Almost 12 years ago, I wrote my first web server in C. It was for a router/firewall device running Linux From Scratch(LFS), I can't recall the kernel version(2.6.x?).
Reading this just took me back and made me realize even though we have progressed so far with tech stack and new technologies(LLMs), there is so much joy in just writing plain C code. To me its just feels like working on a classic old 68 mustang and getting your hands dirty. What a joy!
Funny how I got rejected today from crowdstrike because I couldn’t code a hard leetcode problem under 40mins. I guess leetcode isn’t true software engineering after all.
This is a testing and deployment issue rather than coding... mistakes and bugs happen - but most serious businesses have routines setup to catch them before rolling them out globally!
During my early days in my tech career. I joined a small tech firm that did linux kernel programming and embedded stuff. It was my first job out of college and I was really excited. My mentor was a 50+ guy whom I walked everyday from work to back my home. It didn't started out like that, we would leave work around different times and one day it was raining, so we waited and then it became sort of habit. I learned so much about programming and life in general. Made me a better programmer for sure. I'm always grateful!
With remote, everything has to be highly intentional. Schedule a meeting means having a pre-defined time, often there is a specific topic of conversation in mind, people diligently stick to that topic as much as possible to respect everyone's calendar etc. Collaboration tends to play out within these extremely narrow parameters that are unnatural to hundreds of years of human social development. It doesn't help that the best substitute - video conferencing - still strips a lot of crucial information that you're used to getting in person for modulating conversation (eg. ability to scan body language and facial expressions of people in the room as you talk) and find moments to interject.
This is just because of culture and the tools that we use.
I rarely get this feeling when using Discord due to the culture if "just hanging out" in channels.
Some people in the channels I frequent will stream their screens by default, just in case anyone wants to see what they are playing at any given time.
All that behind said, I hope this model doesn't become an expectation for remote work, because constantly being forced to stream, or be present for long periods of time in voice channels sounds exhausting.
This is a very incorrect and overly prescriptive view based on your, to use your own term, narrow experience. I vastly prefer meetings and collaboration to be remote. People who dominate in person meetings due to their body language and personality are not nearly ad oppressive over zoom.
I would make the exact opposite claim. Since Covid and working from home the quality of my teams’ collaboration and decision making quality has gone through the roof. Quality of promotions has gone up significantly, you’re no longer rewarded for just being the loudest monkey in the room with an opinion. The only metric that has suffered in any measurable way is onboarding and mentoring young engineers who do not yet know how to learn. You have to be much more active and sensitive to their state. In general I look back at that era of my career as archaic. Everyone that wants to go back to that way of working seems dinosaurs who operate on their feelings rather than the data of how quality work is done.
Just noting I didn't prescribe anything or state my personal preference anywhere.
It was merely an observation after working remotely for about as long as I've worked in person and I don't really appreciate you adding words like "loudest monkey" and "dinosaurs" to my statement.
But lately I've been going into office and the throughput of technical discussions is just an order of magnitude higher than in video calls or over Slack.
I've been WFH-ing for a long time now and am usually the person being approached for advice and mentoring. I never found the efficiency of the process to be lacking or as you describe "order of magnitude" worse remotely vs F2F.
As I'm always open to learning new things and changing my opinion, could you please elaborate on how the direct contact makes mentoring so much better?
> and am usually the person being approached for advice and mentoring. I never found the efficiency of the process to be lacking
That's a good exmple for GP's point: deliberate, premeditated interaction works just fine remotely. But everything else falls away. That talk amongst the almost random subset of meeting A that happens to be also in meeting B and walks from A to B together, things like that. Occasional random peerings are powerful and a company chatroulette would be an awkward substitute.
Just my experience, but people are more inclined to ask questions in person. Beyond this, you get cues from body language as well as facial expression.
For me personally, I can see a white board better at 15-20' than I can see a monitor 30" away.
There are ways to digitally cope... But it's just that. It's far less natural if an interaction. I can understand the anxiety and autistic resistance to it. But that's relatively easy to with through.
I'm naturally far sighted, with some retina damage to boot. Glasses help a bit, but not a lot, and with the retina damage it's inconsistent throughout the day.
Fortunately, most of the apps I use can adjust zoom (mostly vs code, browser, visio, etc).
This is my diagnosis of all of these WFH discussions. People like the benefits of remote work so much that they are (subconsciously) trying to deny any possible problems and the "back to the office" trend can only have nefarious motivation.
If you trade commute time for work, WFH is hard to beat for work, because you have so much more time to make up for less efficient communication. If you trade commute time for not work, WFO is hard to beat.
It really depends on office culture. Every time we're all in the office at the same time, we end up going to the nearest bar. WFH is just more productive cause of that.
Someone once said all my friends are like me, they all hate people.
I would have never met any of them WFH. Anecdotes aside, we’re a much better species in person enforcing social behaviors than maximizing antisocial behavior for some optimization argument.
If WFH was productive, this websites front page would be nothing but studies proving that. It’s been four years and… nothing.
Nobody is even writing documentation now, so you can’t even tell the kids to RTFM.
That's more like good mentoring, which doesn't always depend on being in the office, it can work remote as well if the mentors are good at it and want to do it. A year ago I left a shitty toxic office job where there was no such thing as mentoring either way, least of all remote.
Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others.
Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".
> Things like this is the reason I don't work from home. Those little moments of contact.
I, too, miss this. However, 2 things that work against me currently - my company has _mandated_ in-office time, which was not the deal when I joined so is an active reason to NOT go, and I live 30 miles/1 hour away from it, as do many. One of my colleagues is 2.5 hours away, across a time zone.
So the office is extremely 'dead' in culture/atmosphere, providing the bare minimum to get work done, and is a glass-walled fishbowl in a shared office space with a GIANT (think, measured in meters/yards) TV display in the courtyard that we can see. Indeed, one can't NOT see it.
While I enjoy the time with the people there, there's zero "serendipity" of the place since most everyone goes by fiat, not choice, and spends most of their energy on trying to remove the constant distractions.
C-Level: We want culture!
us: You removed every possible input that would make it work.
C: But we want it!
u: give us an office space with some private areas + some collaborative as-needed areas.
I took what I got, which is less than you assume, and didn't demand more. You seem to think I'm arguing against mentorship entirely. I'm not.
I know the value. I didn't get much; I barely even knew my father. I'm going to get distasteful for a moment because of that. You've been warned.
To answer your snide fucking remark: I did in fact succeed without coaching. I wouldn't be so harsh if I hadn't just read you go after someone for a similar attack. Amazing.
Now, back to civility.
There has to be a limit. We don't make seniors to collect them. We have a job to do beyond sustaining the ranks.
Also: it's a subjective title. Who's to say I'm not a junior that snuck in?
Among the pool of seniors there's no consistency in capabilities. It's all arbitrary. Calm down and go back to work.
To close all of this, nobody is owed a promotion or even attention. Selection has to happen. Maybe that's not you this time. Sorry.
While I work from home, I have traveled to teach and attend classes. I get it. I try to use the advantages of both.
It's well established that the way to move up in the industry is by changing jobs. I don't like it but that's how it is. We can team up but I don't like our odds.
Easy mate, take a deep breath. No need to blow your top off over a trivial remark. My observation was not meant to be in bad faith. I'm sorry you took it that way.
Sure, but don't blame your overreaction on others. If someone cuts in front of you in trafic and you get out of the car and beat them up with a a baseball bat in response, it's not an excuse that's gonna hold up in court. Someone's mistake is on them, but your reaction is always on you.
this entire sub-thread and dialogue is like an advertisement for finding a mentor as quick as possible.
on one hand you're talking about how you made it without one, then on the other hand you're also commiserating about being a (metaphorical) homeless lottery winner.
if I was a young'n in the industry i'd read this entire dialogue as a cautionary tale in the same kind of vein as a Zen koan or Aesop fable.
Definitely. Mentorship is symbiotic. I'll even argue therapeutic.
I lacked a lot of it through both work and personal lives. Simply left to figure things out. That, of course, had some impact. Certain skills are strong, others are weak.
I feel that's why I do well at SRE. Natural paranoia and so on. It also makes me goal oriented to the point of being nearly anti-social.
Overall, I'd say I'm worse off for my experiences. It makes me great when the sky is falling. It pretty much always is.
Due to that, I try to reflect and teach as much as I can. I'm one of the fortunate ones. While I'm here, I had to leave a lot of people behind. They can't speak at all.
That sounds like a war story, but aside from the 'atomic family', I'm really just talking about people who quit/moved elsewhere.
Filtering exists in the real world (work/personal), too - not just college. The things we do, and don't do, apply.
A weekly social event would do me a world of good, but I can't. That part of me is broken. Dress it up with work and I'm fine.
Helping people actually helps me. To hear that, no actually - my help isn't enough, was grating. It was wrong to take personally. Soft spot.
These kind of things aren't really summarizable into a quick bite is my experience. It's because of the subtle nuances, the way an experienced person approaches a problem.
I switched companies and I had to use teams. From my experience coming Slack, teams feels heavy app. The bootup is slow and overall it felt like its bloated app. I'm using M1Pro Mac.
What I don't like the most of the teams app is, the freaking code editor. If I paste code in teams, it feels hard to read, in Slack it looks much better. Also, I hate it when on teams having some serious chat about prod issue and some in the group post a random message and whole thing just goes side ways. Lack of threads is bad experience for me. I can go on..
OK, I wasn't going crazy then. I had recently used Google Maps for a road trip that I was planning and I asked my GF if it looks weird. My initial thought was if someone changed my monitor settings. (I use different one for just gaming) . The design and graphics reminds me of Apple Maps a lot(the mac version). The look and feel was slightly off and it felt dullish. Not sure how I can explain it.
The suggestions are definitely good in the post. I like to have a clean maps panel and rest can be hidden away.
And when I die, remember you'd have more of it if your lawyers were not so evil the idea of setting up a key escrow was off the table because of what they did last summer(s).
(Notice how I don't jump in to snarkily tell you it's "advice" because I can tell this is not your first language, and you're getting your point across so it would just distract, not educate? People like me are rare, and when we leave, it's more than just population that Appalachia loses.)
My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in Apple/Google/Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that. I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t even write more than 10 lines of code.
Reading this just took me back and made me realize even though we have progressed so far with tech stack and new technologies(LLMs), there is so much joy in just writing plain C code. To me its just feels like working on a classic old 68 mustang and getting your hands dirty. What a joy!