Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer
Ha! Yeah, I worked on a really cool project for a charity a few years ago: "How many hours is this going to cost us this week, you were working like a warrior?" "35"
Lawyers must hate their work.
A friend of mine is a criminal defence lawyer. I get the impression he really enjoys his work – he gets to meet a lot of people he never normally would (bikie gang members, terrorists, murderers, drug dealers, drug addicts, etc) – and he feels safe in doing so (he tells me that defendants trying to harm their own lawyers is quite rare, rare enough that he isn't worried about it).
Once, at a work function (previous employer), I met one of the lawyers from the contracts department. He was telling me how he used to live in a rural area doing agricultural real estate transactions, now he had moved to the big city to do in-house contracts review for a multinational software company. He was a "top performer" (indeed, this was a function to reward people who'd been nominated as "top performers" by their management)–but he didn't give me the impression he really loved what he did, more that he was just doing it to support his family.
I would agree here, on the condition of rehabilitation.
Obviously our "justice system", isn't.
Edit: Speaking of the US above, no experience or knowledge about other countries systems. It appears I've found a new gap in my knowledge, anyone have a good intro to how courts work in their country?
The US inherited the basics of its legal system from that of England. Australia did too, along with many other countries. So at a very high level, the basics are the same. But, there has been a lot of divergent evolution, so as we drill down into the details lots of differences come up.
I think one huge difference is not really legal but social – Australia has always been a less violent society, with less violent crime and less social conflict than the US has, which reduces political pressure for punitiveness in the legal system. On a per capita basis, the US homicide rate is 5 times that of Australia, and while these numbers go up and down, I think it has been consistently significantly higher than Australia's, for many decades.
There is no such thing as plea bargaining (which is considered a perversion of justice) or bail (which is considered to be jailing the poor). People are rarely jailed pending trial (unless their place of residence cannot be established, or they're considered a flight risk - a very high bar to pass). There's no "perp walk" or handcuffs or any of that humiliation stuff (unless you actually ARE being a pain). After the verdict, you're usually given a month or two to tie up your affairs outside before being ordered by mail to report to prison.
The relationship between lawyers is one of cooperation (albeit with the agenda of pushing towards their point of view). The purpose of the court proceedings is to get to the truth of the matter. There are no theatrics, no grand speeches, no "chewbacca" defense. Withholding evidence or deliberately hampering the other side is severely frowned upon. "Winning" the case is not the point; representing your side well is. Lawyers have no election aspirations, and thus no public to impress with their prosecutorial prowess. One cannot become a judge without years of training and a degree (there's no such thing as elected judges).
The result is a very calm, organized court proceeding, because everyone involved knows the law and is committed to it. You can't bamboozle with doublespeak, shady arguments or unproven methods because there's no "man on the street" juror to deceive; only the judges, who are trained to know better.
Anyone can sit in on a proceeding (I've done so). There's very little ceremony, and often it's just a bunch of people sitting around conference tables in a small room.
you get the satisfaction of exploiting the system, bending the rules to your advantage, making the impossible work. and when you’re good at your job, you get paid well ( lawyer by many more times of course )
case n point: defending OJ
If I start a meeting with a consulting software engineer and spend the first 5 minutes making small talk, that's fine, but my company is gonna pay for that time. The same thing is true for lawyers.
From my point of view as both a programmer and an employer, this is the cleanest way to make sure knowledge transfers between short-term and long-term team members.
Why the disdain? (If I interpreted correctly.)
However, it may be a time-sink for the more experienced person, who could be using their limited time on more critical things.
That's why newbies get assigned a mentor, with whom they can pair freely.
But pairing rigidly with the whole team just sucks and is incredibly unproductive.
But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe.
This is true. I have been on both sides of the pairing equation. I am currently on a team that pairs too often and I am annoyed on a daily basis because I could have been utilizing that same time for actual work.
So yes, it's going to be difficult to convince me but feel free to take a stab.
1. You are in the middle of a death march and pairing with a team mate gives both of you the moral fortitude to keep going (and keep your programs relatively correct and relatively secure).
2. You are working on a tedious but difficult task and working with a team mate makes it so that you are less likely to make mistakes despite the tedium (as well as gives you the moral fortitude to continue with the task).
3. You are working on a difficult problem and you have a team mate that you can truly collaborate with to find solutions neither of you would have found on your own. (The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.)
In any of these cases, it is important to pair with someone compatible with you. And you can build compatibility over time.
I specifically want to talk about - The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.
Do you think they really produced all they did by pairing together? In my experience, the best things were produced by independent thinking, collaborating on experiments and trusting each others decisions. Not by actual pairing on the screen together.
For Dean-Ghemawat, I think they produced many great things by pairing on the same screen together. They also obviously did good work independently of each other.
I vocalize a lot (in my head) during the development process, and I've noticed that when I have to engage with another person during this time I start vocalizing audibly, which is where the problems start. The other person gets confused because I'm speaking the snippets and half-ideas that are passing through my mind at the moment (and the internal jargon I've developed over the decades), and it degenerates into long sequences of explaining my every move, most of which would have been quickly dismissed internally had I not had to stop to explain them.
Or they misunderstand the path I'm taking for something else that won't work and interrupt me, and then I have to stop to explain first that it's not what they think (which is hard), and then explain the path I'm actually going down (harder), and why I think it's a good idea (hardest). It's like having a backseat driver, and just as infuriating.
Every interruption shatters parts of the intricate glass tendrils that comprise the complex model in my mind, and then I have to rebuild them again before I can continue thinking. The creative process gets completely disrupted and there's zero chance of flow. This is fine if I'm teaching someone since the material is well known and there's no creativity required. But during actual work it's a productivity black hole. Death by a thousand cuts.
In what organisation do 25 year olds manage 50 year olds?
I hope to no longer need to work by the time I'm 50, but nobody knows what the future will bring, so I'd certainly like to have the option just in case!
I have encountered technical managers who were not good, for various reasons.
I think having a technical background is always a benefit, HOWEVER, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good manager.
Management is weird in that understanding of the tech side of things doesn't correlate with influence.
It doesn't take a genius to know who is doing the work and who is looking for every excuse to be 'blocked'.
Managers simply know that they can't hire or fire and that calling someone on their bullshit would accomplish nothing, so they say nothing.
Managers are masters of soft power. Soft power is very hard for engineering/techie types to understand, which is why it works so well on them, because they don't even understand the game they're a part of :)
Most developers I know are good at human interactions, some even among the best.
I don't want to be put in that box, and I'm not willing to excuse someone bad at human interactions because they are technical.
Obviously some people are better at human interactions than others, and I'll be happy to adapt, but let's not imply causes.
There are also people who don't know how much they don't know.
The fool is the person not understanding the game they're playing.
Techies who do other people's work are perpetuating the game they despise - they are indeed fools.
Middle managers who perpetuate the game are smart, because it is their job to perpetuate the game. It is not their job to change the rules of the game - that's the job of the techies who can refuse to 'pick up the slack', let targets fail repeatedly and signal to upper management that the game isn't working, forcing them to change the game, which the middle managers will once again perpetuate, because that is their job.
They just harassed some other person into doing it. He was a bit passive aggressive about it on some future calls: "Bob doesn't want to update the spreadsheet, so I will have Alice do it!" Anyway, nice guy, but didn't do any work at all, and he's gone now.
They should not be making technology decisions or specifying how the work gets done. They should trust their reports to not bullshit (and if that trust is broken, those reports should be fired). I think having a technical background can be helpful for these managers, but I don't think it's strictly necessary, and they should be doing essentially zero technical work as a part of their management job.
I've found managers who are like this to be incredibly useful and productive, and a pleasure to work with. Managers who want to get involved in technical decisions just get in the way and cause problems. Unfortunately a lot of newly-promoted former engineers can't let go of the technical work.
Now, they were PAID a lot more than me ...
The first thing they taught me was that it wasn't my job to do the work, because it didn't matter how smart I was, I didn't have almost 30 years experience.
The company's last valuation has it worth over a billion dollars now and they have a few hundred employees. A good chunk of the C suite and VPs are still those same early employees who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are managing former FAANG employees in their 50s.
I've spent a lot of time in startups - including way too many hours in my 20's working on side-hustles (wife was in med school, so it was kind of my thing to do). I've ended up in a situation where my technical skills are strong (but not the best on my team), but my business/startup knowledge is much better so I can help to ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful/valuable outcomes.
We're both at different companies nowadays, but I've been trying to get him started at my current company's team (which I am senior on, but not a lead) for a while now and he's considering it!
I think it prevented the "us vs. them" mentality from creeping in, and I got the impression that most managers were eager to return to production work. There were dedicated managers higher up the ladder, of course.
These people cared about their work a lot, and they enjoyed doing it. Not sure which way the causation goes though...
Edit to add: the rotating managers I'm referring to were doing budgets and performance reviews, not creating business strategies.
I'm contracting with a couple different companies, and one of them... the others on the team range from ... 27-32. So... I've been doing professional/paid development work longer than most of them have been alive, certainly longer than any of them have been adults. The manager(s) I interact with - one just turned 31, and one is... I think 29 or 30.
The older you get the more common this may become.