BowTied Fullstack Quotes

Quotes from @BowTiedStack, writing on how to W2-max in your tech career, build wifi-money, and escape; & occasionally Canada 🇨🇦. Powered by @PoasterApp.

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My primary account got banned, working on a fix but will be posting from this account until it gets sorted out.

RT & follow here if you followed @BowTiedStack.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

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Pushing the rewrite hard against the stated preferences of the current users, growing resentment and animosity between his team of maintainers and their users which fractured the engineering organization. Warring factions opened debates in Slack and would take pot shots in meetings, leadership stayed out of it assuming that the staff engineer could handle it and smooth things over as necessary.

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For some, it's sheer laziness to read and understand what existing code is there and works. For others, there's ideological reasons why they refuse to use the existing code because of their own religiously held technical beliefs. For the cynical, a rewrite is a proving ground for their next promotion and for their team to secure budget runway since their team is now working on maintenance critical work. For many, it's a combination of all of the above.

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After two months of getting familiar with the libraries they'd be maintaining, they declared that the libraries were unmaintainable and would need to be rewritten from scratch or replaced with a similar open source alternative. While it can happen even with lower level engineers, senior and staff engineers are particularly vulnerable to the hubris of encountering any existing codebase and declaring that it is unmaintainable and they must write a truly worthy one to use.

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For any role, if you hire a bad apple, your opportunity cost is their salary paid so far and the lost productivity from if you had hired someone better. With senior and staff engineers, the opportunity cost is higher for both, since compared to a new grad they are certainly paid more, but they also have much higher expectations of positive impact on the organization.

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But why even try? It's just the W2. Unfortunately, you'll be working with people at your W2. If there's a weak or dysfunctional culture, your time will increasingly be spent bickering with them, instead of shipping. The more you have in common, the less you need to ever discuss. It's the water you swim in, there's no need to debate constantly whether it's still wet. Selfishly, the less you need to discuss, the easier you can fade effort, and still appear productive as you ship. If your W2 descends into more hours every week spent on useless social interactions and culture wars, you won't have time to be building wifi-money and planning your escape. For your own self-interest, you'll want to work in a functional, engineering culture. If you don't have one you, you can strive to foster one. If you've inherited one, strive to keep it, warts and all. Chaos is not your friend.

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Unfortunately, few engineering leaders consciously think about culture in a non-LinkedIn, non-cringe, pragmatic way. Sure, the LinkedIn cucks will prattle on about culture for hours if you let them – especially if they are holding a microphone on some panel on stage, but few know how to form, let alone preserve, a high functioning 10x engineering culture. Without a 10x engineering culture, your company surely will slowly die mired in slowing velocity, productivity, and growing insurmountable levels of tech debt, with your 10x engineers jumping ship like rats quarter after quarter. As an engineering culture fades, similar to broader society's culture weakening, the implicit must be explicit. Implicit best practices and values must now be written down, with quarterly HR training to reinforce them. Instead of implicitly knowing what the right thing was and doing it – knowing any stray from the cultural standard will be promptly rebuffed in person or in your PR comments; explicit rules, CI checks, and process will be added to attempt to reap the same fruits from a dying and diseased tree.

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Like any culture, an engineering culture is the implicit embedding of values, ways of doing things, slogans, technical opinions, amongst a group of people. For startups, this may entirely overlap with that of the team since the team of 5 or 10 engineers is the entire engineering organization. But for most larger W2s, the engineering culture sits beyond the team, in the best case capturing and setting as de facto the values, practices, and opinions that should be shared across all teams, regardless of domain. While companies are small, say under 100 engineers, the right charismatic senior engineers can set the culture. During all hands meetings, pair programming with new engineers as they join, and ensuring that other senior engineers are aligned on the same values and practices, a culture can be set which has vast synergetic benefits given the shared context that all engineers now can operate within. For companies that manage to retain their founding engineers, setting culture can be much easier. Initial hires onboard with the founding engineers directly. Once trained and inculcated, when they onboard future new hires, there is minimal loss of culture in the next generation hired. In a tiny team, differences get ironed out quickly and aren't allowed to fester, in contrast to how they can more easily grow in a huge team where everyone is spread thin and few have the time, influence, or authority to chastise a new hire for their foreign values or behavior.

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As you can now see, regardless of what level you are hired at, the pitfalls are vast and deep that you can fall into if you fail to onboard. While many grind hours and weeks away at Leetcode for their coding interviews, few put in the same effort or preparation of their spirit and attitude into successfully onboarding. And that can make all the difference.

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I was called in to pair program on his latest project and help fix his "velocity issues". We started pairing once a week, then twice. Soon it was nearly every day. He had an awful habit of drilling down for days, layer by layer in the code. Endless pointless goose chases. Constant complaints about how the existing code had been written. Some of it valid complaints, some of their code was horrendous. But many complaints, simply were protecting his ego with endless accusations that his colleagues were idiots. And through it all, still no PRs submitted.

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He was a sports bro, betting on every game, loud, Eastern European, upbeat & positive. A stark contrast to the much more subdued, level-headed, traditional nerd interests and mannerisms of the existing team. He talked a good game technically, but soon that was the only thing he had a reputation for. Talk. He couldn't ship. His manager was exceedingly aloof, so he was able to fumble around nearly a year before the tensions rose.