Yeah you dropped off a table. I've got 3 good years left apparently.

FWIW - the prospect of taking an extended trip like I am now, then looking for work cold as a programmer in my 50s is a bit terrifying. Tell me it's ok out there.

Have good contacts...

This rings very true.

FYP

i've totally run out of things to do at my work

they're consumed with this new project, my sprint pretty much got abandoned so I just spent 6 hours today reading a textbook on Spark. The other day I went through the backlog and organized everything and prioritized it based on my understanding of things, I think I got it pretty close. I had to ask for a few opinions about a few issues but i think it's pretty good for now.

i formed a friendship with one of the guys on my team and we were talking about the last time a new full timer was hired (a while ago), and he told me everyone there sort of has really poorly defined roles and i can just fill whatever niche they happen to need at the moment. I guess he's leaving soon.

really curious what direction this is gonna go. I'm trying to round out as best as I can and am approaching a pretty good understanding of the main code base and the underlying implementation. not sure what else to do from here, I've been told basically nothing since I started. In my retrospective i'm gonna do later this week, I'm gonna try to recommend to my boss that he should stick to short sprints (like 1 week) because he and a few others stated that everyone just kinda waits to the deadline to push stuff last minute, and a shorter sprint would lessen the effect of interruptions imo.

I know they're not expecting anything of me now or even in the future possibly, I just want something to do.

but this could totally be a job where i kick back and do absolutely nothing for a year+ amount of time, if i wanted it to be, but i don't.

one small effect I've had that i'm proud of, everyone went from sweatpants/sweaters and sandals to wearing the business casual style I've been wearing every day. maybe i'm flattering myself but everyone is definitely dressing nicer than in the first 2 weeks i was there.

It's OK out there - although the expectation is often that the old folks will provide some level of lead/management/mentoring as well as programming.

That really isn’t anything to be proud of. Maybe your hair is too pointy to be a developer...

Well to be fair, this is generally true of most senior employees with substantial experience regardless of age in any field.

I don't understand - like you started showing up in business casual as a new employee at a company where everyone was dressing super casual before and you think other people started feeling self-conscious because of you and started dressing differently? What do you imagine is going on there?

You can read my post but I imagine you needed to get this out of your system.

Im with candybar on this one. thats a really strange situation.

Walk me through what you think was going on in everyone's mind. I see a new guy wearing business casual -> ??? -> I'm wearing business casual. I mean just about everything you've said about this job is already strange anyhow - I'm just struggling to see the world through your eyes.

I had a phonecall from another company and they requested my CV, so I've been freshening it up. Last time I used it was 6 years ago.

I'm wondering if I should include my github or not. It has 3 projects: my linux dotfiles, a simple rogulike hobby projects written in js, and a PoC I did for a golang CRUD rest service to manage geolocation coordinates bundled with sound files.

None of this is hardened or production ready, just my hobby stuff where I tinker with new tech I want to explore, so no unit tests for instance. The source code is pretty clean however, since I'm quite anal about that. Secondly, there is not a lot of activity. I usually spend a couple of weeks working on a project, and then shelve it and maybe pick it up a year later.

If it's not going to help you get the position why would you include it? I mean, which is going to be easier to explain away, no repo or that your hobby code isn't production quality?

I don't understand why you think business casual over just clothes is a victory?

Randomly clicked on someone stack overflow profile who had asked a question about javascript classes back in 2010 and I saw his product is scirra.com and was like Hey I know this dude, small world.

Well, that is the question: do you think it will help or hurt to show it?

One advantage is that they're looking for a golang developer, and I have no professional golang experience. However I have played with it in my spare time, and could demonstrate some familiarity. And when I say not production ready, I don't mean its just throwaway trash. Just that it needs hardening and unit testing, because its mostly PoC stuff.

nah I'm not gonna indulge you because you're being condescending and douchey. It's something I definitely observed and didn't know what to make of it. Now I guess I do, so thanks, I guess.

LMAO, your filter isn't doing you much good jmakin if you think candybar's version of "why do you think other people dressing business casual is a win for you" was douchey or condescending...

I actually find this business casual convo to be more logical from jmakins side.

People see the new guy dressing nicely, it reminds them they have decent clothes and can also dress nicely, so they do it.

I've seen this exact thing happen many times before.

jmakin,

You claim to have a good grasp on the codebase, and not much to do, with a prioritized backlog, and you wanted to make sure you were coding on this job...

just looking at it from my pov, there is no way I am changing my clothes to something less comfortable bc the new guy is business casual.

People can be influenced by others, especially among fashion-conscious people but usually people for whom "business casual" is an obvious upgrade are usually extremely oblivious or apathetic. Also, the claim isn't that some people started dressing slightly nicely but that every single person went from being a complete slob to business casual. I've been at multiple companies with no dress code and it's rare to see anyone in sweatpants or that level of casualness, let alone everyone doing it consistently. Basically everyone wears somewhere between jeans/tshirts/sneakers and business casual, with very occasional gym clothes, yoga pants, sweaters, ties and dress shirts.

There are enough things that are strange - from everyone wearing sweatpants at work to everyone suddenly dressing well to caring about this to thinking that you're the cause of it to being proud of it to thinking that this is a normal thing that doesn't require further explanation - it's obvious that we're missing some context here. This is on top of the general strangeness about the job situation - new software engineer hire being given almost entirely project management type of work and there being apparently no senior person besides the manager with any kind of leadership or management skills. It's gone from strange but I could see it to too strange to be fiction territory.