|
After 9 months of glorious unemployment, I’m job hunting again. We are trying to move to San Francisco because we love the city and have lots of friends there. But it’s hard to live there without a job! There was one reeeeally interesting opening to work for a video game console manufacturer. They pay great, I’d learn lots of new things, and I’d get annual trips to Japan. The dream. Over the last 2 months I did 9 (!) interviews with them. They turned me down in the end because they had another candidate who just happened to have way more experience. I’m not mad that I didn’t get the job, but I definitely fell into the trap of assuming I already had it in the bag. Planning this move to SF has been extremely stressful and so I found it easier to envision our family’s life there while also assuming I had this job. Now that I don’t, I’m forced to reckon with the idea of continuing to plan this move while I still don’t have a job. It’s scary. There is a silver lining though - I had been complaining to my wife this whole time that I wasn’t excited about having to work for another Big Company. I’ve done the faang thing and wanted to try something different. So this gives me more time to try and find something more fulfilling, but it’s so overwhelming!! I applied to a few small game dev teams, and I also applied to some jobs with the City of SF. I’m also interested in non-profits, but I have no idea where to start there. My ideal would be to work somewhere that I would care about the team’s success even if I didn’t work there. But time is ticking - we want to move by this summer for our kid’s school schedule, and we need jobs before then in order to get an apartment. I’m not sure how long to look for the ideal job before taking a safer option like working for a previous company again. Edit: I should be clear - my wife has great job options there, so even if I don’t have something nailed down she could support us; but she could also be more choosy if I’m bringing in an income too giogadi fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Feb 29, 2024 |
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 13:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 23:21 |
|
|
giogadi posted:After 9 months of glorious unemployment, I’m job hunting again. We are trying to move to San Francisco because we love the city and have lots of friends there. But it’s hard to live there without a job! The game dev market will be tough - SF is a desirable area and the industry is currently hemorrhaging talent at unprecedented rates this year already. Presumably the manufacturer you’re taking about was Sony, which laid off 900 people from their PlayStation division alone two days ago.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 15:33
|
|
|
And yet they still made the new FF7 game a PS5 exclusive 
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 16:39
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:And yet they still made the new FF7 game a PS5 exclusive Eh, they’ve gotten a taste of PC money from god of war, ffxv, and Helldivers2 now so I’d expect it to just be a “timed exclusive”
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 17:06
|
|
|
Too late, I’m just gonna watch Vinny play it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 17:10
|
|
|
video game sales have reverted drastically to pre-pandemic mean, but they hired for the pandemic. same for most of tech, tbh
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 17:11
|
|
|
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. In the USA there are two completely unrelated kinds of software consultants. There's the traditional kind - highly skilled workers brought on at additional expense for a short time because the regular team can't hack it. On rare occasions the only problem will be a budget fight over hiring enough workers to complete the scoped work, in which case consultants can serve as a pressure relief valve by being paid out of a different kind of budget (incidentally, this is how NASA works). This kind of consultant should be making above average salary because the people billing for your time are definitely charging more than usual. Then there's the kind you ran into. - These jokers are churn and burn personified. They hire people without benefits (because they're "self employed!") and send them into death marches, spaghetti quagmires, and other kinds of awful, unpleasant, unhealthy work. I know from unfortunate personal experience that the host company will eagerly pressure you to work overtime if you are doing this kind of "consultancy," but will immediately back down as soon as you ask how they want you to log the time. Or, in particularly loathsome cases, will ask you to not log overtime, but will immediately switch to complaining you logged overtime if you do log it anyways, and then insist you don't ever work a minute over 40 hours ever again.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 20:08
|
|
|
Yeah, I've never worked for specifically Deloitte but I have also done a poo poo-style consulting gig with a different company exactly once and doing so was the biggest joke I've ever played on myself. That said, Deloitte are gigantic so some of the good/bad of it will depend on the specific gig.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 22:13
|
|
|
I'm a TL-lite of about 6 people on my sub team and we're looking to hire an engineering manager for my sub team and the other analogous sub team. My current recruiting team said standard practice for this type of interview is 20 minutes project deep dive and 40 system design. Suggestions?
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2024 21:33
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm a TL-lite of about 6 people on my sub team and we're looking to hire an engineering manager for my sub team and the other analogous sub team. My current recruiting team said standard practice for this type of interview is 20 minutes project deep dive and 40 system design. You're going to be interviewing for someone to be your future supervisor?
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2024 22:57
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm a TL-lite of about 6 people on my sub team and we're looking to hire an engineering manager for my sub team and the other analogous sub team. My current recruiting team said standard practice for this type of interview is 20 minutes project deep dive and 40 system design. My company does loops so multiple interviews in a day, and we generally dedicate one slot to SDI.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2024 03:57
|
|
|
LLSix posted:You're going to be interviewing for someone to be your future supervisor? Eventually yeah. I'll report to my boss for probably 2 Qs while this new hire slowly takes more junior folks then I'll switch to them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2024 05:40
|
|
|
Is there a list of things you'd say a frontend lead has know? I more or less fell into the role about 6 months ago and have been mostly making it up as I go along. I'm originally a Java dev that added Angular in the last few years to be able to call myself fullstack. Now I'm asking myself if it's normal that the frontend seems to be on fire all the time, also why are my devs getting excited about semantic HTML and CSS? It was mostly fine but now we're staring down a potential migration away from Angular Material to an internal design system and it's honestly quite scary. Unfortunately the previous devs built the frontend in a couple of months to hit a deadline. They succeeded, but also built up a lot of tech debt, among them misusing Material, that is now causing major slowdowns. So we need to change this to keep up our development speed but I have no experience in migration whole UIs. I'm worried this is going take away too much from the features we need to deliver to actually keep the project alive. But at the same time approaching this in small steps also seems difficult because you don't want to annoy your enterprise customers by moving one UI element every two weeks.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2024 23:38
|
|
|
https://www.wired.com/story/why-tech-job-interviews-became-such-a-nightmare/wired posted:Broadly, the US job market is still strong, with the unemployment rate at a low 3.7 percent. Tech sector employment is tighter still, with industry group CompTIA calculating it as 2.3 percent based on US government data. But Author sort of destroys in the first two sentences whatever premise they were planning on building and defending for the rest of the jumbled word salad they just shoved it the door 2.3% unemployment seems to track with what I've been hearing (if you're a Sr)
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 02:16
|
|
|
scissorman posted:Is there a list of things you'd say a frontend lead has know? It’s easy to give a list of technologies and ideas a front end dev should know, but I don’t think any of them would solve what appears to be your company’s organizational issues.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 17:02
|
|
|
You might be able to migrate incrementally if you can embed the new framework within the old? Like pick out a small view at the bottom of the view hierarchy and swap it over, bridging whatever bindings and events from old to new. Then you can replace all the lowest hanging fruit, then slowly work your way up the view hierarchy. It's ok if it takes weeks or months because the whole time you're maintaining a working whole, and you don't need to stop everything while you rewrite.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 17:17
|
|
|
lifg posted:It’s easy to give a list of technologies and ideas a front end dev should know, but I don’t think any of them would solve what appears to be your company’s organizational issues. I'm probably mixing up two points, the important here was, OK, what am I missing to be able to judge what I'm being told? So, when someone tells me that semantic html and separating HTML, CSS and JS is the key, I'm not sure. Is there some foundational web knowledge I should be reading up on? Especially after I watched the same person just today make a giant mess in a straightforward pullrequest. And, well, the organization is sadly not extraordinary, no paying customer is a fan of "come back in a couple of months when we're done rebuilding the application".
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 18:46
|
|
|
pokeyman posted:You might be able to migrate incrementally if you can embed the new framework within the old? Like pick out a small view at the bottom of the view hierarchy and swap it over, bridging whatever bindings and events from old to new. Then you can replace all the lowest hanging fruit, then slowly work your way up the view hierarchy. It's ok if it takes weeks or months because the whole time you're maintaining a working whole, and you don't need to stop everything while you rewrite. We're currently looking at this, one problem is the changed look and feel. Is it better to rip off the bandaid in on go and replace everything? Or will users accept the ongoing disruption? In an enterprise setting we have very few customers, so we can't really afford annoying them too much. We are also considering cleaning up the rest of the HTML layout mess first and then leave the components for later which is as close to working in steps we're probably going to get. I have migrated backends hidden behind APIs before but this feels different because our users can pretty much see every little change as it gets released.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 18:54
|
|
|
scissorman posted:Is there a list of things you'd say a frontend lead has know? pokeyman posted:You might be able to migrate incrementally if you can embed the new framework within the old? Like pick out a small view at the bottom of the view hierarchy and swap it over, bridging whatever bindings and events from old to new. Then you can replace all the lowest hanging fruit, then slowly work your way up the view hierarchy. It's ok if it takes weeks or months because the whole time you're maintaining a working whole, and you don't need to stop everything while you rewrite. Pokeyman's advice is good. Any time you have a large problem you want to try and break it down into smaller pieces. Keep doing that to get smaller and smaller pieces until you've got a problem small enough to be solved. Ideally the solution will only take a day so you can quickly test and modify your solution as needed.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 18:55
|
|
|
LLSix posted:Pokeyman's advice is good. lifg, pokeyman and LLSix, thank you very much. I'm probably overestimating how much difference it makes to have every change as visible as this. I'm still remembering the trouble in a past project when all we did was move a button a little bit to the left. From the user phone calls we got you'd think we rewrote the application in pink and blinking comic sans. Also, it probably doesn't help that I have actual Aspergers and am feeling a bit overwhelmed with the still new frontend lead job. Hence me asking if I missed something important, wouldn't be the first time. I've got some vacation scheduled, which should help, I just didn't want to leave my junior devs without support while all my seniors devs were gone.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 19:30
|
|
|
Yeah, there’s some core stuff in your question. HTML and CSS and JS each covers different purposes, though can be some overlap. There’s semantic HTML. How much it precisely matters might be debatable, but it comes up all the time in accessible design and SEO, and is always preferred. There’s semantic CSS. Which is much more debatable, and which Tailwind infamously doesn’t do. You kind of just follow what the framework or design guide says to do. I think this is what you’re asking? It’s all stuff that is good to have high level understanding of if you’re a frontend dev.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 19:43
|
|
|
lifg posted:Yeah, there’s some core stuff in your question. Yes, that's it. I'm noticing that I have much more Angular than general frontend knowledge, so judging how much I need to have more of is difficult. I have been improving, so a clean grid is no problem, same with taking an example an applying to my layout. But please don't ask me to list every CSS selector or when precisely to use <section> without access to MDN. So, if one of my devs starts exclaiming the virtues of semantic and working without a framework, I'm asking myself why we can't keep everything organized in Angular components and compose those.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 20:07
|
|
|
scissorman posted:but now we're staring down a potential migration away from Angular Material to an internal design system pokeyman posted:You might be able to migrate incrementally if you can embed the new framework within the old? Like pick out a small view at the bottom of the view hierarchy and swap it over, bridging whatever bindings and events from old to new. Pokeyman's solution is likely sound. I would maybe redesign the "contact us" or "about" page as an  "pathfinder project" so that you're setting expectations that it might fail, or not work as expected. Grind through getting that pathfinder project done, write up a report (1-6 paragraphs) with your findings and recommendations, along with a best case scenario and also a realistic timeline.Email out the report, call a meeting for the following week, and in the interim try and build consensus privately with your manager and others ahead of the meeting. The meeting is just a formality to get verbal group consensus at that point Doing an A->B total switch over is always a complete disaster, start small, then pick an even smaller subset to complete and set expectations early is all I'm trying to say. Good luck. Option B is: try and do a total rewrite, then leave the company after 18 months when you never ship the product, blaming your peers and burning bridges on your way out the door
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 21:02
|
|
|
Whatever way you slice it, once you've got the simplest thing you can do actually working, you're over the hump of initial setup and probably have a better sense of how much work is involved. I assumed "enterprise customers" meant not too caring about aesthetics, but if they're sensitive to a mix of styles during the transition, maybe you could give them the option? Either "no new features for a month while we adopt the new styles" or "some unsightly blemishes while we move stuff over piecemeal". Replace customer with your own management in the above if that's where the aesthetic concerns are coming from. Honestly even if given the whole month (or whatever you guess it'll take) to focus on it, I'd probably implement it the same way, one thing at a time. Gotta preserve the load-bearing bugs.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 21:28
|
|
|
I'm currently collecting the different approaches to our actual problem, which is that the project has a mess of adhoc UI solutions and no clear system, and not that we're not using the fancy internal system. This should help document the problem, assumptions and pros and cons and then lead to a solution as well as introduce some needed rigor to our architecture. I used something like this before and it helped, both to organize my thoughts, as well as revisit the solution six months later when some assumptions turned out to be not quite so valid as we thought. Talking to my colleagues, not doing a migration to an unknown and maybe not quite mature system seems to be gaining traction, maybe for obvious reasons, maybe because I've been radiating uncertainty. We'd rather clean up what we have first, even if it means our designer has to do more work to extract some sanity from our current chaos. That's at least something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 22:11
|
|
|
scissorman posted:Talking to my colleagues, not doing a migration to an unknown and maybe not quite mature system seems to be gaining traction, maybe for obvious reasons, maybe because I've been radiating uncertainty. Not doing anything and not changing the status quo is a pretty safe way to not get fired, if your peers are defaulting to that behavior that's not necessarily indicative of the best course of action (although I'll agree it's a safe behavior) Maybe I missed it but what direction were you given by leadership when they hired/promoted you? Was it hand wavey "old guy got hit by the bus, long live the new lead" or was it "FE devs have been clamoring for a new framework, can you make it happen?" those are two totally different scenarios. If it's just one guy who wants to go over to his bespoke framework, he might just be the loudest guy in the room
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 22:43
|
|
|
How's the market looking now for fully remote stuff?
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2024 23:21
|
|
|
since this is the oldie thread probably ok-ish but still tight anything less than senior is going to be hard though
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 00:38
|
|
|
I'm still waiting for second half of this year before I'd even consider looking at stuff. If rate cuts do happen I think credit and free money will slowly get stupid again and Late 24/Early 25 might be a fun time to look again depending on your job situation. If you're unemployed or in "I gotta get out of here now" mode, friends I have that looked recently didn't have much trouble finding remote jobs, but the days of everyone and their dog getting WFH jobs making figgieland numbers while living in Nebraska are gone of course.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 00:51
|
|
|
I guess it's 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, so recruiter spam is starting to tick up again I'm averaging about 1.5 messages a day from recruiters right now., including one very desperate 6 mo temp to hire for Twitter just the other day. 90% of it is 3 days a week in the office though Unemployment in the tech sector was 2.3 per that article a couple posts up from this one
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 01:09
|
|
|
I think it just feels like a bad market in comparison to the job-land-where-jobs-growing-on-jobbies market of two years ago, not like an objectively bad market from a compare-for-the-last-50-years point of view
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Mar 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 02:28
|
|
|
my recruiter spam is all "ONLY 1 day a week on site in Fremont!!!" and other similarly attractive offers, full-remote is the only thing that would get me to bother interviewing
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 03:06
|
|
|
My recruiter spam messages have mostly been reasonable to pretty good for my area in the midwest but lower than my current TC since I got hired in the magical times of 2021 when it was reasonably easy to talk companies into paying you their figgieland numbers in not figgieland. Haven't looked much into them beyond looking at title, language, and comp though, so I'm not sure how good any of these jobs are otherwise.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 03:53
|
|
|
No idea what a reasonable TC for a remote job with about 8 years of experience would be. I'm Staff/just starting as tech lead for a small team of 5 but my company inflates titles.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 04:13
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:No idea what a reasonable TC for a remote job with about 8 years of experience would be. I'm Staff/just starting as tech lead for a small team of 5 but my company inflates titles. I think levels.fyi is still the best place for research on appropriate comp. Even more out there locations seem to have data available now. You can filter down to location, YoE, and level.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 04:27
|
|
|
JawnV6 posted:my recruiter spam is all "ONLY 1 day a week on site in Fremont!!!" and other similarly attractive offers, Sadly, same Good Will Hrunting posted:No idea what a reasonable TC for a remote job with about 8 years of experience would be. I'm Staff/just starting as tech lead for a small team of 5 but my company inflates titles. MasterCard is offering like $145,000-235,000 FTR depending on how hard you negotiate and that is on the low side
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 04:31
|
|
|
I recently got promoted to lead but also wouldn’t mind getting a full-time remote gig. Have any of you done lead-type things while remote? I worry that it will be hard to keep the team feeling like a team.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 11:43
|
|
|
Artemis J Brassnuts posted:I recently got promoted to lead but also wouldn’t mind getting a full-time remote gig. Have any of you done lead-type things while remote? I worry that it will be hard to keep the team feeling like a team. I'm in the same situation and, as you might be able to guess, not the best person to offer advice, but what worked for me is lots of 1:1 conversations, a shared teams channel and, once a week, an informal meeting. This seems to keep morale somewhat high, just be warned that it can be exhausting if you're like me. High quality documentation and automatic checks can also answer a lot of questions directly. It also depends on your team members, having generelly good natured and compatible team members helps a lot. Also, as I'm learning, small, focused tasks are really important to prevent team members from going awol for weeks and then delivering something wild.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 14:01
|
|
|
I've been managing a fully remote team for the last 2 years and "how to make the team feel like a team" is something I've thought about a lot. In order of most to least impactful, here's what I've seen work:
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 14:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 23:21 |
|
|
Artemis J Brassnuts posted:I recently got promoted to lead but also wouldn’t mind getting a full-time remote gig. Have any of you done lead-type things while remote? I worry that it will be hard to keep the team feeling like a team. I was a fully remote team lead for several years (As of a few months ago I'm a staff engineer). I much prefer working remotely. I find I'm much more productive when I don't start my day stressed and exhausted from commuting. I'm not the most social of people, but I find it easier to socialize via teams. I'm aware this is not true for everyone. What I try to do is communicate with people however they prefer. Some people like emails, some like teams, some like voice chats or video chats or voice calls. I adjust to whatever feels best for them and when working with someone for the first time I just ask what their preferred communication method is and then use that whenever possible. Formal stuff I need a paper trail for still has to go through email, but in that case it often makes sense to double-up and send the formal email and have an informal conversation in their preferred communication style. In terms of maintaining team cohesion and culture, politeness counts for a lot. It is easy to forget to say please and thank you, but conversely, simple gestures like that can carry a lot of weight. My personal style also leans heavily on code reviews. Every code review is a mentorship opportunity. Most engineers respond better to code review comments that explain why a change is necessary than one that just asks for a change without explaining why. You can (and we do) still have daily standup meetings over teams or whatever communication tool your team uses. A quick 15 minute (usually 5 minute) call at the start of the day goes a long way. Other than that, just be consistent about the balance between speed, quality, and testing that is expected. Communicate clear expectations. Provide public praise when expectations are exceeded (I try to send emails to both the engineer and their direct supervisor whenever someone does something especially well). When someone needs to be guided to a better path, do it privately. (Public "humiliation" will often make someone dig their heels in and ignore well-intentioned advice. Communicating privately is much easier remotely - no needing to ask someone to join you in a conference room or to stay for a few minutes after standup, just message/call them directly. At the current place we do weekly "refinement" meetings where we go over upcoming work as a group. The time is used to come to agreement on acceptance criteria/definition of done. We also hash out a preliminary UI (there are always tweaks and improvements to make once work starts), set story points, and discuss potential challenges and solutions. Basically all of this applies in person too. In terms of remote-specific advice... I guess the thing I have the hardest time with is guiding people when they're sharing their screen because you can't just point at the right part of the screen and giving clear directions is pretty hard. I recommend just being patient, and trying not to get flustered when a concept isn't coming through well. Typing stuff out in the chat channel so they can see the spelling helps sometimes. If something is tricky I'll share my screen, walk them through what I think they should do, and then have them share their screen and repeat it. Oh, another thing that goes a long way is a friendly good morning greeting and good evening goodbye in the team chat. It's a nice little ritual to build positive relationships and I think my supervisors appreciated knowing I was actually logged in and working. LLSix fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Mar 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2024 14:59
|
|