blizkreeg

I posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33783313

Piggybacking off of that, if you're an experienced (mid-level & beyond) eng, where are you going to check out new opportunities passively? Are you just depending on recruiters reaching out?

Are there any platforms or mailing lists one can sign up to anonymously keep tabs on interesting opportunities? Also, what about a new opp draws your attention (aside from total comp :D)

You're an experienced engineer. Do you keep your eyes and ears open to new opportunities even when not actively looking for a job?

For the purpose of the question, I'd define experienced as mid-level+ (5 years in) and senior folks.

I read a lot of things online - blog posts, twitter threads, newsletters etc. But for a long time now, I've realized it really breaks my flow to be bombarded with this information overload during the course of my regular day. It takes my focus away from more productive work and the constant barrage is unsavory.

That said, I also want to consume some of this information. I want to read that post or that thread. I just don't want to do it _now_. Of course, I can use something like a mailbrew or similar but it's still online in nature.

I'm curious to hear thoughts on a service that you send links to as you collect them. Just prior to end of month, the service prints it all in reader mode and ships them to you as a little book so you can read this stuff in peace, _offline_.

Software development in most startup teams today has essentially become ticket-driven development. Tickets are created, assigned, and are magically expected to be delivered on in 1 or 2-wk cycles. Then, more new tickets are created, assigned, and the cycle repeats.

The PM/EM writes a bunch of poorly detailed tickets (often with no detail) and expects devs to deliver on them. Is this the situation in your team too? If there is detail, it's usually a few hastily written lines in the JIRA ticket description with the rest left to the developer to figure out, fill in the blanks on, or ask questions around.

1. have you experienced this? and if so, have you seen that this leads to poorer quality deliverables or does it not have any impact?

2. what would you fix about this process (systems, people, tools) to make it better?

If you're a hiring manager, have you felt the burn trying to find and attract people to full-time roles? And if so, what are you seeing?

Sourcing has become near impossible with most candidates bombarded by recruiters, so even as hiring manager, your message is likely being ignored. Inbound applications are down and convincing experienced folks to switch jobs has become harder than ever.

The pandemic has also made moonlighting more universal and more people looking for remote/part-time/fractional work.

I wonder if anyone else is noticing this too. On the flip side, I wonder how folks looking for full-time roles are faring.

I hear something over and over, often from higher-ups, but also from sales and marketing functions in an org, and occasionally from other eng teams. They really don't know what has shipped and when. This is especially true in small and mid-sized companies where things are moving fast and systems/processes are weak.

Before you pounce on me, yes, in most orgs, it is the job of the product or engineering manager to keep everyone informed and in the loop on this. But it falls through the cracks - sometimes they're late or forget, other times they may have shared but the slack message or email gets lost in the weeds.

Have you faced this? Is this even a problem at your company? What's your current process to remedy it? Also, what form does this take in your company (eg email?, slack?, wiki?)?

The short answer is probably because it's a people thing. Or that people don't use them as they're intended. Or you don't understand agile (side note - the agile way is the stupidest thing invented since waterfall).

But, entertain me for a second. The tools can do a better job. It doesn't matter the tool - JIRA, Clubhouse, Linear, etc - they're all the same with different UIs.

Here are my 3 pet peeves and biggest frustrations that no tool has yet solved. What are yours?

1. Planning is hard. These tools throw a big backlog at you and grooming/planning is incredibly frustrating. They don't give me a good look into my team, their availabilities, or their capacity. It is also really hard to plan and estimate a sprint when you're just staring at a long list of tasks that are prioritized low/medium/high.

2. Once a sprint gets going, there are no guardrails, and no easy way to assess the "health of a sprint". Consider JIRA's Active Sprint view. If you have 6 people on your team, that's a freaking overwhelming board. You really have to hate your life to work with it. It takes way too many gymnastics to assess how we're doing, what's falling behind, and how much more we can actually get done. I'm surprised none of them have a "resource view". I have to filter person by person to get a better look into a team member's tasks.

3. No way for higher ups to get an insight into what's shipping and when. I've grown tired of answering the same question a hundred times - "when is X going to be ready?".

Lastly, as a developer or team member, it sucks to deal with a complex interface just to move your task from ToDo => In Progress.

Curious what others think.