DaedTech

Stories about Software

Mar
17

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The Trouble with Career Sites

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 5 Comments

Last week featured some unexpected alterations (read: extensions) to my travel plans, and this week featured me playing a bit of catch up.  So, Monday featured no post at all, and Wednesday was a cross post.  If I do one thing this week, it’ll be to remain true to my attempts to regularly answer reader questions.  Here’s the question in question.

You mentioned in your “Avoiding the Dreaded Experience Tuples” post that there are better ways than monster.com to look for jobs…

Do you group the other common jobs sites with monster (i.e. dice, muse, hired, indeed, stackoverflow careers)?

Or is monster just bad?

First of all, an advanced caveat.  I am not familiar with muse or indeed, so I I’ll skip them and speak to what I know.  The short answer to the question is “I mostly group these sites together, and I think that using any of them to look for jobs is the Greyhound Bus of finding jobs.”  But, not all Greyhound Bus rides are equal — on some a drunk hobo throws up in your lap, and on some the drunk hobo just falls asleep on your shoulder.  And, with one of the sites here, I’d say you’re not really even riding a bus.  Let me do a bit of forced ranking.

BusHobo

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Mar
8

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Chasing Developer Productivity Metrics

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 7 Comments

I was listening to an episode of the “Western Devs” podcast on a plane the other night (I really like this podcast, by the way — give it a listen).  The subject of this particular show was the idea of developer productivity and the measurement thereof.  At the risk of playing spoiler, the discussion digressed in interesting fashion without necessarily taking a serious run at conclusions about these measurements.

But asking for a definitive measurement of developer productivity is a tall order.  I would actually even consider the attempt to be quixotic, though not for the reason alluded to early in the show (the idea that it might be categorically impossible to measure).  I think there are any number of ways, some even credible, to measure productivity for developers.  I think the trouble arises from the notion that they could be applied outside of a narrow context and also that it’s especially important how productive a developer is.

Let me return to that claim a little later, though.  First, I want to talk about The Organization.

What We Want from the Organization

It’s important, at this point, to dispense with the euphemisms. “Productivity,” in a business context, is a measure of efficiency, which is a comparative ability to deliver the same amount of stuff in less time (or for less money, though, in wage-land, time and money are like energy and matter in special relativity).  So productivity is really “worth” for labor.

Building the Pyramids

For developers, then, it becomes more personal.  Monetary worth is a bean counter distinction, and they don’t really know worth, we tell ourselves.  They don’t understand what Alice brings to the table when she goes around performing targeted refactorings that make everyone more productive, and they don’t recognize how important Bob is to the team’s morale, even if he doesn’t, himself, deliver a lot of code.

So we create situational, alternate definitions of productivity that reflect our ethos and emotional attachment to what we do.  We re-couch productivity as a way of describing the meritocracy that we feel ought to exist within the company.  And it is this very tendency that leads us to discuss endlessly “what does developer productivity even mean and how do we measure it?”  Our definitions are aspirational rather than practical.  We want an orderly world and we want the organizations for which we work to radiate fairness toward us.

But the organization has other ideas.  The organization provides individualized feedback on our productivity/efficiency (i.e. our performance) in the form of performance reviews.  And boy do we ever misunderstand these.

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Feb
24

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Escaping the Legacy Skill Quicksand

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 13 Comments

Editorial note: The readership of this blog has been growing steadily, and I very much appreciate that.  Thanks for reading!  An enjoyable byproduct of this is that a lot of my posts these days generate a good deal of discussion in the comments.  The only downside of this is that it’s growing harder and harder for me to respond to all of them.  Disqus sometimes batches my email notification, and there are days when people are commenting on half a dozen or more different posts, so I lose some in the shuffle.  For my regular readership, if I miss something you say, please don’t think it’s for lack of interest.  If you really want to get my attention or thoughts on something and you don’t see a response, feel free to email me or reach out through the site’s reader questions section.

Now, speaking of reader questions, let’s do one of those.  I was originally going to do a ChessTDD post today, but tornadoes were ripping through the Louisiana countryside like a vengeful wolverine today.  The end result was that I didn’t really have the time or guaranteed power to sit at my recording and development desktop.  I’m going to paraphrase today’s question so as not to have anything identifiable in there.

LousianaTwister

I’ve been working at a product company, focused mainly on specific, entrenched database technologies.  This is causing me to lose touch with current languages and trends, and I’m worried that I’m getting stuck.  How can I avoid being stuck and becoming an Expert Beginner?  Can you offer tips on learning new languages and exploring other technical things?

First of all, let me say this.  Asking yourself, “am I becoming Expert Beginner” is like an inverted Catch-22.  An Expert Beginner wouldn’t engage in this sort professional introspection.  That said, it is certainly possible to become pigeonholed into an unmarketable, aging technology.  I’m sure someone out there reading is, and has for a long time been, “the VB6 guy” and that person is nodding ruefully.  That’s a position that becomes harder and harder to climb out of.

At the core of this discussion is a debate I’ve seen play out an awful lot among people in the software world: is it up to your employer to help you stay current or is it up to you to do this in your spare time?  I’ve seen this debate play out most ferociously in the context of the mildly pejorative “9-5 programmer” used to describe people who are in it for money rather than the love of the game.  One side says “real programmers do it all day for work and all night for fun” and these folks are more likely to say that keeping current and managing your career is your business, to be managed on your own time.  The other side says, “programming is a job, and part of the deal with a wage job is that your employer empowers you to stay current.”

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Feb
2

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Is Unlimited PTO a Good Deal for Me?

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 12 Comments

True to my promise from last week, I am making a more concerted effort to bun down the queue of reader questions on my blog topics Trello board.  Thus, today brings you another answer to a reader question (one of these days, I may get around to doing video answers).  I am actually obfuscating this question somewhat, as the verbatim question could potentially be specific enough to identify the parties involved.  But here’s the thrust of it.

I recently received a job offer from a company that I’d been interviewing with, and it made no mention of PTO/vacation or time off in any form.  Assuming it must have been an oversight, I asked about it on the phone when discussing the offer, and they said they don’t track time off — it’s unlimited.  As long as various stakeholders are happy with their work, they don’t care how much time people take.  Is this a red flag for my prospects of working for this company?

My gut reaction to this, upon reading, was, “no, that’s awesome!”  In a corporate world whose defining feature may be treating adults like children (I have this slated in my backlog as a future post), this seems refreshingly adult.  Get your stuff done and we’re not going to bean-count how you spend your days.  It reminded me of something I once said to a person reporting to me when she asked if it’d be alright to duck out an hour early if she worked an extra hour the next day: “I don’t care how many hours you work in a day if you’re doing good work, so please don’t make when you come and go from the office something I have to care about.”

My secondary reaction was to start and think, “get that language written into the offer letter; have them amend it to state explicitly that they offer a discretionary amount of time off.”  That was the core of the message that I conveyed privately to the submitter, without going too far into detail.  So, over and done with, I suppose.

But this got me to ruminating a bit more on the topic in general and about the strange nature of the corporate vacation concept.  Does this nameless company have it right, following orgs like Netflix that famously buck the convention of tracking PTO?  Is this a good way to reward awesome, trustworthy folks with appropriate trust?  Or is this a trick to seem generous, or even to sneakily save money while knowing that social pressure will actually prevent employees from taking all that much time?

HidingTheMoney

Unlimited?  Really?

Before anything else, let’s get a little more precise about terminology.  Unlimited vacation sounds like just the kind of thing that they’d offer at a Shangri La organization far too selective for the likes of you, thus creating a Catch-22.  If you’re good enough to work somewhere that “adequate performance gets a generous severance package,” then you’re not the kind of slacker that would take advantage of unlimited vacation, anyway.

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Jan
31

By

We’re Not Beasts, So Let’s Not Act Like It

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 6 Comments

If I were in the kind of blogger that sought readers via click gimmicks, I might title this post, “In Business, You’re Either a Partner or an Asset.”  Actually, on reading that, it still wouldn’t exactly be juicy click bait, but it’d at least be less nuanced and more provocative than my actual point here.  Maybe.

On Cats and Humans

Rather than get to the point, I’ll lead with a parable of sorts.  Let’s say that I were an aspiring entrepreneur in the death market, and that I were interested in “niche-ing down.”  I wanted to start an extermination business, and, specifically, a mouse extermination business.  You’ve got mice?  Call Erik — the mouse-killer.

Toward this end, I establish two distinct service products.  The first is that I’ll dispatch a mouse-removal expert to your house to take a more-or-less scientific approach to mouse removal.  This person will wander around your house, doing whatever it is that exterminators normally do, dispatching poison and such.  This will cost you $100 per hour.  The second service product is that I’ll rent you a cat for $15 per day.  The cat will wander around your house, doing whatever it is that cats normally do, which presumably includes chasing and sometimes killing mice.

The difference in price is significant, but it also makes sense.  The exterminator, while onsite, will focus in laser fashion on your mouse problem.  He’s basically a consultant, dedicated to helping you with your mouse problem.  His time is valuable.

The cat, on the other hand, will do whatever it wants.  It will arrive onsite and most likely take a nap.  It will then wake up, meow for food, wander around the house, purr and put its anus near your face, spend a weird amount of time sniffing a couch cushion, and then, maybe, take an interest in the scrabbling sound in your wall that represents the mouse problem.  Or, maybe it won’t.  Maybe you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow or the next day.  Eventually, the cat will be sufficiently interested to do something about the mice, but that’s clearly going to proceed according to the cat’s calendar and not yours.

CattButt

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