4 ms·

Run away from any company that thinks they are family.

by rimliu 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I am so sad that you are so cynical. I guess that reflects today's workforce, and, most likely, management. It was never the company. It was me. The company was a corporation, and they were way too stuffy to do that whole "family" thing. I kept senior-level C++ engineers for decades (I am not exaggerating). It was a small, high-functioning team that wrote image processing pipeleines for a very well-known company. I am aware that today's entire management style is based on engineers staying at a company for an average of eighteen months. That's crazy. I worked for a Japanese company, and the Japanese would barely even acknowledge my staff, until they had been there at least a year. It was really important for me to keep engineers for as long as possible. NEVER underestimate the impact of decent first-level managers. It is often said that armies run on their sergeants. First-level managers are the sergeants of the workforce. I was never interested in becoming a commissioned officer. I liked staying close to the ground. I'm entirely capable of doing extremely good strategy; I just didn't like it. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into management, and being a sergeant was as high as I could tolerate. I'm a really good manager, but I also never liked it. That's why I have returned to my engineering roots.
- Seb-C 6y ago
  I understand that by family you mean to have a good and strong relationship between teammates, which I approve. But my experience with family-like teams is that you end up with managers that act like they were you father/mother and you an immature child whose every request is a whim. Pretending that everyone is a friend is not necessarily good either because straightening a friend is much more harder than a colleague, so you end up not taking the right decisions by fear of frustrating and losing your friend. I agree with rimliu for those reasons. Coworker relationships have to be different than family or friends, but that does not mean being inhuman or disrespectful, and it is not incompatible with a good and fun ambiance.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Well, I apologize for using the word "family." I guess it's loaded. You are correct. It is a different type of relationship. In my experience, I had two primary goals: 1) The corporate strategy and tactical direction. 2) The productivity, cost-efficiency, well-being, and cohesiveness of the team. My stuff came after that. In any case, you're determined to find fault with my experience and outlook. I get that. I am quite aware that my approach is orthogonal to "industry standard," and that makes people uncomfortable. No problem. We'll probably never work together, which may actually be sad. I'm a pretty decent person to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if you were, as well.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    BTW: I enjoyed looking at your code. It shows a clean, disciplined, quality approach. I'm big on having an open portfolio. I think that it is a really important component in interviews. I think an almost perfect interview, is for the prospect to supply some projects, and the interviewer then asks them about their submissions. Like for me, since I do device control and communication software, a good discussion might be around the patterns that I use to synchronize local model with the server state (spoiler: I use what I call my "staged model" pattern, which I'm considering farming out into another one of my general-purpose SDKs).

Run away from any company that thinks they are family.

by rimliu 6y ago

Run away from any company that thinks they are family.

I am so sad that you are so cynical. I guess that reflects today's workforce, and, most likely, management. It was never the company. It was me. The company was a corporation, and they were way too stuffy to do that whole "family" thing. I kept senior-level C++ engineers for decades (I am not exaggerating). It was a small, high-functioning team that wrote image processing pipeleines for a very well-known company. I am aware that today's entire management style is based on engineers staying at a company for an average of eighteen months. That's crazy. I worked for a Japanese company, and the Japanese would barely even acknowledge my staff, until they had been there at least a year. It was really important for me to keep engineers for as long as possible. NEVER underestimate the impact of decent first-level managers. It is often said that armies run on their sergeants. First-level managers are the sergeants of the workforce. I was never interested in becoming a commissioned officer. I liked staying close to the ground. I'm entirely capable of doing extremely good strategy; I just didn't like it. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into management, and being a sergeant was as high as I could tolerate. I'm a really good manager, but I also never liked it. That's why I have returned to my engineering roots.

Seb-C 6y ago
I understand that by family you mean to have a good and strong relationship between teammates, which I approve. But my experience with family-like teams is that you end up with managers that act like they were you father/mother and you an immature child whose every request is a whim. Pretending that everyone is a friend is not necessarily good either because straightening a friend is much more harder than a colleague, so you end up not taking the right decisions by fear of frustrating and losing your friend. I agree with rimliu for those reasons. Coworker relationships have to be different than family or friends, but that does not mean being inhuman or disrespectful, and it is not incompatible with a good and fun ambiance.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Well, I apologize for using the word "family." I guess it's loaded. You are correct. It is a different type of relationship. In my experience, I had two primary goals: 1) The corporate strategy and tactical direction. 2) The productivity, cost-efficiency, well-being, and cohesiveness of the team. My stuff came after that. In any case, you're determined to find fault with my experience and outlook. I get that. I am quite aware that my approach is orthogonal to "industry standard," and that makes people uncomfortable. No problem. We'll probably never work together, which may actually be sad. I'm a pretty decent person to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if you were, as well.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  BTW: I enjoyed looking at your code. It shows a clean, disciplined, quality approach. I'm big on having an open portfolio. I think that it is a really important component in interviews. I think an almost perfect interview, is for the prospect to supply some projects, and the interviewer then asks them about their submissions. Like for me, since I do device control and communication software, a good discussion might be around the patterns that I use to synchronize local model with the server state (spoiler: I use what I call my "staged model" pattern, which I'm considering farming out into another one of my general-purpose SDKs).