Sorry for the (only partially) clickbait title but currently my experience in web dev is that during downturns micromanagement become rampant. People who have no idea what they’re doing will just straight up lie to people and rise the ranks. It’s like a big confidence scheme in some places. I’m gonna tell a story about my recent career. This isn’t meant to be ranting although it is a long story which you are free to skip, where I express some frustration but it’s an example that I think epitomizes what I’m seeing at least in more moderate sized enterprise shops right now. I have questions for industry veterans and experienced devs. Is this normal? Have downturns always caused a race to the bottom with regards to metrics?
As somebody who comes from a perhaps weird background of having 2 bachelors degrees (one in Computer Engineering and one in Applied Physics) and having worked many many odd jobs (union labor, barista, defense industry engineer, controls systems lab researcher, computer vision dev, educational remote lab worker) and has spent about 4-5 years in web dev the environment is undergoing a pretty severe regression right now. I started with company about 2 years ago as a hybrid controls and web dev working on the web and mobile control of some embedded/IoT devices. So I may not have the most normal profile.
About 1.5 years ago my manager who was an engineer who had spent a lot of years in embedded and web dev retired and was replaced with an MBA from some rando and an undergrad from Elon University. This man has 3 years of start up experience which he claimed was highly technical but from what I can dig up was not really that technical. He has an engineering degree with a computing concentration and worked for 1 year at a crypto startup and 2 years at another that made some weird embedded wallet that have both long collapsed. Then took a couple years off to get an MBA from random place. That seems to be the sum total of his experience. I was moved away from embedded work on our trajectory planning groups to help sort out some web pages that allow users to make custom trajectories for some things and also sort out some CI issues with running on test devices. Fine. No big deal. But for the last year the company has been having us go to skip levels and having 7:00 AM alignment meetings where the importance of everything being uniform across the company and the need for ’employee-level observability” has been emphasized. They’ve had an outside contracting firm install spy software on our Github Cloud environment. They’ve mandated pair programming and the use of Jira and Swarmia for performance monitoring. We have weekly meetings to discuss individual productivity and go over delivery speed and how our “line rates” and “lead time” looks.
During the last 6 months I was given the task of fixing peoples NGINX conf and similar web server configs since a lot of our confs were copy pasted from old projects and had weird issues. Broken redirects, weird endpoints. Shitty API design etc. I have a reputation for fixing things quickly and I was recommended highly for the job by my tech lead and by a senior on a different team. It’s something I really don’t like doing, but my boss and skip level manager emphasized that this was important to certain execs who had some outside firm audit our quality and found a bunch of weird web page behavior on our internal sites. I asked if it was valuable since these pages were mostly internal and none of them were really web app breaking or insecure just annoying redirects and weird parameter issues. I was reassured the execs asked for these to be resolved by next year and was considered highly valuable.
Some stuff is hosted raw on AWS and some were on our k8s platform which is self-hosted on-prem. So I wanted there to be a comprehensive guide so people don’t make similar config mistakes again. I made such a guide on our confluence. I touched like 300 .conf files and several hundred more k8s yaml files and helmfiles. A few project specific ones for flask and such. I made a github app that could alert you to common misconfigs proactively. All along my boss encouraged that the execs were asking for uniformity and what I was doing was super valuable.
End of year review comes. My boss comes in and says that my productivity is the lowest on the team (that I’m still tehcnically on I guess?). I’ve contributed nothing to my teams web apps. I say yeah because you wanted me to fix our web apps at the enterprise scale. Literally 3 days earlier at our weekly review my boss and I had discussed yearly reviews and he had told me he really appreciated me stepping up and it was shaping up to be a good year. He says “Yes, that’s before I knew you had made only 14 valuable contributions and 0 jira tickets.”.
Puzzled I ask how this can be? He shows me a few configs that I changed and most of the code for my github app. And suddenly it dawns on me that any commits I made that didn’t have mutli-file changes are not included in his big word doc. I say “Hey you’re not including most of my commits. Most of our configs are rather small one file changes. Also you never started a Jira for this project since I’m currently operating solo.” To which my boss responds that’s an invalid excuse for not having valuable commits in my report. He understand Jira not being present, but he “knows programming” and “knows” that isn’t how things work. He asks me what I’ve been doing the last 6 months I explain once again doing the config changes you asked for like we discuss every Thursday of every week. That if he looks at my PRs many PRs have numerous commits that are collectively mutliple files I just don’t squash before I merge that often for these large enterprise programs. Again my boss explains to me “That isn’t how programming works. I would know I spent years at start ups this would be inexcusable.”
He tells me “I’m not letting you go this year mostly due to the earlier 6 months being good, but you’re on thin ice. You need to prove to the stakeholder your providing value and give me a story to tell.” I ask him about how we agreed the execs really needed these web app behaviors fixed by next year and I’ve gotten essentially every web app working in a proper web like fashion often times involving hours of debugging working with the owners of these apps. Going at an absolutely rapid pace fixing other peoples apps and adding github apps so we can be proactive in the future.
He begins questioning my credentials, talks about how I’m acting like a ghost engineer (that set of articles was all over the MGMT slack channel at that time), asking me if my typing speed is a problem, threatening consequences if I don’t shape up next year. I guess the outside firm uses some esoteric mesurements supposedly involving some AI somewhere and checks by commit who is doing what and ignores commits beneath a certain line number and amount of files and sends them to managers in word docs. Literal LoC metrics in some places. It’s absurd. Swarmia we bought but barely use I guess because it has a much better looking track record from me.
A lot of my commits are credited to web app owners because I’ll tell them and walk them through how to patch it since they are the owners of the actual application. My old manager would never have accepted this. But here is this rich kid who brags about his parents owning a winery in New England who as far as I can tell has never worked a real job not even 2 years my senior telling me that I’m not competent at my own job. A job he’s derailing sending me on some web server config goose chase the execs have to have while also telling me it’s not valuable work. After reassuring me every week I don’t need Jira tasks and don’t need stand-up it feels very intentional to be suddenly confronted with the opposite opinion.
Is this drive towards relatively arbitrary metrics precedented in this industry? Is this normal? In more traditional engineering technical jobs this wouldn’t be acceptable or at least I’ve never seen it get so voracious. I have friends having reasonably similar experiences with Swarmia, LinearB, and GetDX being installed at a bunch of my friends companies. Suddenly dev productivity is #1 as long as the way dev productivity looks is like a good graph on some charting software. It feels like Office Space but IRL. I feel bad for all those who don’t even have jobs right now, but even if you have one things feel like they’re going down the drain. I’d prefer industry level advice and discussion about similar experiences. I can handle myself I have enough savings to cover my rent and bills for ~1.5 years my story was primarily a demonstration about what I see happening right now. I think mine is a rather extreme example of a previously very nice-to-work-at company going metric hungry, but I’m curious if other people have insight.
tl:dr – Is it normal during these economic downturns to move to metric based performance evaluations? How should these things be rolled out? Experiences with being evaluated by Jira/Commits/Swarmia/GetDX/LinearB?
submitted by /u/OneMillionSnakes
[link] [comments]
r/cscareerquestions Sorry for the (only partially) clickbait title but currently my experience in web dev is that during downturns micromanagement become rampant. People who have no idea what they’re doing will just straight up lie to people and rise the ranks. It’s like a big confidence scheme in some places. I’m gonna tell a story about my recent career. This isn’t meant to be ranting although it is a long story which you are free to skip, where I express some frustration but it’s an example that I think epitomizes what I’m seeing at least in more moderate sized enterprise shops right now. I have questions for industry veterans and experienced devs. Is this normal? Have downturns always caused a race to the bottom with regards to metrics? As somebody who comes from a perhaps weird background of having 2 bachelors degrees (one in Computer Engineering and one in Applied Physics) and having worked many many odd jobs (union labor, barista, defense industry engineer, controls systems lab researcher, computer vision dev, educational remote lab worker) and has spent about 4-5 years in web dev the environment is undergoing a pretty severe regression right now. I started with company about 2 years ago as a hybrid controls and web dev working on the web and mobile control of some embedded/IoT devices. So I may not have the most normal profile. About 1.5 years ago my manager who was an engineer who had spent a lot of years in embedded and web dev retired and was replaced with an MBA from some rando and an undergrad from Elon University. This man has 3 years of start up experience which he claimed was highly technical but from what I can dig up was not really that technical. He has an engineering degree with a computing concentration and worked for 1 year at a crypto startup and 2 years at another that made some weird embedded wallet that have both long collapsed. Then took a couple years off to get an MBA from random place. That seems to be the sum total of his experience. I was moved away from embedded work on our trajectory planning groups to help sort out some web pages that allow users to make custom trajectories for some things and also sort out some CI issues with running on test devices. Fine. No big deal. But for the last year the company has been having us go to skip levels and having 7:00 AM alignment meetings where the importance of everything being uniform across the company and the need for ’employee-level observability” has been emphasized. They’ve had an outside contracting firm install spy software on our Github Cloud environment. They’ve mandated pair programming and the use of Jira and Swarmia for performance monitoring. We have weekly meetings to discuss individual productivity and go over delivery speed and how our “line rates” and “lead time” looks. During the last 6 months I was given the task of fixing peoples NGINX conf and similar web server configs since a lot of our confs were copy pasted from old projects and had weird issues. Broken redirects, weird endpoints. Shitty API design etc. I have a reputation for fixing things quickly and I was recommended highly for the job by my tech lead and by a senior on a different team. It’s something I really don’t like doing, but my boss and skip level manager emphasized that this was important to certain execs who had some outside firm audit our quality and found a bunch of weird web page behavior on our internal sites. I asked if it was valuable since these pages were mostly internal and none of them were really web app breaking or insecure just annoying redirects and weird parameter issues. I was reassured the execs asked for these to be resolved by next year and was considered highly valuable. Some stuff is hosted raw on AWS and some were on our k8s platform which is self-hosted on-prem. So I wanted there to be a comprehensive guide so people don’t make similar config mistakes again. I made such a guide on our confluence. I touched like 300 .conf files and several hundred more k8s yaml files and helmfiles. A few project specific ones for flask and such. I made a github app that could alert you to common misconfigs proactively. All along my boss encouraged that the execs were asking for uniformity and what I was doing was super valuable. End of year review comes. My boss comes in and says that my productivity is the lowest on the team (that I’m still tehcnically on I guess?). I’ve contributed nothing to my teams web apps. I say yeah because you wanted me to fix our web apps at the enterprise scale. Literally 3 days earlier at our weekly review my boss and I had discussed yearly reviews and he had told me he really appreciated me stepping up and it was shaping up to be a good year. He says “Yes, that’s before I knew you had made only 14 valuable contributions and 0 jira tickets.”. Puzzled I ask how this can be? He shows me a few configs that I changed and most of the code for my github app. And suddenly it dawns on me that any commits I made that didn’t have mutli-file changes are not included in his big word doc. I say “Hey you’re not including most of my commits. Most of our configs are rather small one file changes. Also you never started a Jira for this project since I’m currently operating solo.” To which my boss responds that’s an invalid excuse for not having valuable commits in my report. He understand Jira not being present, but he “knows programming” and “knows” that isn’t how things work. He asks me what I’ve been doing the last 6 months I explain once again doing the config changes you asked for like we discuss every Thursday of every week. That if he looks at my PRs many PRs have numerous commits that are collectively mutliple files I just don’t squash before I merge that often for these large enterprise programs. Again my boss explains to me “That isn’t how programming works. I would know I spent years at start ups this would be inexcusable.” He tells me “I’m not letting you go this year mostly due to the earlier 6 months being good, but you’re on thin ice. You need to prove to the stakeholder your providing value and give me a story to tell.” I ask him about how we agreed the execs really needed these web app behaviors fixed by next year and I’ve gotten essentially every web app working in a proper web like fashion often times involving hours of debugging working with the owners of these apps. Going at an absolutely rapid pace fixing other peoples apps and adding github apps so we can be proactive in the future. He begins questioning my credentials, talks about how I’m acting like a ghost engineer (that set of articles was all over the MGMT slack channel at that time), asking me if my typing speed is a problem, threatening consequences if I don’t shape up next year. I guess the outside firm uses some esoteric mesurements supposedly involving some AI somewhere and checks by commit who is doing what and ignores commits beneath a certain line number and amount of files and sends them to managers in word docs. Literal LoC metrics in some places. It’s absurd. Swarmia we bought but barely use I guess because it has a much better looking track record from me. A lot of my commits are credited to web app owners because I’ll tell them and walk them through how to patch it since they are the owners of the actual application. My old manager would never have accepted this. But here is this rich kid who brags about his parents owning a winery in New England who as far as I can tell has never worked a real job not even 2 years my senior telling me that I’m not competent at my own job. A job he’s derailing sending me on some web server config goose chase the execs have to have while also telling me it’s not valuable work. After reassuring me every week I don’t need Jira tasks and don’t need stand-up it feels very intentional to be suddenly confronted with the opposite opinion. Is this drive towards relatively arbitrary metrics precedented in this industry? Is this normal? In more traditional engineering technical jobs this wouldn’t be acceptable or at least I’ve never seen it get so voracious. I have friends having reasonably similar experiences with Swarmia, LinearB, and GetDX being installed at a bunch of my friends companies. Suddenly dev productivity is #1 as long as the way dev productivity looks is like a good graph on some charting software. It feels like Office Space but IRL. I feel bad for all those who don’t even have jobs right now, but even if you have one things feel like they’re going down the drain. I’d prefer industry level advice and discussion about similar experiences. I can handle myself I have enough savings to cover my rent and bills for ~1.5 years my story was primarily a demonstration about what I see happening right now. I think mine is a rather extreme example of a previously very nice-to-work-at company going metric hungry, but I’m curious if other people have insight. tl:dr – Is it normal during these economic downturns to move to metric based performance evaluations? How should these things be rolled out? Experiences with being evaluated by Jira/Commits/Swarmia/GetDX/LinearB? submitted by /u/OneMillionSnakes [link] [comments]
Sorry for the (only partially) clickbait title but currently my experience in web dev is that during downturns micromanagement become rampant. People who have no idea what they’re doing will just straight up lie to people and rise the ranks. It’s like a big confidence scheme in some places. I’m gonna tell a story about my recent career. This isn’t meant to be ranting although it is a long story which you are free to skip, where I express some frustration but it’s an example that I think epitomizes what I’m seeing at least in more moderate sized enterprise shops right now. I have questions for industry veterans and experienced devs. Is this normal? Have downturns always caused a race to the bottom with regards to metrics?
As somebody who comes from a perhaps weird background of having 2 bachelors degrees (one in Computer Engineering and one in Applied Physics) and having worked many many odd jobs (union labor, barista, defense industry engineer, controls systems lab researcher, computer vision dev, educational remote lab worker) and has spent about 4-5 years in web dev the environment is undergoing a pretty severe regression right now. I started with company about 2 years ago as a hybrid controls and web dev working on the web and mobile control of some embedded/IoT devices. So I may not have the most normal profile.
About 1.5 years ago my manager who was an engineer who had spent a lot of years in embedded and web dev retired and was replaced with an MBA from some rando and an undergrad from Elon University. This man has 3 years of start up experience which he claimed was highly technical but from what I can dig up was not really that technical. He has an engineering degree with a computing concentration and worked for 1 year at a crypto startup and 2 years at another that made some weird embedded wallet that have both long collapsed. Then took a couple years off to get an MBA from random place. That seems to be the sum total of his experience. I was moved away from embedded work on our trajectory planning groups to help sort out some web pages that allow users to make custom trajectories for some things and also sort out some CI issues with running on test devices. Fine. No big deal. But for the last year the company has been having us go to skip levels and having 7:00 AM alignment meetings where the importance of everything being uniform across the company and the need for ’employee-level observability” has been emphasized. They’ve had an outside contracting firm install spy software on our Github Cloud environment. They’ve mandated pair programming and the use of Jira and Swarmia for performance monitoring. We have weekly meetings to discuss individual productivity and go over delivery speed and how our “line rates” and “lead time” looks.
During the last 6 months I was given the task of fixing peoples NGINX conf and similar web server configs since a lot of our confs were copy pasted from old projects and had weird issues. Broken redirects, weird endpoints. Shitty API design etc. I have a reputation for fixing things quickly and I was recommended highly for the job by my tech lead and by a senior on a different team. It’s something I really don’t like doing, but my boss and skip level manager emphasized that this was important to certain execs who had some outside firm audit our quality and found a bunch of weird web page behavior on our internal sites. I asked if it was valuable since these pages were mostly internal and none of them were really web app breaking or insecure just annoying redirects and weird parameter issues. I was reassured the execs asked for these to be resolved by next year and was considered highly valuable.
Some stuff is hosted raw on AWS and some were on our k8s platform which is self-hosted on-prem. So I wanted there to be a comprehensive guide so people don’t make similar config mistakes again. I made such a guide on our confluence. I touched like 300 .conf files and several hundred more k8s yaml files and helmfiles. A few project specific ones for flask and such. I made a github app that could alert you to common misconfigs proactively. All along my boss encouraged that the execs were asking for uniformity and what I was doing was super valuable.
End of year review comes. My boss comes in and says that my productivity is the lowest on the team (that I’m still tehcnically on I guess?). I’ve contributed nothing to my teams web apps. I say yeah because you wanted me to fix our web apps at the enterprise scale. Literally 3 days earlier at our weekly review my boss and I had discussed yearly reviews and he had told me he really appreciated me stepping up and it was shaping up to be a good year. He says “Yes, that’s before I knew you had made only 14 valuable contributions and 0 jira tickets.”.
Puzzled I ask how this can be? He shows me a few configs that I changed and most of the code for my github app. And suddenly it dawns on me that any commits I made that didn’t have mutli-file changes are not included in his big word doc. I say “Hey you’re not including most of my commits. Most of our configs are rather small one file changes. Also you never started a Jira for this project since I’m currently operating solo.” To which my boss responds that’s an invalid excuse for not having valuable commits in my report. He understand Jira not being present, but he “knows programming” and “knows” that isn’t how things work. He asks me what I’ve been doing the last 6 months I explain once again doing the config changes you asked for like we discuss every Thursday of every week. That if he looks at my PRs many PRs have numerous commits that are collectively mutliple files I just don’t squash before I merge that often for these large enterprise programs. Again my boss explains to me “That isn’t how programming works. I would know I spent years at start ups this would be inexcusable.”
He tells me “I’m not letting you go this year mostly due to the earlier 6 months being good, but you’re on thin ice. You need to prove to the stakeholder your providing value and give me a story to tell.” I ask him about how we agreed the execs really needed these web app behaviors fixed by next year and I’ve gotten essentially every web app working in a proper web like fashion often times involving hours of debugging working with the owners of these apps. Going at an absolutely rapid pace fixing other peoples apps and adding github apps so we can be proactive in the future.
He begins questioning my credentials, talks about how I’m acting like a ghost engineer (that set of articles was all over the MGMT slack channel at that time), asking me if my typing speed is a problem, threatening consequences if I don’t shape up next year. I guess the outside firm uses some esoteric mesurements supposedly involving some AI somewhere and checks by commit who is doing what and ignores commits beneath a certain line number and amount of files and sends them to managers in word docs. Literal LoC metrics in some places. It’s absurd. Swarmia we bought but barely use I guess because it has a much better looking track record from me.
A lot of my commits are credited to web app owners because I’ll tell them and walk them through how to patch it since they are the owners of the actual application. My old manager would never have accepted this. But here is this rich kid who brags about his parents owning a winery in New England who as far as I can tell has never worked a real job not even 2 years my senior telling me that I’m not competent at my own job. A job he’s derailing sending me on some web server config goose chase the execs have to have while also telling me it’s not valuable work. After reassuring me every week I don’t need Jira tasks and don’t need stand-up it feels very intentional to be suddenly confronted with the opposite opinion.
Is this drive towards relatively arbitrary metrics precedented in this industry? Is this normal? In more traditional engineering technical jobs this wouldn’t be acceptable or at least I’ve never seen it get so voracious. I have friends having reasonably similar experiences with Swarmia, LinearB, and GetDX being installed at a bunch of my friends companies. Suddenly dev productivity is #1 as long as the way dev productivity looks is like a good graph on some charting software. It feels like Office Space but IRL. I feel bad for all those who don’t even have jobs right now, but even if you have one things feel like they’re going down the drain. I’d prefer industry level advice and discussion about similar experiences. I can handle myself I have enough savings to cover my rent and bills for ~1.5 years my story was primarily a demonstration about what I see happening right now. I think mine is a rather extreme example of a previously very nice-to-work-at company going metric hungry, but I’m curious if other people have insight.
tl:dr – Is it normal during these economic downturns to move to metric based performance evaluations? How should these things be rolled out? Experiences with being evaluated by Jira/Commits/Swarmia/GetDX/LinearB?
submitted by /u/OneMillionSnakes
[link] [comments]