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Mortanis posted:Thanks all. I'm in the pacific northwest, but far enough from Seattle that a commute would be killer. Which means likely moving, something I'll have to get a grip on once I've picked up at least something marketable to add to my resume. I'm hopeful that "14 years of experience, even in a lovely dead language" is at least going to keep people form immediately binning my resume, even if I've got no college or useful skills, but it's hard to shake that fear that I've basically wasted 14 years without much to show for it. There is a lot to learn about developing software that has nothing to do with computers or languages, you've surely picked up some of that. The main thing people are going to look for is "have you stayed current or not", which is why you should get some more up to date technologies under your belt. Just being able to talk intelligently about them and maybe even show some enthusiasm to learn will speak volumes.
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Feb 12, 2016 21:58
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people are getting six figures with six weeks of bootcamp and no prior experience. as bad as cf is it definitely doesn't make you unhireable
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Feb 12, 2016 22:08
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The March Hare posted:Also, if anyone in here happens to work with distributed stuff – any courses/books/papers/blogs/project ideas/tips/language suggestions are totally welcome. christopher meiklejohn's reading list is really good if you are comfortable with academic papers. there's no total ordering for the list but any of the brewer papers are good entry points martin kleppmann has a really good book underway that covers distsys that is a great intro as for tips, the most important thing in distsys is knowing the consistency model you need and knowing whether your system provides that model. better learn TLA+ and state model testing!
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Feb 12, 2016 22:19
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the talent deficit posted:christopher meiklejohn's Happily, I love reading. Thanks for the links :~)
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Feb 12, 2016 22:27
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Mortanis posted:Haha. That's a whine and a half rant. Hope you're getting paid really well.
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Feb 12, 2016 22:44
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the talent deficit posted:martin kleppmann has a really good book underway that covers distsys that is a great intro How long's it been in early access now, and how many times has the release date been moved back?
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Feb 13, 2016 01:52
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I live in the UK, and was recently hit up by an Amazon recruiter to attend a recruitment event they are hosting here. I never considered applying for them before, and am not really looking for a job right now, but since the role is based in Washington (Seattle?), I figured it would be cool to check it out. I had a technical phone screen that went okay, the interviewer told me the role is for the "Amazon Hardlines and Amazon Search & Discovery" team. It seems very retail/consumer focussed rather than back-end tech, is this the type of job that will be crazy hours and very high pressure? Also wondering what to expect at the recruitment event itself, apparently there will be four interviews of an hour or so each, if anyone has any experience with them?
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Feb 13, 2016 15:07
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Amazon is large enough that its probably hard to generalize experiences cross the company. From all the ex amazon anecdotes I've collected it seems like the closer to the customer you are the worse. Most of these ex amazoners seem to be happier away from the company. As a BCC of a jeff email I'm also glad to be away from that sphere. If you want to make a transition to the US market it might be worth it for you. Despite everything an Amazon engineering role will be a nice thing to have on the resume.
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Feb 13, 2016 16:57
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I worked for Amazon from 2005-2008, and had six bosses during that time due to constant re-orgs. We also had pager duty -- one-week "shifts" during which you'd get paged whenever the order rate dropped below some threshold. Our team at times dropped down to 3 people, so you spent a third of your time on pager duty. I hope like hell Amazon's improved in the last eight years because holy loving poo poo that's no way to run a company.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:05
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I've been out in the professional field for 5 years now and am primarily focused on iOS development. I was just promoted to a engineering lead role and we're starting to build out our team. This is my first leadership role (outside of running a summer internship program) and I'm looking to hit the ground running. Any advice for folks who've made the jump?
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Feb 13, 2016 20:59
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Doh004 posted:I've been out in the professional field for 5 years now and am primarily focused on iOS development. I was just promoted to a engineering lead role and we're starting to build out our team. This is my first leadership role (outside of running a summer internship program) and I'm looking to hit the ground running. Any advice for folks who've made the jump? Being a good leader or manager takes much more than good instincts and people skills: it takes the courage to reject impulsive behaviors that cut to the very core of your being and your identity as a great developer. It means being mindful and introspective constantly. Most of all, it takes confronting that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Read Rands in Repose and Making Things Happen (dated technically, but full of great advice). Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 21:20
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Vulture Culture posted:You're a force multiplier now. Especially when it comes to junior developers, and double-especially when it comes to code that you originally wrote, your instincts are going to be a) to micromanage the other developers on your team, and b) do the hardest parts yourself. Both of these are bad instincts that will hinder the long-term prospects of your team and the people on it. Your success or failure will be determined by your ability to trust people who may not have earned that trust yet, by how much you're willing to let things slide when they aren't up to your exacting standards of quality, by how much you're going to let people make their own mistakes. I was going to chime in about some of my experience mentoring student, but this is all bang on. In my case, it's a little different because there's an extremely high and predictable turnover (they all leave after 4 months). I have found that dumping more and more responsibility on them usually yields better results than trying to do things for them.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:57
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I'm currently a team lead and spend at least 40% of my time doing work for my team directly because they don't trust their own judgment or over-estimate (then proceed to fumble over how to write basic poo poo you can Google instead of asking me about it directly) and we're responsible for keeping things stable in operations, not to write code exactly (but I try to hire for those that know software enough to at least understand application development challenges). If you are constantly being asked to do things that you have tried to delegate, you're likely in the situation that your subordinates are just not very good at taking initiative. Imagine trying to be a team lead of an Indian software outsourcing center where people can barely write a for loop to save their life but people expect you to deliver crazy fast code. It's not all that different for me despite trying to hire the best I can with the salaries I can offer, but I basically can't retain decent people because the job is an incredible waste of time in practice while the customer wants top talent for middling salaries. So be careful about your position and resources as a leader and make sure you're not signing up for mission impossible. I did my due dilligence and expected this but I hoped that things could get better or that my subordinates would have risen to the challenges I've given them. But alas, smart people learn to get out and the leftovers tend to be stuck for various reasons and will not be engaged. There's many reasons I'm quitting in a month though. Yeah...
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Feb 14, 2016 06:25
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necrobobsledder posted:I'm currently a team lead and spend at least 40% of my time doing work for my team directly because they don't trust their own judgment or over-estimate (then proceed to fumble over how to write basic poo poo you can Google instead of asking me about it directly) and we're responsible for keeping things stable in operations, not to write code exactly (but I try to hire for those that know software enough to at least understand application development challenges). If you are constantly being asked to do things that you have tried to delegate, you're likely in the situation that your subordinates are just not very good at taking initiative. Imagine trying to be a team lead of an Indian software outsourcing center where people can barely write a for loop to save their life but people expect you to deliver crazy fast code. It's not all that different for me despite trying to hire the best I can with the salaries I can offer, but I basically can't retain decent people because the job is an incredible waste of time in practice while the customer wants top talent for middling salaries. So be careful about your position and resources as a leader and make sure you're not signing up for mission impossible. I did my due dilligence and expected this but I hoped that things could get better or that my subordinates would have risen to the challenges I've given them. But alas, smart people learn to get out and the leftovers tend to be stuck for various reasons and will not be engaged. I've worked with a few people who kept coming to me for situations that I felt they could Google pretty easily. These turned out to be the reasons:
In only one case was it, at least in my head, the inability of someone else on the team to perform rather than my shortcomings as a lead, manager, or mentor. With the right approach we were able to work through those problems and the people on the team formed a really competent, cohesive unit. But it takes real work to build the trust to get into people's heads -- this is the reason being an individual contributor on top of a manager is a really, really hard thing to do. Back when I worked at Time Warner, a very experienced project manager gave me a piece of advice I never forgot: never, ever assign a unit of work to a group. In the absence of pressure, they will never self-organize around it. Let people volunteer, but in the absence of a volunteer, pick people to make accountable for the success or completion of something. If you're already following this rule, and you're trying and failing to delegate things, one of two things is happening: a) you aren't actually delegating anything at all, you're hoping your employees will magically self-organize and self-manage, or b) they are preferring the fun work to the necessary work, and this is a motivation problem that needs to be dealt with. Being in a position where you're expected to provide the very best with minimal salaries is very stressful, to say the least, but by taking on the work yourself and burning yourself out you reinforce the idea that the organization can get away with paying these salaries -- obviously they can, because the work is getting done. Beyond that, recruiting requires a lot of creativity. I once hired a desktop support engineer to run enterprise backups for a 5 PB enterprise storage environment despite the fact that the candidate had minimal experience with servers and networking, and no experience whatsoever with storage or backups. He turned out to be one of my hardest, most diligent and detail-oriented workers and overall best hires of my career. Often, you'll have to take chances on people much more junior than you're comfortable with and trust that they're smart enough to learn. Taking people who otherwise had little chance and giving them a shot at a real career builds loyalty, and that loyalty translates into retention. It took me close to a year to assemble the right team -- it took some very clever techniques like A/B testing job postings and monitoring impressions on job boards -- but I was able to execute flawlessly despite being able to pay maybe 60% of what these people were worth. And when it comes down to it, and all else fails, sometimes you've just got to get rid of people to make room for people who are grateful for the opportunity. This ties into the above. A smart, motivated person looking to learn is worth way more than a burned-out subject matter expert with a lovely attitude. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 08:00
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Vulture Culture posted:
Thanks for articulating something I've had a problem with on teams I've been on. I'm a worker bee but have occasionally done some low-level project management with middling success, mostly by deliberately avoiding the worst practices I've seen. Thanks for the book suggestions too. I got a copy of Making Things Happen - it's hard to find books about management that don't dissolve into business-y self-help. Lately, I'm back to being an individual contributor. The most frustrating aspect is dealing with a group of smart, motivated people who insist that they don't need project management - and then the project dissolves into a million competing features and premature optimizations. Is that sort of thing salvageable by managing up, or should I just find another project? vonnegutt fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 16:12
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Vulture Culture posted:Back when I worked at Time Warner, a very experienced project manager gave me a piece of advice I never forgot: never, ever assign a unit of work to a group. In the absence of pressure, they will never self-organize around it. Let people volunteer, but in the absence of a volunteer, pick people to make accountable for the success or completion of something. If you're already following this rule, and you're trying and failing to delegate things, one of two things is happening: a) you aren't actually delegating anything at all, you're hoping your employees will magically self-organize and self-manage, or b) they are preferring the fun work to the necessary work, and this is a motivation problem that needs to be dealt with.
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Feb 14, 2016 16:36
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My biggest problem with the teams I lead is that the engineers are both specialized and the unit of work is small enough that is really targeting individual disciplines. "This team would like the UI text to have drop shadows". Well let's see is the DBA going to pick that up? The full stack first party API expert? The scripter that updates the test infrastructure? Or maybe the rendering guru? Ok guys self organize along team velocity!
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Feb 14, 2016 17:53
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Hughlander posted:My biggest problem with the teams I lead is that the engineers are both specialized and the unit of work is small enough that is really targeting individual disciplines. How is this a problem?
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Feb 14, 2016 21:25
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Che Delilas posted:How is this a problem? That's a huge problem, cross-training and knowledge sharing is critically important to the health of an organization.
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Feb 14, 2016 21:56
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pigdog posted:I see where you're coming from, and the advice seems quite valid in most areas of life. Software developers may be an exception though, as the Scrum methodology, which is rather successful these days, advises exactly the opposite. A team is the only unit that work is assigned to, and magically or not people can self-organize to fulfull them. There are necessary components to the framework that allow it to happen, among other things the fact that the team decides the velocity and estimates (among themselves as peers) how much time something ought to take, and the ordered backlog which ought to ensure people are working on things that do matter. Only the Sith deal with absolutes, so just wanted to point out that among programmers, assigning work to teams is something that does routinely happen, and successfully so in the proper context. This comes back to what I said originally: people should absolutely have the capability to volunteer for the work, but someone should be watching to see that the work is actually getting done. If nobody on the dev side has any intention of correcting the mismatch between the business's expectations and the development team's expectations, someone further up the org chart has to move that ball downfield. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 22:13
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vonnegutt posted:Thanks for articulating something I've had a problem with on teams I've been on. I'm a worker bee but have occasionally done some low-level project management with middling success, mostly by deliberately avoiding the worst practices I've seen. Thanks for the book suggestions too. I got a copy of Making Things Happen - it's hard to find books about management that don't dissolve into business-y self-help. Competing features and premature optimizations aren't management problems, necessarily, as much as communication problems. Self-organizing teams can avoid redundant or incompatible work, but it requires people to actually coordinate. Some teams won't be capable of this and will need someone to step in and help. Lots of people are dogmatic about self-organization and they fail to see the forest for the trees that any project is going to have constraints on throughput, and if having a single vision direct the team will help, then that's going to be the best way to move forward. It doesn't have to be permanent; sometimes teams of developers, especially inexperienced ones, just haven't seen what a well-run project actually looks like from the inside and so they don't know what behaviors to emulate. These are skills that can be learned. Someone needs to be owning the product being developed, and making sure that the development velocity is meeting the stated goals of the business. If that's happening, but you think it can be happening a lot faster, that's something you can discuss with whoever you consider the product owner. If it's not happening and there's no accountability for how user stories are being prioritized and turning into product, then the product owner is failing at their job. This is a major problem, but one that requires a lot more politicking to handle -- you need to either light a fire under the rear end of someone above you, or you need to go around them to make your frustrations heard. These are both really dangerous situations professionally, and sometimes neither of these are tenable, but if the job is meaningless to you anyway, maybe you can make things better for the people after you when you blow up like the Hindenburg on your way out. Lastly, sometimes people do just know better than others on the team what has to be done, and what seems like irrelevant work to you might be a yak shave that will double or triple someone's speed of getting features to users' hands just down the road. Sometimes it's a lack of communication on the part of the team with respect to what the right level of effort is for a feature or a piece of plumbing, or sometimes you get (what's perceived as) hard-headed people who just don't get it, and developers work around them without drawing attention to themselves instead of starting arguments. Figuring out why people's work doesn't line up with their teammates' expectations is basically the most important part of working on a development team.
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Feb 14, 2016 22:28
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Vulture Culture posted:tons of valuable stuff Just want to chime in that I at least find these things interesting, so if you want to continue with posts like this, I'm 
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Feb 14, 2016 22:47
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baquerd posted:That's a huge problem, cross-training and knowledge sharing is critically important to the health of an organization. https://twitter.com/asolove/status/697514682022830080
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Feb 15, 2016 00:14
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That's dumb. That already happens, all the time. Don't you people have holidays? Illnesses? Family emergencies? Jury duty? Maternity leave?
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Feb 15, 2016 00:36
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qntm posted:That's dumb. That already happens, all the time. Don't you people have holidays? Illnesses? Family emergencies? Jury duty? Maternity leave? There's always one person who never takes vacation because they either think they're too critical, know they're too critical, or spend the bulk of every day babysitting their broken poo poo and are terrified that other people will discover how broken it is. That approach will help people in category #1 realize they're not, help identify what people in category #2 do that's so critical they can't take time off, and help find people in category #3 so they can be fired.
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Feb 15, 2016 00:54
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Ithaqua posted:There's always one person who never takes vacation because they either think they're too critical, know they're too critical, or spend the bulk of every day babysitting their broken poo poo and are terrified that other people will discover how broken it is. Companies that don't cross-train run into this a lot. It's bad.
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Feb 15, 2016 01:00
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Vulture Culture posted:Competing features and premature optimizations aren't management problems, necessarily, as much as communication problems. Self-organizing teams can avoid redundant or incompatible work, but it requires people to actually coordinate ... Great advice all around. I always want to make sure I'm paying attention to the larger picture, and speak up if I think something is being overlooked, but in this instance I don't think I really have the clout to make any improvements.
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Feb 15, 2016 01:34
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Vulture Culture posted:Often, you'll have to take chances on people much more junior than you're comfortable with and trust that they're smart enough to learn. Taking people who otherwise had little chance and giving them a shot at a real career builds loyalty, and that loyalty translates into retention. It took me close to a year to assemble the right team -- it took some very clever techniques like A/B testing job postings and monitoring impressions on job boards -- but I was able to execute flawlessly despite being able to pay maybe 60% of what these people were worth. This isn't to say that I'm whining that I have life hard or something and that it's just inexperience. I've gotten a ton of top performance reviews and evaluations on leadership from SVPs and up to CTO. But my main point is really that the only way to avoid reinforcing such destructive, counterproductive practices as over-work and gross under-payment is to quit but it's really hard to keep quitting again and again because it makes you look stupid for getting sucked into such garbage organizations. Part of why I took this job was to get a test run as a leader without having to start a company though and it's been good learning. I've learned that budgets are easy to deal with if you can offer a compelling vision and other means to motivate people. I've gotten so much better at hoodwinking people into a poo poo job now it's not even funny (without having to lie at all! I am becoming Satan). I'm really curious what'll happen when I quit though. I'm giving a month's notice to see through my successor's hiring at least but I'm going to really laugh if they wind up being my customer in a year after I launch the service I've been working on.
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Feb 15, 2016 01:44
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qntm posted:That's dumb. That already happens, all the time. Don't you people have holidays? Illnesses? Family emergencies? Jury duty? Maternity leave? That's also true of the original chaos monkey idea though
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Feb 15, 2016 04:33
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Che Delilas posted:How is this a problem? It is a problem in the context of an agile team is self organizing and directing from a prioritized backlog. That isn't the case here as its more about assigning work to an individual and team velocity gains are localized to that individual. For an organization that claims to follow an Agile/Scrum process, it is basically a cargo cult.
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Feb 15, 2016 18:10
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necrobobsledder posted:RSUs are extremely important in differences compared to bonuses and general compensation due to tax treatments once you are above a certain tax bracket. Stock can be held for over a year and be taxed at long term capital gains. For tax purposes, RSUs are demonstrably the same as receiving the same value in cash on the day of vesting. You pay your marginal income tax rate on it, not capital gains, et cetera. If you choose to hold the shares instead of immediately selling, this is equivalent to receiving the money as a cash bonus and using it to purchase company stock (usually not a good idea from a personal diversification perspective). For what it's worth, I automatically sell my RSU grants as soon as I receive them and I have been getting AMTed since 2011 (looks like about $7500 worth this year... sigh). EDIT: There are some slight games you can play with estimated tax payments if you know you're not in AMT one year and will be the next year or vice versa. They don't have anything to do with RSUs and don't really apply if you're mostly a W2 employee or are constantly in AMT. Also, re: Google compensation. Google has some of the best financial benefits in the business in addition to the regular salary / bonus / stock / lifestyle benefits AFAIK - - 50% matching up to the full 401(k) $18k contribution limit - $2k of company HSA donation if you're on a HDHP with your family - allow for the "mega backdoor Roth IRA" strategy in their 401(k) to save an extra $26k in your Roth IRA per year - reasonable oncall bonuses - spot (manager) / peer bonuses are relatively common - reimbursement for home Internet, gym, and cell phone bills (as long as you have a business reason for the cell phone) are very common - (at least in my location) ~$1k for not parking a car at work Evil Robot fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 00:03
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I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. Money isn't really a concern so having a two month vacation like a European aristocrat sounds awesome, except I'm a little bit worried I'll be bored as hell for that much time off, considering I don't have a large contingent of unemployed friends. Then again maybe this is just my American worker Stockholm syndrome talking. Anyone taken longer-ish breaks between jobs? Was it actually relaxing and fun or after like the 4th week more like "whelp only 28 more days of daytime TV and video games!"
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Feb 18, 2016 21:55
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mrmcd posted:I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. If I take even a week off I turn into a trollish creature that hisses at sunlight and eats breakfast at 2am.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:03
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mrmcd posted:Anyone taken longer-ish breaks between jobs? Was it actually relaxing and fun or after like the 4th week more like "whelp only 28 more days of daytime TV and video games!" Also, I totally drink and play video games at my current remote job because it's the only way I can avoid just shooting myself in the face at the sheer idiocy of the things I have to do. It can be like that every day if you find the right remote job, you too can live the dream!
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Feb 18, 2016 22:17
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mrmcd posted:I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. You absolutely need to find some project to use that time on. I don't know about you, but I can't handle one week of idleness, let alone eight. Write a videogame, take up painting, renovate your home, do a Let's Play, whatever, just give yourself something productive to do with your energy or you'll probably go insane. Congrats on the offer, by the way.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:20
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Two months doing absolutely nothing is horrible. Two months to pursue your own projects is awesome.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:43
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mrmcd posted:I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. I was fired unexpectedly at one point. I got a job within 3 days (two of those being a weekend) and ended up with 3 idle weeks. I did some travel during that downtime and it was awesome. So do that, go travel somewhere.
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Feb 19, 2016 00:37
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Ithaqua posted:I was fired unexpectedly at one point. I got a job within 3 days (two of those being a weekend) and ended up with 3 idle weeks. I did some travel during that downtime and it was awesome. So do that, go travel somewhere. Oh yeah, this is a good one too. Since you mentioned that your friends are likely busy or something, travel somewhere that has lots of museums or something. You can spend a lot of time focusing on the stuff you're interested in. Every time I go to a museum with people everyone is always rushing me...
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Feb 19, 2016 00:41
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mrmcd posted:I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. i took a year off between my last job and my current one. i contributed to a couple open source projects pretty heavily during that time but mostly i travelled visiting friends and family and lay on beaches. it was pretty great
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Feb 19, 2016 01:46
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Is it common for people without any kind of contract to be given severance when they quit? Especially when just a mid-level dev? I quit my job of 3 years (I was burnt out) and they gave me severance (4 weeks pay + paying my COBRA). We're all still very friendly as well - I just found it kind of neat that they hooked me up like that. They didn't even want me to sign separation papers or anything to protect them if I got mad or something (which never even came up as a possibility, and wouldn't since they were awesome to work for, just exhausting). Quit 2 weeks ago, was sick the first week after I quit, but still rocked some phone interviews. Went in for an in-person for an amazing job at a world-class organization on Wednesday, heard back yesterday with an offer that was 10% more than I'd been hoping to get. Yay. Of course, impostor syndrome tells me that they only hired me because I'm a great diversity hire (woman software dev, over 40, possibly vaguely ethnic looking) and that I'll get fired on week one when I show up and forget how to talk to computers. I do have a standing agreement with my best friend that she is to slap the poo poo out of me if I still whine about being a fraud once I get my first performance review (assuming it's good).
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Feb 19, 2016 13:11
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