I love dogs and have one myself, but I don't think this is always a good idea. Maybe bring your dog in once a week or something like that but every day is too much. Some people have allergies, some dogs are poorly trained etc.
Once a week would already be nice. How about bring your dog day once a week? Then add a “no meetings” once a week and the workplace would already be much better.
In my experience people like this think in terms of tools they can use. They read an article about some shiny new thing and watch a conference talk about it and think "wow thats cool, what can I use it for?". Often times their shiny new tech will actually solve a problem, but it might be far from the best solution and it might bring a whole host of other problems.
IMO the key to reason about things like this is to ask "What problem are we solving?", clearly identify it, then brainstorm a list of potential solutions (including whatever shiny new toys this dev wants to use), then run through each solution and list the pros and cons.
Also, try not to start out hostile to the shiny new tech, let the proponent of it do all the talking, just ask questions but don't argue against it, save that for the very last minute. Otherwise it could go a bit sour if you are both clearly on opposing "teams". Finally, try asking the question "what are the downsides of this new technology?".
There was an excellent article published here in the last 6 months about developing in the "problem space" it was about exactly this kind of situation. I just wish I could find a link for it but I can't. Maybe somebody else remembers the title of this article?
Its a buzzword that essentially means "is the candidate similar to me?".
It can be a cover for clear racism/sexism/agesim etc. but can also be used to discriminate on less clear terms - i.e. maybe all the co-founders at a startup went to Yale, Harvard, MIT etc. but the candidate is a self taught programmer who comes from a poor background in the Midwest. If the candidate shows that he is just like the co-founders (i.e. has the same interests, outlook on life etc.) then he will be a culture fit. But if the candidate has four kids at the age of 29, goes to church every sunday, hunting on the weekends etc. he will not be a culture fit.
In essence, "culture fit" is the result of a company hiring candidates based on aspects of them that should not even be considered at all. It shouldn't matter if the candidate has a large family or no family at all, if they candidate is religious or not, what the candidate political beliefs are - these are all things that should really be kept out of the workplace.
I've seen this exact situation, so weird that you point it out. Team full of Yale/Penn grads and then a self taught developer from the midwest who got a late start in life. The tension was palpable from the onset, the company ended up firing the midwest programmer even though he was the best one they had. Beyond technical and job ability, there was a camaraderie among the ivy graduates that was largely closed to academic outsiders. Seen this across multiple companies.
One thing I have picked up on is resentment from academic elites who work in small teams with non academic elites. They often feel like the achievements they have from the past entitle them to positions that non ivy graduates should not have. This is really common in finance
I'm curious how old those folks were. I was I would guess the only person without a degree in my department at my last job (definitely the only dev without one) and never felt this.
Horrible advice. Deadlifts are a great exercise but can go horribly horribly wrong if you try too hard to lift an amount of weight that is too heavy for you. Instead you should focus on maintaining perfect form on every lift and incrementally add weight the more you progress. If you try and "ego-lift" a huge amount of weight you are risking serious injuries to your back, dont do it.
Also as to what is a heavy amount of what is a light amount - its irrelevant to an individual. You should lift the an amount that pushes you beyond what your comfortable with, but not so much that your risk injury.
Ugh... really? I meant to train yourself to be able to lift two times bodyweight. Nobody can do that without training. Of course I didn't mean that someone should just go into the gym and try it. You should aim for two times bodyweight. Many people just keep lifting the same low weights over and over again.
> However - excercising these quitting fantasies have actually lead to a lot of personal growth, as I was able to test myself and to get to know myself better, not to mention branch out into different areas of life (my projects weren't only in software). And also somehow, after each flop, I've landed a job with similar or better pay than the one I've left.
This is exactly my experience of quitting jobs to do something else. The grass was never as green as I imagined it to be before quitting, but the amount of new skills I learned and experiences I had were 10x what I would have gained from staying in the same job.
Yeah, sounds secure :)
I've meant that regularly, every morning some device in bathroom can check your health status. For instance, infrared camera, or smth.
Fair point but do we have any actual data around the correlation between years of experience and value to a company? Admittedly its probably a hard thing to measure..
Because I can also tell you another anecdotal example of some developers who each had 20+ years experience each and we're quite high ranking they company they worked at:
- They would re-invent the wheel constantly: the framework provided lots of functionality which had been developed and battle tested by thousands of other developers but they couldn't be bothered to learn what was available to them so wrote a lot of functionality from scratch which was usually far more buggy than the open source code available.
- classes which had literally 10,000+ lines of code in them.
- of course the idea of following SOLID principles was never ever going to happen
- a general view that they were the experienced ones who "just made it work and got on with the job" while the younger programmers or those who followed more modern practices were seen by them as being "airy-fairy" and worried about things that didn't matter. that argument might have held weight if the application they built wasn't so awfully riddled with bugs and so poorly architected that mainting it and building new features took ages.
- They had all been working at the same company for at least 15 years, so they were able to ignore the advances made in software development in that time and carry on with their old ways. Of course they could still code new features and fix bugs but they didn't realise that what they were doing could be done in a much much better way.
I'm not saying all old developers are like this. But if somebody is able to tell me that older developers are better because X, then they should be able to accept somebody else disagreeing and saying that older developers are worse because Y. You can't have it both ways.
This mentality is an issue across all age ranges in the UK. For some odd reason employers seem to have a fixed idea of how much an employee should earn for a certain job - and if they can't find any good people for it they usually end up paying more than double to hire contractors. Its quite baffling really. And its not just in IT, I've heard of this same thing happening in social work, medicine, recruitment etc.
Most contractors aren't getting paid twice what they can get as an employee, it often works out fairly close when you consider time off, the taxes paid, etc. Shit companies obviously do act that way, but you're better off heading elsewhere, because the same companies don't allow their employees to grow.
I'm a contractor myself and made up rates are still a thing. The high end isn't any better than jobs I can see advertising for perms, and many of the companies advertise for perms before they'll consider contracts.
There's actually 3 companies that have been looking for my skillset for around the last 3 months, and they all refuse to even have a call with me because I don't fit in the rate bracket, but they'll keep looking regardless.
Really? Thats not my experience at all that contracting earns roughly the same as permanent. Why would anybody do contracting if that was the case?
Maybe earning double is an exaggeration on my part though. For myself I earn 50% more as a contractor than as permanent (this is the net amount after taxes, holidays, accountant fees etc.)
See, it depends. Realstically, as a contractor you'd be billing ~220 days a year.
Contractor: (Devops, high day rate)
750 x 220 = £165,000.
800 x 220 = £176,000.
Employee: (Devops, high salary) + Employers NI.
150,000 + 19,508.78 = £169,508.78
Said contractor would need to bring his own equipment, pay insurance, and deal with the risk of being let go arbitrarily, and won't get a bonus or pension contribs.
Now where the contractor can make out is, he can pay reasonable expenses, and he can act more tax efficent, especially if he doesn't pay himself more than the higher threshold.
For the record, I'm not a big fan of the politics that comes with being an employee, I like to just come in, do the work, and leave, so quite happy as a contractor.
Hmmm, a £150k salary seems much harder thing to achieve than a £750 day rate, I can see quite a few DevOps contract jobs at £750 / day but no permanent ones at £150k! As you say though, it depends on how you look at it..
I think there's a reasonble amount of both but large bureaucracies like gov, banks or multinationals have finance departments that set salary bands.
These usually don't reflect that skilled IT is vastly different from desktop jocky, and that it's a well paid field, thus they're forced to use contractors or outsource.
