3 ms·

I don't know anything about you or your company, but I know enough about programming and the industry to tell you this: Don't conflate being a good programmer/

by hsn915 5y ago

I don't know anything about you or your company, but I know enough about programming and the industry to tell you this: Don't conflate being a good programmer/engineer with being a good employee. In my experience, most software companies are hopelessly broken. They have complex processes that no new joiner can understand. In fact, almost no one at the company understands. The experienced engineers who do fine probably don't understnad the whole process either. They just know to avoid screwing things up, for example, by being super extra careful before doing anything with the production servers and double/triple checking with other more senior engineers before doing that. In general, I strongly believe that you will not learn how to be a better engineer from your company. Improving your engineering ability is something you can only do at your own time. The only thing you can learn from being an employee is how to be a better employee. In sense, you can only be a good employee if you are well adjusted to all the broken processes. As you might guess form my language, it's not something I recommend that anyone should aspire to do.

stevekemp 5y ago
> Don't conflate being a good programmer/engineer with being a good employee. Very true. I've been working in IT since 1994, initially as a programmer, later as a sysadmin, and nowadays as a cloud-guy. In all my jobs I've done good. Except one. I just didn't fit in. Tasks that even I could recognize as being simple were a real struggle, and I was frankly doing a terrible job at them. I've always fit in, I've always had both people and technical skills, but in that one particular company I was doing a terrible job and it was obvious to everybody, and myself. The topic of a "performance improvement process" came up, but I admit I'd spent so many weeks struggling to get better, to do better, that I just quit the day it was raised. It seemed obvious that for some random reason I just couldn't do the damn job, and it was better to admit defeat gracefully than stretch it out over additional weeks and months. I've done a lot of reflection, but even now I don't know what was going wrong, or why I was so bad. All my other employers have been happy with me, and I've always felt proud of my work. I guess culture/skills fits are real, in a way I'd not appreciated until then. Happily the very next job I accepted things worked out wonderfully from day one ..

by hsn915 5y ago

stevekemp 5y ago

> Don't conflate being a good programmer/engineer with being a good employee. Very true. I've been working in IT since 1994, initially as a programmer, later as a sysadmin, and nowadays as a cloud-guy. In all my jobs I've done good. Except one. I just didn't fit in. Tasks that even I could recognize as being simple were a real struggle, and I was frankly doing a terrible job at them. I've always fit in, I've always had both people and technical skills, but in that one particular company I was doing a terrible job and it was obvious to everybody, and myself. The topic of a "performance improvement process" came up, but I admit I'd spent so many weeks struggling to get better, to do better, that I just quit the day it was raised. It seemed obvious that for some random reason I just couldn't do the damn job, and it was better to admit defeat gracefully than stretch it out over additional weeks and months. I've done a lot of reflection, but even now I don't know what was going wrong, or why I was so bad. All my other employers have been happy with me, and I've always felt proud of my work. I guess culture/skills fits are real, in a way I'd not appreciated until then. Happily the very next job I accepted things worked out wonderfully from day one ..