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mrmcd posted:There's a reason "can break down complex projects and delegate effectively to other team members; doesn't try to micromanage or be a hero by hoarding all complicated or challenging tasks" is considered a crucial skillet for senior engineers at places that aren't totally dysfunctional. He strikes me as a person that will never be able to achieve this due to his personality and incessant need to prove that his tech decisions are the right ones which is why I'm so dejected. I'm slowly realizing how true this is and how so few people have it.
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May 1, 2017 21:05
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Good Will Hrunting posted:He strikes me as a person that will never be able to achieve this due to his personality and incessant need to prove that his tech decisions are the right ones which is why I'm so dejected. I'm slowly realizing how true this is and how so few people have it.  I think you work with my old boss (of the company I just left)
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May 1, 2017 22:02
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That email reminds me of the semi-regular emails we get admonishing us to improve "quality". Nothing specific, just deliver more "quality". These are often related to some high priority issue in production that about 80% of the time is totally unrelated to any possible measure of code "quality".
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May 1, 2017 22:09
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Rename your variables to "quality". On your performance review, include, "wrote 70 quality."
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May 1, 2017 22:16
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I asked this in the 'tell me about being an engineer' thread but looks like it's a dead thread. I'm going to try asking here even though it's about mechanical engineering, because the answer for a dev might be applicable: Can someone give me a rundown, or a link to a rundown, of what it's like to work as a contractor as opposed to a normal full time job? My wife, a mechanical engineer, hates her job and has been looking elsewhere, and is considering trying to do contract work, since we could just use my insurance plan from my company, and there seem to be tons of opportunities for contract work. She also has an active security clearance which hopefully would be useful. Also just one specific question, what kind of hourly rates should she look for compared to her salary? She's underpaid as it is (~75k in st louis, 6 years experience), but what is the general rule here?
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May 1, 2017 22:18
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Doghouse posted:Also just one specific question, what kind of hourly rates should she look for compared to her salary? She's underpaid as it is (~75k in st louis, 6 years experience), but what is the general rule here? If you mean W2 contracting (ie, working for a company as an employee on an hourly rate, as is common with consulting companies), I don't know the field well enough for mechanical engineering to say, but 20% or more over a comparable full-time employee wouldn't be unusual. In terms of differences: the work is usually shorter term, you're brought on for a particular project and let go when it terminates. Typically, the client doesn't do much to include you in their team/company culture, you're just a hired gun. This can range from people neglecting to tell you about company events all the way through policies like "people with contractor badges can't eat in the company cafeteria". If you mean 1099 contracting, sometimes called "corp to corp" -- a quick way of doing napkin math is to take 40 hours per week * 52 weeks is 2080 hours per year that you could conceivably work. Assume half your time will be spent doing non-billable work like invoicing clients, prospecting for new contracts, sales, etc. So to make $75k/year you would have to charge roughly $75/hr -- slightly more, in fact, because of the additional tax burden. This is basically running your own business, with all of the ups and downs of doing that.
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May 1, 2017 22:47
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fantastic in plastic posted:If you mean W2 contracting (ie, working for a company as an employee on an hourly rate, as is common with consulting companies), I don't know the field well enough for mechanical engineering to say, but 20% or more over a comparable full-time employee wouldn't be unusual. In terms of differences: the work is usually shorter term, you're brought on for a particular project and let go when it terminates. Typically, the client doesn't do much to include you in their team/company culture, you're just a hired gun. This can range from people neglecting to tell you about company events all the way through policies like "people with contractor badges can't eat in the company cafeteria". You forgot to pull out vacation. Because America is terrible, 2 weeks vacation isn't uncommon as a full time employee; this also makes the math easier; 2000 hours.
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May 1, 2017 23:10
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Che Delilas posted:My last boss (from hell) did this kind of thing, and he was ex-army so it doesn't exactly surprise me that he'd choose a disciplinary method from Full Metal Jacket. "I do not look down on DevOps, React, Java or Python; here they are all equally worthless."
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May 2, 2017 02:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:We haven't shipped anything. We were supposed to demo poo poo this week - but pushed it to next week. And that isn't because any of us hosed up, rather because there's constant blockage from managers that need to review the PRs. My boss at my previous job sent out a similar "rear end chewing" email to me and the other developer on my team shortly before I left. The other developer and I agreed that it was very clearly him lashing out as a result of an rear end chewing he had gotten from his boss. I'd consider it a very clear sign that your boss can't or won't look into his heart and see if perhaps he is responsible in some way for this perceived gently caress up.
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May 2, 2017 05:19
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Start looking for a new job. The fact an email like that is deemed necessary by him is a big gently caress up on his part. You want to find a management team who constantly lays out clear expectations, not a place that does management by email missive. This doesn't even get into all the other big red flags about his personality. Get out while you can. 2nd Rate Poster fucked around with this message at 06:27 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 06:22
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That email reminds me of the "we need to be better" emails and meetings that used to start up every month or two. That stopped after a former coworker asked for a quantification of "get better". Their cynicism is sorely missed. Any feedback whatsoever is still distributed second hand here though. Exceedingly frustrating.
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May 2, 2017 06:27
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The follow-up from the other manager wasn't as bad, but still so strange. He mentioned reflecting on our first quarter during his "amazing" date night with his wife, who he mentioned by name (what the gently caress lol) and told the other manager to relax but also didn't really say a god drat thing. Fast forward to today, where I talked to my other teammate who says he thinks its an issue between my boss and a specific engineer who gave him some pushback about implementing our own DStream (an area we were all struggling) as a substitute for not being able to use Kafka. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 15:08 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 15:05
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Any Google goons or anyone familiar with the (apparently new) hiring process here? Had my on-site last week and got a call today from the recruiter saying that he's going to prepare my packet to send to hiring managers for team matching. Then, if I find a team that's interested we would move onto hiring committee. Does having that order flipped around really effect anything? If I get through team matching will that hiring manager try and vouch for me in hiring committee or have any effect on their decision at all? Recruiter was a little vague on explaining that part, wondering if anyone has some other insight into it. Other then that, I did manage to get some feedback out of my recruiter. Of my 5 interviews 4 of them went decent/pretty well while 1 of them (1 of the coding ones) was borderline/not great. Wondering if I have any shot at passing the hiring committee at this point.
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May 3, 2017 02:39
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roer posted:Any Google goons or anyone familiar with the (apparently new) hiring process here? Had my on-site last week and got a call today from the recruiter saying that he's going to prepare my packet to send to hiring managers for team matching. Then, if I find a team that's interested we would move onto hiring committee.  And here I thought we couldn't make our interview process any worse. I would expect managers to pre-screen for applicants they think can pass hiring committee and thus the change to impact borderline candidates. I wouldn't expect the manager to even attend the hiring committee as they have a vested interest in you being hired.You can still be hired hiring committee without strong scores on all five interviews and I would expect that it's the norm. There are a lot of factors that are considered including things you'd have no insight into like how well the interviewer interviews.
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May 3, 2017 03:17
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Keeping in mind that I'm still pretty new to being on the "giving" end of interviewing, I'd say it's pretty rare for a candidate to be considered a strong hire by all interviewers. Each interview is different, and each interviewer is picking up on different things (or imagining they're picking up on things). Just like you're not going to get hired just because one interviewer said you were literally God's gift to programmers, you're not going to fail just because one interviewer said you did a bad job. This is part of why you do five interviews in one day.
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May 3, 2017 03:46
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roer posted:Any Google goons or anyone familiar with the (apparently new) hiring process here? Had my on-site last week and got a call today from the recruiter saying that he's going to prepare my packet to send to hiring managers for team matching. Then, if I find a team that's interested we would move onto hiring committee. I don't think it really effects anything. You'd still do team matching after HC and if that fell through I think you'd be SOL.
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May 3, 2017 03:51
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E: bleh
mrmcd fucked around with this message at 08:08 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 03:56
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Holy poo poo I saw a peak of tomorrow's 2 hour retrospective agenda..quote:Needs: A right-hand for me - someone very, very strong at distributed systems  Isn't this something you'd consider when you hire to build your loving team?
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May 3, 2017 04:53
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Needs a man with a red right hand
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May 3, 2017 04:55
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Good Will Hrunting posted:2 hour retrospective agenda.. 
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May 3, 2017 12:12
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I will take 2 hour retrospectives every week over 3 am calls where I stare at a screen waiting for someone that isn't paid enough to give a gently caress to run sudo service tomcat restart. At least you can attempt to get other work done during a retrospective.
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May 3, 2017 17:06
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necrobobsledder posted:I will take 2 hour retrospectives every week over 3 am calls where I stare at a screen waiting for someone that isn't paid enough to give a gently caress to run sudo service tomcat restart. At least you can attempt to get other work done during a retrospective. "Laptops closed."
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May 3, 2017 19:32
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Hughlander posted:"Laptops closed." I haven't fully decided whether a policies that disallow (or strongly discourage) laptop/cellphone use during meetings is actually addressing a root problem, rather than addressing a symptom of a problem and making the actual problem worse (e.g. symptom being people using devices in an attempt to salvage some productivity in poorly run / too large meetings). I'm leaning towards the latter.
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May 4, 2017 00:12
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Steve French posted:I haven't fully decided whether a policies that disallow (or strongly discourage) laptop/cellphone use during meetings is actually addressing a root problem, rather than addressing a symptom of a problem and making the actual problem worse (e.g. symptom being people using devices in an attempt to salvage some productivity in poorly run / too large meetings). I'm leaning towards the latter. I've only seen a "laptops closed" policy work out in one situation. We hired a new PM because our current not-really-a-PM got too busy with his actual job to continue doing it. Not-really was known for his long, agenda-less meetings and everyone would work throughout because otherwise you would spend half a day listening to Not-really and whoever hash out incredibly small implementation details of whatever. New PM threw an absolute fit at first about not bringing our laptops, but also had meeting agendas, shushed people who were getting off topic, and kept every meeting to a tight 30 mins. It was great. Within a month we had actual meetings and nobody really thought about bringing their laptops.
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May 4, 2017 13:53
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Hughlander posted:"Laptops closed." triggered
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May 4, 2017 16:44
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Steve French posted:I haven't fully decided whether a policies that disallow (or strongly discourage) laptop/cellphone use during meetings is actually addressing a root problem, rather than addressing a symptom of a problem and making the actual problem worse (e.g. symptom being people using devices in an attempt to salvage some productivity in poorly run / too large meetings). I'm leaning towards the latter. The [b]only[b] time I've seen it effective was on a team with a not jr but not sr engineer who felt he was too good for anything other than coding whatever it is he was working on that exact minute. Didn't matter if it was vital info he'd need tomorrow, didn't matter that it was architecture review that would shape the org for the next two years, he was at work, so he was going to code comma drat it. This is to the point where after being on the team for two years he raised his hand in a meeting asking what that word was that was just used... It was the name of the server backend he coded against. The passive aggressive way of addressing it was to ban laptops from planning/retrospectives rather then telling him to loving pay attention some of this poo poo is important. So for meetings where the entire team is trying to get synergy such as planning and retrospective meetings I don't think it's unreasonable to call out people not paying attention.
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May 4, 2017 17:16
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How open for salary negotiations are amazon and Facebook? I know google is notorious for having a price in mind and only changing it for other offers, but what about those two? If they're open, is base salary, signing bonus, or RSU the best spot for negotiations?
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May 6, 2017 13:49
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quote:I totally understand that you must get harassed for new opportunities. In that regard I apologize and hopefully I can stand out as a bit different from the rest. I'm not interested in pushing paper and not fully getting to know the developers I work with. Only having a small set of clients, I've become intimate with their needs and what type of developers really thrive in them. 
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May 6, 2017 14:11
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Rule 1 for recruiters: always assume every word coming out of their goddamn mouths is a lie.
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May 6, 2017 14:46
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If third party recruiters for Bloomberg stopped, the amount of LinkedIn spam I get would drop by a good 4/5.
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May 6, 2017 14:48
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I am aware of recruiters being bullshit, but this one just sounds like a drat Markov chain.
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 15:48 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 15:46
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leper khan posted:If third party recruiters for Bloomberg stopped, the amount of LinkedIn spam I get would drop by a good 4/5. Seriously. What is so bad about that place that they have to freelance this army of clones built from the DNA of Gil Gunderson crossed with Patrick Bateman?
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May 6, 2017 18:34
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mrmcd posted:Seriously. What is so bad about that place that they have to freelance this army of clones built from the DNA of Gil Gunderson crossed with Patrick Bateman? As an employee of Bloomberg who deals with recruiting from our side pretty frequently, I'd like to get your feedback on what they're doing (what position(s) are they recruiting for, which office, etc.). I myself was recruited to BB via a 3rd-party recruiter rather than in-house recruiting. My team has like 4 headcount we're trying to fill right now, so it'll be funny if they're spamming you trying to fill these positions.  Knowing which recruiting firm or firms are the worst is helpful as well. Since Pollyanna's thing mentioned Clojure/RoR, I have an idea of which teams they might be trying to fill for.
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May 6, 2017 18:50
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Pollyanna posted:I am aware of recruiters being bullshit, but this one just sounds like a drat Markov chain. Nah it's a form letter that pulled two things from your skills section. They're not actually using clojure and ror they're just showing they "read" your resume. It's all c++ I bet.
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May 6, 2017 19:19
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Hughlander posted:Nah it's a form letter that pulled two things from your skills section. They're not actually using clojure and ror they're just showing they "read" your resume. It's all c++ I bet. That depends very much on what team they're recruiting for.
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May 6, 2017 19:21
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chutwig posted:As an employee of Bloomberg who deals with recruiting from our side pretty frequently, I'd like to get your feedback on what they're doing (what position(s) are they recruiting for, which office, etc.). I myself was recruited to BB via a 3rd-party recruiter rather than in-house recruiting. My team has like 4 headcount we're trying to fill right now, so it'll be funny if they're spamming you trying to fill these positions. The last time I was looking for a job, pretty much every lovely recruiter that trawled linked-in seemed to be pitching everything they could at Bloomberg. They would outright not give a poo poo and just submit me for every single job they could. I had one guy that asked me to make an entirely new email account because another recruiter had already put me in the system for the same crappy jobs I wasn't interested in. One guy didn't even have a working phone and would constantly mumble and I assume talk at a wall until I thought the phone was dead. Another set me up with a phone screen that wasn't even a SWE job, it was, like, being a sysadmin money configuring Jenkins instances based on how the phone screen described it. This was after the Bloomberg system emailed me a bunch of poo poo about signing up for hacker rank and how I needed to be at a computer with an internet connection and a quiet place to talk. After taking time off work and setting everything up, the guy basically called me and said "oh I don't care about that let me ask you two trivial questions about Java, anyway how does configuring Jenkins all day sound as a job??" That's not even including the other weird experience with them. After doing an all day onsite interview with then, which went really well and afterwords the recruiter called and was all "Everyone really liked you and wants you blah blah blah," she calls me like a week later in a panic saying they want to do one more meeting with someone and can I come in right away??!? It's last minute and I didn't want to burn any more vacation days on this, so I setup a thing to go by there after work. Met with a couple people, some director guy, and an HR person who chatted with me about compensation expectations and my current stock grants. The next day all of a sudden the recruiter calls me saying they "didn't think I was a good culture fit", which I'm guessing means either a) The external recruiter lied to me and them about compensation expectations, or b) because it was last minute and I came from work, I didn't wear a suit and one of the manager people vetoed it because Bloomberg's a very serious finance place. Either way, now I tell everyone how in retrospect I dodged a bullet because Google came through with a great offer like a month later, and no one gives a gently caress if I wear shorts to work in the summer on 30,000° days. Those same people used to spam me about more "exciting Bloomberg opportunities" for months after though, and the name still shows up with regularity in my LinkedIn
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May 6, 2017 19:23
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Also, when I did my Google interview, one of the interviewers asked me what I thought about Bloomberg, since I was working in finance at the time. I said something non-committal along the lines of "I dunno, I hear it's either good or terrible depending on what part of the company you work for." I asked why he asked and he just shrugged and said "we interview lots of good people from there who seem to want out really really badly."
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May 6, 2017 19:31
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mrmcd posted:stuff Around when did you go through the interview process? The lack of regimentation in the screening/interviewing process has been an ongoing issue and Strongly Worded E-mails on this matter have been dispatched with regularity; additional data points are helpful. We also do have a lovely tendency to do too many on-site callbacks. I and other people have been working on making the point that we should be ready with the up-or-down after the on-site and we should not be calling people back for a second on-site to get grilled by a director/VP-level person. As far as dress code goes, shorts and T-shirts are normal in the engineering division. Showing up to an interview that way with one of the financial products groups might not get a person far, but they're a totally different culture. I interviewed wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, which is the same stuff I normally wear to work, and the last guy I hired spent the entire day wearing his North Face. mrmcd posted:Also, when I did my Google interview, one of the interviewers asked me what I thought about Bloomberg, since I was working in finance at the time. I said something non-committal along the lines of "I dunno, I hear it's either good or terrible depending on what part of the company you work for." I asked why he asked and he just shrugged and said "we interview lots of good people from there who seem to want out really really badly." I can definitely think of reasons why people would want out, depending on the group they're in, but that's common to any large tech company. chutwig fucked around with this message at 19:41 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 19:39
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Some places do well despite their best efforts in recruiting. Amazon has the same poo poo-pool of 3rd party recruiters. I used to write back and say "no I don't want to move to Seattle" but that just made more of them call to ask me to move to Seattle. Google's in-house recruiters do a great job of being personable although I get whiplash from the way the charm switches off when I say I might be interested. Does Apple even do recruitment or do they rely entirely on star power to get applicants?
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May 6, 2017 19:46
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chutwig posted:Around when did you go through the interview process? The lack of regimentation in the screening/interviewing process has been an ongoing issue and Strongly Worded E-mails on this matter have been dispatched with regularity; additional data points are helpful. We also do have a lovely tendency to do too many on-site callbacks. I and other people have been working on making the point that we should be ready with the up-or-down after the on-site and we should not be calling people back for a second on-site to get grilled by a director/VP-level person. This was like late 2015, so not very recent. Also I checked and the LinkedIn spam mentioning Bloomberg seems to have dropped off in 2016 (them and Two Sigma always seemed to be paired). This year it's mostly Amazon (I also get like 3 emails a day begging me to move to Seattle) and Facebook. mrmcd fucked around with this message at 05:02 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 19:58
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