88 karma · joined May 11, 2018
DXC, Accenture, Capgemini, Indra, etc...they are all the same.
It´s buying what doesn´t add much value/differentiation to focus on the things that are important to the company.
Startups and mid or small sized niche companies are a little more human. But here you tend to get long working hours and more stress, plus sometimes they are also "vertical".
I would like to know the source of this claim. I guess someone did an study on this...
If you have the chance to win it big doing something you love you will find the time. If you have less of a chance or you don´t like it that much you won´t be able to find that much time. If what you have to do is something out of obligation or you don´t care at all you will procrastinate.
And it´s fine. It´s your inner compass trying to tell you that maybe this is not for you/wasted effort.
In the short term the best strategy for procrastination is to put your pants on and do it. In the long term is making sense about why you are doing what you do and evaluating if it brings value to your life or not.
Please answer: do you think aerospace, embedded and relational DB engines is dated work that has not evolved?
To avoid ageism while being an IC you need to find a job in a niche where the domain is CS and/or ENG based (as in embedded, aerospace, or even relational database engines) and these jobs are far and in between.
Beware: jobs like Facebook seem to be CS based but they aren´t (that´s why their programmer average age is 27). The CS problems they have are due to arbitrary complexity and they are short term. Companies like these are media companies.
A-Management.
B-Consulting.
C-Stagnation.
D-Endure a string of jobs where they are mobbed because they are seen as a threat until they retire from the industry.
In my current project (big co.) we have a technical PM, a non-technical PM, a non programmer dev lead, an scrum master and a lead business analyst, all involved in managing the work of a team of 2 and a half (a sr ba/qa guy, a part-time ssr dev and me). Waste work is probably in the 90%.
In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.
In the case of boeing/uber the problem is the regulators are getting more and more relaxed and/or corrupt.
In tech companies the path is from dev to management. Here the BAs and the like are seen as cogs.
But it´s always from individual contributor to middle manager. From there and up the class system seems to be at work as it has always been.
So, instead of trying to get the definite code from the get go, start with a simple design (yagni and kiss) and evolve from that.
But there is no silver bullet. You can get faster but not by orders of magnitude. Quality code takes time.
Personally, I go after the feeling I had when I studied programming in the 90s. Simple algorithms that manipulate strings, ints, etc. and no so much after abstraction and composition.
The belief in social-justice oriented companies, inclusion oriented-companies, etc while they themselves are working in the middle of a contractor/temp worker caste hell, with plenty of harassments (of any type), mobbing and the like.
In my opinion you should cool down as much as you can and then go and talk with the founders, but without taking anything personally.
Happiness is about being able to live in the present moment and share your life with the people that you love. Of course a minimum of wealth, health, etc. is needed and that minimum could be quite an effort to reach depending on where you start with.
I´ve never met a happy unloved person no matter how rich or powerful.
Of course general problem solving ability is still valuable but it is more difficult to assess than a candidate´s experience in some tech stack.
So, for the general programming market the tech stack is the defining factor. The only way you can navigate between jobs with different tech stacks is by having an insider that guarantees the hiring manager that you have what it takes to learn the new tech stack without trouble, or by finding some company which is desperate enough to take the risk.
You can label yourself what you want.
Most code is LOB apps and social media apps churned by software factories and internal IS/IT areas. In these kind of projects coding is a rite of passage before becoming a team leader or a project manager, so most devs won´t invest much in their coding skills. As a result the average code tends to be badly decomposed procedural code over a procedural-like class hierarchy and devs just follow the fads because this is what gets them jobs.
Adding FP to this formula could prove really wrong for those in charge of projects. Better to be conservative and use Java, C#, Python or even nodejs/JavaScript as they allow to churn the same procedural code of ever just in different clothes.