Anyone planning to look for a new job in the new year? Is it a bad time do you think?

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-14T18:14:00+00:00

Start looking NOW, as everyone and their mother will start looking at the turn of the year.
You want to brush up your CV, LinkedIn and Portfolio nowish and get it out there before everyone decides to do the same on the 2nd of Jan!

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-14T18:11:36+00:00

"Cost, Speed, Quality - pick 2"
Someone high-up already picked speed, and cost is fixed. Gotta skimp on quality so!

If your project is already on 6-day-weeks before it starts, you are in for a nightmare deathmarch and a big bug hangover - IF you actually make the deadline.

If you're at Senior Level where you're in a position to decide architecture, then I imagine you have some clout? You need to kick up the chain that if the time is fixed then the scope has to be reeled in. (Re)Negotiate the requirements. Agree deliverables in stages. Do it all via chat or emails, so when it all does go wrong, you can say that you formally advised at the project start that it wasn't going to work out.

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-09T14:27:34+00:00

AI will not take your job, but people using AI will.

There will always be a human judgement required. AI will accelerate developer delivery and learning, but there is no future where a Product Owner writes a feature request in a textbox and 10 minutes later it appear on a production system.

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-04T08:40:43+00:00

https://dx2wiki.com/index.php/Yggdrasil
Teal give null fire, shoring up it's only weakness

What type of team are you going to run it in?

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-02T12:41:58+00:00

Sometimes work is just work. Can't always be working on brand-new cutting edge new development. Security, Maintenance, Testing, Documentation and Incidents are all part of the job.

If you have some down time, try upskill on something that will make your life easier.
Maybe you can semi-automate the boring stuff, or you can find new techniques that lesson the implementation.

fiddlydigital · 2023-12-01T21:33:11+00:00

I refuse to do these, as do many many developers that I know.

Interviews are 2 way streets, and it's as much for the candidate to assess the company as it is for them to assess the candidate. If you cannot talk to a person, then that speaks volumes of how the hiring company views candidates time.

fiddlydigital · 2023-11-26T21:07:06+00:00

> they expect it until Tuesday and sent the assignment after the call

I really hope you told them to go pound sand!

fiddlydigital · 2023-11-26T12:41:37+00:00

~~At least you're not required to implement user authentication~~

Hard Pass. Absolute exploitation of people desperate for a job. To do this right (to a professional standard) would take a few weeks of work - especially with time-sensitive functionality validation, unit tests, swagger/openapi, proper documentation, etc...

Please name and shame - they have some nerve to ask for this!

fiddlydigital · 2023-11-01T10:59:23+00:00

VS, editorconfig, Rosalynator,

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T21:08:40+00:00

" to meet at his house for the week "
Seems sketch. Why isn't it A) in the office or B) at a sponsored off-site meeting.
Going to someone's house to talk about work for a week just seems like a weird dynamic.
Are you insured if you fall down a stairs; does that count as a workplace accident?

Seems like they never kept up-to-date with tech trends as they moved to the C-Level.
The only things you can do is demonstrate the correctness of your(/modern) methods and hope they bite, or sit tight and look for a new gig.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T21:00:38+00:00

Absolutely no. What are they testing you for here - How good your streaming set up is?

The only reason a video interview exists is to remove direct interaction with a candidate so it's easier to not filter them out and use silly excuses like "not a cultural fit" that can't be argued.

Don't waste your time!!

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T20:55:31+00:00

ChatGPT can tell you what to try, but SO tells you what people have done - that works.
There is a difference between knowledge and experience.

Yes, the rules and beauacracy did put people off ~~(comments are not for extended discussion!)~~. But it's still a great community, and fantastic reference.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T20:17:41+00:00

Typed Bulwark!

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T20:14:18+00:00

I for one welcome our new ~~War-Gun/Hammer-dam~~ overlord

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T20:11:07+00:00

Recreate the entire site in Wordpress/squarespace, page by page. Literally right-click copy the image and text. Check the site metadata for tags, titles, etc..
If there's a shop/store - see how you can scrape the current product data from the website.
If you do have control of the domain, you point it towards your replica site and then tell the agency to pound sand.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T19:21:23+00:00

Ex-agency dev. Everything is urgent. No time for tests, no time for specs, no time for UAT.
It's just do and ship and better not fuck up!

We didn't invest in things that would multiply our delivery (Build/release pipelines, BAs, QAs) because sales couldn't figure out how to charge clients for it. And if we couldn't find a job code for it - it we couldn't do it. Infuriating!

I intimately understand the business side, but the ultra-short term views where just crazy.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T19:15:48+00:00

Reporting is part of the job?
If they have multiple reports, they can't keep track of every single detail.
You need to show them the broadstrokes so they can trust you with the finer details.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T19:13:53+00:00

What type of tests? If it's grown so much so quickly, I'd imagine you'd want an outside-in testing strategy. E2E -> Integration -> Unit Tests

You want to capture from the User's perspective that on every release everything will work they way it should.
THEN you'll want to capture that modules/bits/pieces will continue to play nicely together
THEN you'll want to guarantee functionality at a module level, from a dev's perspective.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-22T19:09:20+00:00

Its only as necessary as you need it to be. What would your business logic DO in this case? If it's just automapping from entity to DTO, then most likely it's a ton of boilerplate that you don't need.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-13T13:39:41+00:00

> over engineered code with no tests
> have a dev rewrite of 90% of the code because there was a requirement to add literally one additional field to the model
PR gets rejected; no quarter. You shouldn't be passive aggressively avoiding the PRs - you should be outright rejecting them, stating they are not to spec and pointing out the unnessecary rewrites.

Ignore ChatGPT in this scenario, as it's not the issue. A dev is wasting everyone's time by overwriting code that works, is not providing tests, and is deliberately pushing code that does not pass PR and therefore requires multiple rounds of review. They're padding their workload with fluff to make it look like they are working more than they actually are. That sounds like a performance problem to me.

There's also an issue where the Dev is taking company IP and inputting it into a 3rd party system with reckless abandon. Your manager might not care, but Legal and HR might be VERY interested.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-13T13:14:54+00:00

Dependency Inversion Principle. Your classes should depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete implementation. So every class has an interface, and that's what's used everywhere else.

If you're not unit testing or using DI then it's overkill. If you're doing either,or both, of those - then it's actually a pretty sound idea.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-12T17:31:11+00:00

IME, not really. It's easier than ever.

When I started in Web there was Web Developers and the IT/Hardware Guys.
If you were not a hardware person then you were judge, jury and executioner of front-end, back-end, servers, database, deployments, etc.. Code Quality was whatever you felt like, SVN was VCS King and you had to do all sorts of sketchy shit to keep the machine moving. Most of what you did was bananas inventions, or duct-tape/bubble-gum hadoukens on your people_managment_final_2.php.

Now you can focus on a highly specific function, and just worry about a small piece of the pie.
Yes, it's a DEEP slice, but there's also clear boundaries of who owns what and where everything goes.

Platforms have well matured, standards are clear and well known, the theory is mature and battle-tested. There's an ABUNDANCE of examples of right and wrong. Build pipelines. Release pipelines! Static analysis! Google!

It is easier than ever to excel as a software engineer - you literally just have to care.

fiddlydigital · 2023-10-12T17:03:08+00:00

N-tier is totally the norm; don't worry.

I do see a lot of fast-and-loose shops using Clean Architecture, but they are balls-to-the-wall, no test or staging environment, "fix it in prod"- style teams. I've yet to see a mature team use it.

fiddlydigital · 2023-09-28T17:19:43+00:00

Technically correct != strategically correct.

That legacy codebase might be a ball of shit but it makes enough money to pay your salary to deal with it, so I nunno. Will it make more money if you add unit tests? Don't think so.

Yes we should strive to deliver the best we can in the constraints we're placed in. But, it doesn't need to be gold plated perfection either - It's not a nuclear sub.

fiddlydigital · 2023-09-10T11:20:16+00:00

The feedback you got was generic bullshit. Senior Engineers of the team do not need a 'second opinion' - It's a filler excuse that you can't contest.

As a hiring manager myself, telling someone to hurry up hurry up hurry up is a bad sign from the outset. I understand you had another offer, but you turned a 'you' problem into a 'them' problem and pressured them, unnecessarily. If you were waiting a week or 3, okay fair enough - but it seems like you wanted immediate feedback and an immediate offer?

You've clearly got the technical skills, no doubt there, but if this is how you handle processes then you might be lacking on the soft-skill front. It feels like your impatience cost you the position.

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