>I recommend we discourage phrasing like "move up to management".
Word. At Etsy, we'd occasionally call out people (in a friendly way) for saying "I got a promotion to manager!" Someone (usually a more senior manager who used to be an IC) would say "not a promotion, lateral move." Drove the point home, at least at an IC level, that management is not a move up.
Do you need help? I'm completely on board for that mission and personally feel that we as an industry do a really bad job at testing past the evangelizing phase. Teaching people how to actually test code is something I think we need to do better.
I would! I love coding exercises meant to gain information about a candidate; they're like yardsticks for my professional growth. I love evaluating how I solve a problem now vs how I would have solved it while interviewing for the job I'm leaving. I also just enjoy solving problems. To me, doing a coding exercise is like doing a Tuesday crossword puzzle (they're never hard enough to be stressful) that I get to show off: Look how correctly I solved this, and in ink, with no mistakes, with very well written, clear words.
I don't see it as a waste of time; it's about the potential payoff, which is a (presumably) better job with better opportunities. I wouldn't apply to a job unless I was reasonably sure I wanted to work there anyway. I might be very lucky in that I've worked for good companies in the past few years and the only reason I'd leave one of these companies is for a much much better one. Usually when I leave a job, I've become bored of the problem domain anyway and am looking to solve new problems.
Disclosure: 31 year old man, no kids, I live with my partner.
This is a reminder to me that it doesn't matter how great your idea is, or how technically impressive your product is. If the execution isn't right (in this case, who wants to do math awkwardly on their wrist with a tiny, hard to hold stylus? A calculator is much more comfortable) nobody will buy your product.
I completely agree we should stop being paranoid about what's going to happen when we let other people loose on our beautiful code.
But I don't think having private methods or marking variables const is about paranoia, it's about communicating intent to the people who come behind you and using the compiler to enforce that intent. Every piece of extra context you can give to someone reading your code helps them understand why it's there. Identifiers like const and private are almost like nonverbal communication for code.
I love Zed cause even when he's sincerely offering help to someone struggling, he's still 100% Zed; can't even offer help without mentioning how badass he is. Whether you like him or not, being completely and utterly yourself is an admirable trait I think.
This has basically replaced ack for me. I was dubious of a web -based search tool when Kelly first sent an email about it, but after trying it a couple of times, I abandoned ack. It being linkable is extra icing on the cake for me.
Everyone in the company does these as well (our CEO Chad answered did his holiday rotation a couple weeks ago), typically during the holiday season when we slow down our deploys and our support volume increases. But we're encouraged as engineers to do them once a quarter.
I don't know if it's more important, but I agree with the sentiment that customer service rotations are extremely important. Nothing brings your brilliant head-in-the-clouds engineering ego crashing down to earth like reading an email from a frustrated user who can't figure out how to get (what you thought was) your brilliant product working right.
HTML5 games! They're easy, quick to set up, the feedback is instant and they're fun to play! I've been making HTML5 games as part of short, two hour collaborative coding exercises at work and it's awesome. Here's a recent one we did based on Flappy Bird [1].
I made a few bootstrap scripts here [2] to make it easier to get up and running.
We're looking for everyone! Web/mobile apps/tools/testing engineers; Designers; Ops; Marketing; We have a lot of open reqs for managers all over the world as well.
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Etsy is the world's largest handmade, vintage and craft supplies marketplace. We are a values based company that believes that we can make a profit without violating our core beliefs [1]. We practice continuous deployment [2], and we measure everything [3].
I've never worked with finer engineers, product managers, designers, or data analysts in my life. I recently switched teams to work in a completely different domain because I wanted to scratch a different itch, and it was no problem for my manager or his managers. Highly recommended.
Word. At Etsy, we'd occasionally call out people (in a friendly way) for saying "I got a promotion to manager!" Someone (usually a more senior manager who used to be an IC) would say "not a promotion, lateral move." Drove the point home, at least at an IC level, that management is not a move up.