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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I was just looking for a thread like this, thanks! I'm being considered for a senior software engineering position, but I've got to ask: What does it mean to be a senior software engineer? I'm comfortable with my skills, but I know there's more to it than that. Any veterans care to chime in? Are you mentoring the junior members of the team? Are you speaking to external teams and understanding the business value that your technical work has? Are you client facing? I'd say the border is somewhere around an engineer you can sit in front of a well defined problem and expect a professional solution some time later. Doesn't need technical mentorship to produce results, but doesn't really reach outside the technical tasks to engage in defining those problems. This is a very incomplete answer, I'd look forward to others in more traditional software shops' take on it. This is general enough to apply to engineers beyond software. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Software is eating everything and mobile is eating nearly as much. Usage patterns are shifting away from laptops and towards mobile devices in a big way and it's not a flash in the pan by any means, IMO.
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Feb 7, 2014 22:56
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pr0zac posted:So my first question is, does anyone have any suggestions on staving off the need for something new my brain seems to always get once I'm no longer completely terrified in my job? I'm lucky to have gotten a chance to move back towards security and don't want to ruin it by jumping ship for the next shiny challenge. If anyone else has had a similar feeling of wanderlust and has been able to quell it, I'd love some advice. I'm kinda similar, challenge-driven at least. I spent 7 years at my first employer, mostly by hopping teams as frequently as I could, worked out to about once a year. Spent a year in the design team, spent a year on the emulation team, followed the project when it went from design into silicon testing in the lab, etc. You can still be valuable to a large organization for years, even with a need for constant switching. I don't think that's the only pathway, but keep it in mind. If big orgs aren't appealing and you want to keep a steady flow of different problem types, a consultancy might be a great fit. The work is very different, you or someone else has to be hustling for new work a lot of the time, there's a variety of different ways clients can shaft you. But it's a new problem for every client. This year alone I've had to research a couple new platforms, brush up on my black body radiation theory, and there's a decent chance I'll be writing some raw AT commands. It's also worth noting that life circumstances can change your drive. A lot of people fresh out of college are challenge-driven and are happy to have a huge technical problem that will consume their dreams. It's much more rare to find that same drive in someone with a family and children. Big enough problems can't be tackled by challenge-driven people alone. You need someone eager for a boring 9-5 problem that lets them leave at 5 without a second thought. Don't pigeonhole yourself and think that you have to always be challenge driven. Don't disparage other professionals for having different priorities.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:30
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There's an old pen and paper game that starts with a grid of 1-9 or 1-16, the player has to have the pen on a number to start and other people call out the next number for them to draw a line to. Lines can't cross. Somehow this game came up out at lunch with some layout folks. They absolutely destroyed this game, in the way that makes you unable to imagine how there's any challenge in it for anyone else. Their skills at routing a bunch of wires around with goofy constraints mapped exceptionally well to the game. I don't think physical objects imply infantalization. I think admitting you have no germane test of the actual skill under consideration and must make a leap over to a close-but-not-quite children's timesink game is the objectionable bit. Do you actually do these things in your hiring process or are you guessin' it sounds good for folks you don't actually interview?
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Mar 20, 2014 17:34
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TodPunk posted:Not really, I used them in my description mostly as example of the goal. I've used puzzles twice, and I didn't go into the interview planning to use them. We do a design challenge. Essentially a small product we ask the candidate to architect and present. We make consumer electronics, and we scale the problem to the candidate (e.g. a senior candidate will be told to source an image sensor, with someone more junior we might provide one). It's proved a very effective filter for the type of candidates we're interviewing. Dog Jones posted:I got this job doing .NET programming, and I'm totally disappointed. I consider myself a really good programmer, it has been one of my primary interests since like middle school, and I've been teaching myself constantly since then. Dog Jones posted:They city I'm in doesn't have a ton of other programming jobs and my lease doesn't expire for months. Please give me some advice about how I can get out of this trench. Are my expectations unrealistic? HELP Suspicious Dish posted:So the Zelda puzzle where you have to walk on all the tiles? e: sorry, this was a draft for a while, posting instead of letting it languish the weekend
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Mar 28, 2014 16:34
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Go for 2. Add an "intent" section describing your generic ideal job and tailor it to every place you send.
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May 10, 2014 01:24
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Dog Jones posted:I want to get into embedded systems. I think I am qualified. In general I am a very experienced programmer. I know a lot about programming in assembly w/ several different types of instruction sets, low level optimizations, operating systems, concurrent programming. However, I have never actually done anything with embedded systems, and don't know much about electric engineering. Should I bother applying for embedded systems jobs? Depends on the job. I went from a low-level coder to an embedded position a year ago and it's been fantastic. I can't say that everyone can make that switch as my circumstances were not typical, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. Knowing 0 EE hurts you, but most team making consumer electronics have a lot more FW than EE, I've heard of ratios like 3:1. You need to be looking at bigger places. Both because you can be more isolated from the EE side and because they can afford some of the senior time to ramp you up in embedded. Make your current position and goals clear on your resume and see who calls you back. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Agree on the intent section; disagree on two pages. It makes a difference when reading and marking up a resume. It means staplers whenever you print copies out or the risk of mixing up the papers. It's a pain.
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May 14, 2014 23:54
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Hughlander posted:That last is interesting because it could be rephrased as: We only hire unemployed people with no other options. Uhhh Ever heard of a contractor? You're picking a coworker. Someone who's going to be around you 8+ hours a day for a while, hopefully. If you can pick someone in <4 hours that's grand, but there's a lot of value in making the right choice.
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May 25, 2014 15:18
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Skuto posted:Yes. Not sure what that has to do with anything. You're still looking for someone that can make himself available for a week. Which isn't going to get you any people that are already regularly employed, and contractors may not be too interested in regular employment, so you're not hiring them in any regular meaning of that word either. I agree, it's pretty ridiculous to call it "unemployed people only" when there's this other obvious contingent of folks who make a really good fit. Contracting and contract to hire is much more common for ME's, EE's (layout is $80/hr, can even source it on craigslist), and EE technicians. Sorry if I denigrated super special snowflake CS folks by suggesting this as another totally reasonable option in common use in other fields though.
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May 26, 2014 15:48
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Skuto posted:Given that a major benefit of using contractors or doing contract to hire is the lessened risk on both sides if the other side turns out to be lovely, I don't think it's a particularly sensible idea to compare hiring procedures between them and regular full time hires. Hughlander posted:Grabbing a pickup truck and heading down to Home Depot is a totally reasonable option in other fields as well. But you don't see the programming thread recommending that after you finish brushing up on Oracle you head on down to get you next DBA position. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The flip side of jumping from job to job is people quitting to recover from a job with full confidence that their job search afterwards won't be terribly prolonged. Definitely seen tons of people do it, so a 1 week trial isn't terribly outlandish, especially if the company is extremely hesitant to add an additional head at all, and is trying to keep head count down. Hughlander posted:If you assume a moderate six figure salary you can see my reaction when I rephrase that as "I have never spent less than $20k between quitting and getting an offer of full-time employment."
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May 27, 2014 14:31
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e: this was just mean
JawnV6 fucked around with this message at 17:42 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 17:38
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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. Also be aware of people who were crucial at 5 maintaining that role at 20 or 100. It's a great way for someone to go from IC to Director without any relevant training, experience, or mentorship on how to manage that personal growth. Ask a lot of questions about process, milestones, etc. how they're arrived at and how the team & management reacts when it's clear a milestone won't be met.
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Mar 5, 2015 21:31
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Munkeymon posted:Or do I try to pretend it's a normal job at a company with revenue and whatnot? Two crucial questions: 1) How much money have you raised? 2) How much money do you currently have in the bank? Raised $100M? Fantastic!! Have $50k left in the bank? Not so fantastic. You want to know if they've got a comfortable runway for the next few years and how they're managing cash flow. If they're really poor at fundraising you might be pulled off techinical work to go coddle an investor, or have the fun of a "payroll event." I'm not sure if those are in your "normal" interview question set, but they absolutely should be part of interviewing at a startup.
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Mar 16, 2015 17:38
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Munkeymon posted:OK - I just didn't want to make a protocol/etiquette mistake like talking about salary during the interview. Don't get me wrong, someone might well balk at you asking those questions. But a startup is inherenlty risky, and you want to make your decision with an understanding of as much of that risk as you can. If they want to hide that information from you, it could be a red flag.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:33
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Munkeymon posted:Also I'd be up for equity after six months, so that's cool. Does "up for equity" mean "the first of your guaranteed options begin to vest" or "we'll start to have the conversation about your points"?
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Mar 17, 2015 21:49
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Skandranon posted:I can spend all the free time coding what I want Skandranon posted:I have other obligations that I cannot drop or suspend so easily
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Sep 8, 2015 17:31
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Skandranon posted:I have free time, but I can't spend it anywhere. Location matters. How often do you wrap up a personal project, stand up in front of a half dozen strangers, and give a 2 minute pitch with a minute for Q&A afterwards? I wouldn't have bragged about my pitching skills but crunching on that and running through it in front of the group a few dozen times really helped. It helped that there was absolutely no code, I was pitching an invision prototype against Actual Mobile apps. My cats, given a rough version of the pitch at my leisure, did not provide the kind of feedback that human judges did. kitten smoothie posted:Realistically, if I have to share a $30K prize with a team of potentially 10 people, and there's 10-15 teams, that puts the expected value of my share of the prize down below what I could bill if I just worked freelance for the same time period.
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Sep 8, 2015 19:36
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kitten smoothie posted:Since I work remote I feel like I don't have a whole lot of good ways to stay connected with the local developer community where I live, so I wound up pulling the trigger and signing up.
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Sep 8, 2015 22:52
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Pollyanna posted:I do feel, however, like I'm not being supported in this manner by any senior devs or mentors. 1) Look up "set up to fail" and read last decade's MBA's describe your situation 2) Don't put any more effort, be it typing or emotional, into this job. Focus on the next one.
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Sep 9, 2015 17:28
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Pollyanna posted:Been a while since I interviewed, so I'm pretty nervous. Your entire career is shorter than gaps I've had between interviews.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:50
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Blinkz0rz posted:The hardest thing about software development isn't actually making the software, it's getting X number of people to work well enough together to do good work on time and on budget.
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Sep 16, 2015 19:47
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Yes, hardware mocking is definitely as easy as downloading a framework and plugging it in /s Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I wouldn't count on an embedded system to necessarily have a lot of extra hooks or extra memory to make it as easy as you say. There's no excuse, especially if you're doing less than half of 35 hours a week, for pretending like this is impossible.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:28
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:You linked to a testing framework, not a mocking framework. I'm saying that hardware with a bunch of debug hooks and sensitive timing won't always respond well to splicing test hardware in. FPGAs have that option if they've got space, but still have to be re-laid-out. ASICs don't, unless you built and fabricated in the electronics to do so. So for embedded systems, the difficulty of "just build something that acts exactly like the real module only it feeds fake data" can range from "exceptionally easy" to "virtually intractable" depending on how deeply you need to insert that fake data. I’ve mocked multiple hardware modules with this in a professional context and caught bugs on a beefy host. And I don’t see you addressing jack poo poo about how a HAL should protect your app code from being dependent on all those gritty details, just vacuous clucking about how hard it might be in theory. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:No, embedded C and desktop C aren't necessarily the same. Memory management, interrupts, and error handling aren't necessarily the same.
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Sep 18, 2015 23:41
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It may not apply here, but "market rate for developers" isn't one number. Systems engineering, mobile development, and embedded all have different ranges. Doesn't even get into what a ME or EE is worth. I you're joining as the first software resource, or first of your flavor, it can be odd to be asking for 30% more even when the market rate difference is a lot higher.Doh004 posted:While I don't like co-workers discussing salaries, it does happen with some regularity. ExcessBLarg! posted:Sometimes talented folks find themselves working for a company where they're doing really enjoyable, interesting work, but they're also simply being underpaid--especially at a startup that's in the breakthrough phase where revenue goes towards hiring to cope with workload increases. Although these folks are probably aware they could command higher salaries elsewhere, the work is less interesting, they like where they are, and it's "fair" in the sense that all the engineers at that company is in the same boat and the expectation is that once they pass the growth knee they'll all get raises and it'll work out.
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Sep 25, 2015 17:56
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You asked for severance, right? Should've mentioned this before, but being fired ought to be downright exciting. Ask for severance right then and there, they've got sympathy in that moment that won't persist once y'all leave the room. Them being on board while you're explicitly looking for a new place is pretty nice though. Most places try to set up those discussions for Monday, as you can immediately act on getting your next thing lined up without the awful gulf of a weekend. Wednesday is indicative of their general disarray. Start working on your narrative now. There's some element of this where they really dropped the ball in bringing you up or providing learning experiences, you just need some little story for why you're leaving on those grounds instead of the obvious. I didn't have mine ready for my last transition and made the huge mistake of giving a legitimate gripe to some other engineers at lunch instead of the blameless cover story. You know what you need to do. You're probably better at job hunting than most of us  No moping, no questioning, get your boots on the ground and start looking for a place that will do a better job managing your growth than they did.Pollyanna posted:If impostor syndrome is supposed to improve as I continue my career
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Sep 30, 2015 23:49
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Pollyanna posted:I do have a lot to say on software design theory and best practices Pollyanna posted:I don't think I can consider myself anything other than Junior or entry-level, still.  I don't understand this.
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Oct 4, 2015 20:34
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Principal engineers aren't management and aren't individual contributors. Your whole post is hyper-focused on the label "individual contributor" and ignores the gap between that and management that parallel technical growth tracks generally focus on. You're unable to formulate a definition of "leadership" that is distinct from management.
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Oct 15, 2015 22:48
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Some tech workers actually do this. It's a viable, if weird, option. Yeah, I went out sailing in a friend's home a couple weeks back. He has a slip down in Alameda, uses a bike + ferry to get to work. e: worth a pic 
JawnV6 fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 21:07
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Hadlock posted:I really, really like the sunset district by the park, but it's drat near 7 miles from the Caltrain station.
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Oct 28, 2015 03:38
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Orthogonal to the other concerns, the Potrero Hill one is at the top of the hill. To get to the 22 it's a few hundred vertical feet easy. How are your calves looking?
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Oct 28, 2015 18:36
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Pollyanna posted:1. Calling some sort of shots, or at least having some sort of freedom and independence, "I've progressed beyond the entry level and can confidently handle the tasks that are assigned to me. I want to take on larger chunks of work and start to understand the objectives behind them rather than only engaging at the task level. My previous employer was fortunate enough to have a surplus of technical leadership and didn't have a path for me to grow into that and I'm looking for a place where I can demonstrate that confidence and grow into a technical leadership position." Nobody's going to let you come in and start ordering others around on day one. It's all going to be task-oriented, at least for a few weeks while you get up to speed on the group's objectives. You want to express that you can handle that in a way that suggests you're barely suppressing a yawn and you're hungry for a chance to move up and offload some of the objective/task translation duties from management. Don't ever dog on previous employers in an interview, talk about how lucky they were to have sooooo many talented folks around that there just wasn't room for you to grow. A lot of places can't handle a mid->senior transition well and folks have no choice but to jump ship. Making it clear you're not looking for a few years of mid-level execution to pad out a resume but actually making that transition sets expectations on both sides. You're probably past the point where that would help if you're in final rounds. But there's always a way to gussy up whatever you actually want or whatever actually happened to be more palatable.
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Nov 10, 2015 18:55
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Pollyanna posted:I got asked questions during today's interview that all ended up looping back to what's going on with my job right now, so I failed you there already. The way you post here you're really good at covering a lot of angles on things, maybe just be more selective about which angles you're sharing in an interview. There's no reason a conversation about your current job has to be anything but a sunshine-soaked rainbowfest for unicorns. Pollyanna posted:This is consuming me and turning me insane, I swear. 
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Nov 11, 2015 00:22
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I went through 4 managers in my first year. All of whom left to become IC's or otherwise not manage others after that stint.Cicero posted:I'm curious how often people at other companies find themselves changing managers. Just found out today, I'll be getting my sixth manager soon, and I've been here a few months short of two years (and I haven't really changed projects at all). If the details of your story are more like "left on advice of counsel" or other indicators that the team/group as a whole is on a downward trend it's different. But a high count alone isn't noteworthy. I'd be wary If they start tossing the word "dotted line" or "matrix manager" around.
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Nov 20, 2015 23:18
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mrmcd posted:Probably the only thing non-technical managers hate more than signing a software engineer's paycheck is replacing them when they leave.
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Feb 6, 2016 23:07
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:That's because other fields have even worse interviewing practices. "Tell me about a time when..." If you haven't had a rock solid technical candidate go off the rails when you get to behavioral questions, you're really missing out.
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Mar 2, 2016 21:01
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Hughlander posted:Think I'd take umbrage at these two. Would you work at Google as a Network Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer? Why or why not? From #2, you're also saying then avoid Netflix right? What's causing the umbrage? I don't think it's an ideal state of affairs, but I don't think he's wrong.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:05
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Blinkz0rz posted:Case in point, a boss shaming you over a deadline can happen. It's not a huge deal, you just take them aside after and talk to them. Yeah, I'm sure the guy who engineered failure and used it to publicly humiliate someone is going to be totally reasonable in a 1:1 situation. There's no way they'll leverage that moment of vulnerability to cause further damage.
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Jul 22, 2016 19:01
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Blinkz0rz posted:I've noticed that in software there's a lot of really thin-skinned people and it makes me sad.
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Jul 22, 2016 19:13
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Know when a 16 or 32 bit timer in seconds or milliseconds will overflow. 16 bit seconds won't last a day, 32 bit milliseconds won't last 2 months. The words const and volatile aren't on that practice list. i.e. Would it ever make sense to declare something const volatile? Yes, but Why? Specifically for embedded or hardware control, tradeoffs between SPI/I2C. Which one's faster, which one uses more power, why do you end up using the worse one anyways.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:22
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leper khan posted:It's not immediately clear to me if there's a trick to cut down on the checks of the larger spaces by knowing the values in the smaller spaces, TooMuchAbstraction posted:This is basically just knowing roughly what 2^n is for certain n and being able to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. It can be helpful to remember that every 10 powers of 2 is approximately the same as multiplying by 1000 (2^10 ~= 1000, 2^20 ~= 1 million, etc.). For this kind of thing, being able to approximate is fine (usually) -- there's 86400 seconds in a day but you can call that roughly 100k. You sound more than ready TMA. Good answers, clear reasoning, admitting when you don't know something . And finally, even if you blow this one, there's more lined up soon.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:17
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 08:09 |
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An internal recruiter gets you to sign. They are not your advocate by any stretch of the imagination.
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Aug 16, 2016 04:30
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