The BEST and WORST Places To Work For Developers
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- Опубліковано 23 лип 2024
- As a junior software developer, how should you choose where to work? and how should you think about your career path? Here is some software developer career advice. There are as many routes through a career in software as there are software engineers, but if you are just starting out this can seem confusing and daunting. It's not as simple as "work for Google" or "work for Electronic Arts" - though these may be good software developer job choices for some people. So how do you choose where are good places to start?
In this episode, experienced software developer Dave Farley, gives his take on the advantages and disadvantages of some of the different types of companies that employ software developers, and offers his advice on how to spot the best ones and how to dismiss the places you will, in future, wish you had avoided.
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📖 Dave’s NEW BOOK "Modern Software Engineering" is now available on
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In this book, Dave brings together his ideas and proven techniques to describe a durable, coherent and foundational approach to effective software development, for programmers, managers and technical leads, at all levels of experience.
📖 "Continuous Delivery Pipelines" by Dave Farley
paperback ➡️ amzn.to/3gIULlA
ebook version ➡️ leanpub.com/cd-pipelines
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NOTE: If you click on one of the Amazon Affiliate links and buy the book, Continuous Delivery Ltd. will get a small fee for the recommendation with NO increase in cost to you.
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Also from Dave:
🎓 CD TRAINING COURSES
If you want to learn Continuous Delivery and DevOps skills, check out Dave Farley's courses
➡️ bit.ly/DFTraining
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LINKS:
“What’s wrong with the Game Industry”
➡️ www.gamesindustry.biz/article...
Quora post on working in big tech, by Gideon Shavit
➡️ www.quora.com/Since-software-...
Startup failure rate
➡️ www.investopedia.com/articles...
Startup Stats ➡️ www.embroker.com/blog/startup...
Google research into team performance: Source: Google 2015
➡️ www.belbin.com/resources/blogs...
State of DevOps report 2021
➡️ services.google.com/fh/files/...
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CHANNEL SPONSORS:
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Octopus are the makers of Octopus Deploy the single place for your team to manage releases, automate deployments, and automate the runbooks that keep your software operating. ➡️ octopus.com/
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Everybody knows who has the best t-shirts! :)
You haven't lived until you get a cheap company brand towel as a Christmas bonus.
As someone who's just started their software career in the last year, I really appreciate these more "meta" videos, maybe even more than the technical ones.
It's always great to hear a more holistic view from someone who's been in the industry for a long time, like many of my colleagues.
Great stuff, as always. I really learn something new from every video of your's! 👍
Thanks 😎
I find his talks also enlightening. Not because there is so much new stuff in it, but to hear the things so clearly formulated and friendly in tone and language. It shows we are not alone out there. Also when I tell people similar bits, I often have the feeling that I am talking to a wall. However, it is always different when the teacher tries to teach someone or a renowned figure from the business side portrays it. And for that extra thanks to Dave Farley.
@@AstronomyNik I've seen that recommend a few times and it seems like there is a 20th anniversary edition out for a few years.
Thanks I'll see if its good 😉
The pride you feel when seeing your apps or software used somewhere transfers even when you see the software of a family member. I used to be crazy proud when I went to the cinema when I was young because my dad built the ticket sale app with seat reservation and almost all cinemas in my city were using it 🤩
The problem I've noticed in startups is inexperienced management, especially when you're a developer working in a non software startup.
Management won't - or refuses to - understand the aspect of technical debt. They will openly force you to make dumb design decisions to save a very little amount of time. When those dumb decisions eventually blow up, you're the one who's held responsible for it. Working with this type of manager means you're also seen as the network guy, the IT help-desk person, the server admin, besides being the software engineer or developer. This in turn results in a constant flow of interruptions, making it nearly impossible to efficiently focus on the main part of your job. Once you're starting to complain about these issues to a non-tech manager it's to late, as they won't be capable to understand it. They will shrug it off as you having to become better at multitasking, or use an excuse like "we're in a fast phased environment, get used to it".
Think twice before entering a startup...
I have worked a little bit on both sides of this issue - management and developer. The thing with the concept of technical debt is it assumes a stable business environment which is very far from reality in most startups. You need to communicate with non-technical managers using metaphors about what you are building. The best metaphor is the building industry. Some people build building only designed to last a week - for a trade show for instance. You need to be clear that 'duct-tape software' needs to be rewritten and refactored before it is anywhere near stable and that this takes MUCH longer than writing the first version of it. If they say 'there is no budget for that' then you should probably resign the next day and go somewhere with better understanding of what programmers need to do.
@@michaelnurse9089 You're absolutely right. I do understand as a developer that some things are urgent, especially in a startup. What I do not understand is the absurdly amount of short term memory typical managers suffer from.
I've repeatedly been explaining my current manager in a startup that I need a database server for storage, he always postpones it pushing in another urgent task. I've been comparing that server to a foundation for a building, you need it to start building. He's been forcing me to start building for over two years now, without set foundation.
I'm currently at the point where I'm extremely frustrated and angry. I've been told to work on my communication skills, yet whenever I spend half my week communicating they decide to ignore whatever I say or write. They want me to work faster, yet they refuse to listen to any tips and tricks used in the tech industry to obtain optimal work efficiency (headphone rules, scrum, kanban, git, documentation, ...). Explaining them that multitasking on 5 projects at once won't make me finish anything faster, it's going to make everything 5 times slower (plus the additional overhead due to concept switching). His answer: "We're working in a fast phased environment, get used to it". When I explained my manager some tips and tricks used in the tech industry, he answered: "You're not working in the tech industry here".
His ego and utter ignorance has forced me for the past two years to work at the equivalent efficiency of hammering in a screw. He started to panic and listen the previous time I showed up with another contract proposal, I'm going to do the same thing next week explaining him he better starts to listen or I'm out...
@@timmy7201 honestly, why are you not out already?
@@Glinkis Because ... it's a startup and I actually believe in the product they're developing...
They would need to replace me if I left and given the specific work I do, I estimate training a new person in my position would take 6 months up to 1 year.
There are also nice people within our team, don't want to put their job at risk by slowing down R&D...
Haha we run into this all the time. Intensity and pressure result in some brilliance, but also a lot of idiotic decisions.
I've found it gets less intense when people are more strict about their personal organization and management. But you can only be responsible for yourself. Essentially, I need to carry my own bureaucracy with me. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to find reasons to say no, to slow ppl down so they don't do something catastrophic. It's a tool for managing communication, and half of communication is being able to say *NO* at the right time for the right reasons. The other half is saying yes correctly. If you can't say no, you'll always be saying yes to dumb shit. Your manager probably says no to you because he's saying yes to someone else's dumb shit.
Version control is non optional, though. Fuck all their opinions and put everything in a git repo regardless of what they say. As long as it's secured, what can they really say?
I went freelance early on, worked for several small companies, and got the chance to make/fix many applications by myself. It's a great choice, if you liked making personal projects in college. I've kept almost all of my client relationships open indefinitely, so I didn't run into the problems Dave mentioned with consulting. I mainly look for jobs that will be a new challenge, where I will have a large amount of the responsibility.
I also tried getting into game development at the start, but I soon learned that most of it wasn't fun. I enjoyed working on AI, the physics, pathfinding, and optimization, but adding content was a real slog (and most of the work).
In my experience in most consultancy projects you maintain/extend existing software. So you get to learn a lot of other people's mistakes.
I started in consulting (test egineering), and after almost two decades, am still in consulting, although in entirely different context (enterprise coaching).
The framework I created in my very first project ever turned out so versatile that it made it into multiple organizations across multiple industries, each time getting new plugins, but staying identical at the core.
After getting to know Clean Code practices, we rewrote most of the core.
It ran crash-free with zero incidents and zero maintenance in some organizations for as long as 8 years under changing circumstances.
I learned a LOT about sustainable engineering from that.
Yeah - not all consultancies are alike.
I think is important to split Consultancy in two main workflows, Consultancy and Body Shop, a lot of times companies sell themselves as Consultancy in a way that you will learn a lot because you will work on a lot of project, but in reality they sold you for a company and stay only in that company on the same project, which ussualy is a very old Legacy project that needs maintainance
You are right about the maintenance thing but on the other hand that is also a chance to learn and to learn fast. The system usually misses documentation, there were probaby some questionable design decisions or just old-fashioned ones. Add the normal number of "dirty fixes" made to a working system and you have a very challenging environment. You need to find a way to fix the problem while keeping the impact on the rest of the system to a minimum and also improve the overall code. Having done that for 15 out of my 25 years in this industry I must admit I have grown to like that more than software development. But then again, I'm more an analist then a developer.
Yes I agree.
I like the visual improvements of the videos. Looks sharp! :)
This should be a lesson for final year students in Computer Science or tech degree. This was really awesome, wish I had someone telling me this 10years ago!
That is great talk on very important topic: what motivates us and how this correlates with the company we are working in and technology we are using. Thank you, I have very similar ideas
Hello, could you please give a video on ageism in the software industry?
Thanks for the suggestion
Yes, please
interesting stuff, thanks for the overview and sharing your perspective and experience
Learn to recognize and appreciate a good job when you have it. I was on a high-performing XP team in 2001, about 10-12 developers in a big room with the product owner in the room most of the time. Half the team very experienced, everyone wanting to learn, and everyone wanting to make Agile work. Unfortunately I have the most appreciation for that job in hindsight, though I did enjoy it at the time as well.
Yes, particularly for people just starting out, everyone assumes that pretty much whatever their first job is like is normal. I have some ex-colleagues who blame me for ruining them, because they were spoiled by how nice it was to work on the team where we met. 🤣
In the beginning every job brings something new and better. You start thinking it's the way things go. But after a certain pay limit, the enjoyment abruptly ends even when the money increases obscenely. There is a sweet spot where the money and fun balance each other.
@@ContinuousDelivery "everyone assumes that pretty much whatever their first job is like is normal." which is why I quit my job. I had like 12y of experience, and the beginners with 1y of experience just overrun the culture with their going fast, closing tickers, not doing any testing, and making an absolute firepit, but the results in number of closed tickets were good, even thou the ticket would be reopened later 10 times because the root cause were never solved.
I just had enough, also the boss were giving tasks to my programmers that I was supposed to manage, as I was the team lead. Everyone just got burned out. When I left, I gave my boss 9 copies of the Mythical Man Month, perhaps he could learn it 9 times as fast. Fucking micro-managment bosses. (the problem we me leading the team was that I didn't micromanage, and just trusted the person would do right, I didn't care to check every single minute what they were doing, because I don't care about time or dates, but only the end result).
As they say, eternal september. This profession is hopeless, because young people don't learn and repeat the same mistakes we already repeated in the last 40 years.
Although it did take me the first 5 years to realized that, but then I was 23, the age of the newer programmers with no experience whatsoever...
As I didn't care to check every single minute what they were doing, of course there would be a lot of rework in the begging, its normal, you fucking hired someone with only 2 years of experience, what did you want ? . To just micro-manage, and take the tasks and keep an eye on everything, and make everyone stressed ? just to avoid some mistakes ? or to take a task and do it myself, as I was the one with more experience? of course not, now I manage, let them learn, then I'll teach a lesson or two. Needless to say, that didn't fly. (absurd isn't ? they paying me to teach other programmers, instead of churning out code like crazy ?)
But by that time, solving tickets was more important than creating stable software, and then I sold my stock options and went my own way.
Guess who's going to offer a consultancy service in 2 or 3 years, to rewrite the software all over again ? not me, as I will refuse it.
@@monad_tcp I suppose that this is the same in other disciplines, but for things that are difficult or risky, like software, they have professional controls to put limits on low-quality work. I am not really sure what I think of professionalising our industry, it's probably too late even if we thought it was a good idea.
Wise words! Thanks for your insights.
Hey Dave. Thank you for producing these videos! I think you have a very refreshing view on the world of software development. I always feel that watching one of your videos makes me look at my job and my career with a more clearly perspective and makes me value the right things. Thank you
Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad these videos are of some use 😊
This is very broader view, so many stuff a beginner wouldn't know, My perspectives got little wider. Thanks for making this.
Worst places, IMHO, are orgs that place too much emphasis on project management to the point where people feel like their noses are constantly being shoved onto a grindstone (Fortune 500). Next worst, overly competitive environments where it feels like you’re waiting walking into a room filled with sharp elbows in your face (finance or consulting) Best places, science-focused orgs with strong teams and high standards for hiring. Just my opinion after 20 years.
I am doing a career change right now to do engineering and I frequently get asked "what do you want to do?" and I keep saying "I care more about who I am working with and what problems they are solving than the domain I work in"
Not really a dev, more of a data analyst with business analyst leanings, but I got SO tired of being told to 'make a list of 5 target companies' - wha? How am I supposed to know what companies will have interesting projects that let me use all my skills? I actually landed at a small consulting company when a facebook connection saw me briefly say what I was looking for
I can stress this enough but perspective is the best thing you can teach, this video was awesome in this regard, keep up the great work 💪
Thanks for this, I also enjoy my work when it makes me think deeply about a problem, it makes it fun and makes me proud of being a developer
Thank you for broadcasting.
Start ups! Start ups! Many many, too many, hats! But currently the lure of enterprise salary is enticing. But the freedom and autonomy I have right now to implement and sort solutions may be hemmed in. Thinking of switching sorting a house and perhaps consulting in start-ups may be the way for me to go.
In my experience product companies are best. Startups cut too many corners, banks hire consultancy firms and split the money for pretending to work and getting paid by the hour, while gaming is focused on loot boxes and monetization. But your team is the best predictor of how much you will enjoy working anywhere. Unfortunately the larger the company is, the least likely it is that the team structure and long term goals will be stable.
Agreed with that final point.
Yup, same conclusions here
"Unfortunately the larger the company is, the least likely it is that the team structure and long term goals will be stable."
You mean the bigger the more unstable? I dont understand why. Can you give some reasons? Just inquisitive.
@@puckpovier1559 A larger team is less flexible. I think that's the entire point of what he was saying.
Product companies are the only ones who understand product development. All the other companies either prioritize billing or cutting cost, neither of which will help in the long run.
The best career advice on youtube. It at least reflects my experience quite accurately. Good job putting it out there.
Thanks 😎
great points. i can really relate to not finding the domain as interesting, as the process of developing software
Great talk. I’ve changed to software from 30 years in another industry, this rings so true.
I start my first full time job in a scale-up next year and hope to find a nice balance between responsibility, close colleagues and interesting problems where I see the result of my actions down the line.
But probs won't have access to as large of a pool of knowledgeable and experienced people as in an even larger company
Beautiful intro animation. Awesome content. Keep going
Thanks
Thank you for your valuable suggestions. As a ten-year developer I think they are quite inspiring!
Hi, great video
Can you make a video on how to deal with stress and burnout as a developer?
Or maybe you already have one? :)
Thanks
Great tips, thanks!
I greatly appreciate this sort of content. I'm in my last year of CS and I'm not sure how to approach work.
On the topic, would you consider making a video about internships?
Your pragmatic perspective on that topic as well as experience would probably be beneficial.
I am not sure that I have a lot to say about internships, except that I am a bit wary of them if they last for a long time. Working for for free for a couple of weeks to see what somewhere is like is probably useful. Working somewhere for free for months or more is just working for free. I would be suspicious of orgs that asked you to do that.
I know that it doesn't feel like this when you are trying to get your first job, but there is a lot of demand for programmers, if you need to demo your skills, I'd advise doing some work on an open source project as demonstrating skills and commitment, and it keeps you in control. Just my 2c!
Thank you! Again, really good and honest content.
Let me add a point. I think moving on for yourself is a big thing. Dont become too comfort in your working situation. Judge your situation from time to time and compare it with other places. I dont want to say you immediately have to run away. A good answer could be to push on some changes in your current team or even company. But if the situation doesnt suit to you yourself dont trouble too hard with leaving and moving on.
If you dont feel comfort, if you no longer learn anything, begin to check other teams or even employers. Go to job interviews. It could be enlightened and joy, especially in a stable job situation. And if it fits better to you dont hesitate too long. This often was my big mistake.
Thanks for sharing your advice.
This is really good. I think I've limited myself in the past few years only wanting to work in problem domains that I found "interesting", knowing that other jobs where the problems may not be as interesting could still offer challenging and fun work, and maybe more importantly good people to work with. I had only been looking for jobs where the product is "cool." But I think I've limited myself here, and so Dave's perspective is now making me open up my thinking. This is why I love learning from people who have been in the industry for a while.
Early in my career I worked for four different startups. All four resulted in unplanned out of work periods. Those four jobs involved some of the most personally rewarding technical work I ever did. And of course in a couple of cases, I was in early enough that had they succeeded I'd have been a wealthy person. It's a complete lottery. I always tell young people that *if* they are interested in the startup life, they need to do it early. I stopped with the startups when I got a mortgage and a kid. I still miss it.
Startups are not what they used to be thirty or forty years ago. Low level employees get frozen out of the big money no matter how early they join. Unless you can get in on the VP level, there is nothing in it for you, at least in terms of money.
Why are you missing a bad thing? I don't think start ups are a good thing just for the sake of being one. Not if they are poorly organized and above that using terms like "fast-paced" and "multitasking" as a euphemism for crunching and poor planning. Selling them as skills when they are not.
Consultants often know what they are leaving behind, some choose to ignore it and focus on the short term goal, others choose to make it a priority to leave maintainable code with good foundations that developers after you won't hate you for.
My god how I wish someone told me these things when I started ten years ago.
Thanks a lot for the video sir!
Couldn't agree more on your final test! :-)
Nothing is worse than returning from vacation and the first thing you learn is that the other senior sugned off exhausted on your first day of vacation and they want you to debug what went wrong 3 weeks ago.
This was incredibly helpful!
Thanks
Well, "Which UA-cam host has the best T-Shirts?" is a no-brainer... I was most envious of the simple Pink Panther you had in the last video I watched.
I wish you could explain some of this to more EMPLOYERS. I've missed out on so many jobs over the years because of the logic of "well, if you haven't been using our exact tech stack for the last 3 years you obviously can't come and work here." The idea that getting up to speed on a new framework doesn't take that long at all (especially with 20 or more years of experience in development in general) seems to be utterly alien to many many employers.
I like to create new products and services to help people solve their problems what's why I chose Software Engineering as my career and switched my previous major.
Author has covered mainly the domain areas.
The platform and tools is also important - is it a bank system, is it iOS, Android, Windows, etc. Find a platform you like the most.
Also it’s important that you can work calmly, without stress. If you have a stress, it’s a bad job. Stress is caused by bad management when people overestimate the velocity of the team, or don’t organize the interaction and development or when a product is not demanded.
True that. I worked in web development in the ie6 days and it was horrible. Now browsers have matured, as has the business.
It might also be worth adding that you go through stages in your life and what appeals to you at one stage is often not the same at the next stage.
Good point!
I would definitely like to get the same T-shirt ;) is there any chance you share from where you got this one :) ?
www.qwertee.com
@@ContinuousDelivery So many thanks :) Guess what I will wear to work next week :)
That IS an awesome t-shirt!!!
Phenomenal video
I understand his ability to stay interested in “less than exciting “ business domains. There are still plenty of technical challenges to keep your mind busy and engaged without some killer app or business concept to play with all the time Just hone your craft , recognize the beauty of a career that can exist between engineering , and art. Life could be much harder. 20 years in, still interested. Good career choice imho.
Nailed the Finance description
17:40 When you think that a problem is impossible to solve, or out of your reach... And then you look for answers, and learn, and try and after some time you can do this impossible thing. When you see that you did the impossible thing, it is the time when the code high hits. And it is like I imagine drugs feel. I have my first job as game dev, the contract is not great, but the things I learn during the process make it better than my previous (better on paper) job as mechanical engineer.
While working as a consultant, going from place to place, you hopefully learn in what setting you are the most productive.
I have been in companies where I have felt less free and less of a part of the team - more lonely as a consultant. It depends on the culture you are in. Is at big multinational corporation? a growing company? or an established company which cares about co-workers?
As a consultant you are always removed from the politics. You never have to worry about your pay grade, your evaluation, about being laid off etc.. You will usually earn more than the average employee, so you won't feel the dissatisfaction with your income. Life is, in general, much easier.
After 30 years of employment as a developer I can agree completely that team trust is the most important factor.
I can totally agree with what you said about the financial sector. My last major customer project was with a reinsurance company. They have too much money, and yet hardly anything moves: large teams, rigid hierarchies, a lot of bureaucracy, a conservative attitude. It was both boring and frustrating to me.
thx good stuff
This might be one of the most important videos you've made
There is many interresting points here! First tha Financial system: it's probably very borring BUT you can learn from the weaknesses of it in order to work in good fintech projects next. It's important because you can even select yourself the kind of team you want to work with (looking at good profils). So you can chose the kind of Start-ups tha will most probably prevail. Instead of thinking as an employee, think as an investor. If a small but efficient team knows you understand the chalenges of their business they will be more likely to take you on board.
Last: the gamming industry can be very interresting... if you are unpredictible; I mean if you know strange things like tokenisation for exemple. Or if you know to sell a game to a new kind of consummer. Again, think as an entreprener or an investor... try to be"out of competition". If not, you will work stakanivist hours of your precious life without being happier or richer.
There is a trend I am coming across of employers specialising in employing obsessive compulsive software developers, to try to exploit their attention to detail and persistence on solving a problem. I find this the most challenging kind of employer to work for as a software developer. The upside might work for the employer but the downsides are tough for colleagues: Deadlines, reaching consensus, communications. A worrying trend, like putting magnetic monopoles all together in a box (if they existed, that is).
I miss interpreted this title and thought about workspace do's and don'ts like don't work in your bed sort of thing
Viewers of this channel know that the t-shirt battle has already been won.
8:54 product or service
11:08
13:24 consultancy
14:19 danger in consultancy
14:48 start-up
7:25 That's why I don't like using game engines.
I can get started easily, but I have to learn a lot of features, most of them more complex than they need to be for my use case, and not as flexible.
I prefer the idea of reusable libraries. I can easily remove one library and use a different one instead.
Game engines are typically aimed at professional game developers, working across various teams.
If you're building a relatively simple game on your own, or maybe with 1-2 other people pretty often you won't benefit much from what they give you (e. g. you won't have much use for UEs asset pipeline because you're not going to create assets with complex materials or that benefit much from realistic lighting most likely).
Engines don't do a whole lot for programmers, because a lot of the programming work is already done and you "only" need to fill gaps or develop additional tooling, which can be frustrating if you don't already know the engine well.
@@hannessteffenhagen61 Unity doesn't seem like it's aimed at professionals. The benefit is, you can also get something done yourself, if you don't know that much about the project.
And even in Engines, you still need a lot of programming for the actual game logic.
You just don't need to know how to do some basic things like math, physics, rendering, audio, asset loading.
But when not using engines, you also just need to use some libraries, which already exist. You just have to decide for some, and maybe they don't work together well because the physics lib uses different vector types than the rendering lib, but getting something almost as good as an engine shouldn't be too difficult.
Everything about how you characterized games is accurate to my experiences. We're more diverse than avg in my current startup, but both us programmers are young white dudes, haha. Pay sucks, but it's a lot of fun, we're all super close and we're making stuff we really care about. I'd say it's fun for a ride or two, but likely not something I'll stick to long term. Every year I get more enticing offers for lead positions and I'm sure at some point I won't be able to say no(unless the game sells gangbusters).
crunch is more than 60 hours per week? woah 😳 not 40? if you're in 'murica that explains everything...
I think the best thing you can do in your first years is to understand what specific part of the software development process lit you up. Is it prototyping? UI? Algorithmic tasks? Maintenance, RE? Architecture? Tools? Nothing is worse than being stuck at a job that bores your to death.
You can delete "For Developers" in the Title. As Trainer for Digital Transformation i can tell: What you are talking about is the most important thing to understand at EVERY job nowadays.
Also i can say value diversity is a thing! I have learned and improved mostly because students disagreed with my script or teaching methods and i was open enough to admit own faults and/or tryed out suggestions changing those.
OK, you have the best T-shirts! You were fishing for it, weren't you?
I was 🤣
As a junior dev i would love a video on questions to ask an employer in an interview, to find good/bad culture
Thanks for the suggestion
Which UA-cam host does the best t-shirts indeed matters less but it still matters. :-)
I cannot agree more on human relations. People are everything. Your best software engineer skill is being a nice lad. Most of us, tech people, are introverts, we learn hard skills by just doing our job; now, soft skills -- that requires investment. And languages/technologies become irrelevant after some time anyways.
Some proud moments from my career: 1) Watching kids use my educational software 2) Seeing someone buying my software in a Borders 3) Knowing some of my software was being used many years after I left a particular company
The best t-shirts? Continuous Delivery, clearly!
0:07 Which UA-cam host has the best T-Shirt 🤣
Wisdom bomb
Honestly... I just want the easiest job I can find and work my way up....I have no problem starting from the bottom; it gives you better perspective later when you worked your way up to the top. Some people just go to the top not understanding what others have gone thought to get there; thus making potential crap decisions. If that make any sense.
I was a game developer.
I cannot think of advice to young professionals that ring more true or would be better than these.
0:07 you, definitely.
0:06 At least question #3 is solved.
8:15, this is more than enough reason to quit.
Funnily, I thought the ratio was higher than that. Still not good, and yes, good enough reason to quit.
The gender and race of developers is not a problem. people are individuals, not groups, and hating on them is sexist/racist.
No one is hating here on anyone. Unfortunately there are groups of people who never had a chance of good education and environment that would help them learn programming - just that. We can change that.
I agree it's not an issue. Doors are open to anyone who wants to join. You can't blame us for keeping them open, you are making it toxic before even starting.
I'm not a big fan of quotas, but say you're hiring 100 developers. It's statistically pretty unlikely that these all just happen to be white men if your hiring process isn't biased; the bias being unintentional or your inability to recognise it doesn't mean it's not there.
To be entirely fair here, the bias isn't always on the company end, but at minimum you should at that point investigate if you have a problem and diagnose it properly.
I think we as industry should solve the problem of wrong hiring practices, way to many companies test people on memorizing stuff, for me writing software is not memorizing its logical thinking with relation to requirements of the clients or company for which i develop software. There certainly exist companies ,where you do work on tickets only and you rated on how many tickets you closed , junior developers put in very hostile condition many times , why? Old code , complex hierarchy in company, problem between different departments, so basically 5 years of heavy work in IT area, just wear off anybody, its a pity, but most senior software developers very depress , many times they say to me in private discussion , "why i should care if software crash way to many times" or " its just legacy and i dont wish to put more time on solving those issues". Another problem its a silo knowledge, many companies still believe in silo knowledge , but rather they dont understand , that creating silo knowledge would create the situation , where it would be hard to bring new developers and to teach them how software really works and they stuck. Probably deprecation of anything and everything is unavoidable, but i think many companies need really to fail hard , before they adjust to the new normal which is using freelancers and contractors on constant base ;)
Lots of places do need to improve the way they conduct interviews to be more of a conversation that is related to real work rather than an algorithms exam, and silos of knowledge can be a problem, but I don't think mass hiring contractors is the answer.
I realise you may be biased, but I find that contractors tend to be overpaid and write untestable and unmaintainable code, and then leave before it all goes wrong, thinking they did an amazing job. Bodge it and scarper. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation and I'm sure there are some good contractors out there somewhere, this is just what I've seen in general.
@@georgehelyar Consultants paid for solving problems and if somehow to improve code base, as always in each area of human work , there would be less skilled and less honest professionals, but companies need to take risk and work more with external companies or they will eventually fail. About pay, as consultant you have more risk , risk always need to be backed by more money than normal employee get, because consultant can be sued or even worse the client goes bankrupt, so high pay is not really high if you think about what kind of risk a normal consultant do take, because then you need to pay a lawyer, tax advisor, issurancies, then you have travel expenses and accomodations and even software vendors if you use cloud services. Add to that once per 5 year professional courses which you need to take from time to time and the marketing costs. Ofcourse its BIAS from normal employee's, because they don't know how much really cost to run a profitable business. Did a mention that we do vocations, i personally cant remember when i was on vocation at least last 2 years.
The main advantage of external consultant , that most times we dont care about company culture we solve difficult problems and help companies to improve their business processes , so that in the end they profit from consultant work. Sure in some companies change resistance is very big and it's hard to propose any reasonable plan for improvement, but it's rather a problem of client not of consultant who done the job.
When you are a white straight man, you can virtually work anywhere, base the decision upon functional aspects. If you are not, some places might be deeply detrimental to your mental health.
i don't understand, the problem with the software industry is young white dudes? is the problem with their age, the color if their skin or being male. i can understand he male thing, in my CS cohort there were 3 females out of 100. There were more girls in engineering than CS. Males do better in teams, but most makes in CS aren't the sports type in general. I don't understand the whiteness, yes there were alot of white people in North America, but they were from different cultures like my class had Russians, Germans, Portuguese, French, Brits, even red headed pale El Salvadorean, White is a color not an ethnicity or culture. Now age, yes its on average young and that is s problem but my experience most people leave the industry starting in their 40s.
Never work for cigarettes industry
If you don't want your Start Up to Fail... Start up with your own TALENT....
Each and everyone of us have a Unique Talent.
The Problem with Startups is every Start up want to be the Next FB, YT n co....VERY BAD FOR START UP.
Start Up with your own Unique Talent and then Grow From there.
No Need for Thanks.... Freely we have Received...Freely we must Give Back
How's "young white dudes" a problem? And how is race diversity a benefit in software development?
"young white dudes" aren't a problem, unless that is all there is. The world needs SW that works for lots of people for lots of reasons, and a narrow perspective, whatever that perspective may be, is not as good as a broader perspective. Old black women, no doubt see things differently to me as an old white dude, I see things differently to you as, presumably, a young white dude. None of us is wrong, we just have different perspectives, so SW teams that have a broader perspective will probably do a better job.
I understand this reasoning but I find it superficial. If young white dudes are over-represented in SW, then it means they are the most passionate about it. If that's all there is then it's still better than forcing in a different demographic just for the sake of a different viewpoint. Hence, I see no problem.
@@GeneraluStelaru there are cliches that probably have to be said if someone ants to be published and be invited to speaking engagements. It gets tiring hearing the same mantra for 20 years and nothing has changed because you can't change preferences of males and females, perhaps at the margin but not the central tendencies.
I was always taught that “too many in the industry” was a horrible racist thing to say. Relative to the general population, east asians are over represented in the industry. Should there be fewer of them? Maybe representation in this manner has nothing to do with anything. Leave your politics out of it Dave.
I don't think that the under-representation of half the population of the planet, for instance, is really a political statement, it is a fact.
@@ContinuousDelivery of course it is a political statement. You implied too many white dudes is a problem to be fixed. Everyone knows you have to subscribe to a set of ideological beliefs to say that, especially those involving white western colonialism, patriarchy, and the like.
If you tell people who fit a description they are a problem, don’t be surprised if they express resentment.
@@KevinBeal "there is not enough X" and "there are too many Y" are not congruent statements. It speaks volumes that you think they are.
@@paultapping9510 I don’t get it. I guess there is some vaguely negative thing about me you understand that I don’t.
What am I supposed to think? “oh no, this Paul guy is exposing me! Better back down and feel bad”.
@@KevinBeal "I don't get it"
yes, we agree on that.
In 10+ years of career I’ve learnt to avoid any team that uses mainly Windows
LoL. Same name as me. Who do you find Linux teams?
why is diversity a problem? why does it matter that it's mostly "white young dudes"?
Because any more narrowly selected group of people is in danger of having a narrower pool of experience and assumptions than a broader group, which matters when software is so important in our society. Also, software jobs are sought-after and comparatively well-paid, so it would be unreasonable if access to them was restricted for other groups, wether by accident or design.
Our software development team has 9 female and 6 male team members, and it works very well for us.
@@ContinuousDelivery But there's nothing 'restricting' other groups from entering into tech.
The only entry restrictions I see are large companies creating academies and the like aimed specifically at women and/or ethnic minorities at the exclusion of everyone else, if you're a poor white lad from a burnt out former mill town you're shit out of luck - no programs to help you! And I'm quite sure that if anyone did try to start such a program they would instantly be labelled as a racist misogynist.
When I look at my LinkedIn feed and instead of job posts I get a sea of "Women in Tech! Women in Tech!" it's demoralising because it makes it feel as if you're not just competing against people better than you, people more experienced than you, but also people that have been shoved to the front of the queue so the bigwigs can point and clap at a pie chart for five minutes at a shareholder meeting.
People aren't screaming from the rafters to get more diversity in sewage workers or deep sea fishing or coal miners etc - so why tech?
@@CynicalOldDwarf Exactly. Just because you're a woman/man white/of color does not mean you will bring diversity of thought into the workplace. It's just a marketing trick easy to show as a chart in a meeting. I'm a dislectic white from lower class of manual workers. I think in a different way than most people I work with. How do you show that as a chart?
@@CynicalOldDwarf I am obviously not a white dude but it is naive to think that there is nothing restricting minorities from entering the workplace. When I lived in Australia, I sent out two copies of my resume, one with my name and another with a 'white' sounding name. Same education, same experience and the callback on the later was 70% more than the former.
Again this was not a scientific study, but it did confirm what I heard in the news about how prejudice works. It is human nature to be prejudiced against unfamiliar things, does not make white folks bad or other minorities good. In my home country there is still prejudice across tribes.
If you had a homogeneously white or black society people will self select on other factors, such as socio-economic status, tribe, religion, football clubs etc... the list is unending. Humans always find ways to build intimate societies while keep perceived others out, It is in our DNA
I am not sure why people get triggered as soon as they hear about diversity.