
Rockstar shopping is inherently unsafe (2015) - wglb
http://graham.posthaven.com/rockstar-shopping-is-inherently-unsafe
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singingfish
I got hired as a backend "rockstar" a few years ago. Didn't work well.

1\. I made some mistakes (my general response to said mistakes was to work to
ensure the CI tool guaranteed said mistakes couldn't be repeated. Included
kicking up CI into the process in the first place by fixing their test rot and
enabling someone else to bring jenkins into the mix). One of those mistakes
did cause a recoverable partial outage.

2\. The extensive unfucking of the backend I performed still hasn't been
applied, despite pretty clear demonstration of the safety of said changes .
One of which if eventually applied will reduce their AWS bill by 10-20% - I
produced a demo that this was safe bug-for-bug. A spectacular security hole
that was there is gone, so that's a plus.

I got retrenched (made redundant with a small payout once I pointed out that
was what was needed). I went into the conversation to say "I'm going to need
more money and we need to work out a process where my work gets applied", but
the retrenced bit happened really early, so I never got to propose that :) . I
had an offer within an hour of being retrenched. Currently I unfuck code at a
similar scale for a larger concern and get reasonable career development
opportunities. The place I was working for has been hiring junior devs like
crazy, so I do worry about the health of their codebase - having said that
when in their comfort zone the senior guys there are pretty good. I think the
problem was that I was getting the senior guys out of their comfort zone, and
I didn't take a sufficiently gentle approach. However I learned heaps, so all
good. Can't imagine I'll be going back their though.

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shanghaiaway
Your post comes off as pretty tone deaf. Can you see it as a possibility that
maybe you deserved to be let go?

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singingfish
Tone deaf to what? Oh yeah it was absolutely the right thing to happen, it
wasn't working. That's not quite the same as "deserved to let go". I suspect
any senior developer person with an architectural remit and fair breadth of
experience would have the same problems there.

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wink
Sometime it just doesn't fit, but what you're describing is what often happens
if the organization is not listening. Sure, some people charge in and exclaim
everything sucks in their first week, but if the org isn't accepting objective
improvement sometimes it's better to just run instead of fighting windmills.

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singingfish
Yeah one of the mistakes I made was taking the "everything sucks" approach too
early and too often. I don't think that taking a different approach would have
helped though. Sometimes I think it takes (near-)complete turnover of the
original implementation team to make things suck less.

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YZF
A big hurdle is that when you hire the first dedicated person into a new
domain (be it UX, Embedded, Security, EE, Legal, Finance whatever.) you often
don't really understand the domain well enough to know what you need. You
should also be thinking that rather than this person doing all the work
themselves they should be educating the rest of the company in this area. They
need to be experts, they also need to be good "people" people. You probably
already got lots of "not experts" in those areas ;)

Security is very multi-faceted. Securing your internal/IT applications is very
different than writing secure code which in turn may be different than some
other specialized situation. Ideally you already have some people who have
some clue and/or have seen something that works somewhere else from an
organizational perspective (or have seen things that don't work that you don't
want to repeat). E.g. you may have some IT person who isn't a security expert
who has worked in a team that had a stronger security bias/expertise and has
seen how that team worked/was structured. You may have a senior coder who has
pretty solid ideas about security but it's not his main expertise. Leverage
that stuff! Talk to those guys about how to build the team...

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Terretta
Title should have been “Security rockstar”.

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Ritsuko_akagi
The title made me think about something completely different.

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bitwize
A run to Best Buy to pick up a new TV because you just put a .45 round through
your old one?

Prince saying "I need a camel" in the middle of the night on Chanhassen, MN?

