We both have the same title if it matters.

I think I'm actually going to do nothing.

Not even author the PR because I don't want him targeting me or anything if he feels slighted by it.

I don't need any keeping it real to go wrong.

Lol so this was just a complete fabrication then if your offer came with a different title?

Your petulant attitude toward candybar is getting ridiculous. He's just trying to get you to question your perspective. And frankly he's not even being a dick about it.

But I'll be more blunt. You're completely delusional. Insisting you're an engineer when you have another title and are given only PM tasks. Claiming to have a solid understanding of the code base after like a week. Oops "from a user perspective". So you understand what your company's software does now. Lol. I say this to illustrate that you clearly don't understand the situation you're in.

The job market is good. If you want to be a PM or a dev you have tons of options. Your company is not setting you up for success in either role. Afaict your only selection criteria in taking this job was that they were willing to hire you. You should seriously consider looking for another gig ASAP.

that comment was actually directed at jmakin.

Probably a good call. Some devs take it VERY personally if you make a PR against theirs.

LL, is it standard to ask for second opinions in PR reviews?

It’s pretty common for us if a reviewer and a committer disagree on something to just ping someone else knowledgeable and ask for their opinion. If that fails you get in a room somewhere for 10-15 minutes and figure it out. If that fails someone appropriate (senior technical person, team lead, ...) just makes the call.

I’m pretty anti just making the change yourself. If everybody just writes the code the way they think it should be done there’ll be a huge mess and a giant waste of everyone’s time.

Blackize, for the record I think Jmakin is coming from a pretty reasonable place wrt candybar.

Not every comment (especially in a LC thread) is an invitation to someone with no context psychoanalyzing you. Maybe he’s just trying to help (although I’m sceptical) but either way it’s a pretty normal social skill to realize when that’s not wanted and let the matter drop.

Unfortunately there is no more senior person to check on stuff with. I think I've just outgrown this place. Typically when that happens to me I start to feel frustrated that I'm significantly more ambitious than the people around me and it's just time to move on to bigger and better.

It doesn't need to be a senior person. Just another person is usually enough - someone to say "I agree that consideration X is more important than consideration Y" since most disagreements are just a disagreement about assumptions/relative importance of trade offs.

And on that note I think one of the most valuable skills for doing reviews is figuring out what the trade offs are when you suggest a change to someone else's work. I'll often just ask in a review "Why did you do this?"* and that's kind of a good way for someone to give their rationale before I try to give my rationale for a change I might want to make. I'll also often say something like: "I probably would have done X because of reasons Y, but I'll leave it to you to decide if you want to to leave it as you have it or change".

All that being said, you could be totally right about moving on and finding better co-workers.


* There's a certain amount of personal relationship that needs to be in place for this to work and people to know that its an honest question and not a challenge.

I do feel something has gone weird with this latest Jmakin stuff, like probably the actual job title was mentioned in one of the other threads in OOT / blogs or something and people just reading here weren't aware - "Technical Project Manager" was a surprise to me (and I read every post in this thread, but perhaps I missed it). I certainly did not feel "This is been discussed Ad frickin nauseum".

But oh well, doesn't matter really. Please try and be cool with each other though!

K

I __dave__ is correct and I think a lot of it was maybe in my OOT thread, so my bad there. I feel it has been discussed quite a bit now here though and feel that you guys would be tired of it by now - apparently not. I certainly am, it seems quite a boring and irrelevant discussion to me.

but like, what part of this do you think I'm fabricating? My job title or my responsibilities?

In the informal meeting where i was offered the job he described the role and said software engineer. He told me I had the job and that's when I made that post. Yea, it was premature probably and a little silly.


Clearly I did not know what I was getting myself into - a lot of you are industry veterans for like 10+ years. I am a 29 year old recent (about to) grad whose only experience is working as a boat captain for ~a decade. Of course I am out of my element and don't know what I'm talking about/was getting into.

I feel though that candybar et al is well aware of my naievete and inexperience and using a "helpful" pretense to needle me - it's really thick in those posts. I won't engage it any more, that's my bad too.

Here's a rough outline of what happened so there's no confusion anymore:

I apply to this place in february while looking at one other job that seemed ready to hire me.

The other job seemed like a total dumpster grease fire and people here were quick to note it.

I do not follow up with the other job, but am getting increasingly sick of the toxic environment at my captain gig - I won't rehash it all here but I worked with a very difficult autistic coworker as well as a guy who regularly wore nazi paraphernalia to work, and when he thought I was going around telling people he was a nazi (I didn't) *I* was the one that got in trouble for it. I had a strained relationship with my boss and my wage was far below what I should have been making. To make matters worse, I had a serious relationship with a coworker for a few years that ended when she cheated on me with another coworker, who I still had to see every day for multiple years afterward.

I'm apathetic about CS and programming in general. My GPA is extremely high and I knew I'd end up somewhere but didn't particularly care where or how or what as long as it was local.

So, after several weeks I interview with my current company. I did not feel it went well. I have a lot of reasons to believe it didn't, even now. I don't hear from them for 4 weeks.

They contact me and want me to come in ASAP to discuss the job. I go in, he says my feedback from the interview were that my communication skills were strong but my technical skill was a little shallow. So, he said he had an idea for a position that was "in function, a software engineer" but would also require keeping track of projects, deadlines, and deliverables to potential clients (not his exact words but something very much to that effect). He said more than once that I'd definitely be programming.

This sounded like a step up to what I actually want to do, which is to manage. I don't like programming that much, as I've mentioned numerous times here. So, this sounded really good, it took them a week or so to get my formal offer sent to me, something about the CEO being out of town or something.

That is when I get the actual title. I was a little disappointed with it, to be honest, but figured I'd find out when I got there.

So, I show up thinking they had some kind of system already in place and I'd just need to take it over. I realize pretty quickly (like first week) that no, there is no system at all.

People work on issues as they please or don't please. So, my job now I guess is to try to implement some kind of structure or process that everyone can get on board with. I still haven't really been told (5 weeks in now) what is expected of me or what he wants me to do, I suspect he doesn't know - so I'm just winging it. Admittedly I don't know what I am doing but I am trying.


Some of your guys' advice is really contradictory just fwiw. I freely and readily admit I have no idea what I'm doing, you guys implore me to say **** it and dive into the code anyway.

Oh, but now, I'm being delusional by thinking i understand the code from the user's perspective. Ok. I'm really done talking about my job title. I'm trying as hard as I can and it's a new environment and very stressful for me so I get feedback here and it's been 95% very helpful and I appreciate it, but this discussion is beyond stupid.

I'm getting a sizeable amount of money in next year in January so if this is an actual grease fire I just need to run out the clock for a few months til I figure out what I actually want to do - I know I got myself into what is probably a bad situation, but even with all my insecurity and self esteem issues, I am feeling confident I can salvage at least somewhat of a meaningful and educational experience here, and that's all I'm really hoping for.

I have reasons to believe it's actually *NOT* that bad - all of the devs have been there for 2+ years. They have almost 0 turnover, which I am aware can be a bad sign, but still - everyone seems quite happy where they are. My coworkers are pleasant with one very small exception. My ability to withstand intolerable conditions is probably on the very high end of the scale, so if something is bad, I'm probably not likely to notice it. I think the range of potential outcomes for this gig are pretty good. And the pay is above average for the area, they are well funded and have a legit product (Larry looked them up as did El D, but please don't post their name in here or what they do).

Fin

it has been discussed ad effin nauseaum. its just that there has been a bunch of speculation and informal descriptions.

I don't think this is clear at all. Startups are often disorganized. It's not a good thing, but no company is perfect and there are lots of other things that are more or just as important when figuring out how good/bad of a situation you're in.

I don't get the gaslighting going on here. Cut jmakin some slack guys.

Yeah I think jmakin is doing fine. As far as contradictory advice, you did ask a bunch of computer programmers for advice :P

On the internet, no less. On a poker website, of all places

Thanks, even though he rankles me a tad and i dont think is a big fan of me, kerowo’s been pretty spot on about what’s transpired so far

Yes, and you probably wouldn't have come across like such a forum rep-whore if you had said that, even though you still would've been wrong.

You used your own experience to support your claim even though it's barely relevant. You could have said that you're speaking from knowledge of how others operate but we all know other people so who really cares. More importantly though it's harder to talk down on people using second hand knowledge so we all understand why you phrased it the way you did.

Yes, the conclusion of your argument is also wrong and frankly a bit weird but lots of posters already pointed that out. I myself work in an office where below business casual is standard but occasionally people show up in full business casual. It makes me uncomfortable and if it was a supervisor dressing that way regularly we would all adjust our standards to match. Of course that's only a data point of one so that's another reason why I don't really care to engage in the validity of your conclusion. I have enough sense to not speak authoritatively on issues I have limited experience with.

A friend of mine failed his PhD in computer science. This understandably annoyed him - his algorithm worked, but was exponential time. So he founded a company to prove his ideas work. His company wore casual clothes before it was common in tech - this was the mid 1980s.

The venture capitalists turned up at his work unnanounced one day. The feedback was they didn't understand anything technical, but we're very impressed that everyone was in casual clothes. They invested, and the company soared in the dot-com boom.

So casual clothes can be important.

And that man was Bill Gates

(obv not but felt like where that post was going )

My take away there is how ****ed up the dot com boom was.

These guys dress casually? TAKE MY MONEY!!!!

my latest strat for ancient issues while I've been slowly trying to prune this backlog is to examine an issue and determine it's not actually an issue and/or worth spending time on.

worked great, found 2 already today

How do you fail a PhD?