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On the flip side, if you're enjoying your situation as a manager, that's worth a lot. There's a lot of risks and maybes in moving to a new city and hoping for management in 6 to 12 months if the company grows. Especially because it's growing. Hard decision. Could depend on how much you want to move, how risky you think it might be, how stable the business is, and whether you're willing to face the possibility that you end up not being a good fit – and get fired after moving, before your apartment lease is even close to done.
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May 13, 2015 09:44
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Skuto posted:Unless you're clearly the oldest among your peers, and you feel the step back at this point in your career is problematic, the upsides just seem overwhelming here. A decent chunk of the 40% is due to cost of living differences but I'm well aware I'm getting paid substantially less than market for a variety of bad, historical reasons. My current location is quite rural and has maybe 5 lead engineer/manager positions that open up a year so there isn't a lot of room for moving between jobs if I stay where I'm at. When I've looked to relocate to a major market in the past I ran into problems where about half of the companies didn't want to deal with anyone who wasn't local so that's another upside of taking this new position. But aside from the pay problem (which my current boss has committed to addressing) I am reasonably happy with my present gig. I have a great team, I'm very well regarded by upper level management and we're getting interesting and strategic projects. I think in the long term, both my current job and the new offer have good upsides, the offer is more of a high risk/high reward sort of situation rather than grinding my way up the ladder over the next 5-10 years at my current company. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:On the flip side, if you're enjoying your situation as a manager, that's worth a lot. There's a lot of risks and maybes in moving to a new city and hoping for management in 6 to 12 months if the company grows. Especially because it's growing. Well, my former boss and I had a really good working relationship (we worked together for 4 years) and she thinks I'd be a very good fit. They're also well funded and they have decent number of customers so the risks there are pretty low. My main concern is transitioning back to doing daily development work after a reasonably lengthy hiatus (I was getting pretty burnt out when I transitioned into a leadership role) and not continuing to grow my leadership skills.
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May 13, 2015 23:15
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I think the only question you need to answer is if you WANT to do development work again. If so, take the new job. If you like doing the management stuff better, maybe talk to current boss about the offer and his commitment to address the pay issue sooner rather than later.
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May 13, 2015 23:41
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Anybody have any experience migrating away from one tech stack to something new? I'm a junior-mid level developer with 2 years of experience developing web apps using Coldfusion/IIS/Windows/MSSQL. Before that, I worked with someone else doing freelance work with the LAMP stack as a more junior role with a focus on front end development html/css/jquery. I'd really like to find a junior LAMP/Java/.Net role and get the hell away from coldfusion but I'm having some difficulty getting any calls back when I apply for postings on Dice/Indeed. I spend a lot of my free time on largish personal projects exploring new technologies that I believe would at least make me slightly more marketable. But I spoke to one recruiter out here whose eyes glazed over as soon as I began to describe them so I kinda got the impression that recruiters couldn't give a poo poo about personal projects or my github, and I haven't heard back from them in about a week. So, to the goons who abandoned their primary stack in favor of something else, how did you go about it? Do you have any advice? I'm in the LA area if it makes any difference as far as the industry goes
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May 15, 2015 22:40
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Don't focus so much on recruiters, get out in front of other engineers who can refer you into open positions at their workplaces. Hit up local meetups/conferences and get to know people.
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May 15, 2015 23:02
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ROFLburger posted:Anybody have any experience migrating away from one tech stack to something new? I'm a junior-mid level developer with 2 years of experience developing web apps using Coldfusion/IIS/Windows/MSSQL. Before that, I worked with someone else doing freelance work with the LAMP stack as a more junior role with a focus on front end development html/css/jquery. I'd really like to find a junior LAMP/Java/.Net role and get the hell away from coldfusion but I'm having some difficulty getting any calls back when I apply for postings on Dice/Indeed. I suppose I have something to contribute. Backstory: C#/ASP.NET developer of 5+ years, this year switched to full-time UI work with AngularJS/Typescript. This came about somewhat gradually for me, as the last major C# project I worked on used AngularJS as the frontend, with C# WebAPI as the backend. I ended up working on all aspects of it, so I managed to pick up a fair bit of Javascript & AngularJS. I liked what I saw with AngularJS, and when that project ended, it was time for  , as I was getting tired of the company, but also pure C# as well. Javascript, for all it's faults, is taking the world by storm, and I saw in AngularJS the structured way of writing it that I could get behind. I then managed to fall straight into a job that had a huge AngularJS/Typescript application in development and desperately needed someone with some strong Angular skills to take over, and I haven't looked back. Using Typescript itself also helped make the transition easier, as it has a type system and syntax similar to C#.As for making the jump, you've got to spend enough time in the technology you want to move to to be fluent enough to convince someone on taking a chance on you. With only 2 years, you've got an uphill battle as prospective companies will not only be wary of your skills with the target technology, but of fundamentals as well. I'd focus on getting really good with the fundamentals, and apply to all jobs that move you somewhat in that direction. Once you start spending 8 hours a day working on something, you will learn the details very fast.
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May 15, 2015 23:06
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I'm in a market for a new job. So two things 1. My resume (now that im filling in my current job) is obnoxiously long now, bordering on two lines into 3 pages. I was pretty okay with it before being about 1.5 pages but now obviously no one is going to read that entire thing. Is it better to start condensing every job or cut out the job I had ~10 years ago (although it was a pretty cool job)? 2. Anyone want to share experiences about working remotely? I would like to work remotely from a different part of the world where at best I can share the last 2 hours and the first two hours of the work day here in the US. I am not worried about my focus as much as being able to interact with other workers.
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May 18, 2015 07:20
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Why would what you were doing ten years ago enter into my decision to hire you now? If you've done similar things since, talk about those instead. If not, leave it off unless it's something exceptional.
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May 18, 2015 07:27
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ultrafilter posted:Why would what you were doing ten years ago enter into my decision to hire you now? If you've done similar things since, talk about those instead. If not, leave it off unless it's something exceptional. I would say the opposite. If you've done something 10 years ago and that was different from the 10 years that followed I'd like to know about it. Especially if it's potentially relevant. Did you end up not enjoying it or was it a matter of opportunities etc...
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May 18, 2015 07:32
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Right now my plan is to truncate the last few jobs into smaller blurbs while keeping the last two jobs current. Honestly not even sure if employers even look through the resume.
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May 18, 2015 07:46
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Strong Sauce posted:Right now my plan is to truncate the last few jobs into smaller blurbs while keeping the last two jobs current. If you pass the initial screen sure why not. On the other hand what you put there only has so much influence because for all we know it's all terribly exaggerated and you're really incompetent at all the things you claim to have done.
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May 18, 2015 07:54
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Strong Sauce posted:2. Anyone want to share experiences about working remotely? I would like to work remotely from a different part of the world where at best I can share the last 2 hours and the first two hours of the work day here in the US. I am not worried about my focus as much as being able to interact with other workers. Not having any commute time is awesome. Setting up your office exactly as you want it is nice, on the other hand if your employer has good offices and gives the employees good equipment it's less of a factor. You want to make sure the team you work in has a significant amount of people remote, preferably a manager, too. If there's 10 people, and only 2 are remote, they will suffer because nothing will be documented online or in emails and they'll be clueless to everything. I like being on IRC so there's some non-work chat & banter even if the rest of my team is asleep and I'm sitting alone in my mancave. Overlap will probably steer your hours to some extent, you need to have enough joint time so meetings can be scheduled etc. The flexibility is nice to do groceries or for hobbies, but on the other hand all the meetings end up being scheduled at the same time I should be putting the kids to bed, oops. Personally I find that my mood is very dependent on the amount of *verifiable* work I get done. If I'm stuck debugging, I feel miserable, even outside work. I know my managers understand how software development works but I also know that realistically at some point you're judged on your outputs.
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May 18, 2015 09:32
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Strong Sauce posted:Right now my plan is to truncate the last few jobs into smaller blurbs while keeping the last two jobs current. I think this is a good plan. If you consider a resume to be mainly a timeline of everything you've ever done, then the most recent stuff is the most relevant because it's representative of your cumulative experience. When reviewing resumes, I tend to read the latest 2 positions and then skim the rest. To me, resumes are sales brochures, not biographical documents, so they don't need to be comprehensive. I suggest cherrypicking the interesting stuff from your previous jobs that make you look good, and word them in such a way that they show off why you're awesome. "As an intern, designed and implemented a feature on the company's timecard system" --> "Reduced payroll costs by 20% by optimizing timecard workflow."
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May 18, 2015 12:39
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Strong Sauce posted:I'm in a market for a new job. So two things I love working remotely. My schedule is incredibly flexible (spent last week in Europe and worked from Paris and London without taking any days off), my office is set up optimally for me without any distractions, and coworkers are always a phone call away via PBX or on IRC. I would say that you should only work in a fully or mostly remote team so that everyone's in the same boat. Also, unless your team uses some creepy collaboration software where you all have cameras and mics trained on you all day, your level of social interaction with coworkers will necessarily be less than if you worked in an office. You'll possibly need to seek out social outlets outside of work more so than you would have before. Personally, I'm never going back to an office.
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May 18, 2015 13:02
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I too work remote, my team is mostly in the Bay Area but we've got about 6 or 7 remotes. I'll basically echo the positive and the negative things. I generally love it though.bonds0097 posted:I would say that you should only work in a fully or mostly remote team so that everyone's in the same boat. Also, unless your team uses some creepy collaboration software where you all have cameras and mics trained on you all day, your level of social interaction with coworkers will necessarily be less than if you worked in an office. You'll possibly need to seek out social outlets outside of work more so than you would have before. My first observation upon going to the office was that they seriously limit the amount of work conversations that don't go in chat, video call, or our message board. It's like everything goes on over chat until lunchtime when someone stands up and says "hey let's eat." Even if you have a question for the person next to you it goes in chat. While that's generally a courtesy to keep people from getting knocked out of the zone, it also limits out-of-band work communication and makes it easier for those who aren't in the room. I set up in a coworking space a day or two a week and that has helped with the social/human aspect of work quite a bit. It also helps me get into a mindset of "going to work" even if I'm not going to a company office. bonds0097 posted:Personally, I'm never going back to an office. Yup.
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May 18, 2015 15:22
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I wasn't a fan of working remotely... though this is probably more due to not being motivated in the position in general and that made it too easy to slack off. I was also the only remote worker, so I was out of the loop and easily forgotten. I haven't been that interested in working from home at my new job, as it would probably hinder more than help. It's only a 10 minute drive, and I have 2-3 people I'm mentoring, which would be a lot more difficult. Not having to get dressed in the morning is nice though.
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May 18, 2015 15:54
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kitten smoothie posted:My first observation upon going to the office was that they seriously limit the amount of work conversations that don't go in chat, video call, or our message board. It's like everything goes on over chat until lunchtime when someone stands up and says "hey let's eat." Even if you have a question for the person next to you it goes in chat. While that's generally a courtesy to keep people from getting knocked out of the zone, it also limits out-of-band work communication and makes it easier for those who aren't in the room. What does your office layout look like? This is one of the reasons I *really* hate open office layouts.
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May 18, 2015 15:59
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down with slavery posted:What does your office layout look like? This is one of the reasons I *really* hate open office layouts. My company's actual offices are the standard open office layout with probably 15-20 desks in a room. But people work from home somewhat often rather than ride Caltrain, and on any given day half the desks are unoccupied. Conference rooms around the edges. None are of the "unscheduled" variety for moving ad-hoc meetings out of the main room, but there's usually a room you can grab for 15-30 mins somewhere. The conference rooms all have video linkups, and as a remote I can warp into any conference room from my laptop or iPad and participate in such an ad-hoc meeting. Anything at all is better than a past open-office situation I was in. We had about 30 people in a room, with three unrelated functional teams collocated in it. Rather than sit people working together near one another, they let people homestead the desks with the order determined by # of months of seniority. So the lifers chose the desks where nobody would see them slack off and everyone else just filled in the gaps. No breakout meeting rooms located off the "bullpen." No chat or other communication mechanism beyond using your voice. Since your work most likely had jack squat to do with the people next to you, you'd have to go over to someone else's desk to ask a question. And if someone came over to your deskmate you were guaranteed you'd be knocked out of the zone with something completely irrelevant to you. Typically there were always two or three conversations going on in the room at a time like this. In order to be heard, people would unconsciously speak louder in an vocal arms race that eventually led to near-shouting. If I wanted to get any actual work done, I was escaping up the street to a coffee shop with free wifi. I think if I were to work in an actual office, my optimal solution would be a semi-private office shared with one or two teammates. Enough social interaction and being able to whiteboard problems together, but at the same time we can go heads-down and ignore one another. Remote feels like the next best thing though.
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May 18, 2015 16:35
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kitten smoothie posted:I think if I were to work in an actual office, my optimal solution would be a semi-private office shared with one or two teammates. Enough social interaction and being able to whiteboard problems together, but at the same time we can go heads-down and ignore one another. Remote feels like the next best thing though. If all the team members are developers, I'd call this probably my ideal situation (also, non-click keyboards and headphones required, for gently caress's sake). My team at my last job was me and the DBA, sharing an office, and he served as the de facto helpdesk for several directors (because they were divas and could not be bothered to go through the official helpdesk like they were supposed to). As a result, his phone, which sat 10 feet from me with no cubicle walls to so much as take the edge off the sound, would ring every 15 minutes, ensuring my concentration would never solidify for any length of time. It was a nightmare.
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May 18, 2015 20:40
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Amazon jiggled the bait again and I bit. What should I watch out for? I'm to speak to the team responsible for the APIs and such for outside vendors that use amazon to sell their stuff.
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May 18, 2015 21:54
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Space Whale posted:Amazon jiggled the bait again and I bit.
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May 18, 2015 22:00
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Vulture Culture posted:Amazon's well-known for being a very high-pressure environment that uses stack ranking as the driving mechanism for performance reviews, so be aware of that going in. "Free ride to Seattle to interview at a few other places," gotcha.
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May 18, 2015 22:25
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Vulture Culture posted:Amazon's [...] uses stack ranking as the driving mechanism for performance reviews Don't all the huge companies do that? Amazon, Google and Microsoft do it, and I thought I heard that Facebook does it, too.
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May 19, 2015 03:57
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Safe and Secure! posted:Don't all the huge companies do that? Amazon, Google and Microsoft do it, and I thought I heard that Facebook does it, too. Google does not. Microsoft supposedly abandoned it very recently though I heard that rumors of its death may have been greatly exaggerated.
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May 19, 2015 06:11
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Safe and Secure! posted:Don't all the huge companies do that? Amazon, Google and Microsoft do it, and I thought I heard that Facebook does it, too. Interestingly, Amazon's Zappos division just disposed of all the full-time managers in their organization altogether and moved to Holacracy. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 07:56 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 07:53
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Vulture Culture posted:I have strong feelings on stack ranking regardless of what a handful of companies are pulling from Jack Welch's experiences running GE in the eighties. I'm sure it works great if you, like Jack Welch, started running a company which had accumulated 100,000+ employees worth of dead weight over decades. But I have a hard time thinking these conditions exist at any modern tech company with a high hiring bar.
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May 19, 2015 13:32
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kitten smoothie posted:I'm sure it works great if you, like Jack Welch, started running a company which had accumulated 100,000+ employees worth of dead weight over decades. It didn't work all that well at GE either. There's a reason GE's stock did what it did more or less immediately after Welch left and the music stopped.
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May 19, 2015 14:14
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kitten smoothie posted:I'm sure it works great if you, like Jack Welch, started running a company which had accumulated 100,000+ employees worth of dead weight over decades. I suppose it works fine if your "percent who suck" metric is accurate, and evenly spread through the company. It doesn't take long to start cannibalizing your good people and turning them against each other though.
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May 19, 2015 15:40
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Che Delilas posted:If all the team members are developers, I'd call this probably my ideal situation (also, non-click keyboards and headphones required, for gently caress's sake). That's another advantage of remote I forgot to mention. I have a nice mechanical keyboard and don't ever bother anyone with it unless I accidentally forget to mute myself while typing during a conference call. Mechanical keyboards rule. But yes, I'd do go insane if I worked in an office where people had them.
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May 19, 2015 15:45
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Skandranon posted:I suppose it works fine if your "percent who suck" metric is accurate, and evenly spread through the company. It doesn't take long to start cannibalizing your good people and turning them against each other though. Yeah, the instant you staff a team entirely with A-players because you want the project to succeed, you're just some TV cameras short of Survivor XVII: Silicon Valley.
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May 19, 2015 15:46
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kitten smoothie posted:Yeah, the instant you staff a team entirely with A-players because you want the project to succeed, you're just some TV cameras short of Survivor XVII: Silicon Valley. I remember reading an article talking about stack ranking at Microsoft, and how pretty much everyone figured it out after the first pass, did the math, and proceeded to do anything they could to avoid working with other A-players. This pretty much cost Microsoft the last decade and the mobile market.
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May 19, 2015 15:59
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bonds0097 posted:That's another advantage of remote I forgot to mention. I have a nice mechanical keyboard and don't ever bother anyone with it unless I accidentally forget to mute myself while typing during a conference call. Mechanical keyboards rule. But yes, I'd do go insane if I worked in an office where people had them. You can get a mechanical keyboard that isn't deafeningly loud dude. Browns feel almost exactly like blues and are quiet enough to use in an office. Clears are supposed to be real nice too. Safe and Secure! posted:Don't all the huge companies do that? Amazon, Google and Microsoft do it, and I thought I heard that Facebook does it, too. IANAM but as far as I can tell Facebook does something similar to stack ranking but theres no pre-prescribed percentages for each level so its possible for there to be no one in the "should be fired" ranges.
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May 19, 2015 16:37
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pr0zac posted:You can get a mechanical keyboard that isn't deafeningly loud dude. Browns feel almost exactly like blues and are quiet enough to use in an office. Clears are supposed to be real nice too.
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May 19, 2015 16:48
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pr0zac posted:IANAM but as far as I can tell Facebook does something similar to stack ranking but theres no pre-prescribed percentages for each level so its possible for there to be no one in the "should be fired" ranges.
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May 19, 2015 17:37
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At the last company I worked at, stack ranking referred to simply ordering everyone else on your team by the impact of their contributions. A lot of people found it to be uncomfortable, even though there was apparently no percentage-based cutoff that qualified you as a bad employee. AFAIK, it only really came into play when people were frequently ranked above or below people at other job levels e.g., a SWE V under a SWE IV, or whatever.
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May 19, 2015 18:17
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Kyth posted:Google does not.
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May 19, 2015 19:44
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a slime posted:AFAIK, it only really came into play when people were frequently ranked above or below people at other job levels e.g., a SWE V under a SWE IV, or whatever. This seems like a really weird way to do things. So everyone is ranked against everyone else? Usually performance reviews are based on your performance as measured against others with your title. Expanding it to the entirety of the company sounds super complicated and not very useful. edit: oh, but you're saying it's just your team. Still, what if I'm the only senior dev on the team? I mean, obvi I should be at the top of the rankings at all times, but how is that useful information in any way?
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May 19, 2015 19:47
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Cicero posted:Yeah they do. It's just not the only performance ranking they use. Google does not stack rank by the definitions being used here. Calibrations are checking if "like is like" but aren't the same. The "stack rank" portion of the review process is there to cross check other inputs and is not the defining input itself to anything. It is individual opinions, it is not combined to make a company-wide ordered list of people, and it is not required to be perfectly consistent, either between people or with the actual useful parts of the process while it does in a stack rank. I have managed in both environments and by the definition of stack rank used in the sentence "Amazon and Microsoft use stack ranking", Google does not. (Edit) and in a stack rank-driven system you will primarily experience ratings reduced, because it's never in your interest as a manager to vouch for a higher rating for anyone else's employees as it directly impacts you. In a calibration-driven system like Google's, I see as many ratings raised as I see ratings lowered. Kyth fucked around with this message at 02:59 on May 20, 2015 |
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May 20, 2015 02:44
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Dessert Rose posted:This seems like a really weird way to do things. So everyone is ranked against everyone else? I dunno, if your junior dev is performing better than your senior dev, that might be worth looking at. Either senior dev is slacking and should be talked to, junior dev needs to be promoted before someone poaches him, or your method of evaluating developers is broken. Though, now I think of it, you'd have to have both of those people essentially performing the same duties in order to compare them like that. Which again points more to a broken system than a problem with the devs. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 09:22 on May 20, 2015 |
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May 20, 2015 09:18
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Che Delilas posted:you'd have to have both of those people essentially performing the same duties in order to compare them like that Yeah, this was what made me go "what?" Obvi your senior dev/architect/whatever is going to be doing some completely different things, you can't possibly compare them so easily. In other words, Che Delilas posted:your method of evaluating developers is broken
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May 20, 2015 10:14
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