ShakyJake
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IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
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Vinen
God is dead
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As part of my career I approach continued education and learning by targeting certifications. The more expensive ones will be coming up on Black Friday sales. I aim to do this one next.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) | Linux Foundation Education
Training in skills, knowledge, and competency to perform the responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators and become a CKA.training.linuxfoundation.org
I know many avoid this as they are not necessary and they certainly haven't netted me a job directly. But they have vastly expanded and honed my abilities in understanding exactly how to do stuff and what the limitations truly are. This makes it much easier to speak when most other engineers are just ignorant of things outside of their specific narrow scope. Which has benefitted me a lot over the years.
The most incompetent people I've seen in industry have had the most certifications.
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Start by talking to your manager about applying for it first. I have encouraged that with my folks and actually helped them level up their careers that way, as I championed their application for elevated internal roles.
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Noodleface
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Sheriff Cad
scientia potentia est
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I've seen that go both ways depending on the manager. I generally believe in doing things the right way and good things happen to you, so for an internal position I think talking to your manager is the right thing. I've had other managers try to sabotage those type of applications because they don't want other departments "stealing their people" or "poaching their high performers." Totally depends on how tribal and defensive your current manager is. Try to thread that needle when you talk to him/her.
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Noodleface
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ToeMissile
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Maybe test the waters with a “thinking about the next phase of my career” chat. Frame it as asking for advice.
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Work harder, not smarter. I could use some advice, books, youtube videos, whatever. I feel like I've been compensating for a lack of....high level?...organizational skills by just working more and more. At least a couple days per week, I'm pretty much working all day outside of eating and spending a bit of time with the family.
I wrote up a checklist for a release activity. It was adapted from an existing checklist and reviewed by relevant developers, but I hadn't actually ran it yet because that's at least a day and I don't have that kind of time. Plus, I'm going to actually run it next week as part of the release. My boss insists on using AI to execute and review the checklist but I'm hesitant as while that might be useful in the long run, sounds like at least some hours to get up and running. As in, put it in my fucking iteration if you want it done, that's not a side quest. He calls me up later and we both spend 4 hours of our day using AI to review the checklist. I can't remember the last time I felt like I had 4 hours to spare.
I'm slowly ramping up test development on a server. Due to the way our tests run, we cannot simply run them serially as that will lead to serious underutilization. But we're also trying to cram lots of different tests onto this server, our only one for tests that are not feasible to do nightly. So, big things like analyzing AOSP. Dogfooding with continuously growing artifacts. Distributed analysis with a non-uniform slave pool. Seems like a nightmare to manage, so I put it off until I had too much running serially. When my boss found out I hadn't done it yet, I didn't deny it was a mistake, I just wanted agreement that it was feature-level work(i.e. put it in my fucking iteration). Instead, he calls me up immediately and we spend the next 2 hours making a crude spreadsheet that I suspect will be inadequate in the long run.
I'm annoyed at myself because I often seem to approach tasks with this "uh, just start doing stuff" mentality. I'm annoyed at my boss because I'm sure he intends well, using AI to execute checklists was legitimately cool, there's gotta be a better way than verbal side quests and phone ambushes.
But mostly, I'm annoyed that I'm not really sure who to talk to about this within my company. My boss works more than me. I don't like having hours of my day spent on unplanned tasks, but he's often helping, so feels kinda tone deaf. We recently merged with another company and anyone above my boss is part of the other company, so going to them feels like giving them a reason.
I wrote up a checklist for a release activity. It was adapted from an existing checklist and reviewed by relevant developers, but I hadn't actually ran it yet because that's at least a day and I don't have that kind of time. Plus, I'm going to actually run it next week as part of the release. My boss insists on using AI to execute and review the checklist but I'm hesitant as while that might be useful in the long run, sounds like at least some hours to get up and running. As in, put it in my fucking iteration if you want it done, that's not a side quest. He calls me up later and we both spend 4 hours of our day using AI to review the checklist. I can't remember the last time I felt like I had 4 hours to spare.
I'm slowly ramping up test development on a server. Due to the way our tests run, we cannot simply run them serially as that will lead to serious underutilization. But we're also trying to cram lots of different tests onto this server, our only one for tests that are not feasible to do nightly. So, big things like analyzing AOSP. Dogfooding with continuously growing artifacts. Distributed analysis with a non-uniform slave pool. Seems like a nightmare to manage, so I put it off until I had too much running serially. When my boss found out I hadn't done it yet, I didn't deny it was a mistake, I just wanted agreement that it was feature-level work(i.e. put it in my fucking iteration). Instead, he calls me up immediately and we spend the next 2 hours making a crude spreadsheet that I suspect will be inadequate in the long run.
I'm annoyed at myself because I often seem to approach tasks with this "uh, just start doing stuff" mentality. I'm annoyed at my boss because I'm sure he intends well, using AI to execute checklists was legitimately cool, there's gotta be a better way than verbal side quests and phone ambushes.
But mostly, I'm annoyed that I'm not really sure who to talk to about this within my company. My boss works more than me. I don't like having hours of my day spent on unplanned tasks, but he's often helping, so feels kinda tone deaf. We recently merged with another company and anyone above my boss is part of the other company, so going to them feels like giving them a reason.
Noodleface
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Are you doing agile/scrum or anything with real planning? It's tough to visualize what the real problem here is - almost like there's no planning and you're just trying to do everything at once?
Lendarios
Trump's Staff
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My company pays for Claude enterprise, and my budget is around 1200 a month.
I am very effective with it, and it allows me to be very productive, 3 to 5 times. I have been a developer for 20 years and with the same company close to 11 years, so I know where all the pieces are, even if I did not made them myself.
it also helped me transition from c# to python, and now I manage two teams, one on each language.
Claude makes everything easier, makes my job overall much more enjoyable.
The other day a manager needed a report that required analyzing 400 files to see if we contacting an api, or an html endpoint, and it was a 5 sentence prompt, boom done. Without I would have never gone through so many files.
I am very effective with it, and it allows me to be very productive, 3 to 5 times. I have been a developer for 20 years and with the same company close to 11 years, so I know where all the pieces are, even if I did not made them myself.
it also helped me transition from c# to python, and now I manage two teams, one on each language.
Claude makes everything easier, makes my job overall much more enjoyable.
The other day a manager needed a report that required analyzing 400 files to see if we contacting an api, or an html endpoint, and it was a 5 sentence prompt, boom done. Without I would have never gone through so many files.
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ShakyJake
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I think you're being a little too hard on yourself. To me, this sounds more like a planning problem than an organization problem on your part. Your boss might mean well, but constantly throwing unplanned work at you without taking anything else off your plate just isn't sustainable. And you're right these aren't little side tasks. They're actual engineering work that takes time. I'd probably start pushing back a little with something like, "sure we can do that, but what are we pushing out of the iteration to make room for it?" There's only so much you can get done in a day, no matter how organized you are.
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Control
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Not sure what your company is like, but I think there actually not being anyone there to talk to about this is a pretty reasonable/likely. It sounds like there are two problems though. Your boss patches over being bad at planning with infinite work. Who do you talk to about that? Probably a recruiter. The other is that AI is new and changing what's possible much faster than organizations can manage. Some other people there might be making better use of it than you, and sure, ask them how they're managing it, but also realize that no one really has very much experience at this, and its a different world than it was just a few months ago. Learning how to make use of it takes time. Learning how to do that with some reasonable safely, takes a lot more time. Hopefully the gains very quickly make up for the initial investment, but that doesn't keep the initial investment from being necessary.
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We do the typical two week iterations, retrospective, and planning. It is on me to request work that can't fit to be moved out of my iteration, I need to do better there. Can AI be useful here? Quick and medium(like the two in my previous post) verbally communicated tasks get recorded as 1-2 lines in a notepad, but I rarely ever make issues out of them. It won't immediately help, but it will give a more concrete picture of the workload. My boss knows I have too much work, but maybe a sharper picture would help.
I agree, talking to a recruiter is an option. I'm quite hesitant to exercise it though. AI, bubble popping or not, is and will continue to be very disruptive to our industry. New hires, in my experience, tend to be more vulnerable to these kinds of change.
I agree, talking to a recruiter is an option. I'm quite hesitant to exercise it though. AI, bubble popping or not, is and will continue to be very disruptive to our industry. New hires, in my experience, tend to be more vulnerable to these kinds of change.
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Control
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Oh, I wasn't encouraging you to jump ship, just saying that "boss bad at planning" probably isn't a fixable problem other than by getting a new boss (who also probably ends up being bad at planning). And you should be able to have ai make tickets for your requests if it has access to your ticket system. If it doesn't, just point it at your list once a day or whatever and tell it to turn these into tasks suitable for whatever your ticket system is so you can copy/paste. If you use any with voice mode, you could just verbally tell it the tasks to make tickets for as they come in. Voice mode sounds terrible to me, but I think it works much better for some people's brains.
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Noodleface
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By quick and medium are you saying tasks coming in beyond the scope of the sprint? Unplanned work?
I've taken the stance at work that if extra stuff comes in it'll get scheduled for next sprint unless it is a literal emergency
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Noodleface
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Yeah we used to have big problems with that. It took leadership taking a very hard stance on sprint planning here.
Are you overworked because devs are pushing so many features ?
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I'm still working through a significant backlog from the merger. None of our testing infrastructure worked with theirs, so I'm having to reimplement most of our test suites. We just got attachments back last week, after more than a year without them. Imagine diagnosing failures with the relevant logs missing(AI was actually quite useful here).
But, it's probably myopic to blame just that. Engineers suck at estimating task effort and I'm no exception. We've actually given up on assigning any estimate. So planning is just this kind of "yeah, that'll fit" guessing game.