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Imposter syndrome does go away, it's generally situation-specific and is easily cured by objective evidence of your skill or accomplishments, or by sufficient observations of your colleagues.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:34
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Hey Shrughes why not give us a quiche story?
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Oct 1, 2015 07:43
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Pollyanna posted:Welp, I'm being let go. Commence the "told you so"s.
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Oct 1, 2015 08:03
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Yeah, I think I'd be happier at a larger company. Any place that recognizes I'm junior/early in my career would work, really. I just want support in that sense, and my current workplace completely failed at that. They are not in a position to take on juniors at all - they're barely hanging on to seniors as it is. One of the things I want to get done is a postmortem on my employment here. It will be good to see what I did well and where I need to improve. It will also give me a relatively unbiased document to point to when people ask me what happened. Is this a good idea? We do blameless postmortems all the time at this company, so there's no reason we can't do it for someone who's leaving. Also, it's time to go job hunting again. Means I gotta brush up on my Algorithms and Data Structures, and bullshit interview questions. Also means I gotta start talking to people. Luckily, this will be much easier with a network in place. I also need to start thinking of what I want to be working on. Rails and Angular maintenance was boring as poo poo and I wanna do something new and engaging. I've thought about getting into machine learning or mobile dev, maybe even embedded. I think I need to branch out away from All Rails All The Time or I'll go insane. Hell, I'd be happy just working on React apps. I wanna do something interesting, and I didn't get that here.
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Oct 1, 2015 16:38
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah, I think I'd be happier at a larger company. Any place that recognizes I'm junior/early in my career would work, really. I just want support in that sense, and my current workplace completely failed at that. They are not in a position to take on juniors at all - they're barely hanging on to seniors as it is. A post mortem is a fine idea, but I doubt you'll get anything useful from your company. They can't give you honest feedback, or they risk a lawsuit. They are going to give you nothing but canned, approved by legal answers. If you have any friends there, try talking to them over lunch, or just try to take a hard, honest look at yourself. Also, pure maintenance sucks on any technology stack. You are hemmed in to making crappy fixes and not given any time to properly fix things. Definitely inquire at your next jobs what percentage of time you will be doing maintenance, and how much latitude you will have in how you fix them. If you don't have some ability to put your own creativity into your work, and are just pounding nails, no project will be fun to work on.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:10
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Pollyanna posted:I also need to start thinking of what I want to be working on. Rails and Angular maintenance was boring as poo poo and I wanna do something new and engaging. I've thought about getting into machine learning or mobile dev, maybe even embedded. I think I need to branch out away from All Rails All The Time or I'll go insane. Hell, I'd be happy just working on React apps. I wanna do something interesting, and I didn't get that here. The truth is that you're doing yourself a disservice by working with Rails/companies that are very invested in it, because in 2015 they just about all expect a someone who has been working with Rails for years and is borderline obsessive about TDD/BDD and knows those paradigms well. In most cases you're probably expected to be very comfortable with every part of the stack. It's a toxic community at this point and incredibly unwelcoming to new developers and the knowledge gap is becoming greater by the day, causing a vicious cycle. In all honesty it's probably not your fault that you were treated the way you were.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:25
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sarehu posted:Imposter syndrome does go away, it's generally situation-specific and is easily cured by objective evidence of your skill or accomplishments, or by sufficient observations of your colleagues. Slightly disagree here. I think part of the problem of impostor syndrome is looking at things from the wrong perspective. I have not yet read the book this comes from, but it makes sense to me (from wikipedia: ) quote:Dweck claims to be able to distinguish the two categories by grouping individuals based on their behaviour, specifically their reaction to failure. Those with a "fixed mindset" believe that abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities, while those with a "growth mindset" believe that they can acquire any given ability provided they invest effort or study. I suspect "getting over" impostor syndrome is less about being convinced you're skilled, and more about making this adjustment to your mindset. It probably helps to get evidence that you're good, but I think most people will blind themselves to that evidence even if it's there, until their perspective changes. wins32767 posted:Yeah, this. It's not that I feel omni-capable, it's that I've mostly stopped giving a drat about the fact that I'm inevitably going to do things imperfectly. Just do it and if it doesn't work, adjust and try again. This is probably one good way to do it.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:35
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JawnV6 posted:You asked for severance, right? Should've mentioned this before, but being fired ought to be downright exciting. Ask for severance right then and there, they've got sympathy in that moment that won't persist once y'all leave the room. Them being on board while you're explicitly looking for a new place is pretty nice though. Most places try to set up those discussions for Monday, as you can immediately act on getting your next thing lined up without the awful gulf of a weekend. Wednesday is indicative of their general disarray. No, it's indicative of their use of biweekly pay periods and HR/Finance wanting to stop on a boundary. Or quarterly boundaries depending on the reporting going on as they seek funding.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:37
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Yeah, we finished Q3 yesterday. I'm sure that played a part in it. Re: the postmortem, yeah, they'll probably bullshit the entire thing. I'd like to think they'd respond honestly, but I doubt it. triple sulk posted:The truth is that you're doing yourself a disservice by working with Rails/companies that are very invested in it, because in 2015 they just about all expect a someone who has been working with Rails for years and is borderline obsessive about TDD/BDD and knows those paradigms well. In most cases you're probably expected to be very comfortable with every part of the stack. It's a toxic community at this point and incredibly unwelcoming to new developers and the knowledge gap is becoming greater by the day, causing a vicious cycle. In all honesty it's probably not your fault that you were treated the way you were. Goddamn. Yeah, I've had much more happiness working outside of Rails than inside it, and I do want to work with something else. I'm still fond of TDD/BDD, but it's got its limits, unfortunately. I think being unwelcoming of new developers is more because Rails is the new Java when it comes to "5+ years of experience with the Ruby over Rails language"-level bullshit. I'm getting pretty tired of Rails. I want to work in Elixir or Clojure. That'd be pretty cool.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:48
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Hay, Java can be pretty interesting and fun  though admittedly I bet a lot of companies are boring or bad and those companies just happen to use Java.
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Oct 1, 2015 18:35
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enterprise fizzbuzz is a parody but mirrors my experience with java well. Something simple like a soap receiving endpoint extrapolated to 50 classes, of which 48 were created using some code generator.
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Oct 1, 2015 18:40
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MeruFM posted:enterprise fizzbuzz is a parody but mirrors my experience with java well. Something simple like a soap receiving endpoint extrapolated to 50 classes, of which 48 were created using some code generator. Java is a pretty great language and the core API is solid, but I cannot for the loving life of me understand why every single loving Java engineer does this. It's like everyone picked up "Baby's First OO Design Patterns" and decided that every 10 line task needed to be implemented in the most convoluted "future proof" way possible using 5 different interfaces and 3 layers of abstract classes wired together in Spring using half XML and half annotations plus some other hacked together crap. A key part of this approach is to invent your own ORM, serialization, and caching frameworks, write no documentation on it, then bury the source code somewhere deep, deep down in a 10 year old SVN repo guarded by a snarling dragon. Bonus points if you don't use curly braces on one-liner if statements and run that poo poo 3-4 levels deep.
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Oct 1, 2015 19:32
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there must be some good ol' proverb about "future proofing" code before requirements are given it's like a software dev trying to be an oracle
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Oct 1, 2015 19:52
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See it sucks cause I do have a lot to say on software design theory and best practices, but I never got a chance to exercise any of that and have no clue how to spin it into a job on its own.
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Oct 1, 2015 23:44
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Pollyanna posted:See it sucks cause I do have a lot to say on software design theory and best practices, but I never got a chance to exercise any of that and have no clue how to spin it into a job on its own.
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Oct 1, 2015 23:52
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Pollyanna posted:See it sucks cause I do have a lot to say on software design theory and best practices, but I never got a chance to exercise any of that and have no clue how to spin it into a job on its own. There are not a lot of jobs for just "Best Practices Engineer", but there are plenty of places that can benefit from someone actually interested in implementing them. It's certainly a good topic to bring up on interviews, either they don't do any good practices and are not interested in changing, so they won't hire you, or they ARE interested and WILL hire you. Pretty much a win-win.
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Oct 2, 2015 00:03
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Pollyanna posted:Welp, I'm being let go. Commence the "told you so"s. Definitely don't let imposter syndrome get the better of you. Even though there is a lot to learn in software engineering, there are also things that you get down solid by really understanding the intuition and you have to let that build your confidence. And there's definitely learnable intuition involved in programming or else everyone would be typing code randomly and praying that something works (though admittedly, that works too sometimes.) Good luck with interviews! I still remember how painful those were from just recently and I'm afraid of going back there. I will say that my friend who now is a CS Professor at CMU thinks "random brainteasers" style interviews are dumb as gently caress too. Unfortunately its just something you have to get used to when interviewing in this field.
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Oct 2, 2015 01:06
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Oh hey there is an Oldie thread as well. What is the likelihood that a 4-year old Silicon Valley startup with 30 employees (10 of whom are sales people apparently) and ~10 million in A-round VC funding last fall will still be around in 2 years? 5 years? $10 million with 30 employees at $100k each comes out to about three years worth of salary. I know they have some income on top of that. But I'm curious what the raw statistics are that they will sell out to a larger company, get B-round VC funding, etc? They say 9 out of 10 businesses fail, but presumably you're doing something right if someone writes you a big fat check. Then again $10 mil isn't a whole lot when you're paying Silicon Valley salaries.  Trying to get some perspective here.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:46
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Hadlock posted:Oh hey there is an Oldie thread as well. I think that overall statistics on successful outcomes (exits, large public valuations) are worthless because the causes of success are much harder to pin down than the causes of failure. That said, the most recent statistic I saw put the chances of a five-year-old VC-funded startup of becoming a unicorn (a company with a $1bn+ valuation) around 1.28%. If a startup has been around for 4 years, it's safe to say they've found a product-market fit, and their Series A backer is confident that they've found a product-market fit. If this is a question about prospective employment, I hope the salary is worthwhile, because the remaining options are usually poo poo by the time the company has been around that long.
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Oct 2, 2015 06:02
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Yeah it sounds like they probably have ~1-2 million in revenue? I guess I should have asked that. Whoops. They have some name brand customers including my current employer. How big is a big startup? I have been using the Buffer open compensation spreadsheet as a (very, very) rough guide to raw startup numbers in a competently run startup. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1 It looks like last year they were doing about $4 million annual revenue with 30 employees. Is 30 a lot? I guess I'm trying to get a big picture of employee salary vs revenue vs likelihood of going under. I've worked for two companies under 30 employees before, both in the same industry; one was ~15 employees and had about $15 million in revenue with almost no fixed costs, another had ~25 employees and $8 million in revenue but a lot of fixed costs. Currently I'm sitting pretty in a high pay, low cost of living situation with no debt lots of vacation (~21 days a year) and a fairly good career track, although at ~30 I've mostly topped out within three years as a Senior Analyst until someone in their late 40's quits or dies which could take 20 years, and even then I'm not guaranteed a management position. Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k. I really want to head out there and live the Silicon Valley startup dream, but want to make sure this is a calculated risk before relocating 1500 miles across the country in a place where I can't afford to buy a house.
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Oct 2, 2015 06:20
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MeruFM posted:there must be some good ol' proverb about "future proofing" code before requirements are given
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Oct 2, 2015 06:23
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Hadlock posted:Yeah it sounds like they probably have ~1-2 million in revenue? I guess I should have asked that. Whoops. They have some name brand customers including my current employer. How big is a big startup? Annual revenue might not matter either. Lots of companies look to build user traction before monetization, and will just burn their VC funding until that happens. It's a tradeoff that results in faster growth at the cost of dilution to VCs. It's a decision the owners have to make for the company. There's lots of healthy startup scenes in other places too. NYC is great right now. Boston, Philly, and Portland are all seeing a startup boom in recent years. There's also the opportunity for remote work with lots and lots of companies located all over the world. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 06:40
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Hadlock posted:Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k. Even if they go under, it's not like you wouldn't have another job within a week or so.
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Oct 2, 2015 13:29
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Hadlock posted:Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k. It depends a lot on the founders whether "going down" means your company literally stops paying paychecks or make a "soft exit" where they sell to a larger company. Everyone left on the team (which is often greatly downsized and compose mainly software devs) gets a nice comp package from the larger company + RSU + whatever else, easily boosting your salary 20-50%, getting you close to buying a house there. Either buying a condo in midtown or a decent house in the outskirts.
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Oct 2, 2015 18:34
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Even if they go under, it's not like you wouldn't have another job within a week or so.
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Oct 2, 2015 18:48
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Is the market out there really that white hot? Jesus. I guess you really do have to pay $130 just to keep people from jumping ship to the next guy down the road who not only covers happy hour but also happy hour and bartender tips. When I spoke to them they said they don't want to go IPO and the current trajectory is to stay private. They do enterprise software.
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Oct 2, 2015 19:02
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$4 million in revenue with 30 employees means they aren't profitable, but their burn rate is going to be pretty low and if it's only been a year since they raised $10 million they should have years of runway even without further growth.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:23
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I ended up seriously stagnating in my current job, so I'm out of the loop on what skills are competitive and sought after. I'm seeing a lot of Go and Python these days, as well as Java and Scala. I'm also wondering if there's non-programming language skills that I should learn. Machine learning and data science are big things, right? I'm also getting a lot of Senior-level matches on LinkedIn and AngelList. I'm way too scared to take them, but that's practically all that's being offered.  I don't think I can consider myself anything other than Junior or entry-level, still.
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Oct 3, 2015 00:22
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Pollyanna posted:I'm also getting a lot of Senior-level matches on LinkedIn and AngelList. I'm way too scared to take them, but that's practically all that's being offered. What's the worst that could happen? I applied for some senior position that was a stretch and I didn't get called back but then later the guy called me back about a different position that came up (I didn't end up taking it, but hey). As for the language thing: where do you want to work? This isn't 100% true but I think if you want to work somewhere established Java and C# are probably better bets than whatever's hot right now. RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Oct 3, 2015 |
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Oct 3, 2015 02:16
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It depends on what you mean by "established." I wouldn't want to do Java/C# if it meant, say, maintaining horrible enterprise code forever
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Oct 3, 2015 03:57
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Series DD Funding posted:It depends on what you mean by "established." I wouldn't want to do Java/C# if it meant, say, maintaining horrible enterprise code forever Well, I don't know, Pollyanna said she wanted to go to a bigger company and it seems to me like those are your best bets if you want to work at a large place. Of course, there are plenty of smaller shops using both too.
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Oct 3, 2015 04:21
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Series DD Funding posted:It depends on what you mean by "established." I wouldn't want to do Java/C# if it meant, say, maintaining horrible enterprise code forever Horrible enterprise code in any language sucks, it's not really Java/C#'s fault (though I think Java started it)
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Oct 3, 2015 04:27
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Whatever language represents the monoculture of 98% of freshly-graduated computer science students is going to get an awful, awful reputation.
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Oct 3, 2015 04:32
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Vulture Culture posted:Whatever language represents the monoculture of 98% of freshly-graduated computer science students is going to get an awful, awful reputation. which is too bad because other than the 200mb startup lol, java is pretty cool it's just in every company situation when someone mentions java, it's basically "oh i hope it doesn't look like what I think yeah it does."
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Oct 3, 2015 04:55
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Pollyanna posted:I ended up seriously stagnating in my current job, so I'm out of the loop on what skills are competitive and sought after. I'm seeing a lot of Go and Python these days, as well as Java and Scala. Python and Java are the only two truly employable languages of the four you listed. Interop aside, Java and Scala are basically not even the same language and 99% of Scala code is unreadable FP circle jerk garbage that still isn't as good as something like Haskell or F#. It has a horrid toolset, is slow as poo poo, and has a learning curve so bad that at one point they literally had "official" levels of Scala programmer skill (http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/8610). Go has arguably been on a downward trend for a little while now because people finally realized that it's poorly designed.
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Oct 3, 2015 05:12
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triple sulk posted:Python and Java are the only two truly employable languages of the four you listed. Interop aside, Java and Scala are basically not even the same language and 99% of Scala code is unreadable FP circle jerk garbage that still isn't as good as something like Haskell or F#. It has a horrid toolset, is slow as poo poo, and has a learning curve so bad that at one point they literally had "official" levels of Scala programmer skill (http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/8610). Go has arguably been on a downward trend for a little while now because people finally realized that it's poorly designed. Well, you are right that Java and Scala are not even the same language, because they are different languages.
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Oct 3, 2015 05:22
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Steve French posted:Well, you are right that Java and Scala are not even the same language, because they are different languages. Exactly.
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Oct 3, 2015 05:29
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More places need to use Clojure, IMO. Because I like Clojure.
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Oct 3, 2015 18:21
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Pollyanna posted:More places need to use Clojure, IMO. Because I like Clojure.
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Oct 3, 2015 18:54
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Does anyone here work with D3.js (i.e. data visualization/science/journalism)
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