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Good Will Hrunting posted:Recruiter: "What is your availability like to come meet with the team?" sounds like code for: "someone just put in notice"
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Dec 9, 2016 22:29
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Cool, but what? Excited for the position but cautiously optimistic.
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leper khan posted:sounds like code for: "someone just put in notice" I thought that too but then remembered they're building a new team from scratch to migrate some legacy stuff to new Play/Akka services and only have the director so far it seems. The guy was a bit stoic, but my background is a near-perfect fit for them in terms of domain fit and tech.
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Dec 9, 2016 22:37
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I have a salary negotiation question/opinion for you guys. So, new position, know a guy there, everything looks great with only one downside: a 35-45 minute car commute (one way). Now, during my negotiation, I asked for a number on the higher end of the salary scale, as best I can determine from websites, other job postings, etc. I did this for 2 reasons, one, the longer commute (car costs/tolls), and my experience/domain knowledge lines up really well with the company/industry. Their offer is going to be about 7% less than what I asked for, which puts it more in line with what I consider average pay (i.e. something I could probably get at a closer company that I'm not bringing as much value to domain-wise.) My knee-jerk reaction is to reject it. If they are quibbling over $10K, when they will pay 2x-3x that by involving a recruiter, it feels like a red flag. On the other hand, it seems like a good job, and it's mine to accept. Otherwise, I have to spend the next few months interviewing. Am I being a big baby?
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Dec 9, 2016 23:44
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It's still a negotiation. But don't bring up your commute in the negotiations, just talk about how you can help them. What is their offer based on? Is it just the industry standard of looking at your last salary and adding 5-10k? If so then you have a lot of leverage.
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Dec 10, 2016 00:49
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B-Nasty posted:I have a salary negotiation question/opinion for you guys. $10k is (in my very very very personal opinion) not even close to match a 45min commute. You'll be out of your house driving for almost 2 hours per day. Depending where you are and how is that commute, for me it would be an instant no. I wouldn't even apply there. I've done 45m-1hr commutes in the past, on the canadian 401 to Toronto, one of the busiest highways in the world and it suck balls. The government's budget is not enough to keep me doing that for 1 year straight. But, that's me (and I quit after 6 months, because gently caress that poo poo and other reasons). There are people who are happy with that for years. The wear and tear on the car alone is substantial. On you, the wear and tear can be quite life threatening.
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Dec 10, 2016 03:36
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Volguus posted:But, that's me (and I quit after 6 months, because gently caress that poo poo and other reasons). There are people who are happy with that for years. The wear and tear on the car alone is substantial. On you, the wear and tear can be quite life threatening. It's also a non trivial amount of money. Suppose you make $25/hr, your daily commute ($25 * 2 hours * 250 days) = $12500/yr. Your 10k doesn't even covers that, just get a part time job close to home if you want the money.
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Dec 10, 2016 03:56
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It's also worth noting that commute-tolerance depends on region. I've never had a commute of less than 30-45 minutes, except in my current WFH gig. Even that job I was talking about above (and thanks for the advice, everyone!) would be at least an hour commute given ideal circumstances. The commute is actually one of the major things in my minus column. 2-3 extra hours of free time a day is much more valuable than you'd think.
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Dec 10, 2016 04:01
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lifg posted:What is their offer based on? Is it just the industry standard of looking at your last salary and adding 5-10k? If so then you have a lot of leverage. I think they had a number in mind for the position, and mine was higher. To some degree, I'm glad. At least I don't feel like I'm leaving money on the table. I've expressed my displeasure to HR already about the proposed number, so they know that's my hangup. I'm probably going to reject just based on the commute and see what happens. If they counter and it seems like they're making a good-faith effort, I might reconsider. The commute is at least all highway and no real traffic (normally.) How do you guys typically factor in domain expertise (SME) into positions? Part of me feels like if you want to hire me as a senior software engineer, cool, that is worth X. But if I know a poo poo-ton about your industry, I want X+10 to 20%.
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Dec 10, 2016 04:03
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Skandranon posted:It's also a non trivial amount of money. Suppose you make $25/hr, your daily commute ($25 * 2 hours * 250 days) = $12500/yr. Your 10k doesn't even covers that, just get a part time job close to home if you want the money. Exactly. Being a highly-paid software engineer the amount of $/hr was quite a bit higher. I got a job in my home-town for 20% increase, and told RIM to take a hike. Too bad that I really loved working on the QNX BB10 system. It is (was?) a wonderful OS. But gently caress that commute.
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Dec 10, 2016 04:34
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B-Nasty posted:How do you guys typically factor in domain expertise (SME) into positions? Part of me feels like if you want to hire me as a senior software engineer, cool, that is worth X. But if I know a poo poo-ton about your industry, I want X+10 to 20%. I used domain knowhow once when negotiating for a better offer, but they didn't have a clear salary in mind for that role. Some places have clearly defined salary ranges for clearly defined titles. To use domain knowledge as a negotiating tactic in places like that you'd need to use it to apply for an outright more senior title.
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Dec 10, 2016 07:23
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:Basically, I'm soliciting unbiased opinions as to whether I'm being a sucker or not. Sorry to hear about you family member.
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Dec 10, 2016 07:33
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Destroyenator posted:Is the loyalty you feel is to the company or particular people there? Would you still feel the same way if a couple of them left? It's to my boss, who is also the owner. When all of this poo poo started to go down in October, he immediately told me that the company would work around my needs and to put myself and my family first. I was expecting to just take an unpaid leave of absence for a few months and burn through some of my savings after my accrued vacation/sick time ran out, but he's made it a point to continue paying me my normal salary and allowing me to contribute on a part-time basis (at my insistence) in a way that works around my schedule. The "still working" thing is important to me from a mental health perspective; I need some sort of normalcy and something to focus on other than the awful stuff that's staring me in the face every day. Regardless of whether it's coming from a place of business sense (keeping a good employee around) or from a place of compassion, it's personally meaningful to me. I'm totally aware that if the company were tanking and my salary were too high, he'd have no problem firing me. I'll probably need to re-evaluate the entire situation in a more detached way once the dust settles since I'm experiencing very un-developer-like emotions (which is to say, I'm experiencing emotions  ) lately.
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Dec 10, 2016 15:09
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:It's to my boss, who is also the owner. When all of this poo poo started to go down in October, he immediately told me that the company would work around my needs and to put myself and my family first. I was expecting to just take an unpaid leave of absence for a few months and burn through some of my savings after my accrued vacation/sick time ran out, but he's made it a point to continue paying me my normal salary and allowing me to contribute on a part-time basis (at my insistence) in a way that works around my schedule. The "still working" thing is important to me from a mental health perspective; I need some sort of normalcy and something to focus on other than the awful stuff that's staring me in the face every day. Sounds like he is a decent guy. Still, unless he is family (however you want to define that), I don't think you should be sacrificing any significant amount of future happiness for them.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:06
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Got an interview Monday I'm feeling really good about. From my experiences thus far with these folks I am feeling that if I get an offer I'm probably going to accept the hell out of it. I'm also on PTO until end of the year, as is most of my team. What's protocol in this sort of situation if I give notice? Would they probably just term me right away and pay out my PTO bucket rather than have me around and be on vacation? Should I cut my current employer some slack and set up an end date in early January so there's time for tying up loose ends? The advantage for me in doing this is I would also get my PTO bucket replenished on 1/1/17 and they'd pay me out a whole years worth of accruals upon terminating.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:24
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kitten smoothie posted:Should I cut my current employer some slack and set up an end date in early January so there's time for tying up loose ends? The advantage for me in doing this is I would also get my PTO bucket replenished on 1/1/17 and they'd pay me out a whole years worth of accruals upon terminating.
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Dec 11, 2016 01:54
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A lot of times PTO can't be part of your notice period, so you should probably wait until January to resign. Or, at least, read your employee handbook.
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Dec 11, 2016 03:59
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kitten smoothie posted:Got an interview Monday I'm feeling really good about. From my experiences thus far with these folks I am feeling that if I get an offer I'm probably going to accept the hell out of it. It's pretty unlikely that they'll terminate you unless that's the standard policy. As r4 mentioned the handbook may have a policy in place, I know that at one company I worked for you had to work at least one day after PTO or vacation for it to be paid out. Regardless it's a dick move to give your two week notice and then take PTO for all of it. The whole point is to wrap up or pass off your work and you can't do that if you aren't actually there so just give it when you get back in January.
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Dec 11, 2016 18:42
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I want to learn to make the cool high-performance, large-scale systems that you think of when you think about the major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Currently, I do small-scale python stuff. If want the best bang for the time I invest, what should I do to learn? Grab a classic book on C or C++ or a new one on Go or Rust or what? Or maybe since I have a low level of familiarity with Java already, I should focus on that?
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Dec 13, 2016 00:14
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Depends what you want to actually do with them! We use Java for real-time bidding on video ads and it's pretty cool, but I know most places use C++ for anything bidding related.
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Dec 13, 2016 00:17
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oliveoil posted:I want to learn to make the cool high-performance, large-scale systems that you think of when you think about the major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Currently, I do small-scale python stuff. If want the best bang for the time I invest, what should I do to learn? Grab a classic book on C or C++ or a new one on Go or Rust or what? Or maybe since I have a low level of familiarity with Java already, I should focus on that? The specific language doesn't really matter when it comes to scale. Study up on distributed systems and algorithms instead?
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Dec 13, 2016 01:11
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oliveoil posted:I want to learn to make the cool high-performance, large-scale systems that you think of when you think about the major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Currently, I do small-scale python stuff. If want the best bang for the time I invest, what should I do to learn? Grab a classic book on C or C++ or a new one on Go or Rust or what? Or maybe since I have a low level of familiarity with Java already, I should focus on that? Scala, Java, and (unfortunately) Go. Folks try to avoid C/C++ unless, as mentioned, it's important for ridiculous real time performance (finance, adtech, voice/video). Even then, a lot of orchestration is done on the JVM before and after the performance-critical parts. Microsoft is in .NET, naturally. You're going to find a standard set of languages, but what's more important is how the higher level components fit together in a distributed system that expects to be able to handle large fluctuations in traffic and a certain tolerance for failure. Learn about how different queueing technologies work. Kafka is very different from RabbitMQ, is very different from Amazon SQS. Containers, and container orchestration will likely be useful to you. Learning when you can have different consistency levels for your data is useful. And what databases can provide those guarantees. What are good ways to select sharding keys for different applications? Being able to answer what goes into a high-availability, zero downtime distributed system is important. What can you horizontally scale easily? What is harder to horizontally scale? What are good ways to partition inflight and postflight systems, the latter for data warehousing and offline processing?
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Dec 13, 2016 01:40
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designing data intensive systems by kleppman is a good introduction to distributed systems learning a particular language isn't really important for distsys. most of your performance considerations are io or network, so you can write components in basically anything. tons of real world high throughput applications are glued together with python and javascript
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Dec 13, 2016 03:21
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sink posted:Scala, Java, and (unfortunately) Go. Folks try to avoid C/C++ unless, as mentioned, it's important for ridiculous real time performance (finance, adtech, voice/video). That said, I don't feel it's that important to learn C++ unless you're actually working on the service in question. As sink demonstrated, the field of working at scale is very broad and there are a million other things to learn that probably rank higher.
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Dec 13, 2016 05:35
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minato posted:At large scale, performance is always important. A 1% CPU optimization in a 50,000 server super-cluster would save 500 servers, and at $10K/server that's 5 million bucks every 3 years (the average lifespan of a server). C++ and associated linkers tend to give very fine-grained control to achieve those kind of performance gains (e.g. by reordering "hot" functions into a contiguous block which can be configured to never be paged out of memory, improving cache coherency). Other languages may not have such facilities. And let's not forget that a 1% cost savings is still only a 1% cost savings no matter how big the cluster is.
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Dec 13, 2016 05:57
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Vulture Culture posted:Even then, working on the service, there are a lot of other priorities that will likely rank higher for the team than a 1% performance difference. Until you're as ubiquitous as Google or Facebook's core services, the name of the game is user acquisition and retention, not infrastructure spend. Unless you're actually at risk of hitting a performance bottleneck that you can't reasonably spend your way around, development velocity and defect rates are going to be your key drivers. A language that has acceptable performance and facilitates faster development -- including downstream from your project -- will almost always knock out a language that can eke out the best possible performance. A 1% cost savings is worth a team of hundreds of engineers if you're spending tens of billions of dollars per year on datacenters.
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Dec 13, 2016 06:47
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b0lt posted:A 1% cost savings is worth a team of hundreds of engineers if you're spending tens of billions of dollars per year on datacenters. That's a big if. See the caveat already stated in the post you quoted. But we get it, Google is big and spends lots of money.
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Dec 13, 2016 07:05
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To be fair, minato was making a point that there is room for it if that is what you want to do. As they said, the field is broad. And every application is different at scale. I don't work at Google or Facebook scale, but gc pauses used to gently caress my life. So when I can figure out how to half my allocations in a service, I get excited. For other services, even if the performance is abysmal, I know that throwing more instances at it for now is far far cheaper than dedicating an engineer to rewrite or performance tune. Especially if it is already in production and its failure modes are well known. sink fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 08:19
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b0lt posted:A 1% cost savings is worth a team of hundreds of engineers if you're spending tens of billions of dollars per year on datacenters.
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Dec 13, 2016 15:28
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asur posted:It's pretty unlikely that they'll terminate you unless that's the standard policy. As r4 mentioned the handbook may have a policy in place, I know that at one company I worked for you had to work at least one day after PTO or vacation for it to be paid out. Regardless it's a dick move to give your two week notice and then take PTO for all of it. The whole point is to wrap up or pass off your work and you can't do that if you aren't actually there so just give it when you get back in January. Yeah, new gig is cool with me having a start date in mid-January so I'll just turn in my two weeks immediately after the new year.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:51
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asur posted:It's pretty unlikely that they'll terminate you unless that's the standard policy. As r4 mentioned the handbook may have a policy in place, I know that at one company I worked for you had to work at least one day after PTO or vacation for it to be paid out. Regardless it's a dick move to give your two week notice and then take PTO for all of it. The whole point is to wrap up or pass off your work and you can't do that if you aren't actually there so just give it when you get back in January. While I know that kitten smoothie said it doesn't apply to them due to coolness of new job... I'll second the dick move part. A while back I had a co-worker who gave notice during a 2 week vacation coming back for just 2 days and leaving me holding the bag. He was eligible for rehire officially, but despite him trying 3 times over the next 5 years and having other people pull for him, I repeatedly blocked the rehire. It's really not worth burning a bridge. People talk a lot about you can burn a company because it would burn you just as easily, but there's other people you can be affecting who may be in a position to help or harm you in the future. (That and I also have never personally been at a place that would truly burn someone, everywhere I've been even if there are layoffs they're generous with the severance, but maybe that's just the type of roles I seek.)
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Dec 14, 2016 05:50
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Hughlander posted:While I know that kitten smoothie said it doesn't apply to them due to coolness of new job... I'll second the dick move part. A while back I had a co-worker who gave notice during a 2 week vacation coming back for just 2 days and leaving me holding the bag. He was eligible for rehire officially, but despite him trying 3 times over the next 5 years and having other people pull for him, I repeatedly blocked the rehire. It's really not worth burning a bridge. People talk a lot about you can burn a company because it would burn you just as easily, but there's other people you can be affecting who may be in a position to help or harm you in the future. They may have lit a match and charred it a little bit, but  are you doing admitting to throwing firebombs at the bridge to prove your point? Three times over five years with multiple people in support?Admitting to being the one carrying out retribution to contextualize why not to do something that you think carries a risk of retribution is strange. Hughlander posted:(That and I also have never personally been at a place that would truly burn someone, everywhere I've been even if there are layoffs they're generous with the severance, but maybe that's just the type of roles I seek.)
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Dec 14, 2016 11:26
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:They may have lit a match and charred it a little bit, but I blocked the rehire of a guy who's code was so bad that even the guy who replaced him; who desperately needs help said no thanks to the thought of rehiring him.
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Dec 14, 2016 14:44
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:They may have lit a match and charred it a little bit, but I inherited a horrible system under a time crunch with no opportunity for turnover, ok fine that happens. But it doesn't give you the right to come back into the department and burn me again. Fool me once, etc... how many times should someone come onto your project, poo poo all over it, and leave you holding the bag until you say you don't want to work with them? For me it was once, for you would it be twice? Ten times? How many times is two days in the office notices enough that you would say no to someone in an interview? EDIT: It's like a separate conversation this morning. Someone posted  With the tagline: This is why you should disable access to the server room before firing your IT guy. And my only response was, "I can't even imagine the incompetency that would lead someone to burn bridges like that." Because you'd have to be so incompetent that none of your coworkers would ever want to work with you ever again before you'd go and do something like that to ensure that they would give a thumbs down at any future interview at any location they are after they have to go clean that up. Maybe you'd call them burners but I'd call it common loving sense. quote:It's you, you're the burner Hughlander fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 08:20
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Ah, gotcha. My threshold would be higher, true. It hits my buttons because I've been that person who's re-applied three times in five years (to Facebook, in fact), and for the longest time I perceived some people with hiring power over me as petty or vengeful – and while there's likely *some* small amount truth to that, it's almost certainly much less relevant to me than I thought at the time. I believe that people can operate in entirely different ways and change for the better over the years, especially since I needed to, and did, grow some empathy in the past couple years.Hughlander posted:What I meant by that is that I've never been at a place that just will lay someone off. Everyplace has given a good severance, multiple weeks per year worked + minimum. Or let them know that in X months their position would be terminated. From that point of view not burning a company makes sense.
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Dec 15, 2016 09:13
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Hughlander posted:I inherited a horrible system under a time crunch with no opportunity for turnover, ok fine that happens. But it doesn't give you the right to come back into the department and burn me again. Fool me once, etc... how many times should someone come onto your project, poo poo all over it, and leave you holding the bag until you say you don't want to work with them? For me it was once, for you would it be twice? Ten times? How many times is two days in the office notices enough that you would say no to someone in an interview? you've been very lucky in your career. one place let me go the day after i got back from gdc against my supervisors wishes because i went to gdc having planned that trip for 8 months or so. i had to go back the following week to pick up my check because they didn't have it prepared for the ceo's whim. they did pay me though. another place withheld my final check for 5 months after i gave them 4 weeks notice. just because you've been incredibly lucky and haven't dealt with issues common to small or failing businesses does not mean that the issues do not exist. companies are not generally set up to care about you, they're set up to generate as much profit as possible. then again not wanting to deal with that type of poo poo is definitely a reason for avoiding very small orgs. my history with orgs over a dozen people has been more pleasant administratively. not that they're without dysfunction.
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Dec 15, 2016 12:50
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I was accidentally fired from a company once wat Like someone put the wrong name on a form and nobody noticed?
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Dec 15, 2016 16:00
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Munkeymon posted:wat Same thing happened to Archibald Buttle, in the workplace documentary Brazil.
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Dec 15, 2016 16:43
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Munkeymon posted:wat I burnt out really badly, CEO gave me several weeks off, was fired a month in by a VP who thought I was applying for jobs. CEO gave me the option of a generous severance or a different role but there wasn't really another role I'd have done well in, so...
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Dec 15, 2016 18:32
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leper khan posted:you've been very lucky in your career. one place let me go the day after i got back from gdc against my supervisors wishes because i went to gdc having planned that trip for 8 months or so. i had to go back the following week to pick up my check because they didn't have it prepared for the ceo's whim. they did pay me though. another place withheld my final check for 5 months after i gave them 4 weeks notice. Part luck, part that other than being a founder I haven't worked for a company of less than 150 or so. Which isn't for everyone either, but is where I like it. There are lovely places out there I'm not denying that. Glad it seems you've mostly made out ok though! And I'll continue to give 2 weeks notice and spend as much time as possible doing knowledge transfer.
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Dec 15, 2016 18:55
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Hey, this is a new one.. a "6-10 hour" take home challenge before I even talk to a single member of the engineering team! Usually I at least get phone screened by a Senior/Lead first.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:06
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