At this point they’re seemingly all in on Linux. If it ever reaches a point where <50% of users are on Windows, I imagine they wouldn’t even bother with Windows releases anymore

Thank you! I appreciate your help

I see! I definitely feel that Senior would be applicable for this given position. All of my hang ups were in thinking there was a more defined requirement to be a “Senior”. Between you and my discussions with others, I’ve learned to not worry about that and instead focus more on my knowledge-level and my direct contribution to the Org - both of which I would say are appropriate in this environment.

I did not know that! I was really getting hung up on the “not having any non-seniors” point.

Definitely. My thinking is that it would make it harder for HR to undervalue the position and, if we ever do get to hire additional developers, they will be looking to me / whoever is already in my position, in a senior / junior type fashion - at least for a solid chunk of time.

Thank you!

I will see about sticking with the Software Engineer line of titles (I’m discussing whether or not calling myself a ‘Senior’ would be a good choice with some other commenters). It makes more sense and my supervisor had mentioned that she wants the best title that could represent my skills, responsibilities, and desired future jobs on a resume.

I appreciate your advice! I’ll definitely work on getting the hard numbers to help my supervisor out. She’s been pushing for this for a while, so hopefully I can provide some materials to aid her.

I’ve had to do this before for a former job where I went from a Team Lead on a Helpdesk that started coding tools to help improve our agents metrics and the availability and accuracy of reporting to management and agents. Our helpdesk had no developers, but I was able to show how our team went from spending ~10,000 man hours a year on manually running reports to send to agents and management and only having the reports available weekly to having all of it automated and updated daily for everybody that needed them. So, I can adapt the methodology I used for that to the current org as well.

Oh I see.

So, in theory, dev ops could apply to what I’m doing (just by way of being the only person responsible for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, debugging) - but, in reality, that isn’t often the case and it would be best to avoid putting myself in that box? Am I understanding that right?

I can definitely see what you mean, and I appreciate the detailed post!

As for your scenario, I feel as though my heart rate would go up to a moderate amount, maybe less depending on the exact structure of the project.

The reason I say that is because I’ve done similar things in the past. My wife also has a job as a junior developer (working from home as part of a smaller multi-dev team supporting a massive project), but her team is set up in a way that she can only get a few minutes a week with her senior since he is always busy with his own tasks. She was never given documentation or even a walkthrough to explain how their project is structured or how their database is structured (they said in the interview that they would do this, but in reality the senior has to spend all of his time on other projects or in meetings). There are times that she gets stuck on a task that she has been assigned because she doesn’t know where in the source code she needs to look and she can’t get a hold of her senior. She’ll ask me for advice (without looking at the code, it’s essentially a 20-questions type scenario of hypotheticals) and, even though it is a completely different programming language and I haven’t actually seen the code, I can figure out what it is that she is needing to do and help guide her to where she needs to go in her project. When she finally gets a chance to talk to her senior about it a few days later, he confirms that the steps she ended up taking were correct for their set up.

For example, she once had to update the items in a drop down that she couldn’t find in the code in their project. She knew that the dropdown was being loaded on a specific page, but the items weren’t being populated in that same place. I assumed that this was likely using a stored procedure or a view on their database to pull the dropdown items. With that assumption, I was able to help her trace to where the data was being loaded in their data repository. That gave her the name of a stored procedure. She went and updated the stored procedure’s definition in their dev server and it corrected the dropdown. She later met with her senior and he confirmed that the dropdown (and many other features in the app like the dropdown) are pulling out of stored procedures so they don’t have to redeploy code to update things like that.

Similarly, one of the projects I had to work on at my org is actually taking an MVC web application and an API web application that are written by one of their multi-dev teams that are provided by our ERP software provider that we can customize to meet our specific needs. I did have some documentation to go off of, but I was able to get that loaded in and making customizations that fit within their architectural style within a couple of hours when I first started it.

Total: ~7 years, ~3.5/4 of those were at the current org and the last 1.5 years of that I have been the sole programmer as the other programmers that we used to have retired and were never replaced.

Also, can you estimate how much value you’ve brought to the org? Example: if the web app you wrote was not made, what would the loss be?

This is hard for me to quantify. The web app, for example, was built out of necessity because we are required to provide our full budget to the state that we’re in on a rigid timeline. If the web app wasn’t there, somebody would have had to manually poll the different departments for their full list of budget categories and their costs and then they would have had to manually go in and enter in that data line-by-line which would have taken a significant amount of time. The only way to enter data through the existing user interface (the one we do still have) is through a text editor screen that lets you manually modify data line by line, but can go awry if lines accidentally get moved up or down or the data entered doesn’t match the internal format that the application expects.

That’s kind of why my supervisor is pushing this so hard. She believes that, ultimately, every major procedure that would cost our Org significant time and money to have held up due to a technical issue, such as payroll, budgeting, and state/federal reporting to name a few, rely on whoever is in my position to be available at a moment’s notice. Ideally, we’d have multiple people performing these duties, but she hasn’t been able to get that idea sold to higher ups.

These are some good considerations.

The “Senior” piece felt weird since, while I am responsible for 100% of the programming and coordination of tasks, I don’t really oversee or help train or guide any other developers. I think the main reason that Senior was considered to be put on the title was to ensure that HR doesn’t try and under-value the position again - as our org would run into some major crises if this position is ever left empty for longer than a week or two.

This is good to know. Our org doesn’t have multiple engineers, so I don’t think that the multiple levels would really fit, but SDE (Software Development Engineer?) may be a good match. Probably not a senior since I only have experience on single-dev projects?

That was something I was worried about. It’s a title I hear a lot about, but I don’t actually know that much about it. This is very helpful information.

Thank you for your insight!

Ah, Chief Throwaway Oppenheimer. A worthy title

Yeah I guess you’re right on that. I still don’t mind its usage in the episode since she acknowledges that she wouldn’t normally go along with something like that and since she does lead the charge in keeping him alive when they find out it is a problem, but I can see how somebody wouldn’t enjoy it. I hope the rest of the season is better and can give you some stuff to enjoy!

Completely agreed. I’m enjoying it more than Season 7, so I’ll take that as a win.

I don’t really agree that she was dumb in last week’s episode. If I recall correctly, they didn’t know how life threatening the binging was until after Fry was too far gone to immediately be saved, and once they did know the problem, she was at the forefront of keeping him alive.