I think these are just generally silly and often downright bad. Lots of successful companies don't do these things (and generally do something significantly better). There's maybe a grain of truth in a few of them, but as a yes/no question they're meaningless for judging how good a company is to work for. And sure, there are specific cases where you'd want these things.


These ones (taking the spirit and adjusting for new technology/practices) I guess still seem relevant to me.

And of course the list just completely ignores a whole bunch of more important factors.

Edit: If someone were to make a list of the most important 12 things for evaluating how "good" a company is, it would look nothing like this list - unless you were selling bug tracking software.

I think they’d probably score an ~8 from the little ive seen

I think we're a 3 with a strict interpretation of the questions. Probably 7 if I answer to the spirit of the question with adjustments for best practices / technology (for example we don't do a lot of "hallways usability" but we do a bunch of dogfooding + feature flags, with frequent deploys that accomplish much more without a whole lot of extra work).

Yeah "daily deploys" made me LOL a little. I've probably deployed to prod 9 times today at least (every push gets tested, built, pushed to CI, tested in CI, and then automatically deployed to prod)

One great thing is I ****ing love the laptop they gave me, I don’t know how I waited so many years without using a Mac. Probably because I do so much gaming

Lot's of steam stuff for the Mac these days...

you guys are way overreacting to this. his manager brainstormed for 10 minute about what he should have the new guy do and just picked something that was lingering on his mental TODO list for the last year.

Hah, I searched for previous posts ITT I made about Joel and I basically said the same thing in 2015. In 2012 I was much nicer towards Joel and his list.

yeah, i thought people in the industry generally agreed that it was at least outdated and even quite misguided.

i agree with your updated split of that list. i think half of them should be considered anti-factors.

Ha, that's awesome.

wtf is a bug database? a ledger of bugs that have been fixed? i guess that is basically a JIRA board in 2018?

Yeah I just assumed he meant some kind of issue tracking software.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz

This was his main product at the time. But yeah basically an issue tracker. A place where bugs are reported, tracked, prioritized, etc.

Having someone whose sole job is handling kanban/scrum boards seems really weird unless they also review code. How many team members are they managing?

Random rant: I have this coworker who's unable to articulate an opinion or argument without being a righteous douche. As an example, here he is in a public and widely used Slack channel, learning about how Go imports work (they're URL-based and the go tool downloads them to your hard drive, kinda like npm except you point to github URLs or whatever instead of a package name that a web package manager knows about):

Anyway, submitted a large PR today and asked him to take a look at part of it

Pretty reasonable request, but there's a reason I did it this way so I set out to explain all sides of it

...aaaaaand any challenge to his opinion is NOT WELCOME

Regarding the last comment, worth noting that the number of "other developers" I am "forcing" this behavior on is zero, because I am the only person writing code in Go on this project.

Another coworker gchatted me after that like "yeah man stop adding bogus dependencies to our targets" (obv being sarcastic). The guy's smart but basically immovable on any opinion he holds and incapable of giving ground or conceding merit to people who disagree with him, really a pain in the ass to work with

Yea Goofy, stop adding your bogus dependencies to our ****.

Scrum Managers, according to cannon, handle up to two teams of up to 8 developers. But they aren't doing people management, they run the scrum meetings and generate agile artifacts. Closer to a project manager than developer manager.

Just found out today that my promo from two months ago came with extra RSUs that vest over 4 years. It’s not much but it’s an extra 28k over 4 years.

Does RSU = stock grant (shares, not options)? Is your company public?

Related, saw this tweet recently:



I assume the Lyft RSUs are way higher than the rest because they're probably the farthest of all these companies from being public (well, idk anything about Palantir), thus making those RSUs the most risky as far as "will this ever become money in my bank account"?

For public companies RSUs = money in the bank right?

Correct.

Those salary numbers look about right from what I've heard. The RSUs seem high. Like theoretically possible but I'd heard numbers in that range as an over 4 years type thing

Those are definitely higher than basic mid-level offers but nothing outrageous in the valley, especially given that getting that many offers probably means he's both a very good candidate and had leverage. He may also have been potentially giving up something of value at his old company and getting compensated for it - maybe his RSU grant has appreciated significantly, maybe he has valuable options that he has to either exercise or lose. Also this whole number of years experience thing is a red herring - some people with 2 years of experience are mid-level, others with 25 years of experience may only be entry-level at these companies. You don't automatically get paid more for having accrued more experience. Kids straight out of school can be way better than even solid contributors with 15 years of experience.

Id be interested to find a company without one of these. My experience has been to just let them do their thing and move on, if they want to be a douche, so be it. Provides fun slack conversations with friends anyways. YMMV

They exist. Especially in small and medium sized companies because these people can’t hide from the people that have a lot of influence to deal with them.

I hate dealing with these personalities so it’s a big factor in how happy I am. I decided to leave my first job for two main reasons:

1. The people smarter than me were leaving.
2. I was having to interact more with people like goofy was describing.

I’ve also had someone removed from my team because of this. He did ok work himself but would kill productivity in meetings and code reviews arguing about the most meaningless ****. And he would never end an argument unless he ‘won’.

Edit: The internet is not a work environment. And vice versa.

I’m always skeptical of how people value options/RSUs. Especially for non public companies where they’re usually valued off of some optimistic multiple of the most recent fundraising round.

Palantir is also a weird case because I don’t know what their actual plan is and many employees have gotten liquidity privately - which is generally not going to get a great price.

Our company does not have one of these. I can't remember if my last company did - if they did I didn't deal with them but I worked on a small team. The job before that *definitely* had these, more than one (high frequency trading company, lot of hot shots with lots of experience and firm Opinions). Job before that had one, who was so bad that he "won" a lot of arguments just because people would rather just cede ground than talk to him.

I suspect that's the reason a lot of these guys are like this, because they get their way a lot.

(I've only worked for small companies except when a small one accidentally becomes a big one, like my last job where UnderArmour bought the company I worked for)