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Also, the distribution happens at the organization level so you're not being directly pushed up or down relative to your team mates but relative to overall performance of people at your level in your product area.
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Mar 11, 2022 20:03
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Pollyanna posted:I can’t prove we’re not doing this. My specific experience with Google is not representative; I don't think anybody's experience can be representative because it's such a large company, and was even by 2010. I found consistently that information did not propagate well across teams, and I've heard other people have the same complaint. When I went up for a promotion and put together a package, it was denied. I asked what I could do better, and nobody had any advice. It wasn't "Well, you haven't done this job long enough" or "The X team felt you didn't do great work". I was told I had done great work, I just needed to be more visible.  e: Paolomania is right, it's called "calibration" rather than "stack ranking", and what I was told by my managers was that the bell curve was enforced at the local level and in groups at each higher level. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 20:11
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next time you're gonna offer people advice about how things really work at google as a google alumna it'd be cool to preface it with the fact that it's over a decade out of date, you know? cause ratcheting up peoples anxiety for no reason is kind of a dick move
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Mar 11, 2022 20:30
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I will say that I've heard that certain parts of Google are a lot better than others if you're aiming for L6 or higher. I forget which parts specifically; probably ads, search, and other super-important core stuff, plus of course whatever the current hotness is. Als, depending on what you're doing, there might not even be scope for an L6 SWE in your department.
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Mar 11, 2022 20:32
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Achmed Jones posted:next time you're gonna offer people advice about how things really work at google as a google alumna it'd be cool to preface it with the fact that it's over a decade out of date, you know? cause ratcheting up peoples anxiety for no reason is kind of a dick move
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Mar 11, 2022 20:42
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There's a huge difference between stating a company stack ranks and a company that calibrates, ranks, or bell curves the rankings that are above average. The former is toxic and the latter is 99% of companies. Don't know Google 2010, but Google now only does the latter iirc. The thing that makes stack ranking toxic is the below average ranking of employees that are adequately performing their job and more importantly the firing of low ranked employees that are adequately performing their job. The same thing applies to a bell curve.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:25
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A few years back in one of these rolling threads I was wondering about these different Markdown-based note taking editors and we had a little bit of dialog about it. I ended up using the offline version of Boost Note. Well, I updated it today and it switched over to some cloud-based signin stuff. I logged in with my GitHub account because whatever, but none of my stuff was there. Okay, whatever, why would it be on the cloud. I installed the older version again and all of my poo poo was gone. I mean, corrupted. The different databases were still there but all of the notes had been wiped. That was two years of personal TODOs, cooking notes, and various personal stuff completely blown up. So Boost Note now has Rocko's "Techbro Garbage poo poo" Award for 2022.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:48
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:A few years back in one of these rolling threads I was wondering about these different Markdown-based note taking editors and we had a little bit of dialog about it. I ended up using the offline version of Boost Note. Well, I updated it today and it switched over to some cloud-based signin stuff. I logged in with my GitHub account because whatever, but none of my stuff was there. Okay, whatever, why would it be on the cloud. I installed the older version again and all of my poo poo was gone. I mean, corrupted. The different databases were still there but all of the notes had been wiped. That was two years of personal TODOs, cooking notes, and various personal stuff completely blown up. I like Leuchtterm1917 notebooks. Highly recommended.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:52
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i like text files in version control
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Mar 13, 2022 06:53
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Pollyanna posted:That’s what I did at my last job, cause I was afraid of being ignored or not taken seriously, even though I most certainly wasn’t. Keep doing this, everyone should do this. You'll need it for either a review, promotion, or resume.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:57
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I use joplin, just have it sync to my server.
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Mar 13, 2022 07:12
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leper khan posted:I like Leuchtterm1917 notebooks. Highly recommended. I can respect that except for all the cooking notes I deal with. I ultimately gently caress up whatever I'm trying to use for that when I go pen-and-paper. So I usually print something out that I doodle over for a bit before I update my notes on the computer. So I'm still pissed about losing all my poo poo but my main, current baking recipes are still in a hard copy. quote:joplin, version control I remember my hangup before was that I wanted to experiment with syncing with my phone using my own hosting. I do a similar thing with my password wallet. Is there anything that does that which doesn't require me to get into some cloud based subscription junk?
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Mar 13, 2022 09:56
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bob dobbs is dead posted:i like text files in version control This is how I keep my work journal. Markdown files, one per year, with month and day headings.
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Mar 13, 2022 12:38
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I can respect that except for all the cooking notes I deal with. I ultimately gently caress up whatever I'm trying to use for that when I go pen-and-paper. So I usually print something out that I doodle over for a bit before I update my notes on the computer. So I'm still pissed about losing all my poo poo but my main, current baking recipes are still in a hard copy. I write down recipes in a notebook. It's extremely useful. I convert volumetric metrics to weights, and everything follows the same shorthand. I also get to reorder the ingredients list into the order of use and pipeline the work to better utilize any available help. Kitchen scale is a game changer. Shortens prep time and reduces cleanup. I've thought about upping my game and getting index cards like grandma used. That would let me better sort and reorder recipes than the notebook.
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Mar 13, 2022 14:50
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Is there anything that does that which doesn't require me to get into some cloud based subscription junk? I've been replacing all cloud junk that I need synced with my own nextcloud server. I just converted all my notes over last week. Works just fine, and I'm using Obsidian as a client. The nextcloud web interface works just fine too.
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Mar 13, 2022 16:23
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I've used notion.so for a while but I also don't care about storing my notes in the cloud
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Mar 13, 2022 17:05
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I just have onenote, you don't need office 365 but it'll sync if you do (bet you could put the .one file wherever you wanted)
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Mar 13, 2022 20:47
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:I just have onenote, you don't need office 365 but it'll sync if you do (bet you could put the .one file wherever you wanted) Can you still do that with newer versions of OneNote? I thought they were all OneDrive, and the last version that could do local files was like 2016 or something and unsupported.
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Mar 13, 2022 20:54
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chglcu posted:Can you still do that with newer versions of OneNote? I thought they were all OneDrive, and the last version that could do local files was like 2016 or something and unsupported. You can export the notebooks from the OneDrive based OneNote (the web client and the Windows app client) for backup, but yeah, OneNote desktop is stuck on 2016 even though it technically comes with Office 2019. The OneDrive versions don't actually use local storage. I got tired of messing with OD, and I realized most of my notes are text files anyway. So, I just use markdown with Obsidian sync'd with Google Drive and backed up with my standard 'all my stuff' backup using Duplicati to Azure blobs. I don't really need notes on my phone much, so anything like shopping lists or quick jots I just use a free Trello account and copy it over to actual notes if needed.
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Mar 14, 2022 01:31
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Wondering if anyone might have some general advice for my situation: I’m a somewhat recently turned mid-level mechanical engineer; though I have worked in/with software for a few years, I did not OFFICIALLY become a software engineer until a little under a year ago. My current job is a Stone Age relic that uses barely any new technology and I am basically just stuck making CRUD apps all day every day. I have been job hunting for months, and presumably by merit of my general engineering background and work experience, I don’t seem to have much trouble getting interviews… the problem I appear to be running into is that I don’t really have any professional experience in web dev, modern frameworks, true front end/backend/full stack design, containerization, cloud etc. I have done my best to strike out in my free time and generate some projects that utilize these skill sets for my portfolio/GitHub, but generally it seems that my drive and interest to try and learn these concepts on my own hasn’t been enough to get me in the door anywhere. So now I have to wonder what I can do to improve myself and increase marketability. Is there some kind of night school boot camp I can attend to bolster a bunch of these skills pretty quickly? Do I just need to keep grinding out projects? Opportunities at work are a complete dead end, so I’m really just stuck with whatever I can do in the evenings.
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Mar 15, 2022 14:30
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Gin_Rummy posted:Wondering if anyone might have some general advice for my situation: Are the companies explicitly telling you the issue is a lack of modern webdev experience, or are you inferring that from vague interview feedback? What's been the structure of the interviews that you feel you've done poorly in, and what's the actual feedback you've gotten? In my experience, if you're getting the interviews, then your resume is good enough, and you just need to focus on interview performance. And the interviews themselves tend to be self-contained algorithms questions that have nothing to do with full stack development, with maybe a design/architecture question thrown in where it helps to have real experience but you can still fake it by having read a few chapters of Cracking the Coding Interview. At my current company I've been in several interviews with candidates with minimal distributed systems experience that do well on the coding part and not so well on the design part, and we still extend an offer, just not at senior.
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Mar 15, 2022 14:49
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Edly posted:Are the companies explicitly telling you the issue is a lack of modern webdev experience, or are you inferring that from vague interview feedback? What's been the structure of the interviews that you feel you've done poorly in, and what's the actual feedback you've gotten? Most have not given explicit feedback, despite me prompting for it, but the structure and types of interviews that the rejection comes after seems to I support my assertion. For example, I had a lengthy discussion with a backend hiring manager where he just kind of asked me about what ORMs I have used in personal projects, why I chose the framework I did, etc. He did not seem satisfied enough with my knowledge and I got a rejection the next day. I also had one that just kind of talked about my current projects and the hiring manager seemed unimpressed before the interview even ended, then I got the rejection the next day. I think another aspect of this is that, even though I explicitly apply for junior/mid level roles, recruiters will also sometimes put me in for a senior or staff role without me even knowing it until the interview. At that point, expectations for all parties are way off. One company did explicitly tell me that my GitHub did not display enough “senior level” type design, which is absolutely fair in that context. quote:In my experience, if you're getting the interviews, then your resume is good enough, and you just need to focus on interview performance. And the interviews themselves tend to be self-contained algorithms questions that have nothing to do with full stack development, with maybe a design/architecture question thrown in where it helps to have real experience but you can still fake it by having read a few chapters of Cracking the Coding Interview. At my current company I've been in several interviews with candidates with minimal distributed systems experience that do well on the coding part and not so well on the design part, and we still extend an offer, just not at senior. Generally the coding/DS&A stuff isn’t a huge hurdle for me. I have my share of live coding bombs, but I also have had plenty of positive coding assessments. I’ve had a few design/architecture interviews that seemed to go fine as well… knowledgeable enough to at least hopefully show that I know what’s going on, even if I am not an expert. In any case, I typically don’t have much problem progressing beyond the “coding round.” That being said, I had been looking into getting Cracking the Coding interview… it definitely doesn’t hurt to prop up those skills, but it just doesn’t seem to me like it is the biggest piece missing from my puzzle right now.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:13
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Would you mind posting some of your personal projects that you are sharing with these companies? I'd be happy to take a look and maybe give some pointers on things you might be able to improve if you want that kind of feedback.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:49
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Gin_Rummy posted:Most have not given explicit feedback, despite me prompting for it, but the structure and types of interviews that the rejection comes after seems to I support my assertion. For example, I had a lengthy discussion with a backend hiring manager where he just kind of asked me about what ORMs I have used in personal projects, why I chose the framework I did, etc. He did not seem satisfied enough with my knowledge and I got a rejection the next day. Fair enough. I guess I'm still surprised you haven't gotten any offers if you feel you're doing well on at least some of the coding and design interviews, but I also am from a traditional SWE background so it might just be a failure on my part to relate to your experience. At both of the big companies I've worked, you'll do the entire interview panel even if they all go poorly, so I wouldn't interpret doing the later interviews as having passed the earlier ones (but that's not to say you're not passing, I believe you if you say they feel like they're going well). I'm not at all surprised that recruiters are misleveling you, 90% of my experience with recruiters is that they just suck at their jobs (sorry to any actually good recruiters, I have worked with several). I guess it could explain things if hiring managers are skimming your resume and seeing "X years total experience" and missing the "but only Y of those years are in SWE". If you haven't already, it might help to rewrite your resume to emphasize the recent SWE experience and really deemphasize the mechanical engineering experience, to make it clear that a career change happened. I don't know about night school bootcamps, but people have definitely posted positive experiences with bootcamps in general. Usually though that's how people get their foot in the door to get the first couple years of experience, which it sounds like you've already done.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:52
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How many interviews have you done?
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Mar 15, 2022 16:12
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The March Hare posted:Would you mind posting some of your personal projects that you are sharing with these companies? I'd be happy to take a look and maybe give some pointers on things you might be able to improve if you want that kind of feedback. As far as “published” code goes, I have a science experiment Python signal processing app and a Discord chat bot. I’d be happy to share those if you have PM? They’re pretty rudimentary though, tbh. I also have a couple of full stack web page type projects in the works that I try to speak to in interviews… they generally leverage React and a python-based backend framework (I’ve been tinkering with different options there). EDIT: Sidenote on this, perhaps only two or three hiring managers have even bothered to look at my GitHub anyways. Maybe one interview discussed some of the details of the projects while only one actually stepped through code to ask me about improvements or “why this vs that?” type stuff. Edly posted:At both of the big companies I've worked, you'll do the entire interview panel even if they all go poorly, so I wouldn't interpret doing the later interviews as having passed the earlier ones So the reason I’d say I “pass” most coding interviews is because I generally have them broken up across multiple days/weeks with people at increasingly lower levels (HR -> code screen -> hiring manager -> team members). That being said, you may be right, I suppose it doesn’t inherently mean I passed but I just assumed they wouldn’t waste their time if I didn’t. But also, I have done some of those “full day of interviews” type panels and those companies also were the ones that explicitly don’t give interview feedback… I will never know how I truly did in those. I had been thinking of retooling my summary as well… the only downside is that I feel like I would be selling myself short right out the gate… but maybe I just have to do that to land a better job. Lockback posted:How many interviews have you done? Quite a few by this point. I’ve done maybe three or four of those all day panel interviews, and countless interviews with hiring managers. I’d estimate maybe somewhere between ten and twenty over the course of the last few months. Gin_Rummy fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 16:38
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Yeah, I have PM - send em along and I'll let you know if I see anything seriously red-flag-level amiss or anywhere you could make some improvements that might make those conversations go better for you when you do have them. I suppose I'll also take a minute to post about the Discord I have for this kind of discourse, which I find easier to do in real time. https://discord.gg/8gYEgv7bz5 I've posted about it before in the Newbie thread, but I don't think I ever posted here. It is primarily a tech mentorship group, place to give and receive career advice - not unlike this very thread  . It also isn't SA specific, so feel free to invite people from outside of the forums if anyone has any interest.It asks you to sign up as a mentor or a mentee but that is, of course, a false dichotomy. I mostly set it up that way because I felt like total newbies would feel better w/ that kind of structure, but I don't know that this is actually true - tl;dr don't sweat the label.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:04
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I've been trying for the last few weeks to follow the suggestions from https://alexchesser.medium.com/career-advice-nobody-gave-me-never-ignore-a-recruiter-4474eac9556. I'm not looking for a new job (the one I have is quite fine), but I was curious. Well, what I found was that I'm paid pretty much at the top of the scale for my area, unless I am looking to join the big boys (FAANG-like), which have interesting interview procedures and for which I may or may not qualify. My pay is quite high by my (and almost all) standards, but who wouldn't like a truckload of $ dumping its load into the bank account every 2 weeks? I'm far from a young whipper-snapper that can vomit leetcode problems, though I don't usually have trouble with them if I take my time. But interviews are a different beast. I've had 3 of them in the last decade to Google and 1 to Facebook and I never made the cut. Oh well ... it is what it is.
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Mar 18, 2022 02:07
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Have you considered nonfaang remote? This is what turned the corner for me from top-of-local-market to actual computer money, if not Google level compensation. It was a LinkedIn recruiter who got me the interview, which would never have happened without a recruiter since the company website sucks
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Mar 18, 2022 02:24
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I'm not eliminating anyone, if the right pay is there (and remote is definitely preferred). It's just been a few weeks/a month, so who knows what the future will bring? The emails come (2-4 per day), I reply with the standard message and I see what I get back. The method described in the article works, at least for telling me the pay range in my area. There's no rush whatsoever.
Volguus fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Mar 18, 2022 |
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Mar 18, 2022 02:48
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From my experience, the numbers that are given before the interview are not the same as the numbers you can get at the end. I felt that I had topped out as well, until after two months of interviewing I finally got multiple competing offers and the total comp shot up. The method from that blog post is great for getting a baseline, but there's no way to know the top until you actually negotiate an offer.
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Mar 18, 2022 15:36
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Achievement unlocked: found out "end of quarter maker sprint" is code for "many of you won't be here at the end of the sprint because layoffs happen at the end of the quarter, and we want to make sure all the quarterly initiatives are done before we let you go" rug pull Was not directly impacted but I have a good idea of who is going to pick up half the work of people near me let go
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Mar 22, 2022 04:24
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Sounds like it's time to pull your own rug
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Mar 22, 2022 04:30
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Hadlock posted:Achievement unlocked: found out "end of quarter maker sprint" is code for "many of you won't be here at the end of the sprint because layoffs happen at the end of the quarter, and we want to make sure all the quarterly initiatives are done before we let you go" rug pull Yeah I'm expecting mass layoffs to happen everywhere sometime this year. Rising interest rates means that it's more expensive to finance new projects, which means fewer reasons to hire new people; and rising inflation means that it's more expensive to have people in general, which means fewer reasons to hire new people. So, if revenue won't go up, then you gotta make expenses go down or else the stock price will go down, the dividends will be smaller, and the CEO will look bad. Also, since virtually everyone who has any money is invested in "stocks" (read: dark pools) because everything else sucks, they can't afford to let the growth in net income stop because then all the institutions that actually own the shares will be screwed (read: bailed out again). I'm toxxing that it'll happen in the Summer around the timing of whatever earnings call that is, and then they'll simultaneously announce compensation adjustments for the survivors due to inflation so that the news doesn't make all of their brands look "too" bad. 
Love Stole the Day fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Mar 22, 2022 |
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Mar 22, 2022 04:38
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Yeah surveying the landscape, I think I have 3-6 months before I get outsourced. The way it's setup right now there's my boss who has the keys, I am the bus factor spare, and then we manage the offshore contractors and keep the lights on until they figure out how to push us out to meet wherever capex goal they set out to achieve. Yay.
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Mar 22, 2022 04:43
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Love Stole the Day posted:Rising interest rates means that it's more expensive to finance new projects, which means fewer reasons to hire new people; and rising inflation means that it's more expensive to have people in general, which means Money is still cheaper than it's historically been, it would not surprise me if interest rates eclipse 6% by Christmas but I'm skeptical that'll happen as quickly as this summer If something were to kick over the money printing machine my bet is on inflation, it's already at 40 year high; we had a shot of getting it under control in mid February, but now I think the cat is out of the bag and financial forecasting will push everyone into "wait and see" mode soon if they're not already I'm also not very incentivized to leave right now as wage inflation doesn't seem to be slowing down any, if I jump ship now for a 20% pay raise, might end up with a 10% raise once you account for inflation etc My personal situation wasn't impacted by this, to be clear; the board wanted to tune our capex to revenue ratio for other reasons
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Mar 22, 2022 05:43
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whereas if you stay you get a certain % pay cut lol inflation is differentially bad for equities, which is often surprising to commodities folks. lots of cases where equities inflated right alongside the stuff thats supposed to be good inflation hedges now, bonds are hosed. but theres an entire section of computer touching that just never does bonds
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Mar 22, 2022 05:59
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Guinness posted:Sounds like it's time to pull your own rug this is one of the unspoken benefits of wfh
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Mar 22, 2022 10:48
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redleader posted:this is one of the unspoken benefits of wfh That you have your own rugs that you can mess with?
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Mar 22, 2022 15:31
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Yes and you can tug 'em
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Mar 22, 2022 22:20
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