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Who could have thought that the company going all in on inventing a worse version of Second Life in 2022 would run into financial troubles
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Oct 5, 2022 17:41
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not to mention ruining their other products so that they can try and outcompete TikTok in what it excels at
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Oct 5, 2022 17:44
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Meta's campus sign is built on the old turned-around Sun Microsystems sign. This is apparently a memento mori to remind employees to stay humble/hungry because even huge companies can disappear quickly. Looks like that's gonna come true.
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Oct 5, 2022 18:02
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Hadlock posted:Meta hiring freeze officially in effect now Thank goodness. Maybe they'll finally stop calling me.
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Oct 5, 2022 18:10
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I would like some advice. Out of college I got a job developing a compiler and runtime for a rarely used language. I have no paper qualifications for this (e.g. I majored in biology), but I answered my boss's programming questions on IRC and that impressed him enough. I have figured out things as I go along, mostly by reading a lot of books, but for the most part I have been a bit isolated from the larger world of programming, especially the world that talks about salaries rather than theory. So my employment situation has been a bit weird, and that's been prolonged by the fact that I'm working in non-CS academia. In the near future that's going to change, and I'll be working for the same guy at his biotech startup. That'll be a big salary bump and a more normal employment situation with things I've never had before like equity and written policies, and assuming the startup doesn't flop (which of course it may), more responsibilities. I'd like to make myself a little more aware of the industry. So... I'd like to ask for a ballpark estimate of what somebody working on compilers would generally make in the tech sphere, and more broadly what I can do to network effectively. Besides, I guess, make a LinkedIn page and strike up more conversations on the LLVM discord.
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Oct 8, 2022 03:12
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Syritta posted:I would like some advice. Out of college I got a job developing a compiler and runtime for a rarely used language. I have no paper qualifications for this (e.g. I majored in biology), but I answered my boss's programming questions on IRC and that impressed him enough. I have figured out things as I go along, mostly by reading a lot of books, but for the most part I have been a bit isolated from the larger world of programming, especially the world that talks about salaries rather than theory. So my employment situation has been a bit weird, and that's been prolonged by the fact that I'm working in non-CS academia. What's a "big salary bump"? Are you getting equity in this startup? What region are you in? How many years of experience do you have? I don't think the fact that it's a compiler really factors into things, especially if it's a niche language that's primarily going to be used internally (?) I'd love to understand what's so special about this language that it's worth it to have a special compiler and dedicated developer staff versus using any of the other thousands of programming languages in existence
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Oct 8, 2022 03:39
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Has anyone here worked as an SRE or with an SRE team at Apple? Their recruiters reached out recently and it was the first time in a few years that the thought of actually leaving my current gig popped into my head as a serious consideration. I realize it’s a large company so experiences will vary, but any insights would be appreciated.
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Oct 8, 2022 03:39
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:What's a "big salary bump"? Are you getting equity in this startup? What region are you in? How many years of experience do you have? I honestly feel embarrassed saying this after reading the last few pages in this thread, but I'll be making like 80k (USD). Yes. Pennsylvania. Five years now. New Yorp New Yorp posted:I don't think the fact that it's a compiler really factors into things, especially if it's a niche language that's primarily going to be used internally (?) Good to know, thanks. I'm sure this is obvious but I want to emphasize that I am pretty much entirely clueless about the market. New Yorp New Yorp posted:I'd love to understand what's so special about this language that it's worth it to have a special compiler and dedicated developer staff versus using any of the other thousands of programming languages in existence The short answer is that I'll be in charge of software beyond the compiler moving forward so there won't be a dedicated staff so much, and a lot of the work is foisted off on LLVM. The other short answer is that this is coming from a segment of academia where everybody's been using the same programs for fifty years, and there's all the inertia of old lovely-but-working code combined with the fact that very few people both understand the underlying science and are able and inclined to rewrite it as clean and performant code. There are other reasons but those are probably the most relevant ones.
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Oct 8, 2022 04:28
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i knew a man in the react native team whose tc was 550k usd last time i heard prolly your thingy is not a mainline part of the effort of a putative tech major to deal with strategic threats posed by the phone os duopoly but lol compilers vs non compilers is not a huge difference. figgieland vs not is a huge difference. tech major vs putative tech major vs startup planning to be tech major vs others is a huge difference. lots of peeps writing webshit blub or pushin protobufs getting paid 5x your tc bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 05:49
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You can use specific competences to land jobs sometimes, but a ton of places will just try to sus out whether or not you can program and whether or not you're a complete pain to deal with. Knowing about compilers is not particularly popular right now as far as I know. Your pay will to a certain degree be based on how much experience you have, but to a much larger degree where you work and how good of a negotiator you are. thotsky fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 09:17
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thotsky posted:You can use specific competences to land jobs sometimes, but a ton of places will just try to sus out whether or not you can program and whether or not you're a complete pain to deal with.
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Oct 8, 2022 09:26
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There are tons of terrible ways of doing a technical interview. I don't know that there's a good one. I will be putting one to a candidate next week and my approach will be to have a dialog with them where I present a very simple programming question, sorting a list of integers, and then introducing increasingly difficult complications/stipulations as we go along. I am more interested in seeing how they are to work with, whether or not they ask good clarifying questions, whether or not they take my advice and hints and if they're able to articulate their thought process, than I am in how many of the complications they can solve, but if they can get to some of the later ones and find them interesting rather than frustrating that would also be a good thing. thotsky fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 09:40
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Artemis J Brassnuts posted:I often wonder about this because I have lots of experience in games and I wonder how easily I’d be to move to a more lucrative field. I once interviewed at Volvo but their interview was ridiculous and kind of scared me off of leaving games. It was a timed test with a super hard dynamic programming questions that seemed unrelated to any skills needed for writing UI for an infotainment system. Algorithm interviews are unrelated to the job at most companies. Putting in the time to learn how to pass them is the price to get high paying job. It's not the only path, but most companies include algorithm questions so it's almost certainly the most common. Dynamic programming questions are relatively rare in my experience so if thats the only area you're weak in then you can likely get by rolling the dice on not being asked one. asur fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 12:43
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Make a rubric first.
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Oct 8, 2022 16:15
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Syritta posted:I honestly feel embarrassed saying this after reading the last few pages in this thread, but I'll be making like 80k (USD). Yes. Pennsylvania. Five years now. You could double your salary EASILY at basically any company just doing boring web development and/or devopsy poo poo. If you're smart enough to build compilers you're smart enough to write CRUD bullshit. I'm not smart enough to build compilers.
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Oct 8, 2022 21:34
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:You could double your salary EASILY at basically any company just doing boring web development and/or devopsy poo poo. If you're smart enough to build compilers you're smart enough to write CRUD bullshit. I'm not smart enough to build compilers. 80k was junior straight out of bootcamp front end dev pay in 2015 You're working on space shuttle engines and they're paying you farm tractor mechanic prices 
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Oct 8, 2022 21:39
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Chiming in to say, double your salary by switching to any other job in this industry. That's abysmally low for any real work. My company pays interns almost as much, and I'm in Midwest. E: just wanted to clarify that i don't mean to sound like a dick. The tone you read is one of concern for a fellow programmer who seems to be exploited by their boss. gbut fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 21:51
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Our colombian contractors do great work, but they're green and 22-24 years old with no experience, and we pay them $60k a year, they live like gods in their low cost of living towns
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Oct 8, 2022 22:55
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Salary aside, how large is the code base that it is easier to modify an existing compiler rather than migrate the code? Generally, you want your technology to be where the brainpower is, and compiler tinkering is very niche, but if the code could move into a more common language, even if it were undocumented garbage (not a rare thing), more folks could work on it.
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Oct 8, 2022 23:00
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Unsuprisingly, turns out most national security infrastructure still runs on ancient copies of windows, wouldn't surprise me if he's supporting a C++20 (or .net 1.6 or something? with direct-x 4 graphics support ) codebase for windows 98 SE or something as part of a toolchain for building the targeting system for the A-10 Thunderbolt, or something insanely rickety recently found out my wife's company missed some targets because they don't have a way to update the software on their bespoke hardware
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Oct 8, 2022 23:05
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gbut posted:Chiming in to say, double your salary by switching to any other job in this industry. That's abysmally low for any real work. My company pays interns almost as much, and I'm in Midwest. New Yorp New Yorp posted:You could double your salary EASILY at basically any company just doing boring web development and/or devopsy poo poo. If you're smart enough to build compilers you're smart enough to write CRUD bullshit. I'm not smart enough to build compilers. Hadlock posted:80k was junior straight out of bootcamp front end dev pay in 2015 I was more or less aware of this already but thanks for validating my perception. Getting a sense for this sort of thing is why I'm asking these vague questions. I imagine I could figure out web stuff, but I haven't looked at it much since browsing my mom's old HTML 4.0 reference and boggling at V8, and I like some other aspects of my job. StumblyWumbly posted:Salary aside, how large is the code base that it is easier to modify an existing compiler rather than migrate the code? That kind of ties into the "other reasons" I didn't mention. Honestly speaking, I think it's pretty debatable whether this was the smart way to go when the project started, since while porting a bunch of Fortran and much-more-niche poo poo is a massive pain, so is writing a whole compiler, even with LLVM and copying from open source. Part of it is probably again that the software is specialized enough that the main bottleneck to entry is needing doctorate-level knowledge in the field rather than anything to do with the code. And regardless of how wise it was for the project, it did at least lead to me getting paid (a pittance) to work on stuff that I think is really interesting. There's also the fact we're doing a lot of number crunching, which as far as I can tell rules out a lot of the popular languages, except maybe as a MATLAB- or SciPy-like driver. A while back I did a bit of consulting for a fintech guy and i was honestly shocked at how inefficient Clojure apparently is at that (also: how little number crunching fintech actually needs?).
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Oct 8, 2022 23:33
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Hadlock posted:Unsuprisingly, turns out most national security infrastructure still runs on ancient copies of windows, wouldn't surprise me if he's supporting a C++20 (or .net 1.6 or something? with direct-x 4 graphics support ) codebase for windows 98 SE or something as part of a toolchain for building the targeting system for the A-10 Thunderbolt, or something insanely rickety lol nah but academia is like that a lot. in undergrad i worked in a lab doing some extremely cool cyborg biology, electronically manipulating single living neurons, cutting edge stuff even now I'm pretty sure. the software was written in a twenty year old Borland Delphi you had to run in a VM. distinctly remember staring at a like, 18000 line file with an ODE solver the PI inexplicably wrote himself
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Oct 8, 2022 23:37
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clojure's perf characteristics depend utterly on your attitude towards dealing w its pile of abstractions: its all abstractions, there is no foundational underlying clojure unlike w common lisp or schemes and schemelikes, so it can be ported to java and javascript and .net and dart and all. i worked on one of the more enduring oss clojure dealios and the enduring advantages over python are hiring, async stm and packaging story numerical python is new industry standard, but academia has a lotta weirdoes and stragglers. finance is not even close to one unitary thing: hft market makers have microsecond latency budgets, m&a makes do with the usual crud app and excel. needed numerical competency is sometimes addition and subtraction, sometimes ito calculus bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 23:41
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Judging from what is publically available on levels.fyi they probably could double, maybe even triple their salary with a bit of work and a bit luck, but something like 130K would be the average in Pennsylvania with their amount of experience.
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Oct 9, 2022 10:14
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Dynamic programming just means caching your results it's not that scary. You can definitely get paid more, but moving from (making up your current salary) 40k to 80k + equity is still a move on the right direction so grats on that  Start leetcoding and spruce up your linkedin and resume and apply for some jobs. I'm imagining the worst case scenario is this startup piles on the stress and work hours to the point that you have no bandwidth to find a better job so try to avoid that if possible. Do your best at the startup working 7-8 hours a day and leave as soon as you get a better offer.
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Oct 9, 2022 11:59
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E: nvm not in a position to even think about doing this, drat it
oliveoil fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 9, 2022 17:13
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The tech market in PA isn't great, comparing it to Bay Area or NYC salaries isn't reasonable unless you're actually working for a bay area company. Pittsburgh is probably the best for tech because there are multiple FAANGs here and a reasonable startup scene, but Philly kinda sucks for it and anywhere that isn't Pittsburgh or Philly may as well not exist. You *can* make $130k in Philly but unless it has changed drastically in the past 5 years I think that's the exception unless you've got 10+ years of relevant experience. There aren't a lot of "tech companies" there, so your options are primarily banks or Comcast. Something fully remote would probably be the best option in Philly to be honest.
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Oct 9, 2022 17:38
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Philadelphia does have a lot of biotech, though, so if that's your thing it might be a good market. You're not going to get tech major salaries at those companies but you're also not going to have to write boring CRUD apps.
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Oct 9, 2022 17:54
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Yeah you would need to give to the luxury of commuting to an office every day if you wanted to clear more than $130 in that local market
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Oct 9, 2022 17:57
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Artemis J Brassnuts posted:I often wonder about this because I have lots of experience in games and I wonder how easily I’d be to move to a more lucrative field. I once interviewed at Volvo but their interview was ridiculous and kind of scared me off of leaving games. It was a timed test with a super hard dynamic programming questions that seemed unrelated to any skills needed for writing UI for an infotainment system. Leetcode and get a non-gaming job if you want. One of my FANG coworkers worked on games, most of which I never heard of. Smart guy, did really well.
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Oct 9, 2022 21:40
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this has been very helpful, thank you all. especially interesting to hear about the specific area. i am pretty sure if i was doing CRUD and/or worked for FAANG i would go postal (actually back in college a vision of working for amazon is what made me change majors from CS), so i am pretty okay not making quite that much. but i just spent the weekend refreshing my resume and I'll be making a linkedin and so on, not to mention just pushing for better compensation here. i do enjoy my job, and i'm not overworked, but it would of course be nice to have some more money. bob dobbs is dead posted:clojure's perf characteristics depend utterly on your attitude towards dealing w its pile of abstractions: its all abstractions, there is no foundational underlying clojure unlike w common lisp or schemes and schemelikes, so it can be ported to java and javascript and .net and dart and all. i worked on one of the more enduring oss clojure dealios and the enduring advantages over python are hiring, async stm and packaging story interesting. I guess it should have been obvious fintech isn't a monolith. I was sort of expecting everything to be HFT Ito calculus, so having this guy tell me it didn't come up and that they barely did optimizations i thought were fairly basic (in whatever particular area he was in, sounded more in the "crud app and excel" zone) surprised me.
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Oct 10, 2022 04:36
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Even in the markets a lot more of finance runs on Excel than on all the sophisticated models put together.
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Oct 10, 2022 14:08
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So I was an x-ray tech but job prospects were slim to none in Finland for six years, so I went to university this fall to study computer sciences: https://www.tuni.fi/studentsguide/curriculum/degree-programmes/uta-tohjelma-1705?year=2022&activeTab=1 Now I'm wondering what to do next summer. There won't be school in Jun-Aug, probably not much in May either. What kind of work could an old guy (I'm 37 heh) get after 1 year of CS? I can't get even temp jobs as an x-ray tech so it must be something else. Flipping burgers maybe? First year of CS consists chiefly of mandatory courses like programming 1-3, functional programming, some math & statistics, intro to software development, maybe techniques in C programming language, a git course. Prog1-3 have python, c++ and java respectively. I could probably choose other courses too if necessary (they have a big list: https://www.tuni.fi/en/students-guide/curriculum/course-units?year=2022 ) Maybe I should do a roguelike and share the git repo with potential employees? No idea how this works really.
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Oct 16, 2022 16:55
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Ihmemies posted:So I was an x-ray tech but job prospects were slim to none in Finland for six years, so I went to university this fall to study computer sciences: https://www.tuni.fi/studentsguide/curriculum/degree-programmes/uta-tohjelma-1705?year=2022&activeTab=1 IMO, Python and C++ are great languages for very different things. Python should be easier to pick up and learn on your own, it's used in a ton of places. C++ is for embedded stuff or very large programs that need to manage memory carefully , or just very old code that predates modern languages. Java is closer to C++, but I don't run into it ever.
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Oct 16, 2022 17:13
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StumblyWumbly posted:Are you thinking of getting an internship, or do you want to jump into full time work with 1 year of school? Either way, the way to stand out as a candidate is to have a GitHub portfolio with some clean project examples. I guess the word is internship. I don't really need that much money, I'd just love to get something productive done in the summer which looks like something in my CV. No idea what that could be though. In case everyone else quits the healthcare sector during winter in Finland I may get some work as an x-ray -tech, but I'm so far giving a 0,x% probability for that to happen. From experience gathered by other people I know mixing work and studies is extra difficult. One of them suffers if you want to do the other at least half decently. So I know a ton of people who have yet to complete their studies/degree while they work full time... quote:IMO, Python and C++ are great languages for very different things. Python should be easier to pick up and learn on your own, it's used in a ton of places. C++ is for embedded stuff or very large programs that need to manage memory carefully , or just very old code that predates modern languages. Java is closer to C++, but I don't run into it ever. Thanks. I think it's some compilation of legacy decisions. Two local universities merged, and one had all their courses in C++, the other in Java. So they made a compromise like that, and switched the noob course to python to ease people into programming.
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Oct 16, 2022 18:01
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Hadlock posted:Unsuprisingly, turns out most national security infrastructure still runs on ancient copies of windows, wouldn't surprise me if he's supporting a C++20 (or .net 1.6 or something? with direct-x 4 graphics support ) codebase for windows 98 SE or something as part of a toolchain for building the targeting system for the A-10 Thunderbolt, or something insanely rickety For a plane that old it might be more a case of Ada ;p
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Oct 16, 2022 18:32
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StumblyWumbly posted:Java is closer to C++, but I don't run into it ever. where the hell do you work where java isnt as common as muck
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Oct 16, 2022 20:55
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I've only dealt with Java at one place in the last 12 years or so. About 8 years ago I had a single tool that needed java to run. Everywhere else was Ruby or more commonly (since 2015) Python edit: and some golang, but mostly in a "can I play with this stuff and get paid to do it?" tooling stuff Old guard big corporate run Java I guess? I don't really run in to it either. Hadlock fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Oct 17, 2022 |
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Oct 16, 2022 22:48
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A lot of Fortune 100 companies use the JVM, and many of them seem to be moving over to Kotlin. Kotlin is really nice.
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Oct 17, 2022 00:01
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My place is C++, Python, Go. The only Java around is in JetBrains IDEs 
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Oct 17, 2022 07:42
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