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ToxicSlurpee posted:Because remote employees might not work every single hour they're on the clock! Yeah, Uber is here too but at least Uber's interview process is more like Googles. Just a code interview over the phone then you come in for a more in-depth conversation and tech interview.
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Feb 17, 2017 21:19
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Hey, so I just found myself in a position where I'm currently unemployed and looking real hard at where I want my career to go. I've got some cash saved up so I'm not in a real big hurry, but I'm sort of flirting with the idea of contracting/consulting instead of diving back into FTE programming. I've got a background in backend Java & relational DBs and I'm not afraid of HTML/CSS/JS/Python/Ruby or really any sort of technology out there. But I'm not really sure what to expect or where to start with that. I mostly just know that I get bored when I've been working at the same company for more than a year or so and that I'd like to find myself in a position where I either get to set my own hours or at least do the majority of my work remotely/from home. So does anyone have any experience (or warnings) about following that path?
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Feb 17, 2017 22:33
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Roadie posted:So, here's a warning for anybody else interested in SDE stuff at Amazon: regardless of your experience or references, they will make you take a programming test with someone watching you through your webcam the entire time. Not an interview or anything interactive, just a "proctor" from a third-party company operating on the basic assumption that you are a cheating liar and you and your computer need to be monitored the entire time. Could you give dates for when this happened to you? My understanding is that we stopped doing that (and said we stopped) once the broader SDE community found out and pitched a tent. The interview process /should/ be 1-2 phone interviews using something like collabedit followed by an onsite with 4-5 interviewers. these monitored tests were supposed to be pre-screening, but they are somewhere between not great to awful for the interviewee. FamDav fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 23:19
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The only Amazon emails I get are for job 'events' in random parts of North America. Not sure why I'd want to travel to Detroit or New York for a hiring event to work in a third or fourth city when they have a big office in the city I live 
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Feb 17, 2017 23:53
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FamDav posted:The interview process /should/ be 1-2 phone interviews using something like collabedit followed by an onsite with 4-5 interviewers. these monitored tests were supposed to be pre-screening, but they are somewhere between not great to awful for the interviewee. That's exactly how my interview process went last summer.
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Feb 18, 2017 01:04
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FamDav posted:Could you give dates for when this happened to you? My understanding is that we stopped doing that (and said we stopped) once the broader SDE community found out and pitched a tent. This week.
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Feb 18, 2017 03:23
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Roadie posted:So, here's a warning for anybody else interested in SDE stuff at Amazon: regardless of your experience or references, they will make you take a programming test with someone watching you through your webcam the entire time. Not an interview or anything interactive, just a "proctor" from a third-party company operating on the basic assumption that you are a cheating liar and you and your computer need to be monitored the entire time. We certainly don't do this everywhere. I'm on an interview loop now that is standard phone and code-into-online-text-editor. It must depend on location/team.
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Feb 18, 2017 09:49
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I can see it now: eventually these things will be run using web IDEs, run against unit tests, and include greenfield, debugging and refactoring sections.
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Feb 18, 2017 17:17
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Paolomania posted:I can see it now: eventually these things will be run using web IDEs, run against unit tests, and include greenfield, debugging and refactoring sections. I unironically want this. Only with two unit tests that are mutually contradictory and the spec is clear as to what's right. And another unit test thats just wrong from the spec.
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Feb 18, 2017 18:40
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As long as you're given enough time and not a lot of pressure that doesn't sound too bad.
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Feb 18, 2017 18:42
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canis minor posted:I'm self-sabotaging myself again - gotten an offer in London with 40% wage increase, opportunity to learn new stuff and I turned it down; the part is that I'm doubting myself, and the other one is that the vastness of London kind of scares me - I'd be paying double for a place to live (or triple if I want something similar to where I live now) + I don't have a sense of expenses Not sure where you're moving from, but there's big positives and negatives to London depending on the type of person you are. Happy to talk through more details if you want. It's real big as you say, but because of that scale it's really a bunch of towns squished together. Costs are high but wages are even higher, especially for developers. In the Ruby/Rails world London is the cash cow; I'd estimate there's twice as many of us there as in the rest of the country combined and still jobs left over. The dev job well is deep, you'd never be wanting for employment. Greatbacon posted:Hey, so I just found myself in a position where I'm currently unemployed and looking real hard at where I want my career to go. I've got some cash saved up so I'm not in a real big hurry, but I'm sort of flirting with the idea of contracting/consulting instead of diving back into FTE programming. I've got a background in backend Java & relational DBs and I'm not afraid of HTML/CSS/JS/Python/Ruby or really any sort of technology out there. But I'm not really sure what to expect or where to start with that. I mostly just know that I get bored when I've been working at the same company for more than a year or so and that I'd like to find myself in a position where I either get to set my own hours or at least do the majority of my work remotely/from home. The thing that got me to switch from full time employment to contracting was realising that getting emotionally invested in companies where I had no real control (just some influence) over high level decisions was killing my morale. With contracting you can have a mindset of professional delivery divorced from the ultimate impact of those decisions; they make the calls, you make the code. The caveat to that is you will tend not to be in leadership positions, as contractors deliver their value for money by building things which make the company money. So while "Head of" or "CTO" contractors are not unheard of, you can expect and are expected to be a senior developer most of the time. As for setting your own hours and WFH, most gigs I've found want to embed you into a team on site, and while (in the UK at least) there's legal reasons why a contractor still needs to keep their own hours and working locations there will be some practicalities that mean you can't do entirely whatever you want whenever you want. That said I'm currently 3 months into a 9 month remote contract where I do exactly those things.
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Feb 19, 2017 21:14
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So my new job has been... interesting so far. I was hired by a newly acquired start-up to work on a data pipeline and API to expose our current line of business to the parent company that acquired us so they can integrate it into their platform. I have some experience with the tech stack we're using and have been ramping up quickly on that side. However, since my interview two months ago, work on the actual project still hasn't started and I've observed a few things in my first 3 weeks at the company: - The parent company has 2 very high level people assigned to this project (both pretty obnoxious) and it's clear they have very little interest in working on it. They spent time in planning shredding the POC/benchmarking that my team (before I was here) did and were nitpicking the everliving gently caress out of the findings report to a point where it became uncomfortable and borderline combative - There are almost no concrete specs or stories for any piece of the project. There is one very high level architecture diagram that lays out certain pieces very vaguely and a few one-line JIRA epics with an accompanying two page spec document that the parent company people also ripped apart via Google Docs - While my boss is a nice guy, he's very quiet and reserved and isn't doing a great job of communicating with me what I should be working on or what I can do to help at this point. I am getting the vibe that he may be frustrated with the other side of the team and could be a little checked out but I also don't know what his other responsibilities are as outside of the new pipeline - I still haven't met three of the engineerins I'll be working closely with. The Seniors who interviewed me that are on my team aren't the people who I'll be working with. There are 3 remote developers that will be the Senior engineers on the project (in addition to me, a mid-level or whatever the gently caress I am, and the management posse) Is there anything I should do besides just go in, review the languages and frameworks we're using, and wait until planning moves quicker? I'm not the only one noticing a distinct lack of work and slow pace as two of the other Senior engineers (who work remotely) mentioned it in our StatusHero updates. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 21:29
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Is there anything I should do besides just go in, review the languages and frameworks we're using, and wait until planning moves quicker? I'm not the only one noticing a distinct lack of work and slow pace as two of the other Senior engineers (who work remotely) mentioned it in our StatusHero updates. So, you aren't doing any dev work beyond reviewing what technical documentation already exists? I'd be going a little bit nuts after three weeks of not actually developing anything or seeing any progress towards me being able to develop anything. Maybe try to fix some bugs in the existing system? It'll get you programming again and get you more familiar with things so it'll be easier when (if) the work you were hired to do finally starts up. Also, if you do that without asking permission (at least as far as writing the code, not necessarily deploying anything), it'll give you a good idea of how much autonomy you'll be getting at the company; if they praise you for taking initiative and contributing during a difficult period, that's a good sign, if they reprimand you for daring to do any work without permission from THE LEADERSHIP then that's not so good. Though you may already have some idea of how much independent thought you're going to be allowed in this job, judging by what you've written. You could also look into improving some part of the dev pipeline (deployment automation, source control, whatever might be lacking). Might want to get permission before you dive too deep into that though. If there's literally nothing that you can (or are allowed to) work on until they get done designing this one thing, I'd probably start sending my resume out. I'm absolutely not content to sit around with my thumb in my rear end for three months while other people make design decisions. It's incredibly depressing, both to waste that much of my life doing absolutely nothing, and to not have my expertise trusted enough to contribute to the design. I'm not interested in being a glorified assembly-line worker. Fixing bugs solves the former issue at least.
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Feb 19, 2017 22:02
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So far I've set up my laptop and dev ev, hosed around with color schemes and plugs for IntelliJ for Scala and Kotlin which we use, set up a local Hadoop cluster, got my GCP dev tools set up, worked through some Scala and Spark labs, and made a fix to a LOL rear end shell script that I haven't commited yet cause I don't want to offend the dev who wrote it. It's a lot less than it seems though and yeah I'm going loving crazy especially because this is why I left my last job (lack of work and a very hands-off manager). My take on shruges post and "mentorship" is that a good amount is somewhere in the middle but holy poo poo in my last two jobs I've gotten loving NOTHING in terms of guidance. Re the autonomy: my boss doesn't seem to be getting much at all from the parent company, though he seems to want more and seems to be very trusting of my input (asks me about a lot of tech he's been evaluating). Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 22:08
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Haven't asked in years: Anybody here work in data visualization / infographics / data journalism? PM me if you're ever in NYC.
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Feb 19, 2017 22:32
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Good Will Hrunting posted:…I haven't commited yet cause I don't want to offend the dev who wrote it. Ugh, that feeling is the worst.
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Feb 19, 2017 23:41
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Good Will Hrunting posted:…I haven't commited yet cause I don't want to offend the dev who wrote it. CPColin posted:Ugh, that feeling is the worst.
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Feb 20, 2017 00:19
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CPColin posted:Ugh, that feeling is the worst. Might as well get it over with. Find out now how he responds, how your boss backs you up, etc. Don't be rude, send it to him to review first, be like "Hey, I had some free time on my hands, noticed this bug while reviewing things, let me know if I did it right, etc". Either you get something useful to do so you stop fixing other people's poo poo, or it causes a big row and you get fired or reprimanded, which would probably be for the best long term.
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Feb 20, 2017 00:27
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 commits upstreame: I got in trouble at an early job for doing this because I unknowingly did a thing a VP asked my boss to do that he told the VP was not possible
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Feb 20, 2017 01:26
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I don't mind doing it but I've been here three weeks and it's not like, "bug" it's like a "okay this is easy to do properly what the gently caress are you doing" type deal in the way a shell script handles commands.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:28
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I don't mind doing it but I've been here three weeks and it's not like, "bug" it's like a "okay this is easy to do properly what the gently caress are you doing" type deal in the way a shell script handles commands. Hmm. Post it, write a technical explanation of what it enables, and say you're open to schedule a 1:1 for it if they want additional context on it? Then in the meeting, reiterate what it's blocking, and if they resist, then make it their responsibility/additional work for them "Okay, well, I need X. Do you think you can have something that meets both our needs ready and tested in Y amount of time?" Follow up as needed in tasks or notes visible to others indicating the dependency, responsibility, and timing so there's a record. rear end covered, although at what cost...
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Feb 20, 2017 02:42
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Good Will Hrunting posted:- The parent company has 2 very high level people assigned to this project (both pretty obnoxious) and it's clear they have very little interest in working on it. They spent time in planning shredding the POC/benchmarking that my team (before I was here) did and were nitpicking the everliving gently caress out of the findings report to a point where it became uncomfortable and borderline combative I've run into this kind of behavior with just about every company we've done work for that had an onsite dev team we complimented. It's job security, alpha bullshit. Good Will Hrunting posted:- While my boss is a nice guy, he's very quiet and reserved and isn't doing a great job of communicating with me what I should be working on or what I can do to help at this point. I am getting the vibe that he may be frustrated with the other side of the team and could be a little checked out but I also don't know what his other responsibilities are as outside of the new pipeline Also probably job security bullshit. This is either just bad management or he's keeping his head down during the transition period.
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Feb 20, 2017 03:31
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A woman who used to work for Uber described her time there, and it wasn't so great:quote:See, earlier in the year, the organization had promised leather jackets for everyone in organization, and had taken all of our sizes; we all tried them on and found our sizes, and placed our orders. One day, all of the women (there were, I believe, six of us left in the org) received an email saying that no leather jackets were being ordered for the women because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order. I replied and said that I was sure Uber SRE could find room in their budget to buy leather jackets for the, what, six women if it could afford to buy them for over a hundred and twenty men. The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men's jackets but not on the women's jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men's jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets. That's the most ridiculous story she tells, but it's far from the worst.
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Feb 20, 2017 04:27
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Iverron posted:I've run into this kind of behavior with just about every company we've done work for that had an onsite dev team we complimented. It's job security, alpha bullshit. He might be a bad manager, sure. But he's very smart and not a dickhead so I'm patient with him. It's very odd to me that they didn't tell me In the interview that the rest of my team is remote except for my boss who works from home 3 days a week. I don't need my hand held at all, but I am still growing and having a team spread between three time zones - 3 hours back and 5 ahead - might get tough for me.
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Feb 20, 2017 05:03
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Good Will Hrunting posted:He might be a bad manager, sure. But he's very smart and not a dickhead so I'm patient with him. I've had that type before. I never really had to worry about my job under them, but I had lots of trouble effecting any needed change and getting real feedback. There's certainly much worse management out there, including my current boss.
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Feb 20, 2017 05:24
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ultrafilter posted:A woman who used to work for Uber described her time there, and it wasn't so great: gently caress Uber forever.
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Feb 20, 2017 15:32
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My boss just asked me to code review someone's submission for a take-home assignment for hiring (they waived the assignment for me, it's not hard but it's long as poo poo) and said to let him know if I wanted to interview people on sight. Though he did say "epics and stories for our project will be wrapped up soon!" so I guess Week 4 is off to a positive note! What % of people in this industry are on the spectrum?
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Feb 20, 2017 16:14
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All of them. It's a spectrum.
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Feb 20, 2017 17:09
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Somewhere between 0 and 100%
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Feb 20, 2017 19:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:What % of people in this industry are on the spectrum?
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Feb 20, 2017 19:32
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How clueless do you have to be to ask your new employee, not even a month into the job, who has yet to do any work on the project they were hired to work on, to help you in the hiring process lmbo Also my boss is evidently not going to be working on this project at all, so I'll be working with 5 people who I've still yet to speak to that didn't interview me. This feels very weird and I have a feeling things drastically changed on the management side of the parent company between me being interviewed and me starting.
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Feb 20, 2017 19:39
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Hmm. Post it, write a technical explanation of what it enables, and say you're open to schedule a 1:1 for it if they want additional context on it? Well, if it's not blocking, then what does it hurt to leave it there? Poor styling and practice pains me as much as anyone else, but I've learned to keep my mouth shut when it pisses people off to be questioned/criticized. Then again, if it's a job that sucks completely, then gently caress it, might as well try and make it better.
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Feb 20, 2017 19:50
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ultrafilter posted:A woman who used to work for Uber described her time there, and it wasn't so great: #DeleteUber
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Feb 20, 2017 19:51
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ultrafilter posted:A woman who used to work for Uber described her time there, and it wasn't so great: Jesus. I mean, somehow it's not surprising that a company that makes a profit explicitly by ignoring the law has a dysfunctional internal power structure, but goddamn it must suck to be on the receiving end of that.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:05
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Good Will Hrunting posted:How clueless do you have to be to ask your new employee, not even a month into the job, who has yet to do any work on the project they were hired to work on, to help you in the hiring process lmbo Well, what's "help?" I was sitting in on interviews in week 2 of $newjob, not to drive questioning, but to be able to give my thoughts afterwards. (We interview in pairs.)
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Feb 20, 2017 20:11
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Like give feedback for a take home assignment and do a 1 on 1 interview. Just to be clear I am not interested in management at all right now, maybe not ever, but I'm way too early in my life to think about that.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:15
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It's not unusual to have a developer provide a technical assessment for an interview. I'm mean having an employee perform that role that's been there for a month is a little abnormal, but aside from that I'm not really seeing a problem?
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Feb 20, 2017 20:42
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I've been here 3 weeks and have done basically nothing on a project that is still in early planning phases, how can I evaluate someone's ability to succeed in a job on this team or even a tangentially related team that I know hardly nothing about? You don't see a problem in that? Sure, I can interview someone and ask them some problem solving bullshit white boarding or about their last job but uhhhh yeah. I'm not even a "Senior" engineer by any means of the word.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:50
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I made an assumption that you would be there in a technical capacity. If you're being asked to be responsible to find people that'd be a good fit for your team then yeah that's a problem.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:08
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That's understandable but also I'm the least experienced person on the team and the problem domain is a bit new to me. I have a ton of ramping up to do to be successful at my job.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:18
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