one that’s decent.10 -
!rant
I'll be the first to admit that my web dev skills are average. Where I work we don't get pushed much since we work off of a very limited (custom to us) platform, which doesn't leave one very well rounded. I am very good with CSS/HTML/FLEXBOX/RESPONSIVE DESIGN and have minimal skills in PHP and JAVASCRIPT. In school I've dabbled with SQL, but hell if I remember much (beside key, the whole key and nothing but the key). What other languages or codes do you recommend learning; what's hot right now? Or should I focus on putting higher emphasis on the ones mentioned above first? I am a front end developer and don't plan on ever doing back end so not looking for the toughest of the tough - just something that will help me grow and land a better job. If there's any cool learning sites you know of too, or other tools, please let me know.3 -
Ok so, another post got me thinking…
Every browser I’ve tried sucks one way or another. Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi etc…
Safari on my work Mac is so far the least annoying one, although it seems to have an issue with Google’s services…
On my personal computer (Linux) I use mainly Vivaldi, tho I have Firefox installed as well since apparently Vivaldi doesn’t quite support everything on the interwebs…
So, fellow ranters, what are your favoured browsers (all platforms go!) and most importantly, why?11 -
My best mentor was at my first tech job. I’m pretty sure he’s a big reason why I got the job. Not me specifically, but he advocated for hiring out of a bootcamp that represented minorities.
I was just out of bootcamp. I was very sure I was not prepared. No, this was imposter syndrome. As evidence, I was offered a lesser role than what I had interviewed for. I was pretty sure I was only hired because the company was trying to fill a diversity quota, they could get away with paying me less, and I would take training well.
He was assigned to be my mentor. He was very helpful with teaching me the team’s practices and overall tech practices. Mentoring is hard and he was great at it. He almost inspired me to mentor, but I know I’d be shit at it.
When I was job searching, he wrote my recommendation. He helped me in so many ways.