Programming as a career

do any ilxors have web scripting type expertise? my company is looking for someone for a quick freelance turnaround job. i feel silly advertising it on ilx but i'd prefer to give the work to someone i [somewhat] know if possible

I'm looking for a new software engineering job and I thought with 7 years (5 for real) on my rez, that I'd have gotten something a lot sooner than I have. I've been looking since late March, have had something like 8 on-site interviews, and 7 have already passed on me (the 8th said they'd get back to me by yesterday, so either their discussions are lengthening out or they're contacting the other candidate before they get to me).

I just need to vent/commiserate a little. I don't know if 8 on-sites is a lot, but doing that many (plus the coding challenges to get to that point) has exhausted me, and that I've yet to get an offer makes me feel undeserving as a programmer. (Thought tbf, a lot of questions have been intro algorithm stuff that I've forgotten about, since I don't actually use them at work.) I ought to take a break, but then someone gets in touch with me and I feel like I can't pass up any opportunity. I'm sure being in SF means I'm competing with loads of other people, but then, the demand should be there too.

That might be the only place where it's a problem at that scale. At that software architecture conference I was at in NYC, we were commiserating about how it's nearly impossible to find anyone to fill positions that require some experience.

xp

Did you get that CS degree in the end?

Just keep going, it'll happen. It's tough everywhere. Craft yourself a silver bullet. etc etc . Well that's what my friends are telling me, I've been applying since February and not had a single interview yet - and that's just for office admin or Excel work.

I'm am also trying to get my foot in the door on programming now but with no degrees or previous work experience it's not going to be easy, and at my age I don't see it happening ever.

Ste, I dorm nt finish the CS degree because for the type of development I was and have been doing, the program was not offering me anything useful. (I mean, maybe I'm working for the wrong companies, but I only ever use hashes and arrays.)

A lot of places have been asking me for my Github link, even though I've only used it for coding challenges. However, you might use that as a portfolio to show to recruiters. Also, concentrate on learning front end languages, especially React, which is the hot new thing.

Apropos of nothing, but I just looked at attending a full time clown college.

I work at a university and get a tuition waiver. Considering whether to get a second BA (which will interest me but will not help my career prospects), or do CS. Just wondering if anyone here is, like me, by inclination more "right-brained" humanities inclined and how they fared learning CS.

I'm a BA in English and an MA in Humanities, and I sort of stumbled into CS. That was about 7 years ago, and I'm struggling to find a new place, but I right now am working full-time as a developer.

i just got this book: http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/

it looks fun.

A recruiter at a big SV tech firm suggested that I buy that book, in fact.

yeah it's the canonical book

Still no luck, but I've asked a bunch of people, and they say that looking foro 3 months isn't out of the ordinary.

Another obstacle I think could be that I'm search during the spring/summer, which means that I'd be competing with new grads. (Kids ruin everything.)

As someone who's been in the industry for 20 years, I think the whole interviewing/hiring thing is really messed up right now. No one knows how to interview or what experience or credentials matter or if they matter. There's lots of work, but lots of candidates.

The truth is, coding interviews are often a bit more cultural than people want to cop to.

It can easily be a long slog. Keep in there.

for sure

my group has a devops position open and it probably should be listed as a higher paid position. my manager outlined as what he put as "required" and I was kind of in disbelief, because it was incredibly idealized. but the truth is that any candidate will only have 2/3 of the things we want but should be able to explain why they're a good fit.

I jokingly asked if it'd pay better than my job and the answer was no for two reasons: it's listed at my pay grade, and even if it was listed at a higher level, HR would push for it to be a parallel move. rude.

If you're not on a pager rotation now and the new position has you on call outside of work hours (which would be common on devops), that is commonly a pay increase at large companies. It certainly is an uptick is commitment.

I think we’re not there yet – our dev ops has a small cloud component, but it’s mostly the build/deploy/monitoring part of the pipeline, and making sure some help desk tools (jira, confluence) are up and running. So it’s less availability than configuration tools

public CompanyNameJsonBuilder_Factory(
   Provider<ContextSupplier<CompanyNameJsonArgs>> jsonFieldSupplierProvider,
   Provider<ContextSupplier<CompanyNameArgs>> controllerSupplierProvider,
   Provider<Supplier<RoutingConfig>> routingConfigProvider) {
...
}

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Like someone’s worst nightmare of overdesigned Java.

if you're writing code that only you can understand then you aren't being clever, you are being a dick. programming as part of a team means writing code that the entire team can understand and maintain.

programming means writing code that anyone can understand and maintain.

fixed

One place I worked at, someone made this independent decision to learn Groovy by building one of our systems in it. It was all I heard about for years after he left.

it took me almost a year to find a job with 10+ years experience this go-round; i should write a book about all the dumb early-stage NYC startups vett3ry and their ilk kept sending me to (crypto for the publishing industry! uber for ambulances!)

i've been at this new (permanent) gig for like three weeks now and i'm finally starting to settle in a little; i've probably pigeonholed myself as a digital agency guy forever, but i really like this one. unlike other senior/lead/etc titles i've had in the past, this one isn't bullshitting me; i have actual responsibility. my current client is hell-bent on using wordpress as a headless cms to serve graphql to react, which i am...less excited about.

your client is high as a goddamn kite

PY wants to merge 4 commits into master from multi-s3

+427 lines -105 lines

zero comments on what the changes do

(same person added java 11 to the CI workflow the day after it was released)

Any tests, or is that a silly question?

Just a test of patience, it sounds like

there are unit tests but they don't explain what they are doing either.

public void itReturnsAnS3ClientByGettingAnSTSCredentialProviderUsingTheBucketToRoleArnMapping() throws Exception

(that's one of the unit tests)

That test name /sounds/ descriptive to me, but I don't know enough about the Amazon cloud to know what it means, so ... i assume ARN is a thing that makes sense in your domain :o

We added a commit-hook some years ago that rejected every commit that had less than N characters in the commit message.
It helped, though we still get people who will just do like 10 commits in a row that's just the same jira issue number over and over, with no explanation of what the various changes actually are.

I might actually BE that guy though. I made a small commit yesterday where my message was something vague like "optimized and made easier to read". Immediately got a message from someone telling me he couldn't read the code anymore. D'oh.

I should probably take this to the 77 thread, but the branch a colleague has merged in has four commits, all saying 'initial changes'

The aforementioned no comments / Java 11 guy is my new team lead. He is half my age.

we just went to 8 a few months ago. very cool but we're pretty much left to Google everything.

Literally half my age. I was programming, professionally, before he was born.

Ugh, sorry.

oof... trying to find some black humor - failing.

Turned 30 a couple months ago and I hope to be in a non-programming role by 31

Personally, I'm >40 and honestly the best stuff I've worked in has been in the last 10 years.

But there's lots of places where what's important to the craft isn't defended, and I sometimes leave quickly when that happens.

I've come to appreciate the style guides, reviews and processes of my megacorp because they prevent a good fraction of this kind of shit. Just read about something on hackernews and want to check it in? Sorry, let's slow that shit down because everyone has to buy in first. Want to make a big change? Yes you can. but you have to be able to explain and defend it.

On Thursday we discovered that a big part of the project that we've been doing for the last 8 months just wasn't implemented. It had been overlooked.

On Friday we discovered that another big part of the project that we've been doing for the last 8 months just wasn't implemented.

Neither were in code I wrote, but both were in components that I reviewed and missed. Both were things that were meant to be configurable but weren't. I've never liked the way things are specced out here, not enough detail, and in both cases the things were new requirements in tickets where the ticket titles suggested there were no new requirements, just reimplementations of existing functionality. But two balls have been dropped and I feel slightly responsible.

Yeah, badly written stories is something we try to identify quickly. Is there a scrum master that can help out? Not drinking the Agile Kool Aid, but I’ve found that good SMs, which are kind of hard to find, are helpful.

not sure we have a 'scrum master' as such. we don't really subscribe to the agile thing fully.

we've had problems with tickets before - there was one set of BDD scenarios attached to one piece that i implemented only to later be told that it belonged to something further down the workflow. (we were redoing the entire workflow, i didn't know enough about it, figured it was being moved as part of the rewrite, i lost 3 weeks doing that, argued with the writer who insisted he was right)

the new bit isn't that onerous - we currently have a bunch of things

A1
A2
A3
B1
B2
B3
C1
C2
C3

where all the As are grouped as a kind by the configuration and currently ignored, and then all the remaining 1, 2, 3s are processed appropriately. but now they want A3 to be treated specially. we could do that in code but, like the other new piece, they want it in config to make it easier for OPS to support and the current structures can't differentiate between the cases.

it needs a rules engine really. but everybody i know that has used one has had a terrible time of it. and i just can't trust something called "Drools".

My workplace just appointed me scrum master for life. Apparently all this means is you have to hold 15-minute long meetings every morning where everyone talks about what they’re going to work on during the day. All I have to do is facilitate the meeting and make sure we all stay on task. That can’t be too hard, can it?

I'm all in favour of agile methodology but the terminology for some reason makes me physically sick. Kanban, burndown charts, and worst of all scrum master (apologies Mr Snrub).

Jesus christ I am not in favour of this shit: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/nikoniko/

I'm starting to get brought into those meetings as a "specialist" and it kinda feels like I just joined a cult

i was gonna say - "ceremonies" is even worse jargon than the ones cited above. every single 'retrospective' in my team becomes someone questioning the merits and demerits of scrum v kanban or vice versa. there are some major zealots for agile and within that there is zealotry for methodologies and ways of working. equally, it's so nebulously defined that if somebody doesn't like a suggestion or a comment about how the team works, they might say 'that's not very agile' as if we are all being watched by the agile god who will smite us for offending him, even though someone else's creed would insist that 'yes, in fact defining roles and responsibilities is a good thing to do for any agile team"

i didn't work in software development before agile and i can imagine it is largely a force for good, but it is tiresome too.

i am in hardware, and we are doing this now

another classic is people hiding behind agile to avoid doing things. like i have a delivery manager currently and he's like 'the way we work in agile, it's we as a team who decide how we will organise our work' and this is sort of his excuse for not even gathering info, collating the team's views, or trying to inform discussions in the team to a point that such a collaborative approach might be even vaguely useful or feasible.

it often ends up reminding me of that simpsons with the 'i DO... what i FEEL like' guru - i've worked in other places where it 'wasn't agile' to be unhappy that a colleague took a month off at short notice in a majorly busy time, or like it's 'not agile' to express a negative opinion, etc etc etc.

xpost

xp

my experience of agile has largely been that it's a way for management to abdicate any responsibility whatsoever for running a project, because deciding on requirements or planning anything is not agile. just give a vague idea to development and tell them to get on with it, then complain when what frustrated developers come up with isn't what they imagined in their heads

my current manager doesn't bother with retrospectives "because people complain about things but nothing ever changes" which at least is "refreshingly honest"?

i think our retros are useless for that reason, but it points to a problem of culture when they never result in change.

i think a huge problem with agile is the delivery manager (or scrum master) ends up as some middle management type who thinks their job is to maintain discipline and do the odd job interviews when in fact for it to work well it's more of a servant leader role. i had a delivery manager who like cleaned the desks every morning and evening. when i first started i thought it was absurd and then over time i realised that he would do literally every possible thing to make your work and the delivery of the team's work go more smoothly, he would meet anyone on your behalf, he would help you in any way he could. like your parents when you're a kid or something, i prob didn't appreciate that enough at the time!

admittedly when I had my performance review recently I said to her "I don't know why we persist with this ridiculous charade" so I guess I'm in the same position