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piratepilates posted:You only have two jobs on here and one of them is 'apprentice' so I wouldn't think that would matter at all, it kind of reads like one internship and then one real job that you're still at. Yeah, I suppose it's not so bad. In the future, I want employment to last way longer, of course... The only exposure to Java, C# and C++ I have are from mucking around with Unity, Libgdx and UE4, so unless I'm going for a game dev job (hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha) I don't think I can claim experience in them. I have basically zero game dev experience, although I'd love some. I've done a little bit of Learn C the Hard Way, and I do like the language (especially after reading The Art of Unix Programming), but it's way too low level for me to do much with it at all. (Although I could do some Unix tooling.) Python is where I started, and my first web framework was Flask, so I'm not a stranger to it - but it's been wayyyyyyyyyy long since I've worked in it. I really hope the ecosystem for it has improved - if so, I'm willing to get back into it. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Oct 3, 2015 |
# ? Oct 3, 2015 18:26 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 06:35 |
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Post-interview cry: I visited Facebook and they seemed like a nice place to work, but I flubbed their (not very good) screening problem and got rejected. I had an on-site screen at 4pm. Both the engineer interviewing me and the manager who walked me around were visibly ready for the day to be over, although they tried pretty hard to be alive. They talked about how it was pretty easy to drift between groups, but what sounded even better was that groups would design ~month-long projects for outsiders to work on so you could get a taste of (e.g.) developing the Graph API when you usually did content distribution to mobile clients. Anyway, the interview question was quote:Suppose you have two lists of integers, A and B. Both lists are sorted. List B has $n$ elements and list A has $n$ elements followed by $n$ null values. Replace A with the combined sorted list without using additional memory. Also, don't simply copy B into the empty space and then sort. I completely failed to find the trick here (which is to work from the ends to the front, merge-sorting into the end of A) and the only hint the interviewer gave me "what about the ends of the lists?" totally gave it away. I did the actual implementation fine, but I could tell it was a lost cause when my interviewer asked if I had any other questions in a "please let me get out of here" tone of voice.
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# ? Oct 3, 2015 19:20 |
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Mniot posted:but I flubbed their (not very good) screening problem and got rejected.
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# ? Oct 3, 2015 19:51 |
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nm
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# ? Oct 3, 2015 21:06 |
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Mniot posted:I completely failed to find the trick here (which is to work from the ends to the front, merge-sorting into the end of A) and the only hint the interviewer gave me "what about the ends of the lists?" totally gave it away. I did the actual implementation fine, but I could tell it was a lost cause when my interviewer asked if I had any other questions in a "please let me get out of here" tone of voice. You make it sound like you were given a hint and then you gave a sane implementation. If this is supposed to replace a phone screen then it sounds like you did fine. I don't think any interviewer is going to say "candidate took a hint I gave and ran with it, arriving at a correctly-implemented solution within the time set aside for the interview. Fail." At some places, the screening is just to make sure you're not an alien from Mars who hasn't ever programmed before and all they want to know is "can this person code AT ALL? or would it be impossible for them to pass our full interview process?" Maybe FB is such a place.
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# ? Oct 3, 2015 22:12 |
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Why do you think it's not a very good screening problem? because there's so little to work with from the problem that all the interviewer is getting out of it is "yes they figured it out" or "no they didn't". unless they expected him to write his own merge function, which still doesn't get you much more information. its even a one-liner in c++. code:
FamDav fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Oct 3, 2015 |
# ? Oct 3, 2015 22:19 |
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Mniot posted:Post-interview cry: I visited Facebook and they seemed like a nice place to work, but I flubbed their (not very good) screening problem and got rejected. Hello, I have given approximately 150 interviews for Facebook. This does not sound like a reject at the screen level at all, esp if you wrote a working solution and that was the only hint he gave you. I'm assuming you didn't look like an idiot trying to write the code after you figured out the trick and your code wasn't a horrible mess. And honestly, if your interview ended at 4:45pm on a Friday dude probably actually really wanted to get the hell out of there simply cause it was almost 5 on a Friday and he was late for free beer at the happy hour, totally separate from your performance. pr0zac fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Oct 3, 2015 |
# ? Oct 3, 2015 22:46 |
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Safe and Secure! posted:You make it sound like you were given a hint and then you gave a sane implementation. If this is supposed to replace a phone screen then it sounds like you did fine. I don't think any interviewer is going to say "candidate took a hint I gave and ran with it, arriving at a correctly-implemented solution within the time set aside for the interview. Fail." Ehhh you never know. I had a Facebook interview and I got the right, efficient solution to my problem, but with too many false starts/too slowly for the guy who interviewed me and that was the end of it (I got an inefficient one right away but optimizing it took some more thought).
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 00:45 |
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Ehhh you never know. I had a Facebook interview and I got the right, efficient solution to my problem, but with too many false starts/too slowly for the guy who interviewed me and that was the end of it (I got an inefficient one right away but optimizing it took some more thought). Was this as a phone screen or onsite? Also, what was the question (and your answer)?
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 03:05 |
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If you're just talking about one question on a phone screen they were probably planning to ask a few more and the first was supposed to be the easier warmup question.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 03:14 |
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sarehu posted:If you're just talking about one question on a phone screen they were probably planning to ask a few more and the first was supposed to be the easier warmup question. Yeah this is very likely, thus my asking what the question was.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 03:22 |
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pr0zac posted:Was this as a phone screen or onsite? Also, what was the question (and your answer)? Phone screen. IIRC the question was you had an array that was sorted but rotated (that is to say that like [0,1,2,3,4] and [3,4,0,1,2] were possible) and you needed to find the lowest number in it so I gave them the obvious linear solution first and then eventually got a logarithmic one. Anyway, yeah, I guess I could see that just being a warmup question. Oh well.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 03:33 |
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Phone screen. IIRC the question was you had an array that was sorted but rotated (that is to say that like [0,1,2,3,4] and [3,4,0,1,2] were possible) and you needed to find the lowest number in it so I gave them the obvious linear solution first and then eventually got a logarithmic one. What was the logarithmic solution? I thought of one, but in the case of a list that contains all the same elements it has to check every one to make sure a single smaller element isn't hiding somewhere. Equal values don't give enough information to disambiguate which side of the list you need to search in.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 03:59 |
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pr0zac posted:Hello, I have given approximately 150 interviews for Facebook. This does not sound like a reject at the screen level at all, esp if you wrote a working solution and that was the only hint he gave you. I'm assuming you didn't look like an idiot trying to write the code after you figured out the trick and your code wasn't a horrible mess. I was thinking of you when I wrote that post. I feel pretty confident that it was just a fluke bad interview, but maybe I'm wrong and did something dumb/bad. The recruiter gave me the option of coming on-site for the first-pass interview, since I'm near the local office. I thought that would work well, since I think I can be chatty and fun (in a software engineer sort of way). I got a little tour from the hiring manager, and then sat down with the engineer and talked about some cool stuff. He asked me that problem and wanted to know what language I'd use (I'd said Erlang, JavaScript, and Perl were frequent favorites of mine). For this problem, though, C seems like an obvious choice. I talked through a solution where I either advance the A-list pointer or swap the A-list item with the B-list item and then advance the A-list pointer; that only worked with the example he'd written, not the general case. I talked through a solution where I used the empty end of the A-list as storage and did a 3-way comparison. That works, but takes n^2 time because you run out of space at the end of the A-list. At this point, I clearly had no idea how to begin and I've been saying things like "well I want to get to here but I don't know how to do that" or "I can't see the solution to this but it feels like if I started like this I might get somewhere" as I run trace through the algorithms I'm suggesting. So he says "well what about the ends of the lists," which makes it pretty obvious. I talked through the solution first ("we start with pointers at the ends of the two integer lists and a pointer at the true end of the A-list. Compare the A and B pointers, and copy the higher value to the end-pointer, then advance the end-pointer and whichever list-pointer we read from one step towards the front and repeat. We do that until we reach the front of one list, then copy over the remainder and we're done. We never have the problem of overwriting data because the array of unsorted higher numbers always fits in the space at the end of A." Then I wrote this on the wall: code:
Then we did some awkward Q&A where it seemed pretty clear that he was done but trying to be polite and I left. The interview was on Tuesday; I contacted the recruiter to ask about the decision and she wrote back with the "no" verdict late Friday. Anyway, I feel like the interview problem was pretty rough because there's no easy/bad solution, there's nothing (correct) that you can write until you've got the complete solution, and there's no hint the interviewer can give. So I spent nearly all my whiteboard time "not solving the problem" and it's pretty hard to get enthusiastic about that. Seems like the same deal as RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS' experience. Mniot fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Oct 4, 2015 |
# ? Oct 4, 2015 04:23 |
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Jsor posted:What was the logarithmic solution? I thought of one, but in the case of a list that contains all the same elements it has to check every one to make sure a single smaller element isn't hiding somewhere. Equal values don't give enough information to disambiguate which side of the list you need to search in. I'm not thinking about this real hard so I might be missing some details from the problem or the solution, but as I recall it involved splitting the array in half and checking both extremities of the subarrays, and then repeating that until you get to the answer. I figured out I wanted to split it in half but that particular detail (you can't just look at one end or the other) got me tripped up. You probably weren't allowed to have duplicates.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 04:53 |
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:I'm not thinking about this real hard so I might be missing some details from the problem or the solution, but as I recall it involved splitting the array in half and checking both extremities of the subarrays, and then repeating that until you get to the answer. I figured out I wanted to split it in half but that particular detail (you can't just look at one end or the other) got me tripped up. Yeah, that's close to what I got.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 04:58 |
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I gotta say, I could accept failing the test but the frustrating part of the interview process was the recruiter relayed the feedback that my code was "sloppy" but could not elaborate at all on what that meant (instead when I asked if he had any more detail he backed away from having said it at all which was a bit awkward). e: Also before they rejected me they sent the guy who referred me an e-mail saying I was going on to the next stage so that was also a bit awkward. RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Oct 4, 2015 |
# ? Oct 4, 2015 05:08 |
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I had a similar experience with the initial Facebook in person screen (in the NYC office). I took the typical approach brute force fast, and then optimize (explaining along the way). I made it through two questions: With a hint I was able to get the optimal solution to the first one. Analyzed the complexity of both. Second one boiled down to playing back a DFS. I told the interviewer that implementing DFS given the framework of the question I was going to probably flub the base and recurse cases. So I wrote the solution assuming a tree method/function that returned the data I needed. Then he asked me to implement the DFS function and I sorta flubbed around it and got a working solution with a lot back and forth hints and arrows. Stopped before we could analyze the time complexity of the second... Kallikrates fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Oct 4, 2015 |
# ? Oct 4, 2015 06:14 |
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Jsor posted:Yeah, that's close to what I got. It's a problem from cracking the coding interview too, iirc. One of the first even.
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# ? Oct 4, 2015 16:13 |
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Just got called in for a chat with my boss to discuss our department post-reorg. He wanted to know if I'd be ok with taking a few projects on my own when they come through next year. Hell yeah. Thanks a bunch, job-thread.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 15:18 |
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Ugh what to do. Company A is offering stupid amounts of money over average for area with a lower cost of living, but not really where I want to live (though it wouldn't be the end of the world, lots of friends and family). Company B is offering slightly above or below average (depending on which city you pick) for area with higher COL than area A. It's been a dream to live in area B. Still waiting on company C, which is also somewhere I would love to live (but different than B).
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 20:03 |
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Mr. Crow posted:Ugh what to do. My method for those situations is to ignore averages and focus on absolutes. For example, which job has the highest absolute remaining income? If you live in an area where you make 50,000/yr and spend 25,000 of it on living in that area, you're left with 25k at the end of the year to save/spend/whatever. If you live in an area where you make 100,000/yr and spend 50,000 of it on living in that area, you're left with 50k at the end of the year. In that case, I'd pick the second area, even though it cost double to live there. Urit fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Oct 5, 2015 |
# ? Oct 5, 2015 20:19 |
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Huh. So my company, who is growing and hiring like crazy right now, just announced a "soft landing" program where they will give you at least 30 days to find a new job if you really want to leave, and you can do interviews and things on company time. Uh has anyone ever seen such a thing? We just had a really vital lead leave with fairly short notice so I imagine it's in response to that but it still seems weird as gently caress.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 21:16 |
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HondaCivet posted:Huh. So my company, who is growing and hiring like crazy right now, just announced a "soft landing" program where they will give you at least 30 days to find a new job if you really want to leave, and you can do interviews and things on company time. Uh has anyone ever seen such a thing? We just had a really vital lead leave with fairly short notice so I imagine it's in response to that but it still seems weird as gently caress. Yeah that does sound a bit strange but it also sounds like a good way to figure out who is happy and who isn't.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 21:20 |
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Mr. Crow posted:It's been a dream to live in area B. Unless the post COL monetary difference is like $25k a year go with this one. Mb even more. You'd be amazed how much you realize your long term mental health is worth after a while.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 21:24 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Yeah that does sound a bit strange but it also sounds like a good way to figure out who is happy and who isn't. That does make more sense than just being desperate to have as much notice as they can but I'm not aware of any desire to purge people. Then again I just got here and don't really deal with management. I was hoping it maybe meant they were extremely desperate for devs. I could maybe leverage that into nice things for myself but I haven't been here that long so I'm not sure I have enough entrenched value to be more demanding.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 22:04 |
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HondaCivet posted:That does make more sense than just being desperate to have as much notice as they can but I'm not aware of any desire to purge people. Then again I just got here and don't really deal with management. lots of companies do something similar when going through a culture shift. it gives unhappy/unproductive people incentive to leave rather than hanging around pretending to work while they look for an out
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 22:48 |
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pr0zac posted:Unless the post COL monetary difference is like $25k a year go with this one. Mb even more. You'd be amazed how much you realize your long term mental health is worth after a while. Funny you say that, currently the difference is 30k. I think the option B company will come up, hopefully a lot, but right now it's a significant enough difference to not be able to throw the money question out the window.
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 23:02 |
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the talent deficit posted:lots of companies do something similar when going through a culture shift. it gives unhappy/unproductive people incentive to leave rather than hanging around pretending to work while they look for an out They did get bought out very recently... I just talked to my boss about it and he said it was partly for more notice but also out of "professionalism" because the tech community here is pretty small. So I don't know who to believe. I guess I'm curious about it because I want to leave but just to move cities really, the job itself is good. They seem opposed to letting people work remotely but I was thinking about asking anyway. No matter how nice they seem should I not say anything until I have an offer from elsewhere?
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# ? Oct 5, 2015 23:36 |
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pr0zac posted:Unless the post COL monetary difference is like $25k a year go with this one. Mb even more. You'd be amazed how much you realize your long term mental health is worth after a while. Well, is area B really going to shake out to be that much better? I think sometimes places seem a lot more fun till you move there and have to do boring everyday crap there.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 01:38 |
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Well, is area B really going to shake out to be that much better? I think sometimes places seem a lot more fun till you move there and have to do boring everyday crap there. Sounds like they're already there and enjoying it? I say go with A if you're one of those who aspires to nothing but owning a house/land, but otherwise go with B or C.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 01:49 |
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HondaCivet posted:They did get bought out very recently... It can be both. A company that doesn't have the resources of BigCorp doesn't want to get the reputation that would come with "oh, Initech got bought out and then shitcanned the old guard, you can't trust those guys," especially in a smaller market. So it can be a way of doing right by the people who were going to get the axe no matter what.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 02:01 |
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Mr. Crow posted:Funny you say that, currently the difference is 30k. I think the option B company will come up, hopefully a lot, but right now it's a significant enough difference to not be able to throw the money question out the window. I would take a $30k paycut to live in a dream place (but I'm also a senior guy so I'm guessing percentage is different).
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 02:12 |
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Tao Jones posted:It can be both. A company that doesn't have the resources of BigCorp doesn't want to get the reputation that would come with "oh, Initech got bought out and then shitcanned the old guard, you can't trust those guys," especially in a smaller market. So it can be a way of doing right by the people who were going to get the axe no matter what. I guess I'm just not sure that this is the case because almost everyone there is really new, often less than a year. Can things really change that fast to where they've decided that they want to shitcan a bunch of people they just hired?
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 02:38 |
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If I wanted to live in my dream place I'd probably have to take a >= 50% pay cut, only losing 30k would be amazing.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 02:39 |
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HondaCivet posted:Huh. So my company, who is growing and hiring like crazy right now, just announced a "soft landing" program where they will give you at least 30 days to find a new job if you really want to leave, and you can do interviews and things on company time. Uh has anyone ever seen such a thing? We just had a really vital lead leave with fairly short notice so I imagine it's in response to that but it still seems weird as gently caress. What happens if you haven't found a new job at the end of the 30 days? This seems like a dumb thing to do as opposed to the usual "find job then give your 2 weeks notice".
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 03:10 |
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HondaCivet posted:Sounds like they're already there and enjoying it? Well, I guess I interpreted it as "it's always been a dream of mine to live there" but that might not be what was meant.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 04:55 |
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astr0man posted:What happens if you haven't found a new job at the end of the 30 days? This seems like a dumb thing to do as opposed to the usual "find job then give your 2 weeks notice".
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 18:18 |
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JawnV6 posted:Not sure how much it applies to a situation like that, but I've seen a few high level people rescind their goodbye emails on their 'last' day with guarded language like "With a heavy heart, I just couldn't leave X Company." I can even imagine spinning that positively, "I took a genuine look around and nobody's offering the same challenging work and career development path that I'm getting here, gee I'm so much happier for having looked and can get back at it with new focus!" no matter how shocked someone was at tcomp packages starting fresh somewhere new. How does that work? They tried to leave but the current company gave them a better offer to stay?
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 21:07 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 06:35 |
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HondaCivet posted:How does that work? They tried to leave but the current company gave them a better offer to stay? Yep, they did a stupid and accepted a counteroffer.
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# ? Oct 6, 2015 21:13 |