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situations at work

if this happened to you, how would you respond?

disclaimer - based on real things in my personal experience, and all feelings are my own

inspired by 2010 tigerbeat quizzes

how to do this on your own:

think about moments in your working life that have stuck out to you
jot down some of your feelings about that - how it felt at the time, how you feel now, some intermediate things
categorize types - good, okay, eh, nope

you spend hours studying then taking a hackerrank test, but you must have done something right because you get scheduled for a technical interview the next week. during the interview, the person speaks to you once to say that they are an engineer at x working on x. you struggle for 45 minutes and the engineer interviewing you never says a word. you think it seems like he’s replying to slack messages. you never hear back from them. how we feelin?

i’ve worked places where people joke about blowing off candidates who can’t code well in an interview and they don’t really get any training on how to interview people. feelskindabadman

hackerrank and algorithms interviews aren’t really that fair of an assessment to evaluate people with since the day-to-day is nothing like the experience of being put on the spot under a time crunch. i’d seriously reconsider applying anywhere that uses a system like this to screen candidates

they were probably nervous too, it doesn’t mean anything that this still makes me feel anxious to this day

i’ll just try again next year once i’ve poured more blood, sweat, and tears into learning CS. then i can be just like this when i get the job!

you’re being paid well to work as a junior engineer for a new project where you can help brainstorm what we end up working on. that sounds pretty cool! 3 months later, you guys haven’t found any real need / problem to work on, but the PM pushes the team to do one of the medium effort / medium impact projects - extensions that track “productivity” in your coding environment (think sleep insights but for coding). you learn microsoft is a major stakeholder in this “coding insights” product as they are interested in knowing how productive their employees are. your company’s mission is “democratizing tech skills”. huh?

this seems like a weird way to help people learn tech skills? wakatime (the idea we based this project off of) does the same thing, is open source, and doesn’t have the potential to share this data with your managers…

we’re all gossiping within the dev team about how sketch of an idea this feels, but we’re just going to roll with it

haha that’s weird but i don’t work at microsoft, there are probably no repercussions to writing this code. i can pay my rent now!

the project manager and leadership says we should do it so it must be a good idea

you’re going to the final presentation for your capstone design project. you wait for the elevator with someone who gestures for you to go in first when the doors open. in the elevator, he says in the past where he is from, it wouldn’t be allowed for women to enter first. he is the professor in charge of capstone for the entire department. thoughts?

am i supposed to feel grateful? ece department rly continues to make me feel unwelcome every day

i was already quaking in my boots over this presentation, but now all i can think about is the reminder that current engineering leadership is influenced by ideas like That about Gender

i feel uncomfortable but i’m just going to laugh a little and brush it off because i’m graduating soon

what a silly funny guy!

it’s 3pm and you’re sitting at your desk working on code. your tech lead comes by to see how it’s going before he peaces out to drink beer in the kitchen and play smash for the next 2 hours. what you doin?

that seems kinda unfair. i would get yelled at for time theft for having a mental breakdown in the bathroom at my minimum wage job

ignore that and keep on workin, javascript won’t learn itself

go join him! even if all the guys playing smash are going to laugh at you and you don’t even like beer that much anyway. ~networking~

permanently adopt a more lackadaisical working style

you get on twitter and see that the ceo of yet another company you wanted to work for is a sexual predator/pays no taxes/etc. cool!

not cool at all my guy

i’ve wanted to work in the games industry for a long time; maybe i can put up with it until i have the experience to set out on my own

i’m sure the next person at x company won’t be as bad

yes, cool

you’re offered AN INSANE AMOUNT to take a web dev job. you’ve never really had money before and this would do numbers on your student debt and financial anxiety. how do you respond?

pass. i hated working there and no amount of money can change that. i’ll find something else that doesn’t suck out my soul

accept the offer. maybe i can survive for at least a year and be better off…

just don’t respond. there will be other companies who probably have identical positions with the same salary

committed start date is a week after graduation! money money cash money

the code you spent your entire internship working on is being junked in favor of buying a similar saas (software as a service) product.

i can think of so many places where this code would be useful and people would use it until it breaks. i wonder if schools could afford saas like this?

i spend so many nights working on this outside of regular hours, not to mention the time i spent thinking about it in my free time… bruh

it’s cool, the compensation for doing work was enough, and it was only a co-op. if this was my full-time job, i’d be a little peeved though

that’s just something that happens in engineering! time to learn how to use this thing