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Blinkz0rz posted:There are plenty of other industries that pay people for what's in their head rather than how they move their muscle. Software is the only one I've ever seen that coddles its employees to such a degree. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the perks, but I've noticed that there's a soft of a cult of the man-boy that's pervasive that I really detest. I expect that you'll find people are more productive when they aren't afraid of being snapped at every time something goes wrong. "Coddling" your employees, i.e. treating them like decent human beings, is therefore good for business. If other industries haven't figured that out yet, then...sucks to be them? I mean, I'm not talking about poo poo like putting foosball machines in the cafeteria and having napping rooms and so on. I'm just saying that if your manager is a dictatorial rear end in a top hat, they are a bad manager.
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Jul 23, 2016 15:37
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managers that yell at and publicly shame their subordinates are terrible managers
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Jul 23, 2016 16:18
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Blinkz0rz posted:Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the perks, but I've noticed that there's a soft of a cult of the man-boy that's pervasive that I really detest. Sharing and being sensitive aren't childish nor negative indicators of masculinity unless you're a chauvinist or uncomfortable with yourself. I would go so far as to say that expecting a stoic response to difficult situations is much more emotionally stunted than understanding appropriate emotional responses to them. Entitlement and lack of perspective certainly give programmers a bad reputation, but I'm pretty sure if you suggested programmers' reputations would improve if only they cared less and were less empathetic, people would either laugh in your face or spit in it.
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Jul 23, 2016 17:38
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Listening to others, communications, social interactions, thinking about new concepts, building and prototyping new ideas without fear of failure is what evolution, is all about. And also what differentiate humans from other animals and what would call our "free will". Hating that side of humankind is just sad, and will not improve the physical or psychological situations of you or your peers. There is someone like that where I work, he's a winform programmer that never bothered to learn web technologies, he is always so negative about everyone and everything, he's from that old school of though that women are too sensitive and that kids nowadays are just so lazy and always on social media and never working. I rarely ear him talk positively about anything. He's so convinced he's always right and yet he can't take criticism one bit, when you prove him wrong he goes into shut-in mode for hours or days. He's been working for this company for over a decade and thank god was never considered for managerial position. Anyway, that guy is sad and hate almost everyone, he eat alone. You don't want to be like that guy.
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Jul 23, 2016 17:41
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Blinkz0rz posted:There are plenty of other industries that pay people for what's in their head rather than how they move their muscle. Software is the only one I've ever seen that coddles its employees to such a degree. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the perks, but I've noticed that there's a soft of a cult of the man-boy that's pervasive that I really detest. Personally I would have considered "treating people with respect" and "don't be hostile" to be markers of "being an adult".
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Jul 23, 2016 18:18
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Also I guess this is relevant: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/08/tiger-oil-memos.html and I'll just highlight this: to emphasize the "what's in their heads" aspect.
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Jul 23, 2016 18:23
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The "If you can't afford to do the things you want to do then ask for a raise rather than fabricating expense reports" part of it is good advice, at least. Another one of the memos tells people to stop whining about how they can't find any workers and to just pay more if they have to, which is something that many companies seem to not be able to figure out...
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Jul 24, 2016 01:24
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Come to think of it - how common is it to give a junior developer with ~2mo experience unsupervised access to your server farm's build scripts and tell them to complete an action on their own? I'm wondering if that's not actually kind of a bad idea. Not even I would be comfortable with that.
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Jul 24, 2016 14:18
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Pollyanna posted:Come to think of it - how common is it to give a junior developer with ~2mo experience unsupervised access to your server farm's build scripts and tell them to complete an action on their own? I'm wondering if that's not actually kind of a bad idea. Not even I would be comfortable with that. What's the problem here exactly? Even freshers should be able to poke around builds and get some things done.
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Jul 24, 2016 14:35
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If there's version control, a reasonable release process, and a test environment, then it's fine. It becomes worse with each of those things that's missing.
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Jul 24, 2016 14:52
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ultrafilter posted:If there's version control, a reasonable release process, and a test environment, then it's fine. It becomes worse with each of those things that's missing. Yeah, I'd be fine with it so long as someone more experienced had oversight over what actually happened to the system before any changes were committed to production.
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Jul 24, 2016 15:03
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This reminds me of people we hired that rolled their own code that had nothing in common (in syntax as well as in logic) with stuff in the repo and then complained that it didn't work. On the other hand there are people that copy-paste bits of code and complain that it doesn't work, which isn't any better (and it doesn't work because they don't know the language and are not supposed to do this sort of stuff)
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Jul 24, 2016 15:14
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leper khan posted:What's the problem here exactly? Even freshers should be able to poke around builds and get some things done. ultrafilter posted:If there's version control, a reasonable release process, and a test environment, then it's fine. It becomes worse with each of those things that's missing. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, I'd be fine with it so long as someone more experienced had oversight over what actually happened to the system before any changes were committed to production. In this case, they were live server templates that directly determined how the two app servers would be configured. In particular, whether the app would communicate with the production data API or the beta sandbox API. Said configuration was accidentally set to the beta sandbox API for an entire evening. 
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Jul 24, 2016 22:25
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Pollyanna posted:In this case, they were live server templates that directly determined how the two app servers would be configured. In particular, whether the app would communicate with the production data API or the beta sandbox API. Said configuration was accidentally set to the beta sandbox API for an entire evening. Add a record to the beta system that would be comically implausible (or even impossible without database access or a front end bug) to have in production. Something like a user named "Hambone J. Lioncats", a 200 year old woman from Paris, ID. Have your blackbox monitoring system test your site for that user every 5 minutes, and raise an alert if it ever finds it.
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Jul 24, 2016 23:46
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I remember being in a meeting before where I suggested something to that effect and got nowhere because monitoring for a specific user in production, even if the user is a canary value, would be in violation of a regulation I stopped caring about and gave up doing anything proactive about production besides monitoring systems and infrastructure (the lowest-value of things to monitor because they almost never fire before an outage occurs) before I quit that job. But for a mess of a system as what's going on in this scenario, sounds pretty reasonable.
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Jul 25, 2016 03:54
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That time someone walks into your office for advice on a project that sounds way cooler than everything you're working on. I guess that's my morning. 
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Jul 25, 2016 14:25
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leper khan posted:That time someone walks into your office for advice on a project that sounds way cooler than everything you're working on. I guess that's my morning. Grass is always greener IMO. For all you might know the other project is a shitshow at the moment.
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Jul 25, 2016 15:52
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Sometimes you know for sure that your project is crap and everyone else's is doing better though. My last job I knew that my grass was pretty much dead and covered in dog excrement and even people on other teams were telling me that we were getting slammed.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:22
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What does it mean if a job description plays up "System Integrations". The position title is Backend Software Engineer. I consider myself a full stack developer with the best skill on the backend. Wondering if the integration language is a red flag.
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Jul 28, 2016 15:38
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Integration means "Glue" in enterprise vernacular and after having done enough of that in my career in my title and unofficially, I don't think it's a very good path for aspiring, ambitious software developers. Think "call REST, SOAP, or some horribly cobbled together remote call convention like using rsync as RPC" primarily. It's pretty much commoditized and people aren't going to walk across lava to try to hire you for it basically ever. On the other hand, as long as it's maybe 20% tops in terms of your time spent and the other 80% are pretty alright, sounds like a good gig.
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Jul 28, 2016 16:02
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It feels like prep work could take an infinite amount of time and that I'll never be ready. 2.5 years has given me a really solid tool belt and a lot of diverse knowledge in a few areas, but the algorithms stuff (especially the harder stuff - some subsets of tree algos, more difficult DP stuff, etc) feels so far away that I have a serious case of what I'm guessing is interview imposter syndrome. How do I get over this and Just loving Interview?
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Jul 29, 2016 21:52
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Good Will Hrunting posted:It feels like prep work could take an infinite amount of time and that I'll never be ready. 2.5 years has given me a really solid tool belt and a lot of diverse knowledge in a few areas, but the algorithms stuff (especially the harder stuff - some subsets of tree algos, more difficult DP stuff, etc) feels so far away that I have a serious case of what I'm guessing is interview imposter syndrome. Find some companies you wouldn't want to work for. Ask them for an interview.
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Jul 29, 2016 22:17
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Going to interview next week with a mid-sized but growing company. Their HR rep told me over the phone that I should give some thought to my compensation, in particular what I would be happy receiving, not necessarily what would be appropriate for someone with my level of experience.  Is that, uh, a license to ask for way too much money?For that matter, what would you say would be appropriate for someone with 10 years' experience, primarily in application development, hardware control, and scientific software (data presentation and analysis)? I'm in the Bay Area (specifically San Francisco area). My casual searches for salary information have turned up anywhere from $100k to $150k, which is kind of a broad range. Obviously I want to aim high, but I don't want to aim so high that we can't start negotiating.
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Jul 29, 2016 22:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Going to interview next week with a mid-sized but growing company. Their HR rep told me over the phone that I should give some thought to my compensation, in particular what I would be happy receiving, not necessarily what would be appropriate for someone with my level of experience. For the Bay Area market and that experience level, $140k-170k base, 15% bonus target, plus RSUs or options. A lot of this, however, depends on how a particular company measures experience/seniority, and how they feel you place on that scale. Edit: "what I would be happy receiving, not necessarily what would be appropriate for someone with my level of experience" sounds like they are trying to trick you into low balling yourself.
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Jul 29, 2016 22:59
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mrmcd posted:For the Bay Area market and that experience level, $140k-170k base, 15% bonus target, plus RSUs or options. A lot of this, however, depends on how a particular company measures experience/seniority, and how they feel you place on that scale. I'm curious what your source for those numbers are, since I haven't seen any numbers nearly as high as $170k. I don't distrust you, but some corroboration (even just from other people chiming in) would be welcome. Thanks for the advice and input, though! Man it'd be nice to be making $170k...
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Jul 29, 2016 23:40
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm curious what your source for those numbers are, since I haven't seen any numbers nearly as high as $170k. I don't distrust you, but some corroboration (even just from other people chiming in) would be welcome. For reference, at Google, you'd probably get slotted as a SWE 3 (mid-level; Google tends to downlevel people), probably like 135-140k base, bonus and stock on top of that would probably put you a little over 200. Cicero fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jul 30, 2016 |
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Jul 30, 2016 00:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm curious what your source for those numbers are, since I haven't seen any numbers nearly as high as $170k. I don't distrust you, but some corroboration (even just from other people chiming in) would be welcome. So I'm in NYC, but the cost of living and hiring markets are about as insane in both, so I'm assuming they are fairly comparable. But college hire Software Engineers will generally be 70-90k/yr, and each "step" on a job ladder is ~+25k on the base. The tricky part is how many steps 10 years is worth, because every company has slightly different ladders, and individuals progress at different rates. Two steps would be 120-140k, three steps would be 145-165k. Startups and cheap industries will be on the lower end of those bands, the Googles, Facebooks, bank and financial companies will be on the higher end. Side note: Don't work for startups if you want to maximize earnings, as chances are you're not going to pick the one that turns into a magical unicorn in five years. Don't work for banks if you want to do anything remotely interesting. That's just my impression with ~ 11 years experience. Certain cities and industries are WAY better for making money than others, obviously.
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Jul 30, 2016 03:14
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm curious what your source for those numbers are, since I haven't seen any numbers nearly as high as $170k. I don't distrust you, but some corroboration (even just from other people chiming in) would be welcome. Based on my experience (out of school working full time for 8 years now), and working for a company in the Bay Area with what I think is competitive but not terribly above average salary, those numbers seem reasonable to me. Certainly, as someone with 10 years of experience, if you consider yourself a quality hire, you should be expecting at least the upper end of the 100k-150k range you threw out.
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Jul 30, 2016 04:58
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We should probably set up another salary survey, huh? Why don't we have one every year?
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Jul 30, 2016 05:12
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Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's very helpful, in that I'll be nudging my asking price considerably higher than I otherwise would have. It appears I've been underpaid for much of the past ~5-7 years. I knew that would be an issue with working in academia...I just didn't really realize how much of an issue it would be. Oh well, nowhere to go from here but up.
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Jul 30, 2016 06:26
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Necc0 posted:We should probably set up another salary survey, huh? Why don't we have one every year? Don't we have a thread for it now? Might be good to do it again. I've been wondering if 90k is too little for an area with ~1700/mo rent.
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Jul 30, 2016 14:01
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I think a more interesting thing might be something like a salary history. I've had to do some aggressive job hopping to get mine up to par: 60K + benefits +options - CG artist at ill fated dot-com 60K + benefits - CG artist at a medium size gamedev studio <grad school> 65K + benefits - Software company that was having its lunch eaten by Apple. 1st year out of MS with a resume that looked like an artist. 75K + benefits- Defense contractor as SWE 85K + benefits - Defense contractor 2nd year promotion to SWE2 95K contract - Research staff at a premier CS academic research institute 100K contract - Research staff at a premier CS academic research institute 120K + benefits + RSUs + bonus - 1st year SWE at premier tech co. 125K + benefits + RSUs + bonus - 2nd year SWE at premier tech co.
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Jul 30, 2016 14:38
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Follow up to Pollyanna's question. My salary is in line with my expectations, but my TC feels lacking. I have a 10% bonus and 1000 options but they're not RSUs so even though the company is fairly well established and went public last summer, I feel like the options aren't going to be worth much and I'm not sure I'll be here through the entire vesting schedule. Thoughts? I have 7 years of professional experience but most of it has been at an enterprise company that isn't strictly software focused and I transitioned to a more ops and tooling-oriented role last year.
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Jul 30, 2016 14:45
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I think I've moved up far enough to completely hate these. Every time I have to deal with other people's salary I get a bit depressed over how little they're making and a bit guilty over how much I am. Like a guy making just a hair over 1/3rd of me going through a divorce and wondering how to fit two kids into a one bedroom apartment near day care, while my biggest concern is remodeling a second house for rent.
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Jul 30, 2016 14:48
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Hughlander posted:I think I've moved up far enough to completely hate these. Every time I have to deal with other people's salary I get a bit depressed over how little they're making and a bit guilty over how much I am. Like a guy making just a hair over 1/3rd of me going through a divorce and wondering how to fit two kids into a one bedroom apartment near day care, while my biggest concern is remodeling a second house for rent. Isn't the answer to his problem "ask for a raise (and get a 2br near day care)"? Not that you'd be able to tell him that if he's working under you.. Failing that, until you get pretty far up the ladder, there are generally jobs you're qualified for that will pay more. There's no good reason a competent software developer should be struggling with money. If anyone here is, look for another job. Don't tell the recruiter what you make when they ask. "That's privileged information I'm not able to disclose." Is a good line that works. If you know you're making above market, maybe do tell them, but you should have empirical evidence that you're currently above market. There are reasons to not always take the highest paying option; we have the good fortune of being in a position to do so and still be paid a good salary.
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Jul 30, 2016 15:40
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leper khan posted:Isn't the answer to his problem "ask for a raise (and get a 2br near day care)"? Not that you'd be able to tell him that if he's working under you.. Yes but once you're at a position to see the salary for an entire org and the relative differences in the salary among the people you realize that most people really suck at negotiating. Person I'm thinking of was being paid something like 25% less than someone he was mentoring.
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Jul 30, 2016 15:59
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I just want to know how to become qualified for these $150k jobs people keep throwing around. I don't wanna stay a Rails monkey forever, and I don't know what to move on to.
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Jul 30, 2016 18:04
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Pollyanna posted:I just want to know how to become qualified for these $150k jobs people keep throwing around. I don't wanna stay a Rails monkey forever, and I don't know what to move on to. On a technical level: What's worked for me is working my way down the stack or down different stacks with independent toy projects. I try to finish but don't feel bad that I often don't, as long as I'm learning. I just try a bunch of different random frameworks or platforms to see what I like and play. Non-technical: Breaking a project into steps / pieces and figuring out how to prioritize to get from nothing to something functional. Arguably more important than being super good at the technical part.
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Jul 30, 2016 18:11
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Technical prowess has little to do with your salary, but I'm just one data point. You just need to be good enough to pass the interviews which is a high bar but attainable for basically anyone who stops thinking of it as general programming ability and more just a rigmarole of the hiring process. Read that stupid book and do the problems... I've worked on design to back-end high throughput to architecture to app dev and don't feel extremely proficient in any of them, at least not better than your average person who enjoys their work. I got my salary by jumping jobs and pitting multiple offers against each other. Ask for more than you were previously paying, they should pay you a bit more than your previous job. Then if you can line up 2, tell the lower one that this other guy is offering higher and they'll try to match +5k or something. Usually they match in a bullshit way like adding more RSUs or saying "our accommodations(free food) is worth 2.5k per year", but you can still use it against the other company and say "Well they offered more, can you do better?" All this applicable only to bay area... so your AWESOME money doesn't go as far especially if you're living alone. Still, if you cook instead of restaurant every day and don't shop at Whole Foods, it's a better deal regardless of what people say about living expenses. MeruFM fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jul 30, 2016 |
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Jul 30, 2016 18:50
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Pollyanna posted:I just want to know how to become qualified for these $150k jobs people keep throwing around. I don't wanna stay a Rails monkey forever, and I don't know what to move on to. Location is a big part of it. Jobs in NYC and SF pay very well because no one could afford to live there otherwise. The other thing is having experience in something that's not just programming. You can go along the more business skills route and focus on directing junior developers, requirements analysis, communication with nontechnical stakeholders and general project lead skills, or you can focus on something in computer science like machine learning, big fast databases, distributed systems, embedded systems, or others. The best jobs are going to go to people who are good at both of those things, and they may not do that much coding after a while. Of course your industry matters too. People in finance get paid more than people in nonprofits, even on the IT side of things. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Non-technical: Breaking a project into steps / pieces and figuring out how to prioritize to get from nothing to something functional. Arguably more important than being super good at the technical part. Yeah. If you want to be a senior or principal developer anywhere good, you need to have these skills.
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Jul 30, 2016 19:11
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