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Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Hadlock posted:

If you absolutely need a job, I'm not sure what the hell tiktok is doing over there, but literally two days don't go by without some recruiter messaging me about some job

If you're super desperate for a job and don't mind working for the social media division of the Chinese CIA, I can put a good word in for you with Xi

Yeah, old coworker of mine is over there and has hit me up a few times. Doesn't seem like a particularly stable future product though, given how much scrutiny it's getting, and I wouldn't want to work there besides.

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Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Yeah it is probably not a good long term move. Based on the alarming number of positions perpetually open sounds like it's a revolving door. And also yeah very high ick factor. But they're definitely hiring

Tesla seems to be hiring too but they're gonna chew up work you to death and spit you out if you grow a spine

StumblyWumbly
Sep 12, 2007

Batmanticore!
Congrats on still having a job Pollyanna, I assumed you were doomed

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
apparently they do the ol' 996 over there in douyin itself, dunno about what it's like in the us offices

killerwhat
May 13, 2010

This is pretty much just ranting but I really don't like my job any more. I'm a backend software engineer at my first coding job, a struggling series-B startup of around 150 people. In December the team focus changed, so we all make data apps now. They've got me building loving Streamlit dashboards. I don't know anything about Streamlit, Python, Plotly, Pandas, SQL or whatever and I hate all of them.

I've been in the company for over 2 years so I'm hoping I can find a mid-level job, I've applied to a 4-5 places so far. I have now learned the important lesson: "don't wait until you can't stand your current job to start job hunting". I don't work very hard at all but I resent that too, I'd rather be doing something interesting.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

killerwhat posted:

This is pretty much just ranting but I really don't like my job any more. I'm a backend software engineer at my first coding job, a struggling series-B startup of around 150 people. In December the team focus changed, so we all make data apps now. They've got me building loving Streamlit dashboards. I don't know anything about Streamlit, Python, Plotly, Pandas, SQL or whatever and I hate all of them.

I've been in the company for over 2 years so I'm hoping I can find a mid-level job, I've applied to a 4-5 places so far. I have now learned the important lesson: "don't wait until you can't stand your current job to start job hunting". I don't work very hard at all but I resent that too, I'd rather be doing something interesting.

always be interviewing

Lockback
Sep 3, 2006

All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.
Your 2nd job is almost always A) Easier to get and B) So much better than your first.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Lockback posted:

Your 2nd job is almost always A) Easier to get and B) So much better than your first.

its a pretty tough market right now, so A is a coinflip

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

killerwhat posted:

This is pretty much just ranting but I really don't like my job any more. I'm a backend software engineer at my first coding job, a struggling series-B startup of around 150 people. In December the team focus changed, so we all make data apps now. They've got me building loving Streamlit dashboards. I don't know anything about Streamlit, Python, Plotly, Pandas, SQL or whatever and I hate all of them.

I've been in the company for over 2 years so I'm hoping I can find a mid-level job, I've applied to a 4-5 places so far. I have now learned the important lesson: "don't wait until you can't stand your current job to start job hunting". I don't work very hard at all but I resent that too, I'd rather be doing something interesting.
One of the things that's most disorienting about your first job is that you can't tell the difference between hating the work/tech vs. just hating your job. I have a strong suspicion you're actually in the second category. I almost quit IT/sysadmin work to focus on human-computer interaction and product management. My second job was a lot better and I ended up thriving at all the stuff I hated about the previous gig.

This is potentially really important to you when you're job hunting, because avoiding all the things you're actually experienced in is pretty much the worst thing you can do as an entry-level engineer.

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Vulture Culture posted:

One of the things that's most disorienting about your first job is that you can't tell the difference between hating the work/tech vs. just hating your job. I have a strong suspicion you're actually in the second category. I almost quit IT/sysadmin work to focus on human-computer interaction and product management. My second job was a lot better and I ended up thriving at all the stuff I hated about the previous gig.

This is potentially really important to you when you're job hunting, because avoiding all the things you're actually experienced in is pretty much the worst thing you can do as an entry-level engineer.

I think this is pretty important, because what the poster mentioned doesn't sound like...classic awful work.


killerwhat posted:

This is pretty much just ranting but I really don't like my job any more. I'm a backend software engineer at my first coding job, a struggling series-B startup of around 150 people. In December the team focus changed, so we all make data apps now. They've got me building loving Streamlit dashboards. I don't know anything about Streamlit, Python, Plotly, Pandas, SQL or whatever and I hate all of them.

What specifically do you hate about all of this stuff? Don't take this as harping or telling you that you're wrong, but none of those seem like particularly weird or obscure technologies, or even disliked (well, SQL, sure). Your whole career is likely going to involve touching and having to learn about things you don't know anything about, too, so that's probably worth thinking about; if the issue is unreasonable deadlines or human problems, those are more likely job related issues, but it's not totally insane that some people might just realize 'I don't like writing code'.

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013
Well, I've failed my third big-name company screening interview. I pretty much expected it, as this one was at Meta and I had zero interest in spending a bunch of time grinding Leetcode problems ahead of time. It still felt like stepping into a bizarro-world scenario again (as with wehn I last did the same at Amazon) to go from literally anyone but FAANG actually caring about what the business actually does, to the Meta screener just being 'solve these two Leetcode medium problems in 45 minutes'.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

leper khan posted:

always be interviewing

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Roadie posted:

Well, I've failed my third big-name company screening interview. I pretty much expected it, as this one was at Meta and I had zero interest in spending a bunch of time grinding Leetcode problems ahead of time. It still felt like stepping into a bizarro-world scenario again (as with wehn I last did the same at Amazon) to go from literally anyone but FAANG actually caring about what the business actually does, to the Meta screener just being 'solve these two Leetcode medium problems in 45 minutes'.

Not to sound fatalistic, but Meta isn't the only company that relies on these style of problems. You should probably just dedicate the time to grind out some leetcode problems - some of them are pretty obscure but IMO I think the majority of them should be doable for folks who are familiar with whatever language they're using, or at least accomplishable with some googling.

Edit: and even the obscure ones can mostly be figured out. Inverting a binary tree or whatever might not come in handy for a lot of posititions but it's also generally just rote memorization combined with understanding how recursive functions work - and that second part is extremely relevant to many jobs.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Feb 27, 2024

Lockback
Sep 3, 2006

All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.

leper khan posted:

its a pretty tough market right now, so A is a coinflip

Its still easier than trying to get a first job right now.

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

Hadlock posted:

leper khan posted:

always be interviewing

I've got mid-stage interviews going with like seven other companies at the same time, plus one with a "come do a final interview again for the final time for a different position than the first one, but first wait a week and a half so we can schedule it". This industry is just nightmarishly slow at anything to do with the hiring process.

Falcon2001 posted:

Not to sound fatalistic, but Meta isn't the only company that relies on these style of problems. You should probably just dedicate the time to grind out some leetcode problems - some of them are pretty obscure but IMO I think the majority of them should be doable for folks who are familiar with whatever language they're using, or at least accomplishable with some googling.

Edit: and even the obscure ones can mostly be figured out. Inverting a binary tree or whatever might not come in handy for a lot of posititions but it's also generally just rote memorization combined with understanding how recursive functions work - and that second part is extremely relevant to many jobs.

My reaction is a firm "meh". Plenty of companies have tech screens without using the fairly specific bigtech absurdity of "memorize a bunch of problems and then pretend to come up with a solution on the spot in a time window too small for anyone to actually come up with a solution on the spot".

Roadie fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Feb 27, 2024

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Roadie posted:

This industry is just nightmarishly slow at anything to do with the hiring process.

My founder buddy is convinced salary recruiters intentionally slow walk selection and screening to protect their jobs. If you're only hiring three engineering positions this quarter, it looks really bad if you fill them all in week one and you're sitting on your hands for the next 11 weeks. I don't disagree with his assessment

I was a direct hire (hiring manager says, "we want this guy, he's our first choice") at one company and it took the recruiter 2 months to schedule the required screening call. The rest of the process took two days, and then salary negotiation was a series of scheduled calls 3 days apart each

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug

Lockback posted:

Your 2nd job is almost always A) Easier to get and B) So much better than your first.

My second job took longer to find than the first and was better in a very limited sense of the word, but it paid heaps more and actually connected me to people. When I got let go from it I was re-employed within a week at a place where I really started to grow my career and eventually got my first lead title.

Sign
Jul 18, 2003

Sign posted:

AFAIK he's doing it himself, but we don't have a singular head of operations those 3 teams EMs all report to one of his reports along with a big chunk of other stuff.

And I'd call it a third VP counting the guy he replaced.

It is extra silly for my team since we don't own any services and can't do anything else because of this. And the company wide on site is all of next week.

Giving another update on this stupidity. I found out on Friday that he was surprised that there were services without a singular owner. Everything was clear to deploy as of Monday. Nobody has broken anything yet, but I'm leaving on ~3 weeks of vacation and will see what is going on when I get back. Not hopeful. I really don't want to deal with this job market

killerwhat
May 13, 2010

Falcon2001 posted:

I think this is pretty important, because what the poster mentioned doesn't sound like...classic awful work.

What specifically do you hate about all of this stuff? Don't take this as harping or telling you that you're wrong, but none of those seem like particularly weird or obscure technologies, or even disliked (well, SQL, sure). Your whole career is likely going to involve touching and having to learn about things you don't know anything about, too, so that's probably worth thinking about; if the issue is unreasonable deadlines or human problems, those are more likely job related issues, but it's not totally insane that some people might just realize 'I don't like writing code'.

That is a good question and I'm struggling to answer. I did mostly enjoy my first two years here before the project change. I didn't like building simple demos/anything front-end, in retrospect largely because I didn't have much/any support (I didn't mind it so much during my coding bootcamp). I had a few fun weeks on a brand-new project in November - turns out motivation is easy if the work is interesting. But there just wasn't that much development needed for the stuff I was working on, that dried up and now we have data apps.

This new work is challenging, but it's not a challenge I find interesting at all. How to add an axis to a line chart etc. There's no creativity required.

Before my bootcamp I was an academic scientist. It's four years since I left the lab. I largely let go of grieving that last year but it's still colouring how I feel about this. I used to make discoveries about how life works, now I'm creating a bar chart about how many ads people watched in a video? Tbh I just feel contemptuous of the whole company, if not the whole industry. Bullshit Job for sure. Also, my manager is only interested in sprints and story points, the PM is constantly trying to release untested things, and company morale is low. Low pay of course too.

Vulture Culture posted:

One of the things that's most disorienting about your first job is that you can't tell the difference between hating the work/tech vs. just hating your job. I have a strong suspicion you're actually in the second category. I almost quit IT/sysadmin work to focus on human-computer interaction and product management. My second job was a lot better and I ended up thriving at all the stuff I hated about the previous gig.
That is a good point. I just remembered I was very pleased with myself at undergrad for avoiding learning anything about metabolism, then ended up working in cell metabolism for 12 years.

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
you didn't make discoveries about how life works, you pipetted some poo poo and/or worked some machines and/or did excel or python or matlab wrangling or whatever in a PI's chain gang, lol

peeps want the software enough to pay for it. it's sometimes boring but so is pipette monkeying and working the big ol' biochem machines, sometimes. at least the throatcutting is above your paygrade so far. if you want independence and creativity there's a lotta jobs in touching that do have that poo poo. problem is they don't pay for poo poo and they're viciously competitive just like academia. (they may even just be academia again)

bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Feb 27, 2024

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

bob dobbs is dead posted:

you didn't make discoveries about how life works, you pipetted some poo poo and/or worked some machines and/or did excel or python or matlab wrangling or whatever in a PI's chain gang, lol

There is a vast difference between being part of a team that's doing some kind of important research/development, and being part of a team that's trying to make some dumb corporation's profits go up by 1%. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but plenty of people find it easier to tolerate working at a "meaningful" job than a "bullshit" one, even if their day-to-day work is basically the same.

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

There is a vast difference between being part of a team that's doing some kind of important research/development, and being part of a team that's trying to make some dumb corporation's profits go up by 1%. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but plenty of people find it easier to tolerate working at a "meaningful" job than a "bullshit" one, even if their day-to-day work is basically the same.

:yeah:

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.
so we're on the same page, the meaningful one is the move number 1% one right? because the pure research stuff ive worked on was less than meaningful

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost

leper khan posted:

so we're on the same page, the meaningful one is the move number 1% one right? because the pure research stuff ive worked on was less than meaningful

the main meat of life-science academia is throatcutting and grants, so moving number 1% isn't really exclusive to corporateland, either

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

leper khan posted:

so we're on the same page, the meaningful one is the move number 1% one right? because the pure research stuff ive worked on was less than meaningful

When I was in academia, writing control software for custom-built microscopes, I was helping researchers figure out the structures of organelles in cells, create mutant cells with various potentially-medically-interesting properties, develop new techniques for rapidly imaging microscopic objects with sub-diffraction-limited resolution, and a bunch of other stuff that I no longer really remember. It was fascinating stuff, and while the pay was poo poo, the job was a lot of fun, and easy to justify as "meaningful".

I'm not gonna argue that academia is immune to bullshit jobs, of course, nor that industry work is bereft of meaningful jobs. I do think it's reasonable to say that academia jobs, on average, score higher on the "bullshit to meaningful" axis than industry jobs do.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

When I was in academia, writing control software for custom-built microscopes, I was helping researchers figure out the structures of organelles in cells, create mutant cells with various potentially-medically-interesting properties, develop new techniques for rapidly imaging microscopic objects with sub-diffraction-limited resolution, and a bunch of other stuff that I no longer really remember. It was fascinating stuff, and while the pay was poo poo, the job was a lot of fun, and easy to justify as "meaningful".

I'm not gonna argue that academia is immune to bullshit jobs, of course, nor that industry work is bereft of meaningful jobs. I do think it's reasonable to say that academia jobs, on average, score higher on the "bullshit to meaningful" axis than industry jobs do.

sorry, im more familiar with subcontracting for the military where we put together a flashy AR demo to sell a bunch of tangentially related whitepapers to the military; none of it having any appreciable practical outcome on anything other than the pcoketbook of the owner of the firm.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the main meat of life-science academia is throatcutting and grants, so moving number 1% isn't really exclusive to corporateland, either

makes sense. cant study life without first taking it

Phobeste
Apr 9, 2006

never, like, count out Touchdown Tom, man
You don't have to agree with a lack of cynicism but you must at least acknowledge it exists lests ye become the sort of person who posts like they haven't unclenched their jaw for 30 years

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

Roadie posted:

My reaction is a firm "meh". Plenty of companies have tech screens without using the fairly specific bigtech absurdity of "memorize a bunch of problems and then pretend to come up with a solution on the spot in a time window too small for anyone to actually come up with a solution on the spot".

What sort of questions were you getting that fell into this category? I work at a BigTech and most of the stuff I've seen us ask (I'm not interviewing seniors, so maybe they bust out the really weird ones there) are in the bottom tier of difficulty from the stuff I did on leetcode and mostly should not be 'recite something from rote'.

There's a few favorites like inverting binary tree or whatever, but I think the majority of leetcode style questions could be handled at least at a brute force approach level by someone with a reasonable understanding of the language and standard library. I think the trickiest ones delve into things that are arguably actual computer science stuff, where you have things like dynamic programming (or hell, inverting a binary tree).

Part of this is that at least at my personal bigtech company, the stated goal is not 'A+ if you recite an answer immediately'. There are probably lovely interviewers at my company who approach it like that, but it's a big company and there's lovely interviewers everywhere. If I threw a dynamic programming question or something like that at someone and they could walk me through what they were doing, describe their approach and why they made the choices they're making, and at least get most of the way towards a brute force solution, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't pass that person.

On the other hand, if someone just robotically answered the question in 5 minutes like a chatgpt response I'd...probably just start tweaking the parameters. "Alright, what if the data was passed in as a mix of different string encoded objects?", since just answering the question immediately doesn't actually tell me much, other than maybe you're getting answers from your chatgpt-enabled anal beads or something.

I still think that questions around the lines of 'here's some actual code, let's talk about it, etc' as discussed earlier in the thread are better, but either I've been ridiculously lucky on my interview questions (both ones I've taken and given) or I think I just don't get the hate.

killerwhat posted:

That is a good question and I'm struggling to answer. I did mostly enjoy my first two years here before the project change. I didn't like building simple demos/anything front-end, in retrospect largely because I didn't have much/any support (I didn't mind it so much during my coding bootcamp). I had a few fun weeks on a brand-new project in November - turns out motivation is easy if the work is interesting. But there just wasn't that much development needed for the stuff I was working on, that dried up and now we have data apps.

This new work is challenging, but it's not a challenge I find interesting at all. How to add an axis to a line chart etc. There's no creativity required.

Before my bootcamp I was an academic scientist. It's four years since I left the lab. I largely let go of grieving that last year but it's still colouring how I feel about this. I used to make discoveries about how life works, now I'm creating a bar chart about how many ads people watched in a video? Tbh I just feel contemptuous of the whole company, if not the whole industry. Bullshit Job for sure. Also, my manager is only interested in sprints and story points, the PM is constantly trying to release untested things, and company morale is low. Low pay of course too.

For what it's worth, I think the lack of creativity bit might be very telling, and can be extremely draining. I left a career I was extremely good at, but had very creativity in it because I was just burned out from doing the same thing over and over. I was already in IT, so it's not like I had far to travel, but writing code for me has been a hugely creative outlet in comparison - there's a million ways to approach most problems and my current team is pretty happy to let me drive direction.

It might be worth chatting with your boss about this before leaving; I don't know your manager and if they're an rear end in a top hat ignore all the rest of this, but in general I think most managers would be receptive to 'Hey ever since I moved to project Z I've been struggling to feel interested or motivated in the work because there's so little creativity involved, do you have any advice on what we can do about this?" Don't frame it as 'Do X or I walk', but instead just make it clear you're frustrated and ask for help. If he tells you to pound sand (or even better "Just get it done") that's even more reason to leave then.

Another question: Is your team at all involved in using these graphs or are you just getting a list of requirements via PM and implementing them? Because another thing I've heard a lot from devs is that if you don't understand who your customer is, it's extremely hard to feel motivated. If that's the case, you might try attending more meetings or having face to face time with your customers to discuss the product you're building, if that's appropriate/etc.

At the end of the day it very well could be that the work isn't incentive enough and the company sucks, and then you walk, but I do think it's worth doing a bit of digging at exactly why you're unhappy. Others mentioned it too, but if you don't know why you don't like something, you might discover that switching jobs doesn't fix it - and you might even figure out how to make your current job suck a lot less.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Feb 28, 2024

killerwhat
May 13, 2010

bob dobbs is dead posted:

you didn't make discoveries about how life works, you pipetted some poo poo and/or worked some machines and/or did excel or python or matlab wrangling or whatever in a PI's chain gang, lol

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

There is a vast difference between being part of a team that's doing some kind of important research/development, and being part of a team that's trying to make some dumb corporation's profits go up by 1%. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but plenty of people find it easier to tolerate working at a "meaningful" job than a "bullshit" one, even if their day-to-day work is basically the same.

Exactly. I know that I didn't really contribute much to the sum of human knowledge, my lab results were not very useful or successful (basic science :rolleye:), but I still feel it was an honour to be able to do that work. I mean, obviously it was also extremely poo poo, that's why I left.

Falcon2001 posted:

It might be worth chatting with your boss about this before leaving

Another question: Is your team at all involved in using these graphs or are you just getting a list of requirements via PM and implementing them? Because another thing I've heard a lot from devs is that if you don't understand who your customer is, it's extremely hard to feel motivated. If that's the case, you might try attending more meetings or having face to face time with your customers to discuss the product you're building, if that's appropriate/etc.
Unfortunately my manager is the "just get it done" type: I tried expressing my concerns at the start and he told me "your job title is software engineer, this is software engineering. Loads of stuff to learn. Good for your career". And then wrote in my end of year review that I "don't deal well with change" lol.

Good idea. I've asked today for more explanatory meetings about what these things are for and how they're supposed to work.

Mantle
May 15, 2004

Anyone have any experience/opinions on working for consultancies as a software engineer? I found an interesting role up my alley but I'd like to hear more about people's personal experience: https://careers.deloitte.ca/job/Tor...r&?src=JB-12762

Pay is on the low side but I'm interested in the opportunity to work on Privacy by Design. What other upsides are there working for these types of consultancies? Bonuses or other perks? Working with companies I wouldn't otherwise have access to?

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Mantle posted:

Anyone have any experience/opinions on working for consultancies as a software engineer? I found an interesting role up my alley but I'd like to hear more about people's personal experience: https://careers.deloitte.ca/job/Tor...r&?src=JB-12762

Pay is on the low side but I'm interested in the opportunity to work on Privacy by Design. What other upsides are there working for these types of consultancies? Bonuses or other perks? Working with companies I wouldn't otherwise have access to?

The math and dynamic might be different in the US, but here in Norway where we don't have figgies/faang, consulting are generally the highest paying employers in the industry. Consultancy companies are able to charge exorbitant fees for software engineers because they enable companies to circumvent our strong labor laws (and lets them use project budgets rather than hiring budgets on staffing). If you're a senior consultant you might be able to pocket 50-60% of that, which is a big deal.

In theory, a consultancy should shoulder some of the work of finding you work, and in theory the loosening of labor protections should go both ways; if you don't like a project you say you want a new one and they'll switch you out as soon as possible. Large consultancies like Deloitte also have huge long term deals requiring them to provide staff, which can make them a safe harbor in times of trouble.

I get an extra week of vacation, but it's during the period where there's not much to do. There's the typical corporate IT perks. There's a bonus situation, but it's really just a scam to keep part of your pay if you quit before the year is up, or if the company does badly.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Feb 29, 2024

Mantle
May 15, 2004

thotsky posted:

The math and dynamic might be different in the US, but here in Norway where we don't have figgies/faang, consulting are generally the highest paying employers in the industry. Consultancy companies are able to charge exorbitant fees for software engineers because they enable companies to circumvent our strong labor laws (and lets them use project budgets rather than hiring budgets on staffing). If you're a senior consultant you might be able to pocket 50-60% of that, which is a big deal.

In theory, a consultancy should shoulder some of the work of finding you work, and in theory the loosening of labor protections should go both ways; if you don't like a project you say you want a new one and they'll switch you out as soon as possible. Large consultancies like Deloitte also have huge long term deals requiring them to provide staff, which can make them a safe harbor in times of trouble.

I get an extra week of vacation, but it's during the period where there's not much to do. There's the typical corporate IT perks. There's a bonus situation, but it's really just a scam to keep part of your pay if you quit before the year is up, or if the company does badly.

Are you able to have a decent work life balance? I've heard stories from people at the consultant level working stress-free 9-5 and others working 12 hour days managing offshore teams.

Another thing that interests me about the work is doing things on a project basis and exposure to a lot of different tech stacks. Is that going to be a given in the industry?

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


StumblyWumbly posted:

Congrats on still having a job Pollyanna, I assumed you were doomed

It's...a little fuckin' weird. I specifically am somehow not immediately doomed, but TBQH the past year or so made me lose a lot of trust and feeling of stability. The whole walking-back-the-PIP thing didn't exactly make me feel much better, so...either way, it's still kind of a poo poo frustrating job, but in the sense that corporate/enterprise is balls and vendors are the worst :shepicide:

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Mantle posted:

Are you able to have a decent work life balance? I've heard stories from people at the consultant level working stress-free 9-5 and others working 12 hour days managing offshore teams.

Another thing that interests me about the work is doing things on a project basis and exposure to a lot of different tech stacks. Is that going to be a given in the industry?

I can slack off or bust my rear end. Nobody cares either way at my current employer/project. Working 12 hour days is more of a management level thing; clients usually prefer for you to charge them for a predictable, non-overtime-inducing amount of hours each day.

Not really. Both your employer and your client will have a strong incentive to keep you on for as long as possible if you've worked out. If you're junior it's probably more common, but if you wanna jump around you might have to push that agenda.

I mean, everything is relative, but I would expect to stay at least a year or two with a client, assuming you fit and they have stuff to do.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Feb 29, 2024

Falcon2001
Oct 10, 2004

Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
Pillbug

killerwhat posted:

Unfortunately my manager is the "just get it done" type: I tried expressing my concerns at the start and he told me "your job title is software engineer, this is software engineering. Loads of stuff to learn. Good for your career". And then wrote in my end of year review that I "don't deal well with change" lol.

"Just get it done" is four easy words that actually mean "I'm useless as a manager and a leech on society". So far I've had a 100% hit rate when it comes to managers who say poo poo like that and wouldn't be worth pissing on if they were on fire.

Anyway good luck man, hope things get better.

killerwhat posted:

Thanks ;) Your questions have given me some great food for thought, I appreciate it. And everyone else who replied. Feeling less ragey now

Ah, my bad!

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Feb 29, 2024

Evis
Feb 28, 2007
Flying Spaghetti Monster

Mantle posted:

Anyone have any experience/opinions on working for consultancies as a software engineer? I found an interesting role up my alley but I'd like to hear more about people's personal experience: https://careers.deloitte.ca/job/Tor...r&?src=JB-12762

Pay is on the low side but I'm interested in the opportunity to work on Privacy by Design. What other upsides are there working for these types of consultancies? Bonuses or other perks? Working with companies I wouldn't otherwise have access to?

I haven’t worked in privacy, but I was a security consultant for 7.5 years in between jobs in big tech. The firm I worked for was relatively small, probably a couple thousand people or so spread across the world.

Things I would want to understand in your position are how often clients require you to be in their offices away from your usual home. At the peak I was on the road about two months of the year, but I know some were on the road more than they were home. The work on the road was more interesting and the bonuses for travel made it worth it for them to agree to it.

Another thing is scoping of work. In my field we could have a half hour to an hour conversation with the client and hammer out some reasonable scope of work that matched their budget, and make sure consultants wouldn’t have to spend evenings and weekends working to get the scope completed. If the sales team is running things that can get trickier, as they might be incentivized to sell things that are unrealistic but get them this quarter’s numbers. In my experience things worked best when consultants worked closely with sales to ensure things went smoothly, but that might be less necessary when you’re not doing boutique work.

For software development work, it’s probably even more important to have a good scope of work. In security review we could usually caveat the SoW and say we would cover what we could in the time available, but if the scope says you have to deliver a thing you should probably be sure that is possible before agreeing to it.

Artemis J Brassnuts
Jan 2, 2009
I regret😢 to inform📢 I am the most sexually🍆 vanilla 🍦straight 📏 dude😰 on the planet🌎
That’s interesting to hear, because the only time I chatted with a consultant company, they couldn’t even match my paltry game dev salary.

killerwhat
May 13, 2010

Falcon2001 posted:

Anyway good luck woman, hope things get better.

Thanks ;) Your questions have given me some great food for thought, I appreciate it. And everyone else who replied. Feeling less ragey now

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thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Artemis J Brassnuts posted:

That’s interesting to hear, because the only time I chatted with a consultant company, they couldn’t even match my paltry game dev salary.

They make most of their money hiring people straight out of uni and keeping them on their starting salaries for as long as possible. In Norway there's not a culture of being paid more than 100k for any job, and getting there can be hard, but if you have some experience consultancies will give you that easily. If you're working for a consultancy that give you a straight cut of whatever you bill the client you might be able to approach 150k, which is the highest dev salary I've seen (assuming you're not working for yourself or have stock etc).

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