|
Doghouse posted:Looking for some goon advice. So you have 3 years of .Net experience just not with web? Keep looking, sounds like a  place with that kinda money.
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 12:49 |
|
|
Yeah, I have WinForms and WPF on my resume but the vast majority of the recruiter spam I get is for stuff with a web front-end.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:20
|
|
|
Doghouse posted:Am I going to be totally stuck? Is there any way I can break into web and mobile development? I would start doing some side web projects on my own, but I honestly don't think I have the time, really, with a growing family, friends, and all that other "life" stuff. I think I'll have to try anyway, but is there anything else I can that would help? Good news: you can change careers, you are really young to worry to much about dead ends. Bad news: it will take time and effort Figure out for yourself a few things: - What do you really want to work on? PIck a few things. This can be anything from vague to very explicit. - What would you see yourself doing the next 5 to 10 years? (after the tech changed, you need to do this again) Again pick a few. Take time to seriously ponder what you feel is important to you. - Where is the market demand in the area you live in? Do not wait for recruiters to spam you, but troll jobboards and make lists of keywords you see most. Do this for a few weeks, Autumn is perfect for this. Now make a mental Venn diagram and see where this all comes together. Work on that by adding it to your job, do some online training and then build something to showcase to the world you can do that thing. Give yourself 6 months tops to teach yourself these skills as to preserve the correctness of your market research. Now massage your CV to make it so that you have about 18 months of experience in those things you really want to work on and you see a future in. Get a job that uses those things very explicitly as a central thing, bluff your way into it, accept a small drop in pay if you can afford it. Thing is to set your priorities straight in this whole process. You mentioned a growing family, so "ability to work from home / parttime" could be very important to you, so ensure that you work on a field that has such shortages that this can be negotiated. Also, if the work is close to home, pays lots and let's you work from home as much as you want but is not the tech you want to work on, would you still take it? Where are your values, what can you do without? Good luck, it is a really rough and bumpy road but the main challenge is not your skills but your priorities.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:38
|
|
|
Keetron posted:Good luck, it is a really rough and bumpy road but the main challenge is not your skills but your priorities. I can sort of understand the fixation on the salary, I don't want to sound cliché but money will not buy your happiness, of course it help to be comfortable but ask yourself if being rich is really your end-goal. I've taken salary cut in the past to get a job I was really interested in and it did pay off in the end, came back higher to my previous salary one year later because they saw how good i was.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:43
|
|
|
Doghouse posted:Is there any way I can break into web and mobile development? You really need to find the time to build out a side project or two if you want to do this without taking a paycut. I do know how much it sucks to pick something up in the evening after you're already drained at work, though, and I'm not even close to having a family to worry about. Is there any way you can scale back work-work by a little bit? Or a way to even remotely justify learning some web development as a part of your current role? You have three years of solid development experience already, if you can show a decent amount of competence with web or mobile (and an ability to learn things on your own), then you'll be a fantastic pick-up for most dev teams, even without professional experience in those areas.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:45
|
|
|
I'll take a moment to question: why do you want to work in web dev? If it's something you want to do because it interests you, that's fine. If you're just trying to chase the most common type of dev work, though, I wouldn't worry; most types of software dev are in high demand. For my part, I find the domain I'm working in to be more interesting than the technology I'm using, so I chased that by building my domain-specific expertise. In my case that meant life sciences, but it could also be stuff like civil engineering, or most other sciences, or farming, or etc. etc. etc. Basically there are a lot of industries out there that are, even now, still relatively untapped in terms of integrating software, and developers that have experience with those industries are in high demand as they get more and more software.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:50
|
|
|
Thanks for the adviceAskYourself posted:I can sort of understand the fixation on the salary, I don't want to sound cliché but money will not buy your happiness, of course it help to be comfortable but ask yourself if being rich is really your end-goal. I've taken salary cut in the past to get a job I was really interested in and it did pay off in the end, came back higher to my previous salary one year later because they saw how good i was. I agree. I would be willing to take a pay cut, this case was just not a company I liked that much anyway, and the pay cut was significant. And I'm not trying to get rich, I just have a mortgage, a new kiddo, etc. GenJoe posted:You really need to find the time to build out a side project or two if you want to do this without taking a paycut. I do know how much it sucks to pick something up in the evening after you're already drained at work, though, and I'm not even close to having a family to worry about. Is there any way you can scale back work-work by a little bit? Or a way to even remotely justify learning some web development as a part of your current role? Yeah I kinda figured this and will probably end up trying to start working on a side project. I don't think I could scale back work-work at this point. My current company is ok with taking time on the job to learn but I'm not sure how I could sell the idea of learning something totally unrelated to what we do. Keetron posted:Good news: you can change careers, you are really young to worry to much about dead ends. Haha thanks. I'm not as young as you might think, I got into software development a bit later than most, so I'm 32 now. But the point stands. I don't need to work from home or part time. I'm fine with my current job as far as everything but the work itself - the pay is fine, the benefits are fine. But it is excruciatingly boring.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:53
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'll take a moment to question: why do you want to work in web dev? If it's something you want to do because it interests you, that's fine. If you're just trying to chase the most common type of dev work, though, I wouldn't worry; most types of software dev are in high demand. Yeah I am interested both web and mobile, but I also I want to have exposure to new things as opposed to just working on an old WPF app forever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 20:56
|
|
|
Doghouse posted:Looking for some goon advice. I moved from mainly C# to full web development and it wasn't that hard, though I had a fair bit of ASP.NET web development already (although, looking back, that was all garbage). Try learning some .NET based web stuff, like writing a backend REST API, to leverage your existing skills. Then work on learning JavaScript/TypeScript, and consume that API. This should help mitigate taking a huge pay cut.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 21:44
|
|
|
The good news with going more broader market skillsets is that you'll have more jobs to choose from and this is somewhat correlated with the number of remote jobs available. The downside is that they're oftentimes positions that are fairly easily offshored because in a properly distributed company it really shouldn't matter where an engineer is anymore and you should have no reason to pay someone in South Africa like they're in SF or NYC. There are a few companies that are pretty solid that I can name off the top of my head with decent enough growth and remote work policies that pay at or above market that seem to have their poo poo together enough to stick with for several years.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2017 23:14
|
|
|
Doghouse posted:Haha thanks. I'm not as young as you might think, I got into software development a bit later than most, so I'm 32 now. But the point stands. You are young, there are over 35 years of labour in your future so make sure you do something that you enjoy. Made a change in direction a few years ago at 37 myself. It is never to early to make sure you will last a while.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2017 08:22
|
|
|
What are some things that folks here wished they knew before they started their first official senior/team lead role? I'm starting my first (as a dev) official, no poo poo they hired me explicitly to lead and grow and mentor oh god don't let me gently caress this up role soon, so insights and experiences would be much appreciated. Edit: also would love to hear from people who aren't senior as to what they would want from someone in that role.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2017 19:47
|
|
|
I'm a mid level with ~4 years experience now. My biggest wants from a manager are realizing whether or not an efficient amount of work is coming through the pipeline to us, whether or not we have proper specifications, if we lack someone to go to with requirements questions, whether I have someone who can answer pressing design decisions related to the module/service/etc that I can't make concretely myself, and someone who reviews my code in a timely manor. This is what I think a mentor in software should be: someone who makes sure you're getting semi-well-defined work and being given the chance to implement things on your own with review happening at the end and availability for pressing design decisions.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2017 19:54
|
|
|
People and products over tools and processes. One of the best lines from the agile manifesto. Make sure the people are enabled to create a product, gently caress the rest. If your upper management will not let you do this, consider if you want to sell your soul for money. Do I need to continue?
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2017 20:18
|
|
|
metztli posted:What are some things that folks here wished they knew before they started their first official senior/team lead role? That in some companies the people to whom you ultimately answer have no idea how to do anything and they will never listen to you and dealing with stakeholders and their expectations is like herding cats. Most of the time they're just loving idiots. Also that if you're brought in to be a lead and all of your suggestions are poo poo on and ignored, to start looking for a new job immediately. Because at the point, you should know that they don't want a team leader. They want a Yes! Man and / or a fall guy. Everything started really well. It was an ideal job and project on paper. Hugely popular website with massive amounts of data, interesting challenges with migration and a new product that I hadn't used before. Everyone was happy with what had been chosen. The first major part of my new role should not have been its peak. The project fell into never ending scope creep and I left after feeling completely ineffective and burned out. Everything that I attempted to do to course correct was met with resistance. First from my boss and the stakeholders and eventually the rest of the team because they didn't want to get poo poo on like I had been. That was 2 years from the start of the project that was initially thought to be 6 months. They didn't finish the project for another year after I left. geeves fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 30, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2017 21:29
|
|
|
geeves posted:That in some companies the people to whom you ultimately answer have no idea how to do anything and they will never listen to you and dealing with stakeholders and their expectations is like herding cats. Most of the time they're just loving idiots. Yeah seconding this. If you're trying to change anything at all your #1 priority should be getting buy-in from all stakeholders. The moment it becomes apparent that management is only giving you lip service and not actually giving you teeth everyone will learn that it's safe to ignore any suggestions for change that you make. My current client is guilty of this and I've been attempting to get them to adopt better practices for almost a year now. Any time I corner the managers and show them how no progress is being made they promise to provide me support- only to abandon that promise the very next day. I'm looking to be transferred to a different client because of this.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2017 22:33
|
|
|
Good stuff. It's a start up, and they are making the right noises so far, have been very high-touch since I accepted in regards to asking my opinions on stuff that I'll be responsible for and have to deal with, so that's a good sign. The thing that really gets the butterflies going is making drat sure I don't fail the people I'm going to be managing/mentoring. I've managed in the past in my previous career, but technical leadership and management is definitely a different beast.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2017 02:57
|
|
|
My manager seems to not do anything except micromanage and nitpick about nonsense. He literally has no power to make any real decisions (that's reserved for some people who used to work in sales and now are VPs of whatever and know nothing about software) and is always coming up with ideas that he brings up but never does anything about. He's been there for 30 years but I literally have no idea what the point of his job is. So... Not that, I guess.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2017 04:48
|
|
|
metztli posted:What are some things that folks here wished they knew before they started their first official senior/team lead role? Avoid trying to write too much code / going over people's heads. You'll need a team you can trust to write the code for you, and you're around mostly to be a referee that people trust because you're supposed to know the most / best. Mentorship is oftentimes simply giving people enough room to fail and understanding when someone needs to fail a bit or if they need something to stake onto their resume. Someone sharp should be given responsibilities for stuff and you can probably trust they'll get through it, but maybe they'll need to avoid certain rabbit holes that only experience can tell you to avoid. Some people need to hit a rabbit hole themselves because they're cocky or just too unaware of things that are the bigger enemies. Being a team lead can be satisfying in its own way that technical work can never amount to. If you're cool with helping some folks feel better about their work and seeing them through to gaining enough confidence to potentially even take over your own position, you will probably do fine. If you just want to be a power broker or something, go over to manager land where you really do need to be good at politics to succeed - this applies even for "good" companies, btw.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2017 14:34
|
|
|
I want a new job. I'd had the same IoT embedded systems job since I graduated college four years ago and I haven't been very stimulated/happy for the last ~two years. My intuition tells me it's not going to get much better. Besides that, I have a feeling it's time for a change. The pay is pretty good for the area though. I've done a handful of interviews scattered over the last two years without any offers. I figured it's a typical experience but it bums me out more than a little. Remote work would be awesome since I don't exactly live within a reasonable commute of silicon valley. It's kind of hard to find that in embedded/Linux/C-land though. Where are people searching for jobs nowadays? I've been hitting up indeed a few times a week, is that still a solid place to look? I've actually only had luck getting interviews with personal referrals. Online applications just disappear into a void. I've got (what I think is) a solid resume that I tailor to each posting and take the time to write a cover letter that follows the gist of the application. Thanks for any help!
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2017 09:04
|
|
|
If you were an almost entirely self-taught programmer and wanted to actually learn the theory behind what you do, how would you go about it? For background, I've been programming as a career for the last 10 years, and I have a mathematics degree, but the extent of my computer science knowledge is a few of my friends textbooks I looked through when i was at uni in 2003, and various bits I've picked up just from doing this stuff 5 days a week and reading about stuff. So my knowledge of things like structuring programs properly, testing, converting written requirements into actual code etc. is great, but if you asked me to e.g. implement a text editor using a gap buffer, I'd be lost. Same with things like a simple binary search tree - I know what they are, I can implement one myself, but I only have a passing idea of the underlying theory. I understand the general concepts of complexity analysis, but couldn't rattle off the big Os of various operations without google (though this is probably common even with people with a degree tbh...) So I have a lot of general knowledge of compsci, but nothing really detailed, and I'd like to change that. I've been watching the SICP lectures on youtube, and they definitely cover a lot of what I'm after, but I'm also thinking of doing some EDX stuff over the next year or so. Not to put on my CV, but just so that I actually have a structured way of learning the whole thing instead of trying to pick it up piecemeal from wikipedia. Possibly/probably going through the equivalent of a full degree in my spare time. Anyone done this sort of thing?
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2017 09:44
|
|
|
Read the Algorithms textbook by Vazirani / Papadimitriou.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2017 10:19
|
|
|
meatpotato posted:I want a new job. I'd had the same IoT embedded systems job since I graduated college four years ago and I haven't been very stimulated/happy for the last ~two years. My intuition tells me it's not going to get much better. Besides that, I have a feeling it's time for a change. The pay is pretty good for the area though. Current games job board is https://orcahq.com LinkedIn is a thing I've gotten jobs through as well.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2017 12:25
|
|
|
meatpotato posted:I want a new job. I'd had the same IoT embedded systems job since I graduated college four years ago and I haven't been very stimulated/happy for the last ~two years. My intuition tells me it's not going to get much better. Besides that, I have a feeling it's time for a change. The pay is pretty good for the area though. I use Stack Overflow jobs, LinkedIn, and my personal network. Stack Overflow is a little like shouting into the void - I wrote a generic cover letter introducing myself and personalize it for each company, but I don't write a custom cover letter for each one. I've gotten some calls/interviews as a result, but to me it's purely a numbers game. On LinkedIn I try to make my profile as recruiter-friendly as possible and sometimes I grow my connections by trying to connect with everyone the "you might know" algorithm puts in front of me, which can get me an awful lot of recruiter spam. I'm selective about which recruiters I respond to (I strongly favor internal recruiters and not some idiot from the likes of Robert Half), but I've gotten a lot of interviews through LinkedIn. Personal networking's worked the best, especially if the goal is to get a job at a particular company, as opposed to "any job that is not the one which I currently have".
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2017 20:21
|
|
|
meatpotato posted:I want a new job. I'd had the same IoT embedded systems job since I graduated college four years ago and I haven't been very stimulated/happy for the last ~two years. My intuition tells me it's not going to get much better. Besides that, I have a feeling it's time for a change. The pay is pretty good for the area though. This was exactly me this spring, in NYC which is a terrible market. Angellist (angel.co) isn't a bad option I guess? There are definitely jobs out there they might just be with other IoT terrible startups.
|
|
#
?
Sep 7, 2017 00:44
|
|
|
Quit my job this week. On Monday there was a meeting held in Thai, and on Thursday I found out that that meeting had basically cancelled my current project - but no one bothered to tell me until I went to my manager and forced her to tell me what the meeting was about. I only realised it pertained to me when I overheard a conversation in Thai about my project. Someone out there can handle that kind of communication, but I can't. Working on a cancelled project for 3 days and only finding out by getting in a yelling match with your manager isn't a loving workable arrangement for me. So on that note, anyone have any tips for landing a remote job? I'm on Flexjobs, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn, but I haven't figured out a good way to find jobs that are totally remote. I need to spend some time taking care of my parents and they live in bumfuck, nowhere.
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2017 18:52
|
|
|
Loutre posted:So on that note, anyone have any tips for landing a remote job? I'm on Flexjobs, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn, but I haven't figured out a good way to find jobs that are totally remote. I need to spend some time taking care of my parents and they live in bumfuck, nowhere. Also check out weworkremotely and wfh.io, and maybe search Twitter as well. IDK where you live but are there local developer meetups geared toward whatever work you do, or language/platforms you use? At least where I'm at, there are usually always a couple people at those who work at some remote-friendly company and are always hungry for referral bucks. Also I think you'd be surprised what companies are in fact remote-friendly, so don't be afraid to just ask "is remote okay." kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Sep 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2017 19:05
|
|
|
Loutre posted:Quit my job this week. On Monday there was a meeting held in Thai, and on Thursday I found out that that meeting had basically cancelled my current project - but no one bothered to tell me until I went to my manager and forced her to tell me what the meeting was about. I only realised it pertained to me when I overheard a conversation in Thai about my project. Someone out there can handle that kind of communication, but I can't. Working on a cancelled project for 3 days and only finding out by getting in a yelling match with your manager isn't a loving workable arrangement for me. Holy poo poo, glad you quit instead of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because that is the shittiest thing I ever heard.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2017 07:42
|
|
|
Elastic.co (folks that make / support Elasticsearch) is a company that pays quite well and is strong on benefits and pay for remote workers - probably in the top 10% I'd guess.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2017 14:54
|
|
|
I'm kind of wary of remote work myself, because it's highly dependent on how well the company can pull it off/how invested it is in supporting remote workers. I ultimately declined an offer from a company that wanted a remote worker cause I didn't think it could handle me as a remote employee particularly well, and feared that it would find it annoying enough to dump me after a short amount of time.  Not to mention all the other issues surrounding remote work, e.g. loneliness and possible time zone differences. It can be hard to pull off, and I'm not sure I can handle it yet.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2017 17:19
|
|
|
Loutre posted:I found out that that meeting had basically cancelled my current project - but no one bothered to tell me until I went to my manager and forced her to tell me what the meeting was about. That's so lovely, sorry you had to live that situation man.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2017 17:59
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:Not to mention all the other issues surrounding remote work, e.g. loneliness and possible time zone differences. It can be hard to pull off, and I'm not sure I can handle it yet. The time zone aspect was actually a really nice bonus when I was working remotely for a west coast team. The rest of the team wouldn't roll into the office until 10:30 or 11am their time, which meant I pretty much had four solid hours of work time in which I was guaranteed not to be interrupted. That time was precious gold. I had 4 hours of time in which to schedule meetings and such, and then I'd "go home." I liked to open PRs just before quitting for the day, because then my colleagues had some time to look them over without me breathing down their necks about it. The trick to the flip side of this is to immediately calibrate expectations, that you're not responding to queries after (your) work hours unless things are literally on fire. There is a temptation to answer a message on Slack at 8pm your time because there are still people in the office. "Whatever," you think to yourself, "I'm just sitting on the toilet reading twitter anyway, it doesn't hurt to respond." This takes you to a place you do not want to go.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2017 18:16
|
|
|
What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 10:44
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect. disclaimer: I've only read a few chapters of the SRE book and that's what I base the following on. I think it's gonna depend a whole ton on what that company's interpretation of "SRE" is. My attempt at a capsule description of the Google SRE role: "administrative responsibilities for systems at scale achieved using SWE/CS skills to make/use/improve automation; responsible for being able to triage failures and at least partially localize non-{systems, hardware} failure back into the running applications; shares responsibility for uptime with developers of applications running on those systems." My expectation seeing an "SRE" role from another big company would be that it may have some elements of the google SRE role. My expectation seeing an "SRE" role from a small to medium company would be "nah, you guys don't actually need SREs, what is this role actually" prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 16, 2017 |
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 14:39
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect. Based on mrmcd's avatar, I assume SRE work is like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect. Here's what you should probably know (or at least know about) beyond the same set of coding skills you need as a SWE if you're an SRE for a competently run operations org (most aren't, btw):
Mniot posted:Based on mrmcd's avatar, I assume SRE work is like
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 18:50
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect. - Oncall. Ok admittedly they did devops "right" by putting SWEs on the oncall rotation too, but as the person with the most intimate knowledge of how all the different systems interact, you're gonna get roped into every emergency anyway. - It can be high pressure. The best SWEs were those who could walk into an emergency with little knowledge of the systems, calmly and systematically probe some important points to figure out the problem, and crank out a mitigation or solution fairly quickly, all while managers are screaming and tearing their hair out that $$$ & customer goodwill are being lost every minute. Not everyone is built to work like that. (Personally, I panicked every time I encountered a problem that I hadn't seen before so I was a terrible SRE to be oncall with) - Weird caste system. Just like SWEs probably think themselves to be better than those Computer Janitor sysadmins, SWEs seemed to perceive themselves as better than SREs. While both might both have CompSci degrees, the SRE's opinion never seemed to count as much. - "So... what do you do?". The SRE top-dog had a constant battle trying to explain his org's purpose. It was hard to boil down into just one easy-to-understand sentence. This affected recruiting and expectations, because they'd advertise for Proper Engineers but then have to explain that half the job was fire-fighting, wrangling configs, and waiting on progress bars. - Infrastructure-as-code is not fun to work in. Automating everything means writing code, but the bodgy nature of the domain means that code is gonna be bodgy too. It's often adding bandaids and tweaking config files. Even when you're writing code, it doesn't feel like "engineering". If you're into writing tools with clean architecture and interfaces, then you'll be disappointed. - Forget deep focus. Since part of the job is reacting to emergencies, it can be really difficult to focus on coding. If you're the type that likes to clamp the headphones on and just batter out code for many hours in a blissful state of Flow, it ain't gonna happen very often. SREs were expected to have broad-but-not-deep knowledge. I was expected to know: - Monitoring, alerting "@ scale", which means a decent grasp of Statistics 101 so you understand things like .99 percentiles. - Being able to read any language we used, if not write it. (Bash, Go, Python, C++, JavaScript, PHP lol) - Pretty deep understanding of networking, including how it interacted with the Linux kernel. E.g. you'd have to know how to detect when a process was running out of sockets and how to increase the limit. - Understand the many many services, how they interact, how to bandaid fix them, recompile and deploy them. E.g. If X is alerting, then you're the one that knows it might be because upstream client Y (owned by a different team) is acting up again. To make matters worse, this ecosystem is constantly changing. - Understand compilation and deployment issues. Most SWEs didn't know much about how compilers worked, so things like performance optimizations + hot-function linking were left to the SREs to implement. SREs are notoriously difficult to hire for because I reckon none of that sounds very appealing to anyone who is competent enough to be a SWE. I joined as an SRE because I honestly didn't think I had the chops to make it as a SWE, but that wasn't true and my resume seems to be tainted with it now. Recruiters approach me for SRE roles because it was the last thing I did, despite being a SWE for many years before that. Edit: I forgot the most fun part: in performance reviews, SWEs can point at features they've implemented with data to back up how useful it is. SREs main achievements are about improving reliability, but surprisingly that can be difficult to prove, even if you have backing data. And work like upgrading kernels to avoid potential security holes may not have any measurable impact, so it can be hard to justify. minato fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Sep 16, 2017 |
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 20:52
|
|
|
quote:- It can be high pressure. The best SWEs were those who could walk into an emergency with little knowledge of the systems, calmly and systematically probe some important points to figure out the problem, and crank out a mitigation or solution fairly quickly, all while managers are screaming and tearing their hair out that $$$ & customer goodwill are being lost every minute. Not everyone is built to work like that. (Personally, I panicked every time I encountered a problem that I hadn't seen before so I was a terrible SRE to be oncall with) management failing to remain calm and manage the customer/business side independently of the developers is a sign of lack of maturity and/or trust. isolate the tech team to resolve the issue while the business team can work on customer management. I do think developing the ability to work well under pressure with the unknown is a very valuable (and valued) skill in this day and age, and those who choose not to develop this skill or smugly say "SDEs shouldn't be oncall" are going to lose this battle. I would also say any actively developed service where the SDEs are not the most adept group at operating and debugging their service is a service you probably don't want to be relying on =/. EDIT: the big difficulty with SRE showing value is that their value is inherently in all the money you didn't spend or lose. A good way of doing this (I've seen) is showing how SRE work has reduced the time to do certain common functions or allowed for scaling to not require a (super)linear increase in headcount. Another avenue would be measuring availability of the service, which any good service should have as a key objective. FamDav fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Sep 16, 2017 |
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 22:23
|
|
|
Thanks for the insight. I think I'll stay away from those opportunities. I've been a generalist SWE for a few years now and I see the power of specializing my career somewhat, but I don't feel intrinsically drawn to any particular specialization. That's been giving me a bit of stress lately and I'm not sure why.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2017 22:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 12:49 |
|
|
The flip side to all the cautionary posts is that SRE positions in reputable companies pay way more than the equivalent level SWE.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2017 05:30
|
|
