Job thread

[Cyrrex]

My little department is hiring in a couple new people - one on my relative level, one more junior - so I get to be a "team lead" now.  Mixed blessing.  I guess I get the benefit of largely getting to decide who does which tasks/responsibilities between the three of us, without any of the actual managerial bullshit.  Yay?

[Hawkbit]

I just finished a job at a SpaceX location, doing some data drops for their satellite build facilities. Their engineers told us they're prepping to send up 1000s of devices per year. Its pretty flipping wild, really. They are throwing six figure change orders at my small team, testing out different companies to see who they want to do more permanent work. Our stuff finished looking better than the other companies, so here's hoping.

[Rasix]

Openshift is the goddamned devil. Why would anyone want to use this technology. 

[Trippy]

You wouldn't unless you are tackling Google-scale projects. But people use it anyways cause "Cloud". And they want to use an RedHat-approved solution instead of K8s.

[Chimpy]

You wouldn't unless you are tackling Google-scale projects. But people use it anyways cause "Cloud". And they want to use an RedHat-approved solution instead of K8s.

Or, because they work at IBM? 

[Trippy]

Yeah that would do it too.

[slog]

You wouldn't unless you are tackling Google-scale projects. But people use it anyways cause "Cloud". And they want to use an RedHat-approved solution instead of K8s.

Or, because they work at IBM? 

I recently finished up a project where IBM split itself into 2 companies, IBM and Knydryl.  Usually this means that someone in management wants to split off the cutting edge work from the older mature business that will slowly fade over time.  I think this means IBM is doomed but we will see.

[slog]

The IT chapter leader that manages the coding part of my project that I am the product owner for hired a new scrum master.  On their first day, the person that showed up is not the same person that was interviewed.  This has happened two times now.  Is this some new thing where people hire someone to stand in for them?

[Trippy]

It does happen. Don't know if it's increasing or not. Maybe with more stuff being done online it's easier to be impersonated than it was in the past so people are doing it more though the in-person body switching thing is presumably still relatively rare.

https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html

[Count Nerfedalot]

I recently finished up a project where IBM split itself into 2 companies, IBM and Knydryl.  Usually this means that someone in management wants to split off the cutting edge work from the older mature business that will slowly fade over time.  I think this means IBM is doomed but we will see.

Haven't IBM done that a couple times already this century? Their printer business and PC business and something else I can't remember?

[slog]

I recently finished up a project where IBM split itself into 2 companies, IBM and Knydryl.  Usually this means that someone in management wants to split off the cutting edge work from the older mature business that will slowly fade over time.  I think this means IBM is doomed but we will see.

Haven't IBM done that a couple times already this century? Their printer business and PC business and something else I can't remember?

You might be thinking of HP.  I worked on that one too! (Ironic, the legacy printer business is doing better than the business services company, which was not expected)

[Trippy]

No he meant IBM. PCs, laptops -> Lenovo, printers -> Lexmark, hard drives -> Hitachi, etc.

[slog]

No he meant IBM. PCs, laptops -> Lenovo, printers -> Lexmark, hard drives -> Hitachi, etc.

I see.  That was before my time working on these splits. 

[Chimpy]

Just put in my notice after 8 years at my current job, got an offer for a job elsewhere with the University so I keep my health benefits and pension and will be slightly more pay for way less work/stress and 100% remote. Can only take 1 week off between this job and the new one to keep my benefits from lapsing, but even a week of being "unemployed" will be nice to decompress.

Feels weird, my longest permanent job before this had been 2 years.

[Rasix]

Got to love when it someone logs onto your system, destroys the configuration, and then yells at you for asking why your machine was just bricked.  Looks like I just scored myself a half day vacation. Fucking guys.

[Samwise]

Had a phone call with one of my old employers today and they're now putting together an offer for me to go back to work for them at double my old salary.

herewegoagain.gif

[Teleku]

So...Dropbox?

[Samwise]

Not this time, but now that I've learned this is a thing you can do maybe I'll try over there in a few years.   

[Khaldun]

So this is bad. And apparently there have been a number of other cases of this recently.

https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending-to-be-me

[Samwise]

Reading the Star Citizen thread reminded me that I never shared the crazy-ass startup gig I did over the summer (four months of contract work).

Company was started by a friend and former co-worker about six years ago, right after our former company was acquired and most people either got laid off or chose to quit.  The details of what exactly she was doing were always murky to me; I knew she had a little seed money, and some connections at big companies who were interested in the thing she wanted to build, but that was it.  Over the years she's made a few pitches to have me come and work on her project, with the caveat that she can't afford to pay me anything but equity, and I've always declined.

So more recently during my long stretch between real jobs, she finds out I'm unemployed and tells me she can actually afford to pay me cash money because she has a paying customer -- they're paying her month to month based on her headcount, so she can add me to her payroll as a contractor and I can work on her project.  She then spends a few hours trying to explain to me exactly what the project is -- the pitch is basically that companies have data in a bunch of different systems, in a bunch of different formats, and non-technical people don't know how to organize anything, and so she's building a tool that will make it possible to unify data from all these different systems and package them into neat bundles for archive or delivery to a customer or whatever.

When I ask her questions like how exactly the tool works, or how she envisions it working, or what percentage of it she's actually built vs what remains to be implemented, she gets cagey -- she's built the entire thing, but it's missing some vital pieces so it doesn't actually work yet, she knows exactly how to make it all work but she's not good at explaining it, etc.

Anyway, once I start working on the thing, it turns out that nothing that's been built so far is actually runnable, there's basically zero overlap in practical terms between the mythical thing she wants to build and what this customer is actually paying her for, and there's nothing resembling any kind of design for the mythical thing -- it's a bunch of vague problem statements without any attempt at a viable solution.  Three engineers have allegedly been working on this iteration of the project for months, and they're basically Mechanical Turk-ing the product that they claimed to be building for the customer, because they have just enough combined technical expertise to run through the workflows manually but not enough to write a product that automates any of it (and the overall goal is to somehow build a product that not only automates this customer's workflow, but basically any conceivable vaguely similar workflow).

After about a month of trying to figure out how to reuse, extend, or even run their existing code, I give up and start just writing tooling from scratch that actually does some of what the customer is paying for, but by this point they're starting to wonder why they've paid for roughly one eng-year and not gotten any of what they were promised, and a few months later they terminate the contract.  This happens on the same day that I get back from a weeklong vacation and find out that one of the "senior" engineers on the project (someone with decades of alleged experience who does not have the basic engineering skills I would expect from a summer intern) decided to try to extend my code and didn't bother to run any of the unit tests that I'd set up (what's CI?), and also the same day that I get an actual job offer from my old company, so the timing is actually perfect.

At the present time, the boss is trying to line up a contract with some race horse owners to build them a tool (by somehow extending the tooling that I built for ingesting image metadata) for extracting data from PDF invoices so they can automate paying their vet bills.  To her, this is just another use case for the magical "connect everything to everything" product, never mind that really good tools already exist for this exact thing.  Luckily, people who own horses don't know how to Google, I guess?  This is obviously a complete scam, but as far as I can tell the boss herself does not believe it to be a scam, which is probably how she's able to sell it.

Anyway, while the whole experience of working on who-the-fuck-knows-what was a bit maddening, I did get paid, and the education was invaluable -- namely that you can run a company for six years selling something that not only doesn't exist in the real world, it doesn't even exist on paper.  Star Citizen's success doesn't mystify me like it once did.

[NowhereMan]

I'm currently job hunting and I have to say having racked up some experience working in IT it's been infinitely less depressing than switching from education in a family company. Recruiters actually come back to you! I'm a non-techy Project Manager but I'm intelligent enough to pick up the basics of systems (more importantly what risks and timelines they typically have) and, I hope, humble enough to know I don't have the technical knowledge. I've gotten really bored with basically uninteresting projects on large accounts (great, organise delivery of 15,000 new monitors to various sites and manage the 3 different vendors and subcontractors we're using) and so looking for something that is actually going to give me professional growth beyond just higher value projects. Another big element is my in-laws all live in Argentina and my wife really, really wants us to spend time with them every year. My current job won't let me work outside the country so I effectively get the choice of burning most of the leave or pissing off my wife and none of those are going to be good options more than 1 or 2 years.

I've just had an offer from one company (this is about 3 months into serious job hunting and interviewing) that would be a 40% pay rise. Downside is it would be more interesting work than I'm doing currently (cloud migrations) but likely is going to be doing that pretty constantly and this company also has a strict no working from abroad policy. I'm now torn on taking this job with an eye to exiting as soon as something more suitable comes along or just holding out. It's basically a better position for me to be in but if something comes up in the next few months it feels like a lot of disruption to switch jobs twice in 3-6 months. I also feel a bit crummy taking a position at a new place with an exit plan already there...

[Velorath]

snip

If only you had kept us updated in Discord as this was happening.

[Miguel]

never mind that really good tools already exist for this exact thing

I've come to understand that the incentives in tech are completely aligned to always creating solutions from scratch, regardless of what is already out there that might accomplish the same task cleanly and with less effort.  No engineer ever got promoted by maintaining a system, or (God forbid) making that system better/more maintainable by removing or refactoring code.

I saw this first hand when a (fairly) new programmer got forced to another team when he starting submitting changes that removed large portions of an existing project.  He had spent a lot of time profiling the code running of a particular project in the data centers and realized that large portions were meant to cover edge cases that hadn't existing in production environments for at least 5 years.  He managed to trim nearly 30% of the code base in test environments which had reduced build time and test fixture time significantly. 

So of course he was punished, because this project was the brain-child of a now-Director who ultimately rejected the changes, because the new hire "didn't understand the stack".  The lesson: he should have created a new project, duplicated all the effort, and run the new stack alongside the old stack, to show he had 'solved a novel problem' which didn't 'conflict with existing systems'. 

[Samwise]

It varies a lot by company/team.  When I was at Dropbox a lot of the engineering leaders were huge proponents of killing old code; there was an internal bragging-rights achievement system where one of them was "Dead Code Society" (unlocked by deleting something like 2000 lines of code).  Most of the projects I worked on in my 4 years there were about refactoring and/or burninating old code so it didn't have to be dragged along for the ride as we modernized some large system. 

That said, although doing that kind of work was far from discouraged, I never got a promotion for it, so your statement technically holds up in my experience.   

Other places I've worked have generally been much more reluctant to touch code that's old and moldy, but usually it's less "this is my baby, you can't touch it" and more "it's working fine already, we should focus on building something new that we can sell."

My theory is that the "not invented here" thing is generational to a large extent.  20-30 years ago it made more sense because so many things you might need were easy enough to build, and the off-the-shelf solutions so primitive, that it was easier to build it from scratch than to customize something off the shelf.  You can't get away with that now, though -- if you want to write your own database or networking stack from scratch, you're betting that you can do better than the existing solutions that are the product of hundreds of engineer-years, and you're probably going to lose that bet.  There are a lot of older engineers (I'd include myself in that age bracket) who haven't had to confront that reality yet, but anyone who graduated school in the last decade knows that there are just too many wheels for it to be even possible, never mind desirable, to reinvent them all.

[Cyrrex]

Work situation is turning to complete shit.  They want to make me a manager.  Great.

[Samwise]

Work situation is turning to complete shit.  They want to make me a manager.  Great.

After I got made a manager at a previous job I lasted six months before I burned out completely, and it was almost a year after that and a few months of therapy before I felt ready to have a real job again.

You'll do great!

[NowhereMan]

Started a new job about 6 weeks ago. Having spent 3 years working for a massive IT consultancy, I learned that they did some interesting and challenging projects that were quite good as a way to learn about the technology (those were of course cloud transformation work since that's what everyone's doing) and then spent a year on an understaffed account providing IT support for a police force. Basically my job was managing about 30 different projects replacing monitors in various police stations, supplying new desktops into offices and arranging disposals for the subcontractor because they'd overhauled their entire service agreement sets and so now everything being requested had to be quoted and managed as an individual project rather than just a simple pro-rata charge. It was a year of what basically felt like busy work with absolutely nothing interesting and it took a while to realise it had just burned me out completely.

New job is working for a mid-stage start up, really moving towards scale up at this stage doing contract management for investment and commercial banks. The people are far nicer to work with and the work itself is way more interesting, at least in part because I've not worked in financial services before so I'm having to do a lot of learning. Doesn't hurt that it's paying 40% more than the previous job either.

[Cyrrex]

Work situation is turning to complete shit.  They want to make me a manager.  Great.

After I got made a manager at a previous job I lasted six months before I burned out completely, and it was almost a year after that and a few months of therapy before I felt ready to have a real job again.

You'll do great!

Exactly.  I have been a manager before (elsewhere), but I generally prefer being a highly overpaid professional who largely does whatever he wants on any given day.  Goodbye to that shit, hello to unwanted stress and unnecessary powerpoint slides.  On the upside, now I can probably go buy some of those douchey white sneakers that all manager types seem to love so much.

[Rasix]

Hmmm, looks like there's going to be another culling here. I've been told we're getting canned and the jobs are going to India. I truly missed that old chestnut. A simpler time, where we thought that one person at a keyboard is as good as any other person at a keyboard (direct quote from upper management). I've also been told that is one is going to be harsh because our upper management is just rolling over and taking this one on the chin.

Time to start skill farming, and brushing up the CV.

Fuck, I'm too old for this shit.

[01101010]

I am generally dissatisfied with my job, but no real danger of being laid-off/fired is on the horizon, so I am not fully motivated to start looking for another job. But every day I say to myself this job is not what it was made out to be and I am not liking the prospect of having to do this same shit for the next decade or two, and every day it takes a more serious tone. Could be worse, but man the mid-life crisis is hitting on a different level here.

[Reg]

I've just turned 65 with enough money to live out the rest of my life comfortably with plenty of money and wonderful Canadian healthcare. So neener, neener, neener to you workers. :)

[Samwise]

Grats, you commie scum.   

[Rasix]

Yep. Laid off. 1 month before 20 years and with $60,000 worth of unvested stock options. Fuuuck.

edit: Just got an email for a laptop refresh. Fucking hilarious.

[Sky]

That fucking blows. Sorry dude.

[Hawkbit]

Yep, sorry that happened. We keep emergency Mai Tai fixings in the house after the last time we went through it. Good luck.