I don't understand how a senior developer partnering with juniors rather than crushing tasks solo equates to eschewing accountability -- especially if the goal is "continuous improvement" of the engineering org.
Although, it's not like the first time I've seen it expressed that senior engineers should outproduce juniors in terms of individual tasks/storypoints, and spend lots of time mentoring and pairing with juniors. Which I think is what you're getting at?
I disagree mightily with that. Those goals are in conflict and emphasizing individual stats is more or less the emperor of all perverse incentives. Instead, I favor the traditional agile/scrum emphasis on team velocity.
what if the push to work 4 days instead of 5, and less hours in a day, and the wedge being driven between the founders and the proletariat is the result of a psi-ops from Russia and China to hobble the US from the inside. Convince the current generation that working hard and pursuing your craft is inherently a bad thing. I feel like this would work.
> Convince the current generation that working hard and pursuing your craft is inherently a bad thing
It's not. Pushing forward blindly largely builds tech debt either through paths that get abandoned or eschewing documentation & understanding. Most teams would benefit from going slower with many more small probes to figure out how to build the best feature vs throwing tons of big features out.
My opinion on this is that a slow Michaelangelo (eg: every stroke matters) is a better product than a really huge Pollock.
fabricated outrage. There is no reason why a "go for it" startup wouldn't be honest about the hours they want to get out of employees. You don't have to work here. It's not always a conspiracy.
at will, exempt employee. no overtime. There is generally no cap on the number of hours an employee can legally work in a day. Employer can ask for just about any hours, and you can quit if you don't like it.
Have a discussion. Present your case and listen to your manager's response.
I can't speak for all managers, but I've never met a reasonable manager who wanted to drive our a good engineer even in this economy.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding along the way?
Don't listen to the people who presume all managers are bad, have bad motive, want to screw you for stochastic reasons, or are 100% willing to execute their manager's bad plan.
A lot of managers are ex engineers just like you that want to build great products, enjoy work and their engineering brains still exist and don't want to be a*h*les.
There is way less team loyalty.
Teams are not geographical, so no physical attachment.
Teams change players too much for me to become a fan and buy their merch.
Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.
> There is way less team loyalty.
My only real experience is with Dota. There is a lot of nationalist sentiment in tournaments, but you're right - most people follow players, not teams.
In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.
I think the big challenge is that it really doesn't cost very much money to run an esports tournament. There is no need for an expensive stadium (except to sell tickets to fans). Basically anyone can create the new premiere tournament by just paying a bit of money to organize the thing and have a prize pool bigger than the current biggest prize pool.
This really cuts into the power that a franchise model could potentially have - they'd have much less power to control the sport in the way that the NBA controls basketball or the NFL controls football.
> Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.
OWL never made it to a full home-and-away season; they planned one in 2020 but never executed it. Are there any esports leagues that play in home-city venues?
Dota Esports started as kind of region based there was a big rivalry between Chinese and Western teams it was always hype when one of the top Chinese teams like IG, LGD or DK etc would get invited to a Western tournament and vice versa the metagames across the region were different with each region prioritizing a different play style.
I'm pretty sure The qualifiers for TI (largest Dota tournament) are still region based. But nowadays the scenes have become much more homogenized. For a while the winners of TI would flip back and fourth (West would win one year then China and so fourth) it was a really good story to follow.
I think it started to change after TI 4 you began to get "Super Teams" which would just stack the best players on a single team, you tended to get very volatile rosters and team stability was basically non existent. Teams would form for one tournament then break up almost immediately afterwards. As a result you tended to follow players you liked rather than the teams.
Similarly, my only real experience following is Dota - I blame my teenage years in War3 mods with that fascination.
Aside from the payout & incentive structure for players, the game is very much dependent on aligning player skillsets, heroes in the meta, and player attitudes/communication styles -- So much so, that some teams thrive some years, and completely disintegrate the next.
Plenty of examples of teams feeling they're being brought down by 'those one/two players', while they keep the "streaming stars" for the player fan base.
> In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.
And ironically, Valve is the organization that created this problem.
Agreed, it seems odd to be a fan of a team when they aren't "your" team, as in you can go and actually see them on a regular basis.
Racing and golf are examples of successful sports that don't have geographic ties, and they're both mostly individual-driven. Racing has teams, but nobody really cares about them.
Maybe we will see national eSports teams if the fan base blows up over the years. But as for the existing teams, they're more like soccer clubs, and shouldn't be restricted by region, it allows money to be invested to bring in the best players, which is a good incentive for players to shine.
Regional isn't so much about the players. But that they play every week or every other weak in same stadium with same core group of fans easily being present. And on smaller clubs at least in Europe there is clear pipeline for juniors to the main team players. Thus bulk of the players can be locals.
True but remember most of these teams have existed for a long time before it became possible for fans to support or follow teams abroad via TV and internet. So teams in smaller markets (eg Scotland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden) have had the chance to build a local support base without necessarily “competing” for their loyalty with those in bigger markets (eg England, Germany, Spain, Italy).
Note that I’ve put “competing” in quotes because I’m talking about fanbases and therefore money to build and develop their teams. Interestingly in the past when they did compete on the field things were much more equal. Before the explosion of TV money thumbed the scales in favour of the bigger players, it wasn’t such a huge shock for, say[0], Dundee United to beat Barcelona or IFK Gothenburg to beat Internazionale that it would today.
[0] in fact both of these results happened, in the semifinals of the 1986/87 European Cup
I cannot speak for other eSports, but I follow Rocket League and it has this rules which gives players the power over the clubs. If two players out of three decide to stick together and either move to another team or form a new Org, they can take their ranking and qualifications with them. So at least for this specific esport it's hard to build loyalty around an Org and it's formed around the players instead.
I am an engineer with 20+ years of hands on keyboard, I've got projects that are now part of Apache, 1000's of stars on github. I've been CTO at a number of startups that have got significant funding. My point is to establish some credibility. I probably still suck.
Having said that, I have been working with Microsoft PowerAutomate for the past 1.5 years and while it has saved a lot of time and been overall a good experience, there are times when the no code/low code gets in the way and I wish I could just "drop into code" to get something done. Examples are things like data validation.
This technology is not going to replace coding, the paradigm shift is really happening for people in the marketing and sales operations parts of the business. For these folks, this tech is life changing.
In a lot of ways, this tech felt like when you try a new framework in your language of choice; at first it's super easy and you get hyped, and then you hit a requirement where the nocode/lowcode environment really gets in the way.
I think this is spot-on. No-code solutions allow non-technical folks in marketing and sales to build some amazing things that would have required teams of software engineers: marketing, shopping cart, and email integrations; email onboarding workflows; complex ad campaigns; better inventory and wholesale sales management; and a lot of other things I'm not creative enough to think of. I've seen an entire application prototype built by a product manager by duct taping Google Sheets, Mailchimp, and a database together with Zapier.
However, their wants always grow just beyond the no-code capabilities, and there's still a need for software engineers for things that haven't been fully solved yet.
IMHO, the best fusion of the two is offering a no-code tool to non-technical folks... while ensuring you have a tiger team of random and varied developers to produce one-off duct tape bits to cover gaps for them.
It seems far more efficient to have a non-technical person fiddle with a GUI, get most of the way on data integration, etc., and then come to the team with only the parts they couldn't figure out.
"I have this list of strings and I need to X" or "I need to push data to this API"
We did something similar at a previous job, and it generally worked out well. The code assistance kept people from constructing Rube Goldberg machines in the designer tool, to solve simple coding problems that the tool couldn't cover.
I’ve had a different experience with PowerAutomate.
Both as a no-coder and a user.
As a user the UX is horrible and I’m now swamped with terrible “apps” or “workflows” that people try to get me to use and fail for arcane reasons. Or are just ugly or brittle.
As a no-coder the tools are hit or miss, the docs are bad, and widgets frequently don’t work due to my licensing and there’s no way to know other than to try and see.
It has such promise as the shell scripting equivalent for the cloud what shell was to PCs. But instead it is a costly and difficult thing to use.
I played with Huginn a bit, but it’s a steeper learning curve.
I feel like the promise of the Internet has really been blocked off my adding in some nice business models. So now companies don’t want interoperability and orchestration as that stuff just reduces revenue. Why would goog/face/etc want us spending less time doing mundane tasks. They want us spending the max amount of manual stuff as long as we don’t quit.
I find the UX horrible for different reasons, ones that I believe are pretty easy for microsoft to address if they just watched someone like me use the product.
I have not experienced the brittleness, maybe what I am doing is more trivial.
> I am an engineer with 20+ years of hands on keyboard, I've got projects that are now part of Apache, 1000's of stars on github. I've been CTO at a number of startups that have got significant funding. My point is to establish some credibility. I probably still suck.
More about being in a right place at a right time, but granted.
> Having said that, I have been working with Microsoft PowerAutomate for the past 1.5 years and while it has saved a lot of time and been overall a good experience, there are times when the no code/low code gets in the way and I wish I could just "drop into code" to get something done. Examples are things like data validation. This technology is not going to replace coding, the paradigm shift is really happening for people in the marketing and sales operations parts of the business. For these folks, this tech is life changing. In a lot of ways, this tech felt like when you try a new framework in your language of choice; at first it's super easy and you get hyped, and then you hit a requirement where the nocode/lowcode environment really gets in the way.
I think higher-level languages with a dual code-graphic representation and a possibility to drop into lower level are an interesting option, but even that is not new - Unreal/Unity3D etc.
Why are you trying to diminish his accomplishments? Does that make you feel better, to try to bring someone down? You come off as bitter and unaccomplished and this site could use less of people like you.
