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Wonder what they'd call "Jacket but No Tie" and "Flip-flops with Socks"
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Oct 13, 2017 22:13
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“Scrub” may be about right
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Oct 13, 2017 22:21
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I joined a small dev team a little over a year ago as a straight-up developer. Since then I've taken on essentially a second-in-command developer/back-end designer role under our Senior Architect. I've asked to have my title and salary adjusted given the new responsibilities and while I realize the title doesn't necessarily correlate to any real standards across the industry - having the right words on a resume can make all the difference so I was wondering what I should shoot for. I am inclined to think "Technical/Team Lead" or "Senior Software Developer" since my role has expanded beyond coding to being the direct technical contact for our clients and being the sort of "on-call" guy to put out fires. Anyone have any suggestions?
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Oct 13, 2017 23:30
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Good Soldier Svejk posted:I joined a small dev team a little over a year ago as a straight-up developer. Since then I've taken on essentially a second-in-command developer/back-end designer role under our Senior Architect. I've asked to have my title and salary adjusted given the new responsibilities and while I realize the title doesn't necessarily correlate to any real standards across the industry - having the right words on a resume can make all the difference so I was wondering what I should shoot for. I am inclined to think "Technical/Team Lead" or "Senior Software Developer" since my role has expanded beyond coding to being the direct technical contact for our clients and being the sort of "on-call" guy to put out fires. Team Lead usually signals "had responsibility for other developers working under you". Senior Software Engineer usually signals "skilled/tenured individual contributor".
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Oct 14, 2017 00:06
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I should have clarified that my Amazon knowledge is pretty out of date (mid-2000's). It's not surprising that they've made advances, considering that EC2 was just beginning to be a thing when i was working there. I remember when they first started trying to get us to put all our stuff on VMs instead of actual physical machines. Fair, though I’d say the anemic laptop thing was an issue for much longer than mid 2000s
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Oct 14, 2017 01:46
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Che Delilas posted:Wonder what they'd call "Jacket but No Tie" and "Flip-flops with Socks" Googbeard.
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Oct 14, 2017 03:19
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Good Soldier Svejk posted:I joined a small dev team a little over a year ago as a straight-up developer. Since then I've taken on essentially a second-in-command developer/back-end designer role under our Senior Architect. I've asked to have my title and salary adjusted given the new responsibilities and while I realize the title doesn't necessarily correlate to any real standards across the industry - having the right words on a resume can make all the difference so I was wondering what I should shoot for. I am inclined to think "Technical/Team Lead" or "Senior Software Developer" since my role has expanded beyond coding to being the direct technical contact for our clients and being the sort of "on-call" guy to put out fires. Be careful trying to jump titles too early. I don't know how long you've been working professionally, and while years of experience isn't the only qualification for seniority, but having too big of a title can screw you when you try to go elsewhere that has very different standards for the same title. Instead, I'd approach the conversation with your manager about what a growth path looks like for you at your company. What's the next tier that you're working towards? What are the competencies of being in that tier?
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Oct 14, 2017 13:18
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There's also nothing wrong with taking your time building your career. Don't be like me and freak out over seniority, experience, and all that, and suddenly try starting to push yourself as far as possible - these sorts of things take time, inevitably.
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Oct 14, 2017 16:02
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Doh004 posted:Be careful trying to jump titles too early. I don't know how long you've been working professionally, and while years of experience isn't the only qualification for seniority, but having too big of a title can screw you when you try to go elsewhere that has very different standards for the same title. I got bit by this, even within the same company. About a year and a half into my first job out of college, they saw me having mopped up messes created by a terrible teammate. My boss complimented me on rescuing us from problems and told me I had a raise coming. What they did was fire that teammate and give me the "Senior Engineer" role that he formerly occupied. The new title came with a 10% pay raise. Subsequent to then, they had significant trouble getting any sort of further merit raise for me. The HR office that reviewed raise requests said "we're not approving this higher salary for a senior engineer with such few years of total job experience."
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Oct 14, 2017 17:41
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kitten smoothie posted:I got bit by this, even within the same company. That’s when you just bounce. Start of your career should be greatly raising your salary each year or you’re doing it wrong.
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Oct 14, 2017 17:57
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Hughlander posted:That’s when you just bounce. Start of your career should be greatly raising your salary each year or you’re doing it wrong. Started at 75k -> 85k raise at same company after year 1 -> only 5k raise the following year -> left and hit 120k (base for all of those) I can't imagine making 150k+ unless I get a Senior title and I definitely won't make any progress at my current role in terms of career or money, which is why I'm definitely looking to leave as soon as my bonus (and possibly a huge referral bonus for a friend in a different team opening) hits.
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Oct 14, 2017 18:11
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kitten smoothie posted:I got bit by this, even within the same company. Having an inflated title early in your career can lead to other problems. I did something incredibly stupid and totally against the advice anyone would give you in this thread - I accepted a counter-offer that would transfer me to a different state that would give me a relocation bonus with a clawback period of two years. I switched from senior QA automation engineer to senior software engineer with no commercial programming experience - trying to switch jobs again when you have that kind of title and not much real experience is hard. Worse still when you have that kind of title and are expected to produce as such in your own company. It screwed me because a) my resume looked loving weird in a job search and recruiters didn't know what to make of me, b) I had trouble actually accomplishing things, owing to actually being a new developer, c) I had to produce well enough to not get fired or pay back their ridiculous relocation bonus. Having projects like "learn MFC and make a new host for our activex control, it's scrum so you have two weeks, hop to it" without having real experience is difficult. I think I did pretty drat well for someone with no experience, but when judged against a senior engineer standard, my accomplishments weren't stellar, so I didn't really get much in the way of merit increases. The only saving grace was that I spent the first couple of years of my career (and actually possibly all of it, the way things are going now) working entirely on doomed projects so all that code got thrown away anyway.
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Oct 14, 2017 18:34
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Money is good and all but also try to find a place that you enjoy working at. I took a $10k pay cut when I went to my second job and it was the best decision I could have made.
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Oct 14, 2017 18:49
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Having an inflated title early in your career can lead to other problems. I did something incredibly stupid and totally against the advice anyone would give you in this thread - I accepted a counter-offer that would transfer me to a different state that would give me a relocation bonus with a clawback period of two years. I switched from senior QA automation engineer to senior software engineer with no commercial programming experience - trying to switch jobs again when you have that kind of title and not much real experience is hard. Worse still when you have that kind of title and are expected to produce as such in your own company. I would have done the same thing honestly. I did something slightly similar. I was a consultant for Enterprise Software and had a CS degree but no professional coding experience. I was a 'Senior Technical Architect' for a company and took a transfer to another division as a 'Senior Software Engineer' which was technically a step down. Got there and spent the first few weeks trying to convert my memory of C++ in college to something that would actually compile. By the time they closed the division down I could work well enough to leverage it to another Senior Software Engineer position and now I can make the whole thing sound like a logical journey. The actual experience you have matters little, how you talk about it and the narrative of your career you make is the most important thing.
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Oct 14, 2017 19:28
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Hughlander posted:I would have done the same thing honestly. I did something slightly similar. I was a consultant for Enterprise Software and had a CS degree but no professional coding experience. I was a 'Senior Technical Architect' for a company and took a transfer to another division as a 'Senior Software Engineer' which was technically a step down. Got there and spent the first few weeks trying to convert my memory of C++ in college to something that would actually compile. By the time they closed the division down I could work well enough to leverage it to another Senior Software Engineer position and now I can make the whole thing sound like a logical journey. It's true, the actual experience I received from the experience made me mature as a developer incredibly quickly, and just having survived without losing my job and actually becoming a lead engineer is a really impressive story. But if you're looking to work only 40 hours a week and receive huge salary increases while doing so, you should follow the thread's examples of hopping jobs every two years and optimizing for salary. I would consider myself a much stronger engineer for having gone through this horrible experience, but I did horribly screw myself on salary as a result.
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Oct 14, 2017 20:00
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Hughlander posted:That’s when you just bounce. Start of your career should be greatly raising your salary each year or you’re doing it wrong. Should've done that. Did it wayyyy too late because I didn't have the self-confidence to think I could do any better. I got up the guts and quit that aforementioned job in 2013, for a 40% raise at the new place. I hopped twice afterward. I'm now in a job I love and I'm making more than double what I did in 2013. The amount of money I left on the table is kind of staggering.
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Oct 14, 2017 20:24
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Yeah I've changed jobs 4 times in 12 years. The jumps we're roughly 55 > 75 80 > 110 150 > 165 Comfortable employees must be a huge cost savings for employers, lol.
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Oct 14, 2017 20:32
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mrmcd posted:Comfortable employees must be a huge cost savings for employers, lol. You'd think... that... places might... listen to complaints about {processes, product management, decision making, roadmaps, tech} instead of giving zero shits what their employees suggest and running like a dictatorship when it costs so much money to hire new employees?? I'd be more than happy clearing over 135k (current job) if I had any sort of feeling that management wasn't using me and the senior engineers and even the leads really as basically robots who churn out code. But now I'm looking to leave after a year and expect at least 20% increase given my skills learned in a hot market.
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Oct 14, 2017 20:36
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US dev salaries are loving ridiculous.
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Oct 14, 2017 23:31
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redleader posted:US dev salaries are loving ridiculous. Might as well cash in while the getting’s good. I’m always shocked at the abysmal pay devs get in the UK and other countries.
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Oct 14, 2017 23:43
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Yeah while it feels very bubble-ish, I'm happy to keep banking cash until things change. edit: also pay is probably ~30% less outside of NYC and SF metro markets.
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Oct 14, 2017 23:47
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e: bad idea
Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 14, 2017 23:57
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redleader posted:US dev salaries are loving ridiculous. I tend to think that non-US are insane. I can afford a nice house in Seattle on a dev salary. Can you buy a detached house on a London salary that will get you to the city center in 30 minutes? If not which one is ridiculous?
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Oct 15, 2017 00:16
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mrmcd posted:edit: also pay is probably ~30% less outside of NYC and SF metro markets. That's a pretty accurate number. Outside of the mega hotspots, a senior dev is going to be bouncing against a ceiling somewhere around $115-130. At that level, you're within spitting distance of (or passed) a lot of non-tech VP/Director/Manager pay, and they'll be damned if some dirty computer nerd is going to make more than that.
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Oct 15, 2017 00:19
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In the Netherlands, if you want to make bank you will have to work as an independant contractor to get close to 100K Euro, but that is also because the labor protection laws in this country are such that as a permanent employee it is almost impossible to get fired and if that happens due to down sizing, you get a ton of benefits. So a lot of the pay is matching the risk taken. Kind of similar to the US, with the right-to-work laws...
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Oct 15, 2017 09:00
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Keetron posted:In the Netherlands, if you want to make bank you will have to work as an independant contractor to get close to 100K Euro, but that is also because the labor protection laws in this country are such that as a permanent employee it is almost impossible to get fired and if that happens due to down sizing, you get a ton of benefits. So a lot of the pay is matching the risk taken. Kind of similar to the US, with the right-to-work laws... Right-to-work in the US doesn't mean you need a higher standard to fire someone. Right-to-work laws prohibit employees in unionized workplaces from being required to join a union or pay the union to represent them. States that don't have right-to-work can have "union shops," where you must either already be a member upon hiring, or you have to join within some period of time after hiring on. Even in a right-to-work state, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, unless you have a contract in place with your employer that dictates the ways you can lose your job. There are exceptions with regard to discrimination, but they're narrow. You can be fired for being gay in quite a few states, for example.
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Oct 15, 2017 16:32
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kitten smoothie posted:Right-to-work in the US doesn't mean you need a higher standard to fire someone. Right-to-work laws prohibit employees in unionized workplaces from being required to join a union or pay the union to represent them. States that don't have right-to-work can have "union shops," where you must either already be a member upon hiring, or you have to join within some period of time after hiring on. "Employment at will" is probably the term he's thinking of. There are things resembling a "due process" like PIPs, severance packages, etc. They are entirely voluntary on the part of the employer though, and usually more about legal rear end covering to head off lawsuits than actual fairness to employees. edit: fwiw the list of protected classes is here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class mrmcd fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Oct 15, 2017 |
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Oct 15, 2017 16:43
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kitten smoothie posted:Right-to-work in the US doesn't mean you need a higher standard to fire someone. Right-to-work laws prohibit employees in unionized workplaces from being required to join a union or pay the union to represent them. States that don't have right-to-work can have "union shops," where you must either already be a member upon hiring, or you have to join within some period of time after hiring on.
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Oct 15, 2017 19:44
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Ralith posted:I assumed his point was that pay in the US is higher in part due to lower job security. Yeah, my US employer was very surprised to learn that they couldn't just fire 2 senior software engineers at my old office that they felt were surplus to requirements. First there was a 4 month notice period for any termination, then the engineers made a kerfuffle about the last in-first out laws Sweden has on employees within the same role and the engineer's union lawyers forced the company to terminate the 2 most junior engineers instead. I suspect that incident is a big part of why, the next time there were layoffs, the company decided to fire every engineer in the entire office and then give a couple of us relocation offers to the US. My total comp in San Francisco is like 5x what it was for doing very similar work so certainly my cost for the company has gone up, but also my new at-will contract is more flexible from the company perspective. In general I feel like the risks I face over here is a lot greater in a couple of ways and I need to personally save more money for unexpected unemployment, retirement, etc. The cost of living is also way higher, there's not a hoot in hell that I can get an equally nice apartment in San Francisco within walking distance to work as my $800/month 3-room co-op back in Gothenburg and instead I now spend $3.5k/month on a glorified closet within walking distance from work. I'm certainly more well-off in many ways, but the last couple of years haven't been some sort of huge leap in quality of life either.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:20
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Ralith posted:I assumed his point was that pay in the US is higher in part due to lower job security. That and we're responsible for our own retirement savings and healthcare. If we had something like the NHS, we wouldn't need to be paid as much.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:46
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Xerophyte posted:Yeah, my US employer was very surprised to learn that they couldn't just fire 2 senior software engineers at my old office that they felt were surplus to requirements. First there was a 4 month notice period for any termination, then the engineers made a kerfuffle about the last in-first out laws Sweden has on employees within the same role and the engineer's union lawyers forced the company to terminate the 2 most junior engineers instead. I am slightly surprised to hear that about Sweden, because I had understood that one of the cornerstones of the Nordic model was high flexibility in labor markets; i.e., you can hire and fire relatively freely but it's relatively low-risk for individual employees because of the comprehensive nature of the social safety net. Obviously here in Freedomland control is skewed strongly towards the employer, and even the wildest possible permutations of the governing American left would not produce Denmark 2.0. However, if your skills are in demand and you know how to play the game with some degree of effectiveness, you can make a substantial amount of money. It's a high-risk, high-reward environment. I'm not sure what to think of the current labor market for developers in the US, and whether it's really a bubble. The people that brought Trump to power are discontented blue-collar workers who didn't see that their ancestors were living in a bubble; they were making lots of money for unskilled labor due to extreme demand in the post-WW2 era, and a combination of automation, sagging demand, and cheap overseas labor has eviscerated them. At what point do these elements catch up with us? Demand doesn't seem likely to sag any time soon with the importance of technology to modern society, unless everything goes all Interstellar on us and we all have to become subsistence farmers. Cheap overseas labor hasn't made a serious dent thus far; if anything, the crap code you get out of Tata/Wipro sweatshops has underscored the importance of having talented developers. Automation seems the most likely to me with the rise of machine learning, but maybe ML-generated code won't be useful for anything but replacing the kind of stuff management would've tried to outsource.
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Oct 15, 2017 22:12
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chutwig posted:Automation seems the most likely to me with the rise of machine learning, but maybe ML-generated code won't be useful for anything but replacing the kind of stuff management would've tried to outsource. I'm not too worried about automation/AI/ML/$buzzword, because software development is going to be one of the last jobs to go. Long before they automate one of the most cognitively challenging jobs, 3/4 of the rest of the workforce is already going to be replaced. If there's blood in the streets, I don't think I'll be all that worried about my Kanban board.
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Oct 15, 2017 22:20
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Put another way: by the time software developers are in danger of automating away their own jobs, all the devs will probably have already been lynched by the other workers whose jobs they've automated into obsolescence.
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Oct 15, 2017 22:40
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A lot of ML is really oversold now too. 95% of products with ML and AI marketing behind them are really just fancy automated classifiers. Which is cool in its own regard, they have gotten a lot better at certain classification problems, and it opens new possibilities for automation. However, there's so much garbage ML models that simply don't work because the DNN stuff either overfits, ends up chasing phantoms in the data, or just has the wrong features or no where near enough training data. Many people huffing the AI revolution hype train don't even understand concepts like over fitting, precision vs. recall, how to build clean, uncontaminated training and validation data sets, etc. Also being 95% accurate is fine for say, Hotdog not Hotdog, but catastrophic for something like transportation or medicine. So it's less "hyper intelligent robot overlords are coming to enslave us" and more "certain jobs that focus on rote data entry and/or superficial analysis may see reduced demand due to automation, depending on how well the classifiers shake out and tolerance for error."
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Oct 15, 2017 22:45
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mrmcd posted:A lot of ML is really oversold now too. 95% of products with ML and AI marketing behind them are really just fancy automated classifiers. Which is cool in its own regard, they have gotten a lot better at certain classification problems, and it opens new possibilities for automation. However, there's so much garbage ML models that simply don't work because the DNN stuff either overfits, ends up chasing phantoms in the data, or just has the wrong features or no where near enough training data. Many people huffing the AI revolution hype train don't even understand concepts like over fitting, precision vs. recall, how to build clean, uncontaminated training and validation data sets, etc. There are over 40 AI startups trying to make AIs for Radiology alone. The most prominent company in this area is IBM, where they are training Watson to read medical studies, and while the automation hasn't replaced the radiologist quite yet, it's really heading in that direction. There is definitely a concerted effort to replace the $400,000 year desk job looking inside people's spines all day with computer AIs. They're targeting this field because it's probably the most lucrative pure "start at images all day and write reports" job there is, and I'm certain that if they can get an AI to do a radiologist's job, a lot of other people's jobs are hosed.
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Oct 15, 2017 23:07
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Realistically, I think the largest threat to us is ourselves and the companies we work for. It's become increasingly apparent to everyone that large tech companies like Facebook and Google are in no way the benevolent information spreaders they like to portray themselves as. They're in it to gather as much personal information about their users as possible and use it to make as much money as possible. We need to be way more conscientious than the tech industry has been, before regulation in the West causes these companies to pick up all the high-paying jobs and move them to jurisdictions China Russia that care a lot less about pervasive information gathering and manipulating public opinion, or even consider it a bonus.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:08
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I don't know about the "move it to China/Russia" angle. From what I've seen, those countries have been so transparently drooling at the prospect of getting jurisdiction over big tech companies that nobody's willing to locate any significant code there. But otherwise I agree with you. Everyone's racing to gather as much data as possible, without there being any clear guidelines on what is and isn't acceptable use of that data.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:26
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I overheard the following last night among a bunch of ex-Facebook/Google/etc alumni: A: "I interviewed at a finance company just for the practice and had no intention of taking the job. When they wanted to talk comp I jokingly asked for $600k. They didn't balk, they just said I needed to meet with their CEO, haha." B: "You should have asked for more, some finance places offer 750k if you're good." C: "Yeah, high-frequency trader coders with C/C++ optimization skills can get over 1 million." [chatter about compensation where everyone reveals their current comp packages are all around ~450k] me:  They were all smart people, but those comps seem ridiculous to me. I know Google et al are rich, but if they could offshore those jobs they'd have done so by now. Instead they've done the opposite, expanding their HQ campuses despite ridiculous employee costs. Hell, for years Facebook fought its own employees' demands for San Francisco office (just 40 mins away) because they felt more poo poo got done when employees could interact face-to-face.
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Oct 16, 2017 01:18
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I'm quite sure that if everyone that was hyping deep learning was required to take the Andrew Ng intro to machine learning course, half of the tech companies being funded now would lose half their market caps overnight. The issue as usual is that most of the people in control of money aren't concerned as much about reality as much as potential reality (they kind of should in a way, how else would half of the crazy ideas out there make it to market, right?).
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Oct 16, 2017 01:24
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Ralith posted:I assumed his point was that pay in the US is higher in part due to lower job security. This is what I meant, somewhere stuff got lost in translation. I would like US salaries in this socialist country but they don't combine well and everything considered we are really well off already.
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Oct 16, 2017 10:18
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