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I had a similar experience, but I made the mistake of taking the job. I spent several months in denial about how smart people who act so... not smart. At one

I had a similar experience, but I made the mistake of taking the job. I spent several months in denial about how smart people who act so... not smart. At one point, I asked the CTO for guidance on how to work with the team architect whose feelings I kept hurting. For example, I wrote a constructor for a class, and the architect asked me what "def initialize" was for, and got upset when I asked if they knew how OOP in the language worked. Another time they asked me for help on a weekend to figure a null pointer error on a machine that wasn't running the software they were trying to debug, and got upset when I pointed that out. I brought up both examples to the CTO. The CTO pointed out that the Architect had 10 more years of experience than I did, and while I might be right, I probably wasn't. Then the CTO said (direct quote) "you have delusions of grandeur about your technical abilities" to my face. I started looking for a new job immediately after that conversation. After I left, I heard the project got canceled, the architect got promoted, and they were hiring devs straight out of bootcamps because they couldn't attract anyone with experience.

alephnan 7y ago
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Did you end up working at another Fashion-Tech company? I'm curious how much of this is characteristic of Fashion-Tech industry in general.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I dodged a bullet indeed. Out of the dozen other devs there, there was exactly one person I'd care to work with again. They got pushed out a month or two later, and post-shenanigans felt infinitely better. My advice is to do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but don't delude yourself into thinking that a crazy sauce employer will change its ways because you try extra hard to change them when they resist your attempts to do so.
pgm8705 7y ago
I used to work closely with Quicken Loans and other FoCs and can attest that this behavior is commonplace. There is this strange culture within the Family of Companies where non-tech leaders think that tenured Quicken engineers and tech people are these sort of super-geniuses. Many years back I was a part of a company in the Quicken led start-up space. We were often "encouraged" to meet with Quicken or FatHead senior engineers for advice. One time I reluctantly agreed and met with "the best programmer in Michigan" who's first piece of advice was: "Delete your app and start over. Ruby on Rails is trash. Real programmers use C#. With C# you can create libraries that you can reuse across all your apps."
- kokowawa393 7y ago
  Wow that is so sad/hilarious.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  What on earth is a ‘family of companies’? Googling for it just gets me some sort of crane conglomerate.
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner-company https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner-company
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      Huh, that’s a bit of a random collection of stuff.
      - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
        Rock Ventures, http://www.rockventures.com/ http://www.rockventures.com/ , was founded by Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert.
- jnbiche 7y ago
  While I don't agree with the way he spoke, was C# one of the de facto or explicit in-house languages of the company, and Ruby was not? If so, he may have been referring to the fact that the company already had many libraries in C# that you could use. Plus, if C# was one of their areas of expertise, it's typically best to use that as opposed to a new, unfamiliar language unless you're explicitly testing out a new approach. Also, in general, for programming in the large, many experienced programmers, having worked on multiple large-scale software projects, tend to prefer statically-typed languages. We've found by experience that in such large-scale systems, major refactorings are much, much smoother and feasible in statically-typed languages (although unit and integration tests are certainly still needed). And a whole class of errors are eliminated. I don't think RoR is trash, but if you were starting a large program that would be used across multiple departments whose in-house language was C#, it was probably the right call to suggest switching to C#. Please note: I'm not a C# programmer, and have never done any work in C# (although I've worked many dynamically-typed and statically-typed languages, and have a clear preference for the latter for large-scale software projects). So this isn't something I have any personal investment in. Finally, I do get it, working for these types of companies is misery for most programmers. I've worked in such companies. But in this case, the senior may have had a good point.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

alephnan 7y ago

Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Did you end up working at another Fashion-Tech company? I'm curious how much of this is characteristic of Fashion-Tech industry in general.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I dodged a bullet indeed. Out of the dozen other devs there, there was exactly one person I'd care to work with again. They got pushed out a month or two later, and post-shenanigans felt infinitely better. My advice is to do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but don't delude yourself into thinking that a crazy sauce employer will change its ways because you try extra hard to change them when they resist your attempts to do so.

pgm8705 7y ago

I used to work closely with Quicken Loans and other FoCs and can attest that this behavior is commonplace. There is this strange culture within the Family of Companies where non-tech leaders think that tenured Quicken engineers and tech people are these sort of super-geniuses. Many years back I was a part of a company in the Quicken led start-up space. We were often "encouraged" to meet with Quicken or FatHead senior engineers for advice. One time I reluctantly agreed and met with "the best programmer in Michigan" who's first piece of advice was: "Delete your app and start over. Ruby on Rails is trash. Real programmers use C#. With C# you can create libraries that you can reuse across all your apps."

kokowawa393 7y ago
Wow that is so sad/hilarious.
rsynnott 7y ago
What on earth is a ‘family of companies’? Googling for it just gets me some sort of crane conglomerate.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner-company https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner-company
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    Huh, that’s a bit of a random collection of stuff.
    - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
      Rock Ventures, http://www.rockventures.com/ http://www.rockventures.com/ , was founded by Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert.
jnbiche 7y ago
While I don't agree with the way he spoke, was C# one of the de facto or explicit in-house languages of the company, and Ruby was not? If so, he may have been referring to the fact that the company already had many libraries in C# that you could use. Plus, if C# was one of their areas of expertise, it's typically best to use that as opposed to a new, unfamiliar language unless you're explicitly testing out a new approach. Also, in general, for programming in the large, many experienced programmers, having worked on multiple large-scale software projects, tend to prefer statically-typed languages. We've found by experience that in such large-scale systems, major refactorings are much, much smoother and feasible in statically-typed languages (although unit and integration tests are certainly still needed). And a whole class of errors are eliminated. I don't think RoR is trash, but if you were starting a large program that would be used across multiple departments whose in-house language was C#, it was probably the right call to suggest switching to C#. Please note: I'm not a C# programmer, and have never done any work in C# (although I've worked many dynamically-typed and statically-typed languages, and have a clear preference for the latter for large-scale software projects). So this isn't something I have any personal investment in. Finally, I do get it, working for these types of companies is misery for most programmers. I've worked in such companies. But in this case, the senior may have had a good point.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]