tenpoundhammer

Funny story, while working for a large company in 2012, that may or may not have written this article. I followed these exact steps on the advice (via podcast) of Merlin Mann who talked about how a sane person gets a raise and keeps their dignity and job.

I didn't get the raise.

Two months later I took a better paying job at a different company. Upon putting in my two weeks notice, the management came to me and asked "Why didn't you bring a competing offer, we would have given you a raise if you did?" and then offered to give me a raise in order to stay on. They also said it was common in the industry.

I was happy to leave after this. I wouldn't change anything I did, leaving was the best thing I've ever done for my career.

If you feel like you are providing more value than your employer is paying you for and they won't give you a raise. Then apply at other companies and ask for the rate you want. If you are worth what you think you're worth you will get a job offer close to that rate, otherwise you won't and you'll learn the value that the market places on your skills.

One point I’d like to add which a lot of people disagree with is that we should all focus on writing simple and easy to understand code. Enigineers shouldn’t worry too much about optimizing code unles there is a good reason to do so.

I’d say about 1% of my code has ever required me to return and optimize it.(I usually write apis that are utilized by end user apis). Most of the time my code is more than fast enough and user concerns are more around bugs related to requirements.

In the few cases I have had to optimize its usually been a super obvious problem. For instance there was a Scala API that looped over a list of lists and called the Scala built in find function. That function is linear and incredibly slow I just converted the first list into a hashmap took a call that took 30 seconds to under 3 seconds still slow but order of magnitudes faster. It’s usually been silly stuff like that.

All of this of course depends on the domain you are working in some applications require you to squeeze out every millisecond in which case most of this won’t apply to you.

Student loans are the stupidest form of loans. Do people need a college education? Absolutely. What's the best way to provide it? I have no idea.

Here's why student loans are dumb.

1. They are practically guaranteed to anyone who signs regardless of their future ability to pay it back.

2. The majority of people getting them are children and have are terrible at perceiving future outcomes. Ask any 18-year-old starting college if they will make more money than average after graduating, most will say yes.

3.College drop out rates are high. This site says 56% https://www.collegeatlas.org/college-dropout.html . Taking out a loan to help you make more money and then not making more money puts you at higher risk not to pay back.

4. Relatively speaking all majors are valued at the same cost within an institution. If I get a bachelors degree in computer science I pay the same tuition and costs as someone who gets a bachelors degree in ancient history, even though our potential earnings are vastly different.

The entire student loan and college education market is a mess. I suspect this is a sign that college should be a public good or has been messed with by folks that think it should be.

This article brings up a common theme, people don't want to work 40 hour weeks. I see nothing wrong with that sentiment, but I also don't see any wrong with a 40 or 60 hour work week.

Every person on this planet needs to decide how they want to spend their time and the quality of life they want to have. If you want to work fewer hours you will have less money. It's pretty simple.

If you want to do that good for you.

I don't think it's a coincidence that these are democratically dominated cities who heavily favor regulations. Portland in particular has been trying hard to wave or temporarily relax many of it's regulations in order to deliver more housing, but a more sustainable solution would be to permanently end some of the less useful regulations. The irony of the situation though is that the heavy regulations are part of the reason why these cities are so desirable because certain regulations make it a nicer city. It's hard to strike a balance on regulations.

Appnexus is a good competitor to google ads. It provides many of the same features that google ads offers. http://appnexus.com

"I know there are tons of programmers churning out low-quality code."

People repeat this kind of sentiment all the time but is there anything to back it up? I know we've all run into to random bits of code we considered "low quality". But that can often be attributed to code that was written a very long time ago when programming practices were much different. At the time it was written it was likely high-quality code. It's like saying that a Gallbladder removal surgery from 20 years ago was "low quality" because it wasn't done orthoscopically, that technology was barely used at the time.

I'm starting to think that "tons of low-quality coders" is an industry myth to explain a variety of unrelated phenomena. The modern-day equivalent of the boogeyman. But let me know if I'm wrong.

I'm sure this comment will get buried because I'm so late to the thread but oh well.

"Later, the guilty programmer thanked the lead developer for protecting him. He said: “I knew I shouldn’t have reused that code, but we were in a rush.” She smiled at him and told him not to worry about it."

This quote describes the real issue. Uncle bob is equating software development as some kind of unified profession and making apples to apple comparisons for all software projects. But software development is not like being a civil engineer or being a doctor. Writing software is totally different from heart surgery or bridge building.

Software development is applied differently to all projects and all projects having varying needs about quality and cost. If you are building a bridge it there is a high standard of quality every time. If you take a shortcut you may kill people, or more likely never pass inspection.

In software sometimes you could kill someone but far more often the quality of the software may not matter. There are times when it makes sense to cut corners, there are times when it makes sense to do a quick hack, there are times your boss makes the decision to something the worst way possible and fix it later, and sometimes that's ok. There are other times when it's not ok.

Every person on earth has an ethical obligation to not bring physical harm to others and should avoid doing so even at the cost of employment. But no one has an ethical obligation to write "good" code just for the sake of it. There are times when the best thing for everyone is writing software badly.

Maybe software engineers should have some widely disseminated ethical principles, but they have to be realistic and take into account the entire spectrum of software development. We have different ethical standards depending on the type of project we are working on. If you are a developer working on software for Airline Autopilot you have different ethical obligations from a developer working on Angry Birds 10.

I probably could have said it better, the point I attempted to make was that without the support network most of that other stuff doesn't help. I have seen many people get clean, get their life back on track, and then a disaster happens like they lose their job or get kicked out because of a break-up and there is no one to help them. This leads them right back to drugs and other destructive behaviors. One of the most important privileges of being wealthy is that you almost always have a built-in safety net whether that's friends or family. If I lost my job and all my wealth today, there are a dozen people that would welcome me into their home. That's something a lot of people have and take for granted.

I'm a foster parent to 3 kids and have 4 of my own. In my opinion, the primary problem with poverty is that everyone wants to solve it with money. Poverty can't be solved by throwing money at it, children in poverty need a stable environment and loving adults to help them grow and become productive members of society. Adults in poverty often need intensive counseling, psychiatry, substance abuse therapy, and a support network of caring individuals. Poverty in the united states will only be conquered by loving individuals sacrificing their own time and interests to help others.

I've worked for 2 fortune 500 companies that have brought in multiple low payed H1-b visas instead of hiring at the standard US rate. As an engineer I was part of the hiring process. All of the candidates at both places ended up being far less qualified than Wipro claimed and did a terrible job.

So it definitely happens, I'd say it happens a lot.

There are also great H1-b hires like the one I'm working with right now. He is incredibly skilled. He also cant work for another company unless he reapplies so he's stuck.

That's why I posted it, I'm trying to get the context. Waffle has some great programming related blog posts.

There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.

So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.

Gimme your specs, I'm curious to know what meeting infrastructure you're using. I can start a vidyo meeting in about 15 seconds.

But it's important to remember that UX is only about a quarter of the total experience.

If you are only looking for UX vidyo has a decent product, Microsoft's latest enterprise offering is good, HPs halo now owned by polycom is good, polycom has some cutting edge stuff that is good but very expensive.

I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up exponentially. We found that most people want quality in the 95th percentile but want to pay for the 70th percentile... There will need to be some serious cost reductions, integrations, and improvements on the hardware and video encoding side before enterprise video conferencing meets the quality and price expectations that customers want.

Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.

Well said, this is the comment of the year.

Career insight: If your boss isn't invested in your success you won't succeed.

I've been programming professionally for the last 6 or so years, I've been in 4 teams across 3 companies. The reason this question generates so many answers with such great diversity is that the answer really depends on where you work and what you consider success to be.

At the first company, a good software engineer was a person who could effectively work inside of the team and get through the requirements for code review in a timely manner. While working at another job a good programmer was someone who could figure out the requirements by themselves and have a working product to show the boss in a timely manner. At my current a good software developer is someone who has a strong grasp of their language of choice, can deliver features to a Product Owner, and who can grab a project by the horns and lead from an architectural or design perspective.

None of these answers are wrong, they are just reflections of the engineering cultures they are born from.

Based on my experience a good programmer is someone that understands what success means in the culture they are currently in and can execute on that. Long term a good programmer is someone that continues to learn popular skills, products, frameworks, tools and can continue to follow the path that best suits them, whether that be a startup, large corp, freelance, or entrepreneurship.

It's all about opening doors for yourself to walk through.

Hey Joe, I also work from home full time but as a backend systems developer. I was not trying to highlight that it would be impossible for someone with hardware to work from home, simply that in some cases it's not feasible or doesn't make sense ofr the business.

Wow, don't know where to begin... 1. this article seems to be aimed at startups, but the author then goes on to complain about having to work 8-5 ( good hours for a startup). 2. "Let the bad actors fail" I've met very few people who are actually trying to game the system, the vast majority of people perceived as "Bad actors" need managements help to align their goals and values with that of the business. 3. The title implies this is an issue of trust, where as it seems that it's more about preference and fit. Some software engineering problems lend themselves more to an in-person environment than not. For instance, when I was working on an oil sensing project, All I did was write software but I had to have the hardware close for testing my software. They sure aren't going to let me drag 20k worth of equipment home in my honda. 4. ROWE, how do you measure the output of knowledge workers especially programmers? If anyone figures it out write a book you will make a bajillion dollars.

Page views would be helpful, how often they are updated, topics covered, and maybe even voting.

This article is light on details and appears to be extrapolating a few specific cases of "bio-hacking" into a silicon valley wide trend, which then gets generalized to technologists. I bet the number of people actually doing the kind of experimenting mentioned in the piece is very low.

I consider it normal to not work on side projects. How many other industries consider it normal to work 40 - 50 hours a week and then your "free" time working on other projects? Everyone I know clocks out and does something completely unrelated to their work in the off hours.

With the current ad networks, it's easy to have well-tailored ad's, but most publishers choose not to do so in order to increase the revenue on their inventory.

In my experience it's a fun problem to solve. An engineer gets to design complex architectural solutions, acquire hardware, work with various database solutions, and generally work on larger problem domain than the problems you mentioned. Uptime, performance, and memory are all very important problems but you rarely get to venture outside of the current code base when solving those problems.

I'm sorry you have to deal with being harassed and find your self in an uncomfortable environment daily. I have dealt with this kind of behavior in the past working for several large companies, and as a quiet person that likes to keep to myself I have always had problems dealing with power dynamics. You have a few options.

1. Find a new Job then quit. This may sound like hard advice to take, but if you are in a position and you feel like the structure of the company creates an environment were a person being victimized has no recourse, do you really want to work there anyway? It's always hard to quit a job but finding a new job first will make it much easier, and it will be easier to find a new job now that you are currently employed and have experience. ( I've done this )

2. Find a new job and then talk to HR. If HR does not act to stop the harassment then you can threaten to quit. If you come under retaliation then you can quit. Be sure you have an actual job offer before you threaten to quit, employers will often taken you up on that threat.

3. Talk to the person in a personal way. Explain that you want to be friends and explain how their actions are negatively impacting you. I've found that many people play power dynamics games in an unconscious/impersonal way. They either don't know that they are doing anything to distress you or largely consider it "part of the game". In any case when rational people are faced with the consequences of their actions they often change their behavior.

Good luck and may God bless you.

I have seen numerous versions of the "New Resume" in the last ten years or so. It's really hard to replace something universal that everyone understands, even if it's antiquated. I doubt this will fair much better.

Sure it's specific to music but the thought technology and ideology around it could be exported to other things. The hand labeling sucks though.