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Could someone critique my terrible resume? I was hired at my current job as a mid-level developer but have been performing at the level of a senior developer for a while. My colleagues and boss agree, but... the company isn't willing to pay me like a senior developer. I'm near DC and have heard senior developers can easily start at 120k around here but I'm definitely not within even 20k of that. The environment is also a little toxic and a dead-end. The job is just building forms for an enterprise .NET web app, and I don't see a future for myself developing LOB CRUD apps - which is all MS stack development looks like to me nowadays. .NET looks like one big dead-end to me in general. I love C# but want to do cool poo poo, so I've been learning scala and other non-MS tech in hopes of jumping ship to something more exciting (and lucrative?). Does this sound reasonable/crazy for someone with my experience? I'm willing to relocate anywhere - assuming I can learn enough to show people I know my poo poo with scala or whatever do you think I can do exciting things working with great people and make a lot of money doing it?
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Aug 1, 2014 00:46
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Rudest Buddhist posted:I'm doing my first Hired.com auction on Monday I hope it's not too early to ask, but I'm really curious, how did this go?
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Aug 4, 2014 23:15
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? Do you feel this way because of the people you work with, or is it driven by non-personal reasons (like coding day in day out just sucks)?
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Aug 16, 2014 02:02
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Is it common to reach senior-level in salary and expertise in one stack and then switch to a completely different stack while maintaining the previous salary? Anyone else here do that? What was your experience? I'm a 28 year old .NET developer in suburban MD working on a plain but huge forms-over-data app at a state government contractor. It sucks; forms, forms, and more forms, a mountain of bugs, mediocre and lovely developers who break two things when fixing one, unit tests that don't pass in code deployed to production, critical issues requiring emergency releases all the time... the problems are never-ending, and I'm not learning anything anymore - just fixing stupid bullshit and writing more forms. I can play ping pong and come in whenever though, and I've made really good friends with some of the other developers. I used to make 85k and was pissed about it but after interviewing elsewhere I played it off my current company and now make 120k plus 10k retention bonus, with a probable 5k+ year end bonus, so I'll make at least 130k and maybe ~135k+ if I stick around until January 2016. For my area this COL calculator says that's $206k in SF. Goddamn. I feel like I'm stuck, and that there's no way I can hope to make as much elsewhere. I love C# but I see the rest of the world passing me by. I feel like I should've spent my 20s working at a startup, or working with JVM languages on hard problems instead of in .NET on stupid bullshit. I want to be using Scala, doing machine learning with Python, trying crazy WebGL stuff, or actually using math/statistics in an interesting domain... any of these instead of working on a system tracking Medicaid data. Sure, I can learn these things at night, and I am, but there's no way I can compete with people who already spend 40 hours a week working with these things. I have no idea if transitions like this are common in this industry. Is it reasonable for a .NET developer making 135k to learn Scala at night and then get a job making a similar salary effectively completely switching technology stacks?
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Mar 4, 2015 01:25
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Does anyone here have any recent experience with how having a high clearance like Top Secret with polygraph affects software salaries relative to uncleared/private sector software work? My unsubstantiated opinion is that with the drawdown and lack of growth in defense there's currently a glut of people with TS clearances (at least around me in Maryland), so companies are less willing to clear new people and aren't under as much pressure to pay as well. I don't know if this has any basis in reality. At my last job in defense where I only had a Secret clearance the salaries weren't so hot (which may have just been our lovely contract), but they're a lot higher at my current job (not just for me but for other developers) which is for a software consultancy living off of state and federal healthcare IT contracts. I'm working on trying to make a career move out of .NET and into some combination of scala/python/machine learning/data science, which there's a lot of in defense near me. I just don't know if the salaries are anywhere near what I can get doing the same stuff in the private sector elsewhere. I make $130k as a .NET developer with 6 years of experience in the Baltimore suburbs and worry that's completely out of the ballpark for defense nowadays (at least for someone with only 6 years of experience), or even for other uncleared/private work in Baltimore which is a pretty poor place. I wish discussing salaries was easier. So many people get hosed and I feel they'd be better off if it was an open topic.
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Jun 25, 2015 00:53
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Yes, at least for defense clearances if you quit and then don't work at a job that requires a clearance it expires after 2 years and you have to go through the whole process again to get cleared again. If you get a job within 2 years of leaving it's easier to reactivate the clearance. $130k is nice (CNN's cost of living calculator says that's $200k in SF) but working on boring LOB apps sucks.
Cryolite fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 01:30
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How do salaries differ between mobile developers and other types of developers, for example plain .NET/Java web developers building CRUD apps? Typically lower, or if you know your poo poo can you command a higher salary than for those other types of work?
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Jun 27, 2015 15:51
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What are salaries like nowadays at Google (Mountain View or elsewhere)? Like for someone with 5-7 years of experience, knows Java pretty well, and can get through their interview without too many bumps but otherwise isn't spectacular in any specific way? 150-180k?
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Jul 4, 2015 01:48
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A defense contractor near me contacted me directly saying they found my github and some other online profiles and wanted to talk about hiring me for a C# position. $170,000, 6 weeks vacation, 100% company-paid health insurance, 10% 401k match. Holy poo poo. Unfortunately they require a Top Secret clearance which I don't have, and they're unable to sponsor candidates. I didn't think defense compensation was that good.
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Jul 30, 2015 02:01
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If you're a software developer with a few years of experience and claim to be a lead developer at your current position, should you send a thank you e-mail after an interview? I had an interview this past Friday at a company I think I'd actually like to work for. It's a strange feeling. I'm not sure if I should send a thank you note or not. It seems like such an outmoded concept, but I feel like I've forgotten how to actually try hard to get a job someplace so I have no idea if this is a good or idea or not. Cryolite fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Sep 14, 2015 |
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Sep 14, 2015 03:41
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Are there any good resources out there for figuring out how much insurance, taxes, and all that actually cost as a contractor to make it worthwhile vs. being an employee? I found out one of the contractors at my job (whose code is poo poo and we're firing) is making $150/hour. That seems like a lot to me. For 2000 hours a year that's $300k. The person who revealed this to me told me if I wanted to he could arrange for me to be a contractor for that much too. Is $150/hour a lot? I currently make $135k a year as a full-time employee with benefits, vacation, 401k, and typical crap like that. Would it really not be that much of a bump after the additional taxes and insurance, or is it compelling? I really have no idea how much of a hassle it would be, or if I'd need a lawyer or something for the contract, or anything like that.
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Sep 23, 2015 00:23
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I interviewed for my dream position a week and a half ago. Great company, interesting work, and smart people on a great team using tech I want to get in to and learn. I thought I blew the interview since they didn't get back to me immediately and I received no response after sending a short thank you to the team lead 2 business days after the interview. They got back to me today and asked for my salary requirements. I broke my own advice not to reveal numbers and told them what I make, saying my objective is +5k. After conferring, they got back to me. They want me, but can only offer 25k less than what I make now. Their other senior engineers either don't make as much as I do or make just as much as I do and have worked hard to get to where they are now, so it wouldn't be fair to them to hire me even matching my current salary. What the hell? I offered to send them paystubs and documentation of bonuses if they needed proof of my current salary. I also asked if they couldn't match my salary because I performed poorly during the interview and they said no - they only had praise for me on the technicals, so doing better on the technical assessment wouldn't change anything. It really is just because the rest of their team isn't making as much. I guess if they're really transparent internally about compensation then this could be a legitimate reason. Has anybody else ever got this kind of response before? Do you think they're really actually trying not to stir up poo poo by paying the new guy a lot of money while screwing current employees, or do they really just not want me and this satisfies some requirement to say I turned the position down? Based on how smart the team seemed during the interview and the kind of stuff they're doing I thought senior devs there were making 130-150 for sure if not higher. However, glassdoor seems to suggest it's all 90-120. I don't know, but they're getting screwed. It's for a position using Scala too. I would have thought the esoteric stack would command a higher salary.
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Sep 25, 2015 00:13
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sink posted:Really interesting report. Out of curiosity: If it doesn't give away too much information, what stage company is it? Are they doing well or have a lot of public exposure in their market? And is it in the Bay? This particular division operates and feels like a startup but it's part of a big company with thousands of employees, so it's not like anyone on this team is an early stage employee who had to give up salary and got equity in return or anything like that. The company is well-established and makes boatloads of money. I'm afraid of giving away too much information, but it's in the Chesapeake Bay area. It may also just be the cost of living of that particular area rearing its head. I don't know. The DC/MD/VA area seems strange to me. I'm starting to think the same position can be 90k in one place and 150k 30 miles away which I'm not sure is common elsewhere.
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Sep 26, 2015 02:40
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Live in the back of a truck in the company parking lot.
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Oct 27, 2015 13:02
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Where do you live?
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Oct 28, 2015 02:17
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Can I get a critique of my resume? My boring enterprise .NET LOB job looks more and more like a dead-end and although I don't quite have the portfolio for it yet I want to see if I can move to Scala or a more JVM-focused position doing cool poo poo. Here it is. I reviewed this with a co-worker and he said I word things like I'm not confident, making me seem like a student looking for an entry level position. Like "Familiar Languages and Technologies" or "Developed several modules...". He said these words make it sound like I'm not sure what I did. I don't agree with that opinion and think it's harmless. Is this a valid concern? He also said using words like "developed" isn't flashy/commanding enough, and that any chance I could get I should change things to "architected" or "redesigned". If it isn't truthful I don't want to include it, but saying you "architected" everything kind of cheapens the word I think. However I've interviewed quite a few people with this guy who have resumes that are full of bullshit like that. They're worthless developers and we turn them down, but then they go on to be contractors for some big megacorp making a ridiculous rate so I don't know what the hell to think. I started a technical blog last month. It has 3 posts and about 5000 words so far. Is this big enough to put on a resume, or does it need more meat before being used for job searches in this way? I appreciate any feedback at all. Cryolite fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Dec 9, 2015 |
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Dec 9, 2015 01:38
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apseudonym posted:Drop familiar from "familiar languages and technologies" and I'd probably drop the whole teaching myself section or at least move it to the very bottom. I originally thought that "stuff I'm teaching myself" section was cute but I've gotten the same feedback from someone else recently, so it should probably just be dropped instead of moved. Does anybody think there's any redeeming quality to something along the lines of "these are the things I'm working on next"? Or should you either show proficiency or just plain leave it off, period?
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Dec 9, 2015 02:40
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Thanks for the feedback. I'm incorporating everything you guys said.
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Dec 10, 2015 00:36
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A company near me contacted me a few weeks ago over StackOverflow Careers. They gave me a take home programming test consisting of some gimme questions on bit manipulation, analyzing some binary files to extract data from them, and a written specification for a compiler that translates some imaginary instruction set to x86. I spent like 8-10 hours total on the whole thing since I had to do a lot of research - I don't do much low-level stuff. Then there was a 1.5 hour in-person interview. Now, the company wants me to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a topic I know well to present to the company's CEO and CTO. I feel like this is excessive. I spent so much time on their exercises and in the process promised myself I'd never again spend that much time on a pre-interview programming test. The exercises were fun (except for the compiler design specification document, ugh), but I don't think it's healthy for me to spend so much time on something like that. I can't even put that code on GitHub or anything. However the time I spent was probably an outlier - if someone does low-level work analyzing binary files regularly maybe it would've only taken them 1-3 hours instead of 8-10. Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this? I'm not sure I even want this job anyway. It's mostly very low-level stuff. They analyze forensic evidence and reverse engineer malware. It's really, really cool stuff, but I haven't done these things at all and am not 100% confident I'd like to do that for 8 hours a day. If you asked me what my dream job is the first thing that comes to mind is writing Scala on some big data machine learning distributed this that and the other system. This feels like the opposite direction. Also I'd have to wear a tie and work on a government site. One of the interviewers openly complained that he has to work with idiots. But barring that, they do cool stuff. What should I do? What would you do?
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Dec 16, 2015 17:37
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Skandranon posted:I'd really consider how much I want the position or not, and use that to determine how much I'd spend on the presentation. It sounds like you don't really want it much, and you know that, so I'd probably just wing it on something fun, like swords & metallurgy. Did they even specify what the presentation has to be about? Yes, they gave example topics, like comparing x86 to x64, compiler logic, using Hadoop, or analyzing malicious code. Some in-depth topic I research and develop on my own outside of work, so not swords, unless I wrote code to model the hardness of swords during forging or something. That would be cool. You're right. After thinking about it I'm not sure if this is something I even want. I got the book Grey Hat Python recently after attending a bunch of cybersecurity meetups recently - I feel like I need to work my way through that book before I know if this is something I want to get into. Also like minato said a good 30 minute presentation can take days to put together. Even if it's a topic you know a lot about and could babble for 30 minutes about, organizing it into a coherent half hour presentation takes a bit of time. Also I feel kind of ashamed/like an imposter for not having something I care or know enough about to be able to effortlessly pull a 30 minute presentation out of my rear end to present. I tried predicting the stock market using machine learning ensembles of neural networks, SVMs, and decision trees about 2 years ago, and could probably talk a while about how all that works - but 30 minutes? It would take a lot of effort to prepare that talk. I have so many side project ideas and feel like if I wasn't such a lazy piece of poo poo and did them all I wouldn't have a problem with coming up with a 30 minute presentation relatively quickly. Like, competing in Kaggle competitions, writing demoscene-like stuff using WebGL/three.js, doing crazy stuff in Spark... I don't know. Doh004 posted:I'd expect the presentation aspect for a higher level position, not just an engineer. Is this a leadership/managerial role Cryolite? No, it's definitely for an engineer role - for someone who might have their head buried in a hex editor for hours a day. There's no explicit leadership or managerial aspect about it. Munkeymon posted:Could be that a part of the job is explaining in detail how how clients' systems got owned and how to stop it happening again, etc. I think this is it. I do know the work of the reverse engineers (which are higher up than the position I'd be working) amounts to this. They get some files, executables, and other evidence, and then after analyzing it they write up a report about what it is, what it does, what files were lost, etc. They may need to write a bunch of code to answer those questions, but their output is basically a written report. Speed is a big factor too - they need answers quickly, so maybe being able to come up with a 30 minute presentation on short notice is a skill especially desired in this environment.
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Dec 16, 2015 23:36
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Does that count if it's for a hobby and not for work?
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Dec 17, 2015 04:44
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Does anyone have any good primers for clueless people or resources on questions to ask regarding RSUs in an offer? I've done some research but don't really know what questions I should be asking. I interviewed someplace recently and received an offer that includes RSUs. This is at a privately held 40-something person company. The offer specifies an initial gift of X,XXX shares of RSUs after 90 days and that RSUs vest after a period of 3-5 years with immediate vesting after a change in control. There's no mention of how much individual shares are worth, or what the vesting schedule is like in those 3-5 years. The benefits mention that based on company/individual performance additional equity bonuses are possible, however this is not mentioned explicitly in the offer. What should I be asking? At the very least, how much the shares are worth, right? They could be worth fractions of a penny for all I know, and the equity could be pretty worthless. I asked the CEO during the interview if he plans to take the company public and he said no. He said once the equity vests you can sell it, however I don't understand who I'd be selling it to if it isn't public (unless it would just be selling it back to the company or other employees). The offer is good enough that I'd probably accept it without any equity at all, however for my own maximum benefit I'd like to know as much as possible about this and not appear like I just fell off a turnip truck by asking really naive questions. Can anyone recommend a good guide to RSUs for idiots?
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Jan 9, 2016 19:03
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Quitting really is a great way to get more money. I wish it wasn't true since it's stressful as hell (for me). 3 years ago I joined my current company at 78k as a mid-level .NET developer. A little over a year ago I was annoyed about paltry raises that only brought me to 85k, so I got an offer elsewhere for 115k and went to them saying "oh I'm happy here but I have this other offer, not sure what to do". They beat it and gave me 120k, plus a 10k retention bonus. That 10k retention hit my bank account the end of January. I'm done with this place. I want to get out of the .NET enterprise CRUD machine and work on cool stuff, not maintaining hacked-together forms. So I got an offer elsewhere (130ish) and put in my 2 weeks notice. They now want to promote me to architect and give me 150k (I bluffed that the other place is offering 150 and they said they'd match). Holy crap. There's no way I'm taking it since the new place does deep learning, high throughput distributed systems, blah blah all that kind of stuff so there's no way I'm picking enterprise forms over that, but it really does make me think. Is it normal in anyone else's experience for places to go to lengths like these to retain people? Even after already playing this game once before? I mean if I stay, then I'll have effectively played another offer off of them twice. I would have thought at a real company that if you try to do it a second time they'll just show you to the door. I kind of feel like there's no way I'm going to get back up to 150k base anytime soon if I leave - it seems like it's the kind of opportunity that arises only once you've been somewhere a few years and they know what you're capable of. I can't see them hiring anyone off the street for that much. That platitude about how you should always be looking for your next job is really starting to appear legitimate and wise to me.
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Feb 6, 2016 20:53
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Dang, you got that in the DC area for uncleared work? Is that in DC proper, NOVA, or in MD (oh gosh please say MD)?
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Feb 8, 2016 04:34
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I found a really interesting position I want to pursue but the only option might be to do it as a contractor with no benefits. Are there any good resources online for estimating how much and how much of a hassle it is to do insurance and all that yourself? Adding up the typical costs of health insurance, vacation, and 401k matching it seems like you'd need to be making a solid $25,000 more as a contractor than salaried. However I don't know if that vastly underestimates it or not, or if your taxes become a nightmare too. I'm at the stage where I'm entertaining salaried positions between 115-135k, but this position is contractor at 60-80/hr (124,800-166,400). Is this comparable at all? Cryolite fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 19:12
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Sorry, I meant per hour. That was a typo. I just edited my post. $60/hr * 2,080 hours a year = $124,800 for the year. That means working all those hours without any time off, so realistically I'd never get that much.
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Mar 15, 2016 19:29
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What do you guys think of putting down that one is an Eagle Scout on a resume? On the bottom of my resume, just above my github and tech blog links I have an "Additional Qualifications" section where I list some army award I got for modeling and simulation a few years ago plus a bullet point that says "Eagle Scout". I've gotten positive feedback on this before during interviews, but I showed someone my resume today for feedback and they said it comes across negative - that I lack social skills, that I'm stuck up, and that it's something too personal in an otherwise professional document, like saying "I like dogs" or something. This is the first negative feedback I've gotten on having this on there. I can kind of understand it doesn't belong since it's something I did when I was 18 and I'm now almost 30. However, it's at the bottom and isn't using space that would be of better value for something else, and from personal experience seems to have been a positive. Do you think this is a negative? I'm a little afraid I might not get callbacks or a significant fraction of people won't take me seriously with this on there because they might think it's not relevant on a resume for someone with 7 years of professional experience or they might think something along the lines of "oh how cute, an eagle scout! next."
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Mar 15, 2016 21:16
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So no corporate IT cost centers, no non-software companies, no sales-driven culture, no lax interview, and no contractors. drat, what's left? I feel like the majority of jobs out there are at those kinds of places.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:47
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Has anyone noticed the tech job market is not growing that much, and seems to be shrinking? Or at least in some/most areas and for some types of jobs? I wrote a program to query indeed.com to count the number of jobs for specific keywords for a whole bunch of cities. The point was to try to spot job trends across the country for keywords I was interested in. I've been running it once a week for the past year (7/19/2015 to 7/25/2016). Here's a bad chart that's hard to read just to draw your attention to this post:  Now here are the numbers that make it easy to see what's going on, and since I can't figure out how to make the text look nice in a post it's a literal screenshot of Excel:  What the hell is going on in New York? -26% in one year? LA and SF are not looking too hot either. San Jose is down too. I'd figure Silicon Valley would be growing, not shrinking. Big growth in Chicago and Seattle though. Based on these numbers it looks like Washington, D.C. has the most C#, Java, C++, and Python jobs within 25 miles. necrobobsledder what do you think about that. I bet they're mostly cleared. There are many, many good reasons why it's not a good idea to draw hard conclusions about the job market based on postings to indeed.com. For example, people could just not be using indeed as much in some areas, job postings are not the same as jobs, indeed could be culling duplicates or spam in some regions, recruiters might be spamming multiple job postings for the same job in some areas, etc. However, is there any substance to these numbers? Has anyone else noticed a general slowdown? I'd imagine after a year there'd at least be modest growth, not a total drop. Should I start shorting the stock market? Cryolite fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 01:43
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