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

Noodleface

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That's true when I looked awhile back as I could transfer down there today if I wanted. It's kinda retarded up here.

And I'm not paid peanuts myself but MA in general is just crazy expensive. With the equity in my house I could sell it and buy one in Austin outright
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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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.
 

Noodleface

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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.
She's got other complaints about texas as a strong independent woman
 
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Nija

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15 years in the field and I have to do a coding assessment before we can proceed.

Are people really this retarded that they think this is a good way to do it
Back in 2001 we hired one of the guys who literally wrote the XML spec and ~6 books (at the time) who couldn't code. Like at all. Gotta have some kind of filter in place.
 

Noodleface

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Back in 2001 we hired one of the guys who literally wrote the XML spec and ~6 books (at the time) who couldn't code. Like at all. Gotta have some kind of filter in place.
I get it, but to me that would be a rare case (maybe?). I'm more interested in what candidates have accomplished, not that they can remember how to bubble sort an array. I find you can usually tell who is bullshitting when you talk to them.
 
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TJT

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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.
 
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Noodleface

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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.
Yes and my impacts are much broader than code changes (which I no longer make many of) and more meaningful. But I guess it's moot because every place pulls this shit nowadays
 
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TJT

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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. 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:

1788433463152.png
 
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Control

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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. 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:

View attachment 639426
Is their work actually good? When someone acts like that, my first thought is they're just trying to hide how much of a shitshow everything is. My second thought, which I'm sure you've also had, is "Could you automate that team out of existence in a few days if you really tried?"
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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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. 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:

View attachment 639426
This sounds to me like someone afraid they're about to be found out as a fraud
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Is their work actually good? When someone acts like that, my first thought is they're just trying to hide how much of a shitshow everything is. My second thought, which I'm sure you've also had, is "Could you automate that team out of existence in a few days if you really tried?"
IDK about good. His stuff provides like quoting suggestions and predictions for our customers. It does generate some revenue and supposedly created $10M additional revenue in the past year. Just for two of the working algorithms. I have no idea how true that is but I saw it on some slide decks.

This is all fine and I am happy we are being successful and all but this whole bullshit where he completes something and offloads everything else to our team then washes his hands of it, while also complaining that he can't update and work on stuff because of this complete lack of deployment process. I just don't get it. Given that all of these algos were taken from halfassed python notebooks and refactored into Airflow, Snowflake, and DBT with no checks and engineers who didn't create or understand them I have my doubts.