🔥 Layoffs
Many tech companies around the world were affected with the current market situation and SHARE NOW is not an exception. So it was announced, that we have to do restructuring, which also means letting people go.
But here starts the interesting part. We are in Germany and right before “the news” we, employees, had formed the works council, which is meant to represent us. Because of this, our management was not able to do layoffs on their will, but they had to negotiate conditions with the works council. And even more — the way they do these negotiations is forced by the law, including the sequence of the negotiation phases.
Another interesting topic — how people who were laid off were chosen. Massive layoff shall be based on the new vision — how company will function afterwards, in other words — restructuring. So it’s not that company fires certain people, but company removes certain positions. Then all the people who have this position (for example — Senior Java Engineer) are “sorted” by their social rating (number of years in the company, number of dependent people, disabilities, etc.) and one who has the “lowest” rating is a candidate to be removed.
At the end, our works council has negotiated good compensations for the people who will depart. I will not. I continue to work at SHARE NOW.
🤖 ChatGPT
I believe many people here have already heard about ChatGPT or even played with it. I want to share my personal “WOW”. Recently I had to find out how can I encode
uuid to the BinData type 3 format, to inject it to the MongoDB document. I, together with my colleague, were doing a pair programming session and spend good 30 minutes trying to google that or derive this with our hands on experiments. No luck. Then I decided to ask ChatGTP about this for fun. And that thing has answered me with the code example. After few obvious tweaks that code has worked and solved my problem.
Will we all lose our jobs because of this? No. But this again proves that we need to learn new things to be competitive.
📈 Pipeline game
Many of us do CI. There are times when you join the project where it is already configured, there are times when you need to invent one.
In both cases it’s good to review what’s happening during the continuous integration and if it’s possible to optimize (speed it up). For this cases I want to recommend the Pipeline Game. It’s an online game where you have set of different steps, which you may have within your real pipeline, and your job is to design the ideal pipeline. You do it by placing the cards on the table — in parallel or sequentially. You can also add their execution time and see how long will it take for your project to pass this pipeline. It can be played online together with your colleagues.
⬛️ That was it. These were the things which were interesting for me recently. Next issue — next week.
