We kind of touched on this a while back talking about the maturity of the industry or something; the technology is still changing so fast that there isn't much time for standardized names to emerge for sets of tasks/skill sets. What's the point of developing a taxonomy for role that is going to be obsolete in two years or absorbed by a yet unheard of role? Big data is whatever you can use big data tools on.

The cynical side of me thinks the various data labels are just a signal for what the company is willing to pay you.

In any case, there was no description of what "data engineer" meant for Barrin's friend.

In a sense but it's kind of the other way around - places that have over-inflated titles tend to pay less.

Sort of a trollish/bait post but I'm genuinely interested...

How do you guys feel about adderall?

I used it leading up to finals in college but it made my stomach feel knotty and my armpits sweat significantly.

For professional day to day use I am not in favor of it, the long-term dependency outweighs the short term benefits imo.

I definitely remember feeling like I wouldn't be able to cram a massive amount of studying in without it at a point. Wasn't a good feeling to feel like it was necessary.

We deal with lots of data. I know we have some kind of ETL process that gets done. But as far as spark or what we use I don’t know. I guess I could just stalk LinkedIn on data engineers at my company and try to find out.

Hmm was just discussing this with others actually. I have never tried it but am open

It's very unwise to take amphetamines to do work, unless you need them to function. If you don't - you soon will, lol.

Hit feature-complete for our release today.

When I started 5 months ago there were 3 front-end engineers on my team, then a couple months ago one got pulled away, and it's been only me for the last week and a half. I got the final feature in today after about 7 straight hours with no breaks, ate lunch at 530pm.

I feel bad but I just did it in one giant commit (since i don't always follow linter rules when going quickly, and just do it all at the end, and we can't commit with linter errors) , merged the PR straight in with no one else's review, and no unit tests, plus some hacky "deletes" to just quickly prune an object before sending it off.

I'm gonna enjoy this feeling for the first hour of the day tomorrow and then spend the next few weeks hunting bugs and making the code suck less before release.

Or, you know, just ask them!

That would be too much of a logical thing to do!

Actually one of the engineers I worked closely with is a data engineer. Always thought he was a software engineer. But he’s responsible for managing our Kafka clusters for our whole company.

Or yea I guess I could ask

havent felt the need to go beyond coffee yet.

Does anyone hate doing peer reviews? I just don’t know what to put down. Do I just rate all 5/5 and be done with it??

Hate would be too strong of a word for me. Annoying would be closer to how I feel about them.

No don't do that. What are the categories for rating? Ask your lead/manager about how to respond appropriately.

We have a rating from strongly disagree to strongly agree and there are some statements for which I haven’t worked enough with them to be able to evaluate.

Statements such as, this person goes and seek help and collaboration when appropriate.

Barrin, I'm sorry you work in a place like that.

This is the way I see it:

- My paycheck doesn't say "manager" or "evaluate worker productivity" and I don't do it.

- People need titles. The manager needs it to have the power to evaluate employees and execute as needed. Employees need someone to call a "manager" to present problems to.

- Asking your employees to evaluate each other is a great way to build up toxicity in your workplace. A manager who asks their employees to do this should absolutely be absolved of their duties, as this puts the role of evaluation on the employees and diminishes the employee's respect of the manager.

If I was given that sheet of paper, I'd put 5 Stars across the board and call everyone excellent. As an employee, it is not my job to influence the decision of management about any employee except for myself.

Pretty much, except if people are maliciously bad you should be bringing that up to your management on your own.

...the chains he forged in life!

I hated doing peer reviews like you’re talking about and I’m happy we don’t do them at my current company.

That being said, there’s value in peer feedback (despite this silly idea that only managers should give feedback). I don’t know how to get it in a reasonable way though.

I had to google the reference, but A+.

Yeah, big companies love to have process around their performance reviews but it's always going to come down to manager prerogative so the less bull**** they hang off of that the better.

So true, many things should not be put in writing.

I wasn't saying the managers should only give feedback. There is a degree: feedback that affects an employee's standing or future at a company is very different than "nice code, bro" with a fist bump.

There are many problems here.

When you have someone write something down, they are more likely to believe it post hoc and defend their standing. You're job, as a manager, is to do your best to get people to work with each other. If Daryl writes down "Jenny is a *****," it's going to be much harder to bring Daryl into the office and reason with him. If he storms in and is blowing off steam, you can at least share why Jenny is needed and try to at least budge his opinion of her.

After the votes are in, you bring Marty into the office and tell him he had the lowest ranking of everyone on the team. Reality TV shows have been running on this premise for 25 years now, and they aren't staying popular because everyone is hanging out and drinking beers.

Even if everyone does amazing, you have to give some sort of feedback. "Well, Anne, some people said you tell too many off-color jokes." Wait, what? The whole office laughs at these off-color jokes and now someone is complaining? What kind of back-stabber is Anne working with?

Since everything is in writing, everything is recorded, don't think for one moment someone isn't going to figure out how to read everything, because they will. Would you really want that getting out?

Finally, a good manager does his best to protect his employees from the fire from above his head. This is putting the fire directly on the employee's laps.

It's all politics, but the line between the good kind and the bad kind is rather thin, and this, IMO, crosses well over into bad.

One of the people I have to peer review is the senior engineer on my team who has been nothing but lackluster. Same person I mentioned before who was slow at typing. Now I’m worried about putting criticism in writing.