Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pie Colony posted:

yeah, all those sites count as free time. i get a feeling just about everyone does this, but i'm wondering just how much they do it as a non-junior.

One of the C++ components I'm working with takes fifteen minutes to build+link, so I generally get a lot more internet done when I'm working on that component, but I tend to prioritize programming related blogs so I don't get out of the flow. I'm probably solidly into the above 40 hours a week group even after all that thanks to working on a deathmarch project.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 18:27

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 09:51

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Plorkyeran posted:

It's okay, you're in good company.

Such as PHP.

at least there are unit tests

# ¿ Mar 28, 2014 02:07

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

baquerd posted:

The opportunity is to move into a full-time architect role (within the same organization), where I will no longer have direct reports and I will no longer do any direct implementation

It's difficult to act as an architect without direct reports and with staying apart from actual implementation. I've worked with architects without direct reports before and the big problems are
a) Developers taking your design, not understanding it, and implementing it incorrectly, then their manager protecting them because they don't understand the problem.
b) Developers doing whatever the hell they want in the actual released product without telling you.
c) You getting blamed when A or B happens.

But perhaps these are just organizational issues.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2014 13:22

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Blinkz0rz posted:

I feel like I'm arguing against someone who can't fathom the idea that companies actively try to make money.

Given a chance, all companies will gladly reduce labor costs because it's easier than trying to find new revenue. If that means dumping more responsibility on people and not paying them for it, or requiring employees to work during their vacations any company would absolutely jump on that train.

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.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 02:44

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Luigi Thirty posted:

The company that hired me has entry-level software developers split time between doing support/bug hunting for our product and simple development tasks, with an Associate Software Engineer job title. My salary was very low, but whatever, it's my first job out of college. Six months later, they were impressed enough with my abilities that they promoted me and dropped the Associate from my job title. I'm just a Software Engineer and I no longer do any technical support, just development.

They sent me a new offer letter today with this new job title and it said that there is no increase in salary for the new position. I don't think that's normal but I also don't have any experience to tell me if that is the case. My initial reaction was that I was insulted and that I'm so underpaid at this position that I'm afraid I'm gimping my earning potential for the rest of my career. I want to tell them to go gently caress themselves but I don't think that's a very good option for the immediate future. Now I know why nobody stays at this company more than a year. Am... am I supposed to be negotating this? I don't even know.

Promotions typically aren't salary increases anymore, just more work and a potentially better job later. You should ask for a salary increase, but typically, the payoff comes when you switch jobs.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 10:00

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Vulture Culture posted:

I really hope Rust takes off soon because it has basically everything that makes Go good but also isn't awful in every other way

I've found a really good oracle for knowing whether or not a development tool is going to be a piece of crap is "did google make this?" If the answer is yes, then don't use it in your project for the love of god.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2015 00:38

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Plorkyeran posted:

GWT is close to ten years old and is still being used for new projects at Google, so worrying about it being canceled is pretty dumb.

All of the things that they've said use it are pretty awful, so I suspect there's other good reasons to avoid it, though.

Well it isn't just GWT - I'd rack up Google Closure and the Closure Compiler, Go, and Angular in the horrible google tools category as well (allthough I'm going to give Angular 2 a try most likely because it looks like they agreed with me about the problems with Angular 1.x)

# ¿ Sep 23, 2015 12:30

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Hadlock posted:

Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k.

I really want to head out there and live the Silicon Valley startup dream, but want to make sure this is a calculated risk before relocating 1500 miles across the country in a place where I can't afford to buy a house.

Even if they go under, it's not like you wouldn't have another job within a week or so.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 13:29

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Twerk from Home posted:

Admittedly, TDD owns bones.

Well you have to use TDD with ruby because you need unit tests or ruby falls apart. With typed languages unit tests aren't as useful as they are in dynamic languages.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2015 23:35

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Hadlock posted:

Huh I put in my two weeks notice at my current job and they made a very generous counter offer and I turned that down, which got the attention of the director, so I got 90 minutes of 1-on-1 face time with him today (which is unheard of) where I got to air my grievances and my proposed solutions to them which he was on board with. Apparently, also I've made a very good impression on the new CIO the couple of times I've been in the elevator with him and the handful of meetings I've been in with him where I am a very vocal straight shooter on problem issues. The CIO is very keen not to loose me. So they're looking at a ~40% raise + sizable retention bonus. Also it sounds like there's a hint of ego where the director doesn't want west coast companies stealing talent away from a big company with money. Also we're in the middle of a huge 2-year merger and I'm the key guy in a key group that needs about 18 months to train my replacement.

Neither company knows how much they're bidding against and my current employer doesn't even know who they're bidding against. I appear to hold all the cards. This is kind of awesome.

Man, that's the thing about counter-offers - sometimes they offer you a positively ridiculous amount of money to not leave. It's also not like you're immediately setting yourself to get fired once they actually find a replacement (like the conventional wisdom says) - they're probably perfectly willing to let you work at un-loving your workplace, listen to your suggestions, etc.

However... you could just work somewhere where things aren't hosed up. It'll be a lot less stressful. You wanted to quit for a reason, and that reason isn't going to go away just because you're getting more money.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2015 13:22

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Skandranon posted:

Maybe they think you are great, and have just woken up to the truth of this, but odds are they are scared and don't want some timeline affected, so they are throwing money at you to make the fear go away. Once that's gone, you'll likely start losing traction on the things you want fixed and will become frustrated again. And maybe they try firing you now because you are a) disloyal and b) paid 40% more than they think they can get someone to replace you and/or c) are bitter that you could make them so scared in the first place.

The conventional wisdom assumes that you're working for people who can actually think strategically, and that's rarely the case in corporate america nowadays.

I took a counter offer that was contingent on paid relocation to a different state - two weeks after I moved, my boss quits. My boss's boss (the guy who got me the counter offer) also quit. I changed departments, and that boss got fired. I got another boss. That one got fired.... In two years, I've had seven different managers and no one who remembers that I was disloyal is still with the company, and I managed to pocket like 50k in bonus, a full paid relocation to a cheaper area with half the cost of living of the place I was living before, and a 40k raise.

However, even after that, I'm STILL not sure it was worth it because of how much work I've had to do in the last two years.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2015 03:48

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

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).

I've had six official "HR" managers in two years, and probably a dozen if you count people I actually work for.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2015 11:14

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pollyanna posted:

My parents are skeptical of my job (which has improved quite a bit recently!) and are starting to not-so-subtly push me into going back to school/the military via getting an infosec job (long story). My impression of infosec as a field and industry is kinda negative. Really, the only reason it's being suggested is "people are getting hacked lots!" therefore job security, but that says to me to avoid the field instead of getting into it.

Am I correct in my impression of it? Given the infosec thread in SH/SC and all the insanity over it in the news, I'm kinda put off by the prospect.

Infosec is a lot like working QA in that you write a bunch of documentation and get blamed for things out of your control. Infosec is like games programming in that it's clouded with talented autists willing to work for next to nothing. There also just aren't that many jobs compared with more general it and software roles. You can fall into infosec roles if you know someone (that's how I got into data forensics before becoming a software developer, just my dad knowing a guy) but putting buttons on Web pages beats the he'll out of running encase and cataloging all the child porn on hard drives, believe me.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2016 00:47

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Doghouse posted:

So uhhh...I probably shouldn't watch Netflix while I'm working at the office right? I really want to. I've been working exclusively on performance enhancements for this old WPF app and the tedium is driving me crazy.

I worked with a mid-thirties dude who watched dragon ball z at the office all day at work while waiting for stuff to compile. No one really seemed to mind.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2016 17:39

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

sarehu posted:

Keeping the total annual number of H1B's fixed, I think auctioning off H1B's or increasing the price floor is bad for good developers, because it means that all the H1B's will have to be high quality developer spots, instead of being worthless $60K retards. Thus lowering the demand for good non-H1B developers. So I'm kind of worried.

Actually, the highest paid H1Bs are doctors - like you can have a cardiologist, radiologist, etc. Only approximately 1000 H1Bs in the history of the H1B program were filed for software engineers that made >130k.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 03:37

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

sarehu posted:

You don't seem to be contradicting what I am saying. What I'm saying is, if nobody can get cheap $60k H1B's, that'll leave expensive H1B's which come in and compete on the high end of the market.

Surely changing the h1b law will will these mythical 130k+ h1b software engineers into existence.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 04:15

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Jose Valasquez posted:

Or c) MCSB just moves everything to India

Realistically you can pay like 40k for someone offshore that you could get onshore for 100k salary as a h1b worker (and that isn't including full loaded cost of having the dude in the office.) It'll be cheaper to offshore in most cases.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 14:07

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

oliveoil posted:

I want to get a job as a "senior" (i.e., entry level + 2 promotions) software engineer at a company like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Uber, etc. within the next year. I currently work as a junior and have been at the junior rank for almost 3 years, but I think my chances of getting promoted this year are good since I've been doing mid-level stuff for a while, have been doing more of it recently, and will continue to do more indefinitely. So I'm thinking, I'm not really aiming for +2 levels of promotion by changing jobs - I'm realistically aiming for +1 level.

So what can I learn in the next year to be able to ace an interview for a senior-level engineer position in say, February 2018? I figure I'll try to do that stuff, take a shot at several companies six months from now (and probably fail, but still... maybe I get a better mid-level offer and either take it or negotiate a raise?) and and if that doesn't work out, I'll take another shot six months later.

My impression of what it takes to ace such an interview is to have my data structures and algorithms + coding knowledge down perfect, plus be able to design a system (e.g., for a question like "design twitter!") at a high level and drill down into any part of it, to the point that if I claim that I want to rely on a distributed key-value store or something for some feature, I can answer "oh, well how would that key-value store work?" with stuff like an explanation of paxos and file system journaling or whatever people who design databases do. Basically, if I understand right, I need to be able to design a system using common high-level tools and components like relational databases or hadoop or streaming event processing pipelines or map reduces or messaging queues and explain in detail, down to nitty-gritty details like "these are the processes I'd write and run if I had to implement this messaging queue, this is how I'd guarantee at least once delivery, this is how I'd guarantee a 100ms delivery time, this is how I'd implement push notifications so every mobile device gets those within 100ms, [etc]".

If I knew how to do that and actually had the skills build each of those pieces and explain how I'd do so, would that sound right for getting through typical senior engineer interviews at the big tech companies?

I think the timeline seems fine, as I've heard people in senior positions usually have like 3-5 years of experience if they joined these companies right out of school. 3 years if they were ridiculously fast at getting promoted, 5 years if they were a bit slower. A year from now I'll have almost 4 years of experience, so I'll be in that range, but I don't see myself getting enough project work to hit senior in my current company within the next 2 years (if it takes me 3 years at this company to go junior -> mid, then I can probably expect 3-4 years to go mid -> senior... yuck), so I think I need to start planning how to reach that level elsewhere.

a) "Senior" isn't comparable company to company, silicon valley or not. There are companies where you can get "senior" with literally zero commercial programming experience just by having a master's degree/phD, for instance.
b) If you stay in a job for four years at the beginning of your career, especially without getting promoted, then you're not maximizing your salary potential. Hopping every couple of years or so will improve your salary, allow you to learn new things, and help you avoid doing code janitor work.
c) Optimize for salary as opposed to title.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2017 16:44

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pollyanna posted:

Say I want to work with a specific technology (language, framework, etc.), or with a particular range of technologies. Should I look for jobs specifically about working with those technologies, or is it better to get any job that I qualify for and work on that technology on the side? The problem with the latter approach is that I don't see how to spin that into a job in that technology.

If you're senior enough to make technology choices, you can just pick a new technology to use for a project and learn it at work.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 16:56

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I made the same decision back in 2008, and what I've seen of web development changes since then hasn't really affected my opinion any.

The tools are way better now than they were in 2008, but what people are using them to do is really stupid. The problem with modern web development is that the whole SPA thing is encouraging businesses to make really huge, crappy web apps with dozens of megs of javascript that by all rights should be desktop applications, and it sucks doing front end on that kind of project.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 00:06

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Steve French posted:

Some of the stuff I don't know enough about to know whether a ban is reasonable, but I'd agree with you that the only one I specifically disagree with is DI, and maybe "Data operations in code instead of the database", but mainly because that's pretty vague to me and I'm not exactly sure what it means to them without more context.

I'm interpreting "data operations in code instead of the database" to mean "all CRUD is stored procedures and the application layer should just invokes those stored procedures to do whatever it needs to do. don't use ORM or codefirst style stuff to do database work"

# ¿ May 23, 2017 23:10

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Che Delilas posted:

My current company has a LOT of mission-critical logic in sprocs (that are themselves chains of calls to other sprocs that usually go at least 5 deep) and they're a screaming nightmare to debug most of the time. Somebody in our company's early days was really comfortable with SQL and very little else so we get this mess.

I'd honestly be interested to know what stored procedures are good for these days. Is performance the only real improvement anymore, and how gargantuan a system do you have to have for it to be worth the trouble?

The advantage of using stored procedures for database stuff is that the application layer of a product tends to go stale quicker than the database, and so if you need to replace your application layer (or add another one to support some other new technology), it's much easier just to make the new application layer to use the old stored procs than porting a bunch of stuff based on, say, a specific ORM.

The disadvantage is that debugging and unit testing stored procedures sucks.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 02:03

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Industry vets: what % of your jobs (or % of your time spent working, as I realize jobs can obviously change) would you say was "good"?

I'm coming up on year four of a job that was rough in the beginning, got better in the middle, and is awful now to the point where I fantasize about losing my job daily.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 02:08

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

rsjr posted:

There's a large difference between doing a little self research and asking for advice vs. a history of Livejournal, stream of conscious, you won't believe the new dumb poo poo I did at work today / had happen to me.

The lack of perspective on just how good the OP has it -- graduated from a boot camp, writing if-statements in language of choice and will probably make six figures in most large markets -- and wanting to know if it's the right career that can let you buy stuff. Do you have any idea what the average income is for most people and how cushy your job is?

Please keep treating this person with kid gloves. It'd be awful if they went to a different community to ask for permission to work on their resume and job hunts while taking money from their current employer.

Posting like that is how a forum community dies.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2017 19:42

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

I think assigning a homework project isn't so great because that can take a significant amount of time and they could always just hire someone off the internet to do the project.

One idea I'm toying with is rather than making people do a take home assignment, give them a functional toy project that has a relatively simple bug for someone with experience to fix, and maybe some structural problems that betray unfamiliarity with language features (maybe it's not using Using blocks for connections, maybe the front end js doesn't understand promises and just does everything in callbacks, maybe it uses pokemon exception handling) and ask them to fix the bug and identify refactoring ideas (you would obviously have to be up front and say that the project intentionally sucks and isn't representative of ordinary production code).

I think that could be good because:
a) You could do that onsite without time commitment of more than an hour or so.
b) The interview task corresponds with the task you're hiring the person to do.
c) The task would be resistant to the bad kind of googling (e.g. the kind where you just find the project/solution on the internet)
d) It would be less stressful than the "make a problem from scratch" or the "quiz boy" style questioning, yet could immediately identify experience (e.g. does the candidate try to express the problem as a failing unit test, does the candidate know how to use the debugger adequately, does the candidate recognize the things that are obviously stupid about the project but still function)

# ¿ Jul 16, 2017 19:16

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pollyanna posted:

AthenaHealth I've heard is pretty good. I think they've reached out before, but that was a while ago. Maybe I'll go looking specifically for health care places, if they're in need of devs I'm up for the challenge. It'll depend a lot on work conditions and how un-stupid the dev process is tho (honestly though I'm reaching the point where it's probably better to just deal with the stupidity and keep at something for a long time).

I thought I could put up with stupid too - the problem is that if you look at a company and think immediately "oh boy, something stupid is going on," you don't know the understand the depths. Stupidity is fractal - you may think you immediately grasp how stupid a company process is, but as you zoom in and gain more understanding, you'll learn more and more how stupid something can be. I have seen things so stupid that I have seriously wondered whether or not the company I worked for was some kind of psychological experiment and questioned the nature of reality (although mental health leave is pretty sweet if you can swing it.) Don't work for stupid companies as a FTE for extended periods of time or you will go crazy.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 05:24

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Portland Sucks posted:

Yeah I'm aware that my CS background doesn't translate to doing sysadmin stuff. I've been interested in infosec stuff for years and have a decent nonprofessional understanding of networking fundamentals from that perspective, but I really don't know the first thing about running a network. I guess I'm looking at this as a potential to explore a career path I'm potentially interested in and in the mean time help clean up the low hanging fruit. If I expressed interest in taking over this role I'm pretty confident they'd be willing to invest in me the resources to get it done. When things are as bad as they are any progress makes me look good so it's not like I'd need to become a first class sysadmin over night. I guess on the flip side if we brought someone who is already competent in to fill the role I'd have someone to learn from.

I don't think you're in the right thread, but I'll answer anyway - It really depends on "do you want to do sysadmin or do you want to develop?" That situation honestly sounds real hosed up - if you wanted to learn how to sysadmin, you'd probably be better off working at a place where things are semi-functional. It depends on your role now though - if you're just some random intern at the company and trying to score a full-time gig, it might be worth a shot, but if you're a software engineer already, that seems like a terrible transition to make..

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 00:44

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

How come all these HN or whatever salary threads are full of people making like a quarter million or more in a year and yet actual job listings I see all tend to top out at like 120?

look for the listings that don't list the salary and just say "generous." if you see the salary listed in the job posting it's probably not going to pay well.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2017 11:21

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

Doesn't this have the problem where their idea of "generous" might also just be trash?

yep, but unfortunately, that's life.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 04:16

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

kitten smoothie posted:

I got bit by this, even within the same company.

About a year and a half into my first job out of college, they saw me having mopped up messes created by a terrible teammate. My boss complimented me on rescuing us from problems and told me I had a raise coming. What they did was fire that teammate and give me the "Senior Engineer" role that he formerly occupied. The new title came with a 10% pay raise.

Subsequent to then, they had significant trouble getting any sort of further merit raise for me. The HR office that reviewed raise requests said "we're not approving this higher salary for a senior engineer with such few years of total job experience."

Having an inflated title early in your career can lead to other problems. I did something incredibly stupid and totally against the advice anyone would give you in this thread - I accepted a counter-offer that would transfer me to a different state that would give me a relocation bonus with a clawback period of two years. I switched from senior QA automation engineer to senior software engineer with no commercial programming experience - trying to switch jobs again when you have that kind of title and not much real experience is hard. Worse still when you have that kind of title and are expected to produce as such in your own company.

It screwed me because a) my resume looked loving weird in a job search and recruiters didn't know what to make of me, b) I had trouble actually accomplishing things, owing to actually being a new developer, c) I had to produce well enough to not get fired or pay back their ridiculous relocation bonus. Having projects like "learn MFC and make a new host for our activex control, it's scrum so you have two weeks, hop to it" without having real experience is difficult. I think I did pretty drat well for someone with no experience, but when judged against a senior engineer standard, my accomplishments weren't stellar, so I didn't really get much in the way of merit increases. The only saving grace was that I spent the first couple of years of my career (and actually possibly all of it, the way things are going now) working entirely on doomed projects so all that code got thrown away anyway.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2017 18:34

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Hughlander posted:

I would have done the same thing honestly. I did something slightly similar. I was a consultant for Enterprise Software and had a CS degree but no professional coding experience. I was a 'Senior Technical Architect' for a company and took a transfer to another division as a 'Senior Software Engineer' which was technically a step down. Got there and spent the first few weeks trying to convert my memory of C++ in college to something that would actually compile. By the time they closed the division down I could work well enough to leverage it to another Senior Software Engineer position and now I can make the whole thing sound like a logical journey.

The actual experience you have matters little, how you talk about it and the narrative of your career you make is the most important thing.

It's true, the actual experience I received from the experience made me mature as a developer incredibly quickly, and just having survived without losing my job and actually becoming a lead engineer is a really impressive story. But if you're looking to work only 40 hours a week and receive huge salary increases while doing so, you should follow the thread's examples of hopping jobs every two years and optimizing for salary. I would consider myself a much stronger engineer for having gone through this horrible experience, but I did horribly screw myself on salary as a result.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2017 20:00

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

mrmcd posted:

A lot of ML is really oversold now too. 95% of products with ML and AI marketing behind them are really just fancy automated classifiers. Which is cool in its own regard, they have gotten a lot better at certain classification problems, and it opens new possibilities for automation. However, there's so much garbage ML models that simply don't work because the DNN stuff either overfits, ends up chasing phantoms in the data, or just has the wrong features or no where near enough training data. Many people huffing the AI revolution hype train don't even understand concepts like over fitting, precision vs. recall, how to build clean, uncontaminated training and validation data sets, etc.

Also being 95% accurate is fine for say, Hotdog not Hotdog, but catastrophic for something like transportation or medicine. So it's less "hyper intelligent robot overlords are coming to enslave us" and more "certain jobs that focus on rote data entry and/or superficial analysis may see reduced demand due to automation, depending on how well the classifiers shake out and tolerance for error."

There are over 40 AI startups trying to make AIs for Radiology alone. The most prominent company in this area is IBM, where they are training Watson to read medical studies, and while the automation hasn't replaced the radiologist quite yet, it's really heading in that direction. There is definitely a concerted effort to replace the $400,000 year desk job looking inside people's spines all day with computer AIs. They're targeting this field because it's probably the most lucrative pure "start at images all day and write reports" job there is, and I'm certain that if they can get an AI to do a radiologist's job, a lot of other people's jobs are hosed.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2017 23:07

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

fantastic in plastic posted:

A lot of professional programmers have no degree at all, or a degree in something not at all related to STEM. This is further encouragement not to worry about it and Just Apply.

according to linkedin 50-75% of all job seekers who are interested in the mid-career senior software engineer jobs that I'm interested in have masters degrees.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2017 16:46

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

If I make it through this year using less than three weeks of sick time for mental health leave i'd consider it a success.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2018 20:05

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Plorkyeran posted:

The one time I did defense contracting the project I was working on was explicitly never intended to actually be used. A different department already had a working version of the thing we were building but wouldn't share it, so we were supposed to make it look like we had a bunch of useful features they didn't have so that they'd agree to an exchange. Naturally the punchline was that it turned out that their version didn't work either.

It's less funny when this happens and you work on medical device software.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 14:57

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Hughlander posted:

I've mentioned this before but my ex was an engineer at Ratheon, and they had to fill out timesheets to the nearest 1/10th hour on a daily basis. (6 minute increments.) And yes restrooms and filling out the time sheets themselves were accounted for.

This was the requirements for a military contract.

i did timesheets as a contractor and came up with one timesheet that looked good and then just copied that and changed the date for the next couple of years. if you get caught doing that and you're really working the 40 hours, you should probably look for another job because the people who hired you have mental issues.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2018 14:39

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

CPColin posted:

Well now the COO who laid me off is out on the street and I'm working on code that doesn't even have architecture! So who's laughing now???

High five no-architecture buddy. Scrum is awesome. :v:

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 19:19

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pollyanna posted:

What does Amazon hire for these days, anyway? I can't see a typical fullstack web dev being all that useful to Amazon's AI and robotics-level projects (ask me about failing an Amazon interview).

my ex worked in rails web dev and got hired by amazon (being an ex and getting hired by amazon are connected btw, amazon is a really cool company until it steals your girlfriend) to work on silk. she was a bio undergrad and had only worked as a developer for a couple of years but she was really bright and i think that had something to do with the interview going well.

Bruegels Fuckbooks fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Feb 15, 2018

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 10:00

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Pollyanna posted:

I remember for the graph traversal question, I needed to get the sibling of any particular node immediately to the right (e.g., parent�s parent�s right sibling�s child�s leftmost child). I had absolutely no idea how to do it and cracked under the pressure.

For strings, find the largest unique substring with no character repeats.

They�re fairly simple, but I just couldn�t and still can�t do them.

i've seen both those before, and been asked them on interviews

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-right-sibling-binary-tree-parent-pointers/

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/length-of-the-longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/

would i freeze up if the problem were entirely new (or even now without prepping tbh)?
yes
the reason my ex-girlfriend works at amazon now is she bought a bunch of these books that were filled with these problems, worked through them all in a couple of months, and got lucky in that everything that was asked was something she already studied (although she got better at this bullshit by working through them I imagine)
people are not creative when it comes to interview questions and there seems to be a finite set of what people will ask in interviews, but it's not some innate thing that you either have or you don't.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 15:27

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 09:51

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Blinkz0rz posted:

Just use Java or C# depending on your stack. It might be boring but the only thing "exciting" gets you is tech debt and/or additional onboarding time for new engineers.

C# is so easy that developing in it makes me feel like I'm stealing from my company.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2018 13:43

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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