Gambling with your future

I ran across this article about where new CS grads are going, and was somewhat disturbed by the 'advice' being given by Paul Graham, and someone named Harj Taggar.  They push the idea that new grads should not be looking to work for the established companies, but instead should be looking to work for companies that will be "the next big thing".  They hold out a number of (probably made-up) statistics comparing overall earnings (Going with a known company gets you a 90% chance for $1.1 million, while the new thing gets you 10% chance for $10 million).

Now, Paul Graham has a history of success, but I think he's being disengenuous here in claiming that a new grad has a 10% chance of selecting the next big thing (NBT) at a point where they will get the big payoff.  VCs are much more predatory these days, locking up preferential stock so that they get their money back before any of the engineers get a payout, so even if you were able to find the NBT and get hired, you might not get anything more than a few years' worth of income from it.  He also seems to be forgetting that there were so many new things back in the late 90's that it was very hard to pick the winners.  Graham picked Google, but it was in no way a sure thing at that time.  I'm sure the engineers at WebVan thought well of their chances of becoming millionaires.

Finally, there is the issue of basic compensation.  Startups generally cannot pay as well as established companies, and often have much lower benefits, which makes working for a startup in Silicon Valley much less viable, given the cost of living out there.  Seattle is similar; likewise NYC.

(PS.  A conspiracy-theory view is that VCs want to keep the supply of engineers working at startups high, to keep salaries lower (you can pay less, offer more stock options that may not vest fully, etc) so that there are enough startups for the VCs to hit their percentages for success)

Ch-ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange.....

(With apologies to David Bowie)

Whew.

It's been a busy time these past few months. 
Let me explain. 
No, there is too much; let me sum up.

The Job decided that the profit margin on the project I was part of was not high enough to suit the career aspirations of the C-level acolytes in charge of the business unit, so it was dropped, along with 90% of the team.  So I found myself in good company as I started to look for a new job in earnest.  Fortunately, the severance package was nice, so I was not left hurting.  Still, the sudden but inevitable betrayal was not a fun time.

The biggest problem I had was exactly what I had complained to my then boss 5 years ago when they started splitting the group up - my continued presence in the 'maintain the old application' subgroup meant that I was not learning new skills.  "Don't worry," I was told, "We will rotate other people in as their parts deploy, and you will get to learn new stuff."

And the check is in the mail......

The moral of this fable is that you never trust the organization to honor any offhand statement - if they say they will do X, set up a monthly reminder to ask them about X, until they do it, or you get something else of equal worth, or you do X on your own.  If they haven't delivered within a year, assume they will not ever, and do it yourself.

Especially when it comes to 'rotating' work assignments - it's way too easy for the folks who are working on the new stuff to take longer than planned (intentionally or otherwise), and for management to feel that they do not know the current set of issues in your area of control, and keep you where you are "just until things settle", which may never happen.

Another bit of advice is to look for a new job every quarter, minimum.  You don't ever have to take one if it gets offered, but it keeps you in practice for interviews, keeps your resume up-to-date, and lets you know what the market for your skills is. 

Oh, and one little trick if you are looking for a job and are on LinkedIn - search for and visit the profiles of every recruiter in areas you are looking for (tech sectors and geography); when they look at the activity on their profile, they will see your visit, and get curious about you, and visit you in return, where your profile should be able to grab their attention.

Today's Agile WTF?

Ok, so I've noted that as your organization moves to an Agile development methodology, it will face many hazards.

Today's example - managerial misunderstanding of Agile teams

At The Job, we have a number of offshore development groups, and a few domestic groups.  Due to the skill mix needed, we've split into a number of scrum teams that consist of developers on both sides of the ocean.  Note that this is already contrary to the spirit of Agile, which strongly recommends a team be located in one location, but it's a common reality in many organizations, where the skills are not equally distributed.

Where we see the real WTF moment is when the offshore management decided that the scrum team split did not work with their existing managerial tree, and they peopled the scrum teams with partial developers: people who are allocated part-time to multiple teams, so that no manager 'loses' people to scrum teams.  This leads to problems because a given developer can be unavailable to a team if another team has a problem that runs long and the priorities favor the other team.  Which translates to a problem in one scrum team bleeds into 1 or more other teams.

Now, there are times when a specialist is needed only some of the time for various teams; DBAs are commonly like this; once the DB is in place, the DBA is only needed for a short time for new tables or indices.

But this is full-time, 10s of developers split among 2, 3, or more teams, leading to cascading delays.

So heed this warning!  Let your devs work on one team!

What's Up, Docs?

Ok, it's taken a few incidents, but I've just got to vent about the state of developer documentation at The Job.

We have, like many places, a wiki for the devs to store documentation about our systems, tools, plans, etc.  It's the usual jungle of outdated posts, incomplete references, and even chat transcripts, but the detail that got me today is the abysmal quality of several pages pages - one was the description of a library API, the other was the steps to set up a VM for testing.

The API had a list of the methods for a Java class, but the list was an image capture of a scrollbarred list - not a image in a window with scrollbars, but the static image of the list.  So not only was it lazy, it was nearly useless, in that it was neither a set of linkable items, nor text that I could copy to paste into another search.

The directions page was rife with assumptions of context - that I knew what parts of the images pasted into the list referred to, again without giving me text that I could cut&paste for ease of following or modifying.  I mean, I'm not necessarily the sharpest guy, but the entire point of the list of directions is to make it clear what to do, even for someone who is unfamiliar with the task.

Please, please, people, if you are writing developer documentation, make it easy for the reader to use your steps, and make sure you give full context.

Architects Don't Code

(Title stolen from the C2 wiki)

I just spent a few days working on a new interface for an existing system, where the new way of doing things has the interface specification being written up one of the architects, and supposedly discussed by all the stakeholders.  Of course, the usual story unfolds - there is not enough time to get everyone together in a meeting, so the interface gets put together as the architect's best guess on functionality.

But the architect, by definition, is not the expert in the details of the system interface, so I've had to spend time extracting unneeded data from inputs, and providing dummy data for useless outputs.  And the architect does not have the time to update the specification to include these changes.

In my opinion, it would be better for the details to be handled by the people close to them, and have the architects handle just the broad strokes.  But this runs up against the custom of the higher-level abstraction people having more status, and therefore more power, with the usual empire-building and ego-stroking that accumulates over time.

Lunch Epiphanies (with apologies to the movie)

I ate lunch alone today.  It's somewhat rare during the week, as I have cow-orkers with whom I have lunch pretty much every day, and when they are not able to go, I typically grab some fast food and eat in my car, listening to the radio.  But it's summertime, and too damned hot to eat in the car.

In any case, I was sitting in the restaurant alone, and got a serious case of either burnout or an existential crisis.  I just did not want to go back to the office.  And this is after one of the better weeks I've had, actually being able to spend time writing code and learning the newer IDE and project organization.

It is really not a good feeling.  And The Job is not making it easier with their continual Kool-aid vending.

Fighting the Good Fight

It's actually been a good week for me - I've spent most of it actually writing code.

The big thing that I did was spend 30 minutes arguing with a project lead about our new API.  We are putting a REST interface over an older one, and I was arguing that we needed to make the REST one better than the older one. 

It does nobody any favors to do a dumb port of one interface to another.  Each type of API has strengths and weaknesses, and they rarely overlap.  So I was strongly advocating that we eliminate the useless artifacts required by the older API.

The part that was unsettling was that the project lead was not mentioning any reasons for shortchanging the port.  I have often had a manager tell me that there was not enough time to do something differently, and in some cases that is a valid concern.  But that did not come up in this discussion, which worries me.