5 ms·

Things can change very suddenly - new person joins who makes everyone miserable, company goes in a new direction, market changes or sours on company, advertisin

Things can change very suddenly - new person joins who makes everyone miserable, company goes in a new direction, market changes or sours on company, advertising snafu, etc. Great that you are happy where you are but my advice is to keep your skills fresh and push yourself to learn and experiment with things in your personal time - if you do not the opportunity to do so at work. I just finished interviewing people for an SRE position and it was just staggering the number of people who could be described as having been in the room when someone else did something but could not talk about any aspect of what was done in detail. Several people I interviewed had gotten into Java coding in the 90s but had done nothing to grow their skillset since. One person spent three years manually making S3 buckets in the AWS GUI - no effort to learn the cli, cloudformation, or terraform - just came in every day and waited for Jira tickets telling him to make buckets. You don’t want to be any of those people when the time comes.

bradwood 4y ago
I second this. A good SRE is like rocking horse shit - extremely hard to find. I've had blaggers who can't do basic things on a Linux shell and live their lives in VS Code typing in yaml.
watwut 4y ago
> Things can change very suddenly - new person joins who makes everyone miserable, company goes in a new direction, Being in company where is a lot of long term employees and me being halfway there. One property it has is that if miserable person joins, there are often ways to change the team or otherwise work around that person. You can say "no" to positions and tasks too fairly often. It is not always possible for everybody, of course. But the stable people are the ones whose "I dont want to work under that manager anymore" was respected and not punished. Basically, you have a sense of controlling what happens to you at least partially. The changing direction is then also less of problem in general.
sgt 4y ago
Or someone in management reading a new book on a different type of management style, then deciding to implement it.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  Six-sigma! Can be applied to any situation or purpose as long as the consultants are paid.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
> One person spent three years manually making S3 buckets in the AWS GUI - no effort to learn the cli, cloudformation, or terraform - just came in every day and waited for Jira tickets telling him to make buckets. You don’t want to be any of those people when the time comes. This is depressingly common. I've worked with a few developers like this in the past. It's like that phrase "repeating their first year over and over for the last ten years" meaning they haven't expanded their skills ands knowledge since then. They often don't even start being curious about anything, it's full blinker mode. Reminds me a lot of this recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787857 Some of the ones I've worked with have managed to be promoted to senior or even lead type positions not from knowledge or abilities, but just by repeating their first year over and over at a small business that doesn't have any other developers to help them level up. Management is usually non-technical at these small organisations so they don't even see the problem, even if a solution took 100x times longer than it would have in any other situation. Those developers wouldn't be considered even mid-level at literally any other job. Scary some of the code and systems they've come up with in my experience.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Also known as “this person has one year of experience, ten times”.
gureddio 4y ago
I fully agree with this. I've worked at the same company for the last 7 years. It's essentially because I have a great boss, and we have a great working relationship. If that boss were to be replaced, it would change the job massively

bradwood 4y ago

I second this. A good SRE is like rocking horse shit - extremely hard to find. I've had blaggers who can't do basic things on a Linux shell and live their lives in VS Code typing in yaml.

watwut 4y ago

> Things can change very suddenly - new person joins who makes everyone miserable, company goes in a new direction, Being in company where is a lot of long term employees and me being halfway there. One property it has is that if miserable person joins, there are often ways to change the team or otherwise work around that person. You can say "no" to positions and tasks too fairly often. It is not always possible for everybody, of course. But the stable people are the ones whose "I dont want to work under that manager anymore" was respected and not punished. Basically, you have a sense of controlling what happens to you at least partially. The changing direction is then also less of problem in general.

sgt 4y ago

Or someone in management reading a new book on a different type of management style, then deciding to implement it.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Six-sigma! Can be applied to any situation or purpose as long as the consultants are paid.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

> One person spent three years manually making S3 buckets in the AWS GUI - no effort to learn the cli, cloudformation, or terraform - just came in every day and waited for Jira tickets telling him to make buckets. You don’t want to be any of those people when the time comes. This is depressingly common. I've worked with a few developers like this in the past. It's like that phrase "repeating their first year over and over for the last ten years" meaning they haven't expanded their skills ands knowledge since then. They often don't even start being curious about anything, it's full blinker mode. Reminds me a lot of this recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787857 Some of the ones I've worked with have managed to be promoted to senior or even lead type positions not from knowledge or abilities, but just by repeating their first year over and over at a small business that doesn't have any other developers to help them level up. Management is usually non-technical at these small organisations so they don't even see the problem, even if a solution took 100x times longer than it would have in any other situation. Those developers wouldn't be considered even mid-level at literally any other job. Scary some of the code and systems they've come up with in my experience.

sokoloff 4y ago
Also known as “this person has one year of experience, ten times”.

gureddio 4y ago

I fully agree with this. I've worked at the same company for the last 7 years. It's essentially because I have a great boss, and we have a great working relationship. If that boss were to be replaced, it would change the job massively