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what is SA Code
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Sep 3, 2021 05:44
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| # ? May 27, 2024 01:58 |
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I've been openly discussing it in SA code if you're there! I am also happy to offer it up in PMs but I'm not confident enough with my post history to tie myself to this account, even if that's just paranoia. I'll DM you What's SA code?
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Sep 3, 2021 05:48
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The Discord where all us cool kids hang out and complain about technology but occasionally praise other facets of life all day. Bunch of people ITT can invite you if they see this before I wake up, if not just PM me and I'll get to it sometime tomorrow. It's pretty great, would highly recommend and could always use more jaded tech workers of all roles and levels.
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Sep 3, 2021 06:17
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:My metric is "Do I make more individually than married couples who aren't developers?" I had some friends who made more than me combined before my recent raise and it slightly irritated me. That's fixed now. So irritating, how did you live with it?
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Sep 3, 2021 14:28
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Did you get one of your couple-friends fired?
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Sep 3, 2021 15:47
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Achmed Jones posted:you take a title drop to work there, not a comp drop. if you can't negotiate an increase in comp don't take the offer. you shouldn't treat that as different from a rejection unless your current job is just the worst thing ever that is killing you. Yeah, the whole thing does make me feel like maybe I hadn’t gotten as far in my career as I actually thought. Maybe I’m not really Senior, despite trying my best to push forward on it. Honestly, my perspective on it has changed a bit recently - there’s way more to life than just your career and your title, and there’s other things I want out of it than to just grind levels. Sure, maybe I took a title hit, but that’s not me or anything that determines my worth. It’s gonna take a while to internalize that, but the rest of my life will be slow progress, so I gotta get used to it. Now I just gotta address everything else in life I’ve ignored over my career. 
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Sep 3, 2021 16:14
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Money matters, titles don’t. and toucher pay is high enough in the states that worrying too much about money is bad too
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Sep 3, 2021 16:28
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Well I think I'll have a FAANG interview soon. My recruiter a week ago said to take time, practice, study, and let them know when I ready to take the code interview. First time I took a practice assessment on leetcode I bombed it. Now after doing several problems daily, I've nailed a couple of those well undertime and in the top 10% according to their assessment report. So I think I'm going to be ready soon. I also have an interview with a non-FAANG company. However deeper research into that one has given me a lot of pause. Their overall reviews are great, but there is a definite trend that their reviews dropped off heavily in the last year or two, specifically about some cultural shifts for the worse. Basically going from a near 5 on glassdoor to a 3 in ~2 years. I also have some reservations about compensation, since I noticed they have really wide pay bands even in the same location and title, combine that with the first question I got in a screening email being "What are your expectations of compensation" and I'm worried that they will lowball the hell out of me. Kinda sucks because it's an exact stack match for me, so I'd really be able to hit the ground running there. Not cancelling the interview of course, I'm gonna try to suss out that stuff as much as I can in the interview(s). I'm probably going to send out more applications since I definitely don't want to count on nailing that FAANG interview. Do you guys bother with cover letters? I haven't in the past and my impression is they are mostly ignored, but I was considering including cover letters with my next few apps.
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Sep 3, 2021 17:17
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I would definitely discount "exact stack match" a lot, because unless you're working on COBOL or something you can probably find that at thousands of different places. As for a cover letter, yeah I think it's worth doing. In general, I apply the philosophy of directly applying extremely infrequently, but putting maximum effort into those applications. Tweak your resume to match the job requirements. Write a cover letter that explains why you would be a good fit (highlight recent projects that match the job requirements).
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Sep 3, 2021 17:47
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I’ve never used a cover letter, but I’ve only applied externally once in the last 10 years. This round I even took out the “vision statement” or whatever businessy buzzword bullshit I had on my resume
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Sep 3, 2021 17:47
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Xarn posted:So irritating, how did you live with it? Therapy to discuss my crippling lack of self-worth and how I use money as a proxy.
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Sep 3, 2021 18:01
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pokeyman posted:Maybe you'll love it and want to stay! Thank you! I would ideally never have to do the gauntlet again but it really feels like any company that's going to pay this sort of exorbitant comp with a tasty RSU package is going to require intense algo rounds.
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Sep 3, 2021 18:19
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Ideally you make enough money before you can't stand the job anymore that you don't need to particularly worry about the comp at your next job.
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Sep 3, 2021 23:34
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I was unhappy with my job. I kept it, job searched while I had it, took a year to figure out my next move. Joined a company, after 6 months realized just how awful things were. Quit with nothing lined up. (Day after my last day, they laid off 30% of the company so I'd say leaving on my own terms was a success.) I'm now trying to figure out my next step. I've turned down a bunch of interview requests from my network. I've got a few solid interviews lined up with FAANG and other companies. Given that I only lasted 6 months at my last place, I'm thinking I'm a bad interviewer. How do I make sure I'm not leaving my next place after 6 months? I feel like the answer is going to be "nobody knows, it's a crapshoot." And that bums me out.
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Sep 6, 2021 04:19
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If you ask the right questions and pay close attention, you can rule out some companies during the interview phase. But there's always the risk that everything will look OK on the surface and then suck when you actually start working there. Maybe the team you interviewed with was fantastic...until their manager quit two weeks after you joined. Sorry you hired into a crappy position though.
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Sep 6, 2021 04:26
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huhu posted:I was unhappy with my job. I kept it, job searched while I had it, took a year to figure out my next move. Joined a company, after 6 months realized just how awful things were. Quit with nothing lined up. (Day after my last day, they laid off 30% of the company so I'd say leaving on my own terms was a success.) I'm now trying to figure out my next step. I've turned down a bunch of interview requests from my network. I've got a few solid interviews lined up with FAANG and other companies. Given that I only lasted 6 months at my last place, I'm thinking I'm a bad interviewer. How do I make sure I'm not leaving my next place after 6 months? More generally: if you have a tendency to "be on your best behavior" for interviews, and you're in a financial/career position to not do that, then consider not doing that. It feels good to get the dopamine hit of the offer, knowing you met the bar (whatever that means), but any companies that get a bad vibe off of you bringing your whole self into the interview very likely aren't places you want to work. It's in your best interest to let them do as much of the work for you as possible of figuring out a bad fit.
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Sep 6, 2021 18:52
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What was it that made those two jobs bad? I've definitely had bad experiences that affected what kind of questions I ask during the interview. For instance, in one company I had an absolutely tyrannical product branch without anyone on the developer leadership side who would stand up to them when it came to feature requests and deadlines. Now I tend to ask about the relationship between product and devs during interviews. Another thing I've taken to asking is how come they're hiring externally for my position instead of promoting from within. In good companies this leads to a conversation about promotion processes, bad ones tend to be shocked that anyone would even ask. Questions like these can help you gather signals about the organization at large. It can't guarantee whether or not the company sucks, but it can help.
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Sep 6, 2021 19:27
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When I have a bad or good experience I try to spend some time thinking about the causes and how I can make it into an interview question in the future. An important part of this process is thinking out what a "good" and "bad" answer to the question looks like. I had one company where the "unlimited" time off came with a "never stop working" culture. So now I ask the hiring manager either "tell me about your last vacation" or "how do you prevent burn-out in your engineers". When I ask a bad manager (or at least a manager of a bad position), they laugh at the first question (because they never take vacation) and are confused by the second (what is burn-out / it's not preventable / why would I care). When I ask a good manager they recognize what I'm asking and have a ready answer. My current manager (who I think does this well) told me he tracks how much vacation everyone has taken each quarter and if someone hasn't taken at least a week he checks in to make sure they're planning a longer vacation. He said he likes to take his vacation in 1-week blocks and he'll leave himself available by emergency phone (I'm on an SRE team so this felt OK) but he expects his engineers to be totally unavailable during vacations. I don't know if it's possible to plan for sociopaths who just lie to you, but my experience so far has been that I always got honest answers to my questions. Ensign Expendable, I really like the "why aren't you promoting someone internally" question! I'll try that one next time I do interviews.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:52
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Thank you for the thoughtful answers. I'm definitely going to start asking tough questions. As far as why the last two jobs were bad: Job 1: Was amazing when I started. Went public a week before I started. Best engineering culture I've experienced. Then it didn't produce a single new feature in the 2.5 years, stock tanked, it went private again via acquisition. Job 2: Horribly incompetent leadership. Was cute until poo poo hit the fan. Day after I quit they laid off 30% of the company. With how many interviews I'm getting, I think I need to be genuine self and so I shall ask tough questions.
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Sep 8, 2021 03:37
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huhu posted:Best engineering culture I've experienced. Then it didn't produce a single new feature in the 2.5 years What was the engineering culture because those two statements don't track. It sounds like they utterly failed at engineering if they couldn't ship new features.
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Sep 8, 2021 04:20
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are you saying that "cash checks, take naps" isn't a rad engineering culture?
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Sep 8, 2021 04:25
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:What was the engineering culture because those two statements don't track. It sounds like they utterly failed at engineering if they couldn't ship new features. TDD, all code done with mobbing/pairing, 20% time to pay down tech debt, learning hours, 2 paid conferences anywhere each year, and on and on. Engineering didn't get a seat at the table for like a year and a half. Product told engineering what to do and we didn't have a CTO.
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Sep 8, 2021 06:02
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Just curious, has anyone ever asked to take a look at the codebase before accepting a job offer before? I’ve never heard of anyone doing it, and doubt most companies would agree to it, but I definitely would’ve noped out of my current one if I’d seen the multiple headers with thousand line class declarations and the multi-thousand line function implementations before starting and being saddled with a relocation clawback.
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Sep 8, 2021 15:44
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no (they'd almost certainly say "lol no"), but i did ask one of my interviewers what the worst piece of code in prod was. it gave me some good signal on the type of tech debt they had (a lot, oh lord it was a lot). i took the job and it was about what i expected with regards to that. i'm glad i asked, it got me prepared if nothing else.
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Sep 8, 2021 15:51
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Yeah, I probably just need to figure out some good questions to ask that could help avoid this leaning tower of load bearing spaghetti situation in the future.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:15
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Leaning tower of PITA.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:43
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I like that "Worst Piece of Code in Prod" question. I wonder what's worse, having no answer or immediately knowing the answer. Brainstorming a few others: How did your last few deployments go, were there any problems before/during/after? How often does an emergency feature or bug fix need to go to production? -This one and the last one are both related to quality of work, quality of code base, and priorities. I also hate being a fireman. How did your last onboarding go? -I just hate starting somewhere and it's a total clusterfuck. I think it serves as a microcosm of how the overall situation is. Is this position a replacement for somebody who left? If so, why'd they leave? -Sure would love to know if the last dev just hated the place. Probably worth pressing a bit if they just say "They got a great opportunity..." and I'd want to know what it is that was better.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:58
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i work at an open source dealio and the fact that the whole shebang for backend was less than 100k sloc after years of active development and pretty full feature set was a large part of my decision
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Sep 8, 2021 18:20
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Achmed Jones posted:but i did ask one of my interviewers what the worst piece of code in prod was. If nothing else this is a great ice breaker question in any interview, developers love to bitch about bad code that ruins their day on a regular basis
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Sep 8, 2021 18:32
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A former colleague wanted me to apply to something in their team so I did on Monday night. By this afternoon, I had been rejected. That's gotta be the fastest turnaround on a rejection I've ever had!
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Sep 8, 2021 22:42
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:A former colleague wanted me to apply to something in their team so I did on Monday night. By this afternoon, I had been rejected. That's gotta be the fastest turnaround on a rejection I've ever had! Fascinating. With this market, I get excited for every new application, so I'm guessing that you had a strong disqualifying match (such as no experience with the specific tech stack when they're looking for someone that could become an architect). Be really curious why.
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Sep 8, 2021 22:53
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kayakyakr posted:Fascinating. With this market, I get excited for every new application, so I'm guessing that you had a strong disqualifying match (such as no experience with the specific tech stack when they're looking for someone that could become an architect). Be really curious why. Apparently on their side they had already moved me beyond the tech screen phase. I guess somebody there decided to move me beyond the tech screen phase and directly into the trash. We're apparently both very perplexed.
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Sep 8, 2021 22:56
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:decided to move me beyond the tech screen phase and directly into the trash thread title
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Sep 8, 2021 23:01
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Achmed Jones posted:thread title
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Sep 8, 2021 23:41
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Achmed Jones posted:thread title
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Sep 9, 2021 00:04
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Achmed Jones posted:thread title
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Sep 9, 2021 00:32
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Achmed Jones posted:thread title
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Sep 9, 2021 01:18
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Apparently on their side they had already moved me beyond the tech screen phase. I guess somebody there decided to move me beyond the tech screen phase and directly into the trash. We're apparently both very perplexed.  Have had similar happen before.Definitely thread title.
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Sep 9, 2021 01:28
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Have any of y'all oldies that can afford it dropped to less than full-time? My wife has been at 80% for a while now, and we're at the point where I can do similar. I brought it up at with my manager, and they said they'd look into it, obviously it'll really depend on where the various cutoffs are for 401k/PTO accrual/etc. My other option is to just return to freelancing/contracting, where I was generally invoicing 30-35h/week and much happier in general.
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Sep 9, 2021 02:01
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huhu posted:Engineering didn't get a seat at the table for like a year and a half. Product told engineering what to do and we didn't have a CTO. For this, I've been asking something like "describe the life of a feature to me. Who comes up with new features? What happens next?" I feel like most of the time when I ask this the interviewer is confused. I haven't determined yet if it's more because I'm not being clear in my question or if everywhere I've interviewed is stumbling around in the dark. An example of an answer I think I'd like to hear would be "Product comes to us with a list of the features they want. The engineering manager and a couple of the lead engineers sit down with them and do some quick triage to get rid of really bad ideas and fast-track really good ideas. Once we've got a really rough prioritized list, the manager breaks features down into areas and a team looks at that. Like, the web team would get the part of a feature that's in their domain and then they'd break it down into actual tickets. The iOS team just has their lead dev write all the stories and the web team does it all in a group -- it's just whatever the team likes. Once we've got stories, Product will prioritize them going into 2 week sprints. For everything except Mobile, we release the feature as part of the ticket being closed. For Mobile we have to batch it up and typically do a release at the end of the sprint." And then I could ask them stuff about how often the sprint-plan gets changed, etc... But usually they seem really vague about where features come from. "Well, sometimes its Product. And sometimes it's things in our backlog. And there's, like, bugs and tech-debt." I guess that's accurate. If someone asked me that about my current job I think I'd say "about half the time, I have an idea I think is important and I work on that. The other half, someone on my team had an idea that I think is important."
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Sep 9, 2021 02:14
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