evol262 posted:Companies regularly cut overpaid, underperforming employees to get new blood (which happens to be cheaper). lol if you actually believe this is the source of most layoffs evol262 posted:There was never a chance of me accepting your "advice" in the first place. Good job puffing yourself up, but your post history is what I'm judging. oh god my post history have mercy does it suck to know that someone who posts about video games and enjoys e/n knows more about the business world than you do? sarehu posted:Are we supposed to be angry about this? No it's supposed to illustrate why you shouldn't have any loyalty to an employer who hasn't earned it.
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Dec 1, 2014 22:38
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I'm not proposing having loyalty, I'm proposing not being a lying sack of poo poo.
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Dec 1, 2014 22:43
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sarehu posted:I'm not proposing having loyalty, I'm proposing not being a lying sack of poo poo. Maybe you missed it but he never lied. He got an offer, then got a better one. Saying you're accepting an offer and then explaining that you got a better one is not "being a lying sack of poo poo" and you are a sad man for thinking so. Enjoy getting stomped by an employer in the future. edit. And again, this is Microsoft, not some tiny startup that lives on dies on their hires. They will be more than ok.
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Dec 1, 2014 22:43
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I don't think I could handle the stress of keeping my resume up to date daily, staying hot on any and all interview material, maintaining open job reqs that I could hop over to on a day's notice, and actually do my day to day jobs. Besides "literally start your own firm," what other kinds of steps do y'all do on a regular basis to guard against the events you're telling others to be constantly worried about? Do you ever have a month or two where you're not backed up by 3~4 alternate paychecks ready to be cashed?
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Dec 1, 2014 22:46
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JawnV6 posted:I don't think I could handle the stress of keeping my resume up to date daily, staying hot on any and all interview material, maintaining open job reqs that I could hop over to on a day's notice, and actually do my day to day jobs. Besides "literally start your own firm," what other kinds of steps do y'all do on a regular basis to guard against the events you're telling others to be constantly worried about? Do you ever have a month or two where you're not backed up by 3~4 alternate paychecks ready to be cashed? Keep three months living expenses saved at all times. Update your resume monthly (but keep in mind that when you're applying to jobs you should be customizing your resume for every one), not only for future jobs, but it will also give you a time to reflect on what you've been working on Network, network, network. There are lots of jobs out there, and having a large circle in the industry can be the difference between months of unemployment and an instant offer.
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Dec 1, 2014 22:49
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you really shouldn't make a habit of reneging on offers because it makes you look bad (much like companies that do it would be slaughtered on glassdoor), but if you really feel that the google offer is better than the microsoft offer for what you want to do with your life then take it. my internal moral compass says you can play the microsoft offer to get a better deal from google but not the other way around unless more money would get you to take the microsoft deal, but thats just me  .
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Dec 1, 2014 22:52
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Does anyone here work with the Quintiq software? I'm also looking for other offers in case google doesn't work out and I found a job offer from the Deutsche Bahn programming Quintiq algorithms using the proprietary language Quil. While the offer looks ok, I'm hesitant to pursue a job working with a language I can only use at a limited number of companies, especially if I want to switch to another tech company later.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:00
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JawnV6 posted:I don't think I could handle the stress of keeping my resume up to date daily, staying hot on any and all interview material, maintaining open job reqs that I could hop over to on a day's notice, and actually do my day to day jobs. Besides "literally start your own firm," what other kinds of steps do y'all do on a regular basis to guard against the events you're telling others to be constantly worried about? Do you ever have a month or two where you're not backed up by 3~4 alternate paychecks ready to be cashed? Two glass door / linked in job alerts. One for my job description one for the next wrung up the ladder. My financial advisor has short term finances figured out where I can take money out for a year withoutb penalties and its been years since I lived paycheck to paycheck.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:03
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So y'all actually have the standard 3/6 month cushion and are just telling everyone else to be paranoid and ready to be terminated or hop on a daily basis twitch-reflex style for funsies? Cool. Makes sense.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:12
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JawnV6 posted:I don't think I could handle the stress of keeping my resume up to date daily, staying hot on any and all interview material, maintaining open job reqs that I could hop over to on a day's notice, and actually do my day to day jobs. Besides "literally start your own firm," what other kinds of steps do y'all do on a regular basis to guard against the events you're telling others to be constantly worried about? Do you ever have a month or two where you're not backed up by 3~4 alternate paychecks ready to be cashed? I periodically creep into the woods and slay living creatures (typically even-toed ungulates, sometimes anatidae or phasianidae) and use the bounty of the forest as a hedge against future periods of unemployment. Their flesh provides food to eat if I can't afford food, their skins clothing for the winter, and their fatty cuts can be rendered into tallow, which can be fashioned into candles if the electric bill is overdue or saponified with potassium lye so that I can shower and shave (that way I don't look like a hobo when it's time to interview again). Also, I try not to work for companies that do the kind of crazy and skeezy poo poo that is SOP in some people's fever dreams, but I haven't been in the industry all that long so who knows if my spidey sense for sociopaths and nutcases is any good.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:23
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Blotto Skorzany posted:I periodically creep into the woods and slay living creatures (typically even-toed ungulates, sometimes anatidae or phasianidae) and use the bounty of the forest as a hedge against future periods of unemployment. Their flesh provides food to eat if I can't afford food, their skins clothing for the winter, and their fatty cuts can be rendered into tallow, which can be fashioned into candles if the electric bill is overdue or saponified with potassium lye so that I can shower and shave (that way I don't look like a hobo when it's time to interview again). At least somebody caught the joke.
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Dec 1, 2014 23:29
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Thank you everyone for your input. I'm going to be sticking with Microsoft in the meantime since even the risk of getting blacklisted from a big company and screwing over my future manager/team is not worth it. If I do want to work for Google a few years down the line I can interview again and hopefully get through the hectic process. Now to look for places to live in Seattle
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Dec 1, 2014 23:47
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Anybody got tips for dealing with a recruiter that has become a fairly aggressive negotiator once he's trying to finalize the offer? This guy was acting like we were pals roughly up to the point that he told me that they'd probably be proceeding with an offer due to positive feedback after the on-site interview. He made sure to tell me about some concerns that had materialized - I don't have a CS degree, I've worked exclusively with the Microsoft stack professionally. These were issues that he'd pretty explicitly dismissed as being problems for me in the first phone conversation we'd had - they're more interested in people who can think and learn than people who have the right background and specific tech knowledge. This is after I got through a fairly tough four hour, technical whiteboarding interview which I did entirely in Python, so there's your open technology and CS fundamentals right there. More problematic for me was that he forced me to provide my current salary before continuing with the process - I'd been successfully holding this back through his previous attempts, but didn't feel that I was in a strong enough position (i.e. no other offers currently) to really refuse. This is immensely damaging for me to provide - I'm currently at $50K as a mid-level engineer with two years of experience. My company will be making adjustments throughout the next year to try to improve that for 'high performers' (I'm told that I am one), but as it stands I'm well-below market. The original ballpark range that this guy had established in our first phone conversation was $100K-$105K. He's now coming back to me with $75K, which I push back on, still being in talks with a company that established their new CS grad packages were in the $85K-$100K range. The number will move, just not sure by how much, but I'm not expecting close to the original range and I am bracing myself for an exploding offer. Anything I can do at this point to get closer to that original range? I intend to get myself in for an on-site with that other company ASAP, in order to hopefully secure a competing offer and therefore leverage. I would've been overjoyed at a $75K+ offer from this company if my expectations hadn't been set so high - it's a huge disappointment to watch the bottom fall out like this, when they clearly have the money in the budget and want to hire me, but are aiming to do so as cheaply as possible. Edit: Oh God he just viewed my LinkedIn profile. The calls are coming from inside the house. YanniRotten fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Dec 2, 2014 |
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Dec 2, 2014 04:32
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Is there something truly awesome about this job, that you'll beat yourself up about for the next year if you walk away from it? Quite frankly if they told you a number like that up front, and then decided to gently caress you over to the tune of $25K, it seems like the sort of company that will continue loving you once you are employed there.
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Dec 2, 2014 04:43
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YanniRotten posted:Anybody got tips for dealing with a recruiter that has become a fairly aggressive negotiator once he's trying to finalize the offer? I want be a part of the universe where a non-CS major with 2 years of professional experience is "mid-level" and gets paid 100k. Seriously, someone tell me where these companies are because I should be cleaning up.
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Dec 2, 2014 05:30
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pr0zac posted:To anyone doing interviews, if you implement something and the person you're interviewing with says "ok, so how can we improve the runtime?" the correct response is not saying "This is the best I can do" then refusing to work on it anymore unless you really want to confuse your interviewer. What if you really just don't know should you just toss out ideas like recursion, making less calls, etc? Seriously how do you lower runtime? Oh god I'm never going to get a job.
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Dec 2, 2014 05:31
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KidDynamite posted:What if you really just don't know should you just toss out ideas like recursion, making less calls, etc? Seriously how do you lower runtime? Oh god I'm never going to get a job. Honestly, for 99% of problems in software engineering, improving runtime involves spending memory. * Can you precompute the problem (or parts of the problem) entirely and store it in a lookup table? * If the problem consists of convenient sub-problems, can you cache the answers to those? (Better known as memoization, and the crux of much of dynamic programming) * Is there something interesting about the problem domain that allows you to simplify the approach? * Is there a better datastructure or algorithm you can use? To be honest, a lot of the time, you don't even necessarily have to implement the solution -- you just need to be able to reason about it (and do that reasoning aloud) to establish that a better solution exists. In a recent interview, the answer I gave was "You could solve this with a B-tree, and I don't really trust myself to implement that on a whiteboard; there are multiple libraries for it. But I know it solves it, for reasons X/Y/Z." That, plus a rough explanation on whiteboard of how B-trees work, was enough to satisfy. But in general, I prefer candidates who admit "I don't see a better solution" to candidates who pull poo poo out of their rear end.
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Dec 2, 2014 05:39
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ullerrm posted:Honestly, for 99% of problems in software engineering, improving runtime involves spending memory. I don't think that's true, or at least it's not even wrong. The curve of optimal solutions will involve some sort of memory/time trade-off, by definition. But most solutions you see in software projects are suboptimal at least by a significant constant factor on both axes, and for anything non-trivial usually suboptimal in an asymptotic sense, or in some practical-asymptotic sense such as the use of a sorting algorithm that doesn't perform better under pre-sorted input. For example, a project I worked on used red-black trees in a lot of places where it'd be better off using a hash table or array of pairs.
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Dec 2, 2014 05:54
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Blinkz0rz posted:I want be a part of the universe where a non-CS major with 2 years of professional experience is "mid-level" and gets paid 100k. San Francisco and Seattle, non-CS major with no professional experience can pull well above that for entry-level.
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Dec 2, 2014 06:14
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Blinkz0rz posted:I want be a part of the universe where a non-CS major with 2 years of professional experience is "mid-level" and gets paid 100k. It's in the gooniverse. Not that mid-level developers in major metros shouldn't be making 100k+ (or near it at least), but the one where not being a complete moron and having more experience than their cousin who's "good with computers" makes them mid-level. Which is also the one where whiteboarding in a non-MS language is "open technology right there". And where two years of experience puts you on the same pay level as the top range of new CS grads. That said, if you were expecting 100k and they're offering you 75k, go somewhere else? Surely they're not the only company in the area paying that rate. If you think you did well and you're getting shafted because of your current salary and not because you didn't perform as well, or that they're starting you a little below their rate for new CS grads because you're weaker on fundamentals than they are, then go elsewhere.
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Dec 2, 2014 07:21
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Well way to make me feel like a chump, I was just "the successful candidate" to be senior programmer analyst after 6 years here and 11 years out of grad school and I've just (barely) broken 100k. Maybe my purpose is to be a warning, stay away from academia.
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Dec 2, 2014 07:21
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YanniRotten posted:Anybody got tips for dealing with a recruiter that has become a fairly aggressive negotiator once he's trying to finalize the offer? The way that you get what you want out of a negotiation is by being willing and able to walk away. If your recruiter comes at you with a $75k offer and won't budge, you're entirely justified in saying "I'm sorry to hear that, but if you change your mind and can do $95k (or whatever you want to say here), please let me know." And then you end the conversation and just keep interviewing. If they come back with a better offer, great. If not, that's fine--you'll eventually find someone who'll pay you what you're worth, or you'll discover that you need to aim slightly lower at the moment. If you're not willing to walk away, you have no leverage and they have no reason to offer you more.
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Dec 2, 2014 09:05
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FeloniousDrunk posted:Well way to make me feel like a chump, I was just "the successful candidate" to be senior programmer analyst after 6 years here and 11 years out of grad school and I've just (barely) broken 100k. Maybe my purpose is to be a warning, stay away from academia. I was in grad school for three years and left with no degree. Not that I actually have any six figure offers at this point. In general, if getting paid well is your goal, you're better off changing jobs every couple of years instead of relying on promotions at one company.
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Dec 2, 2014 14:10
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YanniRotten posted:More problematic for me was that he forced me to provide my current salary before continuing with the process - I'd been successfully holding this back through his previous attempts, but didn't feel that I was in a strong enough position (i.e. no other offers currently) to really refuse. This is immensely damaging for me to provide - I'm currently at $50K as a mid-level engineer with two years of experience. My company will be making adjustments throughout the next year to try to improve that for 'high performers' (I'm told that I am one), but as it stands I'm well-below market. And... here's where you dropped the ball. You should never tell anyone your salary. Recruiters are not your friend, you are their prey.
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Dec 2, 2014 14:55
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Zero The Hero posted:And... here's where you dropped the ball. You should never tell anyone your salary. Recruiters are not your friend, you are their prey. Yeah, I'm really feeling now that I should have said "Hey, if you can't proceed without a salary, then I guess we're not proceeding. Let me know if that changes." The engineering team is his customer, and if they want to hire me, they probably wouldn't accept "Uh he wouldn't name his salary so I didn't know how cheap I could get him, so there's no offer" as an answer from him, after six team members each spent an hour with me. Clearly I can never ever reveal my current salary unless I feel it's in my favor to do so - which it won't ever be at my current company. It's so damaging - there's no way it's not costing me at least ten thousand dollars in my first year, if I do end up at this place.
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Dec 2, 2014 15:45
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Zero The Hero posted:And... here's where you dropped the ball. You should never tell anyone your salary. Recruiters are not your friend, you are their prey.
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Dec 2, 2014 16:10
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Has anyone considered lying about your current salary to the recruiter? Just say you already make 90k or whatever.
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Dec 2, 2014 16:51
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The March Hare posted:Has anyone considered lying about your current salary to the recruiter? Just say you already make 90k or whatever.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:03
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Tunga posted:In my case, they don't want my current salary (well, they do but I just say it's under NDA and that works). They want me to give them a number up front for how much I want from a role before they will put my CV forward to the company. $12 million.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:15
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Question: Why would anyone work for a startup when they can work for a huge company like Amazon, Google, etc.? Seems to me that big companies offer compensation that blows startups out of the water. At a huge company, you're going to get a decent salary, a signing bonus, and RSUs. At a startup, you won't get a signing bonus, your salary will be lower, and if you get any stock it's almost certainly worthless. So why?
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Dec 2, 2014 17:18
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Safe and Secure! posted:Question: Why would anyone work for a startup when they can work for a huge company like Amazon, Google, etc.? Equity. It's a risk/reward kind of thing. Also, work environment tends to be way better from my experience (granted, that's not a steadfast rule, but I find that smaller companies are more open to non-traditional employment arrangements as opposed to cubing it up from 8-6)
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Dec 2, 2014 17:21
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Safe and Secure! posted:Question: Why would anyone work for a startup when they can work for a huge company like Amazon, Google, etc.? Hope for a huge IPO which boosts your stock to millions.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:21
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Safe and Secure! posted:Question: Why would anyone work for a startup when they can work for a huge company like Amazon, Google, etc.? As someone working for a startup: it's exciting, the culture is totally different, the feel of a small team is something I particularly enjoy, the pay was at least competitive, you don't risk getting pigeonholed into one specialty like you might at a large company, feels really cool being a major contributor to something novel/unique I mean there are definite drawbacks: yeah stock options are nice but that's a long-term strategy, long hours during some crunch times can be demanding, shifting market/competition can pose a threat that doesn't exist at large established companies, somewhat of a "deliver or die" mandate (some may see this as a good thing), can't do things like lateral moves if you want to change your focus But all in all, I enjoy it a lot.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:24
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Safe and Secure! posted:Question: Why would anyone work for a startup when they can work for a huge company like Amazon, Google, etc.? I'm not at a startup anymore, and I think startup culture sucks, but... Because I have a diverse range of skills, and I like using them all. Being in a multidisciplinary role is extremely satisfying, and it's really hard to pull that off even at other large tech firms, since you'll inevitably end up working inside the orbit of a project, if not one facet of that project.
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Dec 2, 2014 18:49
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YanniRotten posted:Yeah, I'm really feeling now that I should have said "Hey, if you can't proceed without a salary, then I guess we're not proceeding. Let me know if that changes." The engineering team is his customer, and if they want to hire me, they probably wouldn't accept "Uh he wouldn't name his salary so I didn't know how cheap I could get him, so there's no offer" as an answer from him, after six team members each spent an hour with me. I'm confused about something. This is an external recruiter, right (third party, works for a recruiting firm)? Don't they normally take their cut as a percentage of starting salary? That would make him want to puff up your $$$, not cut it by 1/4.
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Dec 2, 2014 19:58
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Munkeymon posted:I'm confused about something. This is an external recruiter, right (third party, works for a recruiting firm)? Don't they normally take their cut as a percentage of starting salary? That would make him want to puff up your $$$, not cut it by 1/4. It's easier for them to just place as many easy placements as possible rather than to spend time on a given placement to get an extra couple hundred bucks.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:01
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Munkeymon posted:I'm confused about something. This is an external recruiter, right (third party, works for a recruiting firm)? Don't they normally take their cut as a percentage of starting salary? That would make him want to puff up your $$$, not cut it by 1/4. Much like real estate brokers, it isn't really in the external recruiter's interest to drive up your selling price at the expense of getting deals done quicker. Let's say he's getting a commission equal to 25% of your first year's salary. If he drives a long hard bargain and bids them up from 80k to 90k, he pockets $2,500. If he doesn't bother and instead uses that time to get another developer placed with another company for 80k, he pockets $20,000. He maximizes his income by getting as many deals done quickly as he can, not by increasing the price of each deal.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:02
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That's a great point but now I'm wondering why the recruiter is the middle man in compensation negotiations at all. Is that normal?
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Dec 2, 2014 20:35
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ullerrm posted:But in general, I prefer candidates who admit "I don't see a better solution" to candidates who pull poo poo out of their rear end. Admitting you're stuck and need a hint is just fine. Saying you can't do better and refusing to continue even after being given strong hints is not.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:47
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Munkeymon posted:That's a great point but now I'm wondering why the recruiter is the middle man in compensation negotiations at all. Is that normal? In my experience, yes.
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Dec 2, 2014 22:52
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