This can't be real life.

Where in the hell do ya'll work?

obv not gonna say the name. really big company. not a tech company.

this is the first time I have ever had a problem with someone. get along really well with everyone else and one of the things I liked about the company up until now was my colleagues and the culture.

but it really does just take one bad apple.

and its been killing me for days now. really stressing me out. like, how can I deal with someone straight up insulting me and then coming back and criticizing my attitude and how I communicate.

and she has a lot of pull at the company so theres really no way I can fight back

Is she your boss?

Funny thing is given the scope of the current project + everything we expect to come down the pike - they could probably build everything on a LAMP stack hosted on EC2 in 6 months and be done with it.

But we want to use all the bleeding edge AWS stuff. So I'm like yippee ki yay - let's do it.

Also we have too many systems of records atm - so the IDM stuff is a real problem that cognito seems to help solve.

suzzer, no she is not my boss but she has been there for like 20 yrs and gets a lot of respect.

I'm gonna make a blanket rude statement:

*If you have been at a really big company for 15-20 years and it isn't a tech company, and you work in IT/tech, you are 99% likely to be absolute dog****.

In fact, I bet if every really big company with people that fit that criteria fired all of them on Monday, it would be substantially positive for shareholder value over the next 6-24 months.

*If it is a tech company but not FAANG-tier (some of which haven't been around 15-20 years) you are 95% to be dog****.

I have a lot of experience in these kinds of companies (big, non-tech). I was set for life in two of them, but left because things got boring. Which supports your hypothesis (assuming I'm awesome of course). And yeah - a lot of the people who stick around are mediocre.

But, that's also a huge function of how dysfunctional the environment is. I've been pretty lucky I guess in that the two big companies I've worked for were also actually my two best development and interpersonal experiences. We went to war together, built something cool against the odds, and were bonded for life after that. If the environment is non-toxic, and the company pays well, good people will stick around.

So I do know some really good people who stayed because they were some combination of: married/kids/in a unique situation/not that ambitious/etc. I know one guy, one of the sharpest devs I've ever worked with, who telecommutes from south Orange county 4 days a week. It would be real hard for him to replicate that with a new job.

Another DBA/programmer I know is one of the sharpest people I've ever worked with. She's a) married, b) gets to telecommute 3-5 days a week and c) gets really nervous and I think would suck at job interviews. She has that nervous laugh thing where she laughs at everything every time you talk to her. It's weird until you get used to it.

So I know those good people do exist.

HOWEVER - none of them make would ever make snarky comments on pull requests and call someone out as "not delivering quality". They would handle things much more professionally. Even if Victor was somehow being a dick to start it (which I'm not assuming, just speculating on worst case).

So yeah this person almost certainly sucks. But my point is there are lifers who make that decision because stuff like stability or working from home is more important to them. Maybe it's more like 40% chance they suck, 40% chance they're ok, and 20% chance they're really good. Also there's more accountability than you think. Sucky people usually do eventually get pushed out. Especially if they're asshats.

Also some of these 20+ year people at big companies still have defined benefit pensions - which are absolutely sick, and worth like 10x more than our crappy 401ks.

My buddy has worked for the NYFD for 18 years. When he retires in two years he will absolutey crush me in terms of lifetime +EV.

The working from home/ comfortable/ lack of ambition one is an interesting category to consider. Then you also have people who have so little experience outside the company they dont realize if their skills are actually valuable or common.

But I do feel like they are a super minority on the whole.

I should have left my job 2-3 years sooner than I did - when node was still hot and I had industrial grade experience in it. I knew that at the time. Now I get Fandango saying my resume looks stale.

But I loved working there and the people I worked with. Also working at home full time and having nothing to do all day does kind of lure you in like a succubus.

And having an extra $8666 a month from the side job for a year was kinda nice. That's another angle to consider - I have a feeling a lot of the people on my all-remote team either had a side job, or were doing stuff like renovating their house or fixing up old cars, etc.

Not too many jobs pay really well while basically giving you tons of free time to do whatever you want. Once you've been at a big company for a while those cracks to slip through seem to appear. Especially if you've built something valuable. It's the non-tech corporate version of being on the roof.

I still question myself for voluntarily giving it all up. I'll have probably have a similar decision on my current job after we build something cool with AWS and it starts to get into maintenance/not interesting mode. But being in my 50s with sick university benefits will be a big succubus.

I guess it was a test of sorts then to see if I knew BFS (which I didn't).

larry, what a tech company nowadays? we have a ton of systems and a ton of customer facing apps. I dont want to give away the field, althought I think I have mentioned it a few times and pmed a few ppl but ultimately we deal in data, and a ton of data.

anyway, as with suzzer, there are some really sharp ppl here. part of that is that there are limited number of legit places to work in my region.

anyway, I dont know if she sucks at coding and developing as I havent really looked at her code much. she is a code reviewer which is a limited position. we have about 10 out of 80 devs on the project. she has a lot of cred. from reading her comments in code reviews she has excellent grasp on our standards for proper structure and conventions. I dont see her commenting on overall design but whatever.

anyway, this is the comment. maybe I am reading too much into but after telling me to forget everything I have ever learned I am pretty sensitive.

the analytics that she speaks of is 2 fields. the values already exist for the existing piece but we dont yet know the numbers for the piece I added so I just left them as empty string. I could have used the '?' on the interface and not put the fields on the new part but making fields '?' is a bit of no-no. I suppose the best way would have been to just rip the analytics off the existing part but I hate removing code that works.

also, its clearly meant as an "I told you so" bc she has been harping on this "small changes" and "focus on incremental pieces of work".

even trying to follow her idea of "incremental blah blah", which I was trying to do, ultimately its gray area judgment call which there will always be. where I slice may be different than her or anyone.

I dont know, that really isnt a big deal and I dont feel strongly either way. thats what pisses me off so much. its such a trivial part of coding and then bam, she just nails me on it.

In a vacuum that comment doesn't sound that bad.

It's possible you might be in oozing testosterone mode right now like my buddy. Maybe take a stroll in the zen garden today (whatever your personal zen garden is).

My advice, as someone who has been in horn-lock mode and seen it ton, is to just give her the benefit of the doubt and try to start fresh when you see her in person. It sounds like this is a no-win situation anyway, given her clout with the company. So it seems like you might as well at least try the path that could lead you out of the woods with her.

I'd just say to her - ok let's walk through this and you show me exactly how you'd like it done. Offer constructive debate in small doses, speak very tentatively. IE - "Well is it possible, we could do it this way?", "Normally I might try this approach, is that a bad idea?" etc. Try to explain your thinking while still deferring to her status. Etc.

I know all this is easier said than done if you've already locked horns. I'm just assuming you're still in the salvageable zone. If not, you might as well just fart in her face and run away because you're already cooked with that company.

That's the thing, I've agreed with her at every turn and changed my code to her specifications without comment or pushback.

And yet she still is coming at me wanting to meet and discuss my "communication"

Sounds like resistance to productivity which I think is more the rule than the exception. Perhaps most people just hate their jobs and would rather do less work and want everyone else to do the same.

while this is fine advice, I will absolutely try my hardest to not do this and rather to just try to implement everything she says to a T. I dont think there is any way to respond and defend myself or my work without setting her off.

my plan is to defer and keep my mouth shut. I am sure this has set me back years in terms of a promotion that I should receive next year.

the problem is how to get through this stupid meeting with her on tuesday without letting on how I really feel. I know she is going to press me to agree with, and to humble myself to her and I just dont think I can appear sincere and earnest (since I wont be).

maybe she is upset that you haven't offered 'ok, thanks!' in response to her comments on your reviews?

I do that though!!!

My $0.02.

That comment isn't very bad. It's written in a sort-of condescending way, but I'd probably agree with the general sentiment in many cases and I try very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when interpreting online comments. [Edit: In real life - on 2+2, not so much]

I'll also say that people that go ahead and quietly do stuff that other people are already working on is a huge pet peeve of mine. I find it a very passive aggressive thing to do and generally a huge waste of everyone's time. If you feel strongly about it, come talk about it before and work **** out. I've felt this way since high school when I use to work in a completely non-technical job.

I think there are a lot of developers that think "I'll just add this simple thing here and its clearly worth it" and the result is a giant pile of **** that actually is hard to maintain and reason about. Obviously there are simple things that are worth doing. But its just as obvious (imo) that we're bad at seeing the line between "simple thing worth doing" and "simple thing that is actually adding more to overall complexity than gives back in value".

All that being said, it seems obvious there's a bunch of context/history that we're missing and almost certainly both of you are being overly sensitive. And in my opinion the junior person gets the benefit of the doubt in these cases and she should suck it up. If she wants to talk to you she should do it without all the damn drama.

BFS is a tree algorithm, right? I don't get using it in the context of a grid.

I think about this sometimes. What are your takes on the question of whether its better to be the tech guy at a non-tech company or just working for a tech company?

I think if you are the only techie in your team or group in a non-tech company that is probably better because people will think what you do is magic.

I will admit I did this. kind of. we were assigned tasks. she assigned herself the task of setting up the html. I was "nominated/assigned" the task of creating the switch statement logic.

obv I need the html template to do the logic that feeds it and an overall design. day 1 I bring this up and the whole team talks about it for like an hour and no decision gets made. day 2 I go to her in the morning to work on it together. she is adamantly against committing to a design and makes the comment that I need to forget everything Ive learned.

I think fine, I can work on other stuff and when she puts her PR up, I will go from there.

no PR that day. I come in the morning and still no PR. I decide to work on my part and throw up a branch around 11 it was just a prototype and I made it known as such. it includes the task I was assigned but obv I needed to include the html to make it work.

so ya, I was frustrated that we had gone in circles for almost 3 days. I was frustrated that she refused to work with me the previous morning. and I was bored.

but I did the task that I was assigned. I just needed some html to make it work and I included it. too bad that it was her task. she had 2 full days to copy and paste the html from one branch to anther. that was literally all she had to do.

ya, in hindsight I should have just sat on my hands and waited for her to finish and go from there but jfc.

Think of each cell in the grid as having all it's neighbors as children in a tree. So you can keep BFS searching your neighbors until there are no more leaves (land is leaves, water is dead ends). While doing the first BFS search mark every land you see as visited.

So you can start in cell 0, 0 and do a search. Then try 0,1 - if 0,1 is marked, then you can skip it. Keep going until you've marked the whole grid.

That's my first thought. It's O(n^2) though so I bet there's something better.

Completely agree.

I think it entirely depends on your ambition and goals.

If you are trying to get by doing the minimum then non-tech company is definitely the way to go. If you are trying to learn as much as possible then surround yourself by people smarter than you in the things you want to learn.

doesn't DFS do the job just as well?