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It's still a negotiation. But don't bring up your commute in the negotiations, just talk about how you can help them. What is their offer based on? Is it just the industry standard of looking at your last salary and adding 5-10k? If so then you have a lot of leverage.
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Dec 10, 2016 00:49
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B-Nasty posted:How do you guys typically factor in domain expertise (SME) into positions? Part of me feels like if you want to hire me as a senior software engineer, cool, that is worth X. But if I know a poo poo-ton about your industry, I want X+10 to 20%. I used domain knowhow once when negotiating for a better offer, but they didn't have a clear salary in mind for that role. Some places have clearly defined salary ranges for clearly defined titles. To use domain knowledge as a negotiating tactic in places like that you'd need to use it to apply for an outright more senior title.
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Dec 10, 2016 07:23
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Munkeymon posted:wat Same thing happened to Archibald Buttle, in the workplace documentary Brazil.
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Dec 15, 2016 16:43
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Hey, this is a new one.. a "6-10 hour" take home challenge before I even talk to a single member of the engineering team! Usually I at least get phone screened by a Senior/Lead first. Is it really a 6 hour challenge? Or is it a 10 minute challenge, followed by 5:50 hours of wondering if you missed some nuance in the question? I once had this conversation after a phone screen: - Given a JSON file and a key, return the value of the key. Should take you a couple hours. - Can I use standard libraries? - Yes. - Does the JSON file have weird nested hierarchies, where the key will appear multiple times in scattered places? - Nope, it's a simple dictionary. - You want a perl one-liner? - Please document your work. - A perl two-liner?
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Dec 15, 2016 21:08
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Pollyanna posted:Does it make sense to move on from a workplace because the work has stopped being interesting to you and you want to work on a significantly different field of study? Reason I ask is that I've been moved from being a Rails monkey for a not very interesting internal application at work, to a kind of poorly managed project that is mostly front-end design and Javascript with little opportunity for the interesting back-end/API/functional core work that I personally find more interesting, engaging, and more promising for developing my career. But the position I have right now is relatively comfortable and not very demanding, so I'm having trouble deciding between staying at a relatively stable-and-secure-but-not-very-good-for-my-development job doing random bullcrap I'm not interested in, and leaving for a less-sure-but-possibly-more-interesting-and-better-for-my-professional-development job in something that's more pointed towards building skills that are in demand for software engineers. Should I stay or should I go? Before you jump ship, tell your boss what you're feeling. A lot of bosses actually do care for their employees happiness level. (Even if for no other reason than working around unhappy people sucks.) There might be a way back to doing something you enjoy. But whatever you decide, don't let your skills stagnate. No matter what.
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Dec 24, 2016 08:49
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Mappo posted:So there are these programming education sites, Skillwise and Pluralsite. They both offer online training courses on different programming languages and IT skills. Skillwise is running a big sale on its courses. I don't know if those specific sites are worth it, but I've seen people put stuff like that on a resume when they're looking to make a slight career shift. It's an indication that they're serious.
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Dec 25, 2016 02:07
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Being a monkey on bad projects is a rite of passage. It gives you war stories, and gets listed on your resume as "something something legacy systems." Experience is what you make of it. Being in a bad place but fighting to improve it, or at least honing your sense of code smells, is absolutely better for you and your career than not working.
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Dec 27, 2016 18:11
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kitten smoothie posted:If they're not receptive to you fighting to improve it, though, then gtfo and go somewhere else that does. Fighting and failing is still useful experience. All else being equal, which is a huge step, I'd sooner say yes to an interviewee who had read Dale Carnegie (and Crucial Conversations and such) and tried and failed to convince their bosses to do better, than one who didn't try. I'm not saying you should stay in a bad job, but having a bad job is better than not having a job, and you can get a lot of useful experience from it.
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Dec 27, 2016 19:21
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My company has lockers and no permanent desks. It makes me feel like a cog. I am not a fan.
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Dec 28, 2016 19:00
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I've never been able to negotiate benefits, only salary. But I'm a mid-tier programmer, and never worked at one of those programmer-paradise companies.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:17
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Larger tech companies have explicit career tracks for individual contributors. Smaller companies have unofficial career tracks for individual contributors. It's where they promote you to management, then realize you can't manage people, so they remove your direct reports but let you keep your title and office because you're too valuable to lose.
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Jan 4, 2017 05:40
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If he spends the *next* nine months contributing to an open source project that Google loves he'll probably get a phone call. (Happened to an old coworker who did work with eclipse, git, and eclipse+git.)
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Jan 11, 2017 22:11
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No, he's a seasoned web veteran with two profitable businesses who still goes to job fairs. I don't understand it at all.
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Jan 12, 2017 18:28
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I didn't know job fairs were a thing outside of college, or companies seeking low-level workers. Are they actually good for experienced professionals on the job hunt?
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Jan 13, 2017 20:11
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I recently had an honest conversation about this topic with my recruiter. She got me a six month contract-to-hire job. I accepted it, and thanked her, but then said, "in four to five months I'll be looking at job postings again." I do love what I'm doing right now, but if my company wanted me to not look around they would've hired me straight out.
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Jan 15, 2017 23:00
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Compensation is fair – actually quite good if you account for everything. Add to that the culture of openness internally, and you get things like discussing compensation, with people visibly volunteering a lot of info for conversations, without repercussions. I've always assumed that companies would only be open about compensation if it was based on skill and experience, and not on the employee's negotiation skill. Is that true at Facebook?
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Jan 16, 2017 21:14
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I remember reading about Fog Creek's open compensation levels. It seems like such a nice idea, especially for engineers, to have such clear numbers to figure out where you are and what your next steps are. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/02/13/fog-creek-professional-ladder/
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Jan 17, 2017 01:07
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oliveoil posted:I had hoped to save enough money in the next 5-10 years that I wouldn't care or be affected, or at worst would be senior enough to be at the top of the pyramid of new entrants. Now? Looks like I need to find a backup plan way earlier than expected. Your looking for a backup plan to being an experienced developer?
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Feb 1, 2017 05:10
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rt4 posted:Sounds like they have a right to that money. Force will decide if they get it, though. It was already decided they don't, unanimously, at SCOTUS last year. Waiting in line to be searched wasn't an integral part of the job, at least not as congress defined it. I prefer being salaried. It saves my sanity to not deal with this small stuff.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:29
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Echoing the above, I worked at Shoebuy for a while and even though its entire operation is a website it was just not, at its core, a "tech" company. But it worked for them. As near as I can tell their speciality was writing contracts so carefully that Shoebuy made money no matter what happened. Biggest recession in lifetime? Profitable year.
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Feb 5, 2017 22:54
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How obscure is the tech you want to work with? If it's Rails, then look for Rails jobs. If it's Io, then look for any job.
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Feb 11, 2017 00:21
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B-Nasty posted:I'm expecting that with the bulk of code out there already that needs maintaining/updating, C++/Java/.NET/(maybe RoR) developers won't have much to worry about for the next 2-3 decades. Granted, F500 financial institutions, health care, and government organizations don't usually have nap chambers and free haircuts, but their money is still green. I don't know if this is relevant or not to people's career choices, but I have to share. I work for big health care, and the way we make choices around here is amazing. We're using an expensive solution that does something with big data, ETL, data integration, and a dozen other things. No one likes it. Recently some directors and VPs asked why we ever decided on this thing, because it's not really what we need. The answer, I learned, is that the only reason it's being used is because, when this whole project first started, this software was a quick and temporary solution. And then everyone forgot that it was meant to be temporary. Edit: I don't know if there's a moral in that, but it I think it's this: There is an infinite amount of money to be made in maintaining and fixing other people's bad decisions, if that's the type of career you want. lifg fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 21:41
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rt4 posted:Years later you dig through the webserver config to find that everything in your production system actually hinges on index_temp_joe2.php I'm used to seeing this in small-to-medium sized companies, where I've normally worked. This is the first time I've been at a billion dollar company. They have all the same problems, just with a larger budget. I didn't expect that, but I guess I should have.
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Feb 14, 2017 17:29
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runupon cracker posted:Yeah, I get it, but it feels super gross and I'm just not comfortable with it. Honesty is a big thing for me. I know I've suffered for it, too, but I gotta stick to my principles. Same. I always recommend against lying. But you can work with HR screeners. They are often doing keyword searches, and *want* to pass along good people. So build a few projects with Spring and list it under "Technical Knowledge," and during the interview talk about how you've worked with Spring-like frameworks for a dozen years and have already built a few real-world apps in Spring.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:11
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FamDav posted:The interview process /should/ be 1-2 phone interviews using something like collabedit followed by an onsite with 4-5 interviewers. these monitored tests were supposed to be pre-screening, but they are somewhere between not great to awful for the interviewee. That's exactly how my interview process went last summer.
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Feb 18, 2017 01:04
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kitten smoothie posted:Yeah it's pretty clueless to enlist the help of the person on the team who most recently went through the hiring process as a candidate, still has it fresh in their mind, and thus can offer a unique and knowledgeable perspective on it I'm with you. I was hired during a big hiring burst, and started sitting in on interviews a month after I joined. I wasn't the final say on *any* applicants, I just passed on my impressions of their programming abilities up to the director.
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Feb 20, 2017 22:41
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Good Will Hrunting posted:If you spent a few hours doing a take home assignment, how would you feel if the person who reviewed it had spent maybe a cumulative 5 hours (writing incredibly simple automation scripts) with the language you chose to use and would be the person assessing you? Sure I can see how it runs, if he did the features adhering to the spec, did anything obviously boneheaded, etc. If you're interviewing for general programming skills, and not language-specific, then that really is all you need to do. Can they build an algorithm. Do they understand space/time trade offs. Is their code readable. Done. It's a low bar, but it's just one step in a large, multi-step filtering process. If you passed through that process, you're qualified to do this step.
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Feb 21, 2017 02:34
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Pollyanna posted:I wouldn't be personally rattled (just ready to check out, instead) if there was an agreement of sorts. I don't believe it exists outside of "you, do more overtime". You're always expected to work overtime during crunch. I think what separates good companies from bad is that crunch time is limited and comes to an end, and then you are allowed time to slack and recover.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:34
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fantastic in plastic posted:It exists because developers tolerate it. If companies started losing their dev staff every time a project manager said "crunch time," the practice would quickly end. On the other side are times when you can naturally relax, like the week between Christmas and NYE, and often a couple weeks in August when executives like to all go on vacation. There's always cycles to work, no matter what the work.
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Feb 22, 2017 22:28
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fantastic in plastic posted:Oh, sure, there's always reasons why it might be tolerable. I think that your comparison is only apples-to-apples if the company policy is that you don't have to report to work on those days, though. Maybe we just have different expectations for work. I've just always considered occasional crunch to be the cost of working at this comfy level, for this comfy salary. Maybe I'm just justifying my sub-par jobs.
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Feb 23, 2017 00:49
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Pollyanna posted:I'll also admit, I've been pulling some less-than-40 hour days recently. Often by 4, I'm totally brain drained and I often call it a day there cause I'm just not productive at that point. It feels like burnout, but I was under the impression that burnout was due to being overworked, and the situation here is more environmental in nature. Can burnout happen because of a bad environment? Yes. I'm going through that myself, due to two reorgs on a row and a missing boss. The good news is you know when you're *not* productive. Save the mindless tasks for that time.
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Feb 23, 2017 16:27
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The games industry gets away with it but the software industry does not nearly as much. Some places can get away with it briefly but a terrible company to work for, like was said, word gets around. I'll never forget this classic rant from the spouse of an EA coder. I assume it's gotten better since then, but it's never been my industry so I really don't know. http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
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Feb 25, 2017 22:01
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Good Will Hrunting posted:My boss is pretty bad. He has a key role in speccing this integration project I'm working on (bringing our system into the company that bought us) and his slow pace is blocking me and the other three developers on my side. There are two managers from the parent company also involved and they see it but they also have many other responsibilities. I don't know what to do. I've asked him questions that he just has ignored. The other developers and I put together a spreadsheet of outstanding questions and there are zero answers in a week, except for management at our parent company giving "I think we'll do it like this/need to do this but I'm not sure we'll have to wait for Big Boss". Have you talk to him about this yet? That's always step one. Step two is ask if you can take tasks off his plate, so he can focus on bigger issue items. I ask my bosses that all the time, phrased just like that, when I see things I'd like to own. If there's anyone who has good rapport with him, they should be the one to do it. I don't know what step three should be. If you are completely blocked and are spinning your wheels, can you quickly build a demo?
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Feb 27, 2017 18:06
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Pollyanna posted:What's the code for "reorgs turned the management poo poo and the environment toxic"? Reorg.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:36
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Pollyanna posted:An official from the MBTA (Boston transportation department) reached out to me asking if I wanted to work in Elixir and React with them. I gotta say the offer sounds tempting on its face, but this is a government job, and I haven't heard great things about government jobs...How much of a hassle are they to work for? Recommend or not recommend? I was half-way through the application process for that very job when I accepted my current role. I'm not sure I made the right choice. It seems like they're doing exciting work there, and the MBTA is badly in need of good workers everywhere. One thing to ask about : that job was classifying everyone as consultants to get around the strict, out-of-date salary bands.
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Mar 1, 2017 16:55
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Speaking of reorgs, I finally learned the truth of what's been happening to my division over the last month. It wasn't a reorg, it was an execution.
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Mar 1, 2017 21:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That sucks. Does this mean you're back on the interview circuit then? I really don't know. It's a contract-to-hire gig, so you'd think they'd just let my contract quietly expire. But everyone keeps telling me that they like me and will find a home for me somewhere. But it's also obvious that I'm always the last to know what's going on. I just wish it had lasted long enough to give me real experience for my resume. The best I have now is, "almost worked with big data," and, "almost built micro-service-based reporting platform."
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Mar 2, 2017 00:35
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mrmcd posted:My favorite part of those court documents was how he thought wiping his hard drive and installing Linux was master spycraft. That, or searching the internal network for how to download everything in the Waymo SVN server. Wait, what?
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Mar 21, 2017 21:36
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Well now I'm becoming convinced to apply for Google. And speaking as someone with a CS degree, it spooks me too. Gotta get reacquainted with B-trees.
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Mar 22, 2017 20:35
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minato posted:"Perf season" is hated by many; you have to review your 6-month history and write an essay about what impact you had and how awesome you are, supported by facts and supporting statements from your peers. It's time-consuming and stressful. That sounds amazing. A soul-bearing honest self-assessment to keep you on track, and get your head out of the trees and see the forest. I don't know why anyone would hate it. Probably people who've never worked at a company whose annual reviews used a mimeographed questionnaire from 1970.
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Mar 23, 2017 23:30
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