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Worst experience with higher ups:
The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.
That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.
I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.
Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.
So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.3 -
First day at CERN: done!
Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.
The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!15 -
The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.
I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.
I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.
Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.3 -
Ya'll know what... If humans weren't such annoying vulnerability-searching little shits then we wouldn't have had to implement any protection against them and think of all the performance that would be saved on that. Take branch prediction vulnerability mitigation in the Linux kernel for example, that's got to make a performance hit of least 10% on basically everything.
Alas, I do get why security is important and why we keep such vulnerability mitigation running despite the performance hit. I get why safe code is necessary but still... if these people weren't such annoying little bastards.
Yeah, I was just kind of set off by the above. So much would be faster and easier if only the programmers wouldn't have to plan for people exploiting their software. Software would be written much faster and humans would progress to stuff that actually matters like innovation.8 -
Story time.
We are all alike as devs, just surrounded by the people who has an idea of "new facebook", but i like how their mind works and how they long for a change, so it does not annoy me that much. I just simply explain how it is not likely to happen, without decent marketing and innovation.
However, yesterday i went to my dad's workplace, because i was bored. He has lots of friends there, and i happen to meet one. When he heard me that i am a software engineer, he told me that he has an idea.
I prepared my words to explain why it is not possible, but when i heard what it is, i was ashamed of myself.
He sells and manages car tires. He wants a simple showroom website to show what tires he has,( not stock-wise. Price, size, type, brand etc. ) and he wants to update them himself.
I swallowed my words and told him that i could do it. Normally i don't make websites, i provide utilities and APIS to make the front-end devs job easier at my work. But i will turn his idea into reality.
He said that he hired someone else for that years ago, but the one he hired made the website in ASP.NET 2.0, so making one from scratch would take much less time.
No way i would touch that mess came from the seventh layer of hell itself, to torment developers endlessly.
Just a simple front-end seasoned with bulma and pure JS, node to communicate with the DB ( maybe golang for fun ? ) and a simple admin panel for him would do the trick. I am excited !3 -
!rant
I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.
The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.
These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.
Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?
What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?
I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.7 -
Their claim is "Innovation and Digital Marketing". They develop software, websites and apps...
I've just clicked on the slider's CTA for Services... and I've got a PDF!!!2 -
any mathematician turned devs here?
I think developers with a formal mathematical education should be the ones actually developing softwares. Ordinary developers are just good cooks who know to prepare these recipes by knowing to mix and manage the Ingredients through their experience, developing software using various libraries and frameworks, I don't understand what innovation we devs do in it, makes me feel less passionate about my work sometimes.
(I embrace the fact that being a developer requires an arstisic craftsmanship to do it properly)9 -
Advices looking for a job in Canada as a foreign?
I've been a software developer for 4 years now. I started in small company in Rome as jr developer where I'm now the CTO... I now feel stuck in this job cause the company makes a lot of money from the core product and there is no room for innovation.
I was looking for a drastic change in my life and career and Canada seems a good place to me.
So, any advices?9 -
If I wanted good feedback for my products (especially if they were geared towards developers) I would scrap devRant and do some data analysis on how our products are perceived in raw form. Would be very raw and informative insight indeed because you are at the heart of raging innovation (raging innovation: when a developer is so pissed at a flaw in a piece of software they highlight or fabricate an ingenious feature or solution) and will help not only iron the kinks out but make a better product all together. Also, of course the good aspects would be lauded.
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I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.
I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)
I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:
1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company
2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)
3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth
4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.
5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.
6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.
7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .
8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.
My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?
we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.
So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?
then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?
if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.
For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.
same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS
for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .
an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".
edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"
but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product
The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad1 -
What kind of innovation approach has helped humanity in a better way? Is it some group of obscure indie devs working overnight to write some software which is free, useful and purposeful devoid of licensing shit or the too-honorary-to-shit-from-arse organizations which put marketing gimmicks like making world better place and which compromise user data either to governments or to other corporations for monetizing given the first chance. If innovation is happening in both the spectrums then what is the viable kind of required innovation at the moment for us humans. IMHO I don't trust corporate innovation and shitty innovations happening in Facebook, Google and likes. Has corporate greed bought innovation for market price.1
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