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There’s really no elegant way to handle the problem when it turns out you were mislead or misinformed during the hiring process or your management decides that you will work on something you don’t care to work on at all- except to have alternatives. Pretend I d Bob Dobbs is Dead’s post, I guess
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 15:48 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 12:15 |
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prisoner of waffles posted:management decides that you will work on something you don’t care to work on at all It's "funny" how many times me, a bad employee, has had to listen to my boss request that I be more excited about working on stuff I don't want to work on and none of them has come up with the obvious solution, which is to let me work on stuff I do want to work on!
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 16:12 |
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:I've been here a few months now, and it turns out that actually various services break constantly (almost daily) and need to restarted by manually logging into the Windows servers and restarting them. The main application itself is actually hosted on several different VMs in Azure with no ability to auto-scale, instead someone needs to manually start up/stop instances and move them in and out of the availability pool depending on expected demand. There's two websites that do the same thing (both were acquired by the one company, so they were formerly two distinct companies/websites) and I am the only developer on mine vs. around 5-6 developers on the other one. I can keep listing off all the problems but basically I can feel myself becoming completely burnt out again, something I promised I wouldn't let happen again after my last job. I feel like I'm coming into work and banging my head against the wall for 8 hours every day. The code-base is so awful that every time I try to improve something, something else breaks and it takes hours and hours to track down what's going on in the spaghetti code that I've inherited. Are they doing something that requires a VM or are they just doing that way out of incompetence? I didn't think Azure App Services cared whether you were asking them to run a Core or Framework project - ours are mostly Framework and we don't have a single VM.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 17:31 |
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Munkeymon posted:Are they doing something that requires a VM or are they just doing that way out of incompetence? I didn't think Azure App Services cared whether you were asking them to run a Core or Framework project - ours are mostly Framework and we don't have a single VM. There are plenty of dependencies that you'll find in the wild that make a VM the only option. Reliance on MSMQ, for example. Any number of weird third-party libraries will make you run headfirst into that, too.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 19:23 |
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:There are plenty of dependencies that you'll find in the wild that make a VM the only option. Reliance on MSMQ, for example. Any number of weird third-party libraries will make you run headfirst into that, too. This being my first time working on Azure-native software, I didn't realize how easy it was
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 20:48 |
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Munkeymon posted:This being my first time working on Azure-native software, I didn't realize how easy it was Another wrinkle: Does the web app require access to on-prem resources? It starts to get nasty at that point, too. It's generally pretty easy to get an app pushed out and running in a web app, but getting it to actually work properly can be a major pain in the rear end depending on the app's requirements.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 20:54 |
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Keetron posted:First I thought: be the change you want to see but after reading that last part I think they lied to you to get you in. Yeah I keep flip-flopping between "I can make this better!" and "Why do that when I could theoretically just go somewhere that is already what I'm after". Your second part hits home for me, and it's something I've been doing a lot of thinking about. I'll definitely be taking my next job search very slowly and carefully, unfortunately I was a bit desperate this time and definitely didn't ask some questions that I should have. pokeyman posted:It sounds like you would quit tomorrow if you could explain it on your resume. This can be freeing: in a sense, you don't care if you lose this job. You can start saying "no"! I really appreciate the time you put into this effort-post. Thanks man. I think you've got some really great advice there, and I think I'll follow it as best I can and see how things go.
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# ? Jan 24, 2020 04:27 |
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Munkeymon posted:Are they doing something that requires a VM or are they just doing that way out of incompetence? I didn't think Azure App Services cared whether you were asking them to run a Core or Framework project - ours are mostly Framework and we don't have a single VM. Mostly out of being used to the old ways I think. So not incompetence so much as outdated knowledge.
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# ? Jan 24, 2020 04:28 |
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Hey guys, so this past week at my newish job (only been at it for a few months), the lead dev (who is also the back end dev) answered the siren call of a full remote offer and is resigning with a month or so of notice, leaving me as the sole developer at this small startup. In recent months, we’d lost the two junior devs and were not in a rush to rehire because we decided to replace them with someone more experienced (and you can’t rush those hires). But the lead dev leaving at this point throws a huge loving wrench into things and accelerates our hiring timetable. This all leaves me more alone at steering this ship than I want to be - I only know the frontend half of it and am terrified that something in the backend is going to break and I will be utterly unable to fix it. Upon learning the news I went into panic mode and bought a bunch of Python and devops online courses (I’m actually kind of excited to learn Python but I dread the devops stuff). Thankfully one of the founders (who is nominally the CTO) will be stepping into development for the time being - he wrote the MVP application a few years back so has some fairly decent dev chops (no devops though so we’ll have to figure that poo poo out together). Top priorities are getting new people hired and pinning down good processes and such to bestow upon the eventual new team and get everybody off on the right foot. Even though I’ve been at the dev game for a few years now, I’ve not been involved in the hiring process before (it was super opaque at my previous company, which resulted in the hire of a mansplaining douchebag), and I’ve not really ever been involved in dev process/project management. So this is all new for me. Because this shift puts a lot of extra pressure on me, I will be compensated with free food any day I find myself working late and a substantial raise don’t worry. Probably title change too. So... I guess I need to learn some new skills fast and also how to identify good backend dev candidates and partake in interviewing them despite not being a backend person myself.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 06:30 |
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My current official position is that if I have to take over my boss's responsibilities, we better be talking "retires in 5 years" money. Good luck
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 09:55 |
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Being on the other side of the interviewing table for a while it’s fun, and it will make you a better interviewee. Plus you get to test out your own personal theories on how tech interviews should happen.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 14:16 |
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Xarn posted:My current official position is that if I have to take over my boss's responsibilities, we better be talking "retires in 5 years" money. Good luck Thanks. The outgoing lead dev and I are at a similar level - he just had the team lead responsibilities and longer tenure than me, so for day to day stuff I reported to him, and then we both answered to the C-level founders. And then I have dominion over design and he does not, so that kind of puts us in complementary roles. I guess I could step up to the plate and be the team lead and get the new backend person to be technically under me, but I’m worried I don’t have the experience/wherewithal to be the lead at this point. At the same time I don’t want to get in the weird position of interviewing my own future boss. I’ll be talking more with the founders so we can figure out what we want the dev department organization to be. Other than a senior backend person, we’re also looking for an intermediate individual contributor for the dev team and a data person (who will be working with dev sometimes but not really be part of the dev team). lifg posted:Being on the other side of the interviewing table for a while it’s fun, and it will make you a better interviewee. Plus you get to test out your own personal theories on how tech interviews should happen. Whiteboard poo poo is definitely out. I don’t ever want to be on the receiving end of one of those ever again, and have zero interest in administering one. I did a very reasonable take-home assignment when I was applying to this job. I was provided with a broken toy app and the objective was to fix it - idea was to get a sense of how you solved problems and bugs, attention to detail, etc. I was told that it was also a depressingly good filter for copy-paste frauds (how do these idiots expect to not only land the job but also keep it when they are obviously incapable of programming?). I like to think everyone’s being honest or at least not exaggerating too much, but dear god. I’d probably want to do something like that - not an assignment to write some huge complex thing from scratch, just hand out some existing code and set it up to tease out some indicators of how they think/work. Also a lot of personality/not-an-rear end in a top hat checking. No brilliant jerks allowed. I especially want to avoid assholes and associated attitude problems because I was subjected to that at my last job and it was horrible.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 17:24 |
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Queen Victorian posted:I don’t want to get in the weird position of interviewing my own future boss. This isn't that uncommon, as I understand it (haven't had the experience myself). I can see why it might feel like a weird inversion of the interview process, but look at the list of what you want to accomplish in your ideal interview. How many would you want to apply to your new boss? Most of them?
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 17:32 |
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Also give serious consideration to getting out lol
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 17:51 |
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bob dobbs is dead posted:Also give serious consideration to getting out lol I think the situation seems worse from my description than it is. Other than being down most of a dev department at the moment, it’s a great place to work - everyone is cool and friendly, my work and skills are respected, I get paid well, office is in a fun neighborhood that is a ten minute bus ride from my house. Company has a comfortable runway and a bunch of happy customers that pay lots of money. And I’m getting plenty of support through this so definitely not being set up to fail or left to flounder. The fact that we lost so many devs in a relatively short period of time is mostly coincidence (terminated, other opportunity, left to pursue indie game dev dreams, other opportunity), or a curse I brought with me. If things are still looking grim a few months down the road, I’ll for sure start looking around.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 18:47 |
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Queen Victorian posted:I think the situation seems worse from my description than it is. Other than being down most of a dev department at the moment, it’s a great place to work - everyone is cool and friendly, my work and skills are respected, I get paid well, office is in a fun neighborhood that is a ten minute bus ride from my house. Company has a comfortable runway and a bunch of happy customers that pay lots of money. And I’m getting plenty of support through this so definitely not being set up to fail or left to flounder. Just gonna throw out that now is the perfect time to convince the company to consider remote employees.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 18:53 |
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Getting paid to learn new stuff is the best way to learn stuff, IMO, so that sounds pretty great to me. Well, other than learning to hire without prior experience
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 18:54 |
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Queen Victorian posted:At the same time I don’t want to get in the weird position of interviewing my own future boss. Queen Victorian posted:Whiteboard poo poo is definitely out. I don’t ever want to be on the receiving end of one of those ever again, and have zero interest in administering one. Queen Victorian posted:This all leaves me more alone at steering this ship than I want to be -
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 19:23 |
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kayakyakr posted:Just gonna throw out that now is the perfect time to convince the company to consider remote employees. Yeah we’ve floated this, especially since the lead dev is leaving for a full remote position. I don’t know that we could do a good job of supporting a full remote developer, but what we can do is offer a ton of flexibility and ability to WFH frequently. Munkeymon posted:Getting paid to learn new stuff is the best way to learn stuff, IMO, so that sounds pretty great to me. Taking an online Docker course right now and company is paying for all this stuff, so yeah that’s awesome. Definitely nervous about interviewing JawnV6 posted:This is a weird line to hold. If you were going to be a boss, would you studiously avoid interviewing anyone who would potentially work for you? I probably just phrased poorly - my concern is that I kind of straddle two realms - dev and design, so I’d be answering to a team lead for the dev stuff, but be in charge of design so I’d be the one handing down specs and workflows. I think this is an area where I need to iron things out with higher ups, and the concern isn’t about not wanting to interview/hire someone above me, I guess just trying to accurately communicate to candidates how these roles interplay. quote:Are you aware of how take-homes can be discriminatory? It's worth understanding and being able to articulate that. Yes. And I’ve heard about some awful ones (in these threads, actually), including some that basically amounted to spec work. I don’t want to do anything like that (more like solving a small issue in an existing piece of code), but as someone who does not work well under intense time pressure while being closely scrutinized, I would much prefer a take-home option. But I also don’t deal with hardships like being a single parent. I figure that if a candidate has a pile of code samples and project contributions online, coding assignment isn’t necessary. But then there’s someone like me - I have a design portfolio but no code to share (work stuff NDA’d, and I don’t really code in my spare time). Options are to take me at my word or check to see if I can indeed code. With how often they’ve run into legit-looking candidates turning out to be liars, I can’t really blame them for not taking everyone at their word. Is there a correct and completely nondiscriminatory to do a tech interview that’s not a stressful gauntlet of whiteboard algorithm poo poo and still get a sense of how good of a programmer the candidate is? quote:also worth remembering this is 100% unambiguously Their Problem
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 20:08 |
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Queen Victorian posted:Yeah we’ve floated this, especially since the lead dev is leaving for a full remote position. I don’t know that we could do a good job of supporting a full remote developer, but what we can do is offer a ton of flexibility and ability to WFH frequently. You'd be surprised, it's not too hard. Basically get a zoom corp account, make sure every meeting has a video link, make sure everyone turns on their cameras most of the time, and make sure that most important discussions happen in slack or are documented in ways that aren't "yell at the team in the room". (having used Google, Zoom, Teams, Meetup, Slack, Skype, and a few other video conference services, Zoom wins hands down right now).
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 20:29 |
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Zoom is best at video Slack is best at chat Teams is best at sharing files
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 20:32 |
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Queen Victorian posted:I probably just phrased poorly - my concern is that I kind of straddle two realms - dev and design, so I’d be answering to a team lead for the dev stuff, but be in charge of design so I’d be the one handing down specs and workflows. I think this is an area where I need to iron things out with higher ups, and the concern isn’t about not wanting to interview/hire someone above me, I guess just trying to accurately communicate to candidates how these roles interplay. I also had the pleasure of being a junior engineer's first interview. He was a ball of excitement, I don't think he knew he was on the interview track until they handed him my resume. I had to guide the process a little ("Now, you should ask me a technical question"). Queen Victorian posted:I figure that if a candidate has a pile of code samples and project contributions online, coding assignment isn’t necessary. But then there’s someone like me - I have a design portfolio but no code to share (work stuff NDA’d, and I don’t really code in my spare time). Options are to take me at my word or check to see if I can indeed code. With how often they’ve run into legit-looking candidates turning out to be liars, I can’t really blame them for not taking everyone at their word. Queen Victorian posted:It is and they’ve made that clear.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 20:43 |
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JawnV6 posted:I like whiteboards v0v. In a stunning coincidence, I do well at them. Show up with nothing, leave at the end of the on-site, done and done. With a take-home you have to ensure you're not selecting for "who had the most free time on a weekend" or outright fraud. There's ways for any process to go off the rails, as long as you're aware of them that's the best you can hope for. I'm honestly OK with either. I like take-homes because (at least as for senior dev's) you can usually replace with something you already have finished. And as long as you use Github and something like Trello, you can make it a challenge a lot like your day to day workplace. I enjoy a whiteboard because it's there during the interview and done after. I found that I'm most drained after an interview day that's got whiteboards, though. I think that live coding exercises are fun too, but also are the worst when taken very seriously. There's a lot of pressure, even for a senior, when you've got someone staring over your shoulder doing live coding, and any sort of technical issue really screws with it. Did one while on a trip at an AirBnB, the Internet dropped but I managed to finish the Interview on a 3g hotspot. Ultimately, that company didn't make an offer because that particular interviewer felt I wasn't strong enough with HTML elements... (that company also took issue with the idea that I considered work-life balance to be an important factor). At the same time, live coding is great fun when everything is set up before (inputs, tests, etc), you get through their little algorithmic challenge in no time, and you get you spend the rest of the interview being nerds, pairing with your interviewer to take the challenge to the next level and discover something new for the both of you.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 21:03 |
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i absolutely despise whiteboards. at the risk of being ridiculed for repeating that infamous blog post, i don't feel like 10 algorithm exercises properly properly convey my skill as a front-end developer, and neither does (to a lesser extent) reciting random javascript prototype methods and their implementations. i prefer to display the actual skills used daily doing real work. that said, the best interview i've ever had was an on-site interview where the interviewer asked about my work experience and all that stuff and then did basically the best of both worlds: "so here's a computer, you have 10 minutes to download and set up a code editor if you don't want to use this one, and then i'd like to see you make this very small application with one endpoint and one view from scratch" it was awesome. dude was completely understanding, didnt disqualify me because i dared use google (like i do literally every day at work), i was very satisfied with what i put out and he could see how i effectively worked. the only difference was that i was explaining my decisions to him as i wrote them. they had been having a terrible time with developers before, went through 4 of them and then decided to change the interviewing process for the next one (me). (i did not take the job - the interviewer was very impressed [and said so multiple times] but as i was walking out the owner of the company happened to walk into the office, then said "yeah, we're not going to wait, i'll just give it to you straight: interviewer here says he's very impressed, but i'm not going to pay you the full salary from the job posting. you simply don't have the years of experience and i have no evidence that you'll be productive other than your word and the interviewer's word, you don't have a degree and you don't have the years. i'll pay you 20% of the salary for this position and after a year we can review that salary". i had been there for 3 hours, went home and never came back even though three guys from the company called me afterwards trying to convince me to do it. "we'll talk to him!")
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 21:20 |
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Inacio posted:i'll pay you 20% of the salary for this position and after a year we can review that salary What.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 21:31 |
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playing bad cop to the employees you had already paid to spend their time interviewing and assessing the competence of a candidate to own the... ???????
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 21:35 |
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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Negging
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 21:45 |
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rujasu posted:What. no degree and not enough years under my belt means i'm basically his slut and he's doing me a favor by hiring me e: what i didn't mention is that i was recommended by an ex-coworker, a senior dev (who was then his employee) with high praise, so it's not like he found me on the sidewalk or anything marumaru fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jan 27, 2020 |
# ? Jan 27, 2020 22:00 |
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Inacio posted:no degree and not enough years under my belt means i'm basically his slut and he's doing me a favor by hiring me Wait, 20% of the salary wasn't a typo? Like if it was a $100k job, he was offering you 20k?
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 22:38 |
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kayakyakr posted:Wait, 20% of the salary wasn't a typo? Like if it was a $100k job, he was offering you 20k? yes
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 22:42 |
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My fist job interview, as a freshly-minted imigrant, was done by two not-so-expert guys, and the guy running the interview was especially junior. I already had some years (almost a decade) of experience, my own business in the ole country, etc. At the end, the owner walks in tries to low-ball me. I took the next company's offer for about 3x as much that same week. I was ready to accept anything, but. Come. On. I guess he saw an opportunity to scam a boater, and took it.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 22:44 |
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Inacio posted:yes what. the. gently caress. I would have been so very pissed as a tech lead if my boss pulled that.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 01:01 |
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kayakyakr posted:what. the. gently caress. I would have been so very pissed as a tech lead if my boss pulled that. i imagine he wasn't very happy. he emailed me for months after that trying to convince me to join them under different terms, and some of the other guys i met while i was there too. i wonder if they finally found a decent front-end dev.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 01:33 |
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Inacio posted:...I have no evidence that you'll be productive other than your word and the interviewer's word, you don't have a degree and you don't have the years. This is biggest bullshit excuse ever. I doubt he was offering you a contract with a golden parachute. I presume it was a regular old at-will crap everybody gets here. Like, it's not hard to let people go if they don't work out, and the risk is minimized by the 2 people (who work for this dumbass) waving giant green flags. One of our best hires ever was a guy who has a humanities degree and decided he liked tech more, was obviously driven and smart albeit a bit self-doubty (aren't we all?), and his previous workplace was becoming unchallenging for him even though he was still pretty junior. He's already been promoted to mid-level, and will get bumped to a senior this year, two years in. I had to fight a bit to get him in as others weren't seeing the potential, but I've learned to trust my gut over time. I still look for enthusiasm and personality above all. Overly self-confident people with narrow interests are a big red flag. You have an odd hobby that's not code or industry related? A plus. You can pick up skills on the way for 99% of the tech work out there. Our most senior engs are all autodidacts with unrelated or no degrees and very interesting life paths.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 01:46 |
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I think I may get an offer to return to a team I left last year that comes with a promotion. I'm 2.5 years into my career, having only worked at this single Fortune 50 company. My former manager, whom I respect a great deal and enjoyed working with, has lost 3 seniors so they are trying to backfill. I was given a great raise and promotion within a year of joining the company by this manager, probably due to my working maturity (I went back to school later in life and am in my mid 30s) and because I really am driven to push myself engineering-wise. I left the team to join a new team working on a greenfield project lead by someone I consider a mentor and a friend within the same company, but our project ended up being scrapped to do integration for a system that can be described by phrases like "distributed monolith," "dependency hell," and "nightmare machine." We finished that project and are now working on a project we enjoy, but our manager is making baffling and frustrating decisions for the team and doing a phenomenal job of creating drama and friction, while providing very little value to myself or the team. I am basically biding my time trying to learn things until a better opportunity arrives or I can't take my manager anymore, probably outside my current company given I have very few internal contacts. I like working for my company, and I'm in a small market that my wife and I won't be leaving any time soon (we're house shopping this year), so I'm reluctant to leave it. Pros for going back to my old team:
Cons:
The old team is infrastructure/platform, while my current team is strictly app development. I don't quite know which I enjoy more. On call comes with either, and the on call incidents for my current team are pretty obnoxious while the infrastructure team is stable (for now). Obviously, I plan on clarifying most of these concerns with my former manager, but I'm wondering what else I should be considering. I really enjoy coding, so I'm mostly worried I'd be taking a payday/golden handcuffs at the detriment to my development as an engineer. Smugworth fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 28, 2020 |
# ? Jan 28, 2020 02:57 |
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Smugworth posted:I think I may get an offer to return to a team I left last year that comes with a promotion. I'm 2.5 years into my career, having only worked at this single Fortune 50 company. My former manager, whom I respect a great deal and enjoyed working with, has lost 3 seniors so they are trying to backfill. I was given a great raise and promotion within a year of joining the company by this manager, probably due to my working maturity (I went back to school later in life and am in my mid 30s) and because I really am driven to push myself engineering-wise. So this is a thing that a lot of us go through. You're hitting it sooner than most, but while you're 2.5 years into a coding career, I'm sure you did something before that, so for "workplace maturity" you've got much more relevant experience. So when you reach your mid 30's your career either takes one of two paths: architect/high-end IC role where you're deeply embedded in a codebase, or management. It sounds like this move boils down to the question, what interests you more? Do you want to be a manager someday and have a team of reports that either love or hate you, or do you want to get crusty and nerdy with code? Keep in mind, if you go into leadership and you don't like it, it's not really hard to step back. And your mentor now becomes your peer, which means you have a whole new relationship that you can keep up with them. Personally, if I was as early/late in my career as you are, I'd take it because $$ and title makes you more mobile in case things go to poo poo. And if you don't like it, then you're in a much better position to move after.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 04:17 |
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The last few posts about whiteboarding make me wonder whether there is a strong correlation between how hard it is to stand up something in your subfield, and how much you prefer coding tests/take homes to whiteboarding. I prefer whiteboarding to take homes because I like my home time spent with my family, and I find live coding tests ridiculous, even though I do pretty well at them (doing ICPC for couple of years helps). But then, my particular niche is research and combinatoric optimization, and for context, our current product has spent ~5 years in research phase, last year in development phase, and there is still at least a year to go before it will be in production... I find it interesting that the other person who likes whiteboards is Jawn, who IIRC is a hardware guy, while our two posters who don't like them are both front end devs.
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 09:39 |
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As a data point for your theory I’m fine with whiteboard tests and I’m a firmware engineer specializing in MEMS sensors applications. I think there’s definitely a question of relevance even relative to the nature of interview questions. I’m not totally sure what a take home test that is even a little predictive for my work would look like. e: for extra data I’m 37 and highly value my family time, an employer can gently caress all the way off expecting me to cut into that without a 100% chance of reasonable reward csammis fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Jan 28, 2020 |
# ? Jan 28, 2020 14:12 |
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csammis posted:As a data point for your theory I’m fine with whiteboard tests and I’m a firmware engineer specializing in MEMS sensors applications. Same, but I'm an embedded Linux/C++/microcontroller software guy
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# ? Jan 28, 2020 14:25 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 12:15 |
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I like whiteboard tests, but that’s because I’m good enough at them. For your data: I’m a basic bitch full stack dev. But I would never use them as an interviewer. They’re crap. lifg fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jan 28, 2020 |
# ? Jan 28, 2020 15:15 |