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Alright thanks, figured as much. I get along very well with all my coworkers so it feels tempting to me to be open about moving on, but you're right in that it has a very large potential to not work as planned.
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Jul 30, 2014 00:02
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I've had my fill of early-stage startup life for a while (edit for clarity: the 'real' reason is a bit more detail than I want to reveal outside of PM, but it's reasonable), so me and my CEO are planning my exit (amicable departure - incidentally, #4 on the previous list). So I'll be on the job market again. Anyone have any insight on places that a) do iOS and b) are generally good at promoting good people?
Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 07:39
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I've had my fill of early-stage startup life for a while, so me and my CEO are planning my exit (amicable departure - incidentally, #4 on the previous list). So I'll be on the job market again. Anyone have any insight on places that a) do iOS and b) are generally good at promoting good people? I'm also moving on from my current 2.5 year gig and am incredibly impressed by Hired.com. Took a few hours to get accepted. It seems like the best way to pick where you're willing to work, set expectations , and let the offers roll in.
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Jul 30, 2014 07:52
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I'm not an oldie - I just started my career, as a web developer. Although I just started my first job, I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't wanna just be like "welp, got a job, guess I'll just play video games on the weekends!", I want to be able to advance my career and get more experience/better positions/ . But...I don't know what to do next. I'm mostly doing web dev (e.g. Rails and front-end/static design), but I'm also interested in iOS/Android development as well, so I'm also using some of my time here at work to learn it. Still, I took this step, and I'm not sure what the next one should be.Oldies in this thread: what were your first two or three years as a developer like? What did you do that you suggest I should do? What missteps should I avoid? What would you do over again? Any advice for someone literally starting out? Edit: To elaborate: I can identify a step to take and take it. I can learn and grow on my own. I just want to make sure that I know how to take the right steps. Maybe there aren't any "right steps", but there can at least be some sort of approach I can take to give myself some safety. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 16:49
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Pollyanna posted:I'm not an oldie - I just started my career, as a web developer. Although I just started my first job, I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't wanna just be like "welp, got a job, guess I'll just play video games on the weekends!", I want to be able to advance my career and get more experience/better positions/ When you don't know what to do, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do something. quote:I'm mostly doing web dev (e.g. Rails and front-end/static design), but I'm also interested in iOS/Android development as well, so I'm also using some of my time here at work to learn it. Still, I took this step, and I'm not sure what the next one should be. Rails, iOs/Android, Other languages like Go, Javascript, Python, Java, C# can't be far off. If you want to hurt your brain, pick up a Scheme or Haskell. quote:Oldies in this thread: what were your first two or three years as a developer like? What did you do that you suggest I should do? What missteps should I avoid? What would you do over again? Any advice for someone literally starting out? i spent a lot of time writing really crappy code to scratch an itch, customise an editor, or hack in a feature often if i didn't understand how something works i would reimplement it. peeling back the layers of abstraction is often a fun project. write your own hash table, your own list, play with sorting algorithms, how about ui elements, regular expressions, sound mixing, how do they work? quote:Edit: To elaborate: I can identify a step to take and take it. I can learn and grow on my own. I just want to make sure that I know how to take the right steps. learning to program is like playing one of those escape the room puzzles where you have to scour around, backtrack, and things don't always make sense until later. eventually you can start learning more from other peoples mistakes than your own, but at the beginning, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. you will likely throw away all the code you write for the first 1000 programs, or worse they will haunt you until you die. write code to throw away: learning comes through hard work, experiment, and play. practice things and give up on writing a magnum opus or a thing of great value. 1. find a thing you want to do, automate, experiment or try 2. hack some poo poo up and see if it works 3. continue hacking on it until you get bored 4. go back to step 1 the best strategy is to make a lot of mistakes quickly, rather than preemptively slow down in fear of the unknown. quote:Maybe there aren't any "right steps", but there can at least be some sort of approach I can take to give myself some safety. thing is, you've been asking this and similar questions a lot. you are really worried about the doing the right thing and no amount of effort posting on our behalf seems to have shifted this fear. it gets pretty irritating when your questions and our answers are like a broken record. we only got good at programming by writing lots of crap programs. not the "right" programs, not the "wrong" programs but a sheer bunch of loving code. in a number of different languages and platforms. or in summary: right step: write a whole bunch of code. wrong step: not writing code
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Jul 30, 2014 17:36
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I think that's what I needed to hear. Knowing that I can't go wrong regardless of what I do is reassuring. Seems like the bottom line is, don't worry over what to do. Do anything. If something doesn't involve programming, shiv it in. Practice and produce, and you'll be fine. I'll cool it on the posting.
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Jul 30, 2014 17:57
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also read some books not on any particular topic, just pick some programming/cs books you like the look of and read them. then pick another topic and read more. coffeetable fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 17:59
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FamDav posted:and im sure a bunch of other questions. Thanks for helping me not sputter around like a dipshit when question time came up at the interview I had last week 
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Jul 30, 2014 18:15
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Pollyanna posted:I think that's what I needed to hear. Knowing that I can't go wrong regardless of what I do is reassuring. Seems like the bottom line is, don't worry over what to do. Do anything. If something doesn't involve programming, shiv it in. Practice and produce, and you'll be fine. Well it's still good to post when you're stuck on code, but we aren't going to be good at finding you projects to write: we can only tell you what itches we have. Really i'm saying is that when you start learning a thing, you should be worried about writing code, but it takes a while before you need to worry about writing good code.
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Jul 30, 2014 18:29
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Pollyanna posted:Oldies in this thread: what were your first two or three years as a developer like? What did you do that you suggest I should do? What missteps should I avoid? What would you do over again? Any advice for someone literally starting out? If we're talking about professional software development, as tef says it doesn't really matter what you do, but I think it does matter where you do it. At your first couple of jobs you're going to pick up habits that will stick with you most of your career, so do what you can to make sure you're working with people who know what they're doing. Beyond that, just do it all day every day for 3 years and you'll be fine.
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Jul 31, 2014 10:12
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Could someone critique my terrible resume? I was hired at my current job as a mid-level developer but have been performing at the level of a senior developer for a while. My colleagues and boss agree, but... the company isn't willing to pay me like a senior developer. I'm near DC and have heard senior developers can easily start at 120k around here but I'm definitely not within even 20k of that. The environment is also a little toxic and a dead-end. The job is just building forms for an enterprise .NET web app, and I don't see a future for myself developing LOB CRUD apps - which is all MS stack development looks like to me nowadays. .NET looks like one big dead-end to me in general. I love C# but want to do cool poo poo, so I've been learning scala and other non-MS tech in hopes of jumping ship to something more exciting (and lucrative?). Does this sound reasonable/crazy for someone with my experience? I'm willing to relocate anywhere - assuming I can learn enough to show people I know my poo poo with scala or whatever do you think I can do exciting things working with great people and make a lot of money doing it?
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Aug 1, 2014 00:46
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Cryolite posted:Does this sound reasonable/crazy for someone with my experience? I'm willing to relocate anywhere - assuming I can learn enough to show people I know my poo poo with scala or whatever do you think I can do exciting things working with great people and make a lot of money doing it? Not crazy at all for California. I'd recommend throwing some references on that resume and connecting with recruiters in SF, LA, and NY. I've had good luck with Jobspring Partners. I'm doing my first Hired.com auction on Monday and that seems like the best way to go about it these days. You can set a minimum salary offer and you see what each company is offering you before you start talking to them. Let me know how it goes!
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Aug 1, 2014 00:52
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Pollyanna posted:Oldies in this thread: what were your first two or three years as a developer like? What did you do that you suggest I should do? What missteps should I avoid? What would you do over again? Any advice for someone literally starting out? I spent my first few years learning, primarily, what and how not to do things. Mistakes, missteps, bad decisions, and bad designs will always occur. Avoiding them is impossible but education and experience can reduce their frequency. Most importantly is the ability to learn and apply that knowledge to future problems. Attitude, which was my largest obstacle as a younger developer, is a very important aspect of working in a professional environment. Being condescending and argumentative are counter-productive to both the development effort and work relationships. Understand that development occurs as a team, and it will be the team's decisions that drive design. Do not be offended or discouraged because you are the minority (or just told no) on a design decision. State your reasoning, learn from any discussion, and move forward. Always pursue continuing education. It is a fact that no matter how good you are, there is always someone better. Constant education on techniques, systems, languages, architectures, etc. will keep you and your skills relevant and assist you in advancing your career. Writing a lot of bad code and understanding why it is bad is a great way to achieve better code.
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Aug 1, 2014 19:02
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I may be in a weird, or maybe not so weird, position. For the last 5 years, I've programmed Games, mostly Web and Online games. Due to circumstances, I may have to jump ship from games and move over to more traditional software development. Has anyone here done this? What is the transition like? If I should re-skill, which direction should I focus, or is that really up to the market in the area? Most of my experience is As3 and C#/XNA/Unity. I'm a good game programmer, and I've lead teams for some web games.
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Aug 2, 2014 05:07
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I can't give specific advice as I did art, models and animation when I was in games; however I can definitely say: get out, make more, live more and never look back.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:18
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Rudest Buddhist posted:I'm doing my first Hired.com auction on Monday I hope it's not too early to ask, but I'm really curious, how did this go?
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Aug 4, 2014 23:15
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Cryolite posted:I hope it's not too early to ask, but I'm really curious, how did this go? 16 hours in and so far so good. There are definitely more opportunities in the SF Bay Area and NYC. If you're willing to relocate to those places it's fantastic. Los Angeles not so much, but that could be due to their LA office just recently opening. A lot of the companies I'm seeing are heavy on Python or Ruby but that might just be related my skill set. Applying can't hurt, seems like a better way then dealing with LinkedIn / JobVite.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:40
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Rudest Buddhist posted:16 hours in and so far so good. There are definitely more opportunities in the SF Bay Area and NYC. If you're willing to relocate to those places it's fantastic. Los Angeles not so much, but that could be due to their LA office just recently opening. Are the offers not contingent on face to face interviews?
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Aug 5, 2014 08:30
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Arachnamus posted:Are the offers not contingent on face to face interviews? Same ol' interview process of phone interview, coding challenge, face to face. Except that there is an offer on the table and the companies respond to you a lot faster than firing your resume into the ether on LinkedIn and waiting to hear back from someone.
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Aug 5, 2014 20:06
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I'm very curious how the hired auctions work in practice. So you get the offers first and interview later? Is there room for negotiation before and/or after the interview?
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Aug 6, 2014 03:04
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Cicero posted:I'm very curious how the hired auctions work in practice. So you get the offers first and interview later? Is there room for negotiation before and/or after the interview? Yep. Offer first, interview second. It's the same interview process we've all been through. Mostly the offer first allows you to set a minimum salary that you would be interested in and all the employers can see each other's bids and change them accordingly. It's a better gauge of the market especially for bigger companies who need a little push to realize how much developers and designers cost right now.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:44
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This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again?
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Aug 15, 2014 18:43
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? A friend of mine definitely did. He's looking into green-tech and education opportunities now. FWIW, I think his hopes were too high.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:02
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Everytime I get thoughts like that I realize that I will most likely hate any other job as much or most likely more than I do now.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:16
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I technically could quit my job tomorrow because I have enough other cash flows to never work again, but I really enjoy my work. If you're getting stressed out too much and it's not because you decided to seek out that kind of environment, find a new environment. There's plenty of lovely ones and few great ones, but you can find them.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:24
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Chill Callahan posted:Everytime I get thoughts like that I realize that I will most likely hate any other job as much or most likely more than I do now. This, exactly. As much as I might dislike my job sometimes, I can't think of anything else that I'd like any better.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:45
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again?
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Aug 15, 2014 19:55
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again?
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Aug 15, 2014 20:36
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? Do you feel this way because of the people you work with, or is it driven by non-personal reasons (like coding day in day out just sucks)?
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Aug 16, 2014 02:02
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? I was ready to give up programming after a certain company nearly ruined me. Maybe you're burnt out and need to spend some time away from programming to figure out if you can like it again somewhere else?
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Aug 16, 2014 05:01
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Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? This can be caused by a bad working environment, a depression that may or may not be related to the working environment, looming burn-out, etc. There's various reasons why people end up with your feelings, but strongly correlated are usually the inability to improve your working environment (say your boss doesn't let you use source control or anything) or the complete disconnect between your performance the companies performance, i.e. the feeling that what you do doesn't matter. The problem may not be directly caused by your current job, or your career (if the feeling happened in past jobs), but it may be useful to find out. Don't stick around if you're unhappy and the job is one of the causes. I've seen people vastly improve their happiness as a programmer by switching jobs, but I've also seen one guy who worked at Apple become happy by becoming a marriage counselor, another guy leaving a programming job to start a bar, a chip engineer become a manager in a racing-pigeon company. Programming a nice job but it's not the only nice job.
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Aug 16, 2014 12:14
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Cryolite posted:Do you feel this way because of the people you work with, or is it driven by non-personal reasons (like coding day in day out just sucks)? There's always one or two people that get under your skin but that's not it, by and large I work with friendly and competent people in one of the most prestigious London Ruby scenes. I've worked in bad places before and this isn't one of them. I'm paid well, I can work how I like, and I'm working on something which makes a real difference to people in the UK. The problem is I don't enjoy going to work anymore. Back in my mid-20s I used to get up keen to get into work and press on with whatever it was I was working on. These days I just can't bring myself to care about other people's problems, and if I don't care about them I get no joy in solving them. Neither green nor brownfield holds any more interest than working an assembly line; it's just work. Edit: Skuto posted:This can be caused by a bad working environment, a depression that may or may not be related to the working environment, looming burn-out, etc. quote:Depressed men are less likely than women to acknowledge feelings of self-loathing and hopelessness. Instead, they tend to complain about fatigue, irritability, sleep problems, and loss of interest in work and hobbies. Well, poo poo. 4 for 4. Jaded Burnout fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 15:20
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Arachnamus posted:Well, poo poo. 4 for 4. If your finances can take it, take a sabbatical. Quit if you need to. Dwelling on a lovely job is unhealthy and it takes time to deprogram yourself of the Stockholm Syndrome that's keeping you there. If you have to, find another job and defer your start date and _don't_ think about it in between.
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Aug 16, 2014 18:59
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:If your finances can take it, take a sabbatical. Quit if you need to. Dwelling on a lovely job is unhealthy and it takes time to deprogram yourself of the Stockholm Syndrome that's keeping you there. If you have to, find another job and defer your start date and _don't_ think about it in between. I think you hit the nail on the head with "stockholm syndrome". My last job was a oval office to decide to move on from, and it had a lovely boss, lovely ways work could come into the team, poo poo responsibility and lovely tools, but I had a couple of good mates there, the hours were good and I didn't think I'd find anywhere else like it. Turns out I was wrong, and my current gig is pretty sweet. Maybe not as challenging, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing, when that meant coming home and being cross with my wife and kids every day. The thing is, it took a long time to reaslise that work the reason I was always pissed off, and a while after that to do something about it. But when I did, and when I got my new gig, things got better.
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Aug 17, 2014 08:51
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I've got an interesting opportunity coming up. Right now as a team lead, I code a fair amount of the time, do some whiteboard architecture for projects in the scope of a month or two development or less (usually ~2 weeks effort from the team), handle line managerial responsibilities for my group of developers, and liaise with product owners and architects. 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, but I will develop architectural diagrams and documents and then support projects in the 6 month+ time period. I will be responsible for coordinating between product owners and team leads and will have a longer term viewpoint. It's not really clear to me how much money there is in it, but I should be able to get 10-20k fairly easily I'd think. My main concern is that I'm no longer coding, but I'm just creating documentation and diagrams and I'm worried it will be annoying and disappointing, despite the increased responsibilities and prestige. Have any of you made this switch, and what do you think about it?
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Oct 22, 2014 03:59
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I've made this switch in a fairly small organization. My main advice to you would be to make sure that there's actually enough people to justify your role as a full-time architect. I personally got frustrated by getting lots of requests to design things from management and in the end only the barest of MVPs got implemented due to lack of engineering capacity.
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Oct 22, 2014 13:13
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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.
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Oct 22, 2014 13:22
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baquerd posted:I've got an interesting opportunity coming up. Right now as a team lead, I code a fair amount of the time, do some whiteboard architecture for projects in the scope of a month or two development or less (usually ~2 weeks effort from the team), handle line managerial responsibilities for my group of developers, and liaise with product owners and architects. It depends on who you report to and who reports to the same structure. It's worthwhile when your boss or bosses boss holds the purse strings on projects. Project managers generally aren't fans of architects and if you don't have any control yourself or related influence, you're going to be frustrated. It's only 6 months so whatever though, its different if you're thinking of a permanent move.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:57
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Sagacity posted:I've made this switch in a fairly small organization. My main advice to you would be to make sure that there's actually enough people to justify your role as a full-time architect. I personally got frustrated by getting lots of requests to design things from management and in the end only the barest of MVPs got implemented due to lack of engineering capacity. Thanks for the advice. The organization is definitely large enough, the existing architecture team is badly overloaded which is why I do a large amount of architecture as a team lead. Bruegels Fuckbooks posted: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 This are great to think about, though I think I can mitigate them almost entirely. In talks about moving to the architect position, the head architect said that proper and full documentation is the most effective CYA measure possible. I could easily still participate in code reviews too to make sure the group is still on track, and though I'd technically not be an implementer, there's nothing really stopping me from integrating with the team as much as I see fit including pair programming. I don't have the whole performance review thing to hold over people's heads, but that never comes up anyway because almost everyone I work with is dedicated and hard working. What personally worries me the most is having my coding skills atrophy, hating just doing investigation and write-ups all the time, or just plain failing by missing important things that then blow up in my face.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:00
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baquerd posted:just plain failing by missing important things that then blow up in my face. Also, doing architecture doesn't mean you should have this big upfront design that everyone then works on. You could still do things in small iterations and make sure your ideas actually work. If you've made a misstep along the way the team can just go back and refactor. It's just that you're the one who's supposed to keep the ultimate goal in mind.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:28
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