And there was me hoping she'd literally taken out a shovel and dug up some treasure

I'm just wondering why your PM is allowed to touch the code - don't they have a Gantt chart to be working on or something? 😅

Engineering manager, sure, but PM? 🤔

Have you tried adding blockchain? AI? ML? DevOps? One of those has to be the solution, otherwise that sales rep wouldn't be talking about them all the time!

@Linux that sounds even better 😄

Being thrown in at the deep end is one way of learning!

But hey, you seem to be getting rewarded for the work that you're doing, and as long as you're not being overwhelmed by it all it it sounds like you're doing a good job 👍

We give applicants who've passed 2 interviews (1 to check personality/fit, and 1 to get an overview of their technical knowledge) an assignment and tell them to spend no more than 4hrs on it

They get 3 days to return it to us

We also encourage them to add some notes saying "if I'd had an extra hour then I'd have done xyz instead", which is basically a way for them to demonstrate greater understanding without having to spend ages actually writing out the code

@lambda123 I'm the opposite - I like all of the architectural/engineering/planning stuff, but then I can't physically output code fast enough to avoid becoming bored with actually implementing all of that actual stuff

I mean I do enjoy the programming part, just not for the entire duration of the project haha

@Demolishun I originally tried running the Linux project via WSL, but it didn't like that
Also tried running the Windows project on Wine, but that also didn't work

There's probably a way to make both solutions work, but clients pay us to build features, not to make their tech stack more efficient ("but it works great for our devs and they have zero issues!")

Firefox had 30% market share? 🤯

I guess that that was before Mozilla fired all their devs though lol

I always found tech recruitment (especially on LinkedIn) to be the exact opposite of dating apps:

On dating apps, nerdy guys get ignored by attractive women
On LinkedIn, attractive women get ignored by nerdy guys

@stackodev actually ignore my previous question - you might want to look into Volta: https://volta.sh/

I've just started looking into it, and it basically let's you specify the Node version that each project uses in your package.json, and then you can just run `volta install` to get the correct version for each project

@stackodev are you on Windows, Mac or Linux?

I work in an agency, so I've built nearly 20 products from scratch now (across Android, Angular, React, backend APIs, Unity games)

You get used to it tbh, but my main gripe is that I never get to refactor projects just for the sake of making them cleaner/more maintainable/etc, because clients only want more features 🙃

On the other hand, I basically get a clean slate, free of tech debt, a few times a year, so that's super nice haha

It's kinda cool to look back through all of my projects and see my progression, like how my architectures have improved, tests have been added, shared code has been pulled out into libraries, etc

(yes, K8s is a bit overkill for this, but it helps keep things standardised across all clients regardless of their size, and allows for easy scaling if any client starts to do really well)

@sariel so we have 1 Google Cloud project per environment, with at least 3 environments (QA, staging, production - sometimes there are more if needed) per client

Each project contains its own "cheap" services, like logging, PubSub, etc

But there's only a single K8s cluster, which sits in the production environment, and actually orchestrates the containers for all environments (each environment gets its own namespace). Because of this, all of the database servers are also in the production project - we usually have a single "non-prod" DB server (which contains individual databases for QA, staging, etc), and then a separate DB server for production (which is usually beefier, has replicas, etc)

It's basically the difference between the bill for each client being £100 vs £300

These clients are usually very-early startups, and that extra money is usually directed towards new features

Well colour me intrigued...if that was a thumbnail on YouTube for something title "HR Training Video" then I'd 100% click it

Not a fan of these switcheroo tactics, but I feel like asking for $5/user/month from a multimillion dollar company for a piece of software is...pretty reasonable?
I mean, compared to other "enterprise" offerings, at least

Similar fun fact: it takes longer to say "www" than "world wide web"

@Floydimus I'm 100% up for MVPs being sent into space, as long as MVP stands for "marketing vice president"

The whole concept is actually a bit misleading - it's actually just a cubesat (which is too small to see from Earth with the naked eye, and probably difficult to see with a regular telescope) which has a screen on it, and that screen is filmed (via some kind of selfie stick apparatus 🤮) and then that video feed is streamed to Twitch/YouTube/etc

So basically it'll be a video feed of a satellite showing ads

React is fantastic

However, people forget that React is just a library for building UI components - you then have to bolt on 100 dependencies to do everything else

And of course every React project chooses a different 100 dependencies to use, which means you're basically starting from scratch every time you look at a new project

Say what you will about Angular/Ember/etc, but at least they have standardised ways of doing common things like routing

I hear "blocker" and "showstopper" all the time, but I've never heard anyone say, "things are getting hot and heavy" 😂

It's a very pretty mask that makes me work faster with less bugs

As a final note, if you have to provide time estimates/deadlines/etc, then give yourself some buffer time, just in case you don't progress as fast as you think you should

Worst case scenario is that you go at your full efficiency and finish early...and I doubt many people will be complaining about that 😂

But yeah, hopefully something in all of these messages is of use to you - I feel like I rambled a bit haha

Also, devRant needs support for longer replies lol

If you seem to be running into a lot of issues, then obviously you don't want to spam your colleagues with requests for help - this might be an indicator that some parts of the project/specification/etc haven't been properly explained to you, and that's why you keep getting stuck

If you do have a bunch of questions that all need to be asked though, try to send them whenever the colleague(s) you're sending them to have a natural break from work (e.g. Lunch, meetings, etc), so that you don't interrupt their flow too much - it's not always possible, but it is appreciated by other devs 🙂

But yeah, always better to reach out for help than to work yourself into a tizzy - nobody benefits from that, least of all you

TBC

RE addressing challenges as they come up, my personal expectation of how devs should handle this is that they should spend a bit of time (15-30m, maybe more, depends on how much luck they're having) searching around for solutions, trawling Stackoverflow, etc

If they haven't found anything at that point, then they should reach out for help. I'd rather they asked for pointers rather than copy-and-paste solutions, since they're more likely to learn that way, but if even the pointers aren't helping then I guess it's okay.

I will actually tell off developers who get stuck and don't reach out - it's bad for developers' mental health, since they'll stress themselves out about not being able to find a solution, spending loads of time on it and therefore missing deadlines, etc, and it's also bad for the project since things will be delayed.

TBC

In terms of your reputation being damaged, I honestly wouldn't worry - yes, colleagues might end up with a lower opinion of you if you churn out bad code for years, but if you're just a bit slow every now and again then most people are likely to forget about it pretty quickly, and even if they do remember then they're unlikely to hold it against you.

For reference, the only time I actually remember a colleague being slow was when they told me that they'd need an additional 5 weeks...on deadline day...for a 2 week piece of work 😂

TBC

Then your supervisor can shift around deadlines, expectations, etc as necessary (assuming you told them more than 5m before the deadline), which is actually usually fine. From experience, clients don't mind delays anywhere near as much if they're told of them in advance...and not-angry client == not-angry supervisors 🙂

TBC

I'm sure others will have different takes on this, but from my experience (head of development for an agency, where most of the devs are junior to mid), communication is the most important thing. Since I work for an agency, everything we do has deadlines/timescales, but if that's not relevant to you then feel free to discard some of my points.

Everyone can have bad day/weeks/etc, any any good supervisor or manager will be okay with that (and from what you've said, your supervisor sounds like one of the good ones 🙂). The most important thing though is that you communicate that to your supervisor - no need to go into the exact details of what's going on, since that's your personal life, but just letting them know that things are taking a bit longer because you're not at your peak will be appreciated by them. Just something like "hey, my head's in a bit of a mush today so I haven't gone as quickly as I thought I would, can I have an extra hour tomorrow to finish it off please?".

TBC

I read "Enough vacations without judgement" as "Enough vaccinations without judgement"

Yup, I'm officially broken