7 ms·

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been

by junon 6y ago

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work that I do. - Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash. - If you're approaching me claiming you've seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven't used in a decade. I don't care, personally, if you've done your research on me, but don't act like you have if you haven't. - My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me. - I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic (yes, even if it's some fancy SaaS). Don't knock me if I'm not. Most senior engineers I know of don't like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We're probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that's okay. - Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we're making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.) - Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else. - A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you'll be fighting us off with bats.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jameshart 6y ago
You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too. Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways? You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically. Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later. You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ericbarrett 6y ago
      Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.
      - Frost1x 6y ago
        I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.
        jameshart 6y ago
        I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you. If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity... ... why would you work for anyone?
Cederfjard 6y ago
> Agile is a time stuck and time waster How do you prefer to organize larger software development efforts that have to be coordinated with other business processes?
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  Anything that treats software development as an iterative research and development process, lets engineers self-organize, respects their time, and respects that time estimate certainty is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    I’m sure I read something similar in some sort of manifesto...
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      And many companies filled with employees with "Agile" in their job title have probably never read it.
      - Cederfjard 6y ago
        Sure, but the top-level comment’s stated point wasn’t that, but rather that Agile is a waste of time, period. So I’m curious what other ways of working handle these kinds of projects better. Edit: This is a genuine question, I'd be very keen to hear concrete ideas on how to work better.
        junon 6y ago
        Identify the problems first. Everyone is searching for a solution when half the time they don't even know what the problems are. Sure, releases might be slow. Why, though? Is it because you're not letting your engineers fix broken windows? How long does it take for PRs to get reviewed? If a long time, why? Do your engineers even know how to make proper commits? Are your PRs more than about 100 changes on average? Are you building your product from a prototype a non-programmer made? etc. There is no silver bullet, period. Searching for one indicates you're looking for workarounds to fundamental issues on your team.
g051051 6y ago
> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic Same! I've never worked on anything that I would have an interest in using personally. I don't have anything against the products, and they served their target audience well, but that's not me. > Stop drowning us in processes. See above. The so called "Agile" stuff they brought in basically crushed our development staff. It was used as a bludgeon.
- junon 6y ago
  Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team. Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.
  - dblohm7 6y ago
    > Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. One other learning that I've taken from big-A Agile is that it is only suited for teams where everybody is a "generalist" within the team. By "generalist" I mean that any developer on the team can work on any issue within that team's purview. If your team is responsible for any component where only a subset of the team has the specialization to work on it, team-wide sprint planning actually hinders progress.
    - g051051 6y ago
      In the "agile" environments I've seen, devs are expected to be the ultimate generalist. We have to do planning, documentation, testing, qa, ops, and still write the code.
nsonha 6y ago
There are great companies out there who not only are remote first but also works distributed and async, like github and gitlab. Per your point about managers there is also the concept of "Manager of one" for being own manager in these companies. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership
npsimons 6y ago
> Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else. OTOH, there are groups that don't have their shit together. I fought tooth and nail to try to get continuous integration up and running at the last project I worked on, and it was just so fucking frustrating trying to get people to change. They recognized the need and the benefit, but wouldn't take any action to actually implement it. And now they're actually looking to abandon Gitlab "because it corrupted one of the repositories." They're going to go to a direct git repo and someone proposed building their own CI from scratch out of cronjobs and such.

by junon 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jameshart 6y ago

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too. Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways? You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically. Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.

ericbarrett 6y ago
From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later. You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.
      - jameshart 6y ago
        I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you. If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity... ... why would you work for anyone?

Cederfjard 6y ago

> Agile is a time stuck and time waster How do you prefer to organize larger software development efforts that have to be coordinated with other business processes?

TimTheTinker 6y ago
Anything that treats software development as an iterative research and development process, lets engineers self-organize, respects their time, and respects that time estimate certainty is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.
- jameshart 6y ago
  I’m sure I read something similar in some sort of manifesto...
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    And many companies filled with employees with "Agile" in their job title have probably never read it.
    - Cederfjard 6y ago
      Sure, but the top-level comment’s stated point wasn’t that, but rather that Agile is a waste of time, period. So I’m curious what other ways of working handle these kinds of projects better. Edit: This is a genuine question, I'd be very keen to hear concrete ideas on how to work better.
      - junon 6y ago
        Identify the problems first. Everyone is searching for a solution when half the time they don't even know what the problems are. Sure, releases might be slow. Why, though? Is it because you're not letting your engineers fix broken windows? How long does it take for PRs to get reviewed? If a long time, why? Do your engineers even know how to make proper commits? Are your PRs more than about 100 changes on average? Are you building your product from a prototype a non-programmer made? etc. There is no silver bullet, period. Searching for one indicates you're looking for workarounds to fundamental issues on your team.

g051051 6y ago

> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm probably not with your product or service's target demographic Same! I've never worked on anything that I would have an interest in using personally. I don't have anything against the products, and they served their target audience well, but that's not me. > Stop drowning us in processes. See above. The so called "Agile" stuff they brought in basically crushed our development staff. It was used as a bludgeon.

junon 6y ago
Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team. Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  > Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. One other learning that I've taken from big-A Agile is that it is only suited for teams where everybody is a "generalist" within the team. By "generalist" I mean that any developer on the team can work on any issue within that team's purview. If your team is responsible for any component where only a subset of the team has the specialization to work on it, team-wide sprint planning actually hinders progress.
  - g051051 6y ago
    In the "agile" environments I've seen, devs are expected to be the ultimate generalist. We have to do planning, documentation, testing, qa, ops, and still write the code.

nsonha 6y ago

There are great companies out there who not only are remote first but also works distributed and async, like github and gitlab. Per your point about managers there is also the concept of "Manager of one" for being own manager in these companies. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership

npsimons 6y ago

> Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else. OTOH, there are groups that don't have their shit together. I fought tooth and nail to try to get continuous integration up and running at the last project I worked on, and it was just so fucking frustrating trying to get people to change. They recognized the need and the benefit, but wouldn't take any action to actually implement it. And now they're actually looking to abandon Gitlab "because it corrupted one of the repositories." They're going to go to a direct git repo and someone proposed building their own CI from scratch out of cronjobs and such.