But nobody wants a “fast-paced environment”

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/59173/why-do-ads-for-s-w-engineers-always-say-they-offer-a-fast-paced-environment

by kpdvx • 15 years ago

97 67 15 years ago

programmers.stackexchange.com

PaulHoule2• 15 years ago

There is a sort of stress that comes from a "slow-paced environment" where you've got a 50% or less duty cycle of doing real work because you're always waiting for somebody else to do something. Too little work can be just as stressful as too much.

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

This. Hurry up and wait. That's exactly how it worked for me when I worked for a large company. Need to make a database change? Be prepared to wait 3 weeks unless you can get someone several levels above you on the org chart to take notice. Same for any kind of additional access you might need, or to provision any amount of computing or network resources...

bad_user3• 15 years ago

One company I worked for had the same problem - because the (Oracle) database was also linked to their payment system and because they were a big company, the simplest change would require 2 or 3 weeks of approvals (by law, not really their fault).

And you know what my department did?

We've managed to setup our own database servers, so changes became independent of any payment system and could be done on the spot.

I know things suck in corporations, but sometimes it's your fault for not doing anything about it.

eli• 15 years ago

Having not enough work to do is slightly worse than having too much, IMHO

stewiecat• 15 years ago

This is the battle I fight every day. I'd rather have a workload that's 110% of my capacity than be at 50%, which I generously where I'm at now.

We're an "agile" shop that grossly under-allocates out of fear of failing a sprint.

Stormbringer4• 15 years ago

Just pretend you're at Google and you have a 20% project you work on. Or learn you some iPhone/'roid programming so you can earn some $ on the side.

Or manage your investment protfolio.

Robert Kiosaki (of Rich Dad/Poor Dad fame) in one of his books gives a couple of examples of people who became millionaires while working for the man and collecting mediocre paychecks. Both were in jobs with plenty of downtime or waiting around for other people. One was a fireman who would read the financial news/stock reports looking for bargain stocks, the other was (I think) working for the Postal Service and he would spend his 20% time looking for real estate bargains.

Alternately, you could start preparing now for your next job.

I worked one time for a boss that I really didn't see eye to eye with (his behaviour included being intoxicated at work to give you an idea). The company had done some semi-disastrous change over of an old reliable minicomputer that customers would access directly via modem to some new fangled dodgy and unreliable web based system. So to punish me for not sucking up to my boss, I got stuck in another building with no computer and had to take phone calls of people complaining bitterly about this. Basically our script boiled down to figuring out which browser they had, and then walking them through the upgrade to the latest version, and if that didn't fix whatever problem they were having, there wasn't anything we could do.

I was, of course, mortally offended. Tech support? The lowest of the low? the janitors of IT? ptooiee

But at the time I was reading through 7 habits and got to the bit about the guy in the concentration camp who decided that the only person that could decide whether he was unhappy was himself.

Anyway, that humbled me a bit. Tech support might not be glamourous, but it's certainly no death machine.

So I decided to enjoy it, even though I had to deal with angry people who had nothing to do. During the downtime I worked on adventures for Shadowrun or AD&D or something like that, basically just doodling. It filled up the time pretty fast. When someone angry would call I would empathise with them a lot more (which calms them down really quick), and I'd be apologetic that they'd been put in that situation by my company.

Eventually my evil ex-boss figured out that I was actually enjoying the tech support. So he took me off it, and gave me nothing to do. So then what I did was I took to wandering around, asking other people how they were doing, helping other programmers debug their code (there's something semi-magical about sitting down at the code they've been banging their head against and then indenting their code properly... half the time they suddenly see the problem, the other half the time it gives you time to figure out what the problem is but to them it looks like you find the problem instantaneously :D )

I'd also put my hand up for any work in obscure and dreadful old languages, things Man Was Not meant To Know. you know, like COBOL or C++ :D In a sufficiently large and sufficiently old organisation there's a surprising amount of that stuff lurking in the background that desperately needs maintenance.

bartonfink2• 15 years ago

At every job I've ever had, in the interview I have mentioned that I'd rather have 10 hours of work to squeeze into an 8 hour day than have 2 hours of work to expand into an 8 hour day. Thus far, nobody has taken me seriously.

PaulHoule2• 15 years ago

In job interviews, never mention actual or imaginary pathology in an actual or imaginary workplace. It almost always works against you.

cydonian_monk• 15 years ago

Especially when your employer watches your every move every second you're in their building. Cameras, remote desktops on every PC, services that track what files you open and when, keyloggers, et cetera. Not having enough work in such a paranoid environment where you get griped at for doing anything outside of your responsibilities or for not being in the building exactly eight hours a day can be a living hell.

But the opposite is true, too.

ern• 15 years ago

I'm in a situation like that currently, but in an open plan office, with a manager sitting behind me keeping me in line.

And since our bug tracker is linked to timesheets, things like refactoring don't happen anymore, unless linked to a specific feature/bug (developers can't create these). The nett effect is that things that used to take me 2 hours now take 8 hours, so I can fill the day. Parkinson's law is not a joke.

georgekv• 15 years ago

Burnout & boreout. The Scylla and Charybdis of most work environments.

jonnathanson• 15 years ago

Weirdly enough, I find that fast-paced and slow-paced can be combined into an annoying hybrid I'll just call "unpaced." An unpaced organization has a hurry-up-and-wait mentality about decisionmaking, but once a decision has been made -- inevitably, right before a big delivery deadline has come and gone -- everyone is sent into an unnecessary crunch mode: the aptly named "fire drill."

Nine times out of ten, if you're at a company with a lot of fire drills, it's because somebody a few levels above you isn't managing timelines appropriately, or some folks at that level just aren't talking to each other. Point is, the "fast-paced" moments are usually symptoms of a deeper issue.

chrisaycock2• 15 years ago

A manager once told me, "multitasking may be inefficient, but that's what we do here." Let that admission sink in for a minute.

JulianMorrison2• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, I haven't got a minute. Can I let it sink in for 30 seconds, and get back to you?

chrisaycock2• 15 years ago

The manager was admitting to doing something that he knew was inefficient. He ultimately knew that multitasking was the worst practice, but he chose to do it anyway.

There's ignorance, and then there's willfully choosing to do wrong.

Edit: This was at an investment bank, in the proprietary trading group. There are no customers or deadlines. So we (should) only work on something we believe will make money.

pauldisneyiv• 15 years ago

Interesting - it would be helpful to have a definition of "fast-paced". The phrase is far too vague.

I love working very hard (potentially fast) on a product that I'm making great headway on. Perhaps I'm in the zone or I know I need to hit a deadline.

That being said if I'm being asked to produce things frantically (also fast paced) with little to no direction or thought behind it...that's not so hot.

In general job descriptions should be more self aware and try to communicate the environment more specifically.

grammaton2• 15 years ago

> Interesting - it would be helpful to have a definition of "fast-paced". The phrase is far too vague.

Welcome to the wonderful world of MBA-speak.

sixtofour• 15 years ago

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-18/

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

As was pointed out in the comments, fast-paced == lots of unpaid overtime. If you had good project planners (or project managers who don't start factoring timelines based on the amount of unpaid overtime they can get you to do) then you'd be working in a "well-paced environment". Which is a nice place to work.

thenduks• 15 years ago

Saying 'fast-paced' usually (in my experience) is a claim that the team doesn't get hung up and blocked on a bunch of minute details and 'sign-offs'. In other words - there's no committee.

Even if that isn't the norm, putting so much stock in the copy in a job ad is probably a waste of time anyway. Just because the ad says 'fast-paced' or refers to the person they're looking for as a 'ninja' doesn't mean it wouldn't be an awesome place to work -- from my perspective, quite the opposite, any text like that makes it feel like it was written by a company without an HR department (+10!).

ultrasaurus• 15 years ago

I've written a few job ads and I'm sure I've said fast-paced and other filler words.

I wish I meant "When reality and the plan don't match, we change the plan," in reality it was "Hmm, this text needs to look longer -- I'll use adjectives!"

grammaton2• 15 years ago

Fast paced is generally code for "we have the attention spans of fruit flies. We'll expect you to pick up the slack for our failings."

bioh42_2• 15 years ago

I have the great misfortune of working at a big company which has tons and tons of specs AND frequent spec changes.

Our process is waterfall that refuses to accept the reality that marketing runs this company and they change their minds a lot.

My point is only that if there was something better I would quit mediately. But I would rather deal with this at a biotech, then work at the most wonderful company working on social apps, or advertising apps, or ticketing, or booking, etc.

Pick your poison kids.

wladimir2• 15 years ago

Heh, that sounds very familiar. When I got my job, it was told that the reason for using a waterfall model was that "the specifications are very clear, and developers just have to implement them".

Reality is so different... :)

shade• 15 years ago

Sounds like my last job. They had gotten burned a few times by waterfall projects failing, so their reaction was to try to implement waterfall even more rigorously.

You had to design and document the entire project up front and then break it out into individual tasks and estimate them. Two points that I thought were particularly horrible:

Your estimates immediately became hard deadlines. If you guessed 3 months ago that gnarfling the garthok would take you 8 hours and you were wrong, it went against you on your metrics. Even better, if you finished the job in less time than you estimated, they'd complain and tell you that you missed low and needed to do a more precise job of estimation next time.

I suggested to my boss once that if they insisted on having all this documentation written (seriously, we were supposed to write up docs on what the function names were going to be, what the arguments were, and what they'd do -- before we were allowed to write any code) then we should probably build some time into the schedule to make sure we could update them based on what we'd learned during the actual process of writing the code. He told me "I understand what you're saying, but that's not possible. We need all of the documentation done up front so that if we're behind schedule, we can add more people to the project and they can read that documentation to get up to speed quickly."

I looked at him for a few seconds, stunned speechless, then basically said "In my experience, that never works." A few weeks later, I was laid off, I suspect because I wasn't toeing the line and buying into the "new" Lean waterfall process. Best thing that ever happened to me, in the end.

rglover• 15 years ago

Fast-paced environment usually describes places that lack an attention to detail and quality, which above anything else should be the core focus of a company. A lot of people are suggesting that pace refers to the amount of work which I don't think is entirely correct. A business could have all the work in the world and still move at a snail's pace. @mrspeaker made an excellent point in that the ideal environment would be "well-paced." More often than not, though, this sort of terminology was probably picked from similar job postings that the HR person (generalizing, of course) saw elsewhere.

kingofspain• 15 years ago

Reminds me of estate agent talk. "Fast-paced, agile, challenging environment" as a plus point on a job ad usually makes me skip right over. I know people say you should turn your weaknesses into strengths but I don't think this is the way!

yannickmahe2• 15 years ago

I moved from an extremely fast-paced environment to a well balanced, well managed software shop. I regret that choice a lot. While I do have now work/life balance, sleep longer nights and never do any overtime, I can't help but feel I'm not even close to the productive levels I had before. I loved being pushed to my limit, constantly having to come up with new solutions to new problems, etc.

On the plus side, I now have the time to launch my company which will - I hope - give me once again the kind of environment in which I can push my own limits.

cema2• 15 years ago

Well I guess in a fast paced environment you are pushed and in a balanced environment you pace yourself. We are adults not cogs.

yannickmahe2• 15 years ago

Less challenge means less of a reason to push yourself in my opinion. I rather relished the possibility to jump on problems other people left alone.

Perhaps it's more an issue of challenge than pace, pace being a side effect of the challenge you encounter.

mildweed• 15 years ago

I want to be a Greybeard UNIX monk some day.

nphase• 15 years ago

Interesting. When I think of fast paced environment, I think of a driven environment with lots of youthful energy that moves quickly.

Shameless self-promotion: My Chicago Startup Tap Me, (http://tap.me) is hiring. If this kind of work environment sounds appealing to you, my email address is in my HN profile.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

The fact that 'fast-paced' has negative connotations for older/wiser workers is irrelevant. They're targeting the same sort of 20-year-olds who all wanted to work for MS in the late 90s because they had free soda. The commenters criticizing this tactic seem oblivious to the fact that the companies using it don't want them.

acconrad• 15 years ago

It's just marketing - on the converse, no one wants to sound slow...it associates with boredom. Fast-paced signals energy and excitement, but translates to over-worked and poor balance with the rest of your life.

When I hear this it reminds me of when engineers in interviews say "I work with the smartest people." Of course you do...who works with the 2nd smartest people? Who admits to working with average people? I'd like to know how you distinguish that in an ad/interview.

mgrouchy• 15 years ago

I work in what I would call a fast-paced environment.

What I always took fast-paced to mean is that, as a startup who is trying to build a business we are constantly evolving our goals to develop the best product possible. This means making smart but quick decisions based on actionable data.

Whether that means adding new features, dropping ones that don't work, etc. thats what we are going to do.

edw519• 15 years ago

"fast-paced environment" says more about the people than the environment...

Let's say, for example, that your environment changes at rate "10".

If you normally move at rate "7", this environment would seem fast-paced to you.

But if you're accustomed to moving at rate "15", you wouldn't even consider it to be fast-paced.

In my experience, what most junior and enterprise programmers would consider "fast-paced" would seem fairly normal to most senior or start-up programmers. It's all relative.

Stormbringer4• 15 years ago

Although normally the Agile evangelists are whacked out wierdos, one of them did say something useful to me recently.

He said that "all coding is change". This is simple, trite and deeply profound.

All coding is change. Either you're building something new (change) or you're fixing a bug (change) or you're adding a feature (change).

The whole rhetoric about programmers who don't like other programmers being 'afraid of change' or unwilling to 'embrace change' is nonsense.

Given then, that all coding is change... I wonder what it means to say that some environments change faster than others.

What does this mean? Requirements flip-flop? Staff turnover? Starting projects and then killing them softly with this song?

sid0• 15 years ago

While it is simple and trite, how is it profound? All human activity is change by that definition.

chc• 15 years ago

I thought the agile guys were all about refactoring, which is not building anything, adding anything, or fixing anything.

bad_user3• 15 years ago

I work in a fast-paced environment for a project.

You know what fast-paced is - ideas thrown at you that invalidate your previous architecture once every 2 weeks. And I don't know how you can get any more fast-paced than that.

If I hadn't enough experience to make the architecture flexible enough or to do unit-tests or to choose the right moment to start from scratch, I would probably go mad.

kalendae• 15 years ago

trying to predict how the company is based on the job listing is on the same order of magnitude of effectiveness as trying to predict how good the candidate is based on the resume. There's probably just some rough correlation on a large scale. I used to have a lot of notions from reading various blog posts but too often they prove to be totally wrong in specific instances. One of my worst experiences ever was going after a clever puzzle online leading to arduous days of coding and grilling and more puzzles (invested so much time) only to get a sub-par offer and lots of 'hard negotiating' which i always avoid. fact is words like fast-paced, multitasking, excellent communications, team player, rockstar, a player, self motivated blah blah blah, I simply ignore. I imagine the same goes on in the other direction, so I no longer put them on my resume.

snorkel• 15 years ago

Software job postings are full of cliches. Best to ignore the description and instead use the interview to ask how project requirements are decided, scheduled, and delivered. If their process doesn't mention any input from developers other than "deliver" then ask how often morale improvement beatings are administered.

amitraman1• 15 years ago

"Fast Paced Environment" means:

1) The specs are not in place 2) They are a software company, mostly 3) The managers are not really managers, but engineers who were given a battle field promotion 4) They have a set of key customers who control 51% of revenue, who dictate everything and change their mind frequently

m3mnoch• 15 years ago

"fast-paced environment" means getting shit done. it means rolling hard like facebook, google, zynga, groupon, etc. it means launching fast. it means getting feedback fast. it means failing fast. it means the exact opposite of the folks complaining about it who work at ibm or hp or microsoft or yahoo or aol. or worse yet, some hole-in-the-wall enterprise vendor inflating internal budgets and wallowing in mediocrity.

fast-paced to me means "if you can't keep up, don't step up."

regardless, if you have to ask, it's not a place for you to work.

m3mnoch.

gaius3• 15 years ago

Yet if you read a job ad from IBM or HP or Microsoft, they're "fast-paced" too.

Lennie• 15 years ago

And there is the problem.

The phrase 'job ad' has the word 'ad' in it and thus anything which is mentioned in the ad was probably (re)written by marketing and thus isn't true to begin with. ;-)

tomkarlo• 15 years ago

I want a fast-paced environment. And I want to work with people who also like a fast-paced environment.

A fast paced environment is not the same as a "ridiculous hours" environment (I've done that - 80 hrs per week, high pressure). Nor is it a "death march" environment.

What it should be is a place where people come in to work ready to go, work intensely for 8 or 9 hours, then go home to enjoy the rest of their lives. I work at one of the more aggressive large web companies and we have an "email blackout" policy on weekends, for example - if it's not an operations problem, we ask folks to wait until the work week to send emails about it so that folks can concentrate on enjoying their time off undiluted by work and be ready to go on Monday.

mcritz• 15 years ago

I offered my last girlfriend a fast-paced environment. I'm single now.

Ladies.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Its like the other phrase I dislike "Rockstar programmers". Now my idea of "rock stars" is that they are temperamental, have low self confidence, and spend 90% of their time complaining. I've met, and occasionally worked with, programmers that fit that particular shoe and frankly I wouldn't try to recruit them.

I am sure the HR/Recruiter is trying to convey a sense of urgency that keeps you at the top of your game, but I agree with most of the comments that companies that create their own urgency by not planning is the more common occurrence.

Florin_Andrei• 15 years ago

Depends.

I'm an adrenalin junkie, so if I'm passionate about something, it better be fast-paced, or else I get bored.

But if it's boring already? Then yeah, everyone please chill.

sabat• 15 years ago

I've always assumed that "fast-paced" meant that you weren't going to encounter a company moving at corporate-speed -- you know, where a project takes 6-12 months (min.) of meetings, tiger teams, blue ribbon panels, design by committee, political posturing, ad nauseum.

But nobody wants a “fast-paced environment”

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