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kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

lifg posted:

I've never understood counteroffers, it seems like a sign of a bad compensation plan. But then I've never angled for or received one.

Ask A Manager sums it up the whole thing pretty well here: http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2012/03/26/why-you-shouldnt-take-a-counteroffer

Before I'd have gone interviewing, I would've already exhausted all the usual channels for getting things fixed. I can't imagine they'd pull out all the stops and actually fix things just because some individual contributor showed up with an offer in hand.

Minimal upside from a counteroffer, but all that downside like this article mentions.

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wilderthanmild
Jun 21, 2010

Posting shit



Grimey Drawer

kitten smoothie posted:

I can't imagine they'd pull out all the stops and actually fix things just because some individual contributor showed up with an offer in hand.

And even if they did, it's not a good thing that a company took until you were basically walking out the door to makes things right. If that's what it took once, that's probably what it will take every time in the future.

Blinkz0rz
May 27, 2001

MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS

minato posted:

I was a SRE at Facebook (they call them Production Engineers over there).

No, you haven't worked on ~global scale systems~ but not many people have, and they recognize that. They'll train you up.

It's kinda hard to characterize what a SRE does, but basically since you're dealing with cattle and not pets, you'll be building the robots that take care of the cattle. Examples of things SREs did:
- build a system to automatically upgrade host kernels as fast as possible, but in such a way that production capacity is not affected.
- Add some monitoring and alarming to a service that uses week-on-week metric comparisons to judge health.
- Write a system that uses shadow production traffic to exercise candidate binaries and does statistical comparisons of various metrics to detect bugs and perf wins (this is an alternative to using explicit tests).
- Rework the compile/link phases to ensure "hot functions" are grouped together so they don't ever stomp on each other's I-cache lines.

At scale, aggregate statistics become more important than individual data points: e.g. not "why is traffic to this machine so slow" but "why is the 95th percentile of request latency to my 50,000 machines so high? Is this problem regional, specific to a certain type of hardware, kernel version, etc?" SREs tend to have broad knowledge about many different things, but not really that deep into any specific thing. c.f. Software Engineers who tend to have deep knowledge in a couple of areas.

I do SRE work for a much smaller company and it's super interesting with lots of cool problems to solve but gently caress me this is cool as hell.

Any Facebook goons know if there's a Production Engineering presence in the Boston office? The recruiter I spoke to was recruiting for NYC, SF, and Seattle but I'm not looking to relocate.

Flaming June
Oct 21, 2004

Similarly, any Facebook duders have some hot tips about their SWE interview process? I have a first round phone screen set up in about a week and have been preparing, but any resources about what they look for or what to expect would be nice. This is my first time with one of the tech giants.

I have some material from one of their recruiters, and a copy of CTCI, if that helps.

minato
Jun 7, 2004

cutty cain't hang, say 7-up.
Taco Defender
For phone screen problems, work out the problem before you start writing code. That sounds like an obvious thing, but I saw people get bogged down in language semantics before they'd hit the crux of solving the problem. The interviewer is not there to check how well you know the language, focus on the problem.

If you make it through to the interview process, FB will give you lots of info in advance on the types of questions they'll ask. The thing they're looking for is "signal" that you know your stuff and would make a good culture fit. They're not trying to catch you out with esoteric knowledge questions, but there will be a point where they hit your knowledge wall, and you need to recognize that: say that you don't know the answer, but make a reasonable guess. Don't try to bullshit.

At the end of the interview they'll ask if you have any questions for them. It's considered very bad to not ask any questions; instead, demonstrate your curiosity and passion with some questions about the company. E.g. "How do you do QA on software that's deployed continuously?"

apseudonym
Feb 25, 2011

minato posted:

For phone screen problems, work out the problem before you start writing code. That sounds like an obvious thing, but I saw people get bogged down in language semantics before they'd hit the crux of solving the problem. The interviewer is not there to check how well you know the language, focus on the problem.

If you make it through to the interview process, FB will give you lots of info in advance on the types of questions they'll ask. The thing they're looking for is "signal" that you know your stuff and would make a good culture fit. They're not trying to catch you out with esoteric knowledge questions, but there will be a point where they hit your knowledge wall, and you need to recognize that: say that you don't know the answer, but make a reasonable guess. Don't try to bullshit.

At the end of the interview they'll ask if you have any questions for them. It's considered very bad to not ask any questions; instead, demonstrate your curiosity and passion with some questions about the company. E.g. "How do you do QA on software that's deployed continuously?"

Also make sure you talk out what you're thinking. If you sit there silently your interviewer doesn't know WTF.

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008

Blinkz0rz posted:

I do SRE work for a much smaller company and it's super interesting with lots of cool problems to solve but gently caress me this is cool as hell.

Any Facebook goons know if there's a Production Engineering presence in the Boston office? The recruiter I spoke to was recruiting for NYC, SF, and Seattle but I'm not looking to relocate.
That covers three of the four central offices for engineering. Most of the opportunities and roles for PEs will exist outside of Boston. I dunno how many they have there, but if you ask a recruiter if there are any openings there I'd expect the recruiter to look into it.

Flaming June posted:

Similarly, any Facebook duders have some hot tips about their SWE interview process? I have a first round phone screen set up in about a week and have been preparing, but any resources about what they look for or what to expect would be nice. This is my first time with one of the tech giants.

I have some material from one of their recruiters, and a copy of CTCI, if that helps.
Mostly generalities, but:

The ironclad expectation of Facebook engineering is that every interview candidate will be able to code, period. No exceptions. AIUI, if they have done engineering at Facebook, they have written code in an interview.

CTCI is a good book. I basically read the questions, outlined the general solutions, and then transcribed completely each solution, and repeated on the ones that were harder until I felt comfortable. Forced me to digest and re-apply the concepts that I had used less of in recent memory.

I'd do the same thing for any future interview, so that isn't FB-specific, though – we're generally discouraged from offering too much specifics. The process is reasonably fair IMO, though rather selective, so don't feel too bad if you get a 'no'. You can expect a focus on thinking algorithmically and translating that to either actual code or almost-code-pseudocode. You may also spend some time talking about architecture as well.

Someone who was doing recoverably well once choked and ended the interview early because they thought they bombed. They hadn't. If you need to gather your thoughts, say so, or if it isn't distracting to yourself, you can use the interviewer as a rubber duck for your thought process.

Definitely bring your humility and intellectual openness, and leave the ego at home. Facebook has crazy smart people. Even people who make it through the process and get hired often struggle for some time to cope with not being the smartest in the room anymore. This happens a lot: Facebook being radically transparent and communicative internally can breed impostor syndrome like no other if you're not paying attention, because tons of interesting and smart people are constantly having interesting and smart conversations in view of others.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

apseudonym posted:

Also make sure you talk out what you're thinking. If you sit there silently your interviewer doesn't know WTF.
In other words, treat it exactly like you're pair programming.

Flaming June
Oct 21, 2004

This is all valuable stuff, so thanks for the insight.

Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know

wilderthanmild posted:

And even if they did, it's not a good thing that a company took until you were basically walking out the door to makes things right. If that's what it took once, that's probably what it will take every time in the future.

Is there anywhere that gives raises as fast as changing jobs? I think the advice you're giving here is "only work at Google" and even then only because Google starts with high enough pay that it'll take a while for your salary to slump down to the level that other companies can compete at.

If your boss is awful, or you hate your coworkers, or your job is boring then I don't know why you'd even listen to a counter-offer. If you tell your boss "everything is great" but then come in the next day and ask for a 50% raise or you quit, that could make them think less of you, sure, because that's really poor communication.

But if you've got an otherwise-great boss and enjoyable job, and you get a "standard" raise when you'd asked your boss for more, then why would they be upset when you come back and say "hey I did some research and here's what other companies are paying an engineer exactly like me." It seems like bad advice to say "don't take a counter-offer" when you really mean "does the counter-offer adequately address all the reasons that you left?" And it should be really, really obvious what the answer to that is: rear end in a top hat boss + $30k = no, 2 hour commute + $10k = no, I wish I had $10k + $15k = yes.

BurntCornMuffin
Jan 9, 2009


I'm presently working as a Java developer and Big/Small Data Engineer, but would like to transition into embedded development, and applications that drive physical objects.

Problem is, I'm not really sure where to start with picking up skills/credibility for such a transition. I've started dicking about with rPis and plan to learn Arduino, but I don't think that's quite enough for a compelling resume in that space. Would a Computer Engineering Masters degree be the way to go? Any good boot camps or certifications?

Mao Zedong Thot
Oct 16, 2008


Skandranon posted:

I don't suppose you can share more? This sounds interesting.

Sorry, tease I know, but I don't want to say much more. Just don't accept a counter offer :unsmith: It might work out, it probably won't.

Mniot posted:

But if you've got an otherwise-great boss and enjoyable job, and you get a "standard" raise when you'd asked your boss for more, then why would they be upset when you come back and say "hey I did some research and here's what other companies are paying an engineer exactly like me."

Right, you should do this. Negotiate for a raise, based on your value and your research of what market rates are. Everyone knows you can leave, you don't need to prove that by telling them you have an offer. All that says is you're too stupid or naive to not straight-up blackmail your boss for more money.

RandomBlue
Dec 30, 2012

hay guys!


Biscuit Hider

VOTE YES ON 69 posted:

Sorry, tease I know, but I don't want to say much more. Just don't accept a counter offer :unsmith: It might work out, it probably won't.

Agreed. The article linked before covers the big reasons (http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2012/03/26/why-you-shouldnt-take-a-counteroffer ) with #2 and #4 being the big ones for me. They're basically #2 - they know you were looking to leave so they'll start looking for your replacement ASAP and #4 - it took you getting an offer from someone else for them to pay you what you were worth, what makes you think you won't have to do that again in 2-3 years if not sooner?

If money was the only reason, their inability to give raises that keep employees paid at a market rate (or close) for their skills is a problem (though a very very common one). If money wasn't the only factor then you shouldn't even consider a counter offer.

I've been with my current company almost a decade so I don't know if things have changed much, but I doubt it. For the 15 years or so before this job not a single employer gave raises that kept pace with market rates and changing jobs was the only way to get a decent salary bump. My experience was large companies outside of Silicon Valley. Most, if not all of them, had a system where 1-2% was the average "You were OK" raise with a "max" of 3-5% depending on the company. Of course they'd go over that for counter-offers. I had one company that was open to rehiring me but could only pay what I wanted if I was in X position but they weren't allowed to re-hire with that big of a promotion within a certain amount of time due to policy and wanted me to come back with a promise of a promotion and raise 6 months later. Yeah... no.

The bigger the company the more draconian their rules about raises and promotions, usually, because you're just one employee out of 5,000 or 15,000 or 150,000.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
Achievement unlocked: received call from drunken recruiter

prisoner of waffles
May 8, 2007

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

fantastic in plastic posted:

Achievement unlocked: received call from drunken recruiter

But now you gotta tell us about this conversation.

RandomBlue
Dec 30, 2012

hay guys!


Biscuit Hider

fantastic in plastic posted:

Achievement unlocked: received call from drunken recruiter

My best recruiter call was "I'VE GOT A BILLION DOLLAR OPPORTUNITY WITH A BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY!!" it was probably meth or coke in her case.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

prisoner of waffles posted:

But now you gotta tell us about this conversation.

There isn't much of a backstory to it. A recruiter called me and pitched me on a role, I liked what I heard and so I told him to go ahead and present me at my W2 rate. A few days pass, the recruiter calls me and is obviously shitfaced, said something like "I've been having some trouble holding it together today" in the pleasantries part of the call. Eventually he gets around to telling me that the client passed because I wanted too much money. He started to insinuate that maybe if I lowered my rate, he could work something out.

I politely told him that my rate's my rate and I'm not changing it, he started to argue, I hung up on him.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010
So I got a guy reaching out to me about a team lead position. I set a date to talk to him on the phone because, hey, why not.

I'm not really too interested in the management track, though. I guess long-term I'd like to go more in the direction of principal engineer/architect. Is team lead a step in that direction or would I be putting myself on a track I probably won't like? Or maybe it depends on the company? I've worked two places and neither of them have had formalized "team lead" roles so I can't really depend on experience here.

Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know
Could be anything from a fancier title to signify that you get paid more to being a full manager with a lovely title.

I was a "team lead" at a start-up that was having some trouble figuring out management. I spent ~30% of my time writing code, 50% in meetings negotiating features and 20% on managing my team. The meeting/coding ratio should have been better, but the point was that I'd go to most of the meetings and be aware of all of them so that my team could go to as few as possible. The management tasks included HR crap (approve their PTO requests), schmoozing to keep other groups happy with us, lobbying for another hiring req, trying to get them raises, talking with them about carear growth, and making sure everyone had a balanced workload.

I've interviewed at a company where "team lead" just means "probably the best developer on the team" and another where it appeared to mean "VP of software".

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Mniot posted:

I've interviewed at a company where "team lead" just means "probably the best developer on the team" and another where it appeared to mean "VP of software".

Yeah. I would ask your contact to explicitly explain what their understanding of "Team Lead"/"Lead Developer" entails. Around here, it seems that "Architect" is the technical track, and "Lead" is more of the management track, though it does vary.

csammis
Aug 26, 2003

Mental Institution
Yeah it absolutely depends on the company and you'll need to ask the interviewer when you talk to them. Before you talk to the interviewer, see if you can find another person at that company with the title "team lead" and glean what it is that they do, or see what other titles are at the company to try and make a distinction between "manager" and "principal architect" (if indeed there is a difference). LinkedIn can be a big help for this.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

This week will be two months at my new job. I've seen virtually no improvement from management in terms of defining the direction of our project, goals, resource allocation or any sort of medium-term roadmap. We routinely spend 45 minutes to over an hour in our daily stand-ups arguing over trivial bullshit. I have no idea what one of the senior engineers does to be honest.

The flow of any sort of product or business analyst to dev is non-existent. There's basically nobody speccing these stories and the person most involved with that (my boss, the VP of Engineering) is only very tangentially involved in this project because he's busy managing 10+ people, other projects, and working with non-engineering management. He also spends like, a ton of time coding and in a terminal? Timezones are also an issue. There are two other managers who clearly have no idea what the business requirements are and one attempts to come up with answers to questions we have that are frequently guesses, it seems.

Another problem though is that a lot of the things my manager wants to accomplish strike me as ridiculously over-engineered. He seems to want to engineer our own version of Kafka to use with Spark Streaming because Google Cloud doesn't have a managed Kafka service. I'm still struggling to understand why we need to do this as opposed to using another managed service they offer which could solve our problem (which they can - I researched this myself during downtime) and his answer to my proposition was "It's not Kafka and that's why we aren't using it".

Tomorrow I have my first 1 on 1 with my boss. Things have gotten marginally better. The pace has picked up a little bit and I am doing more but I'm still working on a lot of POCs/research that doesn't end up going anywhere because nobody can make a decision. I don't plan on saying anything too intense, but I'd like to bring up some of these issues. Anyone help me with... phrasing to not get me fired?

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

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Tomorrow I have my first 1 on 1 with my boss. Things have gotten marginally better. The pace has picked up a little bit and I am doing more but I'm still working on a lot of POCs/research that doesn't end up going anywhere because nobody can make a decision. I don't plan on saying anything too intense, but I'd like to bring up some of these issues. Anyone help me with... phrasing to not get me fired?

I would say to just keep it positive. You're happy to work on research & POCs, but would really like to be exposed to more of the business and get your hands dirty with <important application>.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
Well, yeah it is good and interesting so that won't be hard. And it's all for 1 application - our new pipeline - we just come up with a ton of ideas and they move so slowly because we have to wait for feedback from managers.. which turns into bringing up "I'm blocked by X" at post-daily standup. That leads to hour long discussion about trivial bullshit. No conclusion is ever reached. I just want to ~*~ accomplish ~*~ more and start thinking about ~*~ prod ~*~ and things as a whole, not just compartments of things that never get done.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


I never, ever want to do front-end development again. Ever. No job I will take from now on will involve front-end. Ever.

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

Pollyanna posted:

I never, ever want to do front-end development again. Ever. No job I will take from now on will involve front-end. Ever.

I mean, I know React is garbage, but this is a bit extreme.

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
I made the same decision back in 2008, and what I've seen of web development changes since then hasn't really affected my opinion any.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010
Personally my solemn oath is to not do work in another untyped scripting language if I can help it.

redleader
Aug 18, 2005

Engage according to operational parameters
The nice thing about front end work is that you have something visual and interactive to show at the end. I prefer backend, but it is somewhat less satisfying when three weeks of work results in a different price being charged for freight or whatever based on some arbitrary business rule.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

redleader posted:

The nice thing about front end work is that you have something visual and interactive to show at the end. I prefer backend, but it is somewhat less satisfying when three weeks of work results in a different price being charged for freight or whatever based on some arbitrary business rule.

But that's also the bad part because then you get someone tearing you apart for doing exactly what they asked and making you do the whole thing over.

redleader
Aug 18, 2005

Engage according to operational parameters
We're kind of lucky in that we can just go "oh, [whatever change] is a variance from the original work and will cost $$$", which filters it down to the clients who actually care.

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

But that's also the bad part because then you get someone tearing you apart for doing exactly what they asked and making you do the whole thing over.

If you are doing front-end work, you always ALWAYS ALWAYS should have a living PSD with approved changes in it.

For this very reason.

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I made the same decision back in 2008, and what I've seen of web development changes since then hasn't really affected my opinion any.

The tools are way better now than they were in 2008, but what people are using them to do is really stupid. The problem with modern web development is that the whole SPA thing is encouraging businesses to make really huge, crappy web apps with dozens of megs of javascript that by all rights should be desktop applications, and it sucks doing front end on that kind of project.

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


Pollyanna posted:

I never, ever want to do front-end development again. Ever. No job I will take from now on will involve front-end. Ever.

This is a large part of why I went to grad school.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

ratbert90 posted:

If you are doing front-end work, you always ALWAYS ALWAYS should have a living PSD with approved changes in it.

For this very reason.

The shop I was working at was not large enough for that and anyway, even when we DID have mockups they'd do the same thing and then they'd be supported by senior management. I dunno it was a bad environment in the first place I guess.

jony neuemonic
Nov 13, 2009

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

The tools are way better now than they were in 2008, but what people are using them to do is really stupid. The problem with modern web development is that the whole SPA thing is encouraging businesses to make really huge, crappy web apps with dozens of megs of javascript that by all rights should be desktop applications, and it sucks doing front end on that kind of project.

I'm seriously considering learning mobile because of this. If people are going to insist I help with frontend work I'd really prefer if it wasn't SPAs.

redleader
Aug 18, 2005

Engage according to operational parameters

jony neuemonic posted:

I'm seriously considering learning mobile because of this. If people are going to insist I help with frontend work I'd really prefer if it wasn't SPAs.

You're in luck! Nowadays, you can do mobile development with the same technologies that you'd use for webdev!

jony neuemonic
Nov 13, 2009

redleader posted:

You're in luck! Nowadays, you can do mobile development with the same technologies that you'd use for webdev!

There really is no justice in this world.

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008

Pollyanna posted:

I never, ever want to do front-end development again. Ever. No job I will take from now on will involve front-end. Ever.

You're going to have to clarify and justify this better because this is exactly the kind of red flag that will turn a 'strong hire' into a 'no hire' in my eyes.

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JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

You're going to have to clarify and justify this better because this is exactly the kind of red flag that will turn a 'strong hire' into a 'no hire' in my eyes.

I have a recurring nightmare where I'm just nailing an interview and after a good zinger about dynamic programming there's a polite chuckle before the HR rep comes in with a stack of my posts and starts questioning me about them.

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