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Nippashish
Nov 2, 2005

Let me see you dance!

Mniot posted:

Does Apple even do recruitment or do they rely entirely on star power to get applicants?

I work in a pretty niche area that Apple really wants to hire in. I get 1-2 emails a month from what appear to be in house recruiters looking for people for mysteriously named teams like "the special projects division" which they then refuse to tell me anything about.

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Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


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. :v:

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.

This was from Full Stack Solutions, if that helps. In any case, I'm in Boston, and I'm not looking to move, so I'll have to pass unless they accept remote work (probably don't).

chutwig
May 28, 2001

BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Pollyanna posted:

This was from Full Stack Solutions, if that helps. In any case, I'm in Boston, and I'm not looking to move, so I'll have to pass unless they accept remote work (probably don't).

Yeah, we don't do 100% full remote. Our main engineering centers are NYC, DC, and London.

Since BB apparently spams the entire tech world mercilessly with headhunters, if anyone else has gotten stuff from us or our contracted recruiting hellminions and wants an honest appraisal of how it feels to work in fintech, I will be happy to supply information on what it's like to work here. (tl;dr: you are allowed to wear shorts, work-life balance is pretty good, some of the tech can be... venerable)

lifg
Dec 4, 2000
<this tag left blank>
Muldoon

chutwig posted:

Yeah, we don't do 100% full remote. Our main engineering centers are NYC, DC, and London.

Since BB apparently spams the entire tech world mercilessly with headhunters, if anyone else has gotten stuff from us or our contracted recruiting hellminions and wants an honest appraisal of how it feels to work in fintech, I will be happy to supply information on what it's like to work here. (tl;dr: you are allowed to wear shorts, work-life balance is pretty good, some of the tech can be... venerable)

Whenever I read about the CAP theorem, it gets mentioned that fintech is rumored to have amazing uptime *and* great handling of partitions, but it never gives details. What are you people doing so right?

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

lifg posted:

Whenever I read about the CAP theorem, it gets mentioned that fintech is rumored to have amazing uptime *and* great handling of partitions, but it never gives details. What are you people doing so right?

It's probably the biggest house of cards built out of Access and Excel that will end the world.

chutwig
May 28, 2001

BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

lifg posted:

Whenever I read about the CAP theorem, it gets mentioned that fintech is rumored to have amazing uptime *and* great handling of partitions, but it never gives details. What are you people doing so right?

Most BB stuff runs on an in-house database engine called comdb2, which is due to be open sourced at some point. http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p1377-scotti.pdf is a paper that was published about it recently. I had beers with Alex Scotti a few times before he left to go work on RDS-related things at Amazon, but I've never used comdb2 myself. My natural reaction to encountering something developed in-house is to turn left quickly, and there are a fair number of such things given the company's age and tentative steps into the world of open source, but things are changing. MySQL and PostgreSQL are used pretty widely as well for internal/infrastructure use (my team for example uses MySQL+Galera), but anything that appears in the Terminal is coming from a comdb2 instance somewhere.

As far as fintech having amazing uptime, it tends to be very conservative, because the markets go apeshit and people melt down when we gently caress up (disclaimer: I was not the cause of any of these outages).

Skandranon posted:

It's probably the biggest house of cards built out of Access and Excel that will end the world.

I can deny without reservation that any part of the Terminal runs on Access or Excel.

chutwig fucked around with this message at 05:42 on May 7, 2017

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


chutwig posted:

I can deny without reservation that any part of the Terminal runs on Access or Excel.

How real is the "core systems full of COBOL" thing?

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

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

Arachnamus posted:

How real is the "core systems full of COBOL" thing?

When I worked at a fairly big fixed income BD right after graduating college, there was the one engineer who would regularly shout racist rants to the whole office about Muslims and black people. They apparently couldn't fire him, because he had been around forever and was one of the two people who knew how to keep some specific but very important legacy backend service running that was written in FORTRAN.

Anyway, it varies shop to shop, but things like FORTRAN and COBOL tend to be specific services rather than full stacks. It happens because those services will still be important, but not important enough to invest the money required to rebuild them. That and just the general technical conservatism of the industry that chutwig mentioned. The bulk of the engineering work in finance now is probably C++ and Java.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


My company's core business services and databases and whatever all still run on COBOL, actually. It seems like the non-infrastructure/customer-facing engineering work revolves around exposing those machines via some sort of Java or C# interface. The COBOL/FORTRAN insanity is very real.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

chutwig posted:

Yeah, we don't do 100% full remote. Our main engineering centers are NYC, DC, and London.

Since BB apparently spams the entire tech world mercilessly with headhunters, if anyone else has gotten stuff from us or our contracted recruiting hellminions and wants an honest appraisal of how it feels to work in fintech, I will be happy to supply information on what it's like to work here. (tl;dr: you are allowed to wear shorts, work-life balance is pretty good, some of the tech can be... venerable)

Is it as bad as the Solaris 7 SPARC box with gcc 2.7 I was semi-responsible for until about a year ago? :sun:

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
The annoying part of the COBOL software is the continuous stream of articles bemoaning how all these COBOL programmers are so desirable and so tough to find for banks where they'll pay them a princely salary of "upwards of $100k / yr." That's the same prices I've seen spouted off since 1998.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


necrobobsledder posted:

The annoying part of the COBOL software is the continuous stream of articles bemoaning how all these COBOL programmers are so desirable and so tough to find for banks where they'll pay them a princely salary of "upwards of $100k / yr." That's the same prices I've seen spouted off since 1998.

(ノ∀`)アチャー

I continue to be amazed by how tonedeaf and moronic banks and financial institutions are towards technology. (Begs the question...why am I still working at one?)

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
Compared to a lot of other companies, banks and financial institutions are technology geniuses. A lot of my better clients have been banks because generally speaking if your system goes down, you stop making gobs of money the entire time (Amazon used to not care so much because they figured if you wanted to buy something you'd just come back a little later, but competition is a lot more stiff these days). The business verticals that are routinely the stuff of nightmares are: education / academia, healthcare IT, and any company where no C-level built or worked in a high performance engineering team before (they are all the same in technological maturity regardless of vertical here whether they're an analytics company or a pet dating mobile app). Retailers have been hit-miss for me - Nordstroms is pretty solid in their software side and so's Walmart and arguably Best Buy, but Home Depot and Macys are both places I want to stay far, far away from.

chutwig
May 28, 2001

BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

Arachnamus posted:

How real is the "core systems full of COBOL" thing?

I've never heard anything about COBOL, but other old languages, yeah. Writing new things in said old languages is Forbidden, but the code will probably be around for a while.

feedmegin posted:

Is it as bad as the Solaris 7 SPARC box with gcc 2.7 I was semi-responsible for until about a year ago? :sun:

Not that bad.

Pollyanna posted:

(ノ∀`)アチャー

I continue to be amazed by how tonedeaf and moronic banks and financial institutions are towards technology. (Begs the question...why am I still working at one?)

At least in the case of BB, people are disinclined to mess with things because an outage or mistake on our end typically has serious ramifications for the markets. The history of the Terminal is an unbroken line stretching back nearly as long as I've been alive. At an institutional level, it's not being tone-deaf and moronic; it's the result of cost-benefit analyses that conclude that at the present juncture the risk of doing something is too great to justify it. Individual people within the institution can seem tone-deaf about it, but that's probably the fault of them inadequately communicating that reasoning as it relates to business priorities.

BB's approach has been to gradually apply increasing pressure to migrate to Linux, occasionally with the stick but mostly with the carrot. My job is working on infrastructure and tooling that allows people to take control of their application infrastructure, and once teams get used to the new way of doing things they uniformly agree that it speeds up both their workflows and applications. The important thing from my perspective is to focus on the general use cases and not freak out about stuff at the margins. Will BB have non-Linux platforms around in 5 years? Probably, but I'm not especially worried about that. If my infrastructure vacuums up some percentage of internal applications over the next 5 years, there's a greater chance that management at the top will see the state of the long tail and say "alright, let's do that moon landing project to stick a knife in [LEGACY THING HERE]".

lifg
Dec 4, 2000
<this tag left blank>
Muldoon
^^^ What does the non-Linux tech stack look like in your world?

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

If all COBOL disappeared tomorrow the world's financial systems would collapse

minato
Jun 7, 2004

cutty cain't hang, say 7-up.
Taco Defender

Jose Valasquez posted:

If all COBOL disappeared tomorrow the world's financial systems would collapse

I would watch a Mr. Robot Season 3 where he travels the world to hunt down the world's five remaining COBOL programmers

chutwig
May 28, 2001

BURLAP SATCHEL OF CRACKERJACKS

lifg posted:

^^^ What does the non-Linux tech stack look like in your world?

In my personal world it mercifully looks like nothing at all, because I only deal with Linux on x86 (though I am certainly interested in the trajectory of ARM in the server world). For the company as a whole, it's Solaris and AIX as far as non-Linux platforms go. (I'm pretty sure sharing that is okay, given that we put them in job descriptions.) I suspect it's the kind of environment that any veteran of an 80s/90s tech company would readily recognize.

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine

minato posted:

I would watch a Mr. Robot Season 3 where he travels the world to hunt down the world's five remaining COBOL programmers

Elliot could never bring himself to kill a graybeard, much less 5

FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

Analytic Engine posted:

Elliot could never bring himself to kill a graybeard, much less 5

then he finds out what they traffic in :(

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
I'm meeting a startup for coffee tomorrow. The co-founder I spoke to said they've just closed seed funding and that I'd be employee #2. Doing business with a company which is so new is unfamiliar territory for me (I've done work for early-stage startups in the past, but always as part of a consulting agency, which mitigated the risk). What are the critical questions to ask?

Mao Zedong Thot
Oct 16, 2008


fantastic in plastic posted:

I'm meeting a startup for coffee tomorrow. The co-founder I spoke to said they've just closed seed funding and that I'd be employee #2. Doing business with a company which is so new is unfamiliar territory for me (I've done work for early-stage startups in the past, but always as part of a consulting agency, which mitigated the risk). What are the critical questions to ask?

I've worked at 'startups' for like 7 or 8 years straight now, including founding 2 (the first a dud, the second I left, is still operating and raised $$). For every startup that isn't utter garbage, there are 5 companies that are 'startups' that are total garbage.

1) How much will you pay me? If it's more than ~30% off market, "thanks, no thanks".
2) How much equity will you give me? If it's <2%, "thanks, no thanks"

There's a lot of room for the above things to move around on the above spectrum. In fact my current company gives you a spread of offers to choose from when they hire you: from 3% to 0.5% with a salary that varies about 50k between the equity endpoints. No way you should accept a way below market salary for single percentage points of equity though -- if they want to pay you total dogshit, you should be a founder.

3) Revenue -- how much do they have, what's their path to more, what prospects do they have. You need to know this. If it's zero, okay, what's their plan? If they say it's confidential, "thanks, no thanks".
4) Investors -- who are they, how much have they invested? Vet the investors -- find out if they are reputable and respected (i.e. will actually be a value to the company) or if they are scammers (dump 50k into company, try to push into a bad acquihire or whatever).

5) Founders history. Who are they? Do they get along? What have they done before? It's not *bad* if they don't have like 10 successful found->exits, but you should understand where they're coming from and what expertise they have.
6) Is it a fundamentally sound product? What are they selling, do you think there is a real market there? You don't have to be a subject matter expert, but if it doesn't pass a sniff test, you guessed it: "thanks, no thanks".

Most of your evaluation should be based on common sense "is there a future here?" -- just don't let yourself get screwed over by undertaking the founders risk. They have some money now, and it's literally for paying people. Be realistic that you're not going to get top-tier salary, but no fuckin' way should you accept a 50% discount for a wish and a prayer worth of equity.

Mao Zedong Thot
Oct 16, 2008


Oh, and if they're first time founders, you can forgive them being stupid a little bit. Like they might not understand they need to pay within the realm of market salaries -- it's not an instant :redflag: they thought they could pay you a basic stipend + a bunch of equity. It is if they don't budge off that, or if this isn't their first company and they try that poo poo.

For context, my failed startup raised 50k -- 90% of that went to our first employee (the other 10% to expenses like travel and hosting), who we paid something like $50/hour. Which is not incredibly great or anything, but it's certainly 'okay' money for a kid 2 years out of school with ~10% equity in a crazy startup.

Mao Zedong Thot fucked around with this message at 02:52 on May 9, 2017

oliveoil
Apr 22, 2016

VOTE YES ON 69 posted:

For context, my failed startup raised 50k

$50k is a reasonable amount to found a startup? Really?

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

oliveoil posted:

$50k is a reasonable amount to found a startup? Really?

If you need no equipment and minimal services and don't mind not paying yourself, you can stretch $50k a long time.

Mao Zedong Thot
Oct 16, 2008


oliveoil posted:

$50k is a reasonable amount to found a startup? Really?

Well we founded it on 0$, two cofounders with day jobs working like an extra 30hrs a week after hours. Got accepted to an accelerator that gave us $50k. Neither of us quit our day jobs, but if we'd raised a seed round we would have. Coincidentally not having yet quit our day jobs made raising money a lot harder. Almost as if the game is rigged for unattached 22 year olds :riker:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

If you need no equipment and minimal services and don't mind not paying yourself, you can stretch $50k a long time.

Exactly, both of us were keeping ourselves + our families alive on our regular jobs, the money was entirely for hiring a person (and minor expenses).

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

VOTE YES ON 69 posted:

1) How much will you pay me? If it's more than ~30% off market, "thanks, no thanks".
2) How much equity will you give me? If it's <2%, "thanks, no thanks"
Great questions throughout. You want to understand their mission, understand if they value the same things. I interviewed at a startup with True Believers, they said they'd happily go bankrupt if it meant shipping more units. I am not that committed.

The "founding team," generally employees #1-#10 or thereabouts, the rule of thumb is they take 15-20% of the equity. Meaning #1 got whole points, #2 ought to as well, but realize how much of the pie is getting split between the folks after that. If they're after a big raise in series A or B, you're not getting whole points.

"Runway" is the one metric I didn't see in 69's questions. "Assuming y'all don't raise another dollar, and all planned hiring happens, how long before I'm on the street looking for work again?" A cagey answer here would be a huge red flag for me. It's a legitimate scenario you're betting your livelihood and career on, if they won't tell you that much I'd keep looking.

Mao Zedong Thot
Oct 16, 2008


JawnV6 posted:

"Runway" is the one metric I didn't see in 69's questions. "Assuming y'all don't raise another dollar, and all planned hiring happens, how long before I'm on the street looking for work again?" A cagey answer here would be a huge red flag for me. It's a legitimate scenario you're betting your livelihood and career on, if they won't tell you that much I'd keep looking.

Absolutely, runway is utmost importance, and founders should be able to talk about it. If you're literally the first employee runway should be pretty close to (money in bank)/(your pay). Ask though --- it's fine if the founders are taking a salary, and even okay if they don't literally tell you exactly what it is -- but they should know how long the money will last in a worst case (dont sell or raise further) scenario.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
Thanks, that was very helpful.

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:

I'm meeting a startup for coffee tomorrow. The co-founder I spoke to said they've just closed seed funding and that I'd be employee #2. Doing business with a company which is so new is unfamiliar territory for me (I've done work for early-stage startups in the past, but always as part of a consulting agency, which mitigated the risk). What are the critical questions to ask?

Salary and %. How much of the company does the founder still own (you're looking for a big fat number here; some idiots give away 50+ in the early rounds). Who is their primary investor? Why did they start the company? How big was the seed round? How long until they're hoping to exit?

Doghouse
Oct 22, 2004

I was playing Harvest Moon 64 with this kid who lived on my street and my cows were not doing well and I got so raged up and frustrated that my eyes welled up with tears and my friend was like are you crying dude. Are you crying because of the cows. I didn't understand the feeding mechanic.
I've been working at a company for a year doing work on a WPF desktop app. Am I hurting my career by not working in web?

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
Has anyone done any part-time/contract dev work between finding full-time jobs? The solution for me at this point is definitely leave, but I found job searching was really draining and stressful while working full-time, especially with the assignments most places give out now. I'm okay with money and can afford not-full-time-salary. The option to work maybe 25 or so hours a week while interviewing would be super nice, however, and I'd be willing to start working for free before I'm ready to leave as long as I was able to publicly share what I was doing.

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

Good Will Hrunting posted:

The option to work maybe 25 or so hours a week while interviewing would be super nice, however, and I'd be willing to start working for free before I'm ready to leave as long as I was able to publicly share what I was doing.

Do you have a good way to get 25 hours a week without spending just as much time to get it? I'm a little confused how you'd go from free work to paid, but unless you've got something queued up ready to go I wouldn't count on 25h/wk being a fallback.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I have no insight into anything outside full-time, non-remote employment in a major city. I just figured with the popularity of remote jobs and the ease of working as a distributed team these days,, there'd be a way to find part-time work of some sort. TopTal and UpWork both advertise constantly.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

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



Doghouse posted:

I've been working at a company for a year doing work on a WPF desktop app. Am I hurting my career by not working in web?

Depends on whether you want to specialize in UI/front-end stuff. If so, not having much experience with what is, for better or worse, the most popular UI toolkit today and for the foreseeable future will be somewhat limiting. If you want to build a big sack of skills so that you'll just about always say "yeah, I can think of a few ways to do this" then it's probably OK. The good news is that there are several MVVM web frameworks out there, so if you do want to move into new territory, it won't have to be too alien.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Munkeymon posted:

Depends on whether you want to specialize in UI/front-end stuff.

This is an important distinction.

I've made a pretty good career (15 years so far) with minimal front-end work. I know enough Javascript/Angular/Knockout, CSS, and design to get by, but it's not my specialty and I don't enjoy it. Luckily, there seems to be plenty of work for the back-end "plumbing" guys that are good at architecture, API work, and database design (I do enjoy these things.)

Really, the concept of "full stack" is mostly bullshit for any applications beyond a trivial size/complexity. The person who wrote a 100KLOC React.JS codebase is most likely not going to be an expert at designing RDBMS indexes or writing 3rd-party integration code (and vice-versa), and nor should they have to be.

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008

Doghouse posted:

I've been working at a company for a year doing work on a WPF desktop app. Am I hurting my career by not working in web?

You're hurting your career by working on a WPF desktop app.

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


B-Nasty posted:

The person who wrote a 100KLOC React.JS codebase is most likely not going to be an expert at designing RDBMS indexes or writing 3rd-party integration code (and vice-versa), and nor should they have to be.

And even if they were when they started they won't be by the end.

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


Good Will Hrunting posted:

Has anyone done any part-time/contract dev work between finding full-time jobs? The solution for me at this point is definitely leave, but I found job searching was really draining and stressful while working full-time, especially with the assignments most places give out now. I'm okay with money and can afford not-full-time-salary. The option to work maybe 25 or so hours a week while interviewing would be super nice, however, and I'd be willing to start working for free before I'm ready to leave as long as I was able to publicly share what I was doing.

Small gigs do exist, I don't know what your specialty is but for me there's usually someone out there who wants 50 or 100 hours dumped into a website. If you're doing fixed-price jobs then the fee structure changes too, since the time taken and the cost are functionally disconnected.

What I'm saying is you can do as agencies do and charge far more than your normal hourly if the client and your conscience accept it, giving you more buffer to find the next gig or a full time position.

(Don't worry goon clients, I charged you fairly)

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Doghouse
Oct 22, 2004

I was playing Harvest Moon 64 with this kid who lived on my street and my cows were not doing well and I got so raged up and frustrated that my eyes welled up with tears and my friend was like are you crying dude. Are you crying because of the cows. I didn't understand the feeding mechanic.

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

You're hurting your career by working on a WPF desktop app.

:barf:

Yeah. Hopefully I'll find something better soon. I've only been at this company for a year so hopefully I'm not a lost cause yet.

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