Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

I start on a trial at an early-stage startup (still in stealth) tomorrow. Any clues on what I should expect from companies where my employee number is going to be a single digit?

"On trial"? Does this mean they don't pay you in full or something?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 21:03

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:52

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Misogynist posted:

The term "work/life balance" has taken on a loaded meaning with a lot of people who buy into 2010s un-management, so you should be careful with it. Most organizations running lean, startup-style management cultures are perfectly content to let you have your leisure time and family obligations, but work/life balance carries a connotation of your phone being off after 5 PM,

I would contend that not being on-call after hours is part of the normal meaning of "work/life balance"

# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 19:32

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

"Every company will fire you the minute they find someone who will work for a dollar less" is about as realistic as the management canard that every employee will goldbrick all day every day unless watched like a hawk.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 19:59

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

It would be totally cool to work for a profit-oriented company that was actually trying to make money and cut costs and fire ineffective people and the like. It's unclear what the upper level management in my company does aside from play golf and fire a couple of people now and again when they work on projects that fail.

Well of course, what's best for the company isn't always what's best for the middle manager making these decisions :v:

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 03:24

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Articles pop up on HN every so often proposing various different ways to value startup equity, you can use their search to find a few. Most of them are just applications of expected value with a tweak to account for dilution [e: and maybe vesting and the chance of getting hosed or handcuffed thereby], and they all spit out numbers much higher than typical equity stakes actually given to engineers, implying that equity compensation in lieu of salary is typically a bad deal for the employee. The mode of the random variable representing the value of your equity is zero at any startup that is still a startup anyways.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2014 14:29

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Misogynist posted:

Again, the answer is a big it depends. "Pretend equity doesn't exist" is a great model when you don't really understand equity and don't want to understand equity. Otherwise, by not asking the right questions, you might be screwing yourself out of a big payday if the company does become really successful. To reuse a phrase from earlier in the thread: don't be Homer Simpson selling his shares in the power plant for $25.

Here's a few simple rules to follow:

Companies granting stock options and planning an IPO or acquisition will submit a 409A appraisal to the IRS indicating the fair market valuation of the company. Similar valuation reports are typically given by the board of directors at least semi-annually to important equity holders in the company (VCs, etc., not individual option-holding employees). Most companies will never give you this verbatim, but if you understand it and the important numbers on it, move the equity conversation towards asking for those numbers. Informed hiring managers can probably give you the valuation of the company and an approximate fair market value of your options. They cannot give you a strike price on exercising those options because that strike price can only be determined by the board of directors.

Like others have pointed out, existing equity becomes diluted if the company sells additional stock to new investors, so understand what their plans are with respect to additional funding rounds. Additionally, if the company secures additional financing before your options are granted, the change in material assets can increase the strike price of your options by an order of magnitude, so be careful and understand the company's plans.

Ask about the cliff on stock options. Most option packages come with a three-year cliff, meaning you are entitled to absolutely nothing until you have been at the company for three years. Negotiate towards 33% vesting at a one-year cliff, with additional options vested quarterly up to three years, especially if the company is positioned for a potential acquisition or IPO in the near future. Do this regardless of anything else in your option package.

Like others have pointed out, equity isn't worth a whole lot if you're not one of the early employees of a company (returns fall tremendously past employee #20-30). Because of vesting, exactly how many employees this is depends on the employee churn rate -- startups go through employees much faster than established companies. People who never hit their cliff, whose option package was worth nothing, don't count. Make sure you use this to your negotiating advantage if you're on the edge of this range.

Are 3-year cliffs the norm? Fred Wilson talks about a 1-year cliff (with monthly vesting thereafter) being typical in his posts on the subject. Also, acceleration in the event of an acquisition is also an important contractual item, right? Otherwise you can find yourself losing all your unvested options via a "relinquish them all or you're fired lol" type clawback from the buyer.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 22:22

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

kitten smoothie posted:

I'm sure it works great if you, like Jack Welch, started running a company which had accumulated 100,000+ employees worth of dead weight over decades.

It didn't work all that well at GE either. There's a reason GE's stock did what it did more or less immediately after Welch left and the music stopped.

# ¿ May 19, 2015 14:14

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

JawnV6 posted:

Gosh, thought you�ve give me the slightest benefit of the doubt and recognize I was linking to the framework you were missing, not just the mocking structure. Here�s the mock framework that plays nice with that framework: https://github.com/ThrowTheSwitch/CMock

That looks like it's not horrible and mocking might be helpful with the given situation where you're talking to a GPS transceiver (though I suspect not too helpful) but most of the bugs I run into are timing issues, driving peripherals or external chips wrong (or peripherals or external chips not wanting to be driven even when I do it right :argh:

), poking the wrong address, communication over a bus having some issue, discrepancies between the schematic or layout and the intended design, etc. And while it's great to catch as many bugs as you can with unit testing and other varieties of automated testing, this (relatively barebones? unless I'm missing something) test & mock framework doesn't look like it does enough to make that a ton easier than writing tests without a harness usually is. For example, the last chunk of substantial library-ish code that I wrote which I wound up testing on a desktop for speed & memory reasons (it was basically a sprintf implementation, so I had 4.something billion test cases) wouldn't have been a lot easier to test with this than with the ghetto harness thingy I wound up writing to run the tests and dump the report in a spreadsheet.

Something that would be really useful to me would be a mocking framework that allowed me to mock a pulse X ms wide on pin Y with chatter typical of a microswitch or membrane keypad, or the ability to mock commo over SPI with packet contents following a template I provide and drop bits with probability P and stuff like that. But you'd probably need a real simulation environment to do that.

Aside: Atmel fed me and my coworkers lunch the other day as they gave a pitch on the upcoming generation of SAMLxx Cortex M0+ chips and their IDE has a built-in power profiler that will give you a dataviz of power from Vdd and AVdd over time and automagically line it up with your call stack. That seemed really slick and super useful.

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Sep 19, 2015

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 02:09

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

kitten smoothie posted:

I'm looking for a decent text to refresh my nitty gritty from undergrad. Is there a particular advantage of this book over CLRS, since I still have a copy of that from the 90s?

DPV is a very different text from CLRS - much more of an introduction and less of a reference. It also covers fewer topics and is waaaaaaay shorter.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 21:46

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Skandranon posted:

Then why bother doing the lunch part at all? Just do the 4 interviews and skip the lunch if you think it is so corrupt and unreliable.

It's an opportunity for the interviewee to ask questions and hang out with potential future coworkers in a somewhat relaxed environment

# ¿ Jul 20, 2017 02:41

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

The manufacturing guys here (and the product development guys that get roped into building systems for production) have pretty much entirely switched over to C# to run their systems. That's more industrial than enterprisey, I guess. I think our internal IT folks and the contractors are also doing ops stuff with C#, but I try to interact with them as little as possible so I'm not sure.

Fwiw I find the implementation of bash & coreutils that ships with Git for windows does about 80% of what I want, and it doesn't complain about running from a directory that isn't inside a repo. Unfortunately, every time IT pushes an update it breaks my PATH which makes Perl stop working so I kind of have to slum it with bash/sed/awk when I want to script stuff until I've gone and unfucked things.

Cygwin and WSU (no WSL for me, not on Win10 at this time) both have enough pain points that I don't use them much, and instead fire up a VM if I get to that point.

# ¿ May 23, 2018 17:35

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Takehomes are a great way to screen out potential employees who have families (which I guess is great if you're Catbert and want to cut insurance costs). If I'm looking for a new job, I'm going to try to interview at about three or four places in a short time span - this is feasible if each company expects me to have a quick chat with a recruiter, an hour remote interview with an engineer, and a half-day onsite interview loop. If they all want me to do a weekend project for them, no bueno. Evenings and the weekend are reserved for my wife and kids, gently caress you very much. Even if I were single I don't think I'd want to sink that much time into interviewing. The flaws of the "data structures and algorithms class redux" approach that has been in vogue for a few years are way less onerous than this.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2018 21:48

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Good Will Hrunting posted:

"Is there anything we can do?"

Other than "no" or "sigh *unzips*", what kind of answer would anyone expect to this question? Honestly curious why they even would bother asking.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2018 16:18

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Mniot posted:

Instead, the manager just kept telling me that this length of take-home was "completely standard" and that every company was using this hiring method and how did I plan to get a job without doing this basic thing that everyone required?

There must be some sort of split in the industry I'm not seeing. Even outside of the embedded ghetto (where whiteboard questions are uncommon, discussion questions are the norm and drug tests are standard), I've only had one place ask me to do a take-home - it certainly didn't limit my ability to find work.

And the weird poo poo you hear from people involved in recruitment sometimes just boggle my mind.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2018 19:51

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

feedmegin posted:

Uhhh what kind of embedded are you used to because I do embedded and this is to me. Safety critical poo poo or somethimg?

Yep. My stupid code even needs to be certified now. Are you doing consumer-facing stuff?

# ¿ Jun 11, 2018 13:54

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Horse Clocks posted:

A trie in its natural habitat

It's going to turn out that GWH's prospective employer was founded by Edward Frenkin

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 13:43

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

How about the sentence before, where you're expected to host your own struggle session regularly?

# ¿ Jun 28, 2018 16:32

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:52

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

JawnV6 posted:

I've got a story where I cost a company multiple millions.

Does the phrase "tape out" appear in this story

# ¿ Jun 29, 2018 18:26

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