I think most people are probably thinking how can I seemingly do so much more work than my teammates. There have been previous discussions in here about how much being able to type actually helps as a programmer. Nobody in my current team can touch-type (except me of course).

What does that mean? Well, if they want to document things adequately, use good variable naming conventions, etc then they either have to skip it because they don't have the time (can't type) or they do it and take significantly longer to complete their work.

To give you an idea of the capability of most of my team members...

A while back when I was in another lull state, I decided to take a look around to see if I could find something wicked to refactor. I landed on one of 'em monolithic methods written by the most senior person in my team. You would think he would know better but there you go. Anyway, there was a block of code maybe 30 lines long (could have been shortened quite a bit) that looked like it had been copy pasted about 20 times with only very minor changes between code blocks. I refactored his single method from around 500 lines to just over 100 (thats including comments). As far as I can tell, he would copy and paste the most similar code block, change a few really minor things, then add it to the long chain of if, elseif, else statements.

The last time I told my boss
he took real offense to that since the person who had written that was a really good friend of his and is the person I referenced in the above story.

I wish that i had this problem. We are severely understaffed IMO.

This is reflected in a lot of the work I am doing that my role shouldnt even touch. This last two weeks I fixed all the broken **** in our CI/CD pipeline that was silently failing that no one knew about and created a new regression testing infrastructure for our new project, pretty much singlehandedly. On top of all my other stuff. Lol

To me that's a great opportunity for you. Learn as much DevOps as you can then jump to a much better paying gig.

Yea it’s a completely miserable job that’s probably about to become more miserable, but everyone that says I should find a new job I immediately dismiss because I have an opportunity that’s really unique, so I’m staying on this ship for a while I think.

Talking about things we shouldn't be doing...

One of my teammates today suggested we upgrade to PHP 7 (much faster in all regards generally speaking). It brought up something I have talked a little before about...

There are the things we are allowed to do and are capable of doing
There are the things we aren't allowed to do and are capable of doing
Then everything else

This item falls into category #2. There is a certain task that surfaces pretty frequently. The fix is to delete a few rows from a specific table with specific parameters. The 3 of us that were chatting know what those are, are capable of doing it, but would get chastised if we did. This also happens to be the root of the problem where sometimes you are idle not because of lack of work but because of lack of work you are "authorized" to do the work if that makes sense.

That db task falls to DevOps or Solutions Engineer team. Most of UI team would be able to fulfill the request but quite literally are not allowed to do so.

Seriously your situation is fascinating me. Where can you possibly work? Intuit? McAfee? The federal government??

None of the above. You would probably only know who we are if you develop mobile apps (as in apps for phones). There was a recent google webcast (the sort of ones that have tons of company logos in the background) and we were prominently featured. In our industry, we are pretty well recognized as being one of the top players.

Phone Gap?

Nope. Even if you were to guess I would really only feel comfortable revealing the company after I find my next job.

In all honesty, I might have already revealed it in this thread and, at the very least, the handful of people that agreed to peer review my resume.

My first two non-SAS programming jobs:

1) Psychotic spin-off "startup" which I think was literally just stealing money from the parent company. Boss used to routinely make the women who worked there cry. I always describe him as a cross between Captain Bligh and Mr. Smith from Lost in Space. Mostly he just sat in his office all day blaring ****ty 70s songs he downloaded off Napster. Nobody had any clue what they were doing and the product was complete dog****.

My first day on the job I went out for sushi with 3 of the top devs and the DBA. They told one horror story about the boss after another. First ****ing day, on a job I moved from SF to LA for and literally drove down to start that morning. I was like WTF did I just do?

But I learned enough Java to jump ship after 4 months to:

2) Big healthcare company. I joined a team of Powerbuilder devs on their 3rd strike of trying to build a J2EE web app - and I'm the big savior with my 4 months of Java experience. The boss was a drunk who would come in Monday morning like a black cloud of doom. At one point she was actively trying to get us all fired or to quit. I still have no idea why.

But somehow we persevered and built a product that was a huge home run within the company. After that we could pretty much write our own tickets. Black cloud boss left, replaced by super chill boss on the East Coast who was gone by 3pm our time every day. Our stress levels went from 100 to 0 overnight.


Yeah your instincts are probably right to hang in there as long as you can. You'll know when it's time to jump ship. But seriously - take on all the DevOps you can, especially since you like it anyway. You will thank yourself.

Ironically, no dev ops experience is the likely reason I lost my best job opportunity to date. Also kinda ironically, that company I was interviewing at was our primary competitor. I kinda expected the latter reason + generally giving good answers to the questions they did ask to almost give me a lock on the job but I guess not. We aren't exactly a huge company so I would have thought hiring someone from your competitor would probably have a decent amount of implied value.

Heh - well I'll just keep guessing until you don't answer.

Electron!

Is Phone Gap even a company? And does anyone use them anymore?

You can't bank on past accomplishments. Consider yourself lucky to be getting paid to do literally nothing for most of the day.


It's obvious who does works and who doesn't. If I were you, I would be a little more active and taking work, even if people consider you "annoying". I rather be the super productive annoying guy* than the guy who doesn't do ****. But this also depends on whether there's opportunity at your place. If there's no chance for a big raises or promotion, then I would look for work elsewhere or continue doing what you're doing if you value time more. But I wouldn't complain about having to spend an extra 30 minutes of free time, even if it's at the office instead of at home.

*Come to think of it, I probably am that guy. If you don't approve my MR within 48 hours, you're getting a Hangouts message from me lol

You guys are making this way too complicated. Just be the last (or almost) guy out every day for your first 6 months or so, and don't take a sick day for the first 3 months, and you are golden for the rest of your life at that company. Doesn't matter one lick what time you come in. People talk, and once you get a reputation it sticks.

Most of you aren't married - what are you going to do when you get home anyway? Dick around on 2p2? Just do it from 5-7 at your work while you wait for traffic to die down.

Or if you have a super early in boss you want to impress come in early every day and leave 5 minutes after her/him. Note I've never tried that strategy because **** that.

IMO you're guaranteed to get noticed more being the last one out than the first one in.

No one pays attention to much else except if you suck as a programmer. But that's a different issue. We're just talking about differentiating yourself with most of the office. If you combine "works long hours" with "programmer who people know they can give something to if they want it done right" then you're a golden god.

Lol ive been doing this

Just make sure your boss isn't lingering in the parking lot.

Grim I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. I'll need to get a screenshot tomorrow to confirm this because quite honestly I don't know if you would even believe me otherwise. This is the most recent optimization I worked on...

No story would be good without some backstory. I was tasked with porting this page over into our new framework (Vue). Naturally, I did a bit of testing to see how it worked, which api(s) I needed to hit, etc and then it began...

I would normally take a look at the response in Chrome to get a basic idea of what was returned except it always error'd out. I could never see the response. I then put a console.log in the js and oh boy was I in for a surprise! I'm able to query against the db so I was able to confirm my suspicions. The dev that had worked on this api (that is in go) had managed to allow someone to fetch every.****ing.damn.row in the table. Fortunately for him, it was only a "measley" 7k rows or so (I believe its up to about 9k now). It wasn't quite enough to make the browser explode and, on a fast connection, it only appears to take slightly longer than expected. But here the problems start...

We've been expanding into the Asian market lately and, as you might expect the latency there is not so great most of the time. This page that my esteemed teammate (that did the JS that I referenced in the previous story) and my equally esteemed co-worker in dev team (that had created this select * scenario) basically meant that no Asian customer (with maybe the exception of South Korea since they have amazing fast internet there) could use this page. The first comment in my port over was
**** Screenshot to come

That is only one. There are at least 3 or 4 other not quite as insane optimizations I could tell you about that I did. It's the most recent though.

You don't have to screenshot, I believe you. And I wasn't calling you a slacker either, in case that's what you thought. I just don't think it's a big deal given your situation. Just spend an extra 30 minutes on your personal projects. If you don't have personal projects, get a new job.

And everything suzzer said is right. No one notices the guy who comes in first (by definition). But everyone jealously sees the guy who's leaving before them. But you can't also be the only guy that shows up super late. Arrive at work when 40-50% of your team is there. Leave after 70% of the team is gone, 50% if you're boss already left.

And you can't make it too obvious with the 5 minute rule. Everyone knows this strategy and will automatically know what you're up to.

One of my teammates is a good friend of the boss. I'm starting to think the boss is asking his friend to report on tardiness or absenteeism of other people [specifically me] because in our 1on1 today he mentioned me showing up at times in the morning when he wasn't even in the office to know what time I showed up at.

Bolded the relevant part. There might only be one other person on my team that shows up "late" [after 8]. My team is 5 people. The rest of the people can show up anywhere from 6:30 to 8:00 so arriving at or before them is damn near impossible for me (I'm not a morning person).

I guess I could try to stay a bit later. I don't actually know this for fact but I'm pretty confident they have hidden security cameras at both building entrances. How do I know that? Someone in upper management mentioned one day in passing in the hall
That was the first night in a while that I returned to work after hours to finish something up. If I really wanted to make it seem like I was putting in the full work schedule I would literally have to stay several hours, after hours, doing nothing but twiddling my thumbs.

Sometimes I read what you guys write and I realize how lucky I must have been in my career.

None of this bull**** with first in / last out. Always lots to do. Generally working with people that care about doing that stuff. Promotions that relate to getting **** done (and not just when you get in/out of the office). Stuff like that.

Edit: I have a hard time even imagining the idea of a development job where you have massive amounts of downtime that can't be spent in any productive way.

what looks better on a resume:

personal projects

or

instructional material - like having a video series on Udemy/Udacity

I can tell you everyone completely ignored my github in my last job search. I bet they'd ignore the instructional series too, but maybe not.

It's all about your code trivia and whiteboard skillz bro.

I got my latest job almost directly because people were blown away by my github/personal project so ymmv.

Though somewhat ironically I had the time to make my big side project because I had a bull**** job like Craggoo's for almost 2 years where I really only worked about 4 hours a day and then worked on my side project the rest of the time..