redleader9345

I've seen companies go on hiring sprees just prior to being acquired, which I don't fully understand. I guess the company tries to puff itself up to fetch a larger asking price? Guessing base cost factors in to sale price.

It's shitty, cuz their playing with people's lives. As soon as the acquiring company takes over, their like "what's with all these unnecessary people?"

Pushing back, standing up for yourself, not being a doormat. All this is key to being treated with respect. The problem is that today, we've got a perfect storm. Developers do tend to be more naturally non-confrontational. Combine this with an abundance of opportunities, and developers will just leave rather than confront and push back.

Sometimes it's a matter of hygiene and humane working conditions. You might be surprised at the amount of codebases that are just the equivalent of working in filth.

If your workspace has shit smeared on the walls, you don't ask if you can clean it up. You just do it.

The quote from this article that really hit home for me, was this:

"Coding is generally a team sport. If you’re hacking away on your own then you can do what you want, but when we’re working with a team then we’ve got to discuss our ideas."

My current job has this quasi-team, where we all work from the same backlog, with very little coordination, collaboration, or communication. Everyone just pulls a ticket and runs with it in whatever direction they desire.

I can't stand it. When I raise the issue with my manager, it's just not registering. The turnover and retention is poor, so there are a bunch of new team members, and few people with tenure (like a single dev). The prevailing attitude is that if you reach out to collaborate with someone on your ticket, you're not only wasting the other person's time, but you yourself are incompetent. Because, why can't you just crush tickets all day every day without bothering anyone?

It's silly.

The folks in charge who don't want the foot soldiers to have any agency at all, they call it Shadow IT

Well said. Typically in year two your job has more than doubled in the workload and responsibility that you're asked to carry.

Which makes the line chart even worse. Pay is flat but the demands of the job are not.

Sounds like Darwin award material. But seriously, those who can't survive the sea change of digital onslaught are eliminated from gene pool. Do the evolution.

Correct. What's best for the long term health of the business is not taken into consideration. The Board of Directors and the CEO only care about this quarter and this year, why would the foot soldiers take a long view?

As an engineer, the thought process goes: I can use the same old tried and true patterns that will just get the job done. That would be safe and comfortable, but it won't add anything to my skillset/resume.

Or we could try out this sexy new tech that the internet is buzzing about, it will make my job more interesting, and better position me to move onto my next job. Or at least give me more options.

It's essentially the principal-agent problem. And by the way, I don't blame developers for taking this position.

I wonder how much wfh and distributed teams change this dynamic. I totally get what you're saying with the whole experience of staying in the office after dark, ordering pizza, and just working through a problem, whatever it takes.

I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.

"larger group of developers" is the phrase that caught my attention. Humans don't scale well. This is where microservices do become attractive. This service is owned by a small team, and that team makes these types of judgements. It may be very different from how other service is owned and maintained, and that's ok.

Just commentary on the engineer turned manager narrative. Please forgive if it is out of place. Should I delete it?

Warning ... cynical, pessimistic viewpoint coming.

Here is a pattern that I've observed over a few jobs that I've held as a developer at different companies. Wondering if anyone has any similar experience.

The first line manager (only manages individual contributors) exhibits these characteristics.

1.)He used to be a coder, but that was a long time ago. SQL hasn't changed, so that's the bit he's drawn to when he feels like he needs to roll up his sleeves and contribute.

2.)He has some form of attention deficit, demonstrated by the fact that he can't hold down a conversation really well. Especially if it gets technical.

3.)He really overplays the busy body persona. Always checking phone, always late for a meeting.

4.)He's really insecure in his position within the company, always fearful that he's going to be cut loose. This is extremely amplified when he gets a new manager himself.

5.)He has very little influence over direction. He's really just a proxy mouthpiece for higher level management. And he loves to have status update meetings where he informs the team of all the important updates he received in the big important meeting he attended with other big important people.

6.)Instead of being someone who is respected by the team, he becomes more of someone you have sympathy for.

7.)You wonder why he never asks the real questions, like "are you happy with your role?". And you realize it's because he doesn't really want to hear the answer. He couldn't really do anything about it anyway. See point #5.

8.) He's way too preoccupied worrying about his own safety to nurture the team.

9.) As a developer, you have the safety net of knowing that in the worst case scenario (terminated) you could find another job fairly quickly with pay parody. As a manager, you don't have that comfort blanket. So you cling on to your current job no matter how badly you are abused. And people lose more respect for you because you look pathetic without a backbone.

10.) As a cynical developer in his 40's, you realize that you don't observe many 50+ developers in the wild, and you bemoan the idea that you're going to have to suck it up and play manager eventually.

Anxiety and existential crisis is built into the tech career trajectory, and I feel like the only winning strategy is to be ok with moving backward income wise at various points in your timeline.

Agreed. The market for super snappy user experience seems to be underserved. Maybe not enough demand? Or maybe a symptom of the "everything is free and paid for with advertising" model we have today.

I agree. I've used Octopus to automate deployments of internal LOB crud apps in the insurance space for a few years now.

My questions is, is it still aimed at .NET? I know it leans on Nuget as the package repo. But have they broadened to embrace deployment of other tech stacks?

Is Octopus considered best in class for what it does? Who are the primary competitors? Does Azure DevOps spell the end for Octopus?

Privacy deprivation. It's cruel.