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spatula posted:I'm coming to terms with the idea that I need to get a new job, my current company is turning into an embarrassing disaster and they'll probably lay me off anyway. The recruiters in my inbox smell blood in the water, lol. FYI, a good way to figure out if you are truly overpaid or not is to start applying to jobs and see what comes out. I'm also willing to bet most people who started their dev jobs pre-pandemic are likely not overpaid. I can't say if most people would be better off switching jobs, but most are not overpaid.
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Dec 6, 2021 03:22
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I can say it was pretty eye opening when if asked about compensation in phone screens I named numbers I previously thought were very high and I never had a single screener balk at my number. The closest I got was a few like "Well Salary alone will be less than that, but we'll easily be above that with bonus/stock/whatever else".
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Dec 6, 2021 03:55
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I've always wondered, unless you're a legendary game designer with the noteriety and trade show glory that comes with it... Why work in games? I get that some people get into programming because they grew up playing games and that was just a natural transition, but, man, I do not hear any good stories come from the trenches of game development, seems like you can make way way more money in more traditional software development
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Dec 6, 2021 09:07
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Because you spend almost 1/3 of your adult life on work. For people like me, it’s what takes up all your effort, dedication, and drive for the day - you’re wiped at the end of it all. So where did your time go? It’s something you can’t get back, either. People want to at least contribute to something they admire with the time taken away from them. Unfortunately, it’s still capital-W Work, so it still sucks.
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Dec 6, 2021 13:57
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It’s nice to like what you work on, and for some people that’s games. If working on X is rewarding to you then getting a higher paying job working on Y or Z is not gonna cut it for some people.
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Dec 6, 2021 14:46
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Pollyanna posted:Because you spend almost 1/3 of your adult life on work. For people like me, it’s what takes up all your effort, dedication, and drive for the day - you’re wiped at the end of it all. So where did your time go? It’s something you can’t get back, either. Work in hardware! I will always have the products I led…sitting in a drawer and unsupported by software after five years  Most device manufacturers don’t have AAA game name recognition but I don’t think this industry has the utter and unending clusterfuck of problems that all game outfits seem to. But yeah it’s still capital-W Work and so is incapable of not sucking.
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Dec 6, 2021 14:56
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wilderthanmild posted:Luckily I do have my diplomas and every W2 I've ever received, all digitized. Good call on redacting the salary info. I'll make separate versions with that info redacted. I did find an annoying snag on this when I was going through these documents, all my current company ones have a different company name on the W2. Like completely and totally different. This is because well before I started working for them, some company in this state was acquired by this company I now work for. Every form I fill out, everything I sign, our offices, even paystubs, all say the current company name. However, all employees in my state get their W2s with this old, seemingly unrelated company name. Luckily it's my current company, so if they like call to do an employment verification there should be no problem verifying. It's just if I go that W2 route I doubt some overworked Background check employee will care to understand the weird circumstances of my company not giving enough of a poo poo to change names on some common legal documents.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:17
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Hadlock posted:I've always wondered, unless you're a legendary game designer with the noteriety and trade show glory that comes with it... Why work in games? I get that some people get into programming because they grew up playing games and that was just a natural transition, but, man, I do not hear any good stories come from the trenches of game development, seems like you can make way way more money in more traditional software development Google keeps rejecting me. In all seriousness, you can have a livable wage in games (especially after you've been around for more than a couple years). Individually, given my employment history, it was also the easiest option for moving into a management role.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:39
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Games are often incredibly intricate systems that do things you really won't see in other spaces. Like the dev writing a social media app or tax software won't get to do the same things a game dev will. They are also about as public facing as you can get. So if your goal is working on things that people actively use and want to use, game design could easily satisfy that goal. The problem with game development is that it tends to be long hours and lower pay. It's basically the opposite of the never-ending line of good paying, but super boring jobs maintaining internal line of business apps. Edit: I will add that everyone I knew who went into games was out of it within a few years. wilderthanmild fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 15:46
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I really think that game developers should get an equity-like cut of proceeds from game sales. The same residuals, as it were, that an actor would receive on a movie.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:31
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I wonder how much lower pay in the game industry ties back to AAA games being stuck at that $60 price point for almost two decades. Recently you've seen a few games from AAA publishers climb in price to $70 and $80, but I doubt all that much is going back to the devs.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:43
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Hadlock posted:I've always wondered, unless you're a legendary game designer with the noteriety and trade show glory that comes with it... Why work in games? I get that some people get into programming because they grew up playing games and that was just a natural transition, but, man, I do not hear any good stories come from the trenches of game development, seems like you can make way way more money in more traditional software development Working in games seems like a challenge. Also, working on in a product domain that I understand and care about would also be a nice change. I could definitely do a couple year stint in game dev if they were willing to offer even two thirds of my current salary, but the current model seems to feast on recently graduated college kids who like video games and don't know better. Game programming salaries were poo poo before the current explosion in senior engineer salaries and there doesn't seem to have been a corresponding increase in that industry.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:58
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I just got a rejection from Mozilla too and that ends a long round of interviewing I started towards the beginning of the summer. I am at least hoping to get some feedback on the collaborative coding exercise. I am trying to figure out if I need to live and breathe coding puzzles. I solve them, but it really looks like I have to just kind of vomit solutions and leave a ton of time to spare. Either that or figure out some way to inspire more confidence or something while going through them.
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Dec 6, 2021 17:06
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kayakyakr posted:I really think that game developers should get an equity-like cut of proceeds from game sales. The same residuals, as it were, that an actor would receive on a movie. The vast majority of people who work on a movie don't get residuals.
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Dec 6, 2021 17:08
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Lockback posted:The vast majority of people who work on a movie don't get residuals. They also should receive residuals.
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Dec 6, 2021 17:11
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Hadlock posted:I've always wondered, unless you're a legendary game designer with the noteriety and trade show glory that comes with it... Why work in games? I get that some people get into programming because they grew up playing games and that was just a natural transition, but, man, I do not hear any good stories come from the trenches of game development, seems like you can make way way more money in more traditional software development The reason I started in games is that they're the reason I started programming in the first place. At this point ~15 years after starting my first game job, the work doesn't especially interest me anymore, and I've considered getting out, but everything else seems even less fun. I have zero interest in web development or databases, and I absolutely hate working with java/typescript, which are the majority of job postings I see. I suppose embedded could be an option, but I have no real experience in the area. Really, at this point I'd like a non-programming job and do games in my free time, but I don't really have any other skills that would pay enough to still be able to retire at some point.
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Dec 6, 2021 17:51
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I just got a rejection from Mozilla too and that ends a long round of interviewing I started towards the beginning of the summer. How many did you do past the recruiter? It took me about 30 to get 7 final stages and 4 offers. It's still a numbers game despite how got the market is.
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Dec 6, 2021 17:52
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wilderthanmild posted:I wonder how much lower pay in the game industry ties back to AAA games being stuck at that $60 price point for almost two decades. Recently you've seen a few games from AAA publishers climb in price to $70 and $80, but I doubt all that much is going back to the devs. lmao you can't be serious ahh yes companies just can't afford higher salaries
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Dec 6, 2021 17:56
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Yeah its all about the mountain of young devs eager for any opportunity to get in. I say this as a former young dev who followed the typical path to "wait a minute, I could walk across the street to earn 1/3 more for half the hours and learn actual transferable development skills..."
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Dec 6, 2021 18:34
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wilderthanmild posted:I wonder how much lower pay in the game industry ties back to AAA games being stuck at that $60 price point for almost two decades. Recently you've seen a few games from AAA publishers climb in price to $70 and $80, but I doubt all that much is going back to the devs. The base price of games has stayed flat because you no longer buy a game and then are done spending money, not because game companies are making less money per copy sold than they used to.
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Dec 6, 2021 18:38
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Plorkyeran posted:The base price of games has stayed flat because you no longer buy a game and then are done spending money, not because game companies are making less money per copy sold than they used to. ...and they are mostly digital with significantly lower transport and manufacturing costs, and the consumer base is orders of magnitude higher, and there is a longer sales tail with things like Steam and other venues that keep older games in front of consumers. But mostly remember the cost of producing something is only very weakly tied to the MSRP.
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Dec 6, 2021 19:03
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Plorkyeran posted:The base price of games has stayed flat because you no longer buy a game and then are done spending money, not because game companies are making less money per copy sold than they used to. Lockback posted:...and they are mostly digital with significantly lower transport and manufacturing costs, and the consumer base is orders of magnitude higher, and there is a longer sales tail with things like Steam and other venues that keep older games in front of consumers. These make sense, but I don't think they were as big of a factor until recently. Expansions/DLC becoming a thing had an impact, but Expansions were always a thing and DLC just made it easier to get. Digital releases have been around for decades now, but it wasn't the norm for consoles until fairly recently and there is still a fair amount of physical distribution. I think the rise in stuff like microtransactions, subscription services, and other repeated charges in recent years has really exploded their margins though. You can see this illustrated pretty well by comparing the net margins of Blizzard who started the subscription based WoW back in 2004 to companies like EA and Take-Two which have relied on more traditional game and Expansion/DLC type sales until they steadily made micro-transactions and subscriptions a big part of their model. Blizzard basically remained high and steady the whole time after introducing WoW(other than a brief 2009 dip ) where as EA and Take-Two were fairly tight margined and would spend big chunks of years in the negatives until maybe the last 5-7 years when they started to steadily rise and eventually explode to double digit margins. However, this defeats the whole point I was wondering about because Blizzard also underpaid and overworked their devs just like the other ones despite not relying anywhere near as much on traditional sales and having much higher and more consistent margins the entire time. Paolomania posted:Yeah its all about the mountain of young devs eager for any opportunity to get in. I say this as a former young dev who followed the typical path to "wait a minute, I could walk across the street to earn 1/3 more for half the hours and learn actual transferable development skills..." This makes a lot of sense to me, a lot more than thinking about profit margins big or small. Companies don't pay devs a bunch of money because they are really nice people who want to pay them well. They pay devs well because there is a ton of competition to hire a smaller pool of devs compared to other positions. If it was as easy to hire a new dev as it is to hire a janitor, devs would be paid like janitors.
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Dec 6, 2021 19:51
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Hadlock posted:levels.fyi Glassdoor always was trash and was gamed by employers from the getgo. I remember starting a new job 8 years ago and HR would push all the new hires to write Glassdoor reviews. Pumped it full of 5-star ratings from people who hadn't been been around long enough to see the place sucked. Also remember as you look on levels.fyi that any datapoint from more than maybe a year ago is not at all reflective of reality because of how bonkers the market is today.
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Dec 6, 2021 21:13
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wilderthanmild posted:If it was as easy to hire a new dev as it is to hire a janitor, devs would be paid like janitors. As an employee, almost always you are not paid based on the value you bring. You are paid based on how much it would cost to replace you.
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Dec 6, 2021 23:50
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Usually not even that. How much it costs to replace an experienced employee who has learned all of the relevant domain knowledge is really hard to calculate, so they usually just go with the cost of hiring an employee for an entirely new position.
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Dec 7, 2021 00:20
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based upon ideology until and unless the market tells ideology to suck a dick
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Dec 7, 2021 00:23
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Plorkyeran posted:Usually not even that. How much it costs to replace an experienced employee who has learned all of the relevant domain knowledge is really hard to calculate, so they usually just go with the cost of hiring an employee for an entirely new position. In the public sector here, new hires are pretty much guaranteed to be paid quite a bit more than most people with seniority. There are lots of programmers who have been in the same position for many, many years with negligible raises.
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Dec 7, 2021 00:35
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wilderthanmild posted:I can say it was pretty eye opening when if asked about compensation in phone screens I named numbers I previously thought were very high and I never had a single screener balk at my number. The closest I got was a few like "Well Salary alone will be less than that, but we'll easily be above that with bonus/stock/whatever else". Same. For the offer I'll likely take, it's almost like they felt bad about being slightly below my base salary ask, so they sweetened the pot with more bonus and stock, plus a signing bonus. I was ready to move on from my current job, but the eye popping raise I got really sealed the deal. It gets mentioned a lot in this thread, but anyone that's wondering, do yourself a favor and get some interviews lined up. It was rough scheduling interview loops with 3 companies simultaneously, but picking between 3 great offers is a nice feeling. The 30-40% bump in TC sure doesn't hurt. Employers are thirsty.
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Dec 7, 2021 02:36
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I’ve gotten over 50 emails from recruiters today but I’m dreading it and feeling overwhelmed Also after checking levels.fyi …y’all were right, although I am well compensated, I’m not overpaid.🥲
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Dec 7, 2021 04:12
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Background check company finally got my process started then told me 5 to 10 business days. Ugh.spatula posted:I’ve gotten over 50 emails from recruiters today but I’m dreading it and feeling overwhelmed Honestly, recruiters are overwhelming. It seems like at some point you just hit some recruiting leads list somewhere and the floodgates just open. The worst is if they get your number, because it's a lot harder to filter the calls than the emails and LinkedIn messages. One recruiter here seems to use spammy number spoofing where they constantly call with new numbers and even weird suspicious stuff like number neighbors.
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Dec 7, 2021 14:57
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i just open palm slammed all of this years and about 10% of last years dependent care FSA money. or sucks cause i'll have to put taxes on it instead of getting the advantage* but at least i won't be out five grand *you don't quality for the tax advantage if one person works in the home, unless they're looking for out-of-the-home** work **which included working from home for an external company anyway, remember to spend any FSA money you have fellow oldies. also i posted this in the wrong thread but welp i'm gonna let it ride
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Dec 7, 2021 16:16
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My flood of recruiters is a combo of some things, funniest one being that my company has national shame/interest due to the video of our questionable CEO laying off 900 people via zoom (won’t namedrop here but you’ll find if you want). The recruiters smell blood. The other thing is that I changed my options on LinkedIn yesterday to quietly say I’m looking for work. That REALLY opened the floodgates! If y’all are even considering a new job, definitely remember to update that.
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Dec 7, 2021 16:17
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Happy US-EAST-1 meltdown day, everyone! Why no, it's not on the status board yet. Because their own monitoring is impacted.
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Dec 7, 2021 17:10
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Motronic posted:Happy US-EAST-1 meltdown day, everyone! Azure is running smooth as butter 
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Dec 7, 2021 17:21
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spatula posted:My flood of recruiters is a combo of some things, funniest one being that my company has national shame/interest due to the video of our questionable CEO laying off 900 people via zoom (won’t namedrop here but you’ll find if you want). The recruiters smell blood. I know which company that is. I also used to work in the same industry in a very similar company and had something very similar happen. Laid off like 1/4th of the company in a very sudden fashion while still keeping an annual incredibly expensive(usually over a million dollar from my understanding) full company party on the schedule for a few weeks later. I think that whole industry is filled with companies like that which are managed very poorly but still succeed because it's very low hanging fruit that any moron with capital can exploit. B-Nasty posted:Azure is running smooth as butter My company's self hosted servers are running smooth as... well oatmeal, but still running.
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Dec 7, 2021 17:31
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Does anybody have recommendations on learning how to write good docs? Less for open source libraries, and more for internal corporate APIs/services. Trying to get some Technical Writing experience as resume fodder but not sure how to develop this skill beyond "start writing bad docs until you write good docs". I found writethedocs.org but was wondering if anyone had a resource they liked/pathway to competency that worked for them.
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Dec 7, 2021 18:53
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Kumquat posted:Does anybody have recommendations on learning how to write good docs? Less for open source libraries, and more for internal corporate APIs/services. Trying to get some Technical Writing experience as resume fodder but not sure how to develop this skill beyond "start writing bad docs until you write good docs". I found writethedocs.org but was wondering if anyone had a resource they liked/pathway to competency that worked for them. Read man pages. I'm a fan of most of man 3
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Dec 7, 2021 19:06
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theres docs as teachin, docs as technical reference, docs as machine input and docs as conceptual reference manpage is number 2. but what are you writin
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Dec 7, 2021 19:09
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bob dobbs is dead posted:theres docs as teachin, docs as technical reference, docs as machine input and docs as conceptual reference I mean, all of these would be useful to have some competency in. Conceptual reference would probably be my first choice because I'm in Web Hell and we have an absolute loving mess of interwoven, poorly scoped microservices that nobody knows what they do or what other services they depend on. edit: my greatest opportunity to write these on the job write now would specifically be documenting existing etl/job pipelines with an eye towards SRE/known issues and fixes Kumquat fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 19:21
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conceptual reference paradoxically benefits from attackin specific problems as examples. whack at examples or write a faq faqs should be made from an actual histogram, on computer or in your head
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Dec 7, 2021 19:26
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