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Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake

necrobobsledder posted:

To be fair, working at Salesforce is a lot more enjoyable from what I know having interviewed with them before (and not going through because of budget or location reasons primarily) than using their software. For some frames of reference, I've talked to people that are at Salesforce now and went through a Google acquisition and are much happier at Salesforce. Heroku still exists and isn't bleeding 50%+ of its engineers YoY unlike every acquisition I've been a part of (4 now).

Sorry- *Salesforce partner

It just didn't sound like something I'd be at all interested in since they were entirely based on customer outreach which sounds really difficult to get excited about.

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return0
Apr 11, 2007

return0 posted:

So this happened a few days ago. I thought it went okay but not great, but the recruiter who initially contacted me called today and said it went well and Amazon intend to make an offer. Apparently I will hear from two teams I could work at over the next few days, then there is a process to arrive at an actual concrete offer. Is this a normal typical thing at big tech companies, and if so is it a euphemism for more interviewing with specific teams? As a dirty foreign (UK), should I expect a below market rate offer given I'll require visa sponsorship (probably H1B?).

Turns out H1B is a randomly selected lottery, and you only have a <25% chance of being picked! America, sort your immigration and let us flood your job market already?

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

necrobobsledder posted:

But your real priority IMO is to be honest to the other person most invested in that company - your co-founder - and try to work something out together. If he's burning out and you basically are too, you guys have a mutual uh... "frame of emotion" to work with.

That's an interesting way to look at things, thanks. I don't feel like I'm being burnt out -- I'm still doing the same work schedule as usual, taking my weekends to relax, etc. But the situation is definitely stressful and has been lessening my enthusiasm for the work, so maybe there's some more, uh, "psychology" going on in my own head than I'd recognized, so to speak.

And yeah, it's definitely a cofounders situation -- that's even in my title, and I own a substantial portion of the company. I'm not really so much worried about people saying "wait, you were part of a failed startup, what did you do wrong" as I am about them saying "wait, you were part of the team keeping X awesome program alive, how dare you let it die?" Basically every company that I could apply to work for that's in my area of expertise will be well aware of what we do and morally (if not financially) supports us.

Of course, if they financially supported us, we probably wouldn't be in this situation.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
It's your customers' responsibility to also reduce their risk by working with such a tiny company. It's why most large companies just can't go on a limb to support pet projects - they need the stability of their vendors as well. Most large companies will ask for something like a code escrow service and you can negotiate what works and what doesn't. Furthermore, if you can't manage to make something like $300k / yr between two people after a successful POC or two and you have even one enterprise customer in almost any vertical, your sales person that negotiated the deal should be fired. The tiniest deal I've ever heard of for software was about $50k 10 years ago and it was for basically "can you give us a demo that covers these simple use cases?"

One option available is to divest the company on both your parts agreeing that it's financially unsustainable and that the code should be given back to your customers out of goodwill. Most companies that are viable for niche community-serving projects are spun out of the original developers getting spurned internally but there being sufficient business interest in paying for continued development. Cassandra and Storm are good examples.

I'm not a lawyer though and you should probably have a lawyer look at this if you decide to dissolve the company. Just be aware that a lot of people that have large customers and haven't done enterprise sales in a career before fail to understand how much to charge. The articles by Pat McKenzie / patio11 show just how easy it can be if you know your customer's business problem and have gained sufficient trust to jump up to $500k / yr even as a solo contractor. These methods, however, don't work whatsoever if...

Necc0 posted:

Sorry- *Salesforce partner

It just didn't sound like something I'd be at all interested in since they were entirely based on customer outreach which sounds really difficult to get excited about.
... these engagements tend to be cost cutting measures, not growth, therefore diminished revenue potential without doing something so game-changing (your maximum value with perfect software is capped by what they currently are spending... or you could spend money to write perfect software that makes your customers money - you are not capped anymore and have major negotiating power). You're right to avoid them. It's never fun being in a company where you customers view you as a cost rather than a partner in growing their business - it's the friend zone of company relationships. ISVs and partnerships are bread & butter for small companies but small companies and small revenue really limit your opportunities for technical and career growth unless your objective is to learn how to grow companies. Only do it if you're desperate for employment of some sort or have no ambition left.

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake
It was mostly because they had an opening for an architect role with a description that seemed right up my alley- not to mention would have doubled my salary. My idea was to stay with them long enough to cement that title onto my resume and then jumping to a more meaningful company once ready.

After talking to them though they said I'd be qualified for the role EXCEPT they need someone with prior salesforce experience on day one for it. But they're interested in offering me a bunch of other roles which don't really seem interesting / the direction I want to go in.

Glad my read on salesforce in general was right as that was pretty much the exact logic I was thinking as well. This is why the NoSQL stuff is exciting to me because it offers a new realm of possible development and my engagements with customers will be both understanding what it is they do and trying to inspire them into what they could do with this tech. Then possibly building proof of concept demos for them which will scratch my 'gotta build fast' itch sufficiently, I think.

Necc0 fucked around with this message at 04:17 on May 26, 2016

Space Whale
Nov 6, 2014
I've done .NET full stack web for 4 years.

How much of a corner am I painted into right now? I can't help but get attention for "HEY DO A C#!!!" or "FIX MY OLD WEB FORMS WRITTEN IN VB.NET", but it's kind of meh right now. I could stand to see another side of things.

Besides throw poo poo on github in another language, what's a good thing to do? Just apply for junior positions in other stacks and hope people can put two and two together?

If it matters, I'm in Austin, and I'd move with a relo tomorrow. Lease is even up soon.

Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

Space Whale posted:

I've done .NET full stack web for 4 years.

How much of a corner am I painted into right now? I can't help but get attention for "HEY DO A C#!!!" or "FIX MY OLD WEB FORMS WRITTEN IN VB.NET", but it's kind of meh right now. I could stand to see another side of things.

Besides throw poo poo on github in another language, what's a good thing to do? Just apply for junior positions in other stacks and hope people can put two and two together?

If it matters, I'm in Austin, and I'd move with a relo tomorrow. Lease is even up soon.

I'd say not much? If you learn JavaScript you can easily move to doing the UI integration with a C# backend. Check out TypeScript, it's like C#, but for browsers.

Edit: This is basically the route I took, moved from pure C# dev to doing Angular/TypeScript UI work, and I'm much happier. Was not terribly hard, once you get over the initial "JavaScript is a stupid language" hurdle. It is stupid, but it's the only one we've got.

New Yorp New Yorp
Jul 18, 2003

Only in Kenya.
Pillbug

Space Whale posted:

I've done .NET full stack web for 4 years.

How much of a corner am I painted into right now?

Most good companies don't care what languages you know and use on a daily basis, they just care that you can demonstrate good problem solving abilities. Picking up a new language is a matter of syntax and idioms, and you can learn that in a few weeks.

For what it's worth, the .NET space is becoming really interesting right now, especially with .NET Core and OS-level Docker support in Server 2016.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

necrobobsledder posted:

It's your customers' responsibility to also reduce their risk by working with such a tiny company. It's why most large companies just can't go on a limb to support pet projects - they need the stability of their vendors as well. Most large companies will ask for something like a code escrow service and you can negotiate what works and what doesn't. Furthermore, if you can't manage to make something like $300k / yr between two people after a successful POC or two and you have even one enterprise customer in almost any vertical, your sales person that negotiated the deal should be fired. The tiniest deal I've ever heard of for software was about $50k 10 years ago and it was for basically "can you give us a demo that covers these simple use cases?"

Yeah, one of the problems I've been wrestling with is that both me and my coworker are awful at sales/marketing, my coworker is extremely reluctant to hire that out (ostensibly for fear of making us look bad by irritating our potential customers with bad marketing), and up until recently I literally didn't have access to the information needed to take steps on this front on my own.

quote:

One option available is to divest the company on both your parts agreeing that it's financially unsustainable and that the code should be given back to your customers out of goodwill. Most companies that are viable for niche community-serving projects are spun out of the original developers getting spurned internally but there being sufficient business interest in paying for continued development. Cassandra and Storm are good examples.

The source code's open, actually -- we've been selling support contracts instead. So nobody's losing access to the program, they're just losing access to the people who a) know best how to make it work, and b) are willing to sell that service.

What we may need to do is put the company into mothballs, though. If it can't support the two of us working full-time, then maybe it should only support one of us, or a half of one of us, and the rest of those resources go into more reliable jobs...

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Yeah, one of the problems I've been wrestling with is that both me and my coworker are awful at sales/marketing, my coworker is extremely reluctant to hire that out (ostensibly for fear of making us look bad by irritating our potential customers with bad marketing), and up until recently I literally didn't have access to the information needed to take steps on this front on my own.


The source code's open, actually -- we've been selling support contracts instead. So nobody's losing access to the program, they're just losing access to the people who a) know best how to make it work, and b) are willing to sell that service.

What we may need to do is put the company into mothballs, though. If it can't support the two of us working full-time, then maybe it should only support one of us, or a half of one of us, and the rest of those resources go into more reliable jobs...

If you actually like the work, and the problem is just that it's not really paying enough to be worth the time you put into it, have you considered just charging a lot more? If your customers actually like the product and service and find it valuable to their business, there's a pretty strong possibility you're just undercharging. For profit businesses aren't going to offer to pay more on their own, but a lot more revenue for you would solve the problem meager financial rewards, stress from living on thin margins, and also possibly let you hire another person or two to share the work load.

If they absolutely will not accept a significant price increase, then the work you do probably isn't worth while economically speaking, so you can just notify your customers you intend to wind down the company over the next year or so. This has the added negotiation bonus in that you (probably) aren't bluffing, because why keep doing something that's paying you poorly and making you miserable? Basically, don't sell yourself at charity wages to for profit businesses.

edit: I'm assuming the problem also just a matter of finding more customers, since it seems like you don't have any slack to take on more customers anyway.

mrmcd fucked around with this message at 13:12 on May 26, 2016

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

mrmcd posted:

If you actually like the work, and the problem is just that it's not really paying enough to be worth the time you put into it, have you considered just charging a lot more? If your customers actually like the product and service and find it valuable to their business, there's a pretty strong possibility you're just undercharging. For profit businesses aren't going to offer to pay more on their own, but a lot more revenue for you would solve the problem meager financial rewards, stress from living on thin margins, and also possibly let you hire another person or two to share the work load.

If they absolutely will not accept a significant price increase, then the work you do probably isn't worth while economically speaking, so you can just notify your customers you intend to wind down the company over the next year or so. This has the added negotiation bonus in that you (probably) aren't bluffing, because why keep doing something that's paying you poorly and making you miserable? Basically, don't sell yourself at charity wages to for profit businesses.

edit: I'm assuming the problem also just a matter of finding more customers, since it seems like you don't have any slack to take on more customers anyway.

Digging this back up. The primary issue really is just that I can't rely on my coworker to be at work reliably. Like, one week he'll be fine, the next week he's gone for three days and for the other two he comes in at 2PM. This makes coordination extraordinarily difficult, which is problematic since much of our work requires coordination. Plus I just plain don't like working alone all the time.

Low pay doesn't help, of course, but I could tolerate that as long as I felt like I was working with the guy and getting things accomplished. If I'm just spinning my wheels most of the time, that's a different story.

Anyway, I laid this all out with my coworker, and we're going to keep a close eye on things -- if his attendance remains erratic then I'll probably just give up. It's not worth the stress.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I'm working with the product manager to try and nail down specific release date targets for features (you can stop laughing now). Our engineering team has grown from 4 to about 16 and of the original 4, three are primarily doing management based tasks, so we have 15 people who came in working on an already two year old code base, and when we hire another 2-3 engineers it will be almost four years old.

One thing that came up was guesstimating time per task/bug and then entering that in to JIRA and seeing how accurate that was and basing future projects off that data etc

Two big problems with this

1) programmers universally hate this
2) tracking time feels like you're being hugely micromanaged (see point 1)

When you're a team of 4 engineers you always know what's going on, but now we have three teams, server back end, server front end, and a client agent, and we're rolling out new features that impact all three.

How did your teams transition from "three guys and a keg of beer" to "functional engineering department"

New Yorp New Yorp
Jul 18, 2003

Only in Kenya.
Pillbug

Hadlock posted:

I'm working with the product manager to try and nail down specific release date targets for features (you can stop laughing now). Our engineering team has grown from 4 to about 16 and of the original 4, three are primarily doing management based tasks, so we have 15 people who came in working on an already two year old code base, and when we hire another 2-3 engineers it will be almost four years old.

One thing that came up was guesstimating time per task/bug and then entering that in to JIRA and seeing how accurate that was and basing future projects off that data etc

Two big problems with this

1) programmers universally hate this
2) tracking time feels like you're being hugely micromanaged (see point 1)

When you're a team of 4 engineers you always know what's going on, but now we have three teams, server back end, server front end, and a client agent, and we're rolling out new features that impact all three.

How did your teams transition from "three guys and a keg of beer" to "functional engineering department"

What's stopping you from adopting more agile practices? Break the features down into small stories, estimate the stories, and schedule the stories in 2-3 week sprints based on the team's velocity. Then you have your answer: The feature will be done when all of the stories are complete. If you have 10 points of work and your team has a capacity of 1 point per sprint, then it's going to be 10 sprints assuming you focus purely on that feature. The business can decide if there's one feature that's so important that it should receive the bulk (or all) of the team's effort.

minato
Jun 7, 2004

cutty cain't hang, say 7-up.
Taco Defender
3) programmers universally aren't good at estimating times

That's the only conclusion you'll get from tracking estimates vs actuals. Agile practices take this into account by forcing you to split up the work into stories (features) and rank them by priority. So whatever release date you pick, you'll at least know you got the important stuff in there.

Paolomania
Apr 26, 2006

My team did about a year of weekly "planning poker" (i.e. no daily scrum) with FIFO "dogpile" style task assignment and it was one of the few agile experiences that I've had where the benefits outstripped the pains. I have to say though that I was the oddball who actually liked it as the other developers on the team preferred to have individual ownership of components and voted to discontinue it. To me it seemed like a good way to organize a 4-5 person team, but with the advantage of having a stable task list other teams could view and try to negotiate priority with the team lead over.

metztli
Mar 19, 2006
Which lead to the obvious photoshop, making me suspect that their ad agencies or creative types must be aware of what goes on at SA

Hadlock posted:

How did your teams transition from "three guys and a keg of beer" to "functional engineering department"

At the last place I worked (where I was one of 4 core full-stack devs) the transition happened over a year as each of the core devs quit about 3 months apart from one another. All of us quit for the same reason: we went from being able to think about the product and creating new stuff with a large degree of control to being told nope, product ideas aren't your job, and we had to be corralled by a product manager.

Some people can go from a more free-form approach to structured "functional engineering department" but it seems really uncommon and difficult to do that without major frustrations. I am the first person to admit that my code tends to be about "solving a problem" or "scratching an itch" or coming up with creative ideas to test, rather than well-architected, scalable and performant solutions. As a consequence I do well in the start-up phase, but am not a good fit once things get mature.

Our co-founders did try to keep me engaged by letting me work on blue sky stuff (totally new stack, even) which worked for a little bit until the product managers started getting involved there, too. We had initially been planning on having me keep cranking out MVPs of testable ideas and then handing the winners off to the main sprint teams to turn into more well engineered solutions, and I suspect that if we had managed to avoid power grabs by product managers, I'd still be there.

I guess tl;dr is get ready to lose people who aren't really suited for being part of a "functional engineering department" and that's OK.

Edit: re planning and organization: it was a total clusterfuck. We had constant conflicts since teams were product focused with specialists for each tier but those specialists never really talked to other people in similar roles on other teams. We sort of addressed this by making "guilds" for people in similar roles and having meetings. Problem was full stack devs were in all the guilds and it was loving annoying to have all those meetings.

For estimates: We were especially bad because those of us who had been there for a long time knew all the ins and outs and hidden gotchas, so during planning poker newer devs would just look to us to say an estimate and then agree, which defeats the point of poker and made the newer devs kind of helpless when it came to the older parts of the code. All the original devs would basically get handed all the stories that required deep knowledge, and we offered to pair up with newer people, but the product managers felt like that was a waste of time cause of precious velocity.

Sorry, got off topic with my venting.

metztli fucked around with this message at 21:21 on May 30, 2016

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


Anyone interested in software scheduling should read Coding, Fast and Slow. There's some good stuff in there that's at least compatible with what's generally believed regarding human cognition and learning.

Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

minato posted:

3) Humans universally aren't good at estimating times

FTFY

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008
What's the general protocol for dealing with mental health issues when they start affecting work?

metztli
Mar 19, 2006
Which lead to the obvious photoshop, making me suspect that their ad agencies or creative types must be aware of what goes on at SA
Do you have an Employee Assistance Program?

If so, contact them. If not, you should be able to apply for a FMLA protected leave of absence, so you would have to talk to a human resources person.

You don't have any obligation to share the details (and you shouldn't), though you might need to provide a letter from a health care provider.

Also, take some time off, if that would be useful to give you the opportunity to get things in order.

metztli fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Jun 1, 2016

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Edit: Wrong thread. God, this one and SV season 3 thread are bleeding together in my brain. :gonk:

mrmcd fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jun 1, 2016

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Yeah, if you have an EAP team to work with, they should be able to guide you into helping with HR/etc in a dignified manner. I'd say definitely invoke that sooner than later if it's affecting your performance.

Also the whole stigma around this stuff really bugs me. Compare to, say, if someone gets in a car wreck and had to stay out of work a couple weeks, or had any other illness.

withoutclass
Nov 6, 2007

Resist the siren call of rhinocerosness

College Slice
EAP rules if you have access to it. Using it for therapy was super worth it.

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008
Literally all seven places they referred me to were either full or literally no longer existed

metztli
Mar 19, 2006
Which lead to the obvious photoshop, making me suspect that their ad agencies or creative types must be aware of what goes on at SA

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Literally all seven places they referred me to were either full or literally no longer existed

Ugh, that's awful, sorry to hear it. Your insurance carrier might have a list of individual providers? Alternatively, there may be organizations in your area that have a number of counselors, and intake people you can talk to - those kinds of organizations are usually really helpful at juggling schedules to get people in within a reasonable timeframe.

withoutclass
Nov 6, 2007

Resist the siren call of rhinocerosness

College Slice
Big problem with EAP is that the EAP provider never removes providers from their list, so you run in to a lot of situations like what you've described. Another huge issue is that they make it super painful for Therapeutic providers to collect so many will stop taking EAP patients which sucks. You'd be better off looking for and checking providers around you first, then checking the EAP provider list.

Comb Your Beard
Sep 28, 2007

Chillin' like a villian.
Hi, I'm a full stack developer in the DC area. My biggest strength is the back end, and turning user wants into requirements, and requirements into business logic. My weakness is probably not being modern enough in the front end and application layer.

My current job I like the people and work a lot, but I feel like the company culture is very "cheap," I have multiple issues with my compensation.

My question is how do I begin looking? I know once my resume is "out there" again the recruiters will descend like locusts.

Tentatively my plan is go up on dice.com, use hired.com, and apply to a few companies directly all simultaneously. I don't want to be exclusive with one group of recruiters.

I want to do this in an orderly fashion, I don't want to miss the right job for me.

triple sulk
Sep 17, 2014



Do not use Dice

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake

Comb Your Beard posted:

Hi, I'm a full stack developer in the DC area. My biggest strength is the back end, and turning user wants into requirements, and requirements into business logic. My weakness is probably not being modern enough in the front end and application layer.

My current job I like the people and work a lot, but I feel like the company culture is very "cheap," I have multiple issues with my compensation.

My question is how do I begin looking? I know once my resume is "out there" again the recruiters will descend like locusts.

Tentatively my plan is go up on dice.com, use hired.com, and apply to a few companies directly all simultaneously. I don't want to be exclusive with one group of recruiters.

I want to do this in an orderly fashion, I don't want to miss the right job for me.

This is literally me. I don't know what happened to dice because it was fine a few years ago but it's garbage now. The current hotness is stackoverflow jobs. I opened up my profile last night and had only two emails from recruiters this morning but both of them were sane and actually read my profile (!!!)

I also hit up hired but they seem to be really picky and give zero feedback on what they're actually looking for. Maybe you'll have better luck?

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

If dice is a bad option, what is the goon ranking of recruitment sites currently?

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake
Personal referral from friend / old coworker > stackoverflow > hired (???) > dice > generic job sites

Doh004
Apr 22, 2007

Mmmmm Donuts...
Hired worked for me last year.

PM me and I can send you my profile (that seems to have worked) if you'd like an example.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

My team has picked people up from Hired, and we're a respectable company you've definitely heard of, so it isn't totally a black hole.

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake
Not saying it's bad because for those it's worked for I've only heard good things. Just saying that if you don't have whatever it is they happen to be looking for they give you zero feedback. Now that I think about it though that might be for the best It'd be real easy to bluff your way through if they told you what to change.

edit: So basically if they reject you don't spend too much more time with it. Tweaking your profile won't do much. Definitely give it a shot though. From what it sounds like their presence in DC is still pretty sparse.

Necc0 fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jun 3, 2016

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
DC software market is pretty bad for compensation compared to NYC and obviously the Bay Area but from many stats I saw they're closer to Chicago's market despite DC cost of living being higher. For top compensation, you'll unfortunately have to put up with defense ($200k as a J2EE guy with a TS/SCI is not uncommon) or find a very rare engineering job with one of the big software companies because most companies just plant sales here - the region is the Bay Area for sales people whether you're in politics, commercial, or whatnot. Palantir, for example, primarily has actual engineering work in Palo Alto and most people locally are basically contracted engineers that do essentially integration work half the time.

I got some restricted info on compensation for VC backed companies back in 2014 and saw I was making more than most directors of engineering at the 50+ person companies and I'm terribly mediocre and was ranging between $130k - $150k base from offers then. My contact that's normally Bay Area focused was surprised at how bad the compensation was when we looked at the list together. Obviously, that could be outdated but my point is mostly that start-ups in the region have less wiggle room to compensate their engineers when almost all of them are heavily dependent upon higher-comped salespeople due to the massive focus upon b2b enterprise business models by almost every founder. One interesting option is to consider USDS or 18F because at least they have pretty decent hiring bars compared to most places with software jobs in the area (there are rather few traditional software product or even SaaS companies for a city of its size).

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake
Yeah if you're not willing to do defense work (I'm not) you're gonna take a pretty noticeable hit to compensation here. It's actually one of the reasons I've been eye-balling sales engineering because it'd allow me to stay in this town and my compensation would become less restricted. However at the end of the day even poor compensation in comparison to Silicon Valley or New York is still really really good in the grand scheme of things so I can't complain too much.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
The low-end of sales engineering jobs in the DC area would be a base of about $110k with 25%+ bonuses which from what I saw is in the top 15% of software engineering jobs in the area. I had a sales engineering offer in for $150k base and roughly 45% bonuses + RSUs and all that. But it was basically still defense.

What sealed the deal for me not staying was that of all the really great software engineers I knew locally, you basically had three paths in your career forward outside defense after 10 years of being pretty awesome -
1. go to Google, Amazon, etc. or another Big Tech company
2. go be a manager (still Taylorist-as-gently caress managerial disciplines in DC companies)
3. go into sales

Watching all the best engineers I knew go these paths was depressing.

canis minor
May 4, 2011

Comb Your Beard posted:

Hi, I'm a full stack developer in the DC area. My biggest strength is the back end, and turning user wants into requirements, and requirements into business logic. My weakness is probably not being modern enough in the front end and application layer.

My current job I like the people and work a lot, but I feel like the company culture is very "cheap," I have multiple issues with my compensation.

My question is how do I begin looking? I know once my resume is "out there" again the recruiters will descend like locusts.

Tentatively my plan is go up on dice.com, use hired.com, and apply to a few companies directly all simultaneously. I don't want to be exclusive with one group of recruiters.

I want to do this in an orderly fashion, I don't want to miss the right job for me.

Similar question, but for UK (and cheap = £30k/y). I was using monster a year ago, but had calls where recruiters wouldn't read my CV, would look for everything (PHP, ASP, Cobol, C, Java in one ad), would mix technologies (Java = Javascript, PHP = Perl), or wouldn't simply answer my inquiries. Don't think I'm going to stay in the company I'm currently at.

I would very much like to find a job in the same field (web agency) - currently with 7 years of experience (in the same company), after uni, with background of software development as well (C++ / Java), but I'd prefer to stay in website building business; foreigner (so, don't really have any referrals to count on). Have also experience in CMS and API building, (as generally we do SaaS, with various sites doing different things) and project management at the stage of the development, if that means anything.

ATM we're using pure PHP (with Zend, but nothing that would be treated as proper Zend dev). I've written JS framework we're using (in jQuery). Otherwise - XAMP stack, MEAN stack (non commercial experience), Smarty, Solr, memcache, unit testing (both in PHP and JS).
Currently educating myself in Apache Cordova, Zend / Laravel / Symfony, additionally Angular, Ruby, Python.

Where would you recommend to start searching (as mentioned, monster didn't really find me anything in similar environment)? What should I realistically expect? What more should I look into?

canis minor fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jun 4, 2016

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

necrobobsledder posted:

3. go into sales

Has anyone here done this?

I love coding, and I'd think I would miss it greatly, but sales appears to have some serious perks. For one, you're treated like a rockstar in the business instead of a helpless nerd, and the salary upside seems much higher. I've done some sales-support, and quite frankly, if the product is decent, it doesn't really seem like a very difficult job.

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necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I've spent several years of my time being a sales engineer or working right next to sales and there's pros and cons like any job. What's far more common in sales is obviously the sales douche stereotype bro / jock that really only cares enough about the product to be able to make enough commission for some materialistic pursuit, and the question is if that ticks you off more than spergs in engineering with anime obsessions and such. Great sales guys are much more agreeable and actually moderate and tempered in personalities and I've found them a lot more enjoyable to be around as human beings than just plain insanely good engineers on average. Bad sales guys are a dime a dozen no different than bad engineers, and both sides base most of their negative experiences upon bad representatives of their respective fields. Life is awesome when you have both good engineers and respectable sales guys working in harmony. You pretty much could sell slime in a can and get rich as an engineer if you get that combo going.

Sales pressure is a lot higher than in engineering - you make your numbers or you're fired and you have to explain why you were fired to your next employer and likely get no call-back, so a bad gig can stick longer with you. If you're in post-sales like you were helping with, jobs are easier since the customer has already signed, but getting literally million dollar checks every other year for doing some presentations and helping align customer needs with a product roadmap like some guys I know is basically the end game for senior sales guys. Many make much more than the CEO of their companies, especially smaller ones. The painful reality of sales in software is that the worse the product, the likely it is that your checks will be higher (SAP sales guys regularly bring in $900k+ / yr I've heard).

But seriously, the business may respect you but I really wouldn't recommend it unless half your feelings of self worth are determined by how many commas are on your pay stubs and bank account statements. Maybe it can happen to you later in life and I might be a whore but I'm more fond of metaphorically marrying someone that has the capability of becoming rich than trying to suck off the already-rich in hopes that I sucker one into putting a ring on it.

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