do they?
You seem to generalize a bit no? I have 2 grads that are pretty happy with their life and their salary right now, and are starting to look into buying a house. So I'm doubtful it generalize well.
You can have pretty good salary in non-FAANGs, make a difference, and match your own software values with what you're doing.
I would even argue that by doing so, you're elevating those company, allowing them to then compete a bit more closer to FAANGs comps, and "stealing your talent" away from those less-matching software values, creating what I believe (from my own values) to be a virtuous circle.
Or you can grind at FAANGs, accept stack ranking and elevated salary, play the yearly promotion game and end up with a very nice pile of money. Then clearly do not expect them to change, and I would argue: you do not get to complain unless you are actively trying to change them from the inside
As a startup CTO that has done 15+ years of this, I believe very strongly that your hiring process relfects deeply on the core software belief system you hold on.
That's why bureaucratic/non-engineering organisation will tend to over-emphasize references and tests, big tech will over-emphasize CS40021 style exercises and whiteboarding "shame on you", and the rest of us, other stuff.
My advice for job-seeker: look very deeply why they ask things during the process and you will be able to fairly predict your future there. Make sure it matches you needs and wants.
For the process-builder: are you sure those deeply-held beliefs are filtering what you need or is it filtering what you want...?
ORO Health | Infrastructure as Coder (DevOps?) | Montreal/Canada | Full-Time | FLEXIBLE (=~REMOTE but EST tz compatible + Canada)
In 2018, Canada, two dermatologists and the business analyst brother decided there had to be a better way to care for patients and thus founded DermaGO.ca : the first virtual private dermatology clinic in Canada.
Since the launch, other clinics and health professionals expressed interest in the concept and wanted a medicine platform of their own.
With COVID and seeing no one offering better, we decided it was time to rebirth DermaGO into a white-labeled, highly secure, patient-and-doctor friendly platform that empowers all health practioners to create their own virtual clinic with no coding or design skills and provide asynchronous interaction-efficient high-quality care.
Team: currently composed of 4 Software Engineers and 2 Data Scientists, the CTO (me) a COO and a lot of advisors and excellent contractors (ux, acquisition, marketing and so on) and we’re adding more!
A lot is happening for us that I can’t really talk about, but you get the hint :-) And yes, business-wise US is on the radar, so is the world
I fell in love with IaC and particularly Pulumi (I’m always ok to change my mind though, come convince me). Since I’m a programmer at heart that has many many years of managing servers, then clusters, the openstack clusters, then clouds, and had to be the first DevOps for my nascent team, it was the obvious choice to me.
If you never used Pulumi but you ARE a Software Crafter and you know your stuff around Tier1 clouds, containers, SSL, compliance, SecOps and/or you dabbled into Terraform, Ansible or any form of GitOps, we should talk!
DISCLAIMER: We’re looking for talent, but we don’t have the admin nor the bandwidth to manage more than around Montreal right now plus-minus 3 hours. We do not require onsite at all though and never will.
WHAT? CANADA? If you are not in Canada but fit the profile and want to consider a country and a region with universal healthcare, lots of sun *and snow*, a bit more taxes but with perks (some good, some bad :-p), the French joie de vivre (aka obsession for Wine and Cheese) wrapped into the Canadian niceties and pragmatism, we’re open to help you emigrate (if you’re eligible...)
MONTREAL? DO I NEED TO SPEAK FRENCH? No you don’t. Stop spreading these falsehoods Torontonians!
P.S. : We know our corporate website is crap rn...we’re not focused on it rn :-)
Oh the longing and despair of missing Docker Swarm...
It was missing so little...it was so well done and simple, elegant.
Docker Swarm is now the betacam of container orchestration solution.
hopefuly all these layers (kube-> custom kube -> OA*) will soon converge and fold themselves into something grandiose, efficient and simple.
How eager I am to be there :-)
After 14 years of trying and helping teams experiment, repeating what other have said, here is what we’re doing nowadays:
- don’t mix up Agile with Scrum...
- see Agile as aspirational (aka read an try very hard to go back to the manifesto to clear the clutter)
- see Scrum and XP as tools
- prefer XP to Scrum : yes, it’s better to have good software in the middle of a shitty process than a good process around a shitty software. believe me, good software, even in nightmarish organization can bring joy. don’t be the opposite. :-)
- be concerned about the internal well oiling of the team first and the the product: same than with the process, a good team can course-correct a bad product decision or a user backslash (to a point), the opposite is way harder...imaging trying to keep your users telling them your product is superb, it’s just that the software works half of the time...
For the’code part’
XP if you can/know, or just start with automation (basic ci/cd or cr, tests).
Then raise collaboration by making it easier to ‘code together’, agree on ‘code expectations’ and communications expectations whatever that means for your lot.
THEN everybody should approach their ‘quality standard threshold’. The way is just up from there: code coverage, TDD/BDD, code review, IaC, you’re already pretty ‘software agile’ at that point, but like a circus artist, reach for always more agile
Next the ‘product part’:
That’s where most Scrum consultant will hammer you with the dailys, the demos, the ceremonies and all.
Back to the manifesto.
Learn what your people like, what and when it makes them productive. Make it weird, unwieldy but a perfect-fit for you all.
If a consultant looked at it, it should say ‘oh, ok, that’s a weird way to do it, but I guess it could work’.
To put my money where my mouth is, here is what we do
(but it’s full of our remote, bilingual, socially multi-diverse quirks).
We start and end at a demo to our C-level and business ‘patron’.
Just after the ‘last one’, we pick what we will try to demo next time.
We talk about the value of it.
To whom in our demo audience/user it should evoke excitement. What would be ‘minimum’ otherwise we dont show up. What would be ‘nice’ and what would be mind-blowing.
We all agree what a user should see. We settle on it for the next weeks (yes, no prefixed date).
In general there’s one or two ‘big things’ that would constitute ‘the meat’, we create one/two sufficiently descriptive stories with personas that should match what we discussed for the demo and Condition of Success in JIRA and put it as In Progress. Everything else, except production issues, is considered unimportant and optional. If one of us has time during build or waiting for a review, we tackle the ‘little things’.
The PO/Business DoppleGanger goes get what we need to do all that (wireframe, design, translation, legal wording, marketing spiel,...). He/She works directly with the devs that need it.
We meet every Thu and Fri for 5/10 min (usualy, max 30) entirely to make sure sub-groups or individuals are not missing on what other will be doing and profit from it.
We talk about what we’re working on next not the past (the past is done, stop wasting time talking about it!!! :-)). No task, no story bs, no past ‘blocker’ discussion lingering. If people want to track their stuff in github issues or JIRA, they do it on their own. But they better make sure it’s tidy and up to date cause we do not accept messy backlogs.
In between those ‘bi-weeklies’ if someone in the team need to discuss anything or are blocked, they shout on Slack and wait. If it’s an emergency, they send a mean Giphy. If they really need someone, they DM a lead. and so on. People own what/how/when they do 200% up until we approach the end of the 2 week threshold.
Then it’s about all that we achieved. The big question is asked ‘are we ready to demo’? If a majority don’t think we have enough to show, we wait another week and ask the same question. Then week 4, same. At that point we need to have a freaking good reason not to be showing something after 4 weeks. Even if it’s minimal. Even if it’s a bunch of HTTP calls and some JSON.
And we cycle.
In summary:
- 2 meeting of max 30 min (you can drop of after that)
- lots of behind the scene ‘ad-hoc’ interactions per need (that respect a ‘rule of engagement for collaboration’ the team agreed on, btw)
- 1 demo, tailor-made to the actual delivered value by the team (not the dreamt one) every 2, 3 or 4 weeks
Practice wise: IaC all the way (tks Pulumi and Google Cloud team), CI/CD (with real automated delivery not CR), code-review using PR and on-demand env, fully diamond-shaped code coverage, dependabots and automated CodeSec audits, conventional commits with semantic versioning, and we’re just starting.
-> No planning (except the 40 min discussing the next demo just after the current one).
-> No poker estimate. In fact no estimates.
-> No backlog burn downs and cycle time and resolution time...
-> No WIP (technically, yes, this is Scrumban-ish with a WIP of 2...).
We do one quarterly product vision discussion with everybody that feeds team
growth and high level
product roadmap (no precise estimates, in terms of Q or 2 month span).
I was not suggesting it was, I was talking about expression of sexuality, both in the construct of the self and in society, that was a different part of my questioning. To be precise, it’s non-applicability in the case of asexual people, but I simplified to make my point to say it is extremely diverse and complicated and these studies are really not helping (I believe) by using a very large hammer to nail a multi-dimensional non-euclidian nail.
Appreciate the correction on the grammar though and I knew that resource already but it’s always helpful to reread :-)
And here lies the problems of finding causation not correlation:
- gay is not binary neither through time (people do evolve both way while getting old) neither through ‘space’ (some people are half/half, some people have some preference for love and others for sex, and so on)
- genes are not expressed linearly, and one slight expression in the womb can mean something big, or nothing or maybe something?
- social pressure about sexuality start early even though we may get better at avoiding some: blue for boys, pink for girls, boys do sports, blablabla and so on
- internal development and expression of sexuality does not happen at the same pace and at the same amplitude for everybody (some people really are asexual their whole life) and of course the familly, sister/brotherhood, socio-economical environment influence it too
So in these studies of sexuality and even worse, with the metastudies, I’m always left with the feeling that the hypothesis tested by it was broken from the start. What was the question they were trying to answer?
« Is it biologically complicated? » Ok yes.
« Do we have the tool to even make the distinction between a weak correlation due to the sample bias? » Can’t see how in this study.
What am I missing?
Some of the thread can be a bit depressing, so I want to try to cheer it up a bit by enpowering us :-)
I’ve been building tech hiring processes for a bit now, and here is one far-fetched corollary of Conway’s law I believe in: tech hiring processes reflect the value and internal behaviour of companies.
So pick the process you get recruited by wisely.
You have to go through a whole slew of leetcode questions and double-indirection array inverting tricky loops to get a foot in? Expect the same mindset to apply to mentoring, promotion and getting any big thing done.
At the opposite side of the spectrum: if you’re hired no question asked with a 3to5 letter language in your CV and blabbing about having done some HTML at some point, expect some very fuzzy internal politics and decision making flow...
Here is the thing though: in most countries I recruit in, tech people are in demand.
Pick the process that reflect the type of company you want to work in.
Maybe there’s a tech job crisis I don’t know about, but we, as recruiters and recruitee, dont have to accept this state of affairs.
If people stop applying to some type of interview, or gently refuse to participate in the p*ssing-contest part of the flow (pun intended), company will adapt ...or die.
Tell them, no sorry, you won’t be doing whiteboard-coding with comma validation.
And if mediocre candidate learn rote leet-answers and spit them out to go and crash down BigCompanyX every 2-weeks, I can assure you the the company will soon learn and change (Google did, I believe MS did too). Or go bankrupt. Or outsource to a more sound-minded company.
1- I’m not sure how to pronounce it (maybe it s just me), ‘j’ has a lot of depth consonent-wise (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant)
2- what’s the story behind it (strong believer in the importance of symbols and what they attach to)
3- what is it supposed to make
me think of? A pidgeon? So it’s everywhere and defecate randomly on people?
I must also postface: I understand it’s a spanish word meant to evoke a bird (what for?) and maybe I’m the only one that believes that simple
evocative name change anything, but hey, here you are in that thread :-p
You can plug the ‘waste water outlet’ where you see fit. We use our washer’s, which in our city, is the waste water system, thats goes into the waste water recycling plant which doesnt mix with the ‘clean water’ cycle.
In any case, it is WAY more filtering that if we were using classical litter granule that would be then send to a landfill where those same bacterias and viruses would fest and infiltrate the soil.
It is an interesting debate to have though. It probably depends how your waste water is processed.
I don’t know much about LitterRobor, but I must say, as an expert in cats (yup, don’t ask), that if you have the money and the room (best place is in the laundry room or next to your washing machine): CatGenie is the way to go...(https://www.catgenie.com/)
I’m not affiliated or involved in any way, it’s just an amazing product, from what looks like a great company, that has not-as-good SEO skills and (I would guess) is enjoying success enough that they dont need to be so agressive.
In any case, it’s a cat-owning disruptive item if you make it work for your cat: as any robot litter, it takes some training.
I litteraly don’t change the litter ever. I add more of their recycled washable granules once a year and, around every 4 months, one box of the product that washes them.
It wasn’t talked in any of the threads, so I couldn’t resist sharing.
Maybe our household and cats are an exception and lots of other people had a lot of problem with it. Or maybe people just don’t know how amazing this thing is :-)
I’m rooting for the latter.
In our home, it clearly succeed in wiping what the article start with as the big ticket item: the smell.
For the rest of the blog post, I do believe there’s solution but they all depends on the cat :-)
We have more problem with the air of our small dog, than with our persian-hairy cat...(and thanks robot vacuum cleaners!)
You can have pretty good salary in non-FAANGs, make a difference, and match your own software values with what you're doing.
I would even argue that by doing so, you're elevating those company, allowing them to then compete a bit more closer to FAANGs comps, and "stealing your talent" away from those less-matching software values, creating what I believe (from my own values) to be a virtuous circle.
Or you can grind at FAANGs, accept stack ranking and elevated salary, play the yearly promotion game and end up with a very nice pile of money. Then clearly do not expect them to change, and I would argue: you do not get to complain unless you are actively trying to change them from the inside