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Guinness posted:right?? where do I sign? that doesn't ring true with me tbh. my team is super chill (not "we pay you to do nothing" chill, but i have zero bad things and many many good things to say about our work/life balance), the pay is very good (even if it's not as great as it used to be, and it's not as great as some other tech majors, it's still google for crying out loud). the big thing that's bugging me is the stability, cause the recent layoffs hit some people on my team and i'm constantly checking my back for targets. but in this economy (read: now that it's been normalized and companies can get away with it), it doesn't really seem like there exist companies that would hesitate to ratfuck me at a moment's notice. maybe shopify? anyway im just saying that my experience is that pay goes up along with overall quality of job, not with size of hassle
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Feb 11, 2024 19:34
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Achmed Jones posted:anyway im just saying that my experience is that pay goes up along with overall quality of job, not with size of hassle Yeah, this is certainly true. The more people are paid, the more respect they get paid, and vice versa. Underpaid people are regularly abused and overpaid people are regularly treated with deference (and generally not overworked, etc), regardless of what either deserves.
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Feb 11, 2024 20:00
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Achmed Jones posted:that doesn't ring true with me tbh. my team is super chill (not "we pay you to do nothing" chill, but i have zero bad things and many many good things to say about our work/life balance), the pay is very good (even if it's not as great as it used to be, and it's not as great as some other tech majors, it's still google for crying out loud). my tech figgie job is also pretty chill but the org has lot of big problems that you just have to accept as part of the package. related to the other poster talking about big org stress, if you let it suck you in and stress you out it will because there's nobody to stop you but yourself. but if you just accept the things you cannot change, frustrating they may be, and do your best to chip away at the things you can then it's gravy. quote:anyway im just saying that my experience is that pay goes up along with overall quality of job, not with size of hassle 1000%
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Feb 11, 2024 20:07
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I make figgies doing tech/cloud work for a "non-tech" enterprise its not as many figgies as el goog or similar, but there's still 6 of them and it's pretty laid back
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Feb 11, 2024 20:30
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Achmed Jones posted:maybe shopify? lol no scuttlebutt is the recent round of layoffs was algorithm-driven by tobi
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Feb 12, 2024 20:09
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I'm a relatively new manager, and the most senior person on my team is struggling a lot. We're all data scientists, and the expectation for someone at their level is that they'd be able to drive the technical side of projects at a fairly high abstraction level, breaking down work into tasks for others to execute, influencing the business or other stakeholders to modify their approach for technical feasibility while understanding and delivering on what benefits the underlying business imperative, etc. Unfortunately, they seem to have been promoted to their current level on the back of an ability to just produce MORE QUANTITY of junior level work, which they appear to achieve by just putting in more hours. In other words, just chewing through vast quantities of task-based work, not ever questioning how or why it was written down in a particular way, and then working to hit (regardless of difficulty), whatever mad way something was written in our work tracking system. They're IN the planning meetings writing those work pieces! I've tried to explain that what gets put in there, and how it's interpreted, has broad latitude and that I'm expecting them to shape it in a way that makes sense with the underlying stakeholder's goals, which I'd like them to build relationships with these people to help them understand beyond a surface level, but it's not seeming to land. So I'm in a situation where I'm simultaneously very unhappy with the work output, and also very cautious in how to raise it since in just quantity of hours they're already over what I'd like as a team norm, and I don't want to encourage burnout. There are some other difficulties too -- I expect a senior level data scientist to be making decisions and judgement calls based on the best information available, and then justify and defend those choices from the perspective of ultimate goals. I never get anything close to that -- instead I get endless, unconnected details and nuances. I don't have the bandwidth to be close to the detail on all their projects. When I was in a similar position myself, before I started managing this team, I would actively shape the direction of my analysis to help me decide which details mattered and which did not given our ultimate goals and the scope of our projects, and then only pass the relevant picture forward. Unfortunately my report either doesn't know how (troubling, at their level), or doesn't have the confidence to stand by their decisions (also troubling, at their level.) Any advice?
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Feb 13, 2024 13:40
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If they're doing a ton of work, and have been doing so for a while, it's not inconceivable that they might have picked up a thing or two along the way. Maybe they're too swamped to handle the more abstract tasks you want fixed or maybe those tasks just aren't very rewarding?
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Feb 13, 2024 14:55
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jemand posted:I'm a relatively new manager, and the most senior person on my team is struggling a lot. We're all data scientists, and the expectation for someone at their level is that they'd be able to drive the technical side of projects at a fairly high abstraction level, breaking down work into tasks for others to execute, influencing the business or other stakeholders to modify their approach for technical feasibility while understanding and delivering on what benefits the underlying business imperative, etc. have you let them know your expectations for their level? sounds like a simple mismatch, where they think the thing that matters is quantity of work delivered to spec, and you want specs validated to a quality standard. neither is inherently wrong, though i agree with you in preferring the latter over the former. after letting them know your expectationa and some examples and strategies for fulfilling the goals, if there's no improvement you may need to manage them out. e: in asking this question, you're painting yourself as conflict avoidant. you don't want to avoid conflict as a manager; successfully navigating conflicts is a significant part of the job. if you're worried about being avoidant, and also worried about being an rear end in a top hat on the other side of it, check out "Radical Candor" from your local library. leper khan fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 15:12
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Welp, went to the Ada position interview. Of course without practice, without exercise, like a huge noob. I remembered only too late that I should probably do something like that. It lasted around 40 mins, basically they asked why on earth would I want to learn Ada, and roasted my code exercise's solution (I did it with rust). Whole building was under security clearance so no access to internet, no photographing allowed, guards everywhere, lockboxes outside meeting rooms for phones etc. If I can read a room, I read it thus that they are looking for someone, but that was not me. They were too different than I am, and people usually like to hire similar people from my empirical experience. Also they didn't even suggest looking at my papers, which usually means they are not interested at all, so why bother looking. Off to new disappointments I guess.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:57
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Ihmemies posted:Welp, went to the Ada position interview. Of course without practice, without exercise, like a huge noob. I remembered only too late that I should probably do something like that. you dont want to wotk in a SCIF anyway. dodged a bullet imo
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Feb 13, 2024 16:00
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leper khan posted:check out "Radical Candor" from your local library. they made everyone at my last job do a course on "radical candor" and it came in handy shortly after when the layoffs hit
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Feb 13, 2024 16:09
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leper khan posted:you dont want to wotk in a SCIF anyway. dodged a bullet imo Probably not, how would I then spend my days shitposting?  Really, what's so bad with SCIF though? I have no previous experience.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:15
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How does one actually find chill, relaxed software jobs? One of my friends last year told me "You always find the jobs you need to actually work at." Combine that with years of hearing about people playing video games instead of work and/or working like 2 hours a day and I start to think I've missed some magical special segment of the software space.
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Feb 13, 2024 17:47
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Ihmemies posted:Probably not, how would I then spend my days shitposting? You can't spend your days shitposting
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Feb 13, 2024 17:53
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I've worked at 2 chill software jobs. The first was at a Raytheon subdivision that paid rear end and the second was at a bank that paid eh. The second team got dismantled because they were building a feature that nobody actually wants and the first I left because I was bored and wanted more money. I think the key to finding these jobs is to look at big companies within slow moving industries and to research the work/life balance at these places. If you want faang pay I think it really comes down to choosing not Amazon and getting lucky with your team.
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Feb 13, 2024 17:58
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Ihmemies posted:Welp, went to the Ada position interview. Of course without practice, without exercise, like a huge noob. I remembered only too late that I should probably do something like that. If you took it on yourself to learn rust, why on earth would gently caress with ada? Rust is one of those languages you pull out if you want to appear to be a trendy, modern, up-to-date developer. Did you talk about functional programming at your interview? If so, another strike against.
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Feb 13, 2024 18:08
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:If you took it on yourself to learn rust, why on earth would gently caress with ada? Rust is one of those languages you pull out if you want to appear to be a trendy, modern, up-to-date developer. Did you talk about functional programming at your interview? If so, another strike against. Of course, they asked me why I wanted to learn rust, and I mentioned the handy FP features of rust too… On the other hand, they for some reason thought I’d be amenable to learning Ada because I submitted my solution with rust. Originally they were looking for c++ or Java developers, but they didn’t limit the languages applicants could use with the programming tasks. I’d gently caress with Ada because I have nothing lined up for summer, it would be my first computer toucher job as a cs student.
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Feb 13, 2024 18:14
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wilderthanmild posted:How does one actually find chill, relaxed software jobs? Go search for a list of publicly listed companies that have paid a dividend consistently for the last 10 years, then apply to companies only on that list Banks are near the top of that list. So are utility companies, and the companies that supply them (ge, westinghouse, etc) They also pay about 10% less than median pay. I had an offer from MasterCard that I turned down because they were about 8% less than my current job. And it took about two weeks of negotiating to drag them up from 44% less than my current job. Not a typo. The trade off is they've very lax about vacation, and electronic payments aren't going away so they're effectively recession proof. You're also going to die in your chair using the same tech stack that they're using right now (especially if it's a Java, or as we've been discussing, defense and ada shop) so there's not going to be much professional development Hadlock fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 18:32
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wilderthanmild posted:How does one actually find chill, relaxed software jobs? people who talk about never working are generally one of: exaggerating for comedic effect, completely full of poo poo and just repeating nonsense because ???, or a couple months later they're talking about their pips there aren't actually that many do-nothing jobs out there - even if what you do is unimportant make-work, you'll still be expected to do it. there are lots of jobs like mine that expect me to log in, do my work, and move projects forward, but also don't bug me after work and expect me to miss work to take care of my son, attend dance recitals, and so on. for those, my experience is that you can try really hard to find a good fit during interviews and followup calls, but sometimes the team will _say_ that they're super chill and believe in work-life balance, but then that doesn't work out and they're blowing you up when you're on pto. but sometimes it does work out (as with my current position). it's also worth saying that if you go in to every interview waving your "i will be mad if i have to work more than 40 on the regular" flag, interviews are gonna be more difficult. i didn't have much of a problem with this a few years ago when everybody wanted to at least pretend to be a good place to work - i can only think of one interview that i failed the 'culture fit' on. but i wouldn't be surprised if things are significantly different now, and so i hesitate to actually recommend this strategy.
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Feb 13, 2024 18:46
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leper khan posted:you dont want to wotk in a SCIF anyway. dodged a bullet imo What happens if you fart in a SCIF room? Does it just get endlessly recycled in the air?
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Feb 13, 2024 18:53
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Achmed Jones posted:people who talk about never working are generally one of: exaggerating for comedic effect, completely full of poo poo and just repeating nonsense because There's a big delta between "chill, relaxed job" and "I haven't shipped a project in 6 months" Bigger, more mature companies have established project management workflows and realistic timelines, and shipping two months late isn't the life or death of the company, vs like, guessing, working at Activision and shipping the latest Call of Duty before Thanksgiving to hit sales targets Working for a startup is difficult because 1) generally there's no concept of project management beyond what the founders need to make the sales demo that week 2) you're building everything from scratch every time 3) the ground is constantly moving underneath you in respect to what's a priority and other people shipping breaking changes 4) process/change control is sporadic at best, partly because it impacts velocity Mature companies don't really have any of those problems. Or if they do, there's some kind of remediation effort going on
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Feb 13, 2024 20:55
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Hadlock posted:Mature companies don't really have any of those problems. ahahahahahha hahah ahahahah ahahah aha hah ahah
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Feb 13, 2024 21:02
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I've worked in pretty chill places where we were still doing some cool things and shipping product, working with a modern tech stack, weren't huge and faceless but: 1. The industries have been poo poo-tier (financial, manufacturing software, etc) 2. If you're chasing dollars your probably going to miss these places. Pay has been ok but I've definitely prioritized other things over salary to work at these places. 3. These kinds of places don't usually hire in cattle-call ways, so you need to do your homework and it might be a longer play to find the right place.
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Feb 13, 2024 22:54
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I think the biggest "secret" is just not working that hard. Tons of people in tech barely do anything. You can say "still working on that ticket" for days, sometimes weeks, before you have to make something up. In many companies you can fail to deliver, move to a different project or shift the work to someone else many times before people take note. In some countries it's easier to just tuck people like this out of the way than firing them. For productive people spending your time at work not working is simply more boring than doing the work. Many people also feel guilty or bad about themselves when not pulling their weight, which will eventually motivate them to make an effort. thotsky fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 23:30
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Yeah, it’s surprisingly easy to coast at companies with large number of employees. Once I gave up on my career at my last job, my reviews basically didn’t change even though I was contributing close to zero while I spent that year figuring out my next step.
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Feb 13, 2024 23:46
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thotsky posted:If they're doing a ton of work, and have been doing so for a while, it's not inconceivable that they might have picked up a thing or two along the way. Maybe they're too swamped to handle the more abstract tasks you want fixed or maybe those tasks just aren't very rewarding? They definitely know a lot about data science in general -- they are one of the most likely people to share a new paper, talk about a new technique in the field, etc. I did recently have a very direct conversation with them about making time for the kinds of abstract tasks I'd been asking them to do. I followed it up by having their group's scrum lead significantly reduce their velocity estimate, and messaged it to the product owner as well. I had our weekly 1-1 today, and was happy to hear that they had made time to meet with multiple levels of product leadership since. I'm interested in your suggestion that those abstract tasks are potentially less rewarding. How could I identify if that might be what's happening, or help address it? leper khan posted:have you let them know your expectations for their level? sounds like a simple mismatch, where they think the thing that matters is quantity of work delivered to spec, and you want specs validated to a quality standard. neither is inherently wrong, though i agree with you in preferring the latter over the former. I actually went through an exercise for the whole team last week where we discussed career levels for the data science jobs, specifically the expectations our company had for at each level. They told me it was "really, really, really, really" helpful, and that even though they'd been at the company 7 years, nobody had ever been as explicit with the expectations and progression before. (They used to be a direct peer to me, so you can just check my history in this thread and see why I'm not surprised our former joint manager failed to do that.) I have seen some limited progress, but it's clear there's a long way to go. Still, I haven't had them very long, and inconsistent improvements is at least a good start. leper khan posted:e: in asking this question, you're painting yourself as conflict avoidant. you don't want to avoid conflict as a manager; successfully navigating conflicts is a significant part of the job. if you're worried about being avoidant, and also worried about being an rear end in a top hat on the other side of it, check out "Radical Candor" from your local library. Thanks -- I do hesitate to initiate conflict, however it's not because I'm incapable of doing it but more because my inclination is to use a light touch wherever that works, and only escalate when that demonstrably isn't working. Since we were so recently peers, I wanted to build the new kind of manager/report relationship with them without immediately coming across as demanding or hard to please. I appreciate the book recommendation. I think part of what prompted me to post this morning were some conversations on Monday with people up my own management chain who have been very unhappy with this person's performance since much longer than I've been their manager. I need to figure out when and how I push on my direct report, and when and how I push back UP to say hey, this person has a long way to go, sure, but seriously I just got here to fix it 4 months ago, & the org already had 7 years to do it and didn't!
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Feb 14, 2024 00:56
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thotsky posted:For productive people spending your time at work not working is simply more boring than doing the work. I've never heard it said more simply and more accurately.
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Feb 14, 2024 01:18
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thotsky posted:I think the biggest "secret" is just not working that hard. Tons of people in tech barely do anything. You can say "still working on that ticket" for days, sometimes weeks, before you have to make something up. In many companies you can fail to deliver, move to a different project or shift the work to someone else many times before people take note. In some countries it's easier to just tuck people like this out of the way than firing them. In over a decade I have only worked on two teams where at least one person wasn’t sandbagging. Both were at the same company, but even there I’d have to ping some people on other teams every hour for 2-3 days to get a complete response to even basic questions out of them. Stuff that’d take a normal person half an hour tops to answer.
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Feb 14, 2024 02:31
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jemand posted:I'm interested in your suggestion that those abstract tasks are potentially less rewarding. How could I identify if that might be what's happening, or help address it? If you're doing velocity tracking I'm guessing you might be tracking or grading individual contributors as well? Does solving more tickets lead to better statistics or even tangible financial rewards? For them or the team? Are there social rewards for solving a bunch of tickets? Is there a team culture that puts pressure on solving many tasks or solving them quickly, such as dailies where members list off their achievements more than address challenges? Does the existing tooling better support the tasks they're usually focusing on rather than the ones you want them to do? Will they be able to work with others and receive support and acknowledgement when working on the more abstract tasks or does it leave them on their own? Does the team member in question personally enjoy the nature of the smaller tasks more? Not all front-enders would want to move into design or architecture, no matter their experience level. Do you do any development yourself? A lot of this stuff might be difficult to properly feel out without getting your hands dirty. thotsky fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Feb 14, 2024 |
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Feb 14, 2024 04:25
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When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like - What kind of version control you use - How do you apply common coding standards, with linter or something else? - How do you verify the results? Unit testing, static code analysis, something etc? - What dev process you use (scrum, waterfall etc)? - Can you describe your code review process? Maybe at the end of a tech interview? What if I forgot to ask anything, any way to avoid a potential horror show before signing up? I guess it is not appropriate to ask these afterwards before getting a job offer. Maybe between getting and offer and signing up?
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Feb 14, 2024 04:26
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We recently PIPed out a person who had done maybe two weeks of work over the last three years. You get there by working hard for a while and then gradually ramping things down.
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Feb 14, 2024 04:34
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Ihmemies posted:When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like If you're interviewing for a specific project or team you can probably ask straight away as long as a representative is present during the process, but they might not have decided where to put you, and sometimes the answer is going to be "we want you to decide and/or change this". thotsky fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Feb 14, 2024 |
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Feb 14, 2024 04:45
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Ihmemies posted:When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like ask these during the Q's about the role section with the team or the hiring manager. if you have questions after the interview, you could reach out to your recruiter. after signing an offer is way too late to ask your dealbreaker questions.
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Feb 14, 2024 04:49
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Ihmemies posted:When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like Ideally peppered throughout all stages of the interviews. It's a good indicator that you're switched on and know what the hell is going on. If I interview someone and I don't get any questions like that, you're getting a "neutral" rating at best.
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Feb 14, 2024 04:53
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Ihmemies posted:When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like Another good question I like to ask during the manager interview is “What would success look like in this role?” I got this originally from this or the interviewing thread (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3376083) and it has always been well received. It usually is really revelatory about what actually matters from the company’s perspective. If they care about code quality or UI or just number of features.
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Feb 14, 2024 05:37
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Thanks. I am a noob, not a player, so that means I am always extremely lost during interviews. I only manage to gather my thoughts long after the interview is over, during that I am usually a shambling mess. Way too much is at stake in one moment, and I get crushed under the weight. They said I can ask questions later after the interview. I don’t know if that is some “we just say this”, or do they actually mean that. I can’t tell the difference.
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Feb 14, 2024 08:01
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Ihmemies posted:Thanks. I am a noob, not a player, so that means I am always extremely lost during interviews. I only manage to gather my thoughts long after the interview is over, during that I am usually a shambling mess. Way too much is at stake in one moment, and I get crushed under the weight. You're not the only one who gets like this. It's why everyone needs to practice interviewing. The easiest way to get good practice is to go to interviews where you don't actually care about the outcome - this helps you build confidence in a lower-stakes environment. If that's not possible (e.g. because you really need a job, any job) then you might need to get by with mock interviews.
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Feb 14, 2024 08:17
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Just like going on first dates, you won't get better at it until you've cycled through doing/saying all the dumb stuff at least once, and you'll finally build the confidence as a seasoned interviewee to cruise in there, ask all the right questions, say all the right things and make the right jokes at the right time. Unless you're some super wonder kid you're not going to get hired for your first 5 interviews. The first 10 are all throw away practice interviews.
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Feb 14, 2024 10:05
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Ihmemies posted:When, if ever, is the moment to ask noob questions about the job? Like
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Yes, thanks. Problem is that I did not realise to ask them in the end of interview. They mentioned I can ask my stupid questions later, and I got now an email from the hr person I can send them to. Maybe it is good to ask, even if for practice. For example 3 questions, like - what should I be able to achieve in 1/3/6 months - how are the decisions made (who says who does which thing) - how do they measure code quality and guarantee that it works as it should work These or something else. Maybe I should move the discussion to another thread, but since this is kind of post-interview stuff, I don’t know for sure.
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Feb 14, 2024 16:18
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