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Adhemar posted:Sorry to hear you had a crappy experience interviewing at Amazon. I work there and we are supposed to treat candidates like customers, which means giving them a positive experience whether they do well or not. Of course, there are plenty of assholes who don’t care. Were you surveyed afterwards? Since you work at Amazon, is it a good idea to apply to multiple openings at the same time?
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Aug 7, 2020 21:08
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Imbroglio posted:I'd consider just putting something vague like "US Presidential Campaign" and omitting details that would identify the specific campaign. If they need to know they can ask. I've done this with activism in the past (I would edit in the actual cause if I could find public social media stuff from people at the company that indicated they'd be into it though). Imbroglio posted:I'd consider just putting something vague like "US Presidential Campaign" and omitting details that would identify the specific campaign. If they need to know they can ask. I've done this with activism in the past (I would edit in the actual cause if I could find public social media stuff from people at the company that indicated they'd be into it though). Hmm, thanks y'all. I'll at least make some mock-ups and show them to friends, then
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Aug 7, 2020 21:21
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Happy Thread posted:The mood in that conversation changed greatly over the years. It began in 2012 as a place to encourage new students but slowly everyone realized from each other's stories how screwed they were all getting. To save me reading 8 years of posts, can you briefly summarize? Is it basically, "there's like 200 new jobs a year outside of academia that exist specifically for PhD, and the pay gap between software engineer with bachelor's and PhD after 5 years is almost exactly the same"?
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Aug 7, 2020 22:22
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The very short version is that, while a lot of people come out of grad school fine and some even enjoy the process, not everyone does, and there are very few limits on how bad things can get.
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Aug 7, 2020 22:57
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Ither posted:Since you work at Amazon, is it a good idea to apply to multiple openings at the same time? Hm, probably not. Are you just interested in more than one position? You can always pick the one you like best and mention to the recruiter that you’re interested in the other positions as well. Ultimately you’re only going to go through the funnel for one position at a time. Also, if you get an offer for one position, you can still try to switch it to a different one. I actually did this myself.
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Aug 9, 2020 07:01
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Hadlock posted:To save me reading 8 years of posts, can you briefly summarize? Is it basically, "there's like 200 new jobs a year outside of academia that exist specifically for PhD, and the pay gap between software engineer with bachelor's and PhD after 5 years is almost exactly the same"? The jobs that depend on an advanced degree turn out to not exist when you graduate. It's a false promise of our society that we repeat to ourselves for motivation through school but then reality hits immediately after. The jobs market is hosed and is never coming back. It's not just COVID---but that sure sent us into a death spiral cycle of mass unemployment destroying everyone's savings, thus lack of consumer demand or spending, and as a result contracting business and no incentive to hire anyone back anytime soon. That's the non-academic side. If you're unlucky enough to be in a field that usually only opens job opportunities on the academic side (or if you're someone who just loves teaching and research) then you're even more hosed. There are an excess of fresh PhD graduates in the economy and nowhere for them to go besides increasingly exploitative positions. All the good seats at schools are already taken. Comfy old pensioners with tenure make all the money in universities, and they delegate out all their job duties to powerless contract workers who are denied the title of professor and essentially paid minimum wage when you count all the unpaid prep hours. For example I brought a major university's computer graphics course up to date, not my advisor who let it slide into obsolescence for decades, but I made $10,000 that year that all got eaten up by loan interest, and he made $500,000 the same year. And to think, people wonder how all these new Marxists keep getting made. Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Aug 9, 2020 |
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Aug 9, 2020 11:18
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Oh my god, those shitbags were right: Academia IS the breeding ground for leftists in America!
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Aug 9, 2020 13:34
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Just took a phone screen from google. They expect you in the office everyday once covid clears up. Hahah fuuuuuuuuuuck that get with the times
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Aug 9, 2020 18:34
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i vomit kittens posted:Almost six months ago now I made a post here about a growing desire to leave professional school and attempt to switch careers to development. I am still very undecided. In the Spring, I got an internship with a health informatics company that I hoped would be a great way to mix my love of programming with healthcare, it has not exactly worked out that way. Most of my work involves reading drug information and rewording it to fit on our site. The times when I do get to program something (usually just to make the interns' jobs more convenient) are when I am happiest and most engaged. I spent the majority of my free time over the summer rebuilding a small attendance tracking app that I created for a student organization I'm in to be a general tool that could be used by any other student organization. I'm getting close to finishing it and will be providing it to other orgs at my school as a large scale test. Making this was infinitely more fun than anything I have experienced while getting my graduate level education. Yet, I still don't know whether I should or even want to leave school. I am halfway done with getting a doctoral degree, but my distaste for it grows almost daily; especially with how the faculty have been handling things since Covid started. To be clear I don't regret grad school or anything. I just don't regret leaving. Don't feel bad about not finishing, if that's what you decide. I found academia to be more cutthroat and unforgiving than industry, which is funny, since most non-academics imagine academic life as coddled and insulated from the "real world." As for the resume, you can remove the "Technologies" bit, none of that matters, really. Also, NoSQL isn't a language, remove it from your resume -- you used MongoDB, which is just one NoSQL database among many (generally NoSQL database just means "non-relational database")
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Aug 9, 2020 19:53
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Grump posted:Just took a phone screen from google. They expect you in the office everyday once covid clears up. They've already pushed back return to office until summer 2021.
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Aug 9, 2020 20:24
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huhu posted:They've already pushed back return to office until summer 2021. yes but then I asked about afterwards and they told me it's 100% in-the-office
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Aug 9, 2020 21:22
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Happy Thread posted:If you're at all still on the fence about this, do yourself a favor and head over to our Grad School thread where that very question is the main focus:
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Aug 9, 2020 21:58
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Hadlock posted:To save me reading 8 years of posts, can you briefly summarize? Is it basically, "there's like 200 new jobs a year outside of academia that exist specifically for PhD, and the pay gap between software engineer with bachelor's and PhD after 5 years is almost exactly the same"? Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Aug 9, 2020 |
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Aug 9, 2020 22:03
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Grump posted:yes but then I asked about afterwards and they told me it's 100% in-the-office The policy will probably be relaxed by then (maybe not though), but a random recruiter isn't going to know that or be able to tell you that. Even with the current policy you can still work from home, just not all the time. Pre-covid I worked from home about once a week and that's pretty much the cap barring extenuating circumstances. Even if nothing with the policy changes, to me going into the office 4 times a week is a reasonable price to pay for an absurd amount of money.
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Aug 9, 2020 22:12
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My company has a strict no work from home thing, only one day a month of WFH. But everyone in engineering is like "yeah gently caress that lol" and so we only go in on Tuesdays, and any time we want to discuss things in person.
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Aug 10, 2020 05:24
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I just interviewed at a place in Los Angeles that's remote-only, to do games engine development. I need some advice in case they hire me. Everyone there is a 1099 contractor so I am immediately worried about getting underpaid. Anyone know what a very rough range is for contractor software devs? The job requires no degree, but I'm coming in with a PhD which I assume I can use in negotiation to argue I bring more value and ideas to the company. Considering the industry and that Los Angeles is very high cost of living, what sort of salary amounts should I watch out for as being too low for such a role?
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Aug 10, 2020 08:24
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Gamedev is famously underpaid compared to other dev jobs. Also, unless your PhD is in graphics/networking/something very relevant to game engines, I wouldn't expect it to count for squat. Possibly even against you because of the lovely culture.
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Aug 10, 2020 08:42
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It's a PhD in computer graphics, yes
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Aug 10, 2020 08:44
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Xarn posted:Gamedev is famously underpaid compared to other dev jobs. Also, unless your PhD is in graphics/networking/something very relevant to game engines, I wouldn't expect it to count for squat. Possibly even against you because of the lovely culture. There was a huge kerfuffle recently with regards to Blizzard Entertainment where people were explaining how "the low tier employees aren't being paid a living wage in a notoriously high COL area". And while that was true and we shouldn't detract from that issue, the excel spreadsheet that had all their salaries in it showed that their engineers were mostly paid above average. In some cases, far above average. It made me look into other game industry salaries and this held true across the ones I looked into. Is the game Dev salary thing just a misunderstanding based on non engineering roles? I know the hours are murder and the industry lives on crunch so there's no way the numbers are worth it, but those salaries are pretty solid.
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Aug 10, 2020 11:04
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Every time some rando recruiter tries to hit me up with a gamedev offer (I do C++ and worked in various perf sensitive fields), it is at least 20% below what rando recruiters offer me for non-gamedev  (It is also about 40% below what I am making right now  )
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Aug 10, 2020 13:39
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I admire the middleware tooling companies. They’re the ones selling the pickaxes in the gold rush. So: Unity, Rare, RAD. All large publishers and console and video card manufacturers have internal R&D divisions. Anything so that you aren’t on the making games side of making games. A tooling developer just has to make things work, just not “Is this fun?” Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Aug 10, 2020 |
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Aug 10, 2020 15:14
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Happy Thread posted:I just interviewed at a place in Los Angeles that's remote-only, to do games engine development. I need some advice in case they hire me. I'd be super concerned about "Everyone is on a 1099". If you need it, you need it but keep in mind you are paying more in taxes and are giving up protections, you need your own insurance, no PTO, etc. In terms of pay range, it depends. Are they guaranteeing hours? Generally take what you'd make yearly in a "typical" environment and make that your hourly. So if you think you should make $100k, they should pay you $100 an hour. That is a really, really rough rule of thumb though. If this is going to be absolutely completely remote with guaranteed hours, they probably are just trying to dodge taxes and real company ethics and will try to get you for a considerably lower hourly rate. If you need to take it, you need to take it but my guess is that is their plan. Vincent Valentine posted:
While a lot of the "Blizzard pays poorly" is coming from testers and community folks and not engineering, my experience is generally the pay is lower for the expectations and requirements. Like, maybe a intermediate engineer seems pretty close but that person would be a senior or higher anywhere else and they are probably working more hours than someone in a similar sized fintech or w/e place. I don't think its slave wages or anything though, I'd say you're giving up 10-20% in return for a sexy sounding job. No unreasonable that people would like that.
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Aug 10, 2020 17:46
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Vincent Valentine posted:There was a huge kerfuffle recently with regards to Blizzard Entertainment where people were explaining how "the low tier employees aren't being paid a living wage in a notoriously high COL area". And while that was true and we shouldn't detract from that issue, the excel spreadsheet that had all their salaries in it showed that their engineers were mostly paid above average. In some cases, far above average. That was also raw salary and not bonus and RSUs. When I was at activision Blizzard my bonus target was 40% and they'd throw RSUs at me every year. The right role in game dev pays as much as any non FAANG place I've seen. (Right role meaning engineering management or backend engineering.) And I had to crunch 2 months ago for spending half a day Saturday, that was the first time I've crunched across three companies in the last 8? years. The industry has by and large really matured, it's very much in my opinion the exception to 'live on crunch' and you're more likely to crunch in a startup than an established game dev house.
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Aug 10, 2020 19:01
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That’s good to hear. I’m curious, what caused that change? Competition from sane(r) jobs? Public pressure? A successful summoning of the great god Pan to visit unholy in terror on the owners? Better management?
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Aug 10, 2020 20:09
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Hughlander posted:That was also raw salary and not bonus and RSUs. When I was at activision Blizzard my bonus target was 40% and they'd throw RSUs at me every year. The right role in game dev pays as much as any non FAANG place I've seen. (Right role meaning engineering management or backend engineering.) And I had to crunch 2 months ago for spending half a day Saturday, that was the first time I've crunched across three companies in the last 8? years. The industry has by and large really matured, it's very much in my opinion the exception to 'live on crunch' and you're more likely to crunch in a startup than an established game dev house. How is working for Blizzard these days? They reached out to me recently about a infrastructure role (not working on a game engine/content) curious if it's the same death march grind as  and EA etc, even if you're not directly touching the consumer facing productAs far as I can tell EA is the absolute worst, so Blizzard has to be a step up from them. I'm mid-career so collecting another brand name would be good, but not at the prospect of getting ground down into a fine paste in the process
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Aug 10, 2020 21:40
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Hadlock posted:How is working for Blizzard these days? They reached out to me recently about a infrastructure role (not working on a game engine/content) curious if it's the same death march grind as I left in '18. At the time though Infrastructure was basically same as any other large IT org. I remember a presentation about their datacenter procurement process at the time and it'd be the same as any other Fortune 500 company you'd imagine. Now *EA* when I started in '00 they were death march even down to their IT department. Their Online Operations group is where I still use an example of how not to be a manager... Director calls a Friday afternoon All-Hands meeting to announce, "Saturday is no longer an optional work day." and 9AM and 6PM stand-up daily. Because you were expected to get enough things done from 6pm to 9AM the next morning to require the 2nd standup.
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Aug 10, 2020 21:49
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American anecdotes are the best (doing "Saturday is no longer optional work day" would either be straight up illegal over here, or at least give the employees some amazing overtime, depending on the specific contract)
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Aug 10, 2020 22:10
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Xarn posted:American anecdotes are the best Sorry, I can't hear you over all of this freedom to die of an easily preventable disease
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Aug 10, 2020 22:18
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Xarn posted:American anecdotes are the best I wouldn't say that's even an American Anecdote considering that 20 years later I use that with my directs as an example of shockingly bad management styles.
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Aug 11, 2020 00:44
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Hughlander posted:I wouldn't say that's even an American Anecdote considering that 20 years later I use that with my directs as an example of shockingly bad management styles. It's American because your example is a "bad manager", instead of a slam dunk lawsuit by every single employee the very next day.
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Aug 11, 2020 04:48
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Lockback posted:It's American because your example is a "bad manager", instead of a slam dunk lawsuit by every single employee the very next day. We all have Stockholm syndrome
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Aug 11, 2020 04:54
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downout posted:We all have Stockholm syndrome "If I hear even a whisper about forming a union I'll fire you so fast your head will spin."
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Aug 11, 2020 09:42
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downout posted:We all have Stockholm syndrome Without even getting to live in Stockholm 
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Aug 11, 2020 15:35
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company im working for wants me to come over from hourly to salary and i get to choose my title -- whats a good one?
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Aug 11, 2020 20:31
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barkbell posted:company im working for wants me to come over from hourly to salary and i get to choose my title -- whats a good one? Software engineer or senior software engineer depending on experience. Your title sets the expectation that people have when you're interviewing for your next job, and those are both pretty standard. If you take senior engineer too early it can hurt you a little bit, but after some point you're expected to hit that level at most companies.
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Aug 11, 2020 20:52
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barkbell posted:company im working for wants me to come over from hourly to salary and i get to choose my title -- whats a good one? CEO They shouldn't have left this loophole open
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Aug 11, 2020 23:15
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Senior Software Engineer lvl 2 Most places pick seniority track sequencesveither going 123 or 321 so your next job will know you're a mid level senior and you probably didn't just get it otherwise you'd be a 1 or a 3 Senior here will let you transfer into another company at their Sr payband
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Aug 12, 2020 00:46
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I asked for software engineer since I’m sub one year professional experience.
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Aug 12, 2020 01:41
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The OP and resources post in this thread haven't been updated in 4-5 years. I suspect most of what's there is still current, but it might be worth looking through to see if anything needs to be updated.
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Aug 13, 2020 19:10
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Finishing my IBM internship up tomorrow. It was an incredible experience, I learned more in 2.5 months than I did in 3 semesters of coding classes. And now I understand how all this poo poo I've been learning applies in a professional environment. Got the full-time offer from them but it is in Baton Rouge. I was trying to move to Florida for my next job so that is not ideal, but it has relieved the burden of getting the first cs job!
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Aug 13, 2020 19:27
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