What do you do?

BrotherWu · Dec 23, 2014

Well, there are often external dependencies and integration challenges, regardless of team size. But I agree with you that smaller teams are better- teams with a max size of about 7 or 8 are ideal.

In my world, TDD is not necessarily dependent on customer specifications; the point of TDD is to formalize intent, sure, but the path there is a process of discovery about the problem space. It's also a nice way to be able to automate and to quantify your testing. It can be tedious, however, when refactoring code and you question whether some of the mundane failures are worth fixing.

Noodleface · Dec 23, 2014

Our team just went from 8 to 4

We are a sad group of BIOS writers

BrotherWu · Dec 23, 2014

Noodleface_sl said:
Our team just went from 8 to 4

We are a sad group of BIOS writers

A layoff right before Christmas? That sucks pretty bad.

Noodleface · Dec 23, 2014

BrotherWu_sl said:
A layoff right before Christmas? That sucks pretty bad.

Nah, one guy went to Google, another was a consultant whose contract expired, one left to finish a Master's/PhD program, and another transferred to a new team. It was just bad timing on all leaving at once.

Fifey · Dec 25, 2014

Crone_sl said:
In the job hunt after moving from Phoenix to Portland area, and it really sucks to realize that the last 7 years of experience that I have boils down to customer service in a call center.

Feels bad bros.

Hindsight is always 20/20... maybe would have pushed harder to get into different departments to learn SQL, or make a bigger push into IT to learn more agile/waterfall (our IT uses those ways). Would have had more to put on the resume at this point.

You should look into Netflix, from what I've heard they pay pretty decently with benefits and all that jazz. Only problem would be they are in beavertron and iirc you live in Vancouver so it will be a hefty commute.

Crone · Dec 26, 2014

fifey_sl said:
You should look into Netflix, from what I've heard they pay pretty decently with benefits and all that jazz. Only problem would be they are in beavertron and iirc you live in Vancouver so it will be a hefty commute.

Living with family, who are renting, so I'm going to move close to my job wherever that may be. Rest of family can follow me!

However, I don't see any jobs in Beaverton under any of the categories at Netflix jobs. Will keep an eye out though now, because I had no idea they were also up here. Thanks!

Jx3 · Jan 9, 2015

Just my keys to my own classroom. Also got my first paycheck from teaching. Feels good bros

Picasso3 · Jan 9, 2015

Grats

Conefed · Jan 13, 2015

After quitting Bojangles after 2 weeks, and hopefully the food industry forever, I accepted an offer from a boarding school for troubled youth as a mental health counselor. I have schooling in psychology and all the behavioral sciences and have thought about teaching and about mentoring and about counseling and about consulting, so this is has some overlap.
Cheers to trying new direction
Also, if I go into local politics with the intent of reformation and character development, this experience should be relevant.
It feels like I'm at a hub where I can now more easily transition to multiple wanted routes - and the pay isn't bad, comparable even to Bojangles which was a significant upgrade from Arby's.

Picasso3 · Jan 13, 2015

COMPARABLE EVEN WITH BOJANGLES?

Commander Vimeseh_sl · Jan 13, 2015

Picasso_sl said:
COMPARABLE EVEN WITH BOJANGLES?

That's not cool man, everyone can't be a well compensated internet board millionaire.

McCheese · Jan 13, 2015

Sacel_sl said:
After quitting Bojangles after 2 weeks, and hopefully the food industry forever, I accepted an offer from a boarding school for troubled youth as a mental health counselor. I have schooling in psychology and all the behavioral sciences and have thought about teaching and about mentoring and about counseling and about consulting, so this is has some overlap.
Cheers to trying new direction
Also, if I go into local politics with the intent of reformation and character development, this experience should be relevant.
It feels like I'm at a hub where I can now more easily transition to multiple wanted routes - and the pay isn't bad, comparable even to Bojangles which was a significant upgrade from Arby's.

More power to you if you can handle that kind of work (boarding school for troubled youth). I've known a couple people who were in almost that exact position and it really wore on them and heavily affected their personal relationships due to the stress they were under every day and the horrible shit they saw/heard. Good luck!

Picasso3 · Jan 13, 2015

Commander Vimeseh_sl said:
That's not cool man, everyone can't be a well compensated internet board millionaire.

It's the "even" that gets me.

Korrupt · Jan 13, 2015

Celestein_sl said:
I've seen agile scale(specifically XP) to two/low-three digit teams. I don't think it's well suited to them, but the common factor I've always seen in the moderate successes is that the management understands that good processes mean that frequently groups will be idle, and that that's perfectly ok.

Managers think that if a group is idle it's a failure on their part, it's like so counter-intuitive that even though they've been repeatedly hammered with it in business school, or books, or seminars, etc, that you still rarely see anyone actually believe it. So what I constantly see as a critical system failure at companies I consult for again and again is a group is idle waiting on another process from another group to be finished. The managers take this as a queue that they can either expand the scope, or make up some pointless work for the group. Since that work is quickly planned, and doesn't fit into the original scope, the group will often go over the time to complete it, leaving other groups now blocked because of their busy-work.

And the cycle repeats for each group and cascades into project failure. It's the one trend I keep seeing repeatedly.

or tl;dr lack of organizational discipline.

I've seen the most success with spiral for larger teams personally. For agile to really work at larger levels you need good team division. i.e. divide a 300person company into groups of 10 people, who are all working on essentially independent components/modules/whatever and treating the other teams implementing them like customers.

But meh, IT management just sucks period, because it's not a solved problem and all the methodologies are just different flavors of dogshit.

Im a PMP and literally almost never use anything that has to do with the PM nonsense (imo) they teach you. Its just another certification just like the series tests to get a bigger paycheck. I work as a PM for Global Corporate Investment Banking for one of the biggest banks dealing with only Global Corporations and 95% of them don't even care about seeing the scope or project plan.

Borzak · Feb 4, 2015

New job, started a few weeks ago. It's different from the petro chemical industry which had timelines measure in hours/days compared to years. Project coordinator on this to start off, we are supplying all the plate steel to actually make the steel structure. Different. Fabrication just kicked off and the entire project is around $3 billion, our part ismuchsmaller. That number includes installation of the steel, the proprietary mechanical/electrical etc...They area already discussing another to follow on the same site.

WA Parish | Carbon Capture | Strategy | Sustainability | NRG

Vinen · Feb 4, 2015

Just shat when I saw my W2 for this year. Just shy of 300K USD earned.

Yay being a Software Architect.

Crone · Feb 5, 2015

Back in school to prep for my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) exam. Looking forward to a complete career switch where experience actually means something. More than likely will keep moving up the Cisco ladder for the CCNP, all with a focus on data centers and their new'ish Nexus switches.

Crazily · Feb 10, 2015

Well I am 36...make 75k/year in a nice easy government job as a senior network administrator (I mainly do Cisco firewall's but touch on all apsects of networking) .....I think I might have hit my wall because damned if I can get motivated to get anymore IT Certs or finish a 4 year degree (I have a+, network+, security+, and an associates of science focused in IT). I have bought CISSP course about 6 months ago but only got about 1/4 through it before I lost the will.

Chances are I will slide into my bosses position when he retires in the next 3-5 years and I can just ride that till retirement.

Vinen · Feb 10, 2015

Crone_sl said:
Back in school to prep for my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) exam. Looking forward to a complete career switch where experience actually means something. More than likely will keep moving up the Cisco ladder for the CCNP, all with a focus on data centers and their new'ish Nexus switches.

Make sure whatever you do is compatible with the the SDDC.
Software-defined data center - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Physical Network Hardware within the Datacenter is going to go the way of the dodo within the next 20 years. (TBH, I have no idea how long)

Disclaimer: I work on the management layer of the SDDC at VMware

taebin · Feb 10, 2015

Converged infrastructure is your friend

Disclaimer: I work on the cloud managed services layer at VCE

What do you do?

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shitlord

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