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

ShakyJake

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Even without DI, you get performance and testing benefits by going the second route. Win/win
You're right, and we do where appropriate. In fact I recently added the Moq framework to aid in unit tests. Again, not the topic of my question though.
 

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Trump's Staff
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You're right, and we do where appropriate. In fact I recently added the Moq framework to aid in unit tests. Again, not the topic of my question though.
I already gave you the answer you want, it is better to instanciate once.
 
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Noodleface

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Not even emulators?
Emulators don't exist for our stuff. I'm writing BIOS to a SPI chip on a server board. It's impossible to unit test our code, it has to be running on the target cpu.

I remember a company selling an Intel emulator years ago but the cost was astronomical and a lot of features weren't supported.

Just to come full circle, that memory leak I talked about was caused by someone using method 2 and I changed it to method 1. Saying neither is wrong but prefer 2 when possible.

We aren't calling ours hundreds of times per second thought
 
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TJT

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Out of curiosity what kind of tools do you use to detect memory leaks in such low level hardware development?
 

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Trump's Staff
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Out of curiosity what kind of tools do you use to detect memory leaks in such low level hardware development?
Detecting memory leaks is simple. Locating them is hard.
For detecting you just run lots of things over a long period of time, and check memory routinely.

The last time I did mishandled a stream and left it leaking, the application crashed after 3 days of running on production.
 

Noodleface

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In the greater BIOS we have some tools that only run during development that check things like NULL pointers and a few other things but the main one is memory. When BIOS is going to hand off to the OS we consider BIOS done so we clean up memory, anything left dangling.

We wrote a small application that BIOS launches before OS boot (to do system maintenance), and it actually has its own memory manager that keeps track of everything. All allocs and deallocs go through it, and at the end it checks the memory.

The UEFI / EDK2 API is a bit more robust than just using malloc though anyways.
 

Deathwing

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I told my boss that I have another job offer and that I've accepted it, even have a start date. He wasn't mad, even took the time listen to my gripes. He wanted to know if it was worth his time to counter offer. Out of respect of him as a person, I'm willing to listen to a counter offer but I explicitly asked how do I know I'm not going to end up on some shit list and a priority to replace.

He gave some reasons that were generally not important to my question: should I trust anything he said regarding this?
 
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Noodleface

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I told my boss that I have another job offer and that I've accepted it, even have a start date. He wasn't mad, even took the time listen to my gripes. He wanted to know if it was worth his time to counter offer. Out of respect of him as a person, I'm willing to listen to a counter offer but I explicitly asked how do I know I'm not going to end up on some shit list and a priority to replace.

He gave some reasons that were generally not important to my question: should I trust anything he said regarding this?
You can probably trust him personally, but remember there are higher layers and it's not a cut and dry issue. I would be more concerned with higher ups above his head.

Personal stance is never to take a counter offer unless I felt a very deep personal connection with the company. Any time I've been asked I told them it probably wasn't worth it.

I also feel like once I've made that decision to leave, the deed is done. I also would never be mad if a person came to me and gave me notice. Sad or disappointed maybe, but not mad. My boss at akamai was pretty mad and it turned me off.
 
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Deathwing

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Part of the reason I'd gone looking for another job is that most my gripes I thought were unfixable. I hadn't even talked to him(recently) about them because past attempts had been fruitless.

He spun a good story, but that's kinda what he's supposed to do. We had been bought recently and while I was using that as a reason to find a new job, he was using that as a motivator to fix things. I can't say he's wrong exactly. Some things are changing, but not enough.

It's also worth mentioning that he said the new CEO would want to talk to me personally. The CEO requested anyone with worries should be brought to his attention so he can talk to them. He's committed to keep people because he literally cannot afford to lose anyone. I'm honestly not sure if this a good thing(the CEO wanting to talk to me) but it surely wasn't something I was expecting.
 
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Noodleface

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Just go into it with an open mind and be honest. You quite literally have nothing to lose
 
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Mist

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We bought out another company about a quarter our size (~1200 vs ~300.)

In the past 2 years, 95% of their good engineers/dev/ops people left, and all their shitty managers became our managers and all our good managers left.

Now nothing fucking works.

Tons of customers left and the company has shrunk in revenue over the past 2 years.

Despite all of the above, the CEO somehow thinks these guys know what they're doing because our NPS scores are way better, doesn't seem to understand that these managers are just better at manipulating survey results, likely by manipulating who gets sent the surveys and other easily manipulated factors.

CFO of 17 years quit after the fourth contractor failed to implement FinancialForce and having nightly, extremely vocal arguments with the CEO over dinner at the restaurant down the street about how we still have no way of tracking which accounts are profitable and which accounts lose us money. Said ex-CFO makes a habit of hanging out at all the local bars just so he can tell every current and former employee he sees what a shitshow the company is.

New CFO tells his team "wow I didn't know you guys were in this bad of shape."
 

alavaz

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I've only ever once accepted a counter offer and it was my current job. I do have a strong personal connection and the work is some of the best I've ever done and for a mission I'm highly supportive of. My main gripe was that I was underpaid and as you all know, the best way to get a raise is to leave. I pretty much assumed my current company wouldn't be able to come close to the offer I had but they did manage to match it. I'm still losing money in the long term vs. the other position but I guess I gain in satisfaction and not having the stress of changing jobs.
 

chaos

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As a rule I've never entertained counters. I'm sure that management always keeps that kind of thing in the back of their mind, whether it influences anything probably depends on where you are. But, more importantly, if I went to the pain in the ass to update my resume and do a job search and interviews and all that stuff, that means I was pretty unhappy where I was at for some reason. The way I am, I will have tried to fix those things that made me unhappy before I bailed, so if I've gone through the process of trying to fix the stuff and I've also gone through the asspain of a job search, and only now when I'm heading out the door do I get traction on whatever the issues where, yeah that's a no from me.

Last job I left countered me hard, it was a significant bump. It still wasn't hard to turn down, because that place wasn't great, the on site manager was a blowhard who knew about 30% of what he pitched himself as, and I would have just stagnated and died there.
 
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Khane

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If you're looking for a new job because you are unhappy it's not worth entertaining a counter.

If you get solicited via LinkedIn or recruiter and decide to entertain just because "hey why not" and end up receiving a nice offer. Well, may as well let them counter since you likely aren't unhappy but also want more money.
 
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Deathwing

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More money is definitely a factor. My wife isn't working due to issues that aren't worth going into here, so I could always use more money. If they don't counter with higher money but instead "yeah, we'll fix this shit this time, promise!", I'm out. If it's higher salary, I'll give it some thought.
 

Khane

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I'm guessing taking the other offer is a lateral move more than an upgrade in salary then.
 

ShakyJake

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I think its too late if you already accepted the offer. Not saying you can't back out of course, but once you've let your current employer know you would jump ship it's only a matter of time where they start looking for your replacement.
 

alavaz

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I think its too late if you already accepted the offer. Not saying you can't back out of course, but once you've let your current employer know you would jump ship it's only a matter of time where they start looking for your replacement.

I hear this all the time but I've never once seen this in reality. Maybe in other lines of work, but not IT. I've definitely seen people get treated like shit after they try to jump ship and stay, but they are usually terrible employees anyway. I've had my ass kissed more than ever for accepting a huge raise and staying where I'm at. Threatening to leave and accepting the counter has been nothing but great for me.
 
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