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I'm not sure if this is the right place for this but I couldn't find any relevant threads in BFC and it's fairly technically focussed. I'm just looking for some outside perspective. Background: I'm in Australia and I work in .net consulting (C#, almost exclusively web stuff) at a senior developer level and also have experience running small agile teams. I have decent soft skills and am perfectly capable working at a non-technical client alone or with a team. Professionally: C#, MVC 3/4/5, WebAPI, AngularJS, Cordova/Phonegap. Some F#. Tools: git, Jira, TFS, TeamCity, Bamboo, github, BitBucket, Azure, Octopus Deploy, PowerShell, node. Non-professionally: Haskell, F#, a little OCaml and a few years ago Python, C, and Scheme. Plans: I've always wanted to live outside of Australia for a few years. I'm looking at moving to western Europe some time next year. Ideally I'd prefer something outside of Ireland/UK but I don't speak any other languages at a professional level. I've been looking on Stack Overflow careers and there are postings for C# positions that suggest there is English work available in the Netherlands, France and maybe Scandinavia. I'd be happy in any of those places or Germany/Spain/Portugal. Questions: Given my experience, what sort of jobs titles should I be looking for? I don't know if I would have the confidence to sell myself at a team lead position in a foreign country but I'm concerned I might not be challenged enough in an internal LOB developer position. The cost of living here is pretty high so Paris/equivalent probably won't shock me but what are salaries like for someone of my experience? I've looked on Glassdoor but it's almost unusable these days. The best jobs usually seem to go through word-of-mouth, but I don't have any professional contacts in Europe. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to proceed or should I contact recruiters? What sort of lead time would you expect on an international job application? If I'm aiming for April/May when should I be making contact? Any input or advice you have would be great.
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Jul 26, 2014 06:43
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Yeah I'd expect I'd probably be looking at bigger, more established companies both for their recruiting capacity and English language tolerance. I'm not set on a team lead position, that's just the level I'd probably look to step up into if I was looking for work locally.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:20
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Cryolite posted: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? Another option if you're set on Scala would be via F#. Leverage your .Net experience to get into some F#, from there it might be easier to "jump stacks" across to Scala. Still a bunch of night work, and probably tougher to find the first job, but you've got the framework behind you already when looking into that first step.
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Mar 4, 2015 02:54
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A working visa for Australia is pretty easy if you get an offer from a company that will sponsor you. You probably want somewhere that has been through the process before though.
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Apr 28, 2015 06:57
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Hard to say without knowing the number of people you're dealing with or your relation to who's calling the shots. That said it could be a really good opportunity to try some poo poo out, and have some good and bad experience to talk about when you move on. "Yeah we didn't have agile down at my previous workplace, these were the biggest issues, this is how I tried to remedy something and I learnt blah" is great to talk about in interviews. Start with the biggest impediments to your daily work that you can affect. The infrastructure stuff sounds like it'll be slow and maybe above your level so not worth your time if you aren't sticking around. The 45 minute stand up is obviously terrible, how many people are involved? Is it really just everyone doing the "yesterday, today, impediments"? I'd start with privately asking whoever's calling or mandating that meeting what the goal is, whether it's getting there, and if it's worth the cost. Start pushing the same stuff at the PM, "I know you're really busy, is me coming here every day taking your time worthwhile? Could I pop it in an weekly email for you?"
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May 5, 2015 15:38
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Get comfortable with going to people in person to get stuff done, you'll find yourself needing things from different departments in client businesses (marketing, IT, design, ...) that you won't have an existing relationship with. Being able to walk up, introduce yourself and ask them to do things for you quickly in a way that makes them happy is very valuable and you'll have much better success than relying on email. That said, follow up "Just to clarify what we spoke about earlier" emails for meetings etc. are very important. Be careful about stepping on toes of internal dev teams and other departments, one grudge can hamper a lot of work and some people will see you as a threat. Don't put up with their poo poo if they're causing problems though, just raise it professionally with the appropriate people. Go out of your way to chat/have lunch/joke with client employees, especially in augmented teams. Don't work any hours you aren't getting paid for.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:55
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If they aren't the same person the phone interviewer will have passed notes to the in-person interviewer telling them to probe more into areas they thought you were weak or they felt weren't adequately covered. Just be ready to re-answer or clarify the bits you didn't do well at. If they really push for more on something you covered you can try "Oh yeah, I don't think I explained myself clearly on the phone with *name*, my opinion on blah is…". Make sure you know the name.
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Dec 13, 2015 14:30
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vonnegutt posted:- Pay attention in meetings with your stakeholders for deadlines, requirements, and priorities. Theoretically, you are not supposed to have any deadlines, but stakeholders almost always have expectations, and you need to be able to identify them and prioritize them accordingly. Likewise, stakeholders have stated requirements and priorities but there are often unspoken ones - it's your job to draw those out into the open and make sure they are correctly scoped and assigned. These often include behind-the-scenes type tasks. quote:- Do a postmortem each sprint of which goals were met and which goals were left behind and adjust your expectations accordingly. If your team is not accomplishing as many as you set out to, you need to reduce scope until you meet your goals.
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Nov 2, 2016 21:24
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:Basically, I'm soliciting unbiased opinions as to whether I'm being a sucker or not. Sorry to hear about you family member.
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Dec 10, 2016 07:33
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The team's lost 3 engineers and a manager over the course of the year...me and a teammate both kind of feel like the goals (while laudable) are way more ambitious than the reality that the team is treading a lot of water fixing stuff for other teams, who are not incentivized to help (for good reason though), but my team is also not evaluated on the basis of keeping those things working, but rather on feature work, an arbitrary amount of which is actually recognized or understood as useful. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I could make a case for a transfer, but I'm also arguing with myself on whether I should stick with it despite it being undervalued. If I stick with it until it's no longer undervalued, is being established in that role better for me? Or would targeting whatever shiny project is more easily recognized for its substantial value a better strategic move than producing highly significant but under-recognized value?
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Dec 30, 2016 08:15
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ToxicSlurpee posted:And that is a problem with American employment overall rather than just with software. Everybody I've ever worked for has talked about how important loyalty is and how it's a huge deal that people should be loyal to who they work for while offering nothing but a paycheck in return.
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Jan 15, 2017 21:58
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oliveoil posted:Is there any way that I could frame what I do know in a manner that makes seem like I have some real expertise in a specific area? Or have I basically done one year four times? "My last project was to help some department do X. They came to us with a problem so we sat down with them and worked out what their issues were. As a team we came up with a plan/architecture for technical solution and started building it out. We kept the department involved as development went on, we deployed the happy-path-only solution within two weeks and then kept pushing out updates each week that covered more of the scenarios they had laid out until they were happy with the tool. A lot of the requirements changed as we went on and they discovered more about how they wanted to use the system and what edge cases we'd encounter, but we delivered a product that helps people get their job done and everyone was happy with the outcome." to "My team lead takes requirements from the BAs, comes up with an architecture and splits it into technical tasks. I get assigned the tasks by my PM and when I'm done I have my code reviewed by the team lead and then at the end of the week they publish a release that goes to QA." Unless it's a really niche position the attitude and process experience is worth way more than being a 9/10 over a 6/10 in a given technology.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:16
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I understood it as 2-3x if you're doing true freelance stuff, like week to week you may or may not have a client. A two year contract gives you a bit more stability and you don't have to cover for a week off between clients. I've not been through the maths though.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:47
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Another EU data point: 25 days PTO plus sick leave standard. I asked for and received another 5 days in my "reassessment" last year so now I have six weeks.
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May 18, 2017 21:43
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The logic problems in that code sample could've been caught with some tests. For any code challenge stuff if the problem lends itself to testing then you should definitely write them and include them as part of your submission. A good README file explaining your assumptions and any tradeoffs as well as how to run it is also going to make reviewers much happier.
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Jul 5, 2017 21:27
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Cancelbot posted:On promotions: Does anyone have an end state in terms of their career? Or even know what they'd do when they get there? I'm in a bit of a similar position. I used to have a progression I was chasing and now I've gotten where I wanted I'm not sure what's next. These days I'm 50/50 between hands on technical and people management. If I were to go back to full time IC I think I'd feel really limited in my impact, but dropping any more technical time I worry I'd lose interest. I really enjoy my role right now but looking forward I don't know what's next. Sitting in the loose tech equivalent of "middle management" forever more sounds terrible in the abstract, but short of jumping to a leadership role at a smallish startup I don't see where I'd progress to from here?
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Jun 3, 2018 22:15
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Jose Valasquez posted:I don't give system design interviews but I don't think this is generally true. If it was true for you then you had a bad interviewer. Jose Valasquez posted:They probably wanted you to ask questions about what kind of load was expected and to address potential bottlenecks from there. They should have guided you in that direction though if it wasn't the way you naturally went. Yeah, I give these sort of interviews and usually get to a point where I’ll say “Okay, we’ve built this system and it’s working, everyone is happy, but now we’re getting popular and we’re getting more and more users/traffic. Which parts will break, and how do we fix them?“ Going for a simple, relational solution first is fine. Just be clear at the start you want to begin with solving the problem and then adding complexity if you find out you need it, and mention that you know there are other options. Don’t be afraid to ask if there are other things they’d like you to address in a solution too, it doesn’t have to be guessing what they want.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:05
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rt4 posted:Anything about disrespect to colleagues should be filed under "communication skills" or "professional decorum" which apply to every workplace rather than implying any particular business has a special "culture." The same people who'd reject someone for wearing a suit to an interview may need vague descriptions that don't grind against their "casual" pretenses. We use it for "will be okay with how our teams work". We generally don't have well written tasks or acceptance criteria, teams change their processes as they see fit, people work very collaboratively and change tasks based on helping the team achieve their goals. Someone who wants stability, well written specs and very defined roles and responsibilities wouldn't "fit" in our "culture", even if they're perfectly professional and qualified and pleasant. I'm not sure what else we would call this? (We do go into detail about this in interviews, it's something the candidate needs to know as well to make a good decision.)
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Dec 14, 2019 11:04
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:I wouldn't call that a culture, I'd call that lax engineering practices.
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Dec 16, 2019 08:46
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:How long have you been in business? Do you expect such a "culture" can prevail long-term, or will there be pain once the company grows to the point that it has to enforce stricter practices? I don’t think we’re growing the engineering headcount much in the next couple of years. I’d say we need 50% more to really deliver new stuff at the pace we want but I don’t make those decisions. Honestly it is really nice to work this way, assuming you have people you trust. All the teams are focussed on product outcomes not any contractual stuff or box checking, and the freedom teams are given is pretty great as an engineer or product person. We struggle sometimes with consistency across teams, but that’s been accepted to some degree as the cost of having the so much autonomy in the teams.
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Dec 19, 2019 02:08
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Have you talked to your manager about that? If it’s someone you trust it shouldn’t hurt to make your concerns known and they might be able to give you some indication about what’s coming up politically.
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Jan 6, 2020 07:29
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https://tldr.sh/ might also help, it gives common examples for a bunch of tools. Maybe show them "apropos" too? I can't think of a time I've discovered a tool with it, but it has helped me remember some of the obscure ones.
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Mar 8, 2020 21:46
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I also did the move to management and switched back to an IC track after 1.5 years. I think I did alright in the role, my feedback was always good and there's several outcomes I can point to that I'm really proud of and I generally enjoyed the day to day, but I kept feeling like I was not having the same level of impact as when I was leading more technical initiatives. I'd consider trying it again but only at a place that had a good support structure and some semblance of a manager training program. In my case the "mentor" I had was my manager who had a whole two years of management experience (also with little training or guidance) and wasn't someone I particularly respected. I'm pretty sure you can end up in the "one years experience ten times" situation if that's how your early management career goes. I learnt a lot and I don't regret it but I wonder how it would've been different in a FAANG-level management track.
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Jun 14, 2020 09:18
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asur posted:My experience with FAANGs is that they do not have good support structures for engineers or managers. They kind of expect you to figure it out and get through based on engineering talent. It's even worse for managers and it's very apparent which are promoted from within engineering and which are hired externally.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:58
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vonnegutt posted:I've been full remote for ~4 years now and I don't know if I'll ever go back. The ability to work when I'm fresh and focused, and to go take a nap when I know I'm not being productive, seems like a no-brainer for actually getting things done. I get more exercise, run errands at non-peak hours, generally have tons more free time because I'm not spending hours commuting when everyone else in the entire city is also commuting. Not saying there’s anything wrong with remote, but if you’re in a place that living not too far from work is possible then the flexibility stuff can just be a workplace thing not a remote thing.
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Jul 22, 2020 16:05
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I’ve been doing the expat thing in Scandinavia for a few years now. It differs per country but generally work permits for skilled professionals are pretty easy if you have a company sponsoring you. In my case the visa is a “tied to the employer” thing but in a much safer way than the US scheme. For example if I were fired I’d get a few months notice/severance and am allowed to stay and job hunt for another three months after that runs out. Moving between jobs is fine and usually just means the new company putting their name on your form. The longer term residency/citizenship is very different per country (Sweden being the easiest) so that’s worth considering if you’re planning that far ahead. Getting a job from overseas is possible but it’s a lot harder if you can’t make an in person impression. Bigger places would consider flying you in for interviews from elsewhere in Europe, not sure about the US. Hiring right now is obviously much slower but otherwise the talent market here is small so lots of places are happy to look externally. Lifestyle and work culture is good, English is well spoken by everyone, and there is a good mix of corporate enterprise and small to mid startups to choose from. Standard vacation is five weeks a year, lots of places give six, everyone has unlimited sick leave and free healthcare.
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Jul 24, 2020 23:41
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Candidates are probably going to be overwhelmed and spend too much time looking into the table options for some gotcha. I assume they're all just the defaults but the export tool makes the explicit? Does it matter that STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF? Are you trying to catch me out with some odd behaviour of SET ANSI_NULLS ON?
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Sep 24, 2020 23:36
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And if it’s “pick your own language” then don’t assume the reviewer is familiar with the stack you picked. I’m much happier if someone includes a dockerfile than spending my time having to work out if I have to install a more recent version of Ruby or how to do the package installs.
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Apr 16, 2021 13:58
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Cuntpunch posted:And that's to hardly look at developer salaries in the rest of Europe - just hopping the border into Denmark, Sweden, or Finland and you take a ridiculous pay hit.
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Jun 27, 2021 23:21
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If they’re VC funded at some point the investors will want to cash out which is why there’s probably an end goal of getting acquired or IPO, and the will be when the options become real. The CFO hopefully knows how realistic that is in the next X years but they won’t be able to commit to anything. It’s worth knowing if you keep vested options when you quit, if they have an expiry date, and how they decide how much to give people. One place I got these allocated them (below director level) by working backwards from: if we target an X valuation at IPO, and the strike price now is Y, how many options do we give people that they’d end up with roughly one year of salary as the windfall (I guess averaged per position). They would have to justify this and the expected valuation to the board and investors so hopefully it’s not completely made up numbers. Still it’s all monopoly money.
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Sep 13, 2021 15:04
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Decision made but another thing to consider if you end up in a niche like that is that you have much less flexibility to move around for non-tech reasons. You can always find another react job if you don’t like your boss or you team are chuds, if there’s only two employers for your skill in your city you have to get lucky.
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Jan 28, 2022 19:16
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I'm looking for a bit of advice. I'm living in a high-cost northern European city, and for family reasons will be moving to a low-cost country (also within the EU) sometime this year. I'm fairly flexible on the timeline so there's no hard date. The city I'm moving to is smaller and the tech scene isn't that impressive so I'm looking for a full time remote role. There are a few internationals that are hiring remote with interesting looking work. There are linkedin ads targeting my city while stating it's fully remote in Europe, which means they are prepared to pay northern European salaries. Ideally I'd take a job with one of them then after getting settled move to the new country. Moving involves visas and tax residency for me so it's not something I can do sneakily. I'd like to take the job before I move to "lock-in" some of the employee benefits of northern Europe (annual leave, work-life-balance, parental leave) and hopefully the salary. I suspect some companies are going to have strong benefits across the world and it won't matter too much, others will have policies about scaling the salary by country, and some (lovely ones) may make this difficult or want to move me to lower benefits. Has anyone done this? Any approaches to how to suss this in interviews? I'm not opposed to asking up front but I'm worried that if I make too much of a point of it they may just want to give me an offer based on the cheap country.
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Feb 15, 2022 22:38
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I think there’s definitely some non-tangible benefits of everyone around you not having to worry about it either, not just you and your immediate family. The same with subsidised childcare and a general social safety net. Once you remove random stressors from the general population I feel like there’s a non-quantifiable but noticeable improvement in life for everyone, not just those who were missing out before.
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Mar 6, 2022 16:28
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Doing the main scrum cert can be useful to know the “official” training to pull out sometimes when people are completely misunderstanding or misrepresenting it. I’ve found more and more non technical people in larger orgs are “doing agile” now and having the background in the “offical” terminology if you need to steer them is helpful.
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Jul 26, 2022 09:13
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Flaming June posted:This is correct. I've been in Denmark for the past month and can really see myself prospering here in a way that I haven't felt in a long time. There are plenty of tech companies of various sizes in Copenhagen that will sponsor you for the “pay limit scheme” visa and it’s not too complicated. I think you need to apply from your home country though.
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Oct 2, 2022 08:40
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Even with the widely different meaning of “devops”, it’s generally a function that people understand they have a need for but have a hard time articulating or directing. An experienced manager who can explain what they get from it in business terms and how to manage that role is probably pretty desirable.
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Jan 25, 2023 09:51
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:DevOps was originally a cultural approach to software development that focused on automation and everything-as-code that was owned and maintained by the entire team, not just one particular organizational silo. Basically, forcing folks to move away from doing everything manually and to apply the same rigor around things like version control and testing to infrastructure and general code-like-but-not-code assets, and also to have developers comfortable with and aware of the application's operating environment. I think part of that transition was that the problem space of "application's operating environment" became much bigger an messier in that time. We went from devops meaning the entire team needs to know how the app installs and runs on the on-prem server or heroku, to the entire team needs to know terraform and all the cloud services under it and how to slice up VPCs and security groups, and how to ship logs and configure the full monitoring suite etc. That became too much overhead so we need dedicated teams that handle streamlining that work, and hey we have these Ops teams who can do that right? But unless they're capable, managed and rewarded well you get these issues: thotsky posted:I like DevOps because it recognizes that infrastructure and ops teams are generally pretty useless and you'll often end up having to slap things together yourself.
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Jan 26, 2023 11:49
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Yeah, definitely not criticising your take. It's a common problem. I have seen it work, but I think you're looking at putting maybe 5-10% of your headcount in those teams, have them compensated and managed well and have the right mindset all around.
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Jan 26, 2023 16:17
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ChatGPT and co are better thought of as a new interface to a lot of things. I can use chatgpt to remind me of particular css names or react functions faster than I will find them on stackoverflow, so really it’s a better interface to (1.5 year old) stackoverflow for me. The stuff coming into productivity apps like office is just a better (in theory) interface to putting together boilerplate slideshows or emails. With general reference, chatgpt is quicker than the swamp of seo that search results are now. The problem is that you don’t get all the other indicators we’ve learnt about what looks like an authoritative source, so if it’s not your field you can’t trust it.
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Apr 8, 2023 17:14
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SurgicalOntologist posted:That's cool, maybe I have some imposter syndrome because it's higher than I would have guessed. As other said, you could probably swing line manager for devs/sres if that’s what you wanted but if you’re hired into somewhere with that role it would be less hands on keyboard work (which it seems like you’re used to). Your other option would be as an IC like you described, maybe in an SRE/k8s role. You should think about whether you would be happier inheriting a team of SREs and dealing with business priorities vs their vision for the tech, implementing processes and generally working to develop a high performing team; or joining as someone on a team like that getting your hands dirty in kubernetes and working to enable the teams your team supports, making technical recommendations etc etc. Both paths have the the landmines of who could end up being in the team, but they can both be fulfilling depending on what you want.
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May 1, 2023 19:34
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