Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

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, "Work/life integration" is the preferred nomenclature of HBR hipsters. Depending on what the actual problems were, it might be better to avoid either term and be specific instead about how they prevented you from doing anything outside of work. In the past, I've couched this in language like "they expected me to be available 24/7 for them but weren't willing to accommodate any of my emergencies" because it helps eke out the company's attitudes towards unofficial time off, remote work, and employee burnout.

That said, anyone running a technology organization at a startup and looking for a lifer employee is a special kind of delusional. You want people who will stick around when the going gets tough, but anyone looking to spend 10 years at a company is probably going to do it at a stable company that makes it easy to retire there, not at a startup.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Dec 13, 2014

# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 06:01

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:50

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Blotto Skorzany posted:

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

That's exactly correct, exactly what I'm saying and exactly why it's a problematic thing to tell some interviewers. Most employers with lean practices are looking for employees who are able to participate in a two-way give-and-take instead of declaring rigid boundaries about when they are and aren't available. Like, "hey, as long as you're available to help us with emergencies when the poo poo hits the fan, we don't care if you take off at 3 PM on Tuesday to catch your kid's basketball game."

I'm probably doing a lovely job of explaining what I mean, so here's a Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ronashkenas/2012/10/19/forget-work-life-balance-its-time-for-work-life-blend/

This doesn't mean that you have to blindly accept this, of course; there's lots of positions out there that don't require this type of interplay between work and home life. But do be aware that this is the expectation of many smaller companies, particularly startups, and word your responses accordingly when interviewing.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 21:50

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Blinkz0rz posted:

Two-way give-and-take is codeword for "we give you a phone and require you to check your email 24/7 and you take it with a smile" or "we give you a meeting while you're on your vacation you take the call because if you don't you lose your job."

Companies that expect that sort of thing are awful. Don't work at them. You're only justifying their practices.

You can't apply a generalization like that to the whole software industry. There are situations where that's not the norm and there's no reason to do it -- for example, companies who produce installable, on-premises software or consumer products like single-player games generally have very little legitimate reason to exert this kind of time pressure. On the other side you have service-oriented online products that are directly consumer-facing, and major problems immediately lead to permanent loss of users and unrecoverable damage to the revenue stream. If you're a frontend HTML/CSS developer you should expect not to be called after you go home for the day. On the other hand, if you're responsible for the messaging layer and something goes south and takes out the ability for production services to talk to each other, you bet your rear end you're going to be on the conference call if the poo poo hits the fan, especially in a smaller company.

If your company has risky testing/deployment practices that lead to this happening all the time, that's lovely management and a major organizational problem independent of your actual availability. People shouldn't stand for that; they should work to change that part of the culture/process or find a better work environment. But at the same time, don't go on a date and volunteer that your last relationship ended because your partner's life was getting too difficult. Figure out a way to make it about the broken processes, not about how those processes made you feel.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2014 21:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

down with slavery posted:

I guess if you consider shareholders or investors producers, then sure. But for the rest of us with a brain, not really. The people who make capital investments are again, almost by definition, attempting to return something GREATER than the investment put in. That's why they call it an investment, hth

The disputed premise is true for non-scalable commodities, like car tires produced by laborers in a factory. The idea doesn't make any sense at all with products that have scalable monetization, like software, and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny in even the most basic other cases. Steps in the value chain aren't additive.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 06:21

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

down with slavery posted:

How does it not make sense? Do you think most tech VCs aren't trying to return more than their original investment? That's pretty much what VC is.

It has nothing to do with steps in the value chain being additive (which I said nothing about might I add)

Capital investment is about returns. It's right there in the name.

I was referring to your original point about companies making money by paying employees less than the value they produce. This idea requires a reductionist mindset in which the value of labor within an organization is strictly additive (an organization or a product is solely the sum of its constituent parts), and there's no inherent worth in managing the value chain to produce multiplicative results. In other words: to buy this, you have to outright reject the idea that the product is worth more than the sum of its parts.

This discussion is getting kind of LF though, so I'm gonna leave this point alone.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 07:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Blinkz0rz posted:

It's not even "gently caress the man." Companies want to pay you the minimum amount possible to keep you there. That's a point of fact. Arguing against it is like arguing that gravity doesn't exist.

You're saying this like showing up and being a body in a chair is the be-all, end-all of the relationship between compensation and employee morale/productivity. Yeah, there's obviously going to be an upper bound somewhere on what someone is willing to pay you, but it's absurd to characterize the whole of employee compensation as being based on retention and nothing else.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Dec 15, 2014

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 19:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cryolite posted:

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?

Sure, though it can be hard to build credibility in a new stack that also has lots of experienced developers in it already -- who's going to pay you $200k when someone else can earn the same salary but hit the ground running, etc. Your best bet at moving into something interesting that still has that high salary out of the gate is to find an area where everyone needs experienced developers but absolutely no one has any loving clue what they're doing because the tech is too new. WebRTC is definitely one of those domains right now that's about to explode, and if you have good generalist developer skills (frontend, backend, messaging, distributed systems, etc.) you're pretty much the definition of ideal an early-stage startup employee.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2015 02:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Startups aren't all the same. There's various phases of growth (five man, 20 man, 100, etc.). Find out how many clients they have, their revenue, and their growth projections, and see if their projections make sense. Companies with established clients and revenue (instead of bleeding VC capital dry) must be doing something right.

Also, honestly, pretend equity doesn't exist. Equity is great if the company grows large enough and if you're around long enough for it to matter, but otherwise you have to live for now. It's one thing to take a pay cut for the benefit of being able to work on interesting problems, but evaluate the opportunity just on that, and not the mythical equity money that might or might not (probably not) come.

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.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Mar 5, 2015

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 22:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Blotto Skorzany posted:

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.

1-year cliffs are very common. 3-year cliffs are much less common, but seen frequently enough that it bears mentioning. I've turned down offers with them in the last few years, though they've most often been on options packages that are worthless poo poo to begin with.

Acceleration is potentially important, given the trajectory of the company. If they're positioning themselves for an acquisition, it's very important. If their financial endgame is to sustain organic growth and earn a consistent revenue stream, it might be completely irrelevant. Either way, it doesn't hurt to ask about/for such a clause.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 22:32

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

NovemberMike posted:

If you're working remotely the company should be willing to pay for your work setup, up to things like an Aeron chair and a nice desk. It just isn't a huge cost for the company and they'd be paying that anyway for an on-site employee.

On-site, it's a company asset that lives in the office even though employees might come and go. Many companies aren't eager to expense thousand-dollar things that can't be easily shipped back.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2015 20:58

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Skandranon posted:

If they can't trust someone they pay 100k with a $2000 laptop, then they have serious issues.

Read that post you quoted again.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2015 00:49

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Space Whale posted:

Amazon jiggled the bait again and I bit.

What should I watch out for? I'm to speak to the team responsible for the APIs and such for outside vendors that use amazon to sell their stuff.

Amazon's well-known for being a very high-pressure environment that uses stack ranking as the driving mechanism for performance reviews, so be aware of that going in.

# ¿ May 18, 2015 22:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Safe and Secure! posted:

Don't all the huge companies do that? Amazon, Google and Microsoft do it, and I thought I heard that Facebook does it, too.

I have strong feelings on stack ranking regardless of what a handful of companies are pulling from Jack Welch's experiences running GE in the eighties.

Interestingly, Amazon's Zappos division just disposed of all the full-time managers in their organization altogether and moved to Holacracy.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 07:56 on May 19, 2015

# ¿ May 19, 2015 07:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

pr0zac posted:

You can get a mechanical keyboard that isn't deafeningly loud dude. Browns feel almost exactly like blues and are quiet enough to use in an office. Clears are supposed to be real nice too.

I work from home and the Browns in my Das Keyboard don't make my wife want to murder me. It's not just for people in crowded offices!

# ¿ May 19, 2015 16:48

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

sarehu posted:

Show up in mourning dress just to be safe.

Fixed that for you.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 02:54

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

wins32767 posted:

Really understanding business value is #1 on the list. Meet with and listen to pretty much everyone you can in your company and customers. Sales, accounting, customer service, support, everyone. Listen to their problems and figure out how your projects can solve them. The best designed and written software in the world can be worthless if it solves the wrong problem. Understanding business value also allows you to understand the problems your boss has and lets you help solve them which makes you indispensable.

Clear communications and organization are probably #2 and #3.

As you talk to all those people, make sure you take direction on priority from people who understand the entire business (i.e. executives), because it doesn't do you any good to focus all your efforts on automating an underperforming division that's probably going to be gone next year anyway.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 02:24

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

ultrafilter posted:

CNN's cost of living calculator still says that Manhattan is noticeably more expensive than San Francisco, so you should take it with a grain of salt.

Due to recent gentrification, Manhattan's pretty close to SF levels of ridiculous until you get way up north of Washington Heights. A 1Br/1Ba in a previously reasonable area like Nolita is going for close to $3,000/mo. nowadays. You can expect to pay upwards of $2,500 even in Harlem. It's not $3,000+/mo. for a studio in San Mateo, but it's about on par with Redwood City or Milpitas.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 04:10

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

ultrafilter posted:

Both cities are expensive for sure, but the COL calculator in question says that a $100k salary in SF is equivalent to $135k in Manhattan. That was probably correct 3-4 years ago, but it's definitely not right now.

Oof, yeah, that's a disparity that's got to be at least a decade out of date. I don't think cost of living between the cities has been on an even keel since maybe 2007 or 2008. The Bay Area blew up when smartphones got into everyone's hands.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 19:50

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cicero posted:

It depends on whether you're comparing SF to NYC or SF to Manhattan.

Yeah, that's true, I focused on Manhattan while including the outlying areas near SF. Obviously cost of living is a lot cheaper in the non-hipster neighborhoods of the outer boroughs. In terms of neighborhood quality you'd have a hard time comparing most of the Bronx to anywhere unless you start looking at rents on the east side of the Bay.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jun 25, 2015

# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 23:49

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cryolite posted:

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?

Outside of weird niches, salaries differ a lot more by company than by particular technology. That said, a lot of mobile products are making a lot of money right now.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 16:04

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

On the hiring side, though, finding a competent Android developer seems a lot harder than finding a competent iOS developer, and they seem to like it a bit less. So I think there might be incentive for a lot of companies to pay more for Android devs, if they're desperate. I recall one dev (who didn't get hired) asking for 33% more than the salary cap at the time.

Sure, but technology-specific salaries are fleeting. By the time you see a high salary across the board in an industry and say to yourself, "wow, I've got to get in on this," it's probably too late to catch it on the upswing. It's better to think in terms of what will give you long-term career trajectory.

And for whatever it's worth:

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 17:54

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

I had 20 when I worked for Time Inc., and man, do I miss it.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 04:28

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Travis CI has an interesting take on unlimited vacation, where they enforce a mandatory minimum vacation policy to make it clear this policy isn't about peer pressure to use less vacation time.

http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-vacation-policy.html

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 18:47

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Paolomania posted:

If you are interviewing at GOOG they will hand you a link to a page describing everything they expect you to know - which is mostly just a list of fundamental undergrad CS concepts. You might be expected to know what a red black tree is and what some of its properties are but I doubt an interviewer would ask you to implement one. An actual technical task would more likely be a FizzBuzz that then mutates with more and more requirements like concurrency and scale. The interviewers are not trying to trick, or intimidate you - they are just trying to find answers to questions like: are you actually an engineer? do you know what you are talking about? do you have an understanding of the types of problems big G faces? how well do you collaborate and deal with changing requirements? Puzzles and memory-checks on obscure concepts answer none of these questions.

Also, they only hire people who have the patience to get jerked around by their recruiting process for five months before being given an actual yes/no answer.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 18:21

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

sarehu posted:

Never seen this happen to people I know.

Maybe they've changed their recruiting attitudes recently? I'm based out of New York, and I can refer you to at least half a dozen people who fit this category. I also was lining up for interviews there some number of years ago and the recruiter just stopped answering my emails and voice mails one day with no communication or explanation. It's like they make things deliberately difficult so they only hire Googledrones who are dead-set on working for Google instead of anywhere else.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 19:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

minato posted:

Stats show that 80% of people who accept a counter-offer will quit within a year anyway. The money might be better, but it rarely fixes the systemic issues that caused the person to want to leave in the first place.

The statistic is that they'll quit or be laid off/let go within the next 12 months. This is an important weasely distinction that HR professionals love to gloss over. The wording is also misleading -- this isn't 80% of people at all, this is incidents. Serial job-hoppers who do this over and over and over as they trade up for higher-paying jobs skew the statistics quite a bit upward.

That aside, this assumes that there are systemic issues that make the employee want to leave, of course. There are lots of cases where a competent, talented person is making just under what they need to be making to support their life goals (buy a house, save a budgeted $X a month for kids' college, etc.) and it's the employer's job to understand which employee needs they aren't currently meeting before preparing a counter-offer.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 04:57

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

baquerd posted:

Except those do exist, the effect of which is particularly pronounced in companies that are not typically known for hiring top talent. There are a lot of just "OK" developers out there that can fill out teams and do competent work, but don't have any particular brilliance of design, rapidity of implementation, or knack for optimization. If anything, these people are typically under-compensated for the value they provide, and the presence of a union would drive them away.

Unless of course you have a fair and objective method of measuring productivity and contributions?

These are not the inborn traits of a Programmer God, and while these skills can be mastered in an individual setting, they are best learned and fostered through team structures and dynamics that foster growth and personal development. Show me a team with a 10X Developer on it and I'll show you a broken team that doesn't know how to mentor or delegate.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 13:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Skandranon posted:

It's not that simple. A lot of people are in the field for the wrong reasons, and everyone (but them, it seems) suffers because of it.

Okay, fair, there are a lot of really bad developers out in the world who show no impetus to ever improve or modernize their skills.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 16:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cryolite posted:

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.

It's really not, it's pretty rough across the board and heavily favors 1099 contractors that don't need to be paid any benefits. People with pre-existing Top Secret clearances get to write their own paychecks, though.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2015 02:11

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

mrmcd posted:

Edit: Also a couple months is not that big a hole.

Yeah, people are unemployed all the time. This becomes an issue if you're constantly unemployed in between jobs on your resume (suggesting that you don't appear to be leaving these jobs of your own volition) or if you're very long-time unemployed (suggesting that no one else you've interviewed with has wanted you).

e: were you the guy that, er, removed something from the premises of the Church of Scientology in NYC?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2015 03:42

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Ithaqua posted:

Haha, yes he was. Ah, the good old NYC goonmeets.

The good old days of 120 people showing up at a restaurant without a reservation.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2015 04:06

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

JawnV6 posted:

It really is invigorating to be around young blood undeterred by failure. I found it was a nice mix of ideas that I never would've considered due to their complete disconnect from reality and ideas that I never would've considered because of my complete disconnect from their reality.

this is definitely the best thing i learned from working at an early-stage startup

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 23:25

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

baquerd posted:

Well, there's a very fine line there, I wouldn't discount feedback of this sort entirely because it most likely means there's room to improve if nothing else. If you're not seeing a therapist at least a few times a year, they can be very helpful as neutral observers to the way you come across.

I would suffix this by saying that different rules apply to interpreting this kind of feedback if you're a woman, also. Women routinely receive personality-oriented complaints, particularly about tone and communication style, in performance reviews -- very significantly more than men do. Women should consider the difference between real issues with communication style versus systemic bias in the workplace.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 22:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Pollyanna posted:

No one is offended by a thank you email. Someone might get offended due to the lack of one, and whether you find that reasonable or not/a person worth working under, is up to you.

What do we know about Twitter, and their Boston campus in particular? They seem to be looking for engineers to join their teams, and I'm curious if Twitter has the same standup-y environment as other places, re: work-life balance, PTO and benefits, whatever's important for 401k stuff.

Glassdoor suggests their PTO is good, with great maternity/paternity leave, 401k match is new to the company as of 2014 and is a small match percentage compared to many other companies, and out of the Tweeps I know I haven't heard anyone complain about work-life balance there. I've heard complaints about product direction shifting on a moment's notice, but hey, tech company.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 15:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Cicero posted:

Definitely don't worry about moving on from your current company. They'll live.

And if they don't, were they a stable workplace to begin with? :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 19:02

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

mrmcd posted:

You guys.

I decided to teach myself some new stuff since I'm bored, and I'm going through nodejs tutorials. I can't tell if I'm old of if this is possibly to dumbest way to design software and the world has gone crazy.

Please help.

Async is great, JavaScript is terrible, at least learn Node.js with promises instead of callbacks nested 10 tabs deep

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 20:30

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

piratepilates posted:

Still not half as bad as take home programming assignments you spend a few hours on and never hear back about.

If any place is going to ask me for one of those I'm just going to pass on it right away, life's too short for that poo poo.

There's absolutely no better indicator that a company doesn't value your time. Better to find out before you start.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 19:04

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

School of How posted:

Does anybody here work a job with minimal work hours? My current gig is the best, I basically come in every Monday through Thursday at 2PM, and leave by 5PM. Basically a 12 hour work week. I've been doing this for the past 2.5 years or so. I really like his work schedule (for obvious reasons) but I feel like this work schedule is starting to get to me. I feel like my next job switch is coming up, and am afraid my next job is going to require me to do a full 8 hour work week, which I really don't want to do. Basically the reason why my boss lets me work so few hours is because I always deliver working code every day. Most programmers can't close a single ticket unless you give them one week or more to do it. My boss can come to me with a problem, and I can usually get it done within 10 or 15 minutes, and that includes testing and deployment. Is it possible to find a job that where I can come and go as I please as long as I get all work done?

Maybe it's all my time in startup land jading me here, but I'm having a hard time understanding how this happens. Are all your coworkers completely incompetent at their jobs? Does the company literally run out of things for you to do? The project team I'm working on is constantly cutting user stories from the roadmap because there will absolutely never be enough person-hours in a week to get done everything that we want.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 14:24

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

School of How posted:

I'm the only programmer. Its actually more efficient for there to be one programmer than for there to be a team in some situations. Because I wrote all the code, I'm just as capable as anyone else to review my own code.Maybe some people couldn't work under those conditions, but I've adjusted to it after doing it for so many months.

By the way, when I first started workingat this place, it may have took me a week to do a single story that I can not do in 20 seconds. What changed? When I first started, I didn't know the codebase very well (as it was writen by my at-the-time coworkers). Only after reading over the code over and over again, I started being able to get stuff done super fast.

Also, in response to the first part of your post (which is to another poster): an alternate way of getting a raise is to ask to work less hours. Thats effectively how I got the work situation I got today. Instead of asking for double the pay, I asked to work half the hours.

Have you ever worked as part of a development team before?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 18:45

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:50

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Whether it's appropriate for your current environment or not, with your description of this development workflow I'd be more concerned about being able to land any dev job rather than one that fits the hours you want to work

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 20:14

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

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