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Dr. Arbitrary posted:This job posting is infamous in the IT industry: Jesus Christ. So not only am I on call 24/7, I have no staff to help me AND I work for poo poo money? Why don't they just say "And if you accept the job, we'll just kick you in the dick a bunch of times!" Any self-respecting IT job hunter would look at this and go "So what the hell is my incentive?"
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Aug 17, 2015 19:22
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Phone posted:Too be fair, the moldy beer business isn't terribly saturated because it's mostly just Guinness. To be honest, I think Rogue only can only sell beer by producing really gimmicky poo poo people will try once, adding "cute" labeling on their bottles or selling to places that have no other choice.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:24
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"We're looking for HARDCORE unemployables, here." (lists 15 bullets of must-have personality traits)
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Aug 17, 2015 19:26
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Alter Ego posted:Jesus Christ. So not only am I on call 24/7, I have no staff to help me AND I work for poo poo money? Why don't they just say "And if you accept the job, we'll just kick you in the dick a bunch of times!" Don't you want to be a cool badass like these guys??
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Aug 17, 2015 19:27
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Radish posted:Don't you want to be a cool badass like these guys?? If you do a good job, they might let you piss in their wacky seasonal beer batch and put your penis on the bottle.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:28
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When someone says their business isn't about the money, its all about the money not going to you.Alter Ego posted:Jesus Christ. So not only am I on call 24/7, I have no staff to help me AND I work for poo poo money? Why don't they just say "And if you accept the job, we'll just kick you in the dick a bunch of times!" Plus no opportunities to have a budget increase! This is the type of job you post looking to attract the bottom of the dregs, the social outcasts whose actions have gotten them blacklisted from any reputable organization which calls previous employers and asks whether their staff have sexual misconduct to their name. Radbot posted:"We're looking for HARDCORE unemployables, here." What they say: HARDCORE UNEMPLOYABLES What they mean: Sex offenders for 15k/yr My Imaginary GF fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 19:29
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Cicero posted:The experience is pretty variable for devs at Amazon. I worked there for two and a half years and was definitely not overworked, nor did anyone on my team or related teams at Seattle seem to be overworked. Occasionally there'd be some crunch prior to launch, maybe a couple times a year, but an average week I'd work 8 hours a day including lunch. Part of that may have been being a device team (Android stuff) because that means there aren't any servers to constantly manage, if there's a big problem the best you can do is push out a fix with the next patch. Quoting this so it gets attention on this page. This is really interesting, and I wonder how different peoples' experiences will be. It may come down to division by division leadership, I know that a culture is really based on the leader of the organization you report to. Some managers and mid-managers may be really strongly in favor of a work-life balance, since it's the only way to sustain employees with high morale.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:32
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Oi, mates! Haven't you heard? Working for Amazon is wonderful. I guess if you're high enough in the food chain. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu Apparently Amazon is still using stacked ranking. 
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Aug 17, 2015 19:33
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-jeff-bezos-amazon-20150817-story.html That leaked fast.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:39
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With programmers, there can be a surprisingly low bar for competence (that fizzbuzz is an actual barrier to some interviewees is amazing), and there's also a lot of entitled thinking involved where rather than understanding programming as a skill they picked up and a had a knack for, they treat it as if they've been blessed by Alan Turing himself with the ability to Machine-speak (but no homo, lol). Tie this with businesses desirous to throw money at them to automate everything, and many programmers think they are Randian Superman. The classic born on second base and thinking they hit a double. And it can be very misleading for quite a few reasons, because hey, you show up to work around 10 (or later), get to wear casual clothes, fight each other with Nerf weapons and play Magic, and hey, it's fun! They give us free food! And these are your first adult non-college "friends" in a city you probably know nobody from. You should be glad you're sleeping in the office and doing  things with computers and haven't been home in a week. Yeah, it's a hosed up field in many ways, but still better than a lot of other fields.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:41
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SquadronROE posted:Quoting this so it gets attention on this page. This is really interesting, and I wonder how different peoples' experiences will be. It may come down to division by division leadership, I know that a culture is really based on the leader of the organization you report to. Some managers and mid-managers may be really strongly in favor of a work-life balance, since it's the only way to sustain employees with high morale. Mine was extremely different, and I was extremely overworked and stressed at Amazon and probably had a serious breakdown because of it. I've also had these at Microsoft and other companies in the Seattle area, and definitely have my own issues, so I can't completely blame software engineering corporate culture. But yes, it really matters a lot on division, because these companies all run like a bunch of mini-companies, some times in direct competition with each other. And the pressure from above is of course dependent on what's profitable and not profitable, but perhaps not even then. It's also worth mentioning that this corporate structure exists so I can come in, bash out some code and not have to think about business bullshit at all. It's useful for that, but then it can feel super mysterious why things happen, and it can give the low-level programmers a misleading perspective of how the upper echelons of the business work.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:47
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ntan1 posted:http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-jeff-bezos-amazon-20150817-story.html Of course he doesn't know it: it's a system designed to prevent him from having to deal with diversity in the executive sweet.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:48
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Chrungka posted:Oi, mates! Haven't you heard? Working for Amazon is wonderful. I guess if you're high enough in the food chain. That's an interesting article. It just kind of supports my view that things are very different depending on who is in your management chain. I hear that Microsoft was very much the same way, that some divisions were absolute hell to work for and others were better. It also looks like there's been a response to the responses: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ex-amazonians-reply-all-those-amazonian-replies-times-mehal-shah turn it up TURN ME ON fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 19:48
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My Imaginary GF posted:Of course he doesn't know it: it's a system designed to prevent him from having to deal with diversity in the executive sweet. Nah. He does know it and is implicit in it, from every description of Amazon i've heard. He's just trying to defend against HR violations.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:19
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SquadronROE posted:Quoting this so it gets attention on this page. This is really interesting, and I wonder how different peoples' experiences will be. It may come down to division by division leadership, I know that a culture is really based on the leader of the organization you report to. Some managers and mid-managers may be really strongly in favor of a work-life balance, since it's the only way to sustain employees with high morale. * Compared to other leading-edge tech companies they're probably average, maybe even a little worse, but they still have new college grads making like 120k their first year between salary and signing bonus.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:19
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Cicero posted:It's definitely team specific, but I think on average developers tend to have it easier than people on the more businessy side, because developers have become very difficult to replace. Amazon does pay quite well*...to start. And then they stiff you on raises as hard as possible if the raise isn't part of a promotion. Every single time I see what leading software companies pay new grads, it makes me want to start drinking. I'm an engineer in a really hard to recruit for field and I make about half that with bonuses. It's insane. I generally justify it by having more vacation than most Europeans get, as well as lucrative benefits and great work-life balance and prospects for advancement (although I don't think I'll get to six figures anytime soon). The response to the response I just read seems to get it right - a lot of the people referenced as having terrible times of it were on the business side of things. A lot of the people I see defending Amazon or reporting good experiences are developers. Since developers are really hard to recruit for and retain, they're going to be catered to.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:24
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Well considering that "more vacation than most Europeans get" puts you at somewhere between 3x-10x the amount of vacation that Americans take on average (probably more than that when compared to "rockstar" devs), sounds like you're being compensated well, just non-monetarily.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:26
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I am consistently baffled by tech companies and other white collar jobs insisting their employees work insanely long hours. Pretty much ever study about work environment confirms that once you get passed the 40-45 hour week, your overall productivity plummets. Human beings are not designed to work high stress and demanding environments for 16 hours all day every day. These guys are smart so you'd think try and stop this bullshit work culture. I also don't get why companies have the rank and yank system and internally competing departments. Enron had that and proved disastrous. Sears tried that when it got that rear end in a top hat objectivist CEO and it led to, surprise, departments backstabbing each other and hoarding resources. Which was of course, a huge detriment to the company and made everything to poo poo.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:28
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SquadronROE posted:Every single time I see what leading software companies pay new grads, it makes me want to start drinking. I'm an engineer in a really hard to recruit for field and I make about half that with bonuses. It's insane. I generally justify it by having more vacation than most Europeans get, as well as lucrative benefits and great work-life balance and prospects for advancement (although I don't think I'll get to six figures anytime soon). I went to an engineering college, and on career fair day, I ran into an aeronautical engineer who was bummed because there were no jobs for him, and even though Boeing had come, they were only looking for software engineers. The demand is way over the top, and I'm not sure how much it is warranted based on market value and how much is speculation.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:29
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foobardog posted:I went to an engineering college, and on career fair day, I ran into an aeronautical engineer who was bummed because there were no jobs for him, and even though Boeing had come, they were only looking for software engineers.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:32
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Radbot posted:Well considering that "more vacation than most Europeans get" puts you at somewhere between 3x-10x the amount of vacation that Americans take on average (probably more than that when compared to "rockstar" devs), sounds like you're being compensated well, just non-monetarily. Right, which is how I view it. That, and I am encouraged to use all of my vacation. If I were to look for an antithesis of that Amazon experience it might actually be me. Not trying to brag or anything, it's just utterly fascinating to me how differently companies choose to try to retain talent.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:34
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Monaghan posted:I am consistently baffled by tech companies and other white collar jobs insisting their employees work insanely long hours. Pretty much ever study about work environment confirms that once you get passed the 40-45 hour week, your overall productivity plummets. Human beings are not designed to work high stress and demanding environments for 16 hours all day every day. These guys are smart so you'd think try and stop this bullshit work culture. A lot of white collar jobs are just so fun that you don't wanna stop working. Like when I was in finance, I'd be out on the clock drinking all night. That's a good way to work right there. You have departments fight because a department in constant fear is a department that cannot unite against your administration. It's how the Federal government manages to continue to exist.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:35
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SquadronROE posted:Every single time I see what leading software companies pay new grads, it makes me want to start drinking. I'm an engineer in a really hard to recruit for field and I make about half that with bonuses. It's insane. I generally justify it by having more vacation than most Europeans get, as well as lucrative benefits and great work-life balance and prospects for advancement (although I don't think I'll get to six figures anytime soon). that's just the top of the top playing the prestige game by grossly overcompensating workers. also a lot of these companies are in extremely expensive cities and have to pay a large amount to offset not only relocation but housing millenial graduates in the places where they want to live. tech startups that aren't awash in VC or are located off the coasts have much more reasonable starting salaries
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Aug 17, 2015 20:35
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SquadronROE posted:Right, which is how I view it. That, and I am encouraged to use all of my vacation. If I were to look for an antithesis of that Amazon experience it might actually be me. It's on vacation and personal time that you make connections and accrue social capital which could then be monetized into capital by your company. It's the evidence-based method of maximizing the capture rate on the social capital of your employees.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:37
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Popular Thug Drink posted:that's just the top of the top playing the prestige game by grossly overcompensating workers. also a lot of these companies are in extremely expensive cities and have to pay a large amount to offset not only relocation but housing millenial graduates in the places where they want to live. tech startups that aren't awash in VC or are located off the coasts have much more reasonable starting salaries Good point that most of these places are in cities with insanely high COL. When you adjust a $120k salary down to even what it'd pay in Denver (a highly desirable city), you're talking about $90k or so a year, and that'd be $75k-80k in a city like Indianapolis. That's still a good job, just not gross overcompensation (for highly desirable workers).
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Aug 17, 2015 20:39
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SquadronROE posted:Every single time I see what leading software companies pay new grads, it makes me want to start drinking. I'm an engineer in a really hard to recruit for field and I make about half that with bonuses. It's insane. That's generally how you can tell that a field is unsustainable. Like, Petroleum Engineers also make six figures right out of college but there's a reason for that.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:41
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Cicero posted:I agree that the level of demand from top companies seems pretty crazy these days, but what do you mean speculation? Programmers at your company aren't a resource that you can sell off to another company at a profit. Speculation is a bad term, perhaps, I was referring to investment into personnel way above their value, which can occur for many different reasons. Yeah, speculation was a mistatement.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:41
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Radbot posted:Good point that most of these places are in cities with insanely high COL. When you adjust a $120k salary down to even what it'd pay in Denver (a highly desirable city), you're talking about $90k or so a year, and that'd be $75k-80k in a city like Indianapolis. That's still a good job, just not gross overcompensation (for highly desirable workers). yeah, most of the time when i travel for an on-site our client's office is somewhere in the burbs, or in affordable mid range cities like denver, houston, philly, etc. i've been traveling all over the us for a few years now working for a tech startup with other tech companies as our clients, and they haven't yet sent me to the stereotypical tech cities like seattle, san fran, or manhattan - but i've been to denver like six times for four different clients, and i go to LA about three times a year
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Aug 17, 2015 20:44
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Radbot posted:Good point that most of these places are in cities with insanely high COL. When you adjust a $120k salary down to even what it'd pay in Denver (a highly desirable city), you're talking about $90k or so a year, and that'd be $75k-80k in a city like Indianapolis. That's still a good job, just not gross overcompensation (for highly desirable workers). That pay isn't there for the sake of the employee, its there because such pay allows tech employees to accumulate social capital on their own time at a greater rate than suburban life, which can then be monetized to a higher degree by the company.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:44
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foobardog posted:Speculation is a bad term, perhaps, I was referring to investment into personnel way above their value, which can occur for many different reasons. prestige is the better word i think. like "we pay top dollar for top talent!" when the marginal value difference between the best programmer and the second best probably isn't like $50k really they're just trying to hook employees in with high wages and then see who buys into the 80 hour week mentality. the company i work for is the complete opposite, the pay isn't so hot but it's taboo to call anyone after hours unless something is actually on fire. a sales guy scheduled me at 5:15 one friday with a 9am call the following monday, i didn't see it because i don't check my loving schedule over the weekend, and he got written up when i didn't show because i wasn't given enough advance notice. working for a company that not only understands but encourages you to care more about your private life than your work life is a much bigger perk than getting paid an extra $15k above market salary
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Aug 17, 2015 20:47
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Cicero posted:* Compared to other leading-edge tech companies they're probably average, maybe even a little worse, but they still have new college grads making like 120k their first year between salary and signing bonus. You know as well as I do that 120k post salary + signing bonus is pretty low for total compensation for a tech salary at one of the giants, after 1-2 years. I hear that Amazon also tends to skimp on raises, causing people who have been at the company for a long time to receive less in total comp than somebody who was just hired to that level.
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Aug 17, 2015 20:58
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ntan1 posted:You know as well as I do that 120k post salary + signing bonus is pretty low for total compensation for a tech salary at one of the giants, after 1-2 years. I hear that Amazon also tends to skimp on raises, causing people who have been at the company for a long time to receive less in total comp than somebody who was just hired to that level. Golden handcuffs. Gotta pay that back if you leave before 2 years.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:01
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SquadronROE posted:Golden handcuffs. Gotta pay that back if you leave before 2 years. 1 Year is industry standard for relocation/hiring bonus. 2 Years is really pushing it.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:05
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ntan1 posted:1 Year is industry standard for relocation/hiring bonus. 2 Years is really pushing it. I've been reading that 2 years for Amazon is common. I agree that 1 year is normal. It's not necessarily a bad thing, golden handcuffs are a pretty normal way to retain talent.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:10
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ntan1 posted:You know as well as I do that 120k post salary + signing bonus is pretty low for total compensation for a tech salary at one of the giants, after 1-2 years. quote:I hear that Amazon also tends to skimp on raises, causing people who have been at the company for a long time to receive less in total comp than somebody who was just hired to that level.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:13
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I have to wonder if this is going to be continuing or if there's going to be some sort of influence to depress wages again. Maybe the push to get more people in on visas will make competition for devs less?
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Aug 17, 2015 21:15
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My Imaginary GF posted:That pay isn't there for the sake of the employee, its there because such pay allows tech employees to accumulate social capital on their own time at a greater rate than suburban life, which can then be monetized to a higher degree by the company. Considering that the every Valley firm endeavors to keep people on-campus as much as possible, either by hook (Google) or crook (Amazon), I'm curious to understand why you think that helps develop social capital "on their own time" (which they have none of).
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Aug 17, 2015 21:16
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Popular Thug Drink posted:prestige is the better word i think. like "we pay top dollar for top talent!" when the marginal value difference between the best programmer and the second best probably isn't like $50k
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Aug 17, 2015 21:17
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Cicero posted:I have no idea what this means. Marginal value is an economics term that describes the value the last unit of anything has over the penultimate unit. I'm guessing PTD means that the marginal value of a developer is less than their marginal cost to hire.
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Aug 17, 2015 21:18
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Cicero posted:I have no idea what this means. the difference in cost between the theoretical #1 best programmer and the theoretical #2 best programmer most likely isn't a large number, such that paying large salaries likely isn't for job skill and talent but for other reasons such as encouraging tolerance of awful working conditions i doubt that companies are paying six figures for the absolute most skilled workers, but rather are trying to attract high skill workers to accept punishing schedules through overinflated pay
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Aug 17, 2015 21:20
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