Category Archives: Software Development

The WFH Conundrum

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Privileges at work are easy to give out but hard to take back. This has been true for working from home which was absolutely necessary during Covid, but now some companies are starting to rescind those privileges for various reasons. I’ve been reading about a lot of pissed off workers who have been ordered to return to work full time “just because.”

It turns out “just because I said so” isn’t a very compelling reason for people to hop in their cars and commute two ways to work, deal with day care, and other conveniences they had when they were allowed to work from home. They want to know what changed? Why the mandate? If there’s a good reason, sure, I’ll get on board. Otherwise I would like to know what’s behind the new mandate.

My perspective on this may be a little unique on this issue. While I loved the flexibility of WFH, after 7 years I really missed some of the human interaction. Being isolated at home makes it really difficult to have work relationships in the same way they can develop with face time. At the same time I found it hard-er to get my projects done if I had to come in to the office every day. It’s often noisy and people like to interrupt me when I need to concentrate. WFH allowed me to go head down and really get some isolated time to think through technical issues without being interrupted. So can we compromise here? Yes. Yes we can.

I once had a job and a manager for about 18 months that was absolutely perfect with his WFH policy. In talking to him about it I came to the conclusion that yes, the job requirements will be best met if I utilize some face time with the developers. Whiteboard sessions were extremely valuable and the tools for doing that at the time using Teams were terrible. There wasn’t any way of getting out of coming in some of the time. Fine by me, I like having some element of human interaction anyway, so I’d be glad to come in. How much? I reckoned that I could have a nice balance of WFH and face time with developers if I was in the office about half the time, so 2-3 days a week. Done deal. The best part about it was he empowered me to select which days because it was going to depend on when I could get face time.

The key word here is empowerment. Some managers just aren’t comfortable with it, but some are. Most professionals don’t like to be micro-managed. I realize that some people take advantage of the hands off approach but I tended to reward managers that trusted me to deliver. I preferred if they checked in with me about once a week on how’s it going and then leave me alone and I will for sure try to deliver what they asked for and expected… and then some.

There’s some risk for managers to follow the empowerment path but keep in mind that there’s also risk in micro-managing professionals. We don’t like it and may seek a different role where we don’t have to spend as much time explaining what will get done vs. actually working to try to get it done.

What about accountability? Absolutely. If an employee can’t manage their time with the freedom offered then get a different employee, but don’t randomly come up with policies that are based on power trips. Policies that make it clear who is in charge and knows best. If you already know best about everything what do you need me for?

The Short Leash

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Sometimes a work related social media post will trigger a bunch of thoughts. I want to make sure that I navigate this topic thoughtfully and people understand that I get it.. there are two sides to this issue. Some companies have no other choice than to install a strict set of rules around response time for customer issues. While the post below may be on the snarky side, it does convey a good point.

Not THE reason, but one of the reasons I retired a little early from my role as a Site Reliability Engineer was because of a BRUTAL on-call schedule. Not everyone at my company viewed it the same way I did so I can only speak for myself, but being on a short leash doesn’t set well with my physical, mental or emotional well-being. I HATED PagerDuty and everything about being on-call. The job was otherwise fine. On-call, not so much.

It’s totally my fault for signing on with a company that I knew might eventually lead me to on-call responsibility. It was a choice, and a bad one. A bad one because the pluses didn’t outweigh the minuses. A bad one because my anxiety was off the charts. I’m talking having to take new meds off the charts.

In my role as an SRE I probably earned $10-$20k more than I may have in some other engineering role. For that $10-$20k I gave up my freedom to move about the cabin. The expectation was 5 minutes until hands on keyboard from being paged. I couldn’t take a walk around the block, go to the grocery store or be more than 5 minutes away from my laptop at any point for two weeks. That’s because we got assigned a week of secondary on-call where we acted as a backup to the primary on-call followed by a week of primary on-call. Did we get a ton of calls? Nope. Several in a week’s time but it wasn’t constant. It didn’t matter. I was still on a short leash and tied to my laptop. If life were to offer me one mulligan I would definitely use it to find a role that didn’t include on-call.

But Bill, you’re not a company guy then. You’re a lousy teammate!

Bullshit. At a different company I worked several off hours release deployments that kept me up until 2am and I didn’t mind it one bit. Why? Because I could plan it. I knew it was coming and the company knew that those poor souls who were up all night deserved a little bit of comp-time to compensate for the extra mile they just donated.

I personally never minded extra hours if the project I was working on was interesting. Been there, done that many times. Probably too many times.

So in keeping with the goal of addressing both sides of this issue, I get it. Sometimes there is no other choice than to use PagerDuty and enforce an on-call rotation. But I think what employers would do well to remember is to not take the intrusion of work interfering with family life for granted. For some people it’s a very impactful feature of the job.

Worker bees should think long and hard before accepting a role that has on-call. Will an extra bit of money be worth having to carry your laptop with you everywhere? Will you be checking Slack for security breaches in bed when you’re supposed to be sleeping? Will you freak out if you can find your phone in the moment because you may have missed a page? If any of these things are true then I would suggest not agreeing to take on that role in the first place. Draw a line in the sand and stick to it. Family is more important.

Maybe There Will Be a Recession?

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So you’ve been laid off. You’re in good company.

Every day for the past few weeks I’ve read posts on LinkedIn from people who have been let go who are now using their network to try to find opportunities. The sheer number of these posts isn’t surprising since Tech companies have been cutting back by tens of thousands, and in some cases more than once. I can’t recall a time it’s been this way since the early 1980’s. It’s bad.

I read with interest yesterday that the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the 10th consecutive quarter. Chairman Powell said he believed that there was a greater than 50% chance that a recession could be avoided. Thems pretty hollow words for Tech Workers, especially if you’re in recruiting or project management. For affected tech workers, we’ve been in a recession for almost a year.

Now the question becomes how to respond to a crummy situation.

As someone who has experienced a layoff, the thing I tried to remind myself of was that navigating your way to an actual job offer is in part timing and luck. Well, right now the timing sucks. It’s simple Econ 101. Too many headcount chasing too few jobs. That’s not your fault and there’s nothing that can be done about it in the short term. The good news is that history tells us tech will come back, and probably stronger than ever. We just don’t know when yet.

That leaves us with luck. I’ve never been too keen on relying on luck to get my mortgage paid.

So do we give up? No, of course not. But you might be best served by considering doing something different for a while to keep the bill collectors off your back. There’s no shame in changing course as life throws you curve balls. It’s should be seen as a sign of resiliency. The thought of taking a lesser title or a haircut in pay is a tough pill to swallow. I can speak to this from first hand experience. I once took a $15k whack and a lesser job to keep the money pipeline flowing. It took me a few years to get that back but at least I avoided a gap and kept the creditors at bay.

Multiple times I have seen peers not budge on potential opportunities because their pride wouldn’t let them take a non-management role or a perceived step down in any way. They hold out for the perfect opportunity and end up with nothing. I’ve seen houses lost and relationships destroyed over the inability to be flexible as the situation requires.

Another thing to consider might be that it’s possible you might actually like your alternative path better than sitting in scrum meetings and working the kanban board. A break from Remedy or JIRA might be just what the doctor ordered for your mental health.

Tech will come back and if it’s your life’s dream to work again in tech I’m sure you will, but a tech job doesn’t define you, or at least it shouldn’t. For some people I think having more of a pivot mindset could be helpful — at least in the short term. This is all about the psychology of the market right now. COVID happened. The supply chain got disrupted. Companies took a hit on their bottom line and got spooked.

It’ll change. I hope you can find something fulfilling to do that pays the bills.

3 Words for Elon

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Not surprising of course, but Twitter had another major outage yesterday followed by Elon tweeting

“Ugh. The System is so fragile. The whole thing needs to be redesigned from the bottom up.”

Who pray tell, will be doing the redesigning since what’s left of your staff is repairing leaks in your sinking ship?

Gosh, the system is fragile? No shit, Sherlock

Chasing the Certs

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Years ago I had a discussion with a friend and former Boeing colleague who had recently been hired by Microsoft as a developer. I asked him about the interview process. His reply was enlightening at the time and I ended up using bits and pieces of it to make future hires when I managed a small tools team at Xerox.

The crux of it was, they don’t care so much about what you’ve done in the past. They are more interested in knowing how you approach problems now. You get almost zero credit for having been involved in complex projects listed on your resume. In the interview process you’re more likely to be tested on how you would approach a real world problem. Getting the answer exactly right isn’t as important as how well you rise to the challenge and bring forth ideas and communicate them. I definitely saw the value in this.

This has nothing to do with coming up with “stump the developer” questions which are irritating as hell. It’s more about trying to figure out how a candidate’s mind works. When I started using the process myself I oftentimes walked away from an interview session getting a really good feel for if given a problem, the candidate can take the magic marker and start sketching out ideas vs. me having to lead the discussion from beginning to end. Very telling.

After about 30 years in the biz I realized that less and less of my formal education mattered at all to my career. By the end of 42 years I can easily say that < 1% of my BSEET degree from 1986 was in use as a Site Reliability Engineer in 2022. In addition to that I realized that I was having to reinvent myself every 5-10 years as technology changed and new roles opened up. This is a far cry from my father’s work world of teaching 8th grade math for 33 years. Math doesn’t change much from year to year unless the textbooks change. Must have been nice!

It certainly appears that the educational landscape has changed as far as employers are concerned. Nowadays you see more postings with Computer Science degree or equivalent. If I were newly unemployed or otherwise wanting to boost my resume I think I would focus on Cloud Certifications from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. In my view these are as valuable to an employer’s immediate needs as just about anything else you’ll put on your resume.

I don’t want to discount the value of a Computer Science Degree though. While it’s true that just having that sheepskin doesn’t necessity correlate to a more valuable employee, what it does do is tell you that the candidate had the stick-to-it mindset in order to get through something very challenging to get. And that’s definitely worth a lot.

But as far as employers are concerned, I suspect they are oftentimes looking closely at skills match for the purpose of knowing “okay, how much are we going to have to teach this person?”

Focusing solely on skills-match is a huge mistake. For one thing, people lie. Putting python on your resume might check the box but it doesn’t really tell you the level of complexity of the python programs that were developed. For that you have to rely on good interview questions and even then, you might not be getting a fair comparison.

The Certifications however tell a completely different story. For one thing, it’s necessary to have spent time hands on with the services you’re being tested on. The other thing is the tests are not easy. If you pass a certification test, you’ve done some studying and learned some things that an employer can potentially use right away.

If you’re looking to get ahead these days, chase the certs.

Onboarding Expectations

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I had heard stories about brutal onboarding processes at high tech companies where basically they throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim or not. They place a really high value on self-sufficiency. About the worst thing you could have a peer say is “sure, let me google that for you.” A real no hand-holding around here approach. Man-up, let’s see whatcha got. It sounded horrible and I hoped I never had to experience it. I came pretty close to missing it, but not quite.

In the 1990’s and 2000’s I managed a team of tools engineers and we had the opposite approach. We trained new hires on the tools and sometimes the class size was 1. We did it anyway. One of the biggest compliments I received (and it was from multiple people over the years) was how much they appreciated the time we took up front to familiarize them with the tools, processes and answer their noob questions. The company (Tektronix) got it. They gave me a $1M budget for my team and said “make sure my developers are happy campers.” They gave me some general direction, enough budget to be successful, and then got out of my way.

So in the twilight of my career I ended up doing a contracting stint at Venmo to be their “interrupts” engineer. I had a good idea I’d be on a short leash most of the day and that was fine, I didn’t mind that part of it as long as there were no on-call expectations. I wondered how the onboarding process would go and was disappointed to learn it was more of a throw ’em in the deep end approach.

Venmo has a rotating shift of on-call Site Reliability Engineers and my outlets for outreach were 1) contact the SRE on-call and 2) Hit up the “SRE Team” Slack channel with my questions.

There were several problems with this. First, there are a ton of things to learn starting out and the Confluence Documentation wasn’t a reliable resource for most of my questions so I didn’t have the ability to self-service the vast majority of them. Second, not all of the on-call rotation engineers were 1) available or 2) very adept at mentoring new-hires. Some were extreme introverts who seemed put out at having to answer my questions. Third, having to ask the volume of questions I had on a daily basis to the team slack channel really sucked. Having to expose one’s ignorance publicly that often is not ideal. And more often than they might care to admit, the response was crickets.

What really saved me was a few people who didn’t seem to mind being bothered with questions that I could reach out to 1/1. I tried not to over-use that chip because I didn’t want to wear out my welcome and burn other teammates out, but I had to find someone.

I can see both sides of the issue. On one hand you don’t want to set the expectation coming in that this is going to be a real hand-holding experience every time you get stumped. The other side of it is, having no help all at leads to high stress, discouragement, and the feeling that this is not a team with good collaboration skills.

So if I were managing teams again I think I’d assign each new hire a single mentor to coach them through the first few weeks. That person would be available for questions or pointers to where they could find the info, but they would be responsible for bringing a new hire up to speed. The mentor could also gage whether too many of the questions were google-able themselves and coach the new hire in that direction too if there wasn’t enough effort going into self research before asking others. But in general, some hand-holding would be available early-on.

Job Security?

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I’ve been at this high-tech gig for over 30 years now in various industries; aerospace, printers, compilers, and now health care insurance. You would think that after this long a guy could kick back a little bit and feel secure. Such is not the case.

Something changed right about when I started working in 1980, or perhaps just a bit before in the late 1970’s. Job security went the way of the hoola-hoop.

I remember growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s when people had jobs and kept them for long periods of time, and didn’t feel like they needed to be looking over their shoulders every week. Company loyalty actually existed in both directions. Pensions came with the territory instead of self-directed savings plans. That must have been nice. Work for a goodly spell, then retire comfortably.

Every single job I’ve had felt like there was a layoff just around the corner, and there usually was. Even in management. At one company I was managing a small team and we saw the outsourcing movement coming our way and I prepared myself for the eventuality that I may have to RIF a team member or two. But we never got word of the upcoming RIF. Why? Because managers were targets too! That was a humbling realization.

I’ve been laid off one time, but have had no gaps in employment due to being given 6 months notice of the pending shut-down, so I was able to line up a new employer as the job ended. It seems as though I should get some credit for the equivalent of navigating a 40′ sailboat through Deception Pass or something else really hard.

I’ve tried to explain this to people that are not in high-tech and often get blank stares. Huh? I just go to work every day and don’t worry about it too much. Oh, to be you.

If memory serves, it started with the hyperinflation economy circa the Carter Administration, but got even worse afterwards. Reagan laid the hammer down on the air-traffic controllers and showed ’em who’s boss. That was really bad news for unions which also coincides with the initial demise of the middle class.  The experiment with trickle down economics laid on more pressure to the working class and furthered the divid between the rich vs. the poor.

Then came NAFTA. Ross Perot nailed it with his “Giant sucking sound” comment. I don’t know that something like NAFTA wasn’t inevitable. I sort of doubt the United States could have gotten away with being too isolationist for very long. But man, the effects of all of this has really sucked the energy out of me. For 35 years!

Suddenly layoffs aren’t just commonplace, but expected. Constantly. Look out because the Vice Presidents are under tremendous pressure to show cost savings and productivity improvements. If your job is classified as ‘overhead’, all the worse for you. It was always best to be tied directly to some project work. Unless of course, your project were to be canceled. If you switch jobs, be prepared to start all over and prove yourself no matter how senior your job title says you are. You are replaceable, don’t kid yourself.

How many hours have I wasted worrying about being considered redundant and all the comes with it. Having to break the news to the family. Possibly losing a house and getting in a bad credit situation. Having to take a lesser job to keep putting food in the mouths of 5 people.  Having to go back to school and learn a completely new skill.  A LOT of sleepless nights.

In the 1990’s, outsourcing became the buzzword that showed up on a lot of VP’s powerpoint slides. They couldn’t just come in and propose 5% cost cutting. They were under pressure to come up with a ‘game changing’ idea. Outsourcing tech labor to India or the Far East was the trendy thing to do. Initially the numbers were hard to deny. Labor in India was about 20% of the U.S. rate. It’s since risen to closer to 50% as the global playing field levels a bit, but that’s still a big number. To make matters worse, you could expect to be asked to start looking for a new job while training your replacement. I did for a while. Then one day I just let them know that I was no longer interested in training my replacement. That turned some heads but I got away with it. Not sure how I did, but I just couldn’t train that guy for one more minute.

Meanwhile, in the good old U.S. we have extremists promoting ‘pure capitalism’ as if the human race would be best governed by the laws of Natural Selection. Every man for himself. Dog eat dog. Whatever it takes just so long as nobody’s gonna be mooching off me. The odd thing is, even during the halcyon days of the 1950’s that the pundits like to harken back on as the peak of our exceptionalism, we’ve never been a pure capitalist nation. Taxes were more than double what they are now for the top earners. Our economic policies have always been a combination of capitalism and socialism, just a matter of degree.

I wonder what it would be like to work at a job where the pace was normal and the expectations weren’t unrealistic? Every company I’ve worked for feels like someone’s hair is on fire and the schedule pressures you feel are very real. It’s hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle when you feel the need to work 60 hours a week, often through lunch, and forego your exercise routine in order to help the team meet a specific deadline. God knows you don’t want to be the one called out for holding things up in a status meeting. Anything but that.

There may be hope for future generations. The playing field has leveled quite a bit. Many companies have gone to the school of hard knocks with the outsourcing plans and many have reverted back for a variety of reasons. Some underestimated how difficult it would be to deal with the timezone differences. Others forgot to pencil in additional capital for the bandwidth required to do distributed development. In some cases it’s been the language barrier was too much to bear. 50% is a big number, but there’s a well documented downside now and more outsourcing proposals are getting met with “not-so-fast”.

I’d like to come in at 8:30 every day, always take an hour long lunch and visit with people in mostly non-work conversation, do some interesting work and then go home around 5-ish and leave my troubles behind. And not have to worry about scenarios that might wind a guy up on someone’s RIF list. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll get to experience this in my lifetime.

If you have an everyday job and don’t lay awake at night worrying about job loss frequently, then give some thanks. Well played, I envy you.