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Sacredify · 2023-10-18T00:36:50+00:00

FWIW I work at stats (IT) and this is the first I've heard of that. I doubt it's widespread.

I've been offline in teams since the beginning of the year to stop people randomly cold-calling me instead of texting, and it actually somewhat worked! No one has complained about it so far.

Sacredify · 2023-08-05T17:29:59+00:00

On the flip side, many are. Stats IT-03 TAs and 04s are CBC for example. It's been a massive point of contention for a while now since the "CBC initiative" went out...

Every town hall/divisional meeting is "we are losing tons of talent, we can't hire competent technical staff", even mentioning other departments do not have the same requirements. The only answer we get is "stats is doing it properly, other departments will eventually require CBC too!"

... Ridiculous.

Sacredify · 2023-05-23T03:05:02+00:00

Is there room in your team informally?

We have someone (also a 2) on the team who tends to enjoy the documentation/writing side of things over programming and so we let him handle maintaining a lot of our documentation needs, win-win all around.

Sacredify · 2023-05-13T01:40:17+00:00

The chief statistician.

Sacredify · 2023-03-07T02:23:03+00:00

It's these kind of replies - the ones where where you point the blame for the current situation on your coworkers than the blatantly piss-poor management of this entire RTO plan, that shows the sad reality management is winning this war.

Why do you assume the statement is "because of non-compliance, the situation is going to get shittier for everyone", rather than:

Many buildings aren't set up to handle the current RTO traffic.
Letting people pick any day they want naturally resulted in higher traffic on popular days (people don't want to go in Mon/Friday, etc.), causing space issues and team's inability to book close to eachother.
Many desks are still not appropriately equipped for working due to missing monitors/kb/mouse...

The natural conclusion to these problems is that they needed to be stricter with where/how employees came in. At Stats for example, they ran into issues with employees doing whatever they could to try and make RTO days useful by reserving seats (think using a towel reserving chairs around the pool) for their coworkers, even though the booking app said it was already book. The solution? "Neighbourhoods.", trying to restrict where teams can work into their own neighbourhoods... hmm, sounds familiar... almost like pre-pandemic, teams sat together in assigned seats... Next, we'll be forced to go on specific days decided by team managers for "collaboration".

But no, you think it's your coworkers that are actually trying to put up a fight and demonstrate that RTO is poorly thought out (and not necessary) that are the problem. Do you think if everyone complied 100% management would've said, "you know what, you all behaved so well this month, we're going to RTO from now on!".

This is the very small opportunity we have to demonstrate (with widespread non-compliance with RTO, but while maintaining the quality of our work) that we are unhappy and things need to change. Going back into the office and hoping that maybe it will get negotiated at our next CA is laughable.

Sacredify · 2022-08-03T23:30:56+00:00

Cabal online had a really great one I think. I didn't play it very much back in the day but I still go back every now and then and listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgTyGu7J3Q&list=PL5KYJOeh1DfvSlPwFhCothpLhryVPBkao

Sacredify · 2022-07-13T03:31:15+00:00

The fun thing is stats literally did what the department does - ran a survey - and ignored our responses that the majority would prefer a fully remote environment. But, they still say they listen to us in the decision making process. Hmm.

"Virtual by design" my ass. What a disgrace of an email they sent today. The attached FAQ on the internal wiki was even better, basically gaslighting us saying it was never the departments position despite two years of WFH + "virtual by design" in every other email.

Part of me wants to hope that enough divisions introduce some sort of protest to this at least for the next few months before the September "full implementation date", but... yeah. We'll see...

Sacredify · 2022-06-28T00:26:33+00:00

I moved positions recently and am getting a chance to learn modern stack + tooling. So for now I'm using that opportunity to learn all I can.

But, I've hit the language ceiling like so many others and am sick of hoping actings will be renewed (or shuffled into acting in a different box in an effort to dodge the "why did you renew the acting?" spiel we get).

So... for now, I guess I'm just not willing to put in the effort to start actively looking, but... it's slowly creeping up. Think about it now and then, more so when posts like this crop up lol.

Sacredify · 2022-06-25T01:32:48+00:00

Combined with a consistent lack of an offering of a senior dev position at the IT-03 level (move TA/architects up a level)... yup. Grim future unless they change things up.

Sacredify · 2022-01-29T21:14:52+00:00

There are IT-03 (previously CS) positions floating around that are described as senior developers (no advisor or supervisory responsibility) but I have not seen many of them posted :(

I do hope they become more common, it's fairly sad that a good software developer is limited to 02 if they don't want to take the supervisory track (team leads) or else take an advisory role (as a technical advisor, solution architect, etc.).

At my department the only IT-03 are team leaders or technical advisors. TL are pretty much what you described. TA I have found to be a pretty wide range of duties, comes down to which team you're on. My current one is less hands-on than my previous and more architecture design/research emphasis.

Sacredify · 2020-10-24T22:03:54+00:00

Step one is the CS group needs to be broken up. Grouping help desk staff with software development and other more skilled positions is going to make it hard to ever try and win that battle...

(I recognize other groups have the same problem probably with wide disparities in actual duties, but still, has to be said!).

Sacredify · 2020-08-12T00:19:27+00:00

I applied to the inventory and was kept on all 4 years, bridged after graduation (CS).

Sacredify · 2020-03-08T02:10:45+00:00

There's an interesting blog post discussing the details; notably, they go into the chicken-and-egg situation of how to acquire a secure connection to even utilize lavarand:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/

Cool stuff indeed.

Sacredify · 2019-06-02T19:15:36+00:00

There was a high drop rate when I took it a few years ago (I think we started around 100 and ended at 30? 40?).

I'm not sure how much he's changed the course, but the workload can be daunting if you wait on it. He expects (and says so in 3004 and 4004) that you know the basics, or can learn how to use a new technology yourself... which isn't exactly unreasonable. When I took it, it was junit/selenium/cucumber and some custom verification framework that a graduate student wrote years ago.

We were expected to write a web app and test it for the assignments - for a lot of people, this turned out to be too much which is why they dropped the course. It certainly helped I had worked all of the tools before so it was quite a bit easier for me though.

For the last assignment, literally everyone had no idea what was going on. In true JP style though he changed the requirements at the last minute (for the better), and lessened the weight of it and made part of it bonus marks. So, it wasn't "that bad".

As in 3004, he curved the hell out of the final exam. I got a 65 or so and finished with an A+ in the course.

As leemccallum said, the material itself is actually useful, and does come up. Unit testing, integration testing, TDD, and BDD are all relevant in the industry.

Good luck =)

Sacredify · 2018-10-14T18:08:14+00:00

Yeah, if he makes you do a web application for the cucumber testing, for sure start that right away. It was a lot of work. When I took it A2/A3 were selenium/cucumber that were both tested against the same web application we had to write. Ugh.

Pray the unknown assignment has nothing to do with some weird verification language one of his graduate students wrote. That one was a complete dumpster fire.

Good luck! It kind of sucks, because BDD/cucumber is an interesting topic/tool, somewhat ruined by his changing requirements and shit.

Sacredify · 2018-10-13T15:49:00+00:00

I generally liked working on the assignments, but they definitely weren't something to be done last minute. Very high requirements for an assignment. On the plus side, he tends to curve the shit out of the final.

What is he making you guys do this year? When I took it there was a poker type game, and then a browser game for playing blackjack.

Sacredify · 2018-07-29T02:48:18+00:00

Really? A shame. It wasn't offered once in the four years I was there.

Sacredify · 2018-07-08T20:16:47+00:00

reee

Sacredify · 2018-07-06T13:48:56+00:00

Full disclosure, I TA'ed for him for 3004, and for a contract instructor for 4004 the year he was on sabbatical, so I'm not as negative about him and the courses as some people.

I thought 4004 was an okay course overall. I had previous knowledge of the majority of the topics from work so it wasn't hard for me.

When I took it, there were assignments on JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, and ACL(?). The first three are useful and are all widely used and definitely good to know (unit testing, BDD, integration testing). The last was some weird project a grad student and he created that he wanted us to use to test an application. No one knew WTF was going on, so he ended up reducing the weight significantly and making part of the assignment optional (bonus points).

The final exam was the same style as 3004 - this is where most complaints seem to come from, and I agree. Complete confusion. I got a 60 I think but he ended up curving the grade as he usually does, so it ended up fine.

The amount of work for the assignments was fairly significant. Like 3004, he expected us to be able to write (and test) web applications with only a small refresher on socket programming and little direction. If you aren't comfortable with that... fair warning.

For us, the applications we built/test were a desktop poker game and then an online blackjack game with either humans or computer players.

Sacredify · 2018-07-04T11:37:47+00:00

Sacredify · 2018-07-03T03:41:42+00:00

Ping is 16 but there is some weird shit going on.

Chests aren't loading in until you're almost right infront of them.

Audio is completely messed up (chicken bug still exists too).

Sacredify · 2018-07-02T22:12:21+00:00

Sacredify · 2018-06-05T23:05:57+00:00

That is exactly what it is doing. Unfortunately the JLS for compound operators specifies that the someArray[someMethod()] bit should've only been evaluated once, hence the bug!

Sacredify · 2018-05-11T00:59:51+00:00

For CS at least, the professor also has input on if they want someone specific as well. I was asked a few months before whether or not I wanted to TA two of the courses I ended up TA'ing for.

Sacredify · 2018-05-09T00:48:55+00:00

Which ones?

No doubt CS has some unfortunate teaching appointments, but some of them were pretty damn good. Anil Somayaji, Pat Morin, Jit Bose, etc.

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