IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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What version of DOORs do you use? It's honestly not that bad -essentially fancy Excel.
Unfortunately since my team does commercial aerospace programs we live in DOORs. We tried looking at JAMA, but somehow it's worse (at least with how we want to use it). DOORs makes meeting DO178 objectives around requirements and traceability almost an after thought so it's worth it just for that.


With that being said... Getting a bit bored of the whole manager thing.... Unfortunately now I feel like my technical skills have fallen off a bit so Id have to study to pass any sort of BS programming quiz. Ugh.. guess it's keep climbing the ladder
9.6.1 I think

I understand it makes stuff easier but I'm a software engineer and they're making me do what is essentially data entry
 

Deathwing

<Bronze Donator>
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What version of DOORs do you use? It's honestly not that bad -essentially fancy Excel.
Unfortunately since my team does commercial aerospace programs we live in DOORs. We tried looking at JAMA, but somehow it's worse (at least with how we want to use it). DOORs makes meeting DO178 objectives around requirements and traceability almost an after thought so it's worth it just for that.


With that being said... Getting a bit bored of the whole manager thing.... Unfortunately now I feel like my technical skills have fallen off a bit so Id have to study to pass any sort of BS programming quiz. Ugh.. guess it's keep climbing the ladder
I suggest going on some interviews to remind yourself how valuable "management" skills are. I put that in quotes to mean general skills related to programming but aren't directly programming. Organization, testing, managing, etc.

It's *really* easy for the mind to quantify "I'm not learning anything technical, my experience is a waste!", without recognizing that your experience managing programming could be much more valuable. I had this problem too, still have it. I was dissatisfied with promotion to management just months after receiving it because I was barely doing any programming. It took some job hunting and interviewing for some other software management positions to realize how in-demand those positions are and more importantly what you can do with them.

Now, if you want to just plain do some programming, can't help you there.

EDIT: hmm, kinda went off on a tangent there. Sorry if I responded to something that wasn't your concern.
 
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Lenaldo

Golden Knight of the Realm
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Ya . 9.5 is what we use and it's really archaic. If you get a chance to move them to RTC (doors next gen) do it.

Also; the whole team should be working in DOORs. I don't agree with the idea of having a "requirements manager" that does all the doors work. Hardest thing to do is force software developers to think before they write code. If you can get them writing the high and low level requirements, it's much easier to encourage the right behavior. Breaking non requirements based developers of the bad habits is one of the hardest jobs. It's also why I rarely look to hire someone with a lot of experience if it's outside aero or medical. Auto developers are the worst (not their fault.. the oems are so bad at requirements).
 

ShakyJake

<Donor>
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So my job decided to move away from typescript, because they didn't like the constants updates and upgrades. Now we are doing react with a different type of compile check.

oh boy, this should be fun.
Why do they feel the need to upgrade to every release? We've been on Typescript 2.0, I think, for a few months now. Works great. I would not want to use plain ol' JavaScript/ES 6.
 

agripa

Molten Core Raider
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I have been deploying Fortigate firewalls recently. Man some companies networks are so fucked up. I have been working with a senior network engineer at this latest company, that guy is getting paid 120k a year and he has a hard time troubleshooting routes.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
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Why do they feel the need to upgrade to every release? We've been on Typescript 2.0, I think, for a few months now. Works great. I would not want to use plain ol' JavaScript/ES 6.
because they are stupid, I got out voted =(
 

Mist

Eeyore Enthusiast
<Gold Donor>
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I have been deploying Fortigate firewalls recently. Man some companies networks are so fucked up. I have been working with a senior network engineer at this latest company, that guy is getting paid 120k a year and he has a hard time troubleshooting routes.
Welcome to my world.

Supporting Avaya voice telecoms, usually running on Juniper and/or Extreme network gear (since Avaya wouldn't let us sell Cisco products to our customers for the longest time) and Fortigate for firewalls primarily.

Man some companies networks are so fucked up.

I had a customer's "Tier 4 Network Engineer" who didn't understand how NTP worked.

And if you had any idea how shoddy the networks are at 911 answering points...
 

Noble Savage

Kang of Kangz
<Bronze Donator>
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I have been deploying Fortigate firewalls recently. Man some companies networks are so fucked up. I have been working with a senior network engineer at this latest company, that guy is getting paid 120k a year and he has a hard time troubleshooting routes.

I work in public sector.

My Network Engineer who makes about 120k a year didn't know what an IP helper was so I had to get a contractor in to change those when I stood up new DHCP servers. He also didn't know the difference between trunk ports and access ports. I mean he had only been in the job for over a decade so not really fair to expect that high level of knowledge just yet out of him.

My Oracle DBA got the job because she was a secretary for someone and she knew what Access was (not that she ever used Access just knew what it was). Guess how many contractors we have to cover her job. She still has her job of course and is a mean crossword puzzle solver. I really enjoy her monthly emails asking "how do I log in to those servers again?" Because apparently its not worth her time to write down notes, its just easier to waste my time because hell I am not doing anything important.

Alot of IT folks out there, not alot of good ones though.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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Ya . 9.5 is what we use and it's really archaic. If you get a chance to move them to RTC (doors next gen) do it.

Also; the whole team should be working in DOORs. I don't agree with the idea of having a "requirements manager" that does all the doors work. Hardest thing to do is force software developers to think before they write code. If you can get them writing the high and low level requirements, it's much easier to encourage the right behavior. Breaking non requirements based developers of the bad habits is one of the hardest jobs. It's also why I rarely look to hire someone with a lot of experience if it's outside aero or medical. Auto developers are the worst (not their fault.. the oems are so bad at requirements).

Well I'm low man on the totem pole and this is defense so whatever I say holds no water. Couple this with the fact that they're utterly embedded in shitty fucking clear case writing Perl scripts to manage it means this will stay this way for 20 more years. If I could get them to use git I'd be so happy. But then the 40 year old vet that retires in 3 years would never let that pass because he's the clear case gate keeper.

On doors a couple people author stuff but generally the team at large does not. At least on my team.
 

Nija

<Silver Donator>
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I got an interesting request from a client. At one of the places I work (I have two jobs, 30hrs and 20 hrs / week) we provide analytics for a bunch of companies - most of our stuff is gathered via FOIA (freedom of information act) requests, and we analyze the stuff into specific fields and have a great search interface.

Usually, these huge companies approach us and attempt to get us to sell them a continuous access to our data - everything. We turn these requests down, but they are quite frequent.

This other company though - they have a younger guy running development. He approached us and is interested in a Spotify-like model. They want to send us their private documents, and have those indexed by our analysts and stored in an area where they can search just those, or return those private documents mixed in with our normal documents for their users. Like how on Spotify you can have your own songs intermixed with those that they have on their service.

It's a neat project for me, as I'm kind of a database nerd, but it involves a fairly substantial change to how everything works. Luckily, we also do a lot of contract work for companies, and we often work with batches of private data, but we have never built a full blown interface to work on this private data. This request finally gives us an excuse to build that interface, provided I can get all of the checks and balances created to make sure that access is never provided to the wrong people, or that results that shouldn't be returned for a user are accidentally returned.

I've been going back and forth about how much of the "microservice kool-aid" I need to drink to get this project rolling. I already have a nice authentication system built, but I don't have LDAP or AD or anything in place for federation, if I even want to go that route.

I was thinking about having an authentication service that any number of services would poll in a standard fashion. I would then also have a service to return data to the website. (and possibly other things) That way the multiple search interfaces that we have would package up the requests in a standard fashion, include the auth token, and send it to that service. The service would unpack things, validate the token, and send requests on to N number of other-services which would perform the actual query. Right now we use elasticsearch and mariadb, so we'd have interfaces built for those two products, but in theory this could be anything as long as the exchange formats are agreed upon.

I'm going to most likely create stand alone databases for each client that wants to store their data in this fashion, just so that a select * from ... query won't return anything on accident. That puts the strain on the authentication service to make sure we are querying the exact things the user has access to.

Anyways. Rambling at this point. Is there anything super obvious that I'm missing already?
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
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Anyways. Rambling at this point. Is there anything super obvious that I'm missing already?
It all sounds pretty good, especially ES and Maria. Keep your databases compartmentalized 100% and look into just spinning up the searching on maybe something like AWS so it only needs to be live when they need it. You will save a lot of processing power and they still haves access to always being on demand.
 

a_skeleton_03

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