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I'm currently working at a FAANG in a position that's probably closest in title to SRE, and I've got a fairly firm chance of hitting senior within the year. I've been doing a lot of infrastructure work, although it's all internal tools so not widely used stuff like ansible/etc. All in all I'm reasonably happy with my current position, but when I think long term, I'm kind of thinking of trying to find something less... massive company, massive problems. I don't necessarily want somewhere I can just coast, but I'm trying to identify something that's like a six or seven on intensity instead of 11. Any advice for what sort of things I should be thinking about?
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Feb 9, 2024 09:49
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Falcon2001 posted:I'm currently working at a FAANG in a position that's probably closest in title to SRE, and I've got a fairly firm chance of hitting senior within the year. I've been doing a lot of infrastructure work, although it's all internal tools so not widely used stuff like ansible/etc. All in all I'm reasonably happy with my current position, but when I think long term, I'm kind of thinking of trying to find something less... massive company, massive problems. I don't necessarily want somewhere I can just coast, but I'm trying to identify something that's like a six or seven on intensity instead of 11. Any advice for what sort of things I should be thinking about? personal boundaries
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Feb 9, 2024 11:09
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Welp, what is ADA? Apparently a MIL-STD was created for the language in 1980, so based on that it looks like to be some really legacy stuff. I applied for a job, and accidentally wrote their code task with rust. Someone had the idea of pulling an extra position from under the table, and asked would I want to learn Ada? I have a 2nd interview next week, is this a good idea y/n? Better/worse than COBOL and FORTRAN? Chatgpt gave me some code samples, and it doesn't look too bad..? code:
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Feb 9, 2024 13:55
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I’ve never used it, but people who have always say things like, “it takes forever to write, but once a program compiles you know it’s correct.” So kinda like Rust.
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Feb 9, 2024 14:14
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I dunno how other people feel but I personally consider “you get to learn a weird language” as a plus.
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Feb 9, 2024 14:15
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Feb 9, 2024 14:18
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If the pay is right, who cares?
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Feb 9, 2024 14:35
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lifg posted:I’ve never used it, but people who have always say things like, “it takes forever to write, but once a program compiles you know it’s correct.” So kinda like Rust. Well, that sounds good enough. I am still doing my bachelor of computer science, so I doubt they want to pay me that much. Probably 2000-2500€/month. I moved away from healthcare and I don’t have any programming related positions yet under my belt, so I guess I can’t even be that picky really. Thanks!
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Feb 9, 2024 14:52
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a plurality of ada jobs are make-thingy-that-blows-peeps-up jobs. the reputation it has for correctness is often due to standards and policy and attitudes of peeps using it rather than actual language features (so pretty diametrically opposed to rust) i think the community of adalang could colorably and profitably be described as "a whole fuckin buncha boomers". their oss is weak, their attitudes on pay and working conditions are pretty stuck in the 80s, the better compiler is paid and non-oss (an approach thats basically been verboten since the 90s), etc etc bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 15:05
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If I was a hiring manager and I saw that your first job touching computers was writing some weird rear end old language and you didn't completely put the place out of business or get fired, I'd be pretty intrigued. Plus the hardest part about breaking into 'tutors is getting that first job.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:06
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If your entire job is working with Ada and you don't get exposure to some more modern technologies then you might have some trouble on your next job search.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:06
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ultrafilter posted:If your entire job is working with Ada and you don't get exposure to some more modern technologies then you might have some trouble on your next job search. I am thinking this too. Will I be forever stuck with Ada… 
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Feb 9, 2024 15:19
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oh, if you're in finland, that's probably more of a problem than any lang you're using. any figgieland has more jobs. london's prolly the biggest place closest to you, although if you're not in helsinki at least move to helsinki new programmer is a city job. and frankly, most of the time, old programmer is also a city job, although that got changed materially by the roni. you can have the frequent old programmer dream of living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and working without actually seeing peeps for 95% of the year for some sometimes-immaterial sometimes-material pay cut once you're actually an old programmer and not just an old programmer (if you get what i mean) you need to be able and willing to learn new poo poo outside of work sometimes. i like to say forever, although empirically it often stops for peeps by like 10, 20 years in ada-specific, it's gotta be noted that a huge proportion of ada jobs require US government security clearance. which you're not gonna get, unless you move to america for 10-20 years and become a citizen or something. america makes most of the weapons of the rich world, if you haven't noticed. in the eu, that's gonna have to be france or germany, and adjacent to the eu, the uk bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 15:20
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Ihmemies posted:I am thinking this too. Will I be forever stuck with Ada… You will not. Like A Dingus said, hiring mangers might actually be intrigued. Just don’t spend 10 years writing Ada.
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Feb 9, 2024 16:06
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When I was working on my CS bachelors degree (95-99), Ada was the primary language in my program. The courses of CS I-III and "real-time systems" used it. We were taught using Ada (Ada 83, then later with Ada 95) because it has such strict typing rules. Aside from Ada, it seemed like every course was taught using a different domain-specific language: C, Lisp, MODSIM, Z, M68K assembly, SQL... VRML (for the comedy 3D option). Back then, you had two textbooks assigned for a course: one for the course content, and a reference manual for the language you were using. You either learned the course language on your own quickly or you were left behind. There was a lot more breadth than depth with the programming languages, since CS focused more on applied mathematics and formal grammars and data definition back then. Recruiters flocked to the school, desperately trying to hire every student that they could with Ada experience. There would only be about 50 of us graduating each semester, so competition over the grads was fierce. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Sikorsky Aircraft, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, etc. would come to the school and tell the career services office that they wanted to interview all of the graduating students that knew some Ada. No "give me your top 10 students"... they wanted all of them. Recruiters would call me at home and mail me (I'm talking actual paper letters written to me by recruiters and managers). It was very common for recruiters to invite you, your significant other, your family, etc. out to dinner to discuss one-on-one with you the amazing future available to you at Company X. I worked at Lockheed Martin fresh out of school in Orlando, FL in 1999 doing Ada software for the console displays of the M1A2 Abrams tank. My base annual salary was a whopping $48K with a $5K starting bonus and a signed agreement that I would begin my masters in CS at the University of Central Florida and have 100% of my education expenses paid by the company. So the pay made it worth it (for 1999, anyway), right? The work was super rigid waterfall development, and every single line of code was tied back to one or more requirements and tracked in IBM DOORS. The work pace was glacial. I was the youngest person in my department by at least 10 years, and I was at least 20 years younger than the average age in my department. Everyone was a middle aged white guy with a polo shirt and a big gut. We were in a cube farm, two to a cube, approximately 10 cubes deep and 30 long. And that was just in my building (one of nine) on my section (one of four) of the floor (one of three in my building). If you wanted to locate someone, you'd look up their building/floor/section/row/column location in the personnel directory and then start wandering around the general area while looking for the nameplate hanging on the cubicle. I lasted about a year there before I moved out to California to join a start-up company during the rise of the dotcom era. If you knew C/C++ and Linux at that time, you were a fool if you didn't. My coworkers all told me that I was a crazy young kid doing a crazy thing to leave such a stable, low-stress job. There are classmates of mine hired straight out of school that are now managers and directors at some of these places. They're still using Ada to maintain government fingerprint databases, air traffic control systems, tanks, planes, RADAR, and tons of other non-glamourous projects. They have jobs for life, can auto-pilot for 8 hours a day, and go home to live their lives. No overtime, known holidays years ahead of time, plenty of benefits, and low stress. Those jobs aren't going away, but they also aren't going to take your career anywhere, either. Salaries are determined more by formula than anything else: years of experience, degrees earned, and a modifier for cost-of-living for the facility location. Since the government is being billed for the development as part of long-term maintenance contracts, these salary guidelines match the government ones. All those old Ada guys in polo shirts? They're retiring or have retired. There's a shortage of people maintaining Ada software. If you were too late to jump on the COBOL train, well... here's your opportunity.
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Feb 9, 2024 16:48
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hendersa posted:Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Sikorsky Aircraft, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, etc. see? better be american citizen
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Feb 9, 2024 16:50
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I've been working on a lot of SQL cleanup this week. I'm mostly a C guy, and these SQL queries are coming from Java so this question might be really basic. We're running an SQL insert for a couple thousand rows. For some reason, somewhere in transit the query is getting truncated. After some experimenting we found that we could only pass a few hundreds rows per insert command safely. When using a MariaDB SQL backing database, we can send an insert with 400-500 rows of values. With a postgres SQL backing server we are limited to ~200 rows per insert. Any ideas what the bottleneck might be? Each row of values is ~80 characters long and I think Java stores string characters with 2bytes per character, so 400 rows is "only" ~64,000 bytes. Falcon2001 posted:I'm currently working at a FAANG in a position that's probably closest in title to SRE, and I've got a fairly firm chance of hitting senior within the year. I've been doing a lot of infrastructure work, although it's all internal tools so not widely used stuff like ansible/etc. All in all I'm reasonably happy with my current position, but when I think long term, I'm kind of thinking of trying to find something less... massive company, massive problems. I don't necessarily want somewhere I can just coast, but I'm trying to identify something that's like a six or seven on intensity instead of 11. Any advice for what sort of things I should be thinking about? Any job will happily let you work all the hours. It might be that you just need to ease up on yourself and manage your work-life balance better. I work from home so the temptation is always there to work just another hour and then suddenly it's 10pm and I'm still working. So I know this isn't as easy to do as to say, but most places are pretty reasonable about letting you work the right amount. If you have too many responsibilities and too little time, you might discuss with your manager in your next 1-on-1 which responsibilities you can hand off to someone else. I did that last year and it went really well, but I also work well with my manager so ymmv. Unless it's a crunch all the time kind of team, in which case yeah, time to move on. If I remember right, you're on call a little more than once a week: Falcon2001 posted:Weighing in for my current team but I've done much worse previously: I guess this might be helpful - my wife is a chemical engineer and her on-call duties were stressing her out. The company was happy to help her transfer to another role in the same company where she wouldn't be on call; but the process did take half a year. She's MUCH happier now that she's not on call. LLSix fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 17:15
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Falcon2001 posted:I'm currently working at a FAANG in a position that's probably closest in title to SRE, and I've got a fairly firm chance of hitting senior within the year. I've been doing a lot of infrastructure work, although it's all internal tools so not widely used stuff like ansible/etc. All in all I'm reasonably happy with my current position, but when I think long term, I'm kind of thinking of trying to find something less... massive company, massive problems. I don't necessarily want somewhere I can just coast, but I'm trying to identify something that's like a six or seven on intensity instead of 11. Any advice for what sort of things I should be thinking about? my faang experience is that it's orders of magnitude more chill than either medium-size (~500-1500 people) or tiny (~30 people) companies. leaving a big company for something more relaxed doesn't make a ton of sense. like, i'm at google and i have a lot of poo poo to talk on google, but "it's too intense" is not on the list. ain't nobody at google calling me up on saturday, or blowing up my phone at my kid's birthday lunch, or expecting oncall with no compensation. if you've never worked at a smaller company and are expecting it to be less intense, make sure you do a lot of fact-finding before you jump in. maybe your position really is maximum-pressure, but make sure that a change gets you what you want, 'cause what you're proposing goes against general expectations also: leper khan posted:personal boundaries
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Feb 9, 2024 17:20
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leper khan posted:personal boundaries x1000 it’s completely on you to set boundaries and protect your time and health. if you let yourself work 12 hour days and respond to poo poo in the middle of the night then people will start expecting it. there’s always more work to be done and the reward for finishing a task is just more tasks. pace yourself, it’s just business it’s not that important and don’t let other people’s artificial deadlines and bad planning become your problem especially at a megacorp. and ironically what I’ve found is that the more aggressive you are with setting boundaries and protecting your time and being up front when you can or cannot do something, the more respect you get, assuming you’re doing good work when you are working.
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Feb 9, 2024 17:40
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Guinness posted:and ironically what I’ve found is that the more aggressive you are with setting boundaries and protecting your time and being up front when you can or cannot do something, the more respect you get, assuming you’re doing good work when you are working. i have also found this to be the case
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Feb 9, 2024 17:59
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bob dobbs is dead posted:see? better be american citizen I know. I just like my flat earth, lakes, and drinking pina colada in my summer cottage by the lake. There's basically too much people for me, if I move anywhere else. Too busy. Too crowded. Not worth the money. Thanks for the great Ada story hendersa! Some companies like Saab use Ada too in Europe too. I found a guy who knew a guy who worked on the project I'm applying for, and he said that the work pace was also glacial. So I guess Ada + glacial go hand in hand? Based on that, there could be lots of time to practice my Rust skills as a side project. I will continue with my master's studies in autumn 2024 so I have an honorable way to do less work then, or no work if they don't like me, after the summer.
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Feb 9, 2024 18:13
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lifg posted:You will not. Like A Dingus said, hiring mangers might actually be intrigued. Just don’t spend 10 years writing Ada. Yeah, 3-4 years with Ada is intriguing and interesting, 10+ is pigeonholed. Realistically, language doesn't matter to learn the things you need to learn to move to intermediate and senior level. But you will potentially need to learn new languages and frameworks when you want to jump, unless you find you just loving love Ada
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Feb 10, 2024 00:11
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I would do 2 years just get that out of the way and then move on to something more exciting/modern Finland just joined NATO right? There might be some finish language localization work in the near future that could be lucrative
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Feb 10, 2024 01:49
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Hadlock posted:Finland just joined NATO right? There might be some finish language localization work in the near future that could be lucrative Everywhere I've worked that supported multiple countries kept text strings in an external file so we could swap in new languages without any software changes. Rather, I should say minimal changes, because labels that fit on the display in one language don't necessarily fit in another language. So usually there's some amount of tweaking needed when first adding a new language to make sure the display is still user friendly. Or if the original development was careless - readable. In theory you can make displays that translate easily upfront, but I've never worked on a product that didn't need some after the fact tweaking. Words that are just a handful of letters in one language can be really long in another language. Or much taller. Or dangle more. But all the tweaking is done by the original programmers, or the maintenance team.
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Feb 10, 2024 03:57
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the official policy of NATO is "learn english or french, fucker"
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Feb 10, 2024 04:01
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LLSix posted:Any job will happily let you work all the hours. [Re: this and the other comments] Thanks for the feedback; I worked at MSFT for a long time and it was a pretty common thing for people to go work elsewhere (generally smaller companies) to try and find something lower stress. I haven't worked at a smaller company so I guess I just never questioned this, but it's also possible that things have changed over time and as the job market gets worse, it just sucks everywhere. The problem I'm having right now is that I can't seem to stop finding myself on teams that have a huge pile of massive problems. Even if I'm not being asked to fix all of them immediately all of the time, it still just really has been wearing on me to constantly be like 'well we could fix that but it would require convincing over a hundred engineering teams to change their approach', or 'sure, that's a good idea, the stakeholders are eighteen teams internally and so any solution has to involve every single one of them weighing in.' It's fun working on big projects, but...it just ends up being very draining. Additionally, as I'm moving to senior I'm having to get more and more involved in work planning, which I'm increasingly convinced is just a shared hallucination that project managers convince themselves of. The upside is that my current management is pretty decent about work-life balance and all that, but we still have obligations and need to deliver stuff. The other problem is that if your team has a hundred units of work to perform and you can only do forty a week, even if your management doesn't tell you to 'just make that other sixty happen', the alternative is that poo poo is constantly falling on the ground. Projects I'm working on are focused on 'how do we automate our way out of this bullshit', but I'm not convinced things can ever really improve: if your team is in crunch mode and manage to dig themselves out, you're just going to set a new expectation for work delivery, so I don't know if I believe modern tech companies can get better, at least for this specific problem. Maybe I'll just keep touring FAANG places and see if I can find a team that's less...everything on fire all the time. Maybe a tooling team or something? I dunno. Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 01:18
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Falcon2001 posted:[Re: this and the other comments] the tooling teams have 50 different internal teams they serve as customers/stakeholders. youre looking for the executive's vanity project team.
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Feb 11, 2024 02:19
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Falcon2001 posted:The other problem is that if your team has a hundred units of work to perform and you can only do forty a week, even if your management doesn't tell you to 'just make that other sixty happen', the alternative is that poo poo is constantly falling on the ground. Yup welcome to business. The sooner you can come to peace with it the sooner you can be zen about it. You said you’re shooting for senior and it’s one of the unwritten requirements or else you will burn yourself out. Resourcing is not your problem to solve and being a hero-martyr isn’t going to improve anything.
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Feb 11, 2024 03:21
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And being the hero martyr once or twice makes you the guy who people will expect to do that over and over again.
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Feb 11, 2024 03:43
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Guinness posted:Yup welcome to business. The sooner you can come to peace with it the sooner you can be zen about it. wilderthanmild posted:And being the hero martyr once or twice makes you the guy who people will expect to do that over and over again. In fairness, I am a bit better about not just being hero all the time than I used to be (and our management is actively telling people not to just jump on grenades all the time) but I agree it's good advice. leper khan posted:the tooling teams have 50 different internal teams they serve as customers/stakeholders. youre looking for the executive's vanity project team. Just to clarify, I'm not looking for something just 'totally stressless' or anything, or just like 'I wanna work 2 hours a day and gently caress off the rest of the time'. I'm just trying to find something less...I dunno, just everything on fire? I guess it's worth asking: are there literally no jobs where people have their backlogs caught up and aren't constantly being blindsided by some thing they couldn't get done earlier that year and now you have to scramble, therefore making it so you just end up in that state again? Is that actually too much to ask? Maybe it is, I just...I dunno, assumed someone had figured out how to get poo poo done properly.
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Feb 11, 2024 04:14
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jobs are highly subject to adverse selection effects. the chill jobs aren't hiring and the murderjobs are hiring as fast as they can with their hair on fire craiglist destroyed an industry w/ like 4 peeps. nowadays they have 50 employees. still the 80th most popular webpage in the world, down from like 15th
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Feb 11, 2024 04:20
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Those types of places are hard to find without luck. Your best chance IMO is to find a corporation with more than a few hundred people so there are plenty of divisions, products, and teams. Find where the good leaders are and where the good people flock to and be adjacent to them.
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Feb 11, 2024 04:22
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bob dobbs is dead posted:jobs are highly subject to adverse selection effects. the chill jobs aren't hiring and the murderjobs are hiring as fast as they can with their hair on fire Oh yeah, that tracks for sure. Well, I guess it's more of a 'find the right team' thing, so that's always a good idea. I think my team is heading in a good direction and all, but we're also trying to get much bigger. Good place to be in terms of career growth, but frankly I make more money than I need to already so other than getting more interesting experience and neat things to work on it's not really a huge drive for me to make even more money.
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Feb 11, 2024 04:46
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The other thing to do is to keep an eye on senior developers that you think are competent, and watch where they're going. If several seniors leave a team/department in short succession, that's a sign you should pay attention to. And if you make friends with them, they can give you help finding new positions either within the company or outside.
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Feb 11, 2024 04:55
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Falcon2001 posted:Just to clarify, I'm not looking for something just 'totally stressless' or anything, or just like 'I wanna work 2 hours a day and gently caress off the rest of the time'. i am, if anybody has this and stability and figgies, lmk i'll take anything above 2 out of 3, but none of {chill, stable, well-paid} can be completely missing. oh yeah, and the only way i'm ok with not working from home is if you're either paying all my travel, paying enough for me to have an apartment near the office (so i guess a sign on bonus the size of my mortgage or something), or somehow have a cute lil office in my small socal city so what im saying is ill probably be at google until the layoffs finally get me, but then boy howdy i'm gonna be hollerin at yall for jobs, just you wait Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 06:35
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bob dobbs is dead posted:jobs are highly subject to adverse selection effects. the chill jobs aren't hiring and the murderjobs are hiring as fast as they can with their hair on fire Re: murderjobs Is gamedev really as bad as the rumors imply The closest I've gotten to meeting someone who works in game Dev is the making games thread and more than half of those are casual hobbyist types,I think Seems like in game Dev either you do that for a year or two and I remember reading the tweets from some of the lead developers at  explicitly calling the six months up until the release of battlefield 3 a death march and right then decided I'd never work in that industryI think blizzard ranks half a step above working at Amazon Somehow I lucked into a job in a very chill tiny team at a not at all engineering focused company; I'm never leaving. Very competitive pay, even.
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Feb 11, 2024 06:56
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Hadlock posted:Re: murderjobs the games job market is an inferno. everything is up in flames. worse than general tech situation, though that's not great either. death marches/crunch is generally not as bad as it was back in the day. and the places it is arent at all shy about it during interviews, so it's also easy to filter if you're not desperate. pay is lower than alternatives. most of the time its just another tech job, but instead of web apps it's unity or unreal. really depends on which rumors i guess
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Feb 11, 2024 07:08
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Achmed Jones posted:i am, if anybody has this and stability and figgies, lmk right?? where do I sign? the reason places pay big figgies is because they’ve got big problems and I wouldn’t do it for cheap
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Feb 11, 2024 08:12
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Falcon2001 posted:The problem I'm having right now is that I can't seem to stop finding myself on teams that have a huge pile of massive problems. Even if I'm not being asked to fix all of them immediately all of the time, it still just really has been wearing on me to constantly be like 'well we could fix that but it would require convincing over a hundred engineering teams to change their approach', or 'sure, that's a good idea, the stakeholders are eighteen teams internally and so any solution has to involve every single one of them weighing in.' YMMV, but this is exactly why I am stressed out less at smaller place than when I was at a big one. There is still more work than there is people and time to do, but I don't have to sit in bunch of meetings to explain that there is more work than people. There is also lot less institutional inertia against just fixing things, even if my team is not responsible for that particular piece of code.
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Feb 11, 2024 14:30
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Hadlock posted:Re: murderjobs Several of the big names (e.g. Blizzard) recently got outed as being hugely toxic. But even the regular jobs (equivalent to what most people here are working) pay maybe half what you can get in non-games work. That is one hell of a discount to take, and they mostly get away with it because they have a lot of starry-eyed newbies who want to work in videogames (or worse, on specifically their favorite game or game franchise). They're ripe for abuse, in other words. Also the industry has fired just so many people in the last 12 months. This is just about the worst possible time to try to pivot to gamedev, because labor has next to zero negotiating power. I cannot recommend highly enough, if you want to make games, to do it by gaining financial independence first, and then pivoting to games as a second career or retirement project.
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Feb 11, 2024 18:53
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