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Wow that recruiter is blatantly lying. There is absolutely no way that Google didn't have the right people to interview you available and even if they didn't the correct thing to do is to tell you that and schedule interviews when they are available. That comment on getting bumped to L5 upon finding the right team is laughable unless they meant in a couple of years. Asking for more interviews when you downgrade someone a level is also bizarre.
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Jan 20, 2022 05:39
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Nice pull! 
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Jan 20, 2022 05:41
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nah it's almost certainly true that they didn't have the right people on the interview. the deceptive part is that trying again would mean that they'd get the right people, instead of random rear end google SWEs. i mean maybe they would, but the chances aren't good
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Jan 20, 2022 05:47
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congrats I hope Nvidia is cool. Send us gfx cards
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Jan 20, 2022 06:03
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lol, gently caress them "We want to down level you, but you have to pass more interviews. What do you mean you have a different offer? But you still like us, riiiiiight?"
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Jan 20, 2022 10:18
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Congrats! It sounds like the Nvidia interview process is sane and I hope other high level companies follow suit. The LC monkey dance is depressing. The skills you build learning it are completely useless but even worse is it steals time you could use to actually learn cool, relevant stuff.
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Jan 20, 2022 14:14
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a dingus posted:Congrats! It sounds like the Nvidia interview process is sane and I hope other high level companies follow suit. The LC monkey dance is depressing. The skills you build learning it are completely useless but even worse is it steals time you could use to actually learn cool, relevant stuff. My bigger fear is the skills are harmful and it teaches people to pattern match to a fixed set of solutions and we're all building towards suboptimal solutions as a result.
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Jan 20, 2022 14:30
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weird response from the google recruiter... congrats on the nvidia role
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Jan 20, 2022 14:40
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leper khan posted:My bigger fear is the skills are harmful and it teaches people to pattern match to a fixed set of solutions and we're all building towards suboptimal solutions as a result. it does and we are
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Jan 20, 2022 14:50
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G loves to down-level, especially if they don't see other FAANGs on your resume. They're also offering way fewer RSUs than they used to. So maybe a bullet dodged, glad you found a place you're excited about.
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Jan 20, 2022 14:53
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hendersa posted:The Google hiring committee did not accept or reject my application. Instead, I got an "on hold" status and was told that I wasn't acceptable at the L5 level. I was given the option to do two additional coding interviews for a re-review at L4, which I ended up declining With your background and experience that is an utterly ridiculous outcome. I could understand the rationale for bringing you in at L5 versus L6, but L4 is just bonkers. Congrats on the Nvidia gig!
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Jan 20, 2022 15:39
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hendersa posted:
Wow you are the hero we need and deserve ! I would hug you if I could
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Jan 20, 2022 16:16
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Final Update!
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hendersa posted:Oh well. You win some, you lose some. This tracks with my experience. Google commands a lot of attention and clout as a FAANG, but in my experience the only thing that distinguishes it from other tech companies is its size, and boy does it loving show. Interviewing and hiring seems messy and vague both from the outside and from the inside, and I don't have confidence in its efficacy. I'm honestly kinda dreading ramping up on the interviewing rounds  Don't get down on yourself, don't let it gently caress you up. This is Google's problem, and everyone knows it but just doesn't want to say it nor can do anything about it. Unfortunately, that includes me  best I can do is be understanding and supportive during the process, cause I was on the other side of that screen and I know how upsetting it is.You absolutely deserve to be at the very least L5, with everything you've done (and I even think that's an undershot leveling). I think the NVIDIA role is a great and far better fit for you, and I genuinely wish you luck!
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Jan 20, 2022 16:22
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hendersa posted:
Good God. This is one of those conversations that programmers only dream about.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:01
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Hey goons, would appreciate some advice on next steps to take here ( ahead):I joined a startup in June of last year. It was technically started/funded by a company that's been around for several decades, although the plan is to get us to be independent eventually. When I joined, things were pretty scattered and there was poor communication across departments. We started hiring a bunch based on a hiring plan that assumed a certain amount of growth/revenue that never came. Different departments chased after potential investors and there were no clear priorities on where the product should go. We hired a CEO-type figure in October to help centralize decision making and give us clear direction on how to move forward which has been very helpful. I feel that the scattered approach we had before has genuinely improved. Unfortunately since they were hired late in the year, this delayed budget planning until the end of 2021. We knew we were losing all our contractors due to this, and that the final budget could mean some positions being cut. Come the beginning of this year, there was a sizeable layoff (roughly a third of the company, we went from 50ish folks to 30ish) when we received this year's budget from the parent company. We definitely lost more folks than anyone expected. They told us that the budget is firm and our jobs should be safe throughout at least the end of 2022, and that they cut the budget to the most conservative level possible to ensure project longevity. At least one senior dev has put in their 2 weeks since the layoffs. I was just in a call with them, and they mentioned that they have heard a lot of other folks on the project are also considering jumping ship. My question is, how concerned should I be, and should I start looking for a new job? I received a sign on bonus which I need to pay back if I leave before my first year. Is it common to find companies that are willing to help pay that back? I really don't want to leave, there are some awesome people on the team, the culture is great (despite the layoffs), I rarely feel stressed, and the pay is fine. I know I could be making more, but I don't feel unfairly underpaid. Our revenue situation is definitely pretty barebones, but with the new CEO figure, we have better direction that I'm hoping will start to pay off soon. We got rid of a lot of dead weight during the layoffs, and we have some promising leads in the next quarter or two including a partnership with a very large household-name company. Plus, the parent company has tons of connections that they are leveraging in a more focused way to help improve revenue. Ideally I'd like to hold off looking until May/June when I'm approaching the end of the bonus-payback window, but would it make sense to start looking even sooner than that? This is my first startup so I definitely don't know enough about potential warning signs/red flags/etc or what to expect in general.
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Jan 20, 2022 21:46
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"we are gonna cut the comp budget in the single time of the strongest comp level rises in 20 years, maybe ever" - read that out loud to yourself and think on whether this sounds like a good idea
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Jan 20, 2022 21:48
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Does not sound like you're far off from having done your year. If the pay is not bad, and the bonus was alright then stick with it until then. You can start the process of finding a new place now and see when they need you to join, or if their bonus is enough to offset the cost of jumping ship.
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Jan 20, 2022 21:56
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Most companies offer signon bonuses so using the new one to pay back the previous one should work. The only question you would need to answer is does it matter tax wise. Holding off to midyear should also be fine, doubtful that they do another layoff within 6 months. That job sounds like the worst of both worlds with minimal payoff if it succeeds.
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Jan 20, 2022 22:22
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The Dark Wind posted:Come the beginning of this year, there was a sizeable layoff (roughly a third of the company, we went from 50ish folks to 30ish).... If a company with 50 people has significant dead weight, something is extremely broken in hiring or retention.
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Jan 20, 2022 22:54
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Thanks folks! Yeah there was definitely something really weird going on in hiring. We had/have a really awesome dev team but product was a complete mess. Thankfully they kept only the good ones. Unless various revenue leads pan out and the comp situation changes drastically, yeah, it's pretty clear this boat ain't worth staying on, but I do want to hold out at least a few more months. Due to the layoffs/departures, I'm finally getting an opportunity to learn and work in React Native which is something I've had zero experience with before, so would like to finally add that to my list of skills. I also really don't want to bother with the whole job application process just yet, so I want to squeeze a few more months out of this spot for the time being unless there are red flags showing that this might not even last till June.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:10
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If the senior guys are walking out the door and it's almost feb, I would start interviewing now and be polishing your resume so that you interview well for the job you want when they shut down the company and roll the technology back into the mothership. You don't want to be starting this process a week after you get laid off in June Whatever new job you get will almost certainly cover your starting bonus in the pay delta between this job and your next one. As someone else pointed out, pay is going way way up right now, you'll probably pull a $20k raise when you walk out the door
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Jan 20, 2022 23:49
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You really want to be looking for a job before you need it. If you're happy staying where you are for a few more months, that just means that you can be pickier about what positions you consider.
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Jan 21, 2022 03:50
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hendersa, are you going to be single-handedly making Nvidia Linux drivers not suck? That would be very respectable. I still am trying to leverage you as a stick to beat over my old colleague's head when I tried to get you through to Twitter. I think I learned something I didn't want to learn from that.
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Jan 21, 2022 06:29
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:hendersa, are you going to be single-handedly making Nvidia Linux drivers not suck? That would be very respectable. I still am trying to leverage you as a stick to beat over my old colleague's head when I tried to get you through to Twitter. I think I learned something I didn't want to learn from that. The BMC lives on the baseboard/motherboard of server systems and it constantly monitors and controls aspects of system health: temperatures, fan speeds, various health-related sensors, states of hot-pluggable processors/RAM, etc. The BMC OS work gets very in-depth, since you're essentially making a specialized OS with a suite of custom device drivers and monitoring daemons to watch over and control a system with soft/hard real-time constraints. The Twitter job that your colleague is hiring for is a distro-maintainer job with a focus on tuning resource usage via cgroups for performance. The NVIDIA job that I accepted is more about building an OS from the ground up for a specialized purpose. Since Twitter auto-rejected my application, I never received any feedback on where I fell short of their expectations. I don't know what Twitter is looking for, but it must be something pretty special! 
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Jan 21, 2022 14:04
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hendersa posted:I don't know what Twitter is looking for, but it must be something pretty special! They probably don't know either.
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Jan 21, 2022 14:13
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I think I learned something I didn't want to learn from that. That's a pretty good description of getting involved in the hiring process everywhere I've been.
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Jan 21, 2022 15:01
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Had my first performance review after hitting the six month mark. They were very happy with my performance, saying I had exceeded their expectations. Since they don't do annual raises I felt this was a good point to ask for one, but they did not want to have the discussion, saying they would have to talk to their boss about raises in the team in general before being able to discuss it. When I pressed him on setting a meeting on the subject in the future they said it would probably not be happening until I had been there for at least a year. A bit disappointing, my expectations will be pretty big for this summer seeing the huge salary increases going around right now.
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Jan 21, 2022 21:40
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Seems strange to me, one would think that there was either a policy to do raises on your anniversary or once a year for everyone who's been there longer than X months. If it's probably not happening until you've been there for a year, nothing is stopping it from not happening after you've been there for longer than a year either.
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Jan 21, 2022 21:44
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They seem to have been operating on a basis of people asking for a raise when they have an offer from somewhere else in hand, often at various crossroads for the company. This has led to a huge turnover rate and a few very highly paid seniors. I was definitely giving it at least a year anyway, so it's fine, but they're sort of incentivizing me to start looking around when that time comes around which can't be a good strategy.
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Jan 21, 2022 22:22
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Wait you asked for a raise and your boss flat out refused to run it up the flag pole? Just, "no"? Besides doing weekly 1:1, going to bat for your direct reports is like the only other blood contract you have with your boss. gently caress that guy and run
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Jan 21, 2022 23:24
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Hadlock posted:Wait you asked for a raise and your boss flat out refused to run it up the flag pole? Just, "no"? Besides doing weekly 1:1, going to bat for your direct reports is like the only other blood contract you have with your boss. gently caress that guy and run Yes I didn't have this for for a while and my career turned into a "lateral advancement."
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Jan 22, 2022 03:59
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I worked at a place where my boss and I hated each other, but he'd at least walk into his bosses office and pretend to vouch for me for a raise. Like, we did not see eye to eye on anything, but he still had the... humanity? To pretend to do his job I don't think I've ever heard of a boss straight up being like "nope, not even gonna ask" in the same conversation as "I want a raise". Maybe I've just been lucky, or I know when not to ask for a raise
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Jan 22, 2022 05:28
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At my two-year evaluation, I asked for a raise, more vacation time, and the option to work from home on some days. My boss's answer was "no" and I should have walked on the spot.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:38
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The one boss I had who told me "here's what you need to do to qualify for a raise next year" when I asked was straight up lying. I did everything he asked and still didn't get the raise. Happily, I left shortly afterwards.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:41
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LLSix posted:The one boss I had who told me "here's what you need to do to qualify for a raise next year" when I asked was straight up lying. I did everything he asked and still didn't get the raise. Happily, I left shortly afterwards. I had that at a job once. There was a checklist of things to do for a senior title, I blasted through it pretty quickly. Then my manager claimed there was an unofficial rule that you had to have finished five projects. The projects came and went, and then the goal posts were moved to "you have to be as busy as [architect]". In the meantime I got one 3% raise and the new grads that were being hired were making more than me. My manager was very surprised when I quit for some reason.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:51
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Friday evening musing about my career plan for this year. My #1 goal is to launch my game...but that's indie gamedev, so the working assumption is that it won't pay the bills and I'll need to go back to (non-gamedev) industry dev work. I spent ~15 years as a generalist with a minor scientific programming bent: I wrote microscope control software, data visualization and analysis tools, and a laboratory information management system. A good amount of databases, teaching systems to talk to each other, complicated architecture problems, API/SDK design, liaising with scientists and non-technical folks, being TL of a large but pretty junior team. The past ~3 years of solo gamedev have added a smorgasbord of miscellaneous other skills on top of that, like shaders, music/art direction (+ evaluating and hiring contractors), sound design, etc. It'd be nice if I could get work that somehow leveraged that more recent experience, since I found it on the whole to be personally rewarding. However, it's blatantly obvious that I don't have the kinds of artistic chops that folks with serious artistic backgrounds have. And I don't want to work in gamedev if I'm not working for myself. Any thoughts? If I just have to go back to being paid $300k/year to do <whatever>, well, there's worse fates. I just don't really have a feel for what options my skillset makes available to me, I guess.
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Jan 22, 2022 06:08
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LLSix posted:The one boss I had who told me "here's what you need to do to qualify for a raise next year" when I asked was straight up lying. I did everything he asked and still didn't get the raise. Happily, I left shortly afterwards. truth for that kinda claim doesnt exist lol
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Jan 22, 2022 06:42
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yeah. i was working like l+3 at oldjob going by the actual requirements, yet things kept coming up that the CTO really wanted me to do before i could get promoted i later found out that my manager had never actually talked to the CTO about me being promoted
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Jan 22, 2022 09:54
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How many of you have worked at a company where it actually makes sense to try and get promoted vs leaving? I've only worked for a couple companies. The first for ~7 years and it was definitely not worth trying to get a raise. The second, who knows yet. But it seems like in today's market it makes no sense jumping through hoops for a year for a promotion vs just interviewing elsewhere.
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Jan 22, 2022 13:21
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:hendersa, are you going to be single-handedly making Nvidia Linux drivers not suck? That would be very respectable. I still am trying to leverage you as a stick to beat over my old colleague's head when I tried to get you through to Twitter. I think I learned something I didn't want to learn from that. I tried to refer a friend to my employer, and after he chatted with my boss, who then sent over the contact info to HR saying to go get him, we had to poke them 3 times before they unlost his info. We did not end up hiring him
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Jan 22, 2022 13:49
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