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Falcon2001 posted:On the topic of moving around: I've been in big tech for a while now (10+ years, although I just recently switched over to dev from engineering / ops a couple years ago) and I'm trying to plan my next couple years out, so not actively looking right now but more thinking about what I'll do next. I'd like to try working somewhere less...constantly on fire and incredibly massive and complicated. I've heard good things about midsize tech companies from posts online, but my assumption is that these places are probably less well known than the big tech places. for "constantly on fire", bigger companies are oftentimes better than smaller companies. everything is on fire all the time at all places, but at a bigger company it can be somebody else's problem at the end of the day instead of "lol you're a dev and now you're going to gently caress with a database until it's back up" or whatever. the systems will be smaller, though, that part is true, sort of. keep in mind that at some point the medium company's saas product (or whatever) will just end up just being parasitic on aws or whatever, and as it makes use of more and more features provided, the situation is not all that different from being embedded in a big company. it's just that instead of somebody in the core infra org being responsible for the uptime of pubsub queues, it's somebody on that team inside AWS. and it's a lot harder (and more costly) to contact help at AWS than it is to ask the pubsub team for help. for having more impact, yeah, smaller companies are oftentimes better for that. a lot of the time this is because the processes to prevent people from doing terrible, terrible things have not yet developed and then ossified. the same bureaucracy that makes it annoying to just ship a dang feature is also the thing that keeps people from shipping a feature with massive vulnerabilities that also somehow and unrelatedly brings down all of the app servers in APAC. it's a lot of fun being one of the people that's developing the "don't be a tire fire" policies at a medium sized company, though. you get to make things dramatically better without the annoying parts of working in that dramatically-better environment. of course that can only last so long, though, eventually the guard rails you're installing start being restrictive
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May 11, 2023 18:25
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this is talking about _tech_ companies, though. i have no doubt that at big companies where tech is a cost center, you get all the ossification of a big company AND all of the lovely firefighting and terrible practices of a ten person small shop. frankly that sounds very unpleasant to me
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May 11, 2023 18:27
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Achmed Jones posted:this is talking about _tech_ companies, though. i have no doubt that at big companies where tech is a cost center, you get all the ossification of a big company AND all of the lovely firefighting and terrible practices of a ten person small shop. frankly that sounds very unpleasant to me as always, this is not universal the org I work for is definitely not a tech company but we have a lot of forward thinking executives running the tech related departments and it has worked out quite well
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May 11, 2023 18:31
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If you're "lucky" you can have huge ossified processes that do nothing to prevent taking down all the servers in APAC but sure make it a problem to bring them back up! The small (50-100 people) tech companies I've worked at ranged from garbage fires run by a rapidly rotating cast of sociopaths to actually chill places with a working product where you could have significant impact at any level.
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May 11, 2023 18:37
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Falcon2001 posted:I'm not against taking a pay cut to have a better job, but if you were planning a similar move, what sort of company would you look for, and how would you try and sniff out lovely places? Like others have explained it's tough to tell from the outside whether a company is underwater on their tech debt. Absent insider info, I'd ask an engineer or two during interviews. A simple "how does your team manage tech debt?" should get the ball rolling, I find that engineers are usually frank about it. You can get a signal on how much they're slowed down by tech debt and whether they have a process in place for paying it down. I'd avoid asking managers, too far from the details, or junior engineers, too focused on their deliverables. But if I asked a tech lead about their tech debt and they couldn't quickly rattle off a few examples of what's bugging them and how their team tries to stay on top of it while balancing priorities, I'd take that as a red flag. Either they're hiding problems or ignoring them.
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May 11, 2023 18:51
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you can also just apply to oss companies and inspect their poo poo beforehands like i did with metabase lol
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May 11, 2023 18:54
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bob dobbs is dead posted:you can also just apply to oss companies and inspect their poo poo beforehands like i did with metabase lol power move: Submit a PR along with your resume.
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May 11, 2023 20:02
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Falcon2001 posted:power move: Submit a PR along with your resume. Don't work for free.
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May 11, 2023 20:13
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I ask what the best and worst parts are about what they're working on. If folks consistently focus on the worst parts, that's a big warning sign. I also find the questions folks ask tend to reveal what their problems are, although sometimes it just says something about folks who have left.
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May 11, 2023 22:58
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leper khan posted:Don't work for free. Pretty good way to get an insight into their engineering process, though. In open source I'll often send a small PR to a lib or tool before adopting it just to see how healthy maintenance is.
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May 12, 2023 00:38
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Ugh, job hunting is rough on the ol' self-esteem.  I hosed up my interview with the hiring manager somehow, probably by choosing the wrong past experience to talk about or something. So now I'm back to square one.
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May 12, 2023 15:03
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you're not supposed to ask what they're wearing op
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May 12, 2023 15:11
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Achmed Jones posted:this is talking about _tech_ companies, though. i have no doubt that at big companies where tech is a cost center, you get all the ossification of a big company AND all of the lovely firefighting and terrible practices of a ten person small shop. frankly that sounds very unpleasant to me Look at what's happened to fast fashion and how it's infiltrated every corner of retail
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May 12, 2023 16:48
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ugh, job hunting is rough on the ol' self-esteem. I'm not a huge fan of the questions of those forms. The only things that stick in my memory are the hosed up times.
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May 12, 2023 17:03
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leper khan posted:I'm not a huge fan of the questions of those forms. The only things that stick in my memory are the hosed up times. Questions like 'tell me about a time you X'? Because more and more those are becoming the majority of 'behavioral' questions for non-entry level positions at big tech (and so will probably cascade into other places); they're safe and provide a reasonable fascimile of concrete experience, as opposed to pure speculation questions. FWIW I'd basically sit down before an interview and do some note prep on your side. Sit down and list out all the questions like that you've gotten and come up with examples ahead of time; you won't cover everything of course but it makes you think about the possible directions they could go and when not under pressure you might be more inclined to remember a more convenient example. Like 'Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager' is a trap question but you can absolutely answer it in a way that makes you look good, such as saying 'My manager asked me to implement X, and I was concerned about the performance implications so I did Y research and asked him Z questions, and then we went with solution U instead, which avoided the concerns I raised while satisfying the requirements' instead of 'Yeah last week he asked me if we could just control the .is top level domain and I had to take anti-migraine medication to avoid a stroke'.
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May 12, 2023 18:35
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Fun topic, what are your interviews from hell? I can think of two right away: 1. GE had me come in, stuck me in a 8'x8' room with no windows or anything on the wall, it was hot and stuffy, and they gave me a pencil that desperately needed sharpening. I later found out they stressed interviewees to see which ones responded in a way aligned with their culture. I did not align (thankfully). 2. VP from some tiny software shop meets with me, is super interested in the place I was leaving and asked why I was leaving. Gave the normal answer that didn't bash on them at all. He kept circling back and asking what I didn't like about the place. I finally say "this is kind of like talking about your ex while you're on a date, but you keep circling back to it and I'd like to move on, so here are one or two things I think most places have as an opportunity to get better and how I would fix them..." They then sat me down with a 14" HP laptop that had seen better days and told me to code a program and hook it up to a database. It had been 2-3 years since I'd worked in that stack and I was a little rusty, but they were still using older software that was missing a bunch of the things I remembered. I get it done and the developer watching over my shoulder comments that someone with my experience should have been faster, even if not comfortable on the hardware/software/IDEs. The recruiter told me they liked me and wanted to move on to a second round, but were a little concerned that I badmouthed my current employer. My last time ever working with a recruiter.
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May 12, 2023 19:27
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luchadornado posted:Fun topic, what are your interviews from hell? I can think of two right away: I had just started at a vendor company for Microsoft (very entry level, had only done help desk before that) and my new boss called me up and said there was a team wanted an experienced SQL DBA, but they wanted to pay entry level prices. He told them he'd send someone over to interview at the salary rate they wanted, and someone who could complete the job requirements, and asked me if I'd be willing to interview. I figured sure, I wouldn't mind being a DBA if they were okay with hiring someone with basically no experience but willing to learn. So I was interviewing with MSFT FTE employees; not for an official job there but just as a pass/fail thing for them to give the okay to the vendor team. I showed up and sat down and they immediately started grilling me with high level SQL questions and I was like 'Ah so basically, I've done some really basic SQL stuff at college, but my degree (which I didn't have, I dropped out) was not in DB, but boy I'm happy to learn' and they just...refused to engage with this idea. Six hours of interviews. I sat through six hours of increasingly angry devs trying to interrogate SQL knowledge I didn't have out of me. I was too young and scared of losing my job to protest or anything (the job I had just left was a loving nightmare) so I just...took it. Smiled, kept insisting I didn't actually know much about SQL but I'd love to discuss general options or other things I could help out with. Six loving hours of this, just hammering some kid fresh out of college as though I was secretly a DBA greybeard and was going to crack and go OKAY I UNDERSTAND DEADLOCKS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM YOU GOT ME. Surprise surprise, I didn't get the job. My boss called me up later and I explained what happened and he was like 'Jesus dude, you should have called me, that's ridiculous.' So I don't really think he had any idea what was going on. I started another gig there soon and it was much better and that kickstarted my career. It literally hosed me up, like this day ended up being a frequent topic in therapy for me later. For years I was scared of interviewing and it kept me in lovely jobs constantly because my friends would have to literally sit me down and force me to apply places. As I started taking interviewing training as microsoft as an FTE later it was loving shocking to me because I realized that they absolutely could have just gone 'Oh yeah this dude doesn't know much' and either let me go home early or try and figure out what other skills I could bring.
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May 12, 2023 19:40
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Who has that kind of time? Like, the people doing the interview I mean.
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May 12, 2023 19:51
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McCracAttack posted:Who has that kind of time? Like, the people doing the interview I mean. It was like, six different people. I honestly don't know, I ended up working with that team later on pretty closely and it still mystified me. Like I've stopped interviews early (only a few times) or at least pulled my manager and next interviewer aside after my time slot to be like 'uhhh this is not gonna work out' - but I would never berate the interviewee even if it was a waste of my time; I'd just shoot the poo poo for the rest of the time or find something they've done to talk about, and I've never worked with anyone who would do that either.
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May 12, 2023 20:03
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I think the best one I've ever had was working w/ a recruiter who had actually previously gotten me a job I liked a lot. Dude hits me up for an early position at some finance place working with Go. I let the recruiter know that I don't know the first thing about Go and I've never worked in finance, but I'm happy to take the interview as long as the team doesn't mind. He comes back to me with assurances that he has informed the team that I do not know Go or finance and it will not be a problem. I actually take a little bit of time over a weekend to do some toy stuff in Go, get a little bit of a grip on what the language is all about so I can try to show some initiative + that I'm not incapable of learning. First interview is w/ their CTO - we talk about my background and experience, normal stuff and it went well. Second guy wants to whiteboard the code for a stock exchange in Go. I launch into "we are teammates who are collaborating" mode and start asking questions about how stock exchanges work, what assumptions we can make about them and so on. I then let him know that I've only got a few hours total of experience in Go but that I'm happy to give it a whirl with if he isn't comfortable with me doing the exercise in Python or JS or pseudocode. He insists we do things in Go. About 3 minutes into the actual whiteboarding he lets me know he will be right back. Leaves the room and grabs the CTO who comes in and explains that they are really looking for a Go expert and that they don't want to waste either of our time. Seemed like they were being honest. I don't think I was just blowing the question or the interview all together, I think they really just didn't want to bring someone up to speed on the stack. Which the recruiter really could have sussed out if he bothered doing what he said he had done.
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May 12, 2023 20:13
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I interviewed for a startup using Rails back when Rails was still new. This was back when every job requirements mentioned Ninjas or Rockstars. The interview was a lot of… tricks. Like at one point they walked me through a problem of a server having troubles, and just narrated what was happening. I would say with my next action, and they would narrate the results. I was supposed to figure out the problem. Like an awful RPG, except a real job was on the line. I didn’t solve it. Then I was told the answer was, “the server had run out of space.” Which is a problem that I had actually solved in real life. Multiple times. Sometimes after being paged in the middle of the night. And in real life a lot of small things goes wrong that points you in the right direction, like vi will complain about not being able to create a swap file. And I tried to explain that to the interviewer, and talk about my real experiences, but he didn’t want to hear it—I had already failed in his eyes.
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May 12, 2023 20:24
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a market of lemons on both sides is a cutting wind, a simoom to flense all the morality out of peeps hearts. it is to be expected, even if it is to be despaired of also. would you expect anything except ... things ... wearing the skins of men and women at the used car dealer or at the realtor's?
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May 12, 2023 20:26
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bob dobbs is dead posted:a market of lemons on both sides is a cutting wind, a simoom to flense all the morality out of peeps hearts. it is to be expected, even if it is to be despaired of also. would you expect anything except ... things ... wearing the skins of men and women at the used car dealer or at the realtor's? Did you take too many mushroom micro-doses? Most of your posts are indecipherable, but this feels like another level.
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May 12, 2023 20:47
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bob dobbs is zooted
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May 12, 2023 21:10
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One of my worst interviews was when the interviewer called me a few minutes late and immediately complained that their assistant scheduled our call during their daughter's hair appointment. They proceeded to conduct the interview while clearly annoyed and definitely standing outside the hair salon with no notepad or anything. After I hung up I was like, "Should I have offered to reschedule?" One that could have been bad but turned out fine was when I was looking for some part-time work during college but they were looking to spend six months training up a pen-testing expert. I went "yeah that's not what I'm looking for" and the interviewer took a while to realize it was safe for us to just hang up.
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May 12, 2023 21:14
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sim posted:Did you take too many mushroom micro-doses? Most of your posts are indecipherable, but this feels like another level. that doesn't even have any math jargon or niche historical references in it. you gotta up your game
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May 12, 2023 21:51
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lifg posted:I interviewed for a startup using Rails back when Rails was still new. This was back when every job requirements mentioned Ninjas or Rockstars. This one's wild to me because I've used this same style and the whole point is not 'Solve my RIDDLE' the point is to see what the interviewee would think about during that investigation, because every reasonable person who does this sort of stuff knows there's a million things that could go wrong and without actual access to a real server it's hard to tell. I often do have a specific answer I'm testing on here, but pass/fail doesn't mean getting to it; if you guessed it right off the bat that isn't a point in your favor, and if you use the time going over totally reasonable and meaningful options that's not a failure either. Honestly, I think a lot of interviewer problems come down to people setting some sort of One True Answer to any given question and refusing to accept anything that doesn't fit their definition. If hiring was that easy you'd just have people come in and submit a scantron or something. Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 21:56 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 21:54
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Yeah, my absolute favorite interview answer is "I don't know, but I will find out (without getting frustrated/mad)".
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May 12, 2023 22:57
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luchadornado posted:Yeah, my absolute favorite interview answer is "I don't know, but I will find out (without getting frustrated/mad)". The two things I do most at work are gently caress around and find out
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May 13, 2023 05:02
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I just figured out the specifics of a problem I've had with my communication this week. I was writing up a pre-permitting document for something we were thinking of doing and had my wife look it over; this was personal business so this was a chance where my professional skills could cross over into my personal sphere. It was a fairly technical document, but it was saturated with what I'm now calling "the technical placative tense." If you take a good technical document, you'll see it's clear to the point of nearly being blunt. Heck, just being blunt would be preferable. Now, give that to my first manager at the company I work at now from--poo poo--15 years ago? The danger is in him actually understanding it, because understanding it causes all kinds of bad emotional responses. It doesn't even have to be bad news. I would get asked for a plan, prepare it, and then its existence itself became toxic. I made the connection to that because my current manager was talking about explaining stuff to this same manager the other day and he was just getting more and more agitated. That's where I really put two and two together. I've been writing like that since I started to manage upwards. It had altered all of my technical documentation to be much more wordy just to avoid that, and I've been writing like that ever since. My wife told me it was a lot like how a woman would write stuff in a professional setting surrounded by a bunch of fragile men. A lot of the wordiness comes down to downplaying effects and disclaimers on procedures. It also meant inducing an incredible amount of paranoia into what could happen at each step in case somebody did it and it didn't work for them for some reason. Instead of just having directions clear enough that a seven-year-old could do it, I'd add sections before and after where I served as their elementary school teacher who was trying to get them mentally prepped for the work.
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May 13, 2023 20:58
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I've had 3 bad goes. The first was a whiteboard session that they would give me a problem and then leave and come back to see how I solved it. I mostly sat there waiting around because it took me < 10 minutes to solve each problem and they would only check in every 30 minutes. They started talking up this company culture where everyone worked 60 - 80 hrs/week and I was not into it. They wanted a next round but called out, "they're worried you don't want to work yourself to the bone" and I said yup, and bounced. Second and third happened on the exact same trip to California. First was a half-day, 4 hour on-site that went great. No complaints. Their internal told me that everyone had positive feedback and they were looking likely to offer. In the airport on the way home, the recruiter says, "I didn't think we were doing this, but the CTO wants to do a follow up with you." I schedule it for the next day and have what I think is a pleasant chat with him. They come back the next day saying no thanks and, "We don't actually have a process to give candidates feedback at this stage because this hasn't happened before." I still don't know what I said that made the CTO bug out on me... Third was a brutal 6 hour onsite, 9am to 3pm when I had to hop an uber to get to my 5pm flight. I must have talked to 12, 15 people, even lunch was an interview of sorts. In the last couple, I had to apologize for just being absolutely drained. Overplayed my leadership ambitions in that one, they were trying to do the whole, "flat engineering structure" thing at the time.
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May 15, 2023 16:25
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kayakyakr posted:Second and third happened on the exact same trip to California. First was a half-day, 4 hour on-site that went great. No complaints. Their internal told me that everyone had positive feedback and they were looking likely to offer. In the airport on the way home, the recruiter says, "I didn't think we were doing this, but the CTO wants to do a follow up with you." I schedule it for the next day and have what I think is a pleasant chat with him. They come back the next day saying no thanks and, "We don't actually have a process to give candidates feedback at this stage because this hasn't happened before." I still don't know what I said that made the CTO bug out on me... This probably wasn't anything you said to the CTO. I'd bet that they pushed you up to the CTO for hiring approval, he saw something in your resume that didn't align with what he was looking for in the role and your in person with him didn't clear that block (very possibly because he wanted someone with 10 years in X that you don't have).
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May 15, 2023 16:54
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CTO vibe check is a real thing, especially with startups. Back around 2009-2010 I was interviewing with an ad-tech company and got as far as lunch with the entire team at Rosa Mexicana before they decided not to move forward. One of my current directs had a similar experience with another company a while ago. One thing I learned from the CTO I reported to at my last job is that most senior technical leaders allocate a budget for how many poo poo-stirrers, contrarians, and people with otherwise strong opinions they're allowing themselves in their organization, and they almost always have clear rules for which positions those are supposed to be. So whenever I get up to vibe check stage, I try really hard not to bring my own assumptions along with me and just try to find out more about the problems they're dealing with and how they'd like me to help.
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May 15, 2023 17:02
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Both of those points basically cost me a job I had been in two days. Posted about it in the other thread.
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May 15, 2023 17:58
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My brand new job is doing contracting work in Java. Best I could find right off. Talking another dev I asked how they do local dev, what server setup? He said they don't really, they just maven build and send it off to AWS developer instance with cli, cp, S3, etc. Sounds bad to me? Am I wrong in this? How could you even do breakpoints and such which is one of the best parts of working with the language? Maybe I overreacted and this is somewhat typical?
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May 15, 2023 18:09
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Their dev environment could be short lived instances in the cloud that you can optionally connect a remote debugger to. Or maybe they do all their work in prod, have definitely worked places where that was the case. If you have never connected a debugger to a remote server before you might be surprised that it integrates with your IDE and works pretty much exactly like a local one does. thotsky fucked around with this message at 18:56 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 18:40
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FWIW: I have worked with professional developers at legitimate big tech companies that basically never bothered figuring out their debugger and just use print statements. It blows my mind because it's just so incredibly inefficient.
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May 15, 2023 19:04
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Yea with php I never got xdebug going, it was more old style dump and die, print, log, etc. If I'm gonna be on Java I want to get back to proper debugging. Also no localhost seems like you miss some of the speed and ease factor. We'll see!
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May 15, 2023 20:56
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Falcon2001 posted:FWIW: I have worked with professional developers at legitimate big tech companies that basically never bothered figuring out their debugger and just use print statements. It blows my mind because it's just so incredibly inefficient. Hello, yes, I rarely use debuggers. Not that I can't, but my experience with trying to use them for every problem is that I spend a lot of time diving through hierarchies of containers, and manually taking notes. The console provides a useful history that makes it easy to compare iterations -- often the bugs I'm dealing with are things like "sometimes when I call this function, it explodes, but usually it's fine". So I need to do a comparative analysis to find the differences between the working and non-working calls. Gathering large amounts of data in the debugger is tedious -- probably there's some way to make it less so, but it's still going to require me to set up the stuff I want to watch, then run the program, which is basically similar to print statements, so what have I really gained? Debuggers, for me, shine when the amount of state I need to review is limited and easy to display.
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May 15, 2023 21:29
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Wait nvm
oliveoil fucked around with this message at 21:51 on May 15, 2023 |
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