How dare you!



Nah, the reason they kept me around is mostly because there was a ton of pressure on my current team to deliver the final critical component for a big release due this fall. And a couple of team members had to be away a lot because of vacations/paternity leave. So they didn't want to lose a single hand on deck.

If there’s ever a time to fake your death, it’s now.

There's some hilarious subtext running through this conversation that proves Euros are fundamentally better people than we are

But also the fact that Euros still like to write up stupid contracts that tries and enslave people.

I guess your view of the contract depends on your perspective (the guaranteed downside for workers being fired is awesome), but moreso just the "you signed a contract? So what, what are they gonna do? **** them!" aspect is funny to me and probably uniquely American.

i would pay to be able to have my "take home assignment" failures get a comprehensive review, since employers are too busy to provide any feedback. this seems like one of the most helpful things you can do career wise. the only place i have seen like this online is

https://codereview.stackexchange.com/

which is a graveyard.

I feel like the code I write at work, and those reviews, just aren't that relevant or comparable to kicking ass at these take home assignments.

Post them here imo

Tell them to **** off with their "take home assignment" unless they are paying you a fair wage for the time.

I had one place try to pull that crap out of several I interviewed with recently and I told them thanks but not interested and was sure to let them know why.

In most US jurisdictions employment contracts are not enforceable, and even when they are, it is very rare to go to court over it. This cuts both ways - the employee has very little protection, but also very little obligation.

Like, your employer can make you sign a contract that says you can't work in the industry for a year after you quit, but they will have a very hard time succeeding in court if you do. When it happens, it's when an extremely crucial (and highly paid) person gets poached and uses insider data from his old job.

An example was when I worked at UnderArmour, they got sued because they hired the guy in charge of product design for a particular product, and the shortly thereafter released an almost identical product.

I've never worked anywhere that even asked me to sign a contract stating that I'd give a specific notice length. If you're being nice, 2 weeks is the notice people usually give. But I could walk out tomorrow, nbd.

California has super employee-friendly laws about mobility and about keeping your own intellectual property. It's a big reason why there's so much innovation here imo. Much more cross-pollination and harder for companies to keep IP bottled up.

"Ok, I need you to clear your mind and forget everything you have learned"

jfc, is it me or is that statement like one of the most passively aggressively insulting things imaginable?

ok, maybe with some context. we have fully bought into scrum and the whole collaboration is the key thing. thats cool. we have also bought into the whole thinly sliced and small bits of deliverable code. thats cool. but, like is there a possibility for too much colloboration? too thin of slices?

like, we get a response from an API and then alter some html depending on it. it doesnt get much simpler than that. the API call and response already exist. the form of that response will only slightly change by adding a new field. and an existing field currently is hardcoded to provide the same value at all times, well that value will now be 1 of 7 different strings/codes. currently we show an html image and some wording. the task is to change this image and the wording dependent on that field.

so like, can I just code a switch statement and pump out the different scenarios? oh gawd no. that is too much work. we need to do a single scenario at a time (this already exists mind you as I indicated before). and we need to checkin a nonfunction html shell which doesnt include anything but doesnt break anything.

we absolutely cant consider the overall design as in do we want multiple functions for the 4 things that flex dependent on the field/code? or create some display parameters that flex and are accessed by the html? or create a service that dynamically prepares the html? or hell just copy 6 different html containers and use an ngIf to decide which one to show depending on the code.

nope, such design considerations are "too complicated".

oh ya, also, even adding the new field to the existing interfaces is "too complicated"

I dont think I have ever been more flabbergasted and frustrated in my life.

That was my experience at one place too, all these tiny tasks and we'd spend hours deciding how many story points they got by doing project planning poker. I was remote so I'd usually just work through the meetings. Nothing like watching $1-$2k of productivity go down the drain and not even have any fun doing it

Long time ago when I was in web dev at a medium sized company, the company was split in two organizationally. On my side I would have just done something for that by myself and be done in an hour or w/e, the other side would have done it like that with a big team and meetings and it could take a month.

same at my company.

My boss called me one Thursday and asked if I could meet at 1pm. So I jump on the call and it's one of our project managers, who needed a simple 4 page website built. He had an excel spreadsheet built as an example of what he wanted, along with the sql to get the data out of the database.

I told him we'd have it in a couple of days and he thought I was joking. Apparently another group had been working on it for 9 months, and for 8 months or so had been telling him they are a couple of days away. He finally demanded to see the code on that Thursday and they had to fess up and admit they had nothing. I said the only thing that will slow this down is IT getting us the database access.

The following Tuesday we were all done, just waiting on the database connection. Just as we are finishing it up I get an email from our project manager with a detailed schedule of events over the next 8 weeks including multiple hour long meetings each week. I email her back and tell her we're done, cancel all the meetings. We demo to the guy that morning and he is dumbfounded and amazed. Of course it took 2 more weeks for IT to give us access to his database.

The following Friday we have a team meeting and the project manager says "We need to stop promising we can do projects in a week". I interrupt her and say no, a simple web site should be out in a week. We should strive to turn things around in a week, lets all be better and get rid of this government employee attitude of planning 8 weeks of meetings for a 4 page web site. She was not amused. My boss got on chat while I was talking cheering me on. He's been fighting the lets have a meeting for every ****ing little thing here for a while and is glad I'm fighting it too.

ya I just coded it. not sure if I want to present it to the team as it wasnt even assigned to me. (well only a small piece was assigned to me)

At my last job we started having planning meetings which were literally meetings about meetings, and people kept inviting me to these meetings for 4 different upcoming projects. I stopped going to any of them.

New guy gets hired who is basically a poser and cant code and fills his entire schedule with these meetings.

Thus why I no longer work there.

lol so she is copying and pasting the template 7 times. (actually only twice bc that would be "too complicated")

I created a service that flexes the elements depending on the code and fills up a single template.

Where I work now has the ever-annoying "If you want to work from home you better pretend you or your kid is sick" policy.

So of course if someone calls in sick to wfh the office drones all passively-aggressively call them on it: "Oh you're feeling better? So soon! That's great!"

I'm giving it 3 months before I even try to wfh. That's the standard secret probation period. Actually I may have to wait until my contract period is up - 6 months - or I just lose a day's pay. Wahhhhh.

My goal is to build something really awesome, then leverage that clout to get a wfh day for all of us. Dream big. This project has already failed once, which is good - they know it's hard and we can be heroes.

The combination of "small deliverables" for AGILE! purposes and microservices has basically made it impossible to dig into any fun feature or task and it just feels like tiny maintenance actions all day every day.

Gimme adding a big feature to the Ole monolith any day

I kinda know what you mean but I also think that services mean that you can make a new feature from scratch without stepping on any toes. If you have good tooling it's super fast to get started. I can get a new service spun up, with supporting infrastructure, in about 20-30 minutes (we're talking hello-world in prod, but talking to databases and sqs queues or whatever you want)

Getting rid of a skunkworks project is just as easy - just delete the repo and run your cleanup script.

My current project has been huge - it was an idea my former boss had, that I ran with under the radar, starting as a single service (now maybe 3-4 related services) that looks like it might become a very prominent part of our offering - it's only been about 6 weeks since the launch and 1/3 of our customers are using it, and more than 50% of new customers use it. Tomorrow we're doing a soft launch of the mac version (first launch was windows/linux only)

Because it's so isolated I can move really fast - I can deploy whenever I want, I can break stuff if needed. Even though it's launched all I have to do now is maintain the external contract and I can change whatever I like under the covers.

Our setup for a new project is "fairly" automated but how do you handle permissions in AWS?

We use terraform to create roles and ecr repos and what not, which takes time to get through, we use some KMS setups to encrypt values, we use protobuf schemas. All these things are "easy" but tedious and take time. And those are a lot of the grunt work I am kind of talking about.

We had our first meeting with our AWS rep and tech guy today. He said most people pack a bunch of lambdas into one repo - then have some kind of [magic 8-ball unclear at the moment] step where the CI/CD knows to just deploy one lambda or whatever changed.

Does anyone else do it this way?

I guess the same thing for the infrastructure/cloudformation repo - but it only re-builds what you want.

We use serverless. I think it still redeploys everything, but that may have changed in the last year. Each handler is deployed as its own lambda in the console

Yeah he said serverless was great. I didn't know it handled stuff like that too. That's great. We'll probably use it.