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csammis posted:Related, anyone know of goon-approved employers of C++ developers in the Portland or Seattle areas? If you're not one of the types that believes Facebook is ruining the world then it's a pretty great place to work. Benefits are good, compensation begins at "competitive, if you don't count stock, great if you do" and scales up to "I can buy a house in SF" (/s). But really, comp is good and working conditions are also generally quite good. The Seattle office is growing like mad, and there is plenty of professional infrastructure for you to develop your career, and managers generally foster career growth (and are trained as such), even if you switch teams.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:55
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One thing to be aware of is that Seattle is overcast for 9+ months out of the year, like literally you go from September through April without seeing direct sunlight. I personally couldn't handle that, but maybe it's not an issue for you. There's a reason why Seattle is the birthplace of both Starbucks and Tully's, and it's not because the area's good for growing coffee...
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Mar 20, 2017 20:34
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csammis posted:Related, anyone know of goon-approved employers of C++ developers in the Portland or Seattle areas? A spunky little startup called Microsoft is hiring, I'm told. (Serious, good place. Been in 7 years now.)
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Mar 20, 2017 21:25
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csammis posted:Well I earned my "got laid off" badge last Friday. Hooray. I think the Seattle/Portland moonshot isn't that dangerous if you're a developer. Lots of tech jobs out there. HOWEVER, keep this in mind, housing and other expenses are likely to cost a lot more than you're used to coming from the midwest. I've lived in St. Louis and Seattle and apartments easily cost 2x as much in Seattle. The pay is better, but consider that impact on your savings if you do go. That said, I've done a moonshot twice, once from St. Louis to Seattle, and once from Seattle to Raleigh, and both times I was fine. It was a fun adventure and it wasn't that hard to find a job. (Seattle is very Microsoft heavy though, lots of C# programmers there. I'm sure there are also C++ jobs but I only worked at C# places). Also, as far as my experience hunting while not on-location. It's a big pain in the rear end, but a lot of employers were willing to at least video call me first. I was planning to move anyway, so no one flew me out for an in-person, but a lot of companies will do this for strong candidates.
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Mar 20, 2017 21:42
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Google has a decent presence in Seattle metro as well, plus there's also Amazon, if you're not scared off by their recent rep hit.
mrmcd fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 21:44
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FamDav posted:Was it a system engineer job or a system development engineer job? The former requires minimal coding, whereas the other requires you to meet something close to an SDE. Just a system engineer job. It was suggested that I brush up on networking and scripting fundamentals. It'll be interesting to see what the interview is like.
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Mar 20, 2017 22:20
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Jose Valasquez posted:Any good recommendations for learning C++? I used it in college but not so much since then and my new role is working on a C++ code base. I'm coming from years of Java so the basics are fine but I'm drowning a sea of const* auto&& std::strings that must be rvalues. StackOverflow has a list of resources here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list I did the same recently (coming from Ruby) and I found myself skipping huge chunks of even the "steep learning curve" recommendations, and I'm not exactly a language-learning savant. At some point I stopped reading and started looking up things as I went with the project I was working on because the books weren't helping. Edit: the main takeaway I got from all the books was writing "good" C++ means ignoring two thirds of the language, with which two thirds depending on what type of programmer you are.
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Mar 20, 2017 23:08
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prisoner of waffles posted:What would be wrong with being straightforward with your CTO? Tell him why you want to let people know you're going and ask why he wants it to be delayed. If you leaving will be a morale event, telling people at the last second probably won't make it any better. Pulled him aside. He wanted to push back the date because someone popular was let go on a different team (small company). I persuaded him to go through with announcing it to our team. It's happening in 20 min. Feels like this place went south quickly.
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Mar 21, 2017 00:40
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Shayl posted:I think the Seattle/Portland moonshot isn't that dangerous if you're a developer. Lots of tech jobs out there. HOWEVER, keep this in mind, housing and other expenses are likely to cost a lot more than you're used to coming from the midwest. I've lived in St. Louis and Seattle and apartments easily cost 2x as much in Seattle. The pay is better, but consider that impact on your savings if you do go. Also if you're looking to purchase a home in Portland, know that this is not a place where you can cruise looking for For Sale signs or leisurely browse listings and try to decide between two or three different places before finally putting down an offer less than the asking price expecting to then negotiate. This is a place where a house will get seven offers for 10-20% above asking price before it even gets a chance to get publicly listed, and that's not an exaggeration. Be prepared to rent for a while. That said, the surrounding provinces aren't quite as bad if you're willing to do the commute (car traffic is pure pain but our mass transit system is pretty okay).
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Mar 21, 2017 09:22
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I'm pondering whether to try and make a move now, or to wait and get a bit more experience at my current position, looking for some goon opinions. I have ~3 years experience, first 1.5 working on a healthcare web application, then I moved to a different city for family reasons. I did 6 awful months at a big defense company, and for the past year I've been at a decent and comfortable position working on a construction business management desktop app using WPF. My current position is fine, no real complaints. But long term, I feel like staying and working on this one desktop app is not where I want to ultimately be. There is no real room for any lateral moves, as the company basically has this one business management app, and also an engineering application with 3D modeling and truss design. It's kind of interesting, but I feel like I'd like to transition to web and mobile projects at some point. There is a young, up and coming startup-ish company that does custom software development in the area that has really piqued my interest. The company seems stable and growing, the idea of getting in on the ground floor of a company like that appeals to me. Also, the opportunity to work on lots of different kinds of projects sounds awesome. I'm definitely thinking of moving on from my current gig at some point, but I'm just debating whether I should stick it out another year or two, get really good at wpf while I have the chance, and build a resume that looks less jumpy, or just apply now to the other company and see what happens. If it ends up like I imagine it, I could see myself staying there long term. Any input?
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Mar 21, 2017 15:14
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If the startup is stable and growing, then you're not getting in on the ground floor.  Seriously though, startups can be very hit-or-miss; they can be great or they can really, really suck, and there's not a lot of in-between. The small employee base means that you can make a much bigger impact on the company, but they also tend to have less-experienced leadership, and interpersonal issues get magnified when there's no bureaucracy in place.In other words, while you should always be prepared to join a company only to discover that it's not what you thought it was, the odds of that happening are larger with startups.
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Mar 21, 2017 15:31
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If the startup is stable and growing, then you're not getting in on the ground floor. There's also the potential for the company, as a whole, to change very rapidly. A company can go from great to sucky in a matter of months, or even faster. All it takes is a couple experienced devs leaving and taking all the institutional knowledge with them, or a funder dropping out, and suddenly your dream startup is now having to do insane things just to stay afloat.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:24
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Skandranon posted:Can't really hurt to demonstrate enthusiasm, and if you are sure enough of your error, you can try addressing it. Shows you care, that you can improve on your own, etc. Just don't go admitting to a bunch of stuff that they might not have noticed. Thanks... aaand I got the "we're putting together an offer" email prior to having time to write the "here's what I think I got wrong" email. Seems it would be silly to write it now, right? Rudest Buddhist posted:Pulled him aside. He wanted to push back the date because someone popular was let go on a different team (small company). I persuaded him to go through with announcing it to our team. It's happening in 20 min. Feels like this place went south quickly. Is your decision to move on feeling even smarter now? Because it should. One offer in hand and one in "we're putting it together" status: feels good man
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Mar 21, 2017 16:28
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I've been thinking about what I want to be doing a few years down the line, and I'm genuinely kind of lost. I know I wanna work on cool and interesting things, but is it okay to just follow that line of thinking, bouncing from place to place? I kind of want stability (e.g. able to stay in a single place for a few years) but I don't wanna give up opportunity, either. I've thought of doing consulting/contracting, but I don't think I have the cops or expertise to do that. Still, it might be a good (or at least interesting) experience.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:31
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Pollyanna posted:I've been thinking about what I want to be doing a few years down the line, and I'm genuinely kind of lost. I know I wanna work on cool and interesting things, but is it okay to just follow that line of thinking, bouncing from place to place? I kind of want stability (e.g. able to stay in a single place for a few years) but I don't wanna give up opportunity, either. I'm tempted to reply "e/n is thataway" but I've been in places where my thought process has been basically identical so... Give us some more detail. What have you been doing? What, out of that, would you want to keep doing? What do you want to give up or not give up? What are good ideas, personal characteristics, or techniques that you haven't been able to use so far in your professional life? What have you been building your career out of so far? What are the things you want to do but don't see any feasible way of working towards? edit: somebody please chime in with some who / why / when / where / how questions
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Mar 21, 2017 16:58
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prisoner of waffles posted:Thanks... aaand I got the "we're putting together an offer" email prior to having time to write the "here's what I think I got wrong" email. Seems it would be silly to write it now, right? "Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake." Similarly, don't interfere with your allies when they are doing something good.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:59
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prisoner of waffles posted:Is your decision to move on feeling even smarter now? Because it should. Feeling the best I've felt in months this morning 
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Mar 21, 2017 17:08
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prisoner of waffles posted:Give us some more detail. At my current job? Basic web dev monkeying for a year (Rails), then getting drafted onto a front-end product team that's been pretty poorly managed and hating it for the past 4~5 months. The tech is okay, but badly executed, and the rest is a mess. Other than that, basically busywork. If what I do outside of work matters, I've bounced around a bunch of things like game dev, musical composition, functional programming, etc. The latter has stuck around the longest. quote:What, out of that, would you want to keep doing? The actual products I'm working on at work aren't very inspiring and I don't have much attachment to staying in the industry (fintech/insurance, though our org doesn't touch anything fintech specific). There's nothing I'm doing right now that I would be particularly broken up about leaving behind, though I'm fine with web dev. quote:What do you want to give up or not give up? I don't really want to give up my compensation and my location, but the rest I can go without. The tech stack I work with isn't my favorite, the products range from unused and uninspiring to badly informed and designed, and the company's kinda going down the shitter management-wise. I do want to give up doing anything with CICD, deployment, or AWS. I really have no interest in that poo poo. Front-end also frustrates me and I don't like it. quote:What are good ideas, personal characteristics, or techniques that you haven't been able to use so far in your professional life? - Not much functional programming or any sort of complicated problems - Agile methodology is poorly implemented and so getting poo poo done is like pulling teeth - Good developer practices take a huuuge backseat to "get poo poo done by the end of the month or we're hosed", that or just plain inertia Not much else, really. I haven't developed many special skills to take advantage of, the skills I've developed (project management, requirements gathering, QA and product design nitpicking, team member wrangling) have been a matter of necessity to deal with what I've been given. quote:What have you been building your career out of so far? Um...nothing, really. My career so far has been JIRA grinding in assorted web dev, and I feel like I haven't really pushed my career along yet, outside of just running up the clock. That's been really disappointing and worrying. quote:What are the things you want to do but don't see any feasible way of working towards? I kind of want to get involved in more interesting problems, products, and fields. I see posts out there of how someone used algorithm X to solve problem Y, or a company made Cool Thing Z that employs a piece of tech that interests me, and I both want to get involved but see major barriers to entering. I want to try doing embedded dev, but that requires a lot of low-level C-like knowledge and guru-ness that I don't have. Jobs are also rare. A lot of places that don't do web dev specifically involve fields that I would need background on and would not appreciate me trying to learn on the job. Man. The more I type this out, the less sure I am about what I'm doing.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:45
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I'm wondering how to frame my experience as I be one more senior. I feel like it's important to have broad skills but also have a deep expertise in one or two areas. And I'm not sure (1) if I have any deep experience in any area and (2) how to gain such expertise. I've been doing internal tools and web application development for a little over three years now. Basically, I think it's all been business software. Tools and systems to sync ticket information from one ticket system to a another, track where assets are assigned, track who has permission to login into what and access what data, etc. Just a bunch of random internal tools and system work without a lot of time on any one tool. The systems I deal with have gotten a little bigger over time and I've taken responsibility for bigger parts, but it's still the same work. Basically, for my entire career, almost four years now, I've been moving from internal business problem to internal business problem, solving it by creating a new tool or system or extending an existing one. But I feel like there's either no future in that (lots of experience doing this doesn't make me an expert in anything... What do I call my skillset?) or a mediocre future with less than top-tier pay (e.g., companies are willing to pay top dollar for machine learning experts - who the hell is willing to pay top dollar for internal-tools-developer #3912?). What do I do if I want to maximize my bargaining position over my career? Seems like I might be able to find a team using ML tools at my current company and get kind of involved with them, but that's still less than ideal because I feel like I'd be starting over, given I have zero ML experience. Also, seems like even if I can use an existing ML tool to solve a problem, the top tier pay is for those people with PhDs who design NEW tools, rather than merely apply other people's tools. Is there any way that I could frame what I do know in a manner that makes seem like I have some real expertise in a specific area? Or have I basically done one year four times?
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Mar 21, 2017 17:50
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The good thing about web dev is that virtually any business software can benefit from having a web interface
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Mar 21, 2017 17:53
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Pollyanna posted:I've been thinking about what I want to be doing a few years down the line, and I'm genuinely kind of lost. I know I wanna work on cool and interesting things, but is it okay to just follow that line of thinking, bouncing from place to place? This has been my attitude for the past ~8 years and 5 jobs that I've been in software and I think it's working out well for me. (Feel free to tell me how wrong I am) I write general back-end code (pretty much everything but UI) with no specialization, I prefer small teams where I can get a lot of variety and I like functional programming languages. I'm currently getting $160k in the Boston area, and I feel like I could get a new job offer any time I wanted one. Working in software makes me happy, so as long as the company I'm at isn't completely destroying my soul I'm enjoying myself. If I was doing things over, the only big change I'd make would be trying to get a stint at somebody family-friendly (like Google) when I had my kids. I like having them visit the office, but that was uncomfortable in the start-up I was at (run by college grads) and getting weeks of paid leave to ride out the worst of the sleep loss would have been great. I think the future danger is that if I stop learning new things it'll be hard to change jobs and if I made different choices (working for larger companies or specializing in some niche or getting into management) I could be making more money than I am.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:08
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oliveoil posted:Is there any way that I could frame what I do know in a manner that makes seem like I have some real expertise in a specific area? Or have I basically done one year four times? Depends. If you think about salary in the private sector, they're trying to maximise the gap between the amount they're paying you and the amount they make from your work. Being rare with a niche skillset can work supply/demand in your favour, sure, but being very effective is also a good way to go. If you're so good at doing internal tools that you can ship the code of two lesser devs or tech lead a team of 5 to perform 30% better each then you've more than paid for yourself, especially when you multiply that by the increased productivity of everyone using the tools you're writing. I advertise myself as having well-rounded expertise and I get perfectly good senior rates. You may be undervaluing dependability and a strong attitude of getting things done for the business and helping people achieve their objectives.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:14
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Mniot posted:This has been my attitude for the past ~8 years and 5 jobs that I've been in software and I think it's working out well for me. (Feel free to tell me how wrong I am) Yeah, you're basically what I want to do and the position I want to be in. Mobile, flexible, working on interesting things and problems. Also helps that I don't have kids so that isn't a worry
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Mar 21, 2017 18:19
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If I recall correctly, Pollyanna, you have somewhere around 3 years' worth of experience? At this point I wouldn't be worrying about long-term career goals; just keep working on interesting projects, building experience and adding skills. Somewhere in the 6-12 year range is more appropriate to start wondering "okay, what am I really going to do with my life?"; at this point you just don't have enough experience to make a good decision.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If I recall correctly, Pollyanna, you have somewhere around 3 years' worth of experience? At this point I wouldn't be worrying about long-term career goals; just keep working on interesting projects, building experience and adding skills. Somewhere in the 6-12 year range is more appropriate to start wondering "okay, what am I really going to do with my life?"; at this point you just don't have enough experience to make a good decision. That's true, I guess my questions are about how to get working on those interesting projects in the first place. Which is an easier question to ask, really...and might be a better avenue of attack. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 18:24
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Pollyanna posted:That's true, I guess my questions are about how to get working on those interesting projects in the first place. Which is an easier question to ask, really...and might be a better avenue of attack. Apply for jobs at places doing interesting work.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:31
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Somewhere in the 6-12 year range is more appropriate to start wondering "okay, what am I really going to do with my life?"; at this point you just don't have enough experience to make a good decision. Seconded. At 3 years working experience, I still had not made most of my major career blunders. I thank the good lord that "maybe I'll do something with programming and math/physics/statistics" was in fact a good enough career plan to make up for not being very smart about where/how I work. I've suspected that I've been lagging behind with salary and now I'm looking to play catch-up? Anyone want to give a ballpark figure for the following: ~~~actually I deleted this because I am kind of paranoid~~~ also, lol if anyone from the company reads this, just lol. I guess I've got a touch of the ol' capitalism anxiety. prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 18:33
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Arachnamus posted:Being rare with a niche skillset can work supply/demand in your favour, sure, but being very effective is also a good way to go. Why not both? I think no matter what my niche is, I'm going to aim to become more effective at it, so then the question is: what niche? Do I have one already? If not, do I just pick one and see if I can hack it?
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Mar 21, 2017 18:52
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When I graduated, ML was called "AI," neural nets were somewhere between a joke and a toy. 3 years into my career the App Store was released. Aiming for what's hot/interesting *right now* by running out to exactly one of those jobs doesn't seem like a solid plan.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:00
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That's just an example. Doing nothing also seems unlikely a solid plan.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:11
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oliveoil posted:Is there any way that I could frame what I do know in a manner that makes seem like I have some real expertise in a specific area? Or have I basically done one year four times? "My last project was to help some department do X. They came to us with a problem so we sat down with them and worked out what their issues were. As a team we came up with a plan/architecture for technical solution and started building it out. We kept the department involved as development went on, we deployed the happy-path-only solution within two weeks and then kept pushing out updates each week that covered more of the scenarios they had laid out until they were happy with the tool. A lot of the requirements changed as we went on and they discovered more about how they wanted to use the system and what edge cases we'd encounter, but we delivered a product that helps people get their job done and everyone was happy with the outcome." to "My team lead takes requirements from the BAs, comes up with an architecture and splits it into technical tasks. I get assigned the tasks by my PM and when I'm done I have my code reviewed by the team lead and then at the end of the week they publish a release that goes to QA." Unless it's a really niche position the attitude and process experience is worth way more than being a 9/10 over a 6/10 in a given technology.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:16
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oliveoil posted:That's just an example. You might legitimately be in danger of the "one year four times" but I sincerely doubt it. At the very least, you're more aware of the business needs surrounding the coding tasks. Higher level folks spend a lot of time working those things out and translating needs up and down. Well ok this captures it: Destroyenator posted:Unless it's a really niche position the attitude and process experience is worth way more than being a 9/10 over a 6/10 in a given technology.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:35
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Pollyanna posted:That's true, I guess my questions are about how to get working on those interesting projects in the first place. Which is an easier question to ask, really...and might be a better avenue of attack. You're in Boston right? Apply to the Google Cambridge office -> Study all the basic CS algos on Wikipedia + implement a few from scratch + get a friend to do practice problems from Cracking the Coding interview -> Get job at Google -> work on random project for 1 year learning tons of things -> Find interesting project to transfer to if you don't like the first one -> Take a generous relocation package to transfer to NYC office (best office) Optional side quest: In 2-4 years if a super awesome exciting and interesting opportunity comes along leverage your resume with "Google" on it to get startup job -> work startup job for 2-4 years -> if startup is yuuge: collect $$$$; if startup implodes: Go back to Google, collect $$$.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:40
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This but replace NYC with Pittsburgh and live like a king on a Google salary with the super cheap cost of living instead of living in a $3000 a month box on the street like I imagine the NYC people do. As a bonus Uber is in Pittsburgh too so they might pay you lots of money to download all our files and go work for them
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Mar 21, 2017 21:15
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Jose Valasquez posted:As a bonus Uber is in Pittsburgh too so they might pay you lots of money to download all our files and go work for them My favorite part of those court documents was how he thought wiping his hard drive and installing Linux was master spycraft. That, or searching the internal network for how to download everything in the Waymo SVN server.
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Mar 21, 2017 21:28
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mrmcd posted:My favorite part of those court documents was how he thought wiping his hard drive and installing Linux was master spycraft. That, or searching the internal network for how to download everything in the Waymo SVN server. Wait, what?
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Mar 21, 2017 21:36
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lifg posted:Wait, what? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3515476-Declaration-of-Gary-Brown-PUBLIC.html
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Mar 21, 2017 21:43
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My favorite part is that the "specialized software" that every news outlet reported he installed was just TortoiseSVN.
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Mar 21, 2017 21:50
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Jose Valasquez posted:My favorite part is that the "specialized software" that every news outlet reported he installed was just TortoiseSVN. Like dude if you're gonna download a whole repo, make sure it's on git. Full backups and commit history are in every client by design, so it'll just look like your normal work. Amateur hour! Edit: also lol@ him and like three other people clicking "download" on sensitive Google docs and not realizing that poo poo is logged. mrmcd fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 21:53
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mrmcd posted:Like dude if you're gonna download a whole repo, make sure it's on git. Full backups and commit history are in every client by design, so it'll just look like your normal work. Amateur hour! What does git have to do with it? SVN may be what they use in some teams in Google (according to that testimony it is in that team), so checking out the entire repo for work is not that crazy (not advisable normally though).
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Mar 21, 2017 21:58
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