Comments by "Christian Baune" (@programaths) on "A Life After Layoff"
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@katekilgannon3567 When I started in consulting, we were "swappable". So the uniform helped in that regard. It also removes all personal identity, which is a good thing in the workplace. You don't want politics to get in the way, you want untainted communication. It's also helps to blend as it removes all biases based on appearance. In the end, what matter is what you do.
You get to know people during breaks, that's were you get your emotional bond. Also, when you have to work with someone you never saw, you also know there is a basic framework that everyone had to learn. So you know what to expect and what is expected from you.
This was really dystopian for slackers, of course. So the first weeks, a lot of people resigned. From time to time, few people departed because they saw they couldn't leverage politics to avoid work. (Anything not being KPI is worthless)
Today, I work 100% remote, so I dress as I want (decent though, still have calls from time to time ^^). I strongly signaled I am against politics in the workplace, so I am shielded from it and just do the technical stuff.
In private life, though, I sponsor OSS and before going back to studies, I volunteered a lot. Still, none of my coworker know about it. Only my boss when I had to take a day off for a special event, not even sure he remembers.
That's really important that people can work together regardless of their financial success, past, origin, beliefs... Uniforms helps a great deals. (And well established processes and protocols)
And to top it, it helps in the morning too, you don't have to think about your outfit. It also makes a clear cut between private and professional life.
And to make it easier, the company offered a cleaning service free of charge! You just had to hang your suit next to your desk and next day it was there, but cleaned!
The only way to know that my boss was my boss at that time was looking at where he sat (next to the team) or looking at the "who is who" where the role was indicated. The only ones that were different were the pink shirts (top level management that you only see when going to eat and with which you've no business outside team-buildings).
The negative side is that you can't signal. I find that a positive though.
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Back in 2009, there was a shortage of employees in IT...Or it is what was said. The reality was that there was a shortage of cheap IT employees. So, people with a good level in IT (at least, bachelor), just did other occupations! I did apply and was dismissed for being too expensive and a liability as I could easily do job hopping. Rightfully so, job hopping became an issue with people who accepted cheap offers because they couldn't get better, then learned a bit on the job and started job hoping. So, the situation was dire for IT companies as the workforce was there, but too expensive. To counter that, the state funded centers where you could be a developer in no more than 6 months. Companies hired to guys and it fired back. It took a decade for companies to understand that someone doing programming for 6 months is nowhere!
Still, I did saw companies which started big projects with a team of juniors 🤦
Oh, those centers still continue campaigns of disinformation like "You don't need to be intelligent, just hard working" , "Requirement to be good in mathematics is a myth" etc. And people do believe them, because they teach the ABC of computing and in the eye of untrained people, it looks like rocket sciences.
One no so stupid question I asked in interview is to design the "hashCode()" function. When you know what it does, it's a stumping question, because not only it's its own field of study, but on top of that, you need to know the usage pattern! So, there is not universal hash function, just "not atrociously bad ones".
And obviously someone who got a 6 months training will not wonder if a bloom filter will improve an application or if he should implement columnar data to gain CPU cycles through vector operations (SIMD) and avoid too much cache busting...
Even when you finish a bachelor, you are not sufficiently trained. What you get from the bachelor is a solid overview and a good understanding of that overview. So you know what you don't know and can start to learn. When I did my internship, I did 100% of nothing I learned at school, besides learning to learn 🤣 and then wrote my papers on that, checked by teachers and specialists who know that. And that's how they validate. I've seen people crying and sobbing because they couldn't answer questions they didn't study for. You've to contrast that with a 6 month training focused on implementing a project. So, student learn to do that specific project.
Writing code is the mundane part.
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