Cid Vicious

Yeah, waterfall would be “you collect requirements to build a rocket to Mars, 2 years later you have a rocket to Venus and it turns out they didn’t think oxygen is essential, they’ll have to add that in the next major release.”

Power dynamics is definitely part of it, and I’ve found that I have much better luck in interviews when I treat them as a conversation rather than just being grilled. It’s easier to do in your 40s than in your 20s though.

On the one hand the way corporations expect loyalty and devotion all the time in return for a very small percentage of their profits being paid out to us as salary sucks. On the other, having to work if you want to eat is just kind of…life? Not saying we couldn’t work on something better as a society, but there’s been very few people at any point in human history who didn’t have to work hard to survive. I’m glad that I get to at least do soulless work in an office which is mostly just boring instead of hard labor or something actively dangerous.

A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don’t make them a bad coworker. I don’t think I agree with that. Your job isn’t just the stuff you like. Organization, prioritization, collaborating and interacting with your coworkers, attending meetings and making useful contributions, just generally not being a dick…all of those are your job. Interviews often take place after they’re already convinced that you have the required background, so they’re largely interested in discovering whether you’re a good chemistry match for the team.

Can’t really speak to grueling tech interviews though. That’s a whole different category of thing.

It doesn’t really matter what they call it. Companies that want to be waterfall (or more accurately, whose executives want waterfall style commitments) are going to be waterfall even if they call it Scrum.