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Is it going to hurt my career to quit a job after 4 months? On a whim, I've arranged a phone interview with another company for a full-time remote position. I'd love to stop driving 30 minutes to this hick town every day and get out of the open floor plan that I share with a loving call center.
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Aug 26, 2016 21:29
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If you do it a bunch of times in a row it will look bad. If you have a short stay at one place no one is going to care that much.
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Aug 26, 2016 21:31
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The March Hare posted:Oh yeah, I'm certainly not complaining. I like the place I work at and my salary is higher than most people I know at my age. Was more marveling at the idea of a quarter of a million a year in comp than anything else. Well about 100k of that is going to taxes, then another 25-50k to rent. (Not kidding, my coworker who is leaving and moving back to ATL is paying 4500/mo right now in Manhattan). So it's comfortable but not gently caress-you money, and it's not like you're a millionaire after 4 years. I'd say 85k base is about on par with a recent college grad. Maybe a bit low because of the startup part. I've been working for 10+ years.
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Aug 26, 2016 21:35
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Of course this will vary depending on location, but it's reality check time here people. The average salary for someone with the title "Software Engineer" across all levels of experience and locations is somewhere around $100k depending on what source you use. There is no shame in flyover country taking a $50k job fresh out of school. I know in Chicago (outside high finance), things really top out at around $180k base these days for a high-end senior engineer and basically no one is getting that (but plenty are in the $140-160 range). Talk about any higher numbers, and they just refer you to their executive committees and try to talk about hiring you as a director.
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Aug 26, 2016 22:05
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baquerd posted:There is no shame in flyover country taking a $50k job fresh out of school. Yeah my first job out of school was 67k in 2016 dollars. You definitely level up in comp as you get experience and work in more lucrative industries. Also, always be sure to sacrifice only the finest goats to the gods of stock price, because that's a large chunk of these big total comp numbers people are posting.
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Aug 26, 2016 22:11
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mrmcd posted:Yeah my first job out of school was 67k in 2016 dollars. You definitely level up in comp as you get experience and work in more lucrative industries. Also, always be sure to sacrifice only the finest goats to the gods of stock price, because that's a large chunk of these big total comp numbers people are posting. Can you elaborate on this? The stock part.
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Aug 26, 2016 22:14
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Can you elaborate on this? The stock part. Lots of the compensation at the big tech companies (and really much of SV) is in the form of company stock (well it's not quite that simple but it's close enough for this discussion). If the company shits the bed somehow and their stock price plummets because no one likes them anymore, this stock is not worth as much, but if it goes up substantially, your actual compensation could be higher than expected.
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Aug 26, 2016 22:18
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baquerd posted:Of course this will vary depending on location, but it's reality check time here people. The average salary for someone with the title "Software Engineer" across all levels of experience and locations is somewhere around $100k depending on what source you use. There is no shame in flyover country taking a $50k job fresh out of school. I know in Chicago (outside high finance), things really top out at around $180k base these days for a high-end senior engineer and basically no one is getting that (but plenty are in the $140-160 range). Talk about any higher numbers, and they just refer you to their executive committees and try to talk about hiring you as a director. This is why you get the coast money to start and then move to remote from flyover country 
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Aug 26, 2016 22:25
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It's also pretty common when negotiating compensation for your next job for the company to make an offer based on your current comp +x% for both base salary and stock. So if your average stock grants for the last 3 years were $Y/yr, then you might get an offer with RSUs worth (1+(100/x)*Y /yr. The actual grants are in shares though, so if it goes up a lot over the next several years, it could be worth way more at time of vesting then when you got the offer. The flip side is if it goes the other way your compensation can be a lot less than you expected. Ask my friend who just finished a 4 year gig at Lending Club about that fun scenario.
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Aug 26, 2016 22:33
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mrmcd posted:It's also pretty common when negotiating compensation for your next job for the company to make an offer based on your current comp +x% for both base salary and stock. So if your average stock grants for the last 3 years were $Y/yr, then you might get an offer with RSUs worth (1+(100/x)*Y /yr. The actual grants are in shares though, so if it goes up a lot over the next several years, it could be worth way more at time of vesting then when you got the offer. Didn't they just go public a year ago? Cash out 3 years of options and leave when the stock dumps to 1/2 the price! Personally I think that would be my rule of thumb, if from grant to vest the value drops to 1/2 it's time to just get a new job.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:11
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So while we're talking about stocks and stuff my company is privately held and I've started getting stock option grants. How is this supposed to work? Should I go whole-hog and buy a bunch? Buy some? Not buy any? How do you decide? The heady world of for-profits is pretty new to me.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:21
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:my company is privately held Pretty sure this means the stock is worthless.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:26
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:So while we're talking about stocks and stuff my company is privately held and I've started getting stock option grants. How is this supposed to work? Should I go whole-hog and buy a bunch? Buy some? Not buy any? How do you decide? The heady world of for-profits is pretty new to me. Treat it as toilet-paper and never think of it again.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:26
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rt4 posted:Pretty sure this means the stock is worthless. This isn't necessarily true, but at the very least you need to understand how they determine the share price and what options you have to sell.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:47
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Alright so update on the Necc0 job-hunt that started months ago: I'm super conservative with the companies I talk to. If I'm not 100% on their business plan, future prospects, culture, office, etc I usually bail. Because of this my job hunts typically take longer than usual but I've gone to in-persons with two companies now that both seem really compelling. I haven't received offers from either of them but I'm very confident both will give me an offer. Now I'm having trouble deciding between the two because they both seem like solid work opportunities but they'll be massively different. Company A: Very very small security company, maybe no more than 50 people. They've found a very interesting niche in security that's been a massive but obvious blindspot for many companies and found an extremely method for securing it. I wasn't too compelled by their elevator pitch at first but decided to go in to see them in person anyways because they're almost entirely staffed by CMU professors so they had to have been up to something. Was ultimately extremely impressed with the work they've done so far and they had a very clear vision of where they wanted to go. I would be a lead developer helping them delve into genuinely uncharted territories working under the guidance of some of the smartest people in computer science. The big part is despite being only a few years old and going through a single VC round they're already profitable. Because of this they're growing slowly but steadily and are in no rush to ramp up volume or make mistakes. Since they're truly in a niche category and security seems to finally be taken seriously by the rest of the world, they've looking at a very target-rich environment. Pros : I get to move from a career of consulting into a bona-fide sw.eng role. Work underneath stupidly smart people on a profitable product with tons of freedom to accomplish my work as I want. In-person meeting was with the CTO himself who seemed genuinely excited about what they'd caught on to and wanted me to be part of it. Potential to be on the ground-floor of something big. Cons: It could all be smoke up my rear end- or this whole thing could end up flopping. Their customer base seemed pretty wide so far but satisfied with their results, but I don't know if that's just the honeymoon phase. If this ends up just coasting I could be stuck working on the same product that never really goes anywhere making minor modifications / maintenance for years with nowhere to go. Company B: Mediumish company with around 450 people but HUGE aspirations. Like company A they too have locked themselves into an interesting niche but instead of being uncharted territory they're going head-to-head with some of the biggest titans in the industry. Almost everyone who interviewed me was an ex employee of the Great Other competitor (including myself) and seemed to have a very deep loathing for how that company ran things along with a very clear vision of how much better things could be. Despite not being taken seriously by said competitors they've been scoring extremely serious victories which has demonstrated just how strong their platform is. I would continue my career as a technical consultant here working with some renegade titans of silicon valley. These guys aren't profitable yet but they're scoring huge victories left and right and building strong relationships with their clients. everyone is extremely confident in the CEO and they're looking to go public within the next five years. Pros: By remaining in consulting I get to keep the freshness in my work by working with different clients and technologies every 6ish months. While the base pay will probably be roughly the same as company A I feel like their bonus and equity package is going to be MUCH more lucrative. Potential to get in to a company that may explode like a bottle rocket as they're still getting ready for liftoff. Cons: LOTS of travel. They're telling me 75% is expected but realistically usually drops to ~30% once the customer sees the travel expenses. I'm fine with this but it'd be nice to have the freedom of working remote or in a single steady office for once. Sorry for all the words, I guess I'm more chewing over all the information I took in this week more than anything. These are both really compelling places to work and I'd be excited to wind up with either of them. But due to how much potential is at stake I feel like there's a lot more weight on the decision than normal. I think sleeping on it for a few days will be best.
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Aug 27, 2016 00:23
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Necc0 posted:Alright so update on the Necc0 job-hunt that started months ago: I'm super conservative with the companies I talk to. If I'm not 100% on their business plan, future prospects, culture, office, etc I usually bail. Because of this my job hunts typically take longer than usual but I've gone to in-persons with two companies now that both seem really compelling. I haven't received offers from either of them but I'm very confident both will give me an offer. Now I'm having trouble deciding between the two because they both seem like solid work opportunities but they'll be massively different. As someone who works in security those kinds of companies can come and go rather quickly, but they sometimes get bought for stupid money because security is a silly industry.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:07
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rt4 posted:Is it going to hurt my career to quit a job after 4 months? On a whim, I've arranged a phone interview with another company for a full-time remote position. I'd love to stop driving 30 minutes to this hick town every day and get out of the open floor plan that I share with a loving call center. It depends. There are those hiring managers who will frown upon you leaving a job after X months. There are those managers who will frown upon you leaving 5 jobs after X months. Then there are smart managers who don't give a poo poo, who know that in order to keep someone employed means that you need to keep them happy. What "happy" means is different for each person, and certainly you cannot keep everyone happy. Is a lot of work but some companies managed to do it. Of course, those companies do seem to be highly successful and places where engineers do want to work for  . Loyalty and "it's just business" goes both ways.
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Aug 27, 2016 02:12
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rt4 posted:Pretty sure this means the stock is worthless. I think it's pretty likely they'll go public in the near future if this changes things at all.
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Aug 27, 2016 02:48
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rt4 posted:Is it just the people I've worked with over the years, or do most people have no clue about database design and normalization? It's so easy, but nearly every database I've worked on is just plain wrong. Sorry for digging back a page, but I've seen some winners over the years (especially during consulting stints) and feel a sympathetic rant coming on. Some standouts: 1) Yay, this table actually has a primary key! Wait, it's a varchar holding integers as strings. 2) Yay, this table actually has a primary key, round two! Wait, it's a float. An auto-incrementing float. 3) No yay for this one. Every table is named T(integer)(optional letter). Every field of every table is named F(integer)(optional letter). There were hundreds of tables and some of the tables had hundreds of fields. So the nightly room rate is stored in T17, F21B. Everything's a varchar(255). Think about how joins look with this schema, and that these names leaked into the code all over the place (really lovely perl, with variable names like %T17 but hundreds of them and no comments). That still isn't the end of this tale of data woe though, you see, the system had evolved some over time, and the developers didn't want to think too hard about updating the schema, so sometimes they'd just arbitrarily change the definition of a given field at a given row ID. Like the first 372,425 rows, T17,F21B is the roll-away bed charge for the room, and then starting at 372,426 it's the cleaning cost for smoking in the room, and then starting at 421,877 it's the nightly room rate. Sometimes that was even documented. They had a gigantic Excel file that did nothing more than track all this bullshit. This, of course, was managed by copy-copy-whose-got-the-copy rather than something sane like source control, so making sure you had the latest definition of the Holy Data Dictionary was a weekly irritant. Punchline: last I knew, this database handles about 80% of the hotel reservations in the United States. Happy traveling! Back in the career topic, starting a new gig in a few weeks, yay! I'm hopeful it won't suck. Seems like all the really good jobs I've had over the course of my career started via connection with a friend or prior coworker I was on friendly terms with. In this case I was flying up to interview with Amazon, and I knew this fellow from a prior job who had done two years there before moving on to this place. So I reached out to get the down low ("Recruiters say this is awesome, but they're lying pigdogs as a rule, so what's the score on the ground?"), and he filled me in, following it up with "well, since you're in the area, want to talk to us too?" I ended up with two offers out of it and this place beat the pants off Amazon's. Plus Amazon's culture, what I saw of it, kinda creeped me out.
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Aug 27, 2016 06:17
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:So while we're talking about stocks and stuff my company is privately held and I've started getting stock option grants. How is this supposed to work? Should I go whole-hog and buy a bunch? Buy some? Not buy any? How do you decide? The heady world of for-profits is pretty new to me. It depends on how the private stock is organized. If you work at an ESOP company you should buy as many shares as possible because they're effectively the same as publicly traded stocks that only change value once a year.
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Aug 27, 2016 09:02
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Don't really know if I qualify as an oldie yet, but wanted a place to offer hope to DC-based folks since this seems to be where most of the justified DC-griping happens: Just accepted a verbal offer at a series B startup for $100k a year even (which is a cool ~50% raise), working from home 3x a week after the first month, and on a metro line. This is my second dev job; first one I was promoted into from an analytics role, and I had some real dud-like interviews on my way to this one. Seriously, ask me about my six hour day at the Post, or the time I waited ten minutes for a Cap One engineer to read my resume and get ready. Full-stack role, but with the flexibility to gravitate towards a specific end. Place has some pretty interesting problems to solve regarding EMR ingestion/parsing, and is growing super fast, so I'm excited! I still have no idea how I'm going to break this to my current job, but that's always the hard part (at least when you like the people you work with), right?
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Aug 27, 2016 15:25
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Sup fellow frustrated-with-the-DC-market goon. Funny enough both companies that are giving me offers ended up being from other cities and just have a tiny presence here in order to snipe frustrated engineers away from DC. 
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Aug 27, 2016 15:35
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Necc0 posted:renegade titans of silicon valley.
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Aug 27, 2016 17:33
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"Renegade titan" sounds like code for "established contributor, but possible rear end in a top hat"
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Aug 27, 2016 17:41
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JawnV6 posted:This is pretty ridiculous. I don't want to get into too many details but many of the guys were in very high places at the Big Dog companies. Yes what I said was a bit hyperbolic though 
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Aug 27, 2016 18:19
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DC area has a legacy of companies like AOL and some old Enron tech employees, but the number of companies that spawned from either seems to not have resulted in companies like Valve that are both commercially successful and engineer friendly.
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Aug 27, 2016 18:20
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JawnV6 posted:This is pretty ridiculous. Prometheus was a renegade titan and he ended up getting his liver disrupted.
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Aug 27, 2016 18:32
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What's y'all's opinions on contract-for-hire? Had a company call me up and ask if I'd be willing to take a position with a review after 90 days to see if it should convert to full-time. I told them I'd much prefer to be hired as a full-time position straight out (specifically, it wasn't a dealbreaker but was a "major cause for concern"), so now their hiring folks are circling back with the team to see what can be arranged.
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Aug 29, 2016 19:09
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Your instinct is on the mark. I have rarely heard of good, sustainable positions in any industry start as contract-to-hire (I think that's what you meant?). The good reasons to use the employment terms are solved with modifications to terms of employment (90 day probation period, for example). Most of the software market is in favor of engineers, and there's little about contract-to-hire that is of benefit to a well-qualified engineer. With that said, I would take it if I had few other options or it was for a really, really reputable company that would improve my resume.
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Aug 29, 2016 19:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:What's y'all's opinions on contract-for-hire? I personally avoid it. If you're talking about the US, almost all states are already "at will" employment, which means they can fire you for no real cause anyway. Likewise, you could always quit 90 days in if you found out the culture was toxic or you hated the job. So, that only leaves me with the feeling that many companies do C2H because they are wishy-washy or are plagued with bad employees. I'm taking a big chance and expending a lot of energy to ramp up with a new job...and they don't want to take the same chance?
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Aug 29, 2016 19:58
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Dark Helmut is a recruiter that frequents the SH/SC IT threads and has stated that many companies do in fact convert some of their C2H employees into permanent. It's a way for companies to try before they by - specifically it allows them to not bother with all the benefits and insurance for longer than they might otherwise need to. That said, I personally am very wary of these positions, because as others have mentioned, there's almost no upside for the employee unless they are desperate for a job immediately. The risk is already disproportionately large for the employee, adding the C2H dice-roll just feels like adding insult to injury to me. It's probably mostly an illusion - people get let go from "permanent" positions after a month or two all the time in this country (I'm assuming we're talking about the 'States here), but maybe I just don't like having a solid, looming deadline for proving myself hanging over my head.
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Aug 30, 2016 03:03
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Che Delilas posted:Dark Helmut is a recruiter that frequents the SH/SC IT threads and has stated that many companies do in fact convert some of their C2H employees into permanent. It's a way for companies to try before they by - specifically it allows them to not bother with all the benefits and insurance for longer than they might otherwise need to. The other possibility you should have in mind is that they want to string you along as a contractor indefinitely.
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Aug 30, 2016 03:18
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Most places are honest when they offer contract-to-hire. The problem is that it's a bad sign for other reasons. If they're posting C2H jobs, it probably means they suck at vetting candidates and you'll have lots of bad coworkers. If they post a regular job but offer C2H then it means they didn't love you very much and you should think twice about jumping in with a company that starts out lukewarm on you.
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Aug 30, 2016 05:57
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Yeah, the bait and switch stuff is probably less common in this industry. Still, it isn't unheard of.
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Aug 30, 2016 14:15
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Okay, sounds like my intuition more or less matches y'all's experience. Thanks! To be honest, this company is not my #1 pick. I've primarily been interviewing with them to get potential leverage over another company when offers start getting flung about.
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Aug 30, 2016 15:24
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Additionally there is a self selection bias at work. If they exclusively do C2H then no one who would be in demand enough to never consider C2H will be there and that puts an upper bound on the ability of your coworkers.
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Aug 30, 2016 15:27
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I just had my Google screen, it wasn't hard but like it was definitely not the kind of trivial the interviewer made it sound like before starting. Just one question and I got the solution but I felt like my interviewer was expecting me to do it faster. He also sounded like he hated his job.
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Aug 30, 2016 16:11
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I signed and sent off my offer letter -- am genuinely happy with the offered base salary, the vesting schedule, annual bonuses, etc. I'm not a complete mark for not trying to negotiate anything better -- like a signing bonus -- right?
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Aug 30, 2016 17:47
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Speaking about my previous company (few k engineers in size) regarding contract to hire, it was generally used for candidates who we liked but weren't 100% sure about, and was a means of keeping them sort of in a trial period. All of the people in that scheme ended up getting hired as full timers when their contracts were up.
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Aug 30, 2016 17:59
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Monkey Fury posted:I signed and sent off my offer letter -- am genuinely happy with the offered base salary, the vesting schedule, annual bonuses, etc. I'm not a complete mark for not trying to negotiate anything better -- like a signing bonus -- right? If nothing else, always ask for 15% more than the offer and you'll probably get like 5-10. Always haggle, they expect it. Never fail to do this. The worst thing that happens is they say no and then you maybe say yes anyway.
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