innerText is whatever JS feels it should be based on the value and context of the operation.

Man AWS has a way of making some hard stuff easy and easy stuff hard.

Infrastructure as code is good right? Ok so you want to generate your API Gateway from code right? Awesome - here you go - just annotate your swagger definition with some AWS specific stuff and you're off and running.

We'll even let you generate an API Gateway from a raw swagger file, add all your AWS-specific stuff like authorizations and request and request manipulations, define which lambdas to invoke or use mock data for now - and THEN export that to a full-blown cloudformation template that is basically a beefed up version of your original swagger spec.

Awesome! Now the only thing I need to do is write some CI/CD to build and deploy the thing whenever I change the template.

Oh yeah sorry, you can build automatically but deploying your new changes automatically is gonna be really hard and hacky. We only deploy the first time you create the resource. After that you're on your own.

#@$(!*@$(*

Yeah we actually have:

Eng 1, Eng 2, Senior 1, Senior 2, Staff 1, Staff 2, Principal.

We don't have any principal engineers and I think maybe a handful of staff. I think we want principal engineers to be thought leaders with a large online following. The only rumblings I have heard of anyone getting that title were when we interviewed an author of a very widely used open source library.

I think staff is director level and principal would be vp level in the management track.

I'm more curious what distinguishes the levels at your companies than what titles are offered.

uh we have scrubs/senior/lead/principal at my fortune 100 dinosaur. Principal appears to be olds/people who know vice presidents/technical project owners i.e. people who show up to the office once a week if that and have no real things assigned to them on any issue trackers. I want that in the next year or I start looking again sadly.

It turned out I don't need to deal with it. Our app is still in "testing mode" which just gives you an additional "look out, this might be evil" screen prior to the consent screen, that will work without verification. The consent prompt wasn't appearing because a local data store had a cached expired token which it was still trying to use for some reason. I just deleted the store and was good to go.

ya my company is similar. they want sr and leads to be, well leaders. but who is gonna do the work? I proly wrote more code than anyone else in my program last year (I did have the most pull requests completed) but was told it would take 2 more years to get promoted. I did a bunch of bs leadership classes, created a monthly presentation for the devs and am running it and moved away from coding to being a "lead" for the features. boom, I just got put in for promotion.

but I was doing a ton more work last year. and since I was coding all the time and reading other ppls code I was actually helping others a lot more. I actually created a whole onboarding syllabus with mock requirements bc 2 new ppl joined my team that had no front end experience.

its almost like coding work is frowned upon.

I think I have my first incompetent resource I'm dealing with.

I took over a major, failing project of ours. It was previously being ran by a team that no longer exists at the company, outside of the main guy who is in a purely advisory role now and a very limited one.

So I hop into this project, it seems in an ok state. I didn't understand what the previous problems were. Then I start working with this guy.

This guy isn't a part of our core dev team - he was brought on by our head of sales, and works directly under him on-site with potential clients. Well, one of our on-site major clients literally kicked problem guy out after we were months past a deadline. That was basically all I knew going into this and had no preconceived notions whatsoever. I suspected maybe the bottleneck was someone on my team I work with directly and is occasionally prone to problems.

So problem guy's on site for a week and we give him a basic task that was supposed to be delivered on a Friday. Friday comes, "almost done."

Monday comes, same update. Tuesday - "About 80%."

At that point I told my boss that I strongly suspected it wasn't getting done and he needed to take it over. The guy hands my boss over the source code and he'd basically written just half of a crappy arg parser in python and hadn't even got to the core problem yet.

This was my first red flag and ruined a lot of credibility the guy had with me, so maybe I am being biased now, idk.

Same sort of thing happens for the next phase in the project I'm running. We pass along some task to him (this time it's remote), it's been multiple weeks, no real progress, vague status updates. This guy is atrociously bad at communicating, a little combative in slack, and seems to resent me running this thing now - but that's fine I am used to that from my own team. But what is not okay and what I finally explained to my boss is, that we are all COMPLETELY in the dark and 100% blocked until this guy finishes. Which is scary to me because a) i have no idea what he is working on at any given point, b) if he does update, I can't really trust it, and c) when he does deliver it's often poor/incomplete (basing this off the prior experience, and one I experienced this week, which I'll get to in a sec).

So I kinda threw the guy under the bus but this is after consistent feedback from every single member of my team and multiple prior conversations I had w my boss about concerns I had with the guy.

Today he force pushed some commit to our main working branch of this project that I knew within 5 seconds was going to break the entire thing, and even had a bonus divide by zero flaw in it. This commit broke something one of my devs was trying to deliver to a MAJOR customer today.

To top it off, this was the result of like 2 weeks worth of work, this 5 line busted ass commit he made. And it's also after we discussed with our adviser what this guy's plan was, and the adviser said "no don't do that." So I tried to pull problem guy off the problem but, he won't really listen to me or even my boss.

At this point what the **** else is there? I asked my boss straight up, "What do we actually need him to do, and let's have him only do that. And if the answer to that question is nothing, I don't know what you need to do politics-wise but this isn't working at all and I need to cover my own ass at this point."

My boss seemed to agree but I felt really ****ty about it. I know I'm not wrong though. I don't think there's anything I could do better to help the guy at this point I just feel he's not really capable in this role. Maybe, maybe if he was on-site. But I guess that's not an option.

You'll run into that many more times. Lots of dead weight is able to float around for years and years at a lot of places.

I mean, that dude should not be tasked with such solutions with such timelines. he needs constant hand holding and someone to guide him. it may not be that he is incapable, he may just need some coaching and training.

obv try not to put the guy in charge of a dependency.

but seriously, wtf is this? "a) i have no idea what he is working on at any given point"

like, how can a dude with a massivlely important task/story/whatever without anyone else being aware of wtf is going on with it.

because the updates he gives are passable but kinda BS. or he'll ignore messages a lot for just long enough to string you along another day or two and blame the time difference or some BS. He was tasked with this because, for reasons beyond my control, this feature was asked for out of nowhere by the sales guy. So what the sales guy says usually goes. There's some weird politics behind that that I'm not sure of. One reason though is the problem guy sees the salesperson as his direct boss which is pretty much true.

Like I said I'd never worked with the guy and expected him to be at least as communicative as the rest of my team which is a pretty low ****ing bar. That never really happened even when I prodded him.

Sounds like your sales engineer is more sales than engineer...

I didn't realize until he left our campus that he didn't have the basic skills necessary to work remotely. It's not even a question, the guy can't communicate at all. And that's before addressing the other stuff.

edit: it's not entirely his fault either. We don't have the basic organization infrastructure to accommodate him in the best way either.

Jmakin you are overthinking this to an exponential level.

The dude is clearly complete garbage.

Not frowned upon, just not looked on with that much respect in my view. The description of your working environment is very common. My experience is that not that many people actually like coding and all the activities that go along with it thus they place a higher value on other things like presentations, bs leadership classes, etc.

The forum poster who recommended the book, Developer Hegemony, thanks. It is a decent book that gets into the culture/working environment that is very typical for software development at companies.

Including middle management.

There are companies out there that arent like that, but I would imagine almost all of them are under 1k employees.

I wonder if I'd enjoy being a dead weight employee and never doing anything. Honestly it would probably suck because you would still have to show up and sort of appear to do stuff, it's not like you get to stay home and play games

And every day you go home feeling like a fraud.

I've been on jobs where there was basically nothing to do but you have to show up. It's miserable. The day goes by a million times faster when you're actually working. And you feel like you accomplished something.

This is so true. The dysfunction at some places is absolutely stunning.

The last two places I've worked at you could easily show your face in the morning, leave most of the day, show your face in the afternoon, then go home.

There were several employees I am pretty sure did that regularly.

I've seen guys leave at mid-day but leave their screen locked to on, leave like an open bottle of orange juice, coat, etc. - to make it look like they're still around somewhere.

What did you think of his opinion on a quickly growing gig economy vs full time positions?

I have weeks that are occasionally like this and it’s completely soul sucking and demoralizing.

Speaking of demoralizing workplaces: https://kotaku.com/the-fallout-of-ac...ffs-1832597892

Blizzard has gone 3 years w/o a release.

Does anyone here work for a big game company? Is it as death-grindy as I imagine?

I've been wondering if my coworkers who do nothing have like multiple remote jobs and are just laughing at the free salary or if they are just super lazy and suck at coding. From a gto perspective, the goal of an employee should be to do as little work as possible while still being paid. But yeah, I just can't do that. So far I have been the idiot looking for things to do and creating work for myself.