The Water Cooler

Masked Man

12:21 AM

@DarkCygnus Perfect example of XY problem.

DarkCygnus

Yeah right, took an answer there addressing the real prob

Crossed the river styx

12:52 AM

@DarkCygnus Geri Ryan is actually a good actress. I didn't realize that until I saw her in things OTHER than Voyager. Most of the cast were decent to great actors and actresses, but the scripts didn't take advantage of them.

Between pounding the reset button and scripts that were so heavily laden with treknobabble, I couldn't watch it.

DarkCygnus

1:21 AM

yey, DV's for everyone that answered the font question

Crossed the river styx

1:44 AM

LOL

DarkCygnus

2:32 AM

-1

A: Senior SW Engineer role without leadership experience? Expectations?

Am I setting my sights too high? I'd say no, you can set your sights as high as you want. Is it unreasonable to expect to find a senior position without the leadership requirement? I would say that all Senior positions involve at least a bit of leadership. Maybe you say you haven't h...

What do you suggest I can do to improve this answer?

Masked Man

3:15 AM

@DarkCygnus At least the question stopped getting downvotes after my comment lol

Folks, please don't downvote because you don't agree with what the OP is doing. This question will be useful to plenty of people. If the OP is doing something wrong, that should be explained in an answer. — Masked Man 3 hours ago

Masked Man

3:46 AM

if anyone comments further or even reads this comment, you must buy me a packet of chewing gum and adopt a puppy. — Kilisi Nov 10 '15 at 20:32

^THIS is hilarious!

DarkCygnus

4:08 AM

Wth! Somebody is DV all answers posted there... except the Nope one that has 5 UV..... smells funny...

DarkCygnus

5:07 AM

Geez, whosoever wins the Mod election, I hereby pledge mysef to help them straighten the site

Masked Man

@DarkCygnus Seems that it is not the 5UV user doing the downvoting.

The reputation total adds up correctly. Even though the -1 for downvote is not showed on your profile to others, you can still add up all the numbers and count how many answer downvotes the user has cast.

DarkCygnus

6:06 AM

I can add the DVs and UVs

Snow

6:44 AM

@motosubatsu Good morning Sir.

motosubatsu

@Snow Good morning to you too sir

last day before the long weekend and thank crunchie for that

Snow

Yes. Next week is also a three-day for me. I'm off on hols on Friday.

motosubatsu

@Snow nice.. you going away or just taking the day?

Snow

Away for two weeks. Off to Skye.

motosubatsu

@Snow sounds ace.. Skye is on my todo list, which given it really isn't that far from I should get around to it really

Snow

6:54 AM

Yeah, you should do. There's some really nice driving roads down the west coast. That's if you like the combination of driving and stunning scenery.

motosubatsu

@Snow which I very much do.. a bit of a rambling driving tour of scotland has been penciled in for me for the last couple of years, I just seem to keep being busy at the times I think of doing it. Kinda fancy doing skye and maybe a part of the NC500

Snow

A few years back, we did the coastal route right up to Durness. Pretty damned amazing trip.

Masked Man

7:40 AM

@DarkCygnus No I meant I went to his profile and saw if the total reputation adds up to the change in reputation. If there were any downvotes, those numbers wouldn't add up. Example if I have written only 1 answer on this site and got 10 upvotes and no downvotes, but my reputation shows 95, it means I have downvoted some answers.

Raf M.

8:18 AM

Hi all

Cronax

hi

motosubatsu

morning :)

Snow

Coffee #4 on the go. It's going to be a sparkly-eyed day today...

motosubatsu

@Snow I've already had a can of Monster, a can of coke and have just brewed a coffee, hoping by the end of that I might start to feel something resembling awake. It's been a long week.

Snow

I get you there. My partner decided she was too cold in bed last night, so put on the extra comforter. Then she decided to sleep right in the middle of the bed (so I get 18 inches to sleep on). Then she decided she was hot and dumped all of the duvet/comforter combination onto me. So I went and slept in the spare room.

This is a few days after she did a passable impression of an unmovable anti-tank obstacle right in the middle of the bed, and snored loud enough to wake the enemy.

Masked Man

8:32 AM

@Cronax What is the point of your edit?

2

A: How do I deal with the political promotional items someone placed in the office canteen?

Never pass by an opportunity to mind your own business. You have nothing to gain from getting involved in a confrontation over it. Ignore it and move on with your work.

motosubatsu

@Snow ouch.. that's going to disturb your sleep, both of them

Snow

Yep. And I'm supposed to be monitoring her snoring to see if there's sign of any sleep apnoea. Nope. She can snore for three hours without missing a beat.

Cronax

@MaskedMan It was made in haste, your original wording seemed to me like it was just slightly off on the phrasing for that saying, but in hindsight it's actually unnecessary to edit and you might have had it right the first time

I was about to bring it up actually, but then work interfered XD

motosubatsu

@Snow well good news in terms of her not having sleep apnoea I suppose but not so good for your sleep!

Masked Man

@Cronax ok cool, I thought it was an expletive or something in some part of the world. ;)

Tinkeringbell

9:05 AM

Peek-a-boo! anyone around?

motosubatsu

@Tinkeringbell present!

Tinkeringbell

@motosubatsu Nice :) We've got a question over at IPS and we think it might be better recommended that the OP ask at Workplace: interpersonal.stackexchange.com/questions/14922/…... We don't think it's as much a matter of a problem with Interpersonal Skills and a way to say 'I am doing well' as with the metrics used, the way the team is acting...

What do you think?

motosubatsu

@Tinkeringbell Yeah feels more like a workplace question than an IPS one

Tinkeringbell

Anything we can recommend the user to take into account when asking here?

motosubatsu

@Tinkeringbell nothing massively obvious comes to mind.. thinking of the sort of thing that would likely get asked in comments I'd say it would be worth the OP clarifying who is doing the evaluation of the performance and any relevant hierarchy info

Tinkeringbell

9:14 AM

Great :) I'll go put up a comment then, thank you!

Snow

Hmm. Something's wrong if one aspect of performance is gauged on the number of commits. That doesn't sound right at all to me.

Tinkeringbell

@Snow Right, that set off my alarms too... commits, and they talk about 'business value of features' and go right on mentioning only numbers of features implemented, not their business value

Magisch

@Snow I can make 900 commits in a day or 10. Depends on how I setup my dev environment

motosubatsu

@Snow it's a crap metric for sure.. same problems as lines of code as a metric

Magisch

Measuring something so arbitrary is so pointless it actually dilutes genuine performance metrics

Snow

9:18 AM

i'm tending toward this being more of an SO question on how to measure the effectiveness of developers in a team.

A high number of commits just tells me that someone is either checking in too often or is constantly correcting their own bugs.

Magisch

Sounds like yet another person who got hung up on the fact that developer productivity requires expertise in the subject matter to accurately measure.

Tinkeringbell

Anyone familiar with GQM?

Snow

This needs to be a question relating "how to measure developer performance?" rather than "How do I defend my performance when it's measured using a misguided metric?".

Tinkeringbell

And @Snow, does SO do metrics? Isn't that more of a thing for Software Engineering?

@Snow Yeah, well, I think the second one may still hold some value because a lot of people have to deal with it :/

Magisch

"How to measure developer productivity" would be far off topic on SO

Snow

9:23 AM

Well that answers that one then.

Magisch

Possibly better for softwareengineering.se but probably a dupe there

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch Yeah. Anyhow, does TWP see any value in that second question, or will that be dupe too?

Snow

I expect so, but the question will need some beating into shape, I feel.

Tinkeringbell

@Snow I'm trying to gather stuff for comments, and encourage the user to just ask here instead of migrating the original post, so any suggestions are welcome :)

Hopefully, that way you'll have a question that's already shaped at least a little more :)

Magisch

@Tinkeringbell It's been a while since I've been active on here

so I probably lost my touch a bit

motosubatsu

9:26 AM

@Tinkeringbell Classical Quantum Mechanics?

Tinkeringbell

@motosubatsu Goal - Question - Metric. It's an approach to getting software quality metrics that I personally like ;)

Start with goals, make questions that need answering to determine whether these goals are being met, and metrics that can answer the questions :)

If the goal changes, so do the questions and/or the metrics used to answer them...

Snow

I think it might be ok for that question to go here. I feel the answer will be "change the way that you report your performance".

motosubatsu

@Tinkeringbell haha.. makes more sense, I'd read it as CQM somehow

Tinkeringbell

@motosubatsu Yeah, I got that impression ;)

Magisch

My current workplace has a novel way of tracking dev performance

they just dont

Tinkeringbell

9:31 AM

@Magisch Lovely! Mine just has me ask my co-workers somewhere during July to fill in some feedback on my performance (like what do I need to improve, what did I do really well)... First year, I got 5 star reviews because I arranged a get-well soon card for a co-worker with a long-term illness :/

Made me go ... Erm, I'm here for my developer performance :P

motosubatsu

@Magisch probably better than some I've seen.. I worked somewhere once where both devs and IT techs had income and profit based objectives in a company where we could literally have no direct affect on either

Magisch

It's a bizarre thing

Generally speaking nobody abuses it

Despite it being wide open to do so

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch Which is what often happens... If you're allowed to do something, it's just no fun anymore, it doesn't give satisfaction.

A J

@Magisch My workplace starts checking developer's performance at the time of appraisal.

Magisch

Slacking off loses its charm when nobody calls you on it

A J

9:33 AM

Quite strange it is.

Magisch

then it's just ... boring

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch It is. I've been slacking for about 3 weeks now, because my assignment to a new project just keeps being delayed :/

Snow

It's pretty simple where I work - the performance is project based. The team lead just asks the project managers how things went in completed projects. The PMs know if things are done on time and knows the quality of the deliverables.

Tinkeringbell

My company does tend to look at the time you actually worked for a client in a year... so, in my case, with training in April and no assignment in May, I'd be likely to take a performance hit :(

Magisch

9:53 AM

@Tinkeringbell Can they actually hold it against you if they just don't assign you?

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch Depends on the manager I guess. Some do. I hope (don't think) mine will, he's generally a good guy

Masked Man

@Snow "12-15 features in 20-30 commits" also sounds quite strange to me. Do they just keep (p)adding commits to make up the required numbers?

Magisch

Methinks if I was your manager and didn't assign you for a month that month of downtime isn't on you

Since, you know, you're not responsible for gathering your own clients

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch True... Technically the problem now lies on the client side, so it's not his fault either. I hope that he can brush it off like that to his higher ups, and we'd both not be in trouble :P

Cronax

@MaskedMan I wonder if they mean pushes or commits...in general it's a good idea to commit often, I personally try to commit whenever I finish a 'part', but then I'm just a tester so I 'merely' write test automation code

Having said that, I know there are people who want an entire feature to be contained in a single commit...I'll never understand that way of working

Tinkeringbell

10:04 AM

@Cronax I do, no-one is supposed to see my stuff when it isn't finished yet.

Cronax

just because it's not all finished yet doesn't mean the commit doesn't have value

that's why you use git-flow, so you don't push anything that's potentially broken to a branch that someone else might be using

Snow

I can see this question being liberally comment-stormed.

Tinkeringbell

@Snow The joy of being able to clean stuff up :P

Snow

This is how people earn their Marshall badge...

Tinkeringbell

Yep :) but right now, it's in chat, which is good :)

Cronax

10:18 AM

One of the big reasons why I think small commits are better is the commit messages. if one feature = one commit, then the commit message will just be 'added feature X'

when you've changed a lot of things to add that feature, that becomes hard to tell

Snow

It seems that today is "noisily clean your desk area" morning.

Cronax

so when you're hunting for 'when did we change how this thing works' then the commit messages will tell you nothing

Masked Man

@Cronax Assuming a DVCS like git, if the single commit means a commit pushed to the remote, then it makes sense to me. We do this in my current job. That is extremely useful for cherry-picking and reverting. If a feature is composed of multiple commits, things get out of hand quickly.

Cronax

@MaskedMan are you familiar with git-flow?

Masked Man

@Cronax Yes, but we cannot use it due to cough management decision.

Tinkeringbell

10:22 AM

@Cronax So, commit on your branch (locally) and push the branch? I still don't like doing that if my stuff isn't in some state of 'finished'.

Masked Man

I commit locally as many times as I want to, that helps me try out different combinations of code changes without doing too many "comment out'.

motosubatsu

most of my local commits are purely so I can switch branches

Masked Man

I do local commits mostly to cherry-pick from one local repo to another for testing. Otherwise I have to spend lot of time rebuilding stuff.

Crossed the river styx

@motosubatsu My code was much shorter than the code it replaced, it must have been better, because the code it replaced took 10 hours to run, mine took ten minutes

Masked Man

An IPS mod triggered a discussion about git on TWP lol.

Tinkeringbell

10:36 AM

@MaskedMan Hey, don't blame me! It's a very civil topic to discuss :P

Masked Man

@Tinkeringbell I'm not sure any more. It has been recently established that "THIS" is an offensive word. 😹

Tinkeringbell

Oh dear, did I miss a PSA again?

Crossed the river styx

@Tinkeringbell yes, please don't use the "T" word, it could get your post flagged.

@MaskedMan I finally tried git. It's very annoying

Masked Man

@Crossedtheriverstyx It was written by the same guy who wrote Linux, so you can expect that.

Crossed the river styx

@MaskedMan yes, and he was very aware of what the word "git" means in UK English.

motosubatsu

11:08 AM

@Crossedtheriverstyx indeed..and one can only thing it was fully deliberate given what a PITA git can be

Crossed the river styx

@motosubatsu given what he's said in a few interviews, there's more than a little bit of evidence to confirm that

motosubatsu

@Crossedtheriverstyx yeah.. I'm fairly sure that Tovalds is actually a master of torture, he succeeds in making his software good enough that it gains significant market share only to ensure that the Pure Evil(TM) elements of it reach a wider audience to torture

it's pure genius as evil plans go really

Cronax

@Crossedtheriverstyx Git is worlds better than the alternative tbh, the alternative being SVN or 'nothing'

there are other systems like Mercurial that are similar, basically the same advantages and downsides

@Tinkeringbell Re: not committing when your stuff isn't 'finished' that makes me curious what you consider finished and what the harm is of committing before that

motosubatsu

@Cronax TFS <cough/>

Cronax

@motosubatsu off-camera retching

Crossed the river styx

11:14 AM

@Cronax unfortunately, too many IT departments think that since it's there, it should be used for everything. For smaller projects, it can double delivery time

Cronax

@Crossedtheriverstyx I disagree, but it requires proper discipline

especially when talking about delivery time, that sounds like a terrible line of reasoning

Tinkeringbell

@Cronax Well, it may be due to the project I worked on being ... not so loosely coupled, and working with git submodules ... but basically, finished meant that I got a cucumber test working

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax git's value is inversely proportionate to the size, complexity, and amount of people involved.

motosubatsu

@Cronax properly implemented TFS is pure joy compared with git IMHO and far more intuitive

Cronax

@Tinkeringbell Just because your commit won't have working code on its own doesn't mean it has no value, with proper commit messages and small commits, you're actually much better able to debug

@Crossedtheriverstyx @motosubatsu Properly implemented git-flow makes git a great way to work, never any issues with merges, no untested code in places you don't want it, etc

Crossed the river styx

11:19 AM

@Cronax but that's the qualifier, isn't it. When, in IT is ANYTHING properly implemented.

Cronax

I use git-flow even for solo projects

generally I agree, but when we're talking about git it's one of those things where the proper implementation is in the hands of the team, no need to convince management

so it just requires good agreements and the discipline to adhere to them

motosubatsu

@Cronax to be fair I've only used git in one workplace so don't have many data points so I may be judging it harshly. I just find it deliberately obtuse about everything

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax those are pretty large qualifiers

Cronax

if you can't get your team to adhere to this kind of discipline I probably don't want to see the quality of their code

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax Well, the code I replaced took ten hours to run, mine takes about six minutes. I'll let that speak for itself.

Cronax

11:27 AM

@Crossedtheriverstyx it achieves the same goal, with the same amount of verification etc etc?

not that I think it unlikely that ten hours can be reduced, but when the reduction is to six minutes that smells like it's actually a dirty hack rather than the kind of code I'd like to trust my production to

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax Yep, that was the opinion of headquarters, and they went over it with a fine tooth comb. They must have liked it because they brought me on full-time from a two month contract.

Masked Man

@Cronax Your underestimation of the tricks management can pull out of their bag astonishes me.

Cronax

@MaskedMan I think it's more a question of 'the low bar on the amount of BS I am willing to put up with'

motosubatsu

@Cronax it's not unheard of.. I once reduced some slow SQL code from a run time of 2 days to about 20 mins

Cronax

my profile is relatively scarce in the current workforce so if the BS reaches a certain level I have the luxury to just go away, get a new job, and probably even earn more in the process

@Crossedtheriverstyx @motosubatsu again I'm not saying it's impossible, if it's not a dirty hack though, then there's a high chance that the other coders are severely incompetent

Masked Man

11:35 AM

@Cronax Good for you, some of us don't have that luxury, at least not to that extent.

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax a good programmer is about 5X more efficient than most others. I don't do dirty hacks, I clean them up.

Cronax

maybe I have an overly simplistic view, I am 'just' a tester and the only code I write myself is the automated testing code, but when people tell me they can't adhere to basic quality standards because 'that just won't work in our company' I call BS

I've been in similar corporations before, all it took to change things was actually explaining to management what the real consequences of their choices were and what the real consequences of doing things the right way would be

@Crossedtheriverstyx you genuinely sound like the kind of person I'd love to work with in that case

Magisch

@Cronax Or not specialised in that area. I do this with SQL Queries from time to time

my coworkers aren't really invested in sql

Cronax

@Magisch disinterest/lack of knowledge is no excuse for doing a shoddy job in my book, but perhaps that's just me

Crossed the river styx

@Cronax Yeah, I just reamed a coworker for hard-coding. We don't have any control ove incoming data, and i't's usually erratic, and unreliable, so to minimize the damage, we have check after check. One data source had data and comments in the columns. that was fun to fix.

Cronax

11:42 AM

@Magisch when I'm researching how to do a thing, I don't look for the easiest quickest way to do it, I look for how to do it properly

@Crossedtheriverstyx sounds like it's a good thing I'm not testing in your company, your poor coworkers would be up to their eyebrows in bug reports :D

Crossed the river styx

11:55 AM

@Cronax our IT leaves much to be desired, but I'm very strict about the shop standards. I WILL ding someone for not using meaningful variable and procedure names, repetitive code instead of procedure calls, et cetera. There's more to the maintainability of code than it just being bug-free. It should be self documenting as well, and simple.

Cronax

@Crossedtheriverstyx I wholeheartedly agree

Magisch

@Crossedtheriverstyx You would get a seizure here then

Most of the code is legacy "I learned to code vba while writing this" ERP software

Crossed the river styx

12:18 PM

@Magisch I always say that coder's heaven and coder's hell is the same place: In each, you get to maintain your own code.

motosubatsu

@Cronax it wasn't really a case of incompetence.. the guy who wrote the original code was a decent enough SQL coder in his own right and his code worked okay and was robust he was just out of his depth in that specific area. I just happened to have spent the previous 5 years of my career dealing data volumes a few orders of magnitude up the scale so I was somewhat specialized in that area compared to most

Magisch

If all you do is work with data volumes where optimisation doesn't matter one bit and suddenly you have a big data optimization problem it doesn't mean you're a shitty dev if your code is slower

And the "always optimize" mantra rings a bit hollow when you have to justify your product owner that you spent a day making sure a UI input query takes 0.0001s instead of 0.1s

Anne Daunted

Sometimes, it just needs to work.

Masked Man

12:36 PM

@Cronax My standard for tolerable BS is also pretty low. Unfortunately, when the "management" is in another country and they dance near the line of "acceptable racism", it is hard to convince them of better way to do things. I have been tolerating this for a while due to certain other priorities outside work life, but since that is now mostly taken care of, I am actively searching for another job.

motosubatsu

@Magisch yep.. spot on, in my scenario my heavily finessed (and dare I say it rather spiffy) SQL took me about 2 days to develop, something that simply wouldn't be worth it for a saving of a few seconds here and there which is all the difference it would have made to a more "normal" amount of data and unless you were dealing with vast amounts of data day in day out you'd likely never even learn to do it the way I did, necessity being the mother of invention and all that

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