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Iverron
May 13, 2012

leper khan posted:

You work everything into your rate. 40 hours can be a concern, as can stability.

There are a bunch of issues on the employer side if they don't handle it correctly. It's a bit cheaper for them, but most places eventually switch to w-2 to avoid tax investigations and litigation from workers due to misclassification.

It did seem a little odd that a place of 200 odd people would be entirely independent contractors. It can't be that easy to stay within the boundaries.

Maybe that's a plus?

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Plorkyeran
Mar 22, 2007

To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Iverron posted:

It did seem a little odd that a place of 200 odd people would be entirely independent contractors. It can't be that easy to stay within the boundaries.

Maybe that's a plus?

For remote-only work it's a lot more plausible. Any place with a meaningful number of 1099s working out of their office is very likely to be lining themselves up for a lawsuit.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



Or they pay a third party vendor to rent the contractors - at least I've been assuming that's a legal dodge around employment status

Plorkyeran
Mar 22, 2007

To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed
The third-party vendor setup generally involves the employee being a normal W-2 employee of the vendor, so while they tend to get hosed on equity and such (where applicable) there isn't really anything legally iffy going on.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



I meet plenty who aren't W-2, but my sample size and bias aren't statistically sound :shrug:

Paolomania
Apr 26, 2006

Plorkyeran posted:

The third-party vendor setup generally involves the employee being a normal W-2 employee of the vendor, so while they tend to get hosed on equity and such (where applicable) there isn't really anything legally iffy going on.

I did some contracting for MIT that was structured exactly like this. Not really getting screwed out of equity on an academic coding gig, though.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010
I could type up a long thing but I think my question is pretty simple: I don't have any degree or training other than self-teaching. I've been a software engineer for about 4 years now, first doing Web stuff in .NET and now Rails. I'm officially a "senior software engineer" (previously I was an "architect" but the company was very small so that means less than it would at a bigger company) and I'm making money that feels pretty good (some of the salary-share stuff on HN or here shows people doing better but I think I'm probably above-average for my experience level). I don't really see myself as being successful in management, so... where is my career supposed to go from here? What should I even be working toward?

I have this weird feeling like "wait... is that it?" and I'm wondering if I should be expecting my next move to be a lateral one. The trip from "I don't know how to program" to "senior engineer" was a pretty heady one with a lot of ramp-up in difficulty and pay but I feel like the road from here on out is less clearly marked.

I haven't been at my current company very long so it's not like this is a burning question that I need to address ASAP, but better to consider at leisure than in haste, I figure.

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

I could type up a long thing but I think my question is pretty simple: I don't have any degree or training other than self-teaching. I've been a software engineer for about 4 years now, first doing Web stuff in .NET and now Rails. I'm officially a "senior software engineer" (previously I was an "architect" but the company was very small so that means less than it would at a bigger company) and I'm making money that feels pretty good (some of the salary-share stuff on HN or here shows people doing better but I think I'm probably above-average for my experience level). I don't really see myself as being successful in management, so... where is my career supposed to go from here? What should I even be working toward?

I have this weird feeling like "wait... is that it?" and I'm wondering if I should be expecting my next move to be a lateral one. The trip from "I don't know how to program" to "senior engineer" was a pretty heady one with a lot of ramp-up in difficulty and pay but I feel like the road from here on out is less clearly marked.

I haven't been at my current company very long so it's not like this is a burning question that I need to address ASAP, but better to consider at leisure than in haste, I figure.

Expand your coding skills into another language? Maybe try some embedded stuff or driver programming?

Are you a engineer as in you create code from scratch or are you more of a maintainer/developer?

There is all sorts of things you can do/move towards.

lifg
Dec 4, 2000
<this tag left blank>
Muldoon
Larger tech companies have explicit career tracks for individual contributors.

Smaller companies have unofficial career tracks for individual contributors. It's where they promote you to management, then realize you can't manage people, so they remove your direct reports but let you keep your title and office because you're too valuable to lose.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
How weird is an interview that's formally structured with alternating opportunities for questions? I mean the interviewer asks a question, then the interviewee asks a question, and so on.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

fantastic in plastic posted:

How weird is an interview that's formally structured with alternating opportunities for questions? I mean the interviewer asks a question, then the interviewee asks a question, and so on.

Pretty weird. My first question would be if they took the format from the speed dating thing they went to last month.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

ratbert90 posted:

Expand your coding skills into another language? Maybe try some embedded stuff or driver programming?

Are you a engineer as in you create code from scratch or are you more of a maintainer/developer?

There is all sorts of things you can do/move towards.

I've done both greenfield (including as a lone guy for a pretty long stretch) and brownfield dev so I don't think that's a problem.

Certainly I can learn new technologies and kinds of technologies (or maybe spend more time on CS stuff) -- always room for improvement there -- but career-wise that's kind of a lateral move, isn't it? I spent an inordinate amount of time studying stuff at home in the past but lately I'm kind of having a harder time motivating myself to study things that aren't really related to my job that with the more tenuous external motivation.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

I've done both greenfield (including as a lone guy for a pretty long stretch) and brownfield dev so I don't think that's a problem.

Certainly I can learn new technologies and kinds of technologies (or maybe spend more time on CS stuff) -- always room for improvement there -- but career-wise that's kind of a lateral move, isn't it? I spent an inordinate amount of time studying stuff at home in the past but lately I'm kind of having a harder time motivating myself to study things that aren't really related to my job that with the more tenuous external motivation.

I question how far you've reached in a span of four years. You're almost certainly either lacking general knowledge or a strong specialization. It usually takes more time than you've spent working to become expert in a topic. Maybe take a step back for perspective and figure out what you want out of your career?

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

leper khan posted:

I question how far you've reached in a span of four years. You're almost certainly either lacking general knowledge or a strong specialization. It usually takes more time than you've spent working to become expert in a topic. Maybe take a step back for perspective and figure out what you want out of your career?

I certainly don't think I know everything there is to know about any topic but I guess I'm having trouble fitting together the picture of learning more stuff and career advancement. Maybe my imagination is just failing me.

spiritual bypass
Feb 19, 2008

Grimey Drawer
Almost 90 days in to the remote job I started in October, I got a call from my boss. He said although I know what I'm doing, I'm a "poor fit" for reasons he can't find a way to describe. Now I'm unemployed. What the gently caress??

Anyway, I think I can probably get paid a few tens of thousands more so that's what I'm gonna try to do.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

rt4 posted:

Almost 90 days in to the remote job I started in October, I got a call from my boss. He said although I know what I'm doing, I'm a "poor fit" for reasons he can't find a way to describe. Now I'm unemployed. What the gently caress??

Anyway, I think I can probably get paid a few tens of thousands more so that's what I'm gonna try to do.

Somebody got their budget slashed.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

Any advice on what to expect from a team match meeting with a Google manager? I've got a couple set up for Monday and I don't want to fumble the ball on the 1 yard line :ohdear:

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

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

Jose Valasquez posted:

Any advice on what to expect from a team match meeting with a Google manager? I've got a couple set up for Monday and I don't want to fumble the ball on the 1 yard line :ohdear:

If you already got past hiring committee, then it's unlikely you'd blow this unless, like, you just act like an insane crazy person the whole time. Most people don't get to pick their team, so this is probably a few different managers trying to woo you for their team.

I just showed up and it was like joining the nerd army: Here's your gun laptop, here's where we feed you, report to this room for boot camp eng-edu classes at 9am tomorrow.

Edit: btw PIT is a cool office and you get the big benefit of Google salary and benefits without having to live in an ungodly expensive place like SF, SV or NYC.

mrmcd fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 6, 2017

apseudonym
Feb 25, 2011

Jose Valasquez posted:

Any advice on what to expect from a team match meeting with a Google manager? I've got a couple set up for Monday and I don't want to fumble the ball on the 1 yard line :ohdear:

It's not that bad, but it totally depends on the manager what you'll get. They're not like interviews though. Relax.

They might ask you some questions but it's generally to make sure that you're a fit for the team and equally that it's something you want to do.

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
Yeah, mine were basically a combination of the manager saying "So this is what our team is doing, does that sound interesting to you?", and from my end, getting some more insight into what my background was like and what kinds of projects I preferred to work on. It's not a test.

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

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

The goongler mafia seems to grow larger by the day... :ninja:

b0lt
Apr 29, 2005

mrmcd posted:

The goongler mafia seems to grow larger by the day... :ninja:

Organizing the world's shitposts and making them universally accessible and useful

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

b0lt posted:

Organizing the world's shitposts and making them universally accessible and useful

Until you get bored with the project and it withers away.

Paolomania
Apr 26, 2006

mrmcd posted:

The goongler mafia seems to grow larger by the day... :ninja:

I look forward to continuous meme improvement.

sarehu
Apr 20, 2007

(call/cc call/cc)
So I applied for a job and got an email from an internal recruiter asking to schedule a call (on some online calendar thingy). Next available time was a bit more than 2 weeks from now. How do you get things moving faster?

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

sarehu posted:

So I applied for a job and got an email from an internal recruiter asking to schedule a call (on some online calendar thingy). Next available time was a bit more than 2 weeks from now. How do you get things moving faster?

Tell them you're expecting an offer from someone else, duah.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

sarehu posted:

So I applied for a job and got an email from an internal recruiter asking to schedule a call (on some online calendar thingy). Next available time was a bit more than 2 weeks from now. How do you get things moving faster?

Was it on youcanbook.me or some site like that?

I'd just mail them and ask; you'd think if a candidate expressed significant interest and wanted to work on a quicker timeframe, they'd prioritize that person and not want to lose the lead.

sarehu
Apr 20, 2007

(call/cc call/cc)

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Tell them you're expecting an offer from someone else, duah.

It'd kind of be a bald-faced lie, given the timing relative to the holidays. Anyway a hole opened up and I'm scheduled for tomorrow.

Cuntpunch
Oct 3, 2003

A monkey in a long line of kings
At some point you kind of just have to roll with that sort of thing, as distasteful as it might be. I'm currently playing nice at the tail end of a contract gig while I wait for an offer letter, because there's nothing to be gained at this point from telling a recruiter "Oh yeah, in a week or so I'm expecting an offer for 30% more than this gig is paying". Just gotta look out for yourself these days, the era of "trust your employer, they will take care of you" died a decade or more ago.

Cancelbot
Nov 22, 2006

Canceling spam since 1928

UK based Senior Developer (.NET/C#) and just ranting about my options. I've been banging at the Team Leader door for some time now but some internal vacancies/strife has risen which has made me second guess my career goals. First of all the roles that are up and coming:

- Team Leader in our new office; the commute changes from driving to taking the train, overall time is the same. But oh holy poo poo is the team toxic; I'm pretty certain that if I went for it and got it, half the team would resign as they want "one of their own". I'm OK with this because gently caress them and I can hire people who have some emotional maturity instead. But the domain is also very high profile and has more stupid politics going on than any other team. This is in 6 weeks time to allow external and internal interviews.
- Team Leader in current office; this is 3 months away, nothing changes for me except I get that juicy promotion in a domain I know and can build the team from scratch. Sounds ideal, but is 3 months away and will have the same internal/external process. But due to it not being a shitstorm to apply for I think the competition will be higher.

And now for something (slightly) different:

- Senior Developer in a new "Shared Services" team; I become a developer who is no longer aligned to business needs, but other developer and infrastructure needs. We become a cross-cutting team who have the whole department as our client. First projects are automating the poo poo out of future devops things, standardising big stuff like configuration and logging, and fixing some nasty and disruptive development environment problems. Then after 6 months who knows. But this goes against what I've wanted for a while now, and I see it as slowing down my career to what could become a team that just gently caress about being ivory tower architects.

I'm feeling pressure from senior management to take over the toxic team as they do see me as a strong personality who can deal with their crap, but I don't like the toll it would take on me and would prefer the new team instead. At the same time I'm not a fan of sacrificing my career progression even though being super-dickabout team sounds more fun.

If you have advice or been there then it could help, but gently caress me its been a pain in the arse to work out what I want to do next. As only I can answer this fucky question.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Cancelbot posted:

stupid politics

Depending on the severity this can be a dealbreaker for me. If it's petty nonsense I can deal with it but if we're talking about stack ranking tied to compensation, backstabbing among team members, a huge diva roadblocking everyone else, I would personally run screaming if I saw any of that coming. Unless I had authority to change it.

quote:

And now for something (slightly) different:

- Senior Developer in a new "Shared Services" team; <snip> But this goes against what I've wanted for a while now, and I see it as slowing down my career to what could become a team that just gently caress about being ivory tower architects.

People in these threads like to make fun of the word "DevOps" but don't underestimate what a team like that does. There can be a LOT of overhead involved with releasing products, and having a separate team dedicated to it can free up the other teams to a surprising degree. Obviously it's a judgement call, if your company already has a very smooth process then maybe this team wouldn't have a lot of important things to do after a short period of time, but in my experience they work just as hard as any feature team. Still, if that's not the direction you want to take your career, your answer to that team should be a solid Not Interested, period. Also keep in mind that a low-effort job, if that position does turn out to be one, is likely going to be incredibly boring after a very short period of time and you'll probably end up hating life if you're anything like most developers.

quote:

I'm feeling pressure from senior management to take over the toxic team as they do see me as a strong personality who can deal with their crap, but I don't like the toll it would take on me and would prefer the new team instead. At the same time I'm not a fan of sacrificing my career progression even though being super-dickabout team sounds more fun.

If you have advice or been there then it could help, but gently caress me its been a pain in the arse to work out what I want to do next. As only I can answer this fucky question.

gently caress the pressure, apply for the team you think will be best for your happiness and your career. The toxic team might be a challenge you want to tackle, and it might be possible if you have hire/fire authority, or you might not want that kind of challenge (I like computational challenges, but fixing other people's interpersonal problems sounds like hell to me). If nothing looks good at that company for your career growth, then it's time to shop around.

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

Che Delilas posted:

gently caress the pressure, apply for the team you think will be best for your happiness and your career. The toxic team might be a challenge you want to tackle, and it might be possible if you have hire/fire authority, or you might not want that kind of challenge (I like computational challenges, but fixing other people's interpersonal problems sounds like hell to me). If nothing looks good at that company for your career growth, then it's time to shop around.

Definitely don't take the toxic team unless you actually think that is fun, which it doesn't sound like you do. Go for what will potentially make you happier. Other two sound like you know you won't like them, why do you even entertain them as possibilites?

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

Che Delilas posted:

People in these threads like to make fun of the word "DevOps" but don't underestimate what a team like that does. There can be a LOT of overhead involved with releasing products, and having a separate team dedicated to it can free up the other teams to a surprising degree.

People make fun of it because it's misunderstood buzzword bingo as shown by your post. If there's a separate team doing it then it's just ops since the developer of the code was taken out. If you have a dedicated position called dev ops you're not embracing the philosophy you've just renamed your ops department.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hughlander posted:

People make fun of it because it's misunderstood buzzword bingo as shown by your post. If there's a separate team doing it then it's just ops since the developer of the code was taken out. If you have a dedicated position called dev ops you're not embracing the philosophy you've just renamed your ops department.
Worse, in most cases, since it's not really either development or operations, it's a third silo responsible for handling build tooling and release engineering. Those are both valuable responsibilities and there's a good case to be made for centralizing them in some organizations, but it sure as hell isn't DevOps.

Cancelbot
Nov 22, 2006

Canceling spam since 1928

Skandranon posted:

Definitely don't take the toxic team unless you actually think that is fun, which it doesn't sound like you do. Go for what will potentially make you happier. Other two sound like you know you won't like them, why do you even entertain them as possibilites?

The toxic team is purely from management pushing it, shared services made me pause as I never really considered it and whilst I wouldn't be the team lead; there wouldn't be that position for a while as it's a brand new team with new people except for me. So I see the opportunity in the future there. But you're right, there's only one role I really want.

Vulture Culture posted:

Worse, in most cases, since it's not really either development or operations, it's a third silo responsible for handling build tooling and release engineering. Those are both valuable responsibilities and there's a good case to be made for centralizing them in some organizations, but it sure as hell isn't DevOps.

I'm not even sure how to characterise it as it's supposed to be a bit of everything, but the first 6 months are 100% DevOps:
- Move our public website from existing hosting provider to AWS
- Make it so if anyone wants to make an API/Service/Web site, they can one click create their repository, build pipeline and infrastructure.
- Elimination of useless alerting across the department, leave only alerts that can be actually worked on

After that we become department "grease", with devs, QAs, DBAs etc. feeding their non-project technical problems that aren't tech debt into our backlog so they can move faster, according to the development manager.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Cancelbot posted:

The toxic team is purely from management pushing it, shared services made me pause as I never really considered it and whilst I wouldn't be the team lead; there wouldn't be that position for a while as it's a brand new team with new people except for me. So I see the opportunity in the future there. But you're right, there's only one role I really want.


I'm not even sure how to characterise it as it's supposed to be a bit of everything, but the first 6 months are 100% DevOps:
- Move our public website from existing hosting provider to AWS
- Make it so if anyone wants to make an API/Service/Web site, they can one click create their repository, build pipeline and infrastructure.
- Elimination of useless alerting across the department, leave only alerts that can be actually worked on

After that we become department "grease", with devs, QAs, DBAs etc. feeding their non-project technical problems that aren't tech debt into our backlog so they can move faster, according to the development manager.

Devops is the developers doing ops. What you're describing is a build/release team working on the tooling you would expect a build/release team to work on.

The conflation is devops with the opposite of devops, as you're unembedding operations from development.

Not that there's anything wrong with working in release; it can be very challenging.

pr0zac
Jan 18, 2004

~*lukecagefan69*~


Pillbug

Good Will Hrunting posted:

I got the offer for a 30k raise with a 7.5k increase in my bonus. I didn't tell them what I was looking for but I did tell them how much I had received in a previous offer and that they were going to have to beat which they did. Do I still negotiate?

Am behind on this thread, so Good! Don't worry about not being good enough. Just work on growing into the job and be open about asking for help and advice early on. If your new manager doesn't suck, one of their jobs is to help you grow as an engineer.


In other news, taking 9 months off to study in order to try to get a job at Google is apparently NOT a good method.

https://medium.com/@googleyasheck/i-didnt-get-hired-here-s-why-21f26d4784d5#.4q9kzd3fj

quote:

The thing that bothers me is that I didn’t even get a phone screen. I didn’t even talk to a recruiter over the phone.

csammis
Aug 26, 2003

Mental Institution

pr0zac posted:

googleyasheck

I think his problem might have been that he didn't put working at Google on a high enough pedestal

Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know

pr0zac posted:

In other news, taking 9 months off to study in order to try to get a job at Google is apparently NOT a good method.

I spent a while looking at the banner picture on https://googleyasheck.com/ because I was sure he would have photoshopped his face over at least a few of the employees.

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Cancelbot
Nov 22, 2006

Canceling spam since 1928

leper khan posted:

Devops is the developers doing ops. What you're describing is a build/release team working on the tooling you would expect a build/release team to work on.

The conflation is devops with the opposite of devops, as you're unembedding operations from development.

Not that there's anything wrong with working in release; it can be very challenging.

Ah I see! Never occurred to me actually. And in digging more the teams will still be doing their own ops as they will own their infrastructure due to us doubling down on AWS. That makes more sense it being a release team.

The development manager is throwing around the term "site reliability engineer" as a comparison, which I need to look into some more but I'm not sure if that is only going to confuse things.

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