Tech Professionals' Aggravations Rise, But So Do Salaries (dice.com) 180
Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite some concerns over the stock market and whether the so-called "unicorns" will survive the year, it's apparently still a good time to get into tech: New data from Robert Half Technology suggests that salaries for various tech positions will increase as much as 7 percent this year. Which is good, because tech professionals have confessed to a host of aggravations with their lives, including too-expensive housing, lengthy commutes and gridlock, inability to achieve work-life balance, and a disconnect from their jobs. It's neither the best nor worst of times, but the money could be pretty good.
But is the money worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
There comes a point, and its exact location may differ from individual to individual, where more money is just not worth the aggravation. Selling your health and/or your relationships for money???
Nice spin Dice.
Or, as my boss put it (Score:2, Flamebait)
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? [blueletterbible.org]
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Or, as my boss put it:
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? [blueletterbible.org]
He's up one world and down one soul. Duh.
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The point, in my experience, is approximately five miles up the 101. More than about five miles of that 5 MPH traffic, and I'm looking for VC funding to develop Dogbert's anti-traffic missile system.
Re:But is the money worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
My commute is pretty long - nearly 25 miles one way. I naively moved to this area when my wife was pregnant with our first because it was a better school district, but I've regretted it ever since... but we're just not in the financial condition to move, unfortunately, and my wife does freelance work now at a number of places near where we live.
Anyway, I've tried a number of things that the company seems to conspire to make not work for me, despite their "green" initiatives and advertising alternative schedules for "work life balance."
I tried a compressed work week - came in an hour earlier and left an hour later for four days (M-Th). It was good because traffic was better earlier and later, and then I had a three day weekend. You think "great, I get to spend extra time with the kids because of the three day weekend," but what happened was I left for work before they got up, came home when they were going to bed, and within a couple of years they were both in school on Friday anyway. So I was seeing them less. My jackass of a boss would then keep scheduling private meetings with me on Fridays, and it was obviously just to f#@k me up, because I'd come in on Friday and wait all day, then he'd say "I don't have time, let's meet on Monday." And yes, I'm certain it was intentional.
So I tried work from home (and still do). Hey, if you can work one day a week at home, that automatically cuts out 20% of the weekly aggravation from commuting. And if everybody did it (I know they can't), and the days at home were spread evenly through the week, then everyone's commute every day would be 20% better. But it doesn't work that way, and I can't do it when people schedule meetings or I'm working on a project that requires me to use resources at the office. But on the whole it works pretty well.
Alternative hours - this is where I get aggravated. So I manage to get my ass out of bed before five; the gym at work (at least we have that) opens at 5:30. I work out, shower, and I'm at my desk at 7:00am. Work eight hours (lunch at my desk, typically), I can leave around 3:00 or 3:30. Traffic is a dream at those times. Unfortunately, a lot of the artists I work with don't even come in until 10:00am or so. They schedule meetings at 3:30 and 4:00. To make matters worse, I work in television production and write playback interfaces for on air graphics. I'm not a graphics operator, but we're not union, so when all the graphics operators are booked, they ask me to do it. It's a nice change of pace... but the show we do is at night, so my schedule is shifted by almost exactly 12 hours.
So one of the keys to good health is keeping a regular schedule, and they make it impossible... I might go for a week or two, but then something always happens. Sure, there's a few special events I need to deal with every year, which might take me away from home for a week, but it's the constant interruptions in your daily schedule all throughout the year that lead to health problems. Frankly, I don't know how the graphics operators do it, because when they're not doing live shows, they're in during normal work hours to prep.
I have an unusual position, though, and it does pay well (although I haven't gotten a decent raise since they could blame the recession... all the while boasting publicly how well the company is doing and posting increasing revenue year after year). I also like my job, on the whole, because it's different, and the work is constantly changing. So I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but if a bunch of money fell into my lap right now, I'd quit for sure, and I'd take less money to work elsewhere. But my job is so specific, it's hard to find decent compensation anywhere else... few companies need someone with my talents.
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Is this not what we all do? We sell our time and energy. There is wear and tear associated with all this. There are differences of course - some work in uranium ore mine others in well paid hobby as work paradise. There are limits to everything and there are costs to everything. That is why we are compensated for our work.
Other than that I agree - working in the industry for few decades now I see only assholes and geniuses have good lives. The rest of us low lives pushes the buttocks together and goes on in
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Well at least somebody is selling clicks. The "article" has supposedly ten points, which are spread out on 10 sub pages and each one loads a new set of ads. Clickwhoring for those ad dimes like this is aggravating to say the least.
As I recall, there was once a Grease Monkey script or similar that blocked all Bennett Haselton's rants. Maybe someone could share with us a script that blocks all these Dice's ad-filled trash submissions from their shill account.
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I took a trade, job security for health. I took on a role as sysadmin despite being a sr dev. I also agreed to 24/7 on call.
Long, long story short my health took a holy hell of a beating. Days and at one stretch weeks at a time not getting a full nights sleep (and of course no fault of my own).
I did it for the job security I told myself. I also did it for a pittance. I figured it would buy me browny points.
I am now unemployed, fired roughly two weeks before xmas. My boss is a cunt. I am a sucker. Replaced b
Re:But is the money worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your post really hit home with me, mainly because I'm almost the exact same: I'll be 39 this month, been a *IX SA since 1991 (and add NA since roughly 1999). I did graveyard NOC jobs for almost 9 years to make ends meet, which took a massive toll on my body and mind: I've developed severe IBS, I have difficulty sleeping, generalised anxiety, minor long-term memory loss, and in the past year or two have noticed I can't multitask effectively as I once could. I have to work entirely from home as a result (which also makes finding salary positions difficult).
I was paid well (at peak, US$140K/year not including benefits or stock), but I never did what I did for the money nor did I want it. I'd ask my bosses after annual reviews "is there any way I can exchange this pay raise for more time off?", and the answer was always no. I quit my last job, which was in DevOps, after being there for little more than a year (my job prior to that was at a company for almost 8 years; I prefer stable work). I couldn't stand the "fix the problem with the least amount of effort, and stop trying to figure out how all of this works from top to bottom" mentality. I've been living off savings and spending frugally since May 2015, and doing that in Silicon Valley is difficult to say the least.
When I started seeing SRE and DevOps terms show up circa mid-to-late-2000s I became concerned with the direction my field was heading. SA/operations folks have always worked with developers, but we do and think about very different things: I can code in a multitude of PLs but I'm in no way a professional programmer and couldn't tell you how to implement a complex algorithm if I tried; in contrast, software developers don't have decades of operations knowledge and procedure, good design, or know the importance of application of KISS principle (especially in systems architecture). Like good programming style/approach, these are very hard to convey quickly and effectively. How do you instil over 20 years of knowledge into someone in 10 minutes? You can't. But companies today want the quick-and-easy solution (oh, and it needs to be cheap too. And efficient. And it needs to do our laundry. And herd cats. By the end of this sprint).
I've been wanting out of this line of work for the past 7 years, but especially within the last 2-3. The storage industry is where I'd like to go, as I find things like ATA protocol and doing data recovery quite enjoyable. The problem is that the storage industry is very... "niche" (some might stay stale). Finding someone to give you a chance and open the door for you is very rare.
Many of my friends and colleagues in systems/operations today share the exact same view I do -- there is something "shallow" (I would use the term moronic) going on when it comes to systems/operations. Any time I hear the phrases SaaS, agile or waterfall, DevOps/TechOps, cloud (context here depends), or scalability (outside of appropriate context) I cringe. Like me, my friends are trying to get out of this field, but because our skills are pretty much honed in one area switching to a new career is nearly impossible: companies acknowledge you, but upon seeing your work history go "oh wow, you have lots of operations knowledge, there's this opening we have in DevOps..." and not want to pursue any other discussions. It's like a curse.
Did I choose poorly? No -- I chose doing something at the time (early 90s to early 2000s) was incredibly exciting, rewarding, and enjoyable. But what the job role is *today* is not what it used to be (and what it should be, IMO). The rebuttals I get are "yeah well, adapt or get out" -- adapting doesn't work (a frontal lobotomy might work?), and getting out is almost impossible without taking up, say, giving everything up and flipping burgers.
Long story short: is the money worth it? The answer, 98% of the time, is a big fat NO. The 2% exception is if you know you need extra money and you know the thing you're doing is brief (say, under 6 months). It's never worth it long-term. I just wish companies would embrace this fact already; I'm still unsure if the millennials have.
Re:But is the money worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, very well said. Please mod up. (Millennial by about 6 hours and 2 minutes here.)
"Shallow" is a very good way of putting it. My job has become more and more digital burger flipping without satisfied customers. Actually, I think I got more recognition when I used to flip burgers. People can understand burgers. However, it's been more and more glaringly obvious that nobody understands what I do or even why I should do it. They just use me for no particular reason--just because they can. The work is all meaningless. It's like I show up at 8 am, and someone starts shooting at me saying "dance!" so I dance, and I dance mad. Then at 5, I go home, and I've contributed nothing to the world except perhaps entertainment for 5 or 6 individuals.
I mean, granted, I used to keep dancing mad into the night because I thought it'd keep them happy. Now it's just 8-5, because I don't care anymore and they've given me no reason to care anymore other than to keep the paycheck coming so that I can get myself out of the stupid financial situation I got myself into thinking I had a career ahead of me.
Flipping actual burgers is the way to go. Somebody's always going to cuss you out over something, but I felt a deep satisfaction when I used to flip burgers for a living because, well, burgers make people happy by and large. What I do now makes nobody happy. It's a mine field, and there's no point to it at all. People give me tasks just to see me fail at them because I didn't notice some stupid detail five forwards down in an email.
I mean, literally! I'm currently implementing an API which is a Rube Goldberg machine to work around a piece of shitty proprietary software, and I know it will never be used.
When I cook somebody a burger, I can see them eat it and be satisfied. When I'm done cooking this API, it'll be thrown straight into the trash the moment the cocaine-snorting assholes who wanted it have their next cocaine-induced vision, which will happen just as it gets ready, and then that next one will be thrown straight in the trash as well.
It's like a restaurant full of people all ordering absurd burgers, complaining that they're starving to death but they just need a mayonnaise sushi burger with Worcestershire sauce made with ground duck and half a bell pepper so they don't starve to death, and when it's ready, they just throw it in the trash and demand another absurdity.
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I mean, literally! I'm currently implementing an API which is a Rube Goldberg machine to work around a piece of shitty proprietary software, and I know it will never be used.
Preach brother. I did the same thing, a crazy mishmash of code that was impossible to maintain. I'd suggest ways of updating the code and removing redundant methods (one code section was concerned with converting decimal to hex, something that today could be accomplished with 3 lines of code) but I was told the code worked, and "we don't want to invest the money in updating it."
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The bonus of my position is that I get all the info on the maintenance scans on people's computers, and a lot of times people have things that show up. Sometimes it's just unwanted stu
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Is any job worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the 1990's during the "Tech Bubble", "Economy 2.0". Tech workers were treated like gods, High pay, large benefits, and easy jobs. Anyone who was around during that time was lucky. A lot of people skipped college and went straight into tech, as "Web Developers", with an increase of people going to college in degrees that they really didn't care for but because it made a lot of money and was an easy job.
So what happened it created a glut of bad employees, lazy tech workers, who were over paid. Well new immigration laws, and the rise of Free Software allowed these business who realized that "Economy 2.0" was "Economy 1.0" in a market bubble needed to switch to more profitable entities. So they outsourced to cheaper countries for many of these easy jobs at a much lower rate, and kept raising the bar until, they found a happy medium.
So Tech workers who are employed in the US today have to be the following to be competitive
1. They need to be at a particular skill level, if not they will need to work harder to compensate. I am sorry but in my 20 years of professional experience, I have found the person who is working past 50 hours a week is either new at the job, and is working up experience, or just not technically savvy enough to get the job done right and on deadline.
2. They need to know how to be professional. This means a degree of people skills, not being insulting. Also knowing a bit how to deal with politics, how not to take blame for every problem yet willing to work on a solution to fix it. Also if you are to point blame you need to be professional about it, and make sure it isn't too sharp of a point.
3. They should understand the business they are in. There isn't a "Tech Industry" No one works in Tech, Apple make Consumer Product that happens to be computers. Google/Facebook/Twitter... are advertising companies with interesting software to keep its viewers engaged. Your technology skills should be used to benefit the business they are supporting. Medical IT work is different than Industrial IT Work, which is different than Government IT work... Know the business is important.
4. Know your place. In tech we tend to work across the organization, so we get high level glance at every job, and try to improve it with technology. This sometimes makes us think that we know how to do all these peoples jobs... You do not. You can make the best hammer in the world, but it doesn't make you a good carpenter, but your hammer may make a good carpenter better.
Yes today we tech workers have to be like the rest of the middle class staff. We are no longer treated as gods having the skills unknowable by mere mortals. We are not expected to produce, and be part of the team.
Now my experience, I don't work in metro areas, I have worked for startups, large and small orgs, Governments and industries. I found for the most part I found my aggravation is from my own pride being stomped on by reality, not from The Man who is trying to keep me down. Much of IT work is very creative, however working as part of the team means your creativity is limited to the needs of the group. So you will not get your own way.
Re:Is any job worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Also if you are to point blame you need to be professional about it, and make sure it isn't too sharp of a point."
Nope, I'm old enough to stop caring about this, if a manager fucked things up so that a project failed, I will not only call him out but also throw him under the bus and sick the dogs on his body.
Pieces of crap that single handedly destroyed a project with their ineptitude have no right to stay employed and it's the rest of us that need to make sure they burn for their deeds.
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"Also if you are to point blame you need to be professional about it, and make sure it isn't too sharp of a point."
Nope, I'm old enough to stop caring about this, if a manager fucked things up so that a project failed, I will not only call him out but also throw him under the bus and sick the dogs on his body.
The GP was talking about situations where you are at fault, not someone else. Is immediately deflecting blame to your manager your strategy for avoiding blame for your own mistakes?
Personally, I've always found that when I screw up the best thing I can do is to say so and then work to fix it. Worst case is that the company culture is one that latches onto any scapegoat and I get fired... but in the long term that's a place I'm better off not being anyway.
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You are a cost center. They are a profit center.
If you throw them under the bus do not be surprised if the PM who has contacts with the VP's including the HR VP throws you under the bus too! It happened to me and I was luckily only demoted and not fired! It sucks having a 20 something year old kid bark orders at me but it was because the PM failed and I pointed it out and she told me it was all my fault 3 levels above my boss and she wanted me fired.
That my friend is life. If you suck up and treat the PM's
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Yeah, they tried that. I then threw the VP under the bus with the CTO by emailing him the chain of evidence where the VP tried to cover his ass by saying he didn't, but my emails and the audio recording of the conference calls where he authorized the purchase of the wrong equipment said otherwise.
Works great to keep all email and all communications, that's how you make your bus big enough to run over a VP without even disturbing your beer.
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Yep.
She had proof. I did not even have a chance to respond. Just a phone call syaing this guy is my boss now with my job title and the door is there if you do not like it ... etc
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I could not even imagine working in an environment like that. It shouldn't but it still does sort of shock, disturb really, me that not only did you feel compelled/obligated to keep such evidence but that you had to use such evidence. I just, I just can't picture having to do that sort of thing. This is probably going to be a bit longer than I'd like but there's a bit to say - some background, and an observation. 'Snot major or anything but, well... It's an observation, more than anything - at least I think
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The tech bubble generated a lot of annoyed middle management who suddenly found themselves at the mercy of people who did actual work and knew actual things. While it's true a lot of startups from the wild west of the tech bubble were more about fleecing people out of VC than actually generating useful products, neither of them could even pretend to exist without people who knew a modem from a printer. These were the people the fratboys bullied in high school/college, so to have the tables turned, to a po
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Well they earn the bills. You cost them.
Of course you will know your place or be terminated with an Indian who will care. If you do not like that then work at a .com or tech company where your input generates real revenue.
Sorry if that sounded demeaning. It is but that is reality you can't change in a non tech company. People who make revenue growing corn in an agricultural company will be Gods. In the restaurant industry the managers in restaurants and VP's of operations and sales are the Gods. At a hospit
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The poor treatment I'm talking about is not related to within IT, it's without when we have to fix the AA's computer for the kajillionth time because they don't understand that pop-ups are bad and they shouldn't click them. The IT person will immediately be blamed for the problem, since they fixed the computer in the past, and when they try to do their jobs and educate the user on how to prevent the issue in the future, they either get ignored or have their jobs threatened. I routinely had to fix a laser
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The poor treatment I'm talking about is not related to within IT, it's without when we have to fix the AA's computer for the kajillionth time because they don't understand that pop-ups are bad and they shouldn't click them. The IT person will immediately be blamed for the problem, since they fixed the computer in the past, and when they try to do their jobs and educate the user on how to prevent the issue in the future, they either get ignored or have their jobs threatened. I routinely had to fix a laser printer that some dumb bitch in AR kept fucking up, and I got told that unless I stop that from happening, I'd be in danger of losing my job. For something she did, something that I tried to educate her about, and something that broke the printer consistently every time.
If you fuck up your budget and need Accounting's help, you don't blame them or threaten their jobs over it. If you need some paperwork from HR for a review or something, you don't blame HR for your needing it. But, somehow, when it's IT, abusing them is not only acceptable but encouraged. Those nerds never do any work anyway, they're just down in the basement playing Warquest or Evercraft or something.
I would update your resume. It is not worth being treated that way. But my point is if money is thrown down the drain yes accountants do get threatened too. If your department goofs off all the time then yes it impacts you. Attitude and service is everything at a level of desktop support. The sys admins can be more jerks as they deal with problems with someone violating privacy. How did you talk to that lady in accountants receivable? Do you say hi to her when you are not fixing something? Have casual conve
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I have yet to see a support job where that wasn't the case. Accounting or Marketing need to do something wrong before they get abused; support folks do not, they are there for you to bitch at about things you can't do anything about. You don't even need to say or do anything. With the workload I had, and the treatment I got from the mundanes, I had no time or inclination to talk to any employees that weren't in IT, lest I get roped into doing something that I didn't have time for.
It doesn't matter if the
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Erf... Alright, I'll try to make this short but it does need a preface. Try to read this with an open mind and not take slight where none is intended. Okay? If you can do that, read on.
In short, I'm retired. This is fairly well known but I don't think I've interacted with you before. So, I'll mention it. I sold my business and retired. My business was definitely a "tech" business. In fact, it was very tech oriented as we were among the earliest to really get to "market" with traffic modeling. As in, we were
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Your suspicion that you don't really understand the issue, not having been in that situation yourself, is correct. Let me tell you what will happen if you take the advice you're giving, in the 2, 3, 4 order you suggest.
2: You have got to be fucking kidding me. Your users make you miserable every single day. If it's not their blinding stupidity or refusal to learn anything ("That's not my job to know that, that's your job" "Oh, I don't have to know that") it's the attempts to have you fired for doing you
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Oh, I moved on from support years ago. That's why I'm still alive and sane. It's the ditch digging of the 21st century; it's hard, unforgiving work, with those who consider themselves better than you laughing at and occasionally spitting on you.
You may understand that IT folks are human beings, and as a small (I'm assuming) business owner you have some more flexibility in how you take care of your people. I am also gratified to learn that there's still someone out there who thinks of his employees as hum
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Ah, that's good to hear. I might be an asshole but I was legitimately curious if you were still putting up with that.
I sold back in 2008 and retired. It's been almost exactly 8 years since the sale was finalized and I was able to divest the shares in the now-parent company. I am, shall we say, quite comfortably retired.
I don't know what it was, or how it happened, but somewhere before the time I sold and now, things have really changed. If I had to lay it out there and guess at a date, I'd say it was probab
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Support has sucked for a long time before that. Saying it got worse around 2008/2009 is kind of like saying you're being crushed by 15 tons of rocks instead of 10. My first job in tech was in 1997 working phone support for a dialup ISP and it's gotten steadily worse ever since. Stupids gonna stupid.
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Last I heard, the middle class is gone. It's either the 1%-ers and the poor.
Guess where most of us folks now fit in?
That's a big reason why we're all miserable.
Work work work (Score:1)
Yeah, I hear that. As I write, somebody is trying to schedule a "follow up meeting" for an issue. Since I'm pretty much booked up with actual work all day, her answer "oh, can we just schedule it at 12:30" then.
Yeah, the answer to me being too busy for more meetings is to schedule one in my lunchtime, because apparently my calendar is open there...
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I have 2 problems with this post (Score:5, Insightful)
1) This is Dice stuff, posted on a Dice website. Intrinsical value seems questionable, if not for that of a place-filler. Slow news night / day ?
2) Regarding housing and commutes: this concerns only Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a tiny part of the world. A large, large majority of us techies work somewhere else: Australia, Europe, Asia, other parts of the world. Scope of post seems limited. Also TLDR.
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yea uh that's kinda what i was thinking i guess... i was thinking "of course they want people to think salaries are rising, how else will Robert Half summon the fresh meat?"
Re: I have 2 problems with this post (Score:1)
London, Europe's biggest location for software developers, is very expensive too.
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Agree. But that is not caused by a heavy influx of techies; rather by speculation (Middle-East tycoons driving prices up) and London's position as financial centre.
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1) This is Dice stuff, posted on a Dice website. Intrinsical value seems questionable, if not for that of a place-filler. Slow news night / day ?
2) Regarding housing and commutes: this concerns only Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a tiny part of the world. A large, large majority of us techies work somewhere else: Australia, Europe, Asia, other parts of the world. Scope of post seems limited. Also TLDR.
Housing rates have skyrocketed in many cities around the world. I'm in Paris and it's very expensive here since AirBNB came along and some percentage of the market became unavailable to normal renters / apartment buyers.
Google "airbnb effect on renting" and you'll see that it's not just California.
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Interesting. I'd not yet thought of this, living in an owned house. Darn yankee unbridled-cap'talism croonies!
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Interesting. I'd not yet thought of this, living in an owned house. Darn yankee unbridled-cap'talism croonies!
It is what it is but the consequence is that anyone who doesn't make a lot of money and can't work remotely is going to have trouble making a living in a touristic city without incurring a long commute (assuming jobs that can't be remoted). If salaries adapt then it balances out but are salaries adapting?
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2) Regarding housing and commutes: this concerns only Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a tiny part of the world. A large, large majority of us techies work somewhere else: Australia, Europe, Asia, other parts of the world. Scope of post seems limited. Also TLDR.
I live in Perth, Western Australia and affordable housing causing long commutes happens everywhere. Even here in Perth with it's low population density. In fact combine our poor public transport system, lots of single lane roads and overly aggressive drivers, it's easier to get around peak hour LA than it is to get around peak hour Perth.
If you want an affordable house here in Perth (meaning $250-350,000 USD) you need to live on the outskirts of Perth. This means a driving commute into your place of empl
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That's because the rest of us don't get mandatory, statue-guaranteed vacation time. But try to bring that up and you get shouted down by the corporate lobbyists who would not only like to continue to be free to abuse "exempt" employees who don't get overtime (or sick days, or parental leave, or a lot of things common in other First World countries), they find it offensive that they can't chain the cogs to their desks.
Mandating vacation time would put everyone on the same playing field, instead of one compa
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That's why you change jobs every 6-18 months. Every time you change jobs, take a month off.
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Me, I get a month or so off every year.
Of course, I live in a civilised country.
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Because they don't have to. Most companies will actually let you take the vacation time you've earned, but many have turned PTO into a meaningless number on a screen. You might have 160 hours of vacation in the bank, but if you can't ever get a vacation approved, you might as well not have any at all. And that's perfectly legal; with only a few exceptions (FMLA, which is unpaid; jury duty, National Guard exercises) that they'll still try to fire you (or at least try to screw you out of getting paid when
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And lack of vacation just makes that worse. I haven't had a full week off since 1992.
No offence, but you're a fucking idiot then.
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And lack of vacation just makes that worse. I haven't had a full week off since 1992.
No offence, but you're a fucking idiot then.
They're not an idiot, They're a fictional creation. It's and entire thread of ACs spouting crap to each other. It's probably just one AC who is doing so at his job where they get paid to do no work, be they still feel oppressed.
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Yeah, a fucking idiot that wants to keep his job. At many companies, actually taking the time off that you have earned is a one-way ticket to not being a "team player" and poor performance reviews. Vacation is optional here. You can get fired for taking vacation (because of poor performance reviews because you took vacation).
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Getting crushed by agile meetings! Also, the methodology doesn't allow a day off.
Then get a new methodology.
You people are like turkeys who think Christmas and Thanksgiving are great for business.
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It does if you account for it. It helps if everyone on your team knows ahead before the sprint when they will be off. It's just a matter of guessing how much the missing people will cost the team in how much it can get done. In reality agile accounts for missing people really well. If the sprint goals aren't met then too bad. Unfortunately no one respects that aspect of agile.
It probably largely depends on how it is implemented at your company. A lot of scrum seems to have been created because "Agile doesn'
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In theory scrum does give the developer some insulation from managerial bullshit. The product owner (idiot MBA usually) decides they need a new feature or an enhancement, the tickets are written and groomed, and they're presented in the backlog at a sprint planning meeting.
This is where it goes off the rails: According to the scrum rules, the developers get to decide if an issue is ready for development or needs further grooming, and if the issue is too large to get done in one sprint and needs to be brok
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Agreed. No matter what rules are put in place the people that don't do the work will end up wanting more than possible out of the people that do.
This is where you need "leadership" from the development team. Go ahead and fuck up my sprint. I'll tell you form the get-go that it's probably not going to work. And when it doesn't I will hold you responsible.
This requires a "corporate culture" that allows for this. But I would say successful software development requires some form of listening to the devs. That
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That is Agile done wrong. The Agile Manifesto says "people over processes", so if you get shoehorned into a process that doesn't work, it ain't Agile, even if that's what it's called.
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No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's called "Agile" and that's how most companies practice it, then it IS "Agile".
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"Agile" is a term that is more or less defined, and using it improperly hurts our ability to communicate. There are two concepts here, Agile more or less based on the Agile manifesto, and Agile the buzzword. How do you propose to distinguish them? I'm a bit tired of Free-as-in-speech and Free-as-in-beer myself, although I don't have a better idea.
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The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't mean that technical terms (jargon) cannot have precise definitions at odds with their common use. It just means that you have to define your terms before you can meaningfully claim that something does or does not qualify. Claiming that someone is not a True Scotsman raises the question, "What attributes must one have to be considered a True Scotsman?". Until that question is properly answered, the claim that one is not a True Scotsman remains an unsupported assertion.
The
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The problem is, if absolutely no one actually practices it the way the manifesto says, then the manifesto is irrelevant. No one's talking about some mythical thing that no one really does in the real world, they're complaining about how it's actually used in real life. It's like communism as described in Marx's writings versus how real communist countries actually act.
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There seem to be two definitions of Agile going around. One has something to do with the Agile Manifesto, and one is a buzzword management uses to screw employees over. I'm reasonably happy with Scrum myself, but we actually do it more or less right around here.
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Calculating a day as six hours of work is more realistic. In the long run, you're not getting more work than that anyway.
Re:"Seattle Hundreds" suck (Score:5, Interesting)
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WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
Agreed, there can't be that many identical morons in the world.
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WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
Agreed, there can't be that many identical morons in the world.
I was wondering the same thing. It's like an AC Gish gallop.
Re: "Seattle Hundreds" suck (Score:1)
No worries! (Score:2)
I think the best part is no worries about money drying up after retirement. Work hard, party hard, die of heart attack at 45!
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I think the best part is no worries about money drying up after retirement. Work hard, party hard, die of heart attack at 45!
If you're working 100+ hours a week you are not also partying hard.
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This is why I have a bottle of good Whiskey in my drawer at work...
Well that and the fact that I have to sometimes drink at the office to deal with some of the idiots in management.
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fluff (Score:2)
I love comments like "can increase as much as" which don't mean anything.
The attached article from the staffing company reads very well as marketing/recruiting material but strikes me as optimistic.
What are your impressions of the labor market where you are ? Do you see such demand that rates/salaries will go up the significantly this year (assuming we don't get slammed too hard by outsourcing / H1B) ?
Maybe mechanical engineering was a better choice (Score:2)
$132000 a year, 38 hour week, six weeks leave a year, plus public holidays. Oh, and I work one day a week from home. My commute is half an hour from one house, or an hour from my weekender.
So this whole tech worker thing sounds like wool mill workers in the 1880s. Are you the new proletariat?
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Careful. Not everyone is as lucky as you are. There are plenty of us with engineering degrees from top 10 engineering schools that haven't managed to swing high salaries or continuous employment. Count your blessings.
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No, I work for a car company that didn't get bailed out by the US government recently. I work 38 hours because that's what my contract says. They pay me to do stuff for them, I do it. That's what contracts are for.
Yeah! (Score:1)
My aggravation definitely rose when I tried to read the f***ing ten page, one paragraph per page, article!
Sausages (Score:2)
To be clear, are there any professions out there that don't suck in some fashion? Is there some magical career that is reasonably compensated, where the management isn't evil, and it is possible to have some semblance of a life outside of work?
The smart money sez that if IT is so awful, maybe it is time to jump ship and look into careers of being plumbers or country doctors.
Or maybe the notion of work culture needs to change, and that is certainly not going to come from above.
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Yes. CEO you get paid handsomely when you destroy the business, you get paid handsomely when you don't do anything, etc....
Re: Sausages (Score:2)
not enough. (Score:2)
Yeah, 7% is bullshit. we need a 35% to make up for the decade of not getting ANY increases.
If you're getting into tech because it's a good... (Score:2, Interesting)
.. industry, PLEASE DON'T.
There are far too many people working in IT who simply shouldn't be, and they just make stuff harder.
Housing costs (Score:2)
What's really important for us to realize is that we're a favored group of the working people, but we are not immune to how the current system treats workers, and we need to look at our impact on others.
We haven't taken this recession quite so much on the chin as blue-collar workers; jobs may be on the rise again, but not well-paying jobs for most. In the meantime, those landlords who are charging high rents in tech-heavy cities? They're making life hard for us, but nigh well impossible to other people.
Life/Work Balance (Score:1)
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She made $1200 per week and couldn't afford food? I'm guessing at least one of your numbers is totally made up...