Someone in your organisation has not handled that well if they’ve told the new engineer that they’ll be joining your team and they’re now having to backpedal. That’s a) lots of avoidable uncertainty and change for the new guy and b) not showing much understanding of or respect for your team by dropping a new person in without checking that you can accommodate them…
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I haven’t been privy to all the conversations but fortunately I don’t think they’d quite got as far as telling the new guy what he’d be doing precisely.
I do feel a little bit disrespected though.
Bit of a rant
It’s not the first time we’ve had someone dropped into the team. My previous manager was of the view that more engineers equals more code. My new manager at least asks me first. In this case my manager seems to have been told that the new hire was being placed with us.
However, we have just had a junior team member stolen by another project only 5 months after he started with us. Not sure why they’d think I’d be in a mood to train anyone so soon after that. (Training seems to fall to me as the Scrum Master.)
It’s also apparent that senior management seem to think that all we do as a team is write software, which is a gross simplification of what we actually do.
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Even if it wasn’t, that’s not exactly a simple thing to be doing!
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My concern here is they’ve been allocated to a team without consultation when they’ve specifically asked to work on their own. It seems that this person would be best allocated to support tasks that all teams rely on?
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I’m not sure it was so much about working on their own per se but the summary of the situation has essentially come via a third party so it’s not entirely clear.
All the more reason it might have been nice to discuss this with us first.
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Speaking of dubious hiring decisions…
We’ve recently lost two junior developers in a restructure, and it was the right thing to do, but I still felt bad for them. They should never have been hired, because neither of them had enough experience and the team didn’t have any capacity to provide the level of training that was necessary; but somehow they were hired (I have no insights into who is at fault for this), and then somewhat abandoned because they weren’t useful to anyone (working with them was essentially counter-productive to any given project); so their time with the company must have been pretty sucky all in all.
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Could be worse, you could be stack-ranking, then everyone wants to be on their team so that they can look good relative to those guys…
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For reasons (mostly “we need to be able to offer some people more money “), my job profile was changed from “an engineering role that exists only here “ to “an engineering role we just made up, and that only exists here, but we will use an industry standard role for comparative compensation analysis “ (don’t worry. My business cards still say performance art victim.)
A side effect is that this afternoon, some automation decided that people with the profile “an engineering role we just made up, and that only exists here, but we will use an industry standard role for comparative compensation analysis “ aren’t engineers, and removed access to systems that only engineers get to use. Including, of course, ones we run. Oops.
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I love this sort of business process logic.
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why is this not your forum title?
also: oops to the great automation processes.
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Sounds similar to the twelve or so new positions my company has created in the past couple of years that get filled, and then strangely vacated after 3-12 months, either to be filled again or just discontinued. Meanwhile I get to try to figure out what permissions these positions need in our various systems as best I can, change up workflows to fit them in, and prod HR to modify who supervises whom in the systems so the workflows go to the people they should. At least until it changes again.
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It could be…
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The permissions issue was sorted out, within a few hours.
Performance art victim comes from a previous job. The product was a resource scheduling and management application, which was, for reasons[1],written in lisp. by reimplementing web objects. In lisp, did I mention? And not just lsp, but real god-dammit, we’re lisp programmers lisp, with meta-meta-objects and 5000 macros, most of which produced another macro. When I started, one of my cow-orkers was giving me a tour of some feature. I expressed some surprise that the code stack was so complex. He said “You think it’s software. It’s not. It’s performance art.” Keeping that in mind was very helpful.
This was a small company, and I never had a job title. Then I applied for a mortgage. The bank wanted something more concrete than “I torture computers until they do what I want them to.” I talked to my boss, and he suggested something, I countered iwth performance art victim. We settled on something boring.
[1] These reasons were never adequately articulated to me, but I strongly suspect they are ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ And the ‘why it seemed like a good idea’ was ‘high grade hallucinogens.’
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FYI: The place where I work is being hit with fishing attacks (this is normal I guess) and attacks on multi-factor authentication (this is the interesting part).
I also just got an MFA request on my primary google account which has a sufficiently strong password that I am suspicious now…
I changed both of my google account passwords (yes I have 2 accounts, one is devoid of any and all information and just made in case I am traveling to the US or other crazy places and have to show my phone) just to be sure and did a small check on all the apps and services I have granted access at some point and removed most of them.
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Phew! Finished migrating all my public code from github to codeberg. Should have done it when Microsoft bought it, really, but it took the copilot thing to get me to move. Probably I’ll self-host eventually (everything comes back to either “servers I run” or “servers I don’t trust”) but that’ll do for now.
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Oi that sounds like an idea.
I tried co-pilot back in December, it is good for writing tests and other boring code. But it quickly gets in the way when you want to write more interesting stuff like advent of code or anything but tests.
In any case, besides the data concerns the company has (my team lead said we should try but not tell anyone, he was just curious about it)… having discussed ChatGPT and the image AIs so much recently I now realize that co-pilot is more or less appropriating content like all the other artificial „intelligences“ … one probably has to agree to let co-pilot learn from whatever one hosts on github. But… now that you mention it I should probably move my advent of code repository over before it gets any bigger (my other public stuff is so old it is probably diminishing the quality of co-pilot) and my private git repos are on my own gitlab server.
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Codeberg has a clean auto-migration. I set up a checklist for removing files from the github version, replacing the readme with a note of the new URL then archiving the repo, etc.
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We are very explicitly prohibited from using copilot. We have an internal similar project. It is, as you say, good for boilerplate. Not just tests, but function docstrings, and standard function stuff. It’s also pretty good at the Except: part of try/except blocks, at least where the error that might be raised is something it can infer. I’ve veen working on some crazy complicated database queries, which are written in something that’s almost SQL, but isn’t quite. It’s okay at that, it gets some of the stuff right, and is reasonbably good at guess at what your joins and where clauses are (and it’s easy to ignore it, when it makes garbage suggestions, just keep typing). It’s done a couple very strange suggestions, like not include all of the string it should be suggesting (there seems to be some line length limit) and a couple times putting whitespace inside quoted strings inside macros.
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Is that python?
The first time I worked with python I saw a lot of “it’s very readable, like natural language” comments thrown around regarding the language in general. It wasn’t long before I encountered its exception handling and the syntax except <foo>: <do thing> meaning “only when <foo> happened, do the thing” which is the complete inverse of the natural language “except when <foo> happened, do the thing”, and I decided that someone had a serious brain-fade on the day that had been implemented.
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Serious brain fade is a common occurrence in python syntax. Except where there was conscious decision to make the worst possible choice. But there are lots of “what?” moments all over the language and in core libraries. I’m willing to give the try/except syntax a pass. It’s clear enough, and concise enough. what’s wrong with ‘catch’, though?
I’ve never thought python was more natural language than lots of scripting languages are.
so some of the naming and usage syntax doesn’t bother me from that point of view. (the x if x >y else y construction drives me nuts, especially when the most likely result isn’t first. )
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