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

Pretty sure Boston is way more expensive than Austin.

Then do it. The woman will complain about the heat eventually though. They all do.

I have a coworker right now from Toronto. She wants to get out of Austin badly and she's been here for like a decade.

If you have been in the game long enough as we have it isn't complicated. Ask a candidate about various things you think they should know. Their ability to talk about it in depth will be very apparent. Ask about the projects they have worked on and what the most challenging thing he did in the past year was. Then ask them how they would solve some issue you are currently in the middle of.

I do favor questions like a database question involving row_number() function. If you do a lot of database work its an obvious answer in .3 seconds. If you don't know then you haven't done a lot of it.

I have a coworker right now who runs the Data Science team. This guy is a PHD from Purdue which he of course mentions constantly and to everyone. I shit you not the guy wears a tweed suit like some 19th century British professor to the t-shirt and flip-flops office that is our company.

I don't really care that the guy tries to be, or is, eccentric. But in the worst part of it is that he effectively refuses to work with the rest of the data platform organization that we are all in. This comprises a Data Platform team (mine), Data Science, Machine Learning, and Analytics Engineering.

Such as:

1. Company uses Jira for work management, he refuses to touch it and manages his team on google sheets which forces everyone else to deal with his retardation on their own.
2. Totally refuses to use Git for anything and forces his entire team to not use Git.
3. Refuses to be part of the delivery of his own work. So he kind of throws a halfassed python notebook over the fence to my team. We refactor it into something usable by the data platform but whenever it has issues its our problem now. So he gushes to leadership about how effective his pricing models are but refuses to participate in debugging or anything because "it isn't the same" as his local solution so its our problem. Nor does he document how it is supposed to work for anyone.

I have absolutely no clue why executive leadership tolerates this unless he is a pro at dicksucking up the chain so they just let him keep on keeping on. I've told the director that either we own their stuff once they are "done" or they own it end to end. To facilitate this I developed a middle ground solution that allows them to develop their gay python notebooks but automates their deployment to a server where I can orchestrate and performance tune them without having to deal with them. The only requirement here is that they use git, everything else is handled by my automation and a PR Claude Agent that runs their stuff through a checklist to make sure they aren't doing stupid things they are prone to doing like using raw api keys directly in their code.

I got this working fully on Monday after spending a few weeks on it. The guy was all excited then when I said okay we are ready to onboard your next project to this pattern he passive aggressively freaks out and gets all cagey. Runs to the VP and complains that I am introducing problems and friction to the organization and tells me to shut it down. Which is where I am at in this negotiation phase. So I've been discussing with my director and the VP about the above. I have just come down to it. If he refuses to participate then he has to provide a total technical document on exactly how his stuff is supposed to work, how to implement it and how to test it. Then we can just develop this with DBT like it always should have been. Or he can participate by using Git when he has to deliver his own work. If he fails to deliver his own fucking work that should be on him.

Totally looks like this but younger and not as classy looking: