8 min
The junior and the agent
Eight months into their first job, they fixed in 40 minutes a bug that would have taken me two days at that stage. Then they couldn't tell me why the fix worked.
Careers
All writing →15 posts filed under Careers, newest first.
8 min
Things I unlearned
I read a post I wrote in 2015 and found the person who wrote it insufferable. That turns out to be the useful part of keeping an archive for 11 years.
7 min
Ask a question that gets answered
Two questions went into the same channel within about ten minutes of each other. One got a useful answer in four minutes. The other is still sitting there, and the difference wasn't the difficulty.
5 min
Everyone says they're faster
Three people in one standup gave three different multiples for how much quicker they've got, none of them had measured anything, and I sat there working out whether to say that I genuinely don't know if I'm faster at all.
6 min
The form came back
In April 2020 I wrote that I'd like somebody to write down what we'd just proved, before everyone forgot and the form came back, and four years later the form has come back and nothing was written down.
8 min
Pricing is the hard part
I went looking for writing about how developers price their work and found essentially one post, in a field where thousands of people publish constantly and every one of them has to answer this question.
6 min
Nobody's leaving now
Eighteen months ago it was six recruiter messages a week. This month I've had one, and two of the three people who left have been made redundant.
7 min
The tutorial trap
Somebody who had completed three courses, all the way through, all the exercises done, sat down in front of an empty folder and could not start, and was quietly convinced this meant they weren't cut out for it.
7 min
Everyone I know is leaving
Three going-away parties in eight weeks, all on video calls. Six recruiter messages in one week. I'd rather think about the mechanism than about how it feels.
8 min
Saying no
I said yes on a call last month while a voice in my head was very clearly saying don't. What I'd have needed in that moment wasn't courage.
7 min
Code review is teaching
I can still quote a review comment somebody left on my work in 2015, and I can also remember one I left last year that I'd like back, and neither of those is about whether the code was correct.
6 min
The long table
The monthly meetup I'd been going to since I started didn't happen in February, or in March, and nobody announced anything, and I think that's just how these end.
6 min
A wall of green squares
A candidate apologized to me for their contribution graph before I'd asked about it, and I've been uncomfortable about that for about a month, mostly because I'd have done the same thing.
9 min
Everyone has a Brent
Not a good novel. I got more out of it than most of the good books I read this year, largely because of the one character everybody quotes the wrong lesson about.
5 min
I learned PHP by accident
I did not decide to learn a back-end language this year. I got cornered into it one template at a time, and I've been thinking about how much of what I know arrived that way rather than on purpose.