PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.
Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.
Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo process.
The daily stand-up is entirely reasonable and productive if you do it right. The problem is people who insist on doing it wrong. Upper management has no business deciding when a team has their stand-up. Agile means "people over process", after all.
Sure. But the real reason management loves the 'morning standup meeting' is because it enforces morning attendance of all employees. So much for those flexible work hours. Oh, you do get to go home late to finish your work of course.
My team has morning standups. We first changed the time, then agreed to make my participation optional, when it became clear that (due to personal reasons) I was struggling to make it to the office on time. It's a shame, too, because they're some of the best standups I've ever had. Our flex time is actually a thing, with some of my team mates showing up early and usually leaving around 17:00.
I think I was asked, at every interview I've been to in the last few year, how I handle receiving difficult feedback. This is the only place I've ever interviewed at where I was asked how I handle giving difficult feedback.
In my team, when someone can't make it, they call in to the meeting. It's a short meeting, just a few lines per person. Doing it over the phone is totally fine.
Management shouldn't even be at standups. Its for syncing with your peers, not an instrument of control. But I guess this is what you're saying, right?
The funny (or tragic) thing is, treating a version of Agile as a religion that's right for all teams all the time is against everything that Agile actually is.
Eh, the first place I worked didn't claim to be agile or anything. The daily meeting wasn't a stand-up (we sat and usually ate breakfast at a cafe or chatted in the lobby). It was still a really useful meeting.
I guess if you drop the facade that it’s supposed to be fast and allow people to sit down, eat breakfast and drink coffee it doesn’t sound that bad (even if it’s still not a productive meeting).
Well, it's supposed to be fast because it's supposed to be done by a small team, of fie or six engineers. If you got fifteen people taking turns it doesn't really work. Even worse when the whole point is for middle management to check your progress, rather than an engineer-only meeting where you can discuss actual technical issues you're having so the more senior members can give you a pointer etc.
Agreed, I don’t need to stand to ensure my teams concise in their update. The parking lot concept is a great way to shorten meeting and politely interrupt people when they are long winded.
You are missing my point entirely. Yes its called a standup because standing encourages brevity. Just because you sit or stand doesn't mean its a standup in literal definition though.
>I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.
So, you were consistently late for work, didn't pay attention in meetings and were admittedly inattentive and working from home "too much". So you were put on PIP and you took that as a reason to leave the company?
What did you expect them to do? You sound like a nightmare employee. I'm sure the company is equally glad you're gone.
I had a job where I put in longer hours than any other person on the team and was the most capable of handling the widest/diverse workload.
My manager was obsessive about when I showed up at work- despite never missing a meeting. If I got in at 7:30 one morning and 9 the next, it drove him crazy, regardless if I was putting over 9 hours a day every day.
He valued predictability over production because he was an obsessive control freak not because it made anything better from the point of view of the company or my actual output.
I may have been a nightmare for him, but I don't think I was the problem- a manager should manage for productivity/outcomes not for his pet peeves. My current manager (at another company) understands how to maximize output and is comfortable as long as work gets done and everyone is much less stressed.
Yea I didn't even mention my prior job. They had a mandatory 9:30am attendance meeting that they called "standup", and if I showed up 5 minutes late my manager would joke about it coming out of my bonus. Despite this I don't think he actually cared, but the President did, and ultimately he answered to him. I quit that job soon after and my only regret is not leaving earlier.
Some people aren’t cut out for being on time to late morning meetings (930). It’s a culture mismatch and there are companies that do perfectly fine with no meetings before noon and whatnot.
I wish there was an easier way to learn about this culture as part of the job search. I like to have candidates shadow for a day or two to meet the team and see how days go.
People who are into being on time have it as part of a larger philosophy, I think. Being late for them means something specific. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone change modes on this but it’s probably easier to change their philosophy than be late to a bunch of their meetings.
The only nightmare i see is a company that values a warm body being in a specific seat for a specific range of hours over actual productivity. Physical presence is not really required most of the time for most engineers.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but once you are on $250k+ a year like most of the readers here, it is reasonable of the employer to demand both your butt in a seat and results.
I my personal experience the guy who turned up at 8am and started getting shit done, always was far more productive (and indeed ended up a much better coder very quickly) than the “judge me by results not hours” guy turning up at 9:45. Even despite the latter guy being smart and more experienced.
Yes, I was consistently late for a software engineering job where 95% of my productive time was spent in front of a computer and "lateness" was arbitrarily defined by upper managers who moved the standup time 1.5 hours earlier to passively start enforcing attendance. Standups went from being a team thing to being mandated top-down by executives completely uninvolved in the day-to-day of our team's work.
Notice I said "didn't appear attentive in meetings". Yes, I was not very enthusiastic about our 15-20 minute morning daily standups where every employee goes around justifying their own existence and reitering what is already on the Jira board.
Yes I was working from home "too much" in a job where I was working from home 1-2 times/week, and for the first 6 months it was never an issue, but then when a new manager took over (with no involvement in our team's day-to-day activities) all of a sudden he had an issue with it. Not because my/our output was any lower than before, just because some marketing executive noticed that my team was working from home more than the others (made more apparent by an open office), and assumed this meant we were probably slacking.
You sound like one of those nightmare "managers" I worked with who destroyed the company's culture and caused the company's enormously high attrition rate with most employee's only averaging ~1 year before quitting for greener pastures. I'm glad I no longer work at companies with corporate drones like you.
This is extremely disturbing, not to mention so ironic that a self-proclaimed "communist" regime is torturing and kidnapping communist activists.
We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.
Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.
I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
> Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries.
I think russia has been taken seriously for a century now, with not better track record. What makes your country be taken seriously is your military strength, which is your capacity to flip-off any other country that tries to take political advantage over you.
> I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
What I think is that the vast majority of chinese don't care about this topic at all, and would rather not think about it. Remember, most of them dont know about Tiananmen square, not because the government censored it, but because they don't care about it.
I've asked this question to people that live in china, which is very anecdotal.
In the modern age, it's impossible to keep information out. Any chinese person that left the country has had access to this information, and could have disseminated with virtually no effort.
China's government is not Marxist in any sense of the word. And it could hardly be considered to be communist unless you're willing to accept self-applied labels. From the article:
“The government is scared because the domestic contradictions are growing,” Michael said. “Once you study Marxism, you know real socialism and China’s so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics are two different things. They sell fascism as socialism, like a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb.”
I think it has less to do with merely growing the money supply, and more to do with preventing and quickly recovering from crashes.
The Great Depression was exacerbated and prolonged by us being on the gold standard and thus not being able to use monetary stimulus. Also with a gold standard, there's a limit to how much fiscal stimulus a government can conduct as well because every dollar has to be convertible to gold.
Essentially, fixed money supply = less control. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, and if money is in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy I'd prefer the fixed money supply. But most people don't realize that only 3% of the money supply is printed by the government (the rest is created by private banks), and economic bubbles/crashes and inflation/deflation aren't restricted to fiat currencies.
Section "Money creation in reality" [1]. States that 97% of money in circulation are from bank deposits, the majority of which are themselves created by commercial banks (though it doesn't explicitly state that the rest comes from governments).
Mass transit in America is terrible, period (outside of maybe Manhattan, despite the fact that our subway has been getting worse and is in dire need of upgrading). America sucks at mass transit, but for whatever reason Americans don't seem to care. I think it's because they're complacent, don't know any better, and have this toxic "everybody for themselves" mentality that makes it impossible to improve anything that's in the general public welfare.
Even IF there was a desire among politicians to fix the transportation issues in San Francisco I doubt they'd find a means to do so. It would cost a ton of money and congress has no idea where to get that money from.
The middle class is taxed to capacity. When ~30-40% of your paycheck is taxes (including federal), and another 30-40% is exorbitant rent costs, you're left feeling quite squeezed. I myself for example, simply mark NO on all tax supported programs on the ballot, regardless of their merit.
It sucks because many of those programs are so desperately needed. But asking me to raise my taxes any further is a non-starter. If you include property tax and sales tax in your estimation of how much you're getting taxed the number is astonishing. Yet look around and witness what that buys - failing infrastructure, skyrocketing housing prices, terrible roads, healthcare prices spiraling out of control, an educational system in decline, the list goes on, and on...
It's not that I have an "every man for them self" perspective, it's just that I have believe there are deeper issues with our country that we can't tax ourselves out of.
One thing I wish I understood better is where the hell does the money go?
The federal budget is to a first approximation is 2/3 medicare/medicaid/social security/defense. In California across state and local has it's 2/3 being spent on health care/education/pensions. The Golden Gate Bridge cost $1.5B in today's dollars to build. Today-ish it took $6.4B to rebuild the east span of the Bay bridge.
How have things gotten so expensive, where does that money go, it just seems like despite paying a fair amount in taxes we're just not getting very much for our money.
It's more expensive everywhere than it used to be, but the construction cost inflation is vastly greater in the US than in other developed countries. Construction is getting less efficient over time.
I have the same damn question - where is all the money going?
Put another way, why is my dollar buying exponentially less than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Don't even try to tell me it's inflation.
I don't know the answer. We pay politicians to know those things and to work on finding solutions. Funny how they don't seem any better at understanding the problem and finding a solution than you and me.
So while I don't honestly have any solid understanding, I can only posit that it may have something to do with wealth consolidation [1]. I'm no proponent of socialism or artificially redistributing wealth but I look to the growing divide between the rich and poor in the U.S. (and globally) and can't help but notice it correlates quite strongly with my dollar buying less, and less. Yes, correlation != causation, but you gotta start somewhere.
If you can get past the 90s era cinematography "The Money Makers" is a fascinating documentary which illuminates some of the issues with our monetary system.
My Youtube account got banned 10 years ago with videos on it I made as a teen that are now gone forever. 7 years ago or so I had tried emailing their customer support which of course didn't get me anywhere. Is there any way I can get those videos back? Unfortunately I don't have any contacts at Google, but if I were to get in hold with someone who works there, is there anything in particular I should direct them to do?
I should be upfront and say that I got banned for uploading a video that was deemed inappropriate. I don't really fault them for banning the account, I just wish they had given me the chance to back up my other perfectly appropriate videos. I know those videos probably still exist on some hard drive on a Google server.
What i don't get i why they do these "hard" bans. Would have been more helpful and long term friendly to basically take the videos off air and forbid the account from uploading any more videos, but leave the account itself active.
Do what you enjoy, and don't be afraid to venture outside of software development. At the end of the day, not everyone obtains fulfillment out of staring at a computer screen all day fixing bugs and developing incremental features onto a piece of software. That's ok - we're human, not robots.
You're still young, so you can try something else (eg. product development) and easily go back to software development if you end up missing it. Or maybe there's another are within tech that'll interest you (eg. blockchain, AI/ML, game dev).
I will say one thing though - software development is probably the best job for money, work life balance, and ease of finding employment
Calling this a gender issue is like saying "we're raising the minimum wage to help women".
The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.
Not sure about that. It helps anyone who has been systematically discriminated in hiring against over time.
When you start a new job, it's not uncommon for your new employer to offer you a salary that's X% higher than your old one, using that as a base. If your old salary was lower due to discrimination, you'd start with a lower base, and would get less in the new job than someone who was not previously discriminated against.
Real wages for everybody have been roughly flat for decades even as productivity and GDP/capita have skyrocketed.
I wouldn't necessarily call this exploitation since I think there's a broader issue in play, but it's not exactly like everybody, except this one isolated discriminated segment, is just thriving. And in particular I thinking framing this as an issue of discrimination works as a red herring against the aforementioned broader issue. That issue being that general increases in productivity and the percent of qualified individuals are resulting in a downward pressure on wages. The rapid growth in outsourcing, increases in foreign workers, free trade, and other such things also work to compound these issues.
I do not believe there is any clear solution, but I think it's a shame that the focus is rarely placed on this issue. And when it is, it's often more in the context of jingoism than the issue itself.
I think you have it a bit backwards... you're suggesting that we should sideline equality and discrimination issues and focus on raising the boat for everyone.
But the economy doesn't really work that way, it's the opposite. When the economy is doing well, fewer people complain... it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip.
But when the economy does less well, it's only reasonable for everyone to look at the inequities.
But just because fewer people complain about inequities in a good economy doesn't mean that we should forget about them and solely focus on the economy overall. Curing inequities is a moral goal in its own right.
Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating, unemployment (even more realistic measures like U6) is lower than it's been in a long time, inflation is stable, and so on. So I don't think it's really reasonable to take as an assumption that people behave in a certain way during a bad economy and imply we're in a bad economy. I would completely agree with you [about the state of the economy], but this is not a majority view so we can't extrapolate outward.
And a bit of a tangent here but the "it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip" is also a bit dubious. One social study that has repeated and reproduced countless times is that people are happier being the king among rats than a pauper among kings. People ought care about themselves objectively. In reality we measure ourselves relatively. Kind of a bad trait for a species seeking to make global progress, but again - that's all a tangent that's way out there!
As for my own view, the way to "cure inequities" is to ensure equal opportunity. It turns out time and again the medicine is rather worse than the disease when we start working to ensure equality of results. I'm actually in favor of this law since I see no positive result from employers asking for employee past earnings. What's offered to somebody should not be based on what they earned in the past like some sort of soft caste. It also takes another burden off applicants. However, I would be rather shocked to see this have any meaningful effect whatsoever. An employer is going to have a high price and a low price. I don't see removing one tidbit of information making all that of substantial changes to either, or the applicant's ability to more effectively hit the high. But I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
> Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating ...
When stocks are up and wages are flat, it means that those with wealth get wealthier and a faster rate than those without wealth. Inequality worsens, and advancement is based not on what one is doing, but on what they started with. Not exactly equal opportunity.
It helps anybody who's underpaid. One being underpaid doesn't imply or even suggest that one was discriminated against. I was underpaid my first job, and it wasn't due to discrimination. I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.
My analogy of "we're raising the minimum wage to help women/<insert minority>" still stands.
>I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.
That is due to discrimination. Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control. One might even go so far as saying it is worse than discriminating based on religion, given the general view of religion being a choice one can actively change.
Historically we have been fine with such discrimination, but it wasn't too long ago the true was based on all the forms of discrimination we now view as wrong.
> Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control.
Actually, it's very different, precisely because most people can control social awkwardness, and further, a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others, which is a major component to just about any job.
> precisely because most people can control social awkwardness
This is a wild generalisation at best. I know many people with crippling social awkwardness that they would give anything to be able to control to any degree but they can't.
> a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others
Data shows women tend to do much less negotiation than men. If you didn't negotiate your first salary that can compound for the rest of your career even if you negotiate later salaries.
It's absolutely absurd that "arrest quotas" are even a thing in America. The job of the police in most first world countries is to protect the people, not make arrests for ludicrous laws. I don't want my tax dollars funding police officers camping out on highways to hand out speeding tickets or arresting random people for having pocket knives on them. No wonder Americans have such an adversarial relationship with the police.
"Arrest quotas" is a bit like voter fraud. It's talked about a lot, there's heavy speculation, but there's little evidence showing it exists in any systemic form.
It's also worth noting in many areas arrest quotas are outright illegal.
What departments do typically do is look at distributions. Say on a Friday evening shift, over the past 12 month period, a typical officer typically has 16-18 speeding stops.
However, during the same Friday evening shift, an offer typically writes 1-2 for the past months. Why? Maybe it's something explainable. Maybe it's the officer isn't doing a good job.
But that's the intent of looking at distribution. It's not to say the officer has to write 16-18, but if it turned out they were slacking off, they may easily see it that way.
Arrest quotas are obviously and undeniably real, they've been documented numerous times in various contexts. The most recent major case of many such examples in NYC was the Adrian Schoolcraft case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
““It’s an easy way to make an arrest. And they’re under pressure to make arrests.” A poster on Officer.com, a verified online message board for law enforcement officers, put it bluntly in 2013 when he advised a rookie to be on the lookout for “GKs”: “make sure they have a prior conviction so you can bump it up to that felony!!!”
So, there may not be quotas, but it’s pretty clear that there is pressure to deliver arrest numbers, especially felony arrests. A different mechanism that drives the same behavior.
But they have to put pressure on cops to make arrests, because if they don't, cops will only make an arrest when someone pisses them off or does something so bad and so public it's going to make the papers.
Speeding tickets are a perfect example. The sergeant has a life outside work - he gets days off, he runs errands, he drives to and from work. And all the while he sees people doing stupid stuff just like the rest of us. So it's hard for him to imagine his officers can drive around for an entire shift and never see someone speeding, running a red light, or making an illegal u-turn.
What do you think your boss would do if you sat at your desk and did nothing all day?
> And all the while he sees people doing stupid stuff just like the rest of us. So it's hard for him to imagine his officers can drive around for an entire shift and never see someone speeding, running a red light, or making an illegal u-turn.
Then they should stop and cite those violations. No one said that the police should not write tickets for minor misdemeanors. The complaint is the practice of using those misdemeanors as a way to pad their productivity, and by extension their department's budget.
Police departments should be a sunk cost. There shouldn't be pressure to make arrests, as an arrest can only be made when someone breaks the law and is caught. Look at the whole Arpaio mess. Sure, Illegal Immigrants are here illegally, but it's a national problem, not a local problem. We've sat complaining (at least we were as of last year before shit got fucked) that the feds are going after medical marijuana dispensaries in CA despite the fact that locally, those dispensaries are by-and-large complying with local laws. An illegal immigrant in Arizona isn't all that different. They may be breaking a federal law, but they're a productive member of their community. They aren't breaking any local laws, and it's been ruled countless times that local police departments should not be enforcing those laws much like a local patrolman can't really arrest and cite someone for treason. It's above their pay grade. When you do have departments focusing on one kind of violation, like treason or illegal immigration, as Arpaio ended up doing, the department pulls resources from other violations, like rape and statutory rape, that are mostly violent crime with victims that want justice for the pain and suffering they endured by their neighbors. Those are the people that should be arrested, and the fortunate (or unfortunate) reality is that a lawful community will have officers that are not "productive".
>The complaint is the practice of using those misdemeanors as a way to pad their productivity, and by extension their department's budget.
The evidence for that is spotty at best, and you're missing the point, which is cops won't write tickets (or make arrests) at all unless they're pushed to do so.
Let me add another example. Where I live there's a massage parlor every other block or so. Everybody knows these places are giving happy endings. If there are a hundred brothels (let's call them what they are) in the city, it's not unreasonable for the police chief to say to the vice squad "You have the manpower to shut down at least three of these places every month, so if that doesn't happen I'll want to know why." That's perfectly legitimate management.
> "Arrest quotas" is a bit like voter fraud. It's talked about a lot, there's heavy speculation, but there's little evidence showing it exists in any systemic form.
This is incorrect. Almost every law enforcement organization in the United States tracks the number of arrests made by each officer, and there is ample evidence that this information is used when making personnel and staffing decisions.
Also, many municipalities track arrests by organizational unit (in NYC it is per precinct), and when management (police chief) requires that mid-level management (commanding officer) "get their numbers up", you have exactly the same incentive to commit fraud that you see in places like Wells Fargo.
Also, rather than taking my word for it, you should look at the many, many, many, many news articles that have been done on the subject. There's the first google hit (http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/NYPD-Lieutenant-Say...), feel free to look at the first 200 search results for corroborating reports.
>"Arrest quotas" is a bit like voter fraud. It's talked about a lot, there's heavy speculation, but there's little evidence showing it exists in any systemic form.
No it isn't! In New York City, of course there are arrest quotas.
As a matter of fact, NYPD officers will arrest innocent people, on entirely trumped-up charges, just to make quota.
I’m not saying there’s a [citation needed] for every single claim someone makes, but good golly this sure would go better with a link to back what you’re saying.
And by extension the government. Americans have a built in distrust of our government (often for good reason), which is why a lot of policies don’t happen here.
I'm much less concerned with that question than whether or not it should be this way. Personally, I'm not given to throwing my hands up with a "capitalism amirite?"
Lol they're common in other parts of the world too, e.g. in Germany. They dont officially exist, rather informally, and end up in the UN complaining about racial profiling by cops.
Pro tip, avoid German train stations if you're not white.
> Do you mean "avoid loitering at train stations" or "avoid using trains"?
Avoid using the major traffic hubs. No joke. Cops here will even fleece you on the spot sometimes if you're black. They seem to believe that all black or rasta wearing persons are dope dealers.
If the law is broad enough that the law can be "enforced" and used to arrest anyone at any given time for almost any reason, then yes, it absolutely is oppression.
Welfare is capped at a maximum of 5 years, and unemployment insurance - which you don't qualify for if you quit your job -
is capped at even less. Meanwhile student loan payments pile up and can be used to garnish your wages and social security.
The Scandinavian countries clearly have far more generous social safety nets.
Comments here have blown up but almost everyone is missing one of the most important points: dollars spent do not determine how good a social safety net is.
There are estimates NYC spends >$40k/year/homeless-w-mental-illness with no evidence their situation has improved. In fact, it might be getting worse!
Social safety and healthcare in America is broken. The War on Poverty has spent 10s of trillions, and our healthcare costs are the most outrageous in the world. That doesn't mean we have a good social safety net.
Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.