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Content notice: I'm talking about how much I love my work situation, where I'm fairly spoiled with the things that matter in life. My partner gets weirdly jealous about it so I thought I'd prefix with this CN, for others who don't like to read about how some jobs are actually good. :P
We're getting the Holidays off, from Dec. 23rd to January 3rd. We had the same thing at my previous startup last year. We're "on call", esp. the 30th and 31st which are big deadlines for our customers, but still. We aren't pushing major changes so nothing should collapse.
Now since that wasn't specified in my contract, I don't know how that works out with the vacation allowance I negotiated. (My previous company had it written in there so it was clearer. They were more experienced at the small startup game.) But my manager/former roommate says "no one's counting" and "I don't care, take the time you need". :)
It's kind of interesting because many times he's asked me if I like the work, and I would say I like 80% of it. But I'm getting a bit annoyed of being asked that question? Like it's happened half a dozen times at least, what's going on? So if he asks again, I'll tell him that I would watch paint dry with him, because he's very competent and he's chill. Those are the things I care for in a boss and co-workers. That's what makes me productive. That's what I care about. I had that last year, lost it, and I'm happy that I found it again.
Another thing that's interesting. At previous companies, we had daily stand-up meetings. For those who don't know, a stand-up meeting is a meeting which happens early during the workday where everyone on your direct team (hopefully not more than 7 people in a meeting, otherwise you should split the meeting). Everyone takes turns giving their updates: 1) What are you're working on, 2) what's blocking you 3) what you're going to work on next. If you can help your coworkers on something they're working or blocked on, that's a good time to speak up. This is a standard practice for modern software development teams, part of what's called SCRUM or generally Agile methodologies. It's called a stand-up meeting because you're supposed to meet stand up; it discourages people from blathering on and on, no one wants to stand for more than a few minutes. If someone goes on for too long they're going to get told to wrap it up. At the Star we had an actual 1-minute timer to get people to keep it short, because we had a meeting of 10+ people. But of course in our remote work era, no one's standing up anymore.
My manager is basically anti-meeting and has told everyone else outside the dev team to send him meeting notes, he's not going to attend meetings. He does sometimes, but he got burnt out on them during the pandemic and just pushes back on them. So he's not too keen on regularly scheduled meetings. He wants us devs to keep him regularly apprised of what we're doing and ask him (and each other) for help if we're stuck. I'm a bit of a lone ranger, so eventually he got sick of my isolation and scheduled me a daily 16h30 meeting. A couple of my coworkers are in Calgary so they start later than me, and my boss himself has morning duties to deal with, so I rarely hear from anyone in the morning. Anyway, I basically just have a daily 1:1 with him, and it's pretty productive. Eventually the goal is to wean myself from the scheduled meeting but I'm not there yet. :) Oh yeah: we also have no ticketing system for tasks. The daily 1:1 is also for getting direction on what to work on next. My manager is my human JIRA. And sometimes he changes his mind on the fly. So you gotta roll with that. But as much as I thing Kanban is the ideal state, I'm fine with this, with the right person, which he is.
Now I don't want to sugarcoat it. In spite of all of this I've had tons of anxiety about the work, imposter syndrome, getting stuck on the most stupid problems and taking the long way around to resolve them, in particular not asking for help quickly enough, because I'm a Stubborn Man. But it's much better to deal with that in a supportive environment. Which my previous jobs were, but this is even better, I think.
Also, after my previous stint working on a lot of back-end development 2 jobs ago, I thought I was done with the back-end, I initially was happy to go back to React at my last job, but I'm really enjoying this Lambda stuff. It's basically re-branded micro-service architecture, and I'm sold. I'm also writing tests for the first time in my life. Just integration stuff for now, so no stupid mocking problems, but still. It's helping a lot. Unit testing is not the most useful thing for Lambda, and you need more integration testing than in a monolith architecture, so integration it is, for now.
(Back in early 2020 my 2-jobs-ago work had paid for all of us to actually go to the Amazon office (which was conveniently in the next tower over) to get a course about Lambda architecture, but they taught it to us without any framework. Like we were composing the architecture by hand, creating permissions and creating resources manually and stuff. Talk about turning people off! No one in my then-office ever touched the stuff again. A few years later now, AWS has this SAM framework which is getting pretty mature, or you can use the CDK if you feel you need to get programmatic about it. Or a mixture of the two. We're currently using the Serverless Framework, the granddaddy of this stuff, but we might switch to SAM, we'll take the decision in the next few days.)
I'm going to keep my old AWS tag on this post, but my opinion of this whole stack/type of work has greatly improved. :)
We're getting the Holidays off, from Dec. 23rd to January 3rd. We had the same thing at my previous startup last year. We're "on call", esp. the 30th and 31st which are big deadlines for our customers, but still. We aren't pushing major changes so nothing should collapse.
Now since that wasn't specified in my contract, I don't know how that works out with the vacation allowance I negotiated. (My previous company had it written in there so it was clearer. They were more experienced at the small startup game.) But my manager/former roommate says "no one's counting" and "I don't care, take the time you need". :)
It's kind of interesting because many times he's asked me if I like the work, and I would say I like 80% of it. But I'm getting a bit annoyed of being asked that question? Like it's happened half a dozen times at least, what's going on? So if he asks again, I'll tell him that I would watch paint dry with him, because he's very competent and he's chill. Those are the things I care for in a boss and co-workers. That's what makes me productive. That's what I care about. I had that last year, lost it, and I'm happy that I found it again.
Another thing that's interesting. At previous companies, we had daily stand-up meetings. For those who don't know, a stand-up meeting is a meeting which happens early during the workday where everyone on your direct team (hopefully not more than 7 people in a meeting, otherwise you should split the meeting). Everyone takes turns giving their updates: 1) What are you're working on, 2) what's blocking you 3) what you're going to work on next. If you can help your coworkers on something they're working or blocked on, that's a good time to speak up. This is a standard practice for modern software development teams, part of what's called SCRUM or generally Agile methodologies. It's called a stand-up meeting because you're supposed to meet stand up; it discourages people from blathering on and on, no one wants to stand for more than a few minutes. If someone goes on for too long they're going to get told to wrap it up. At the Star we had an actual 1-minute timer to get people to keep it short, because we had a meeting of 10+ people. But of course in our remote work era, no one's standing up anymore.
My manager is basically anti-meeting and has told everyone else outside the dev team to send him meeting notes, he's not going to attend meetings. He does sometimes, but he got burnt out on them during the pandemic and just pushes back on them. So he's not too keen on regularly scheduled meetings. He wants us devs to keep him regularly apprised of what we're doing and ask him (and each other) for help if we're stuck. I'm a bit of a lone ranger, so eventually he got sick of my isolation and scheduled me a daily 16h30 meeting. A couple of my coworkers are in Calgary so they start later than me, and my boss himself has morning duties to deal with, so I rarely hear from anyone in the morning. Anyway, I basically just have a daily 1:1 with him, and it's pretty productive. Eventually the goal is to wean myself from the scheduled meeting but I'm not there yet. :) Oh yeah: we also have no ticketing system for tasks. The daily 1:1 is also for getting direction on what to work on next. My manager is my human JIRA. And sometimes he changes his mind on the fly. So you gotta roll with that. But as much as I thing Kanban is the ideal state, I'm fine with this, with the right person, which he is.
Now I don't want to sugarcoat it. In spite of all of this I've had tons of anxiety about the work, imposter syndrome, getting stuck on the most stupid problems and taking the long way around to resolve them, in particular not asking for help quickly enough, because I'm a Stubborn Man. But it's much better to deal with that in a supportive environment. Which my previous jobs were, but this is even better, I think.
Also, after my previous stint working on a lot of back-end development 2 jobs ago, I thought I was done with the back-end, I initially was happy to go back to React at my last job, but I'm really enjoying this Lambda stuff. It's basically re-branded micro-service architecture, and I'm sold. I'm also writing tests for the first time in my life. Just integration stuff for now, so no stupid mocking problems, but still. It's helping a lot. Unit testing is not the most useful thing for Lambda, and you need more integration testing than in a monolith architecture, so integration it is, for now.
(Back in early 2020 my 2-jobs-ago work had paid for all of us to actually go to the Amazon office (which was conveniently in the next tower over) to get a course about Lambda architecture, but they taught it to us without any framework. Like we were composing the architecture by hand, creating permissions and creating resources manually and stuff. Talk about turning people off! No one in my then-office ever touched the stuff again. A few years later now, AWS has this SAM framework which is getting pretty mature, or you can use the CDK if you feel you need to get programmatic about it. Or a mixture of the two. We're currently using the Serverless Framework, the granddaddy of this stuff, but we might switch to SAM, we'll take the decision in the next few days.)
I'm going to keep my old AWS tag on this post, but my opinion of this whole stack/type of work has greatly improved. :)
