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Che Delilas posted:It's Dunning-Kruger most likely. This field is huge. HUGE. There is so, SO much to learn, and every time a concept finally clicks, you realize that there are another dozen that you think you need to know right now and you feel inadequate. The breakneck speed at which everything is changing and evolving doesn't help either; there's always some new technology or pattern that does <thing> in a really cool or fast or efficient way, and you feel like you need to learn it or become a dinosaur in a month. Thanks, that's awesome.  I think inside I already knew that* but it's good to hear that other smart people have similar feelings/issues and how they get past them.*I mean, I knew it deep down but not in any place where it'd actually be accessible to me because FEELINGS.
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Dec 22, 2013 11:15
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Not sure if this is the place to ask this or not but it seemed best fit. I have a strange half and half job at work, started out as a little accidental coding on the side, turns out I loved it and got kinda good (or at least semi-competent) at it as you do most things you love doing. It has become a greater and greater part of my job and the projects I've been working on started to move away from smashing out a few macros in excel to pretty much making whole applications through vba\access\sql. Fair enough, I enjoy it. But I still get paid like my previous\normal job and that's my title as well. I've slowly taken on responsibility for pretty much all maintenance, IT support and development for a 500-1000 staff department that has quite specialised IT, mostly built by me or some guys that have now left the company and due to higher up politics is totally unsupported by group IT (this is a huge company). Everything is so embedded they can't get rid of it without spending $$$$$ and hiring boatloads of new staff and I think they are aware of this, heck most of the staff now don't actually know the old "correct" way of doing anything. So my questions are two fold. 1) I see a fair few job postings out there for various combinations of VBA \ Access \ Excel \ SQL developers. What exactly do these jobs entail? What sort of skills level is expected here, I always assumed those kind of skills were pretty much coding with training wheels\in the basic toolbox of any serious developer and if you wanted to actually have a pure development job you best get yourself a real language or two. Yet these jobs seem to get more money etc than straight forward .net or java type postings, and if you combine it with c# etc you move into mega money. There are LOTS of these jobs as well, its not like 3 random postings by idiots. Makes no sense to me can someone shed some light? 2) I ask the above because my plan is, if it turns out I'm basically doing one of those jobs, or at least am close, I'm going to gather up evidence of that and how screwed the place is without me or someone like me and present a give me this job with a reasonable wage or I start looking elsewhere and you're up poo poo creek. Any one have any advice on how to do this or done similar? I think I have a reasonable chance of success, the company is kinda against a wall, and I don't have to worry about being poo poo canned for it either so its pretty much a no lose situation. Cast_No_Shadow fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 13:07
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HondaCivet posted:I definitely have things wrong with me so I guess you're right, haha. I often find something I want to learn and then in the middle of it I'll feel like "wow this is huge and I'm too dumb to ever get good at this thing aaaaaaa." I don't know if it's Imposter Syndrome or if I'm actually dumb or just too insane to learn hard things or what but it sucks.
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Dec 22, 2013 19:54
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:1) I see a fair few job postings out there for various combinations of VBA \ Access \ Excel \ SQL developers. What exactly do these jobs entail? What sort of skills level is expected here, I always assumed those kind of skills were pretty much coding with training wheels\in the basic toolbox of any serious developer and if you wanted to actually have a pure development job you best get yourself a real language or two. Yet these jobs seem to get more money etc than straight forward .net or java type postings, and if you combine it with c# etc you move into mega money. There are LOTS of these jobs as well, its not like 3 random postings by idiots. Makes no sense to me can someone shed some light? It's probably very similar to your situation. They started off with a spreadsheet that grew and grew over the years, and now they are stuck with whatever monstrosity they have. The pay is probably good because most CS grads probably dont aim to be a vba developer so there's not as many people out there to fill the roles. From what you have written it sounds like you would have the right skills to take on a similar role somewhere else. quote:2) I ask the above because my plan is, if it turns out I'm basically doing one of those jobs, or at least am close, I'm going to gather up evidence of that and how screwed the place is without me or someone like me and present a give me this job with a reasonable wage or I start looking elsewhere and you're up poo poo creek. Any one have any advice on how to do this or done similar? I think I have a reasonable chance of success, the company is kinda against a wall, and I don't have to worry about being poo poo canned for it either so its pretty much a no lose situation. Try and stay classy about it, just point out how your role and day to day work no longer matches what your formal job description is and that you feel you should be paid more in line with what you actually do. It's good to provide evidence about what you should be earning, most likely they just don't know. I would hold back on letting them know how screwed they are unless they are resistant to it. They may or may not appreciate how screwed they are, for example if they actually cared about quality software they probably would have bitten the bullet and built a properly engineered system. Hopefully though they can realise it. I had to work on this system once and it was something totally bizzaro that had five different layers of excel spreadsheets all over network shares or something and all I could think was the guy who looked after that must have the safest job in the world cause noone would be able to figure out how it really worked. The situation you describe is not uncommon, with a small project compounding "organically" over the years, but no one ever stopped to think about the best way to build something sustainable. It's a level above technical debt.
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Dec 23, 2013 01:25
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:1) I see a fair few job postings out there for various combinations of VBA \ Access \ Excel \ SQL developers. What exactly do these jobs entail? What sort of skills level is expected here, I always assumed those kind of skills were pretty much coding with training wheels\in the basic toolbox of any serious developer and if you wanted to actually have a pure development job you best get yourself a real language or two. Yet these jobs seem to get more money etc than straight forward .net or java type postings, and if you combine it with c# etc you move into mega money. There are LOTS of these jobs as well, its not like 3 random postings by idiots. Makes no sense to me can someone shed some light? 1) I've never been on this side of development, so I can only offer guesses that are colored by my experience as a C# developer in a non-development-oriented company. These guesses will not be very encouraging and may be entirely wrong, so I'm not going to make them here. Hopefully someone with direct experience will be able to answer you better. You may want to ask this question in SH/SC proper, perhaps the "Working in IT" thread, as it could yield more answers. What I will say is that access and excel scripting/programming are not necessarily in the toolbox of "serious" developers. I would put them more into a business intelligence category, often used by people outside of IT for themselves and with little to no experience in turing-complete languages. They're by no means necessary to know if you want to move into full application development. That said, they're by no means an "illegitimate" form of development. They're just scoped to a particular environment (excel or access) and not appropriate for all tasks. If you like this kind of development, that's fine! 2) Be professional. What I mean is, don't make threats or ultimatums or even imply them, especially if this is a company you want to keep working for because they're nice people not not complete shitheels (I don't know if they are or not). Do your research. Ask for a raise, and back up your request with the results of your research in combination with what you've done for and will continue to do for this company. Highlight specific things you've done with this new knowledge you've gained that have benefited the company, saved hours, saved/made money, etc. "It used to take 4 hours to run this report and now it takes 10 minutes, I saved you nearly 4 man-hours per week with this one thing." The bottom line is that you're more valuable as an employee than you used to be, and you feel that your compensation should increase to reflect that. Also, I'd avoid using specific job postings as your evidence of market rates for this kind of position; that's kind of directly threatening that you are thinking about leaving. Instead use statistics gathering sites like salary.com and glassdoor. That way it's not as much of a direct threat, you're just doing your homework and making sure you're being treated fairly  If they balk and don't give you any raise, THEN you can move onto direct threats. Do that by getting interviews and offers from other companies, and then bringing those offers back to your current company and saying, "I have an offer for X, can you give me a reason to keep working here?" (Again, be more professional than that, but you get my meaning) Edit: unixbeard's guess is pretty much my guess, so I guess my guess was a decent guess.
Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 01:53
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Not sure if this is the place to ask this or not but it seemed best fit. quote:
Generally if you don't enjoy your job, you should look for another one. If the way you are approaching this is that the company has committed a "crime" against you by paying you too low and you are gathering "evidence" to rub in their faces that they should pay you more money. You are 1) approaching the situation in the worst way possible, and 2) you should probably quit since you hate the job and consider the company an adversary. The best way (again IMO) to do this is to ask your boss for a meeting, and explain the situation. Tell them, "Look I have been here for X, and while originally my job entailed only doing Y, I am now also doing some automation and programming that is helping the company save money, so I feel like a pay increase respective to my increased skills and responsibilities is in order." You only need to gather "evidence" if it is irrefutable evidence that you have saved or generated revenue for the company and they are resistant to the idea of paying you more. For example, your fix saved them $1000/month on their AWS bill. I would also look around a couple of salary websites to see what kind of raise you are looking for. It doesn't seem like you have a general idea what you would say if they said, "OK how much more do you want to get paid" so looking up some figures you can be confident about would be good in case that situation arises. IME, people who write just macros for Excel and other Windows applications are generally writing these things as one-offs to help do their jobs faster, which is kinda like saving the company money but essentially just allows people to goof-off with the time they have saved doing the task. It's kinda hard to tell but from what you describe you may or may not be doing this kind of thing. But basically if you are just creating things that make your job easier to do rather than full-on applications you have to maintain because other departments use it, then it will probably be less likely you will get more money and may have to just quit. unixbeard posted:I had to work on this system once and it was something totally bizzaro that had five different layers of excel spreadsheets all over network shares or something and all I could think was the guy who looked after that must have the safest job in the world cause noone would be able to figure out how it really worked. The situation you describe is not uncommon, with a small project compounding "organically" over the years, but no one ever stopped to think about the best way to build something sustainable. It's a level above technical debt. This sounds essentially like accrued technical debt. What does it mean to be a level above technical debt? Strong Sauce fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 02:03
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Che Delilas posted:If they balk and don't give you any raise, THEN you can move onto direct threats. Do that by getting interviews and offers from other companies, and then bringing those offers back to your current company and saying, "I have an offer for X, can you give me a reason to keep working here?" (Again, be more professional than that, but you get my meaning) I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I mean, you already had a talk about getting a raise, and they said no. What is the point of going through all the effort of looking for a job, then finding one that pays you more or is a better environment to work in, and then going back to your employer and saying, "Look these guys are paying me $X, match that or else" Just quit and go to the new job? Maybe you like the current company a lot, but for me that is hard to understand. I have never been at a company that I enjoyed working at, who wouldn't give me a raise for legitimate reasons. A company should be smart enough to understand that losing me over maybe another $1000-$2000/year is silly. That is real chump change to most companies.
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Dec 23, 2013 02:24
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Strong Sauce posted:I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I mean, you already had a talk about getting a raise, and they said no. What is the point of going through all the effort of looking for a job, then finding one that pays you more or is a better environment to work in, and then going back to your employer and saying, "Look these guys are paying me $X, match that or else" Just quit and go to the new job? Believe it or not, you can have a great working environment, great co-workers, great bosses, and still be underpaid. You can ask for a raise and get turned down because one guy high up the chain, that you never deal with, who doesn't otherwise have any effect on your day-to-day life or job, is a miser or can't be made to understand or care that someone is being undervalued. "Dude wants more money" isn't enough to sway these people, but "Dude wants more money and WILL LEAVE if he doesn't get it" can be, or failing that sway people who can override them. I mean, if it's not just money for Cast_no_Shadow, then I'd say don't even bother; just start looking for a better job. But if it's just the money/title that's the problem, you don't have to give up after an initial attempt. There's no limit to the number of times you can ask for a raise, or the amount of pressure you bring to the table each time.
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Dec 23, 2013 02:51
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Che Delilas posted:There's no limit to the number of times you can ask for a raise, or the amount of pressure you bring to the table each time. I always figured after the first time promising you'd quit without a raise any business with half an ounce of sense would start looking for a replacement. I'm quite risk-averse though and wouldn't try to leverage an offer against a current employer anyway.
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Dec 23, 2013 03:54
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Not sure if this is the place to ask this or not but it seemed best fit. I have some similar experience and honestly if you're proficient in designing Access and VBA apps it's not a big jump to make something with WinForms.
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Dec 23, 2013 04:35
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Strong Sauce posted:This sounds essentially like accrued technical debt. What does it mean to be a level above technical debt? It is basically, but technical debt to me is where you have something that is more or less fundamentally sound, theres just a bunch of extra work to be done to bring it back to a position where it is robust and maintainable over the long term. I've been in a few situations where someone asks me "Hey can you just write a 10 liner to do x", which I do, and it works, then they go away for a while then come back and say 'oh you know that thing you wrote, can you make it do y' which is another relatively small addition. This will basically continue on for eternity, because no one ever asks for less features. Its easy for things to spiral out of control and you end up with something that was originally a 10-20 liner being a part of a core system. It was never designed for it and will forever be a nightmare to extend, getting more and more hacky as time goes by ("held together by shell scripts and bubblegum" was a favourite phrase of a colleague). So in effect I consider it beyond technical debt because for the most part it just isn't salvageable. What you really need to do is stop, work out a proper set of requirements and future goals, allocate a reasonable set of resources towards the task and go from there. Unless you are working for a set of people who are relatively enlightened wrt software development it can be a hard sell. Which is reasonable cause really there is never a good time to stop active development on something and take 3-6 months re-doing it. Now clearly I don't know what the deal is with the case at hand but I've seen plenty of Excel sheets that have turned into monsters, just lots of little changes and additions over the course of a number of years.
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Dec 23, 2013 04:59
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I'd call both technical debt, but one's like a 30 year mortgage at 3.25% and the other is like a payday loan at 400%.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:06
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JawnV6 posted:I always figured after the first time promising you'd quit without a raise any business with half an ounce of sense would start looking for a replacement. I'm quite risk-averse though and wouldn't try to leverage an offer against a current employer anyway. That's why you don't promise to quite without a raise. You ask for a raise, and if you have an offer letter from another company you can use that as leverage ("I don't want to quit, but this is a significant increase in my pay/quality of life/etc. Can you make me an offer so I can justify staying?" That kind of thing.) But if it gets to that point, where you're using an offer letter as leverage, you have to be ready to walk that minute if they don't make a reasonable counter-offer. And you should, if it's that much better! Honestly in most cases there's probably something more than just money that's making you want to change companies, so it's rare that I would actually bother soliciting my current company for a counter offer. unixbeard posted:Now clearly I don't know what the deal is with the case at hand but I've seen plenty of Excel sheets that have turned into monsters, just lots of little changes and additions over the course of a number of years. I'll add to this the case where a little spreadsheet/access app was created, and then the company grew, and all of a sudden you have a dozen people trying to use a shared file to manage restaurant reservations or something, and then you run into concurrency issues and OH GOD IT USED TO WORK SO WELL WHEN THERE WERE JUST 2 OF US!
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Dec 23, 2013 07:01
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Che Delilas posted:Believe it or not, you can have a great working environment, great co-workers, great bosses, and still be underpaid. You can ask for a raise and get turned down because one guy high up the chain, that you never deal with, who doesn't otherwise have any effect on your day-to-day life or job, is a miser or can't be made to understand or care that someone is being undervalued. "Dude wants more money" isn't enough to sway these people, but "Dude wants more money and WILL LEAVE if he doesn't get it" can be, or failing that sway people who can override them. You should not be waiving your new job offer as a bargaining chip. I mean if you disliked the job, why are you not there to discuss your resignation? And if you liked the job, you run the risk of your boss saying, "OK, good luck at your new job" Neither scenario is great because in both you are burning your bridge with the boss, and in the latter, where you wanted to stay at the company, you can possibly be called on your 'threat'. I mean let's run the scenario. You ask your boss for a raise. After going through upper management, he comes back, says "Sorry but I can't give you a raise" you decide to go out and find another job opportunity that will offer you more money. You find that job and then you take that job offer and tell your current employer that you are going to essentially go work with this new company unless they match that offer. They of course match it (unless of course they can't actually afford to pay you that much), but then now what kind of work environment are you working in? You essentially just blackmailed the company into giving you a raise. Do you think any of your managers will have a good outlook of you for essentially putting them in a tough spot? Who is that next promotion going to? Who will the scapegoat be when it comes time for the blame? Also dumb is accepting a counter-offer if you do decide to quit but then are enticed to stay because they offer more money than the actual job you were quitting to. Edit: Another problem with doing this, is that they have not even acknowledge what you have brought to the company. So essentially in the end you are left unsatisfied with the raise because you did it under a threat rather than being recognized on it by merit. Strong Sauce fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 07:53
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Yeah. Best-case outcome of trying to fish for a counter-offer like that is you get some more money once, great. But you still end up working in a place where the only way you got a raise was to threaten to quit, and not because you convinced them of your worth. So you can't expect they'll just see the light and start giving you regular raises. What about a year or two from now when they short you on a raise again? If you show up at your boss' desk once more with an offer letter from elsewhere, they'll just start putting together your offboarding paperwork. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 08:31
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Yeah, I should probably clarify a little. 1) On the technical side, this is well beyond a few macros to automate parts of my job. They might as well be stand alone applications for want of a better word, they just happen to have grown up through ms office, the software didn't really have a proper development plan. There are a range of pieces, probably 20 or so each with between 20-500 users doing a variety of tasks. Savings from these can be measured in the 6 figures per year without problem. I was worried there were whole new levels of complexity between what I am doing and what someone actually in that kind of role would be expected to do, after finding what little I can out on the internet I'm confident there isn't really too much difference. This whole situation is also probably down to the amount of suprise I had that "holy crap people actually get really good money for this thing I do right now". 2) As for the asking, I should probably have written it out better, I tend to use far more hyperbole than needed on the forums. I'm not planning on walking in there and being an arrogant dick about things. I like working here, and I'm actually willing to work below 'market rate' for a number of reasons, good people, convienient location, good benefits etc I'm fine with that and I really think I've ended up doing this for my current package out of lack of understanding rather than malice or any real intent to take advantage of me. The problem is, this isn't an extra few grand we're talking about, its into 5 figures. I'm worried they would balk at it just because its so large a difference in pay. My plan is to approach my boss about this in the new year. He is pretty up on the IT side of the business despite this not being his primary role. He can also code somewhat himself so he is probably the most likely to actually get where I'm coming from and he has a lot of respect in the company when he talks about departmental IT. The down side is he isn't one to rock the boat much, you might also describe him as pessimistic. His boss is the one who will probably make the call, she is 2-3 positions below the CEO and her department is ~600 - 1000 people the budget etc will almost certainly be purely down to her. If I'm forced to go out and get an offer, my thoughts tend to be, why wouldn't I take it? I'm not one for staying at a company that needs another company to validate their valuations of a person or will only pay the market rate because they are forced to. Cast_No_Shadow fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 09:33
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I'd guess you'll have to sell it as a promotion more than a raise.
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Dec 23, 2013 14:01
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Strong Sauce posted:You should not be waiving your new job offer as a bargaining chip. I mean if you disliked the job, why are you not there to discuss your resignation? And if you liked the job, you run the risk of your boss saying, "OK, good luck at your new job" Neither scenario is great because in both you are burning your bridge with the boss, and in the latter, where you wanted to stay at the company, you can possibly be called on your 'threat'. It's not blackmail, they are given the choice to try and retain you. I mean, you can make it blackmail, developers and people in IT in particular can arrange themselves to become indispensable to the company's assets and then work that leverage once they have their hooks in. But if it's just that skillset X in your area is now in more demand and offers a higher salary than it used to, that's not your doing. And in those cases remember it is also a wake-up call to them that if you can find more money for what you're doing, odds are if you do leave they'll have to hire someone in for around that pay level anyway. Might suck for them but the reality is their problem is bigger than you. That said, this is for substantial bumps in pay (I'd say 10-15% min, depending). If you are getting a thin marginal increase then odds are if you're considering it then deep down you aren't happy with where you're working so you should just go for it anyway. There is some above average delicacy required to avoid mis-handling the situation, sure, but it's only adversarial if you make it so. Or if they do, which can happen but hey it makes your decision super easy. Bhaal fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 22:58
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Bhaal posted:I disagree, it's not burning bridges at all provided you aren't a dick about it. Don't throw it in their face that they're paying you less than what the market is. Don't gloat about being in a win/win situation financially. Don't mention it to other employees if you stay with the raise you wanted, and only frame it publicly as a special opportunity that was too good to pass up if you leave. With an offer that is above and beyond their compensation to you, they will understand your need to justify saying no to that offer. These are people too, they understand job loyalty only goes so far when money enters the equation and they themselves know that they'd be considering things like you are if they were in that spot. Someone in that company has probably considered outsourcing the work you do, before and/or after hiring you, and as a business they are right to make those evaluations. That's the game, but it need not become personal for either side. I mean ignore the fact that you are kinda being a dick to the company that _ACTUALLY_ wants you for the compensation you deserve by backing out of your agreement. Then also ignore the fact that your current company didn't give you a raise because they actually valued your work, but because you are essentially putting them in a "pay me or else" position. Then also ignore the fact that the management will scorn you for essentially pushing through your raise where for one reason or another was declined. Then yes, I agree that getting another offer from a company is a good tactic.
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Dec 24, 2013 00:43
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I had a lot to say about this but I feel like we're going to start creeping out of the scope of this thread if I keep going. I will mention that nobody was talking about leveraging a signed employment agreement with company B to get more money out of company A. It was about using an offer letter in such a way. Declining an offer of employment, for any reason at all, does not make you a dick. At all. Cast_No_Shadow posted:If I'm forced to go out and get an offer, my thoughts tend to be, why wouldn't I take it? I'm not one for staying at a company that needs another company to validate their valuations of a person or will only pay the market rate because they are forced to. The reason is if you otherwise enjoy working in your immediate environment. The people you interact with, especially in a company the size you're describing, likely have almost nothing to do with salaries, and the people who hold the purse strings may not know or be made to understand anything about what you are doing now, and why they should suddenly pay you so much more (this is your boss's job to make them understand, but some bosses have collapsible spines when dealing with their superiors). Changing companies is a gamble; you may get a better salary but end up with a hellish working environment, psychopath boss, odoriferous co-workers, etc. So it may be worth it to go out of your way to stay at this company. But yeah, usually if you're looking for other employment, there are reasons beyond money and you should just move on and not get a counter offer. There are certainly risks to putting that kind of pressure on an employer. Switching jobs is the most often recommended course of action. I'll definitely echo that with the amount of money you're talking about, you want to try and sell this as a promotion/position change, not just a raise, though.
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Dec 24, 2013 05:04
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JawnV6 posted:I always figured after the first time promising you'd quit without a raise any business with half an ounce of sense would start looking for a replacement. I'm quite risk-averse though and wouldn't try to leverage an offer against a current employer anyway. I'd think so to, but the two places where I've personally seen it happen, one has been there for the past 9 years and is now a lead engineer, and the other has been there for the past year and survived multiple layoffs.
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Dec 24, 2013 20:01
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HondaCivet posted:Put up a profile/resume on places like Dice, CyberCoders, etc. and you should get lots of recruiters coming after you. Speaking of Dice, I got a voicemail from the most awkward-sounding recruiter ever last week. "Hey, um, is this, uh, Funambulist? I'm Recruiter Guy at Recruiting Place, and I um, saw your um, resume on Dice and thought it looked great, so I submitted you to um, Place You Got Rejected At Last Year. Um, if you want to talk, about any other opportunities, just, um, call me back." My resume on Dice is more than a year old, and I'd been out of work for about five months when I put it up. I'm pretty sure I set it to private when I started my current job, too. Dice
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Dec 24, 2013 20:24
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I got some downtime tonight, so I figured I'd update my LinkedIn profile. (No, I have not ditched my web app. I'm just recovering from Christmas dinner.) Can someone help me with my top blurb thingy? I'm really poo poo at putting together stuff like this.quote:I am a graduate student pursuing a Masters in Bioinformatics at Brandeis University. ...I know it's a skeleton but bear with me. I'm having trouble thinking of what to include. Thing is, I haven't done nearly as much in bioinformatics/software dev as I have in biotech/BME. My original intro/profile had way more information in it, which looks more attractive in my opinion. It mentions my work history and academic projects, but that's all biotech related as opposed to software dev related. Should I just work that information in, or should I focus my profile on dev stuff? For reference, here's the original. Most of it is irrelevant (I think), but I'm wondering if there's anything in it that I should include in the new one. quote:I am a recent graduate from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering. My experience ranges from biomaterials (tissue interactions with hip implants), to medical devices (a painless waterproof electrode for underwater exercise), to biomechanics (a process for modeling osteoporosis in chicken bone), to medical imaging (cell segmentation, fluorescence intensity analysis and statistics, etc.). Also I know you guys are gonna go "FOCUS drat YOU" but there's a reason why I'm worrying about this. basically i really really need a job/money/independence
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Dec 26, 2013 04:01
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Original was way too long. Make the new one shorter and take out the wishy washy points. Show me you can program
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Dec 26, 2013 07:07
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Hey, sorry if this has been answered already, but how hard should one push for changes in an employment contract? Specifically, I've received a contract with the following provisions:
I was hoping to get points one and two taken out entirely - It's not like I'm planning on moving to a competitor, but the freedom to do so would be nice. On point three, I understand where they're coming from, but if in the course of my work I built some kind of library that was completely unrelated to the company's core business, I'd want to be able to open-source it. Do those sound like reasonable requests?
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Dec 27, 2013 00:56
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It's perfectly reasonable that the company owns what you make while you're on the clock. If by "in the course of your work" you mean you still did it on the clock as an employee, it's a work for hire and the company gets copyright over it anyway. If you want to open source something, convince the company why they should open source it. I would consider it a victory if the company doesn't make you sign over any rights to what you create off the clock, because many companies' contracts contain an invention assignment clause that just assigns them the rights to everything you make, period.
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Dec 27, 2013 01:35
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Good point, I hadn't thought about it like that.  Scratch that last bullet, then. I'm straight out of college, so I'm still kind of collecting my bearings.
205b fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Dec 27, 2013 |
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Dec 27, 2013 02:02
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Point one is a non-compete. Pretty much unenforceable and in many states they aren't even legally binding, even if they're in most employment contracts. Point two is basically no-poaching and its another standard clause; I wouldn't worry about it (as long as you aren't planning on striking off in your own and taking clients with you). Even then it's pretty hard to enforce a clause like that... Point three is just making the WFH status explicit; again I wouldn't worry about it except to make sure that you disclose anything you do outside your work and have them sign off on it as your own work--they should have a process for that.
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Dec 27, 2013 02:35
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Just to make it clear: you need to get rid of point 1 if it's enforceable. If it's not, I'd still get rid of it. It makes you unemployable for a year because Lord knows what is considered a competitor.
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Dec 27, 2013 09:50
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If they are reluctant to kill #1, insist on a year's pay as a bonus when you leave the company for any reason.
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Dec 27, 2013 15:31
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There was a high profile case a few years ago where an executive emailed his future employer from his corporate email address, openly acknowledging he was moving into a competing role. Kai-Fu Lee if you want more info. The most likely case is that you're not that important or flagrant. And if it's California, the state supreme court struck those down as unenforceable back in 2008.
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Dec 27, 2013 16:05
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Ranma posted:Original was way too long. Make the new one shorter and take out the wishy washy points. Show me you can program How's this? quote:I am a graduate student pursuing a Masters in Bioinformatics at Brandeis University, with a Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering. My biological and technical background has given me experience ranging from biomaterials, to bioinformatics, to software and web development.
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Dec 28, 2013 01:16
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Litigation is expensive enough that a company can't routinely sue everyone who leaves for another job in the same field. The situations where an employer might consider it worthwhile typically involve former employees attacking the company's interests on multiple fronts.
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Dec 31, 2013 22:36
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Man, job postings on the entry level side seem absolutely barren right now. I hope people start hiring again after the new year.
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Jan 1, 2014 01:56
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Zero The Hero posted:Man, job postings on the entry level side seem absolutely barren right now. I hope people start hiring again after the new year. Give it a couple months when the new crop of college seniors starts to ripen. Don't stop looking in the meantime, but you'll see it pick up soon.
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Jan 1, 2014 05:25
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It probably depends on your area but I'm once again looking (my job is awful) and I've found at least two times more Junior jobs than I did in summer 2013. I'm actually not stressing at all just because my target job list is so high. Your area will probably pick up in the Spring too. This is just a really bad time for hiring.
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Jan 1, 2014 08:31
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I actually had the phone interview for my current job about a week before Christmas '12, and then Christmas/New Years pushed the face-to-face to the second week of January 2013 so everyone could catch up on critical work. The one-two holiday punch at the end of the year makes things a little funky. Don't give up hope.
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Jan 1, 2014 08:45
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I have very little experience with Linux but I'm finding a lot of jobs I'm interested in list "Must be proficient in developing in a Linux environment." Is this always a deal-breaker, or will it depend on the company? What can I do to get "proficient"?
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Jan 1, 2014 22:12
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What that means depends on whether you're doing web development, versus systems programming, etc.
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Jan 1, 2014 22:24
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Mostly web, some systems and mobile listings. The jobs in question have the typical laundry list of tech requirements. For example:quote:Requirements/Qualifications I've worked with more than half of these between school and my current position. I generally get discouraged by these since it'll be my first(ish) programming job but this company looked pretty interesting. The only experience I have with Linux is deploying to AWS. Lately I've been doing mostly Android (on Windows) and other Windows web stuff but it's loving boring and I'm looking for a change.
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Jan 1, 2014 22:34
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