ya I am staying out of this for the time being and hoping that we kind of just move forward next sprint and forget about all of these arbitrary rules.

but I dont have a confidante, nor do I even know who to approach. also while my reputation is great with other devs, I get the feeling the myriad middle managers dont hold me in that high of regard.

3 devs just took etb for the rest of the sprint now lol.

but now we have other issues. we did some work for another program bc we needed to consume one of their APIs and it needed a slight tweak for our use case. in the process our devs and QA tested at the API level and tested the other 4 consumers. the contract didnt change so it really was low risk.

anyway, they now want us to test some apps that use the consumers of the API. this is ofc overkill but whatever. I let QA fight about it and probably should have stepped in. anyway, we end of having 2 impromptu meetings about it yesterday and our scrum master took the idea to the program higher ups who said absolutely do not do the extra testing.

ofc, the other team flipped out and now we are having an hour long meeting with the SME, manager, and QA from that team, along with myself, 2 QA, our scrum master and our entire programs tech lead.

like, for all this time spent, just do the freakin work. and thats really my fault as I should have organized the extra testing and just gotten it done.

part of the problem is that we dont have immediate access to the other app and know how to test it. and that is on the other team as they should have primed us for that work and at least told us how to start. ofc at the start they didnt say anything about testing that app. I dunno. I just hate meetings. and I dont really like conflict either. so if I can avoid a meeting and make ppl happy then that just seems a lot easier than all this bs.

Suzzer, I don’t remember ever seeing you ***** this much about a job. IMO you have too much experience to put up with this ****, save your sanity and find someplace you want to be.

Haha I read that whole post and the tone sounds a lot like the freak out moments I’ve had at my job. The difference being - i dont have a lot of other good options with my experience level, and i have strong support from management. Those both aren’t true for you, the boss sounds incompetent and like you guys need a true project manager or some kind of person in a management role because your boss doesnt seem to be very good at managing expectations of her superiors which is always going to end in headache for everyone.

I have 2 offers I am considering.

First is a large bank. Pay is slightly better, commute is much better, there is a nice gym at the office. Name is better known. Tech is slightly better. It seems there is a specific project they are working on. Manager seems good. Downsides are it seems a bit chaotic overall. Didn't really meet the team. Big downside is they do stack rankings.

Second one is a medium/large sized company. Pay slightly worse, commute much worse. I like the manager. I like the team. Easier interview. No stack rankings.

Leaning towards option one. Both managers have emailed me and asked if I have any questions or if there are any reservations. Any questions I should ask them?

Some feedback I have received before from different people is that my communication could be improved. My written communication is decent, I respond quickly to people in slack or email. However, I have a hard time with in person communication. Not sure if this is something I should bring up or not.

Take the better commute. My new commute is averaging way too close to two hours each way for comfort.

Just looked up stack rankings. Holy crap don't do that one.

Back today - still stressful and some dysfunction but I was probably also being kind of paranoid about the whole thing - probably due to ... DIETING - YAY!

I get fat as **** every time I start a new job, and there's literally no way for me to lose weight w/o turning into an obsessive paranoiac. FML

Pretty sure I quit my last job due to a thyroid disorder. I was paranoid, anxious, irritable, etc, due to an overactive thyroid. Looking back, I don't think the job was great but there wasn't really a reason I had to leave.

The only time I can lose weight on a job is after I've already built something valuable so people will put up with my grumpiness.

In other news, PowerPoint without VBA is Turning complete:

I had to google it too - sounds a little rough, but is it worse than "lmao promotions are you joking? At our company juniors must remain a junior for at least X years before a promotion can be considered, even if they are exceeding the work of seniors!"

If Goofyballer has taught us anything, you should say to #2 (or the one you decide against) "I'd like to consider it seriously, but I have a competing offer of [much better] - is there anything you can do?" and then repeat with job #1. Then make a decision with new and improved pay!

Perhaps you've done this part already.

Dave, I assume either you are located somewhere without much competition for tech talent or the talented junior devs don’t stick around long?

I think he was quoting an earlier Victor post.

Indeed.

I may have embellished the language slightly, though

not really.

but tbf, while that is a general guideline, my manager was taking it to the extreme. and I had seen plenty of ppl promoted quickly and in line with their skills. but I have seen others languish, including a guy who is easily one of the strongest devs in the program and beyond that a true leader and teacher.

regardless, I do think that the stack thing is far worse than slow promotions at a large company in a somewhat conservative and depressed business area.

I can immediately see a number of ways that it would create a hostile work environment and backwards incentives. like, you can get ahead by doing great work, but that runs the risk of making others look good and even allowing others to steal your work. seems the optimal way to operate is to cover your own ass at all times and find ways to denigrate and undermine others. their loss is your gain.

and ofc the best way is to buddy up to the managers who actually do the ranking which can create all sorts of problems at that level. it essentially makes the managers little tyrants of their region.

Yep, this pretty much. I would add that buddying up with the right people in general is the correct way to operate.

I've worked at several places who could probably claim to be doing stack ranking. But in practice it just meant there was one big bonus to go around per group - and a bunch of normal ones. And the big bonus wasn't even really that much bigger - like an extra 2-3% of your salary on top of the normal bonus most got. Anyone in the bottom 10% was probably on some sort of improvement plan already.

I also know someone who worked for Microsoft in Dallas who said they were strict about cutting 10% of the workforce every year, and it unsurprisingly created a hellish environment.

Similar to agile, the devil is probably in the details in how strictly they're following it.

Most of the places I worked at would be much better off after a couple years of dropping the bottom 10%. But I can see how after that you're cutting into the live wood, and people are more worried about where credit/blame goes for something vs. actually building it. Standard surprise layoffs every once in a while seems like a better route.

EXACTLY

My favorite tv show of all time. I have it on DVD. Every few years I rewatch - except the 5th season which petered out w/o Phil Hartman - but still had some GOAT episodes. Flowers for Matthew and Punk Matthew are two of the best episodes of the whole show.

The current place I work has stack rankings and the offer I took is the closer commute with stack rankings. Will report on how it is and compare the two. The place I am leaving it is kind of lame in that you can get a low rating even if you don't deserve it. We had a manager forced to give one of his people a low rating and quit rather than do it :/ Bonuses are tied to it, so it goes 0, 50, 100, 150, 200 % of your target so it actually matters quite a bit money wise.

Also I took the advice to ask for more money based on having multiple offers. I didn't plan on it because I had already told them my other offer and they beat it. The recruiter had said they didn't want to go back and forth so I assumed that plus it being a better offer meant the end of negotiation. But after the advice here, I did ask for more, and they just instantly gave more. So thanks dave.

In a small to mid sized place i can see stack rankings being complete cancer, but i can see the argument for it in a mid large, rapidly growing place that can’t afford any dead weight. It seems the dysfunctional product of a bygone era i definitely wouldnt want to be a part of.

Some managers think competition between employees increases productivity and don’t mind it turning employees into *******s.

Thats awesome, congrats and nice work

Thanks!

Also the shaft video was funny and accurate.

Anyone who uses AWS for CI/CD - how do you trigger a promotion from say stage to prod?

Right now I build to the dev environment, based on code being checked in to the develop branch on our various lambda repos and our front end react site repo. But we're going to have at least 5 environments and having to check everything into a new branch would be a really cumbersome way to promote code.

One pretty simple way I can think of is just to drop a new zip file (of the build artifact from the develop branch) into and environment-specific s3 bucket which is being watched by CodePipeline, and would then build the front end to that environment and archive off the zip file.

But it feels like there should be a more automated way. Thoughts?

Edit: hmmm well looking at create-react-app, it needs to know the environment at build time, not run time. So we may just stick with branches for that one, since it's only one repo. But the same issue of wanting to promote w/o branch check-in still applies to all the lambdas.