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The Dark Wind posted:When's a good time to bring up upcoming time-off during the interview process? I'd bring it up after getting an offer and before accepting; prior to that they either won't care at all or it might hurt your chances. It's very unlikely to be a big deal though, especially at a larger company. There's also a chance it'll be moot, the hiring process can be real slow so it's not totally crazy to think you might not have an offer on the table by August. The company I just joined let me pick my own start date and even suggested I take 1-2 months off between jobs to recharge, so that's another option.
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May 19, 2021 01:21
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Guinness posted:I and many of my software friends have been lamenting lately how there seems like there is no real way to be less-than-fulltime at most software/tech companies. The industry just seems to not even recognize the concept as possible, let alone beneficial, to both employee and employer. Google has exactly this already, you can go down to 80% time or less for a commensurate reduction in compensation. Alternatively, in SRE you get oncall compensation hours you can use as bonus vacation; if you max it out every quarter it's an extra 8 weeks of vacation a year, which you can use to implement your own 80% time without taking a compensation hit. I had a FIRE-minded teammate who did exactly that. I don't work there anymore but feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
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Jun 15, 2021 01:41
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dantheman650 posted:Really? My wife has been at Google for a while now and this is the first I've heard of it. I listened to people give talks on how to succeed at 60% time or whatever so yeah it's a thing. Now the question is, what else isn't your wife telling you about Google company policy.
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Jun 15, 2021 20:49
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I'm around 10 years, 7 of which were at a FAANG. I recently left for a fully-remote position at a non-FAANG tech company. Mostly I wanted to go remote, but also I was burned out from trying and failing the promo process at my last place. Previously I was around 270 TC which was like 135 base/35 bonus/100 RSUs, which was also apparently the soft cap for the level I was at (one below senior). Now I'm at 200 base/90 RSUs/0 bonus with the senior title. I also have to say that interviewing again after so long was really tough, and gave me imposter syndrome all over again for a while. edit: was in Pittsburgh, now at a beach town. Edly fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 20:00
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Jose Valasquez posted:Yeah, same, I didn't jump around as much but making FAANG bucks didn't happen over night. Thirding this, went to a state school, first two jobs were in the 50-60k range, got hired at a FAANG around 130k and grew over time with consistently good-but-not-amazing perf scores.
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Jun 25, 2021 20:45
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm doing the true deep dive LeetCode/FAANG grind for the first time and I have to say, it's simultanously better and worse than I expected it to be. I've breezed through all the mega-patterns (windows, backtracking, dfs and bfs on trees, grids, and graphs, combo DP stuff, etc) and things like that which were once quite daunting have become totally manageable, but there are still so many random questions I run into on the company lists where I have quite literally no idea how I'd solve them in a 40 minute window without rote memorization of that exact problem. People used to say there was a lot of luck invovled, hence the "algo roulette" moniker, but I refused to believe them and just thought I had to git good. Now, I feel like I have to git good at accepting that I may prep a ton, become very strong, and still fail which is maybe even harder to swallow than the original take of just being a dumbass. You sound way more well prepared than I was, hopefully that gives you some confidence. There is a big element of randomness to the process for sure though, both in the questions you get and the interviewers themselves. I did fine with algo questions I think, where I struggled was with system design (at least until I went through a couple interviews and got a sense of what kinds of things interviewers wanted to see and ask about) and then one company's take home project where they wanted to do a deep dive into the code I wrote and test me on whether I knew some really specific implementation details about a Python class I was using (spoiler: I did not). It's been observed many times in this thread but the skills I had to demonstrate in interviews were almost completely unrelated to the skills I had to develop on the job. I did a lot of large-scale migration type stuff in SRE, so I actually didn't write a ton of code, or ever design a scalable system from scratch. Instead I learned a bunch of soft-skill type stuff about managing big projects etc. I think not coincidentally I only got offers from the companies where part of the interview process was talking about my experience directly with hiring managers.
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Jun 25, 2021 22:14
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Armauk posted:Is the leetcode-grinding interview truly the only obstacle for getting that foot into the door at FAANG? Once you're in, do you have to worry about doing it again for future jobs? Your resume has to get you to the interview in the first place, but after that I'm pretty sure the main deciding factor is your performance in the interview. I was never on a hiring committee so take that with a grain of salt, but I did conduct maybe 75-100 interviews and get to see the whole slate of interview feedback and ultimate hire/no hire decision. Sadly you still have to go through the whole process again for future jobs.
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Jun 25, 2021 22:29
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For me personally the money stopped mattering around 150k, but I felt like I had to chase promo because I wanted the status and respect of my peers etc. I think "who cares about titles" is the best way to live your life but it didn't come naturally for me.
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Jun 27, 2021 16:57
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm in NYC and with 5 YoE I'm worried I won't get the 200 TC I want if I don't get one of the FAANGs. But, I quite literally could not care about titles as long as I'm getting paid enough to live relatively "comfortably". I think my current company might be a good option, I PMed you.
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Jun 27, 2021 17:53
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rt4 posted:How hard do you need to stick to disqualifiers for an offer? I have one offer at $170k which has some solid perks such as paid training, then another for $200k + some performance-based stock grants (real stocks). The higher paying role would be the first on an internal support team with on-call duties and an "unlimited" vacation policy with no mandatory minimum. I'm worried that the higher paying job will stress me out with on-call, uncertain vacation boundaries, and general workplace chaos. On the other hand, I'm also worried that I'll feel stupid in the future for passing up a significant pay increase. How stressful oncall is is going to vary a lot by company and team, but it's a pretty common thing so I don't think it should be an automatic disqualifier. Ask them how long each shift is (eg 24x7 or are shifts split across teams in different time zones), how frequently you'll be oncall (eg 1 week every month), how many times per week your prospective team typically gets paged, and if there's any extra compensation for being oncall outside of work hours. Ditto for unlimited vacation - it could be a net negative or a positive depending on the team and company cultures. My current company has unlimited vacation and I viewed that as a negative but their pitch was that half the company lives in Europe and that informs the vacation culture, and my manager told me he makes sure people take at least 4-5 weeks. Ask how many weeks people take each year on average, and ask your prospective team in particular how many weeks each person actually took last year. Edly fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 16:43
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Achmed Jones posted:what jose said about measuring impact. if you tell somebody to do something in a meeting, make sure that's written down as meeting notes or whatever and that your name is next to it. doing l5 work isn't all that big of a deal, but doing all the bookkeeping to show that you're doing l5 work is a bit obnoxious. also, sometimes there ain't poo poo you can do. if you're leading a team of devs on an obviously l5 project and then some p0 poo poo comes in that takes those devs off the project for three months, then you're not getting promoted that cycle. it's not your fault, and nobody will say it's your fault, but you still won't get promoted. This kind of describes me, I really really cared about promo to L5, and I had finally built the skills to do L5 work, and then the pandemic ate a promo cycle, and then I got asked to drop my "here is your L5 promo" project to work on some other time-sensitive project that turned into multiple quarters but wasn't deemed impactful enough. I was so burned out after that that I left, but now I can't remember why I cared about promo so much to begin with. I was at L4 for a really long time though, so I was salary capped. My L5 advice is, decide if you actually want it, because it's not all upside - the nature of your day to day work will change. Make sure your manager is actively working with you to get you there; choosing projects with the right scope is hugely important, as well as going about them in the right way. You don't have to lead a small project team to get there, but my impression was that that's by far the most common path to success. And if your team doesn't have the right projects available for you to get promoted, change teams proactively, don't wait around for things to change. edit: Pollyanna I PMed you Edly fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Sep 14, 2021 |
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Sep 14, 2021 17:55
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But, like, it doesn't matter too much. I used to really, really care about promotion because of the title change (back to my old title) - the title change would give me more leverage on the job market and internally to transfer to my preferred location. but then a pandemic happened, and now I've been approved for full-time remote work. I'm being paid an L5 salary because I'm doing L5 work and everybody is happy to say "Achmed does L5 work leading blah blah blah, but the impact isn't there yet because of reallocations and stuff, pay him pls". the only thing that promotion would get me now is bumping up the salary cap, but I haven't capped out yet so it doesn't matter for the near term.
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For me the money stopped mattering a long time ago, but at Google I worked with so many people who were smarter than me and just got to L5 and L6 naturally like it was nothing. Meanwhile for me, L5 was a huge stretch goal that required a bunch of personal growth before I could even realistically think about taking a shot at it. I felt like I needed to chase promo because a bunch of my friends had already gotten it and people wouldn't respect me if I didn't too. Obviously now I realize that was distorted thinking, (almost) nobody gives a poo poo about level. It was really hard to see that at the time though.
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Sep 14, 2021 19:33
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Can I get a discord invite too please.
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Oct 30, 2021 21:20
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I've been in big tech for ~8 years, but only moderately successful, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I think it's possible to have a very chill, pleasant experience, or a really stressful cut-throat experience, depending on your level of ambition. If you just want to coast along working < 40 hours a week getting slightly above-average performance reviews for your entire career, you can do that and be very comfortable. Heck, you'll probably still visibly outperform some of your peers. Where you might encounter politics and cut-throatiness is if you want to really climb the ladder and reach the echelons where the slots and projects are limited. I have no personal experience with that, so I'll let others say if I'm right or wrong there. My big tip is, make sure you're choosing the work that will actually get rewarded. You can work really hard and do really great work on a problem that's either genuinely unimportant, or for whatever reason isn't valued by the internal promotion process, and you might as well not have bothered. This can apply to choosing a team, too - some teams' work is genuinely more impactful (eg a core infrastructure team where any performance optimization will save the company thousands of cores); likewise some teams' work is just easier to translate into numbers that will look good on a promo statement.
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Jan 3, 2022 22:38
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I switched jobs about a year ago, I had to send my laptop back but I got to keep my extra monitor and WFH office furniture because it was impractical to ship.
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Feb 16, 2022 17:55
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Gin_Rummy posted:Wondering if anyone might have some general advice for my situation: Are the companies explicitly telling you the issue is a lack of modern webdev experience, or are you inferring that from vague interview feedback? What's been the structure of the interviews that you feel you've done poorly in, and what's the actual feedback you've gotten? In my experience, if you're getting the interviews, then your resume is good enough, and you just need to focus on interview performance. And the interviews themselves tend to be self-contained algorithms questions that have nothing to do with full stack development, with maybe a design/architecture question thrown in where it helps to have real experience but you can still fake it by having read a few chapters of Cracking the Coding Interview. At my current company I've been in several interviews with candidates with minimal distributed systems experience that do well on the coding part and not so well on the design part, and we still extend an offer, just not at senior.
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Mar 15, 2022 14:49
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Gin_Rummy posted:Most have not given explicit feedback, despite me prompting for it, but the structure and types of interviews that the rejection comes after seems to I support my assertion. For example, I had a lengthy discussion with a backend hiring manager where he just kind of asked me about what ORMs I have used in personal projects, why I chose the framework I did, etc. He did not seem satisfied enough with my knowledge and I got a rejection the next day. Fair enough. I guess I'm still surprised you haven't gotten any offers if you feel you're doing well on at least some of the coding and design interviews, but I also am from a traditional SWE background so it might just be a failure on my part to relate to your experience. At both of the big companies I've worked, you'll do the entire interview panel even if they all go poorly, so I wouldn't interpret doing the later interviews as having passed the earlier ones (but that's not to say you're not passing, I believe you if you say they feel like they're going well). I'm not at all surprised that recruiters are misleveling you, 90% of my experience with recruiters is that they just suck at their jobs (sorry to any actually good recruiters, I have worked with several). I guess it could explain things if hiring managers are skimming your resume and seeing "X years total experience" and missing the "but only Y of those years are in SWE". If you haven't already, it might help to rewrite your resume to emphasize the recent SWE experience and really deemphasize the mechanical engineering experience, to make it clear that a career change happened. I don't know about night school bootcamps, but people have definitely posted positive experiences with bootcamps in general. Usually though that's how people get their foot in the door to get the first couple years of experience, which it sounds like you've already done.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:52
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Cugel the Clever posted:My org this year has decided that, because product's roadmap far outstrips our resourcing, all our interns will take up projects that are intended to be more or less production-ready by the end of their 12-weeks. I'm not sure whether this idea came from product or our management, but, needless to say, every engineer's response was uniformly some mixture of: This post is setting off sirens in my head - please don't sacrifice yourself doing work that won't be recognized. Allow me to suggest that, by taking on all this firefighting, you may not actually even be helping your team in the long run. For example: your manager might be unaware that there is an unsustainable problem because your heroic efforts are masking it; or maybe some of this firefighting would be promo-worthy for someone else on your team but you're not giving anyone else the opportunity. Can you either redistribute some of this work to the rest of the team, or simply allow some things to fail? That could free up some of your time to take a step back and plan more sustainable, long term solutions. All of the above only applies in a healthy org/with a good manager, although if that doesn't apply to your situation then don't wait until the end of the year to leave, start looking now.
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Jun 29, 2022 10:52
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It sounds like you're not sure whether your contributions will be recognized; I think it's worth checking in with your manager explicitly on that today so you can potentially change course instead of waiting for a performance review. I'm saying this having learned that lesson the hard way; I left my last job over a similar situation and I'm still kinda bitter about it.
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Jun 29, 2022 17:16
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raminasi posted:This F# for Fun and Profit piece dunks on Uncle Bob, it's pretty fun. This is the snarkiest part: Thank you! I read this article a couple years ago and it made a big impression on me, been trying to find it again ever since.
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Oct 26, 2022 17:24
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bob dobbs is dead posted:read the goon book Purchased!
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Oct 26, 2022 18:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm seeing numbers come down a bit in NY. I'm at roughly $275k now and looking to leave my job and it's starting to feel like it's going to be pretty tough to beat that with my 7 YoE. Finance I guess? That's on the low end of Senior at Datadog. NYC passed a law recently that job listings have to disclose salary, so you can find theirs online, not including RSUs. Example: https://careers.datadoghq.com/detail/4609413/?gh_jid=4609413 From asking around, the biggest RSU package I've heard of someone negotiating at Senior is about $225k/yr, so the upper range for TC is around $500k I'd guess.
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Nov 13, 2022 19:44
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I got rejected from Datadog last go around, also isn't their stock in the shitter too? Even so, it's a data point in favor of "yes you could probably do better in NY without resorting to fintech". And yeah DDOG is currently less than half its peak, although as far as I know it hasn't done especially worse than the tech sector in general.
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Nov 13, 2022 22:15
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Without having your lead's side, there's not enough context here to say. It could be that they're just neurotic about estimates and think that this is how agile is supposed to work; or it could be that you're a chronic underperformer and just weren't called out on it until this team because that's how most of G's culture is. Do you have a sense of how much you get done compared to the rest of your team? Have you ever gotten feedback before around velocity? Your manager (or their manager) is the person to ask about this. A lot of managers are shy about giving critical feedback, and a lot of ICs are oblivious about hearing it, so "we think you're a slacker and are planning to fire you" might sound like "there have been some concerns around your velocity on this project in the past". If you're not sure, be explicit: "is my current level of performance enough to keep working here indefinitely, or will I get fired if I don't improve?" If it's clear that your manager doesn't think you're the problem, then you can talk about ways the lead can manage the project without stressing everyone out.
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Mar 20, 2023 16:14
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oliveoil posted:Yeah, I do feel like other people churn out code much faster than me. I've only been able to match the volume I've seen from others by taking Adderall. I also got feedback from my manager on velocity when I first joined this team as well, when I was under this same TL. I'm sorry to hear that, and no judgment here btw; I've been on both sides of the table. I was fortunate to get to work on a team that let me skate by for years while I figured my poo poo out. The medical stuff is way beyond my expertise, but I hope you get some answers, or figure out a work environment that works for you. If you have a diagnosis you may be able to approach things from that angle; I believe using the magic words "medical accommodation" will trigger a whole HR process, and you might be able to get more flexibility around work hours or something.
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Mar 20, 2023 16:37
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While it sucks to have to deliver feedback like that, it can help to remember that you're doing it for the good of the team. Other people notice the underperformance too, and it can be a drag on morale if it feels like someone isn't pulling their weight. Plus, people really do turn things around sometimes, which is a great feeling for both parties.
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Jun 23, 2023 13:45
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I'm still interested.
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Jun 24, 2023 20:50
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Sorry Pollyanna, what a shitshow. Sounds like your managers failed you; you're not supposed to have to figure all this out on your own.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Man, I'm having an actual mid-life crisis. So, background here is: Boo hoo, trade lives with me. Serious response: if you're into self help books, I found Designing Your Life to be really helpful in planning out my last big life/career change.
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Jul 7, 2023 20:50
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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:
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Mar 6, 2024 14:54
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thotsky posted:I'm really struggling. My entire team consist of people approaching retirement, they're all working from cabins dotted around the country, and nobody gives a poo poo about what I do. Sorry for your troubles, but as an outsider this is really funny. What a time to be alive! When you say nobody gives a poo poo, do you mean just your peers or does that include your management chain and the business at large?
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Mar 6, 2024 16:17
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ultrafilter posted:You interviewing?
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Mar 6, 2024 17:05
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minato posted:How does this look in practice, if everyone's remote? Like, is it a combo of pair programming, code reviews, and people on the task coordinating on what each of them are doing each day during standup? A little of all of the above; for the most part folks are still working on tasks individually. A lot of the collaboration comes in the form of impromptu design discussions in Slack, or in the weekly Zoom project sync where they're scoping out/strategizing the next chunk of work. We're all in the continental US though, a big timezone disparity is a whole different beast. I've worked on a couple teams split across the US and Europe and I've never seen this solved to everyone's satisfaction; either project teams are clustered by timezone and separate team cultures develop, or you force everyone to work across timezones and it adds a ton of friction.
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Mar 6, 2024 22:07
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Agreed that your managers aren't doing a good job, if they're expecting you to sacrifice yourself to keep the project from failing. Does your manager know the extent of your struggles? Have they asked you to work overtime to keep the project afloat? IMO the way to approach this in a healthy organization is to not compromise on work life balance: "So far the project has only survived because I haven't been working at a sustainable pace for almost a year. What I can get done sustainably is X, Y, Z, which means A, B, C won't get done by the deadline. Would you like me to prioritize differently?" Sometimes that means things fall on the floor and projects fail because they're understaffed, but that creates the impetus to get more headcount. You're the best judge of whether you're in a healthy organization though.
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Apr 30, 2024 12:59
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