The point of fizz-buzz was to serve as a simple filter at the front end of the interview process. It should be simple, but a surprising number of job candidates were unable to do it.
I've always been afraid of pairing. I don't know how well others would appreciate my periods of daydreaming followed by periods of hyper-fixated focus.
When your team owns an application you have no background knowledge in, and it uses a technology that you haven't touched since you attended a training 18 months ago; I would assume that your on-call response for any non-trivial issue would still be to page someone for help.
I find it ironic that the article itself was edited after the initial posting, per the disclaimer at the bottom. If Netflix added such a disclaimer in the credits of the episode, would that make it more acceptable to the author?
I can't speak to the author's views, but it would to me. There's something very disconcerting about the ability of digital media to be "memory holed", and the Streisand effect is no longer a sure thing, in the age of big tech censorship infrastructure built by popular (media) demand.
At least with TV shows this isn't a problem. Everything is dumped on day 0 so the original releases are preserved. It wouldn't surprise me if there are hundreds of thousands of copies of the original releases floating out there due to torrents.
It was actually a much bigger issue in the past. You pretty much cannot get the theatrical release of the star wars episode 4. I think the best we have are the laser disc rips. To me, that's a a bigger "memory hole", happening way before big tech.
> You pretty much cannot get the theatrical release of the star wars episode 4. I think the best we have are the laser disc rips.
There is the "Silver screen edition" of Star Wars (first of the first, even before it got the "Episode IV"), but it only happened due to enormous efforts of fans who got an original print that should have been destroyed, digitized it with a homebrew machine, and painstakingly restored it frame by frame. That's a really fascinating story.
Journalists have been doing this the last few years without using a disclaimer. Personally, I think it's completely different as film and music is art. If this was done with music it would be especially damaging. Imagine your favourite songs being remastered and arranged for the worst. Artists could rework unsuccessful albums, which is weird.
I would recommend looking at the company's culture. I've seen similar situations where the services team were treated as second-class citizens. What opportunities for advancement are recognition are there? Are they comparable to the product side? Is there any movement between the two sides?
To quote Charles Dickens -- "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery"
To practice being in a relationship. To gain a better understanding of what you want in a relationship. It is one thing to have a bad significant other as a teenager, it is totally different to have a bad spouse.
Many years ago I interviewed at a military contractor. Every time we walked through a work area someone went ahead and announced I was coming through to ensure nobody had something that would require a clearance to see.
In my experience, pair and mob programming are just yet another scenario where neuro-atypical people are punished for approaching their work differently.
I just recently started working at a place where mob programming is commonplace.
It is easily the most wasteful use of time I have ever seen in my professional career.
1.5hr session * 6 devs = 9 hours down the drain.
Only one person can speak during a Zoom call! It's a single-threaded, low throughout, low latency communication medium.
So it always ends up being one or two people talking - the one or two driving what is being mobbed on.
Due to this, I try to only jump in when I have something valuable to add. Which isn't often given the situation I described. If I'm driving or directly involved with the design or w/e of the mob session's focus .. sure of course I'll talk. But I'm not going to sit around trying to get a fluffy word in edgewise for 90 min just for its own sake.
And yet a frequent driver of this mob culture (a "principal" engineer if you can believe it) loves to mention how I'm not "engaged."
??? I sit in your dumbass meetings and pay attention for 90 minutes! My time is 100% focused on the meeting!
Being a junior previously I derived a lot of benefit from light pair coding every now and then to learn something from a more senior developer. I have also been in code reviews where 2+ people are of equal relative skill, but have different approaches to a problem, and it almost becomes a stalemate or some kind of power struggle to 'be right'. 6 devs seems very excessive and an expensive use of time heh.
Think of it as a chance to pick up editor and language tricks you might not have known, or to socialize "best practices". The metagame is still part of the game. If you can't change the practice, try to make the most of it.
It's slow at the beginning, but the payoffs are huge. With mobbing, everyone knows how to do everything. Far less design mistakes are made. No one ends up "owning" certain parts of the system. It's also very humbling as everyone succeeds and fails together, discouraging "heroics".
Pairing is also great for this (but you have to switch every day).
Obviously, if you're working in a feature factory, pairing and mobbing are pointless. If you care about code quality and de-siloing, they're incredibly valuable.
Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it works incredibly well where I work and I will never accept another job that doesn't encourage pairing by default.
For "normal" mobbing, 6 people is too many. If I had 6 devs coding (which I often do) that's very rarely going to be a single mob. It could split up 2/2/2, 3/3, 1/2/3 or whatever, but a single group of 6 is really inefficient.
I won't say it's for everyone. But for ADHD specifically, my personal experience is that pair programming is a godsend. I am able to use half my regular dose of ritalin while pairing.
I'd say I can get behind pair-programming to a point... it helps get new ideas, different view points and leads to rubber-duck-programming like effects.
I'm not sure I'm a fan of Mob programming... as others mention, over a phone/video conference, it seems inadequate. Turns more into an ad-hoc video lesson by the stronger personalities (for better or worse - I happen to be one of those in my small group at work).
Do you have problems with both? 2 vs 3+? or is it one or the other?
To do mobbing effectively you should be switching the driver very rapidly. It's a bit tough remotely, but it can be done. There are probably other ways to make it effective, but if only a few people are contributing, then the mob has failed and should either be recalibrated or stopped altogether.
No, anecdotally a lot of people struggle. It is an intensive experience and places different pressure on a person than soloing does. For me it works great, for many people it works great, but not for everybody.
