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Workaday Wizard
Oct 23, 2009

by Pragmatica
if you ever think you are not good enough to do something look at the idiot morons already doing it and remove that stupid idea from your mind

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Workaday Wizard
Oct 23, 2009

by Pragmatica
hi. i am fully employed.

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

Symbolic Butt posted:

current job status: slowly descending into despair

champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

Symbolic Butt posted:

current job status: slowly descending into despair

jesus WEP
Oct 17, 2004


i like the people i work with but i got stuck on a horrible “3 month” project that’s gonna take a year and probably perpetual maintenance duty

long story short, ive been there a year. what is the shortest amount of time to be at a job before it doesnt look bad to be applying other places

jony neuemonic
Nov 13, 2009

St Evan Echoes posted:

i like the people i work with but i got stuck on a horrible “3 month” project that’s gonna take a year and probably perpetual maintenance duty

long story short, ive been there a year. what is the shortest amount of time to be at a job before it doesnt look bad to be applying other places

you’re probably fine right now, it’s only a problem if it’s a pattern and/or you don’t have a canned answer for why you’re leaving.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

Shinku ABOOKEN posted:

if you ever think you are not good enough to do something look at the idiot morons already doing it and remove that stupid idea from your mind

yeah this.

St Evan Echoes posted:

i like the people i work with but i got stuck on a horrible “3 month” project that’s gonna take a year and probably perpetual maintenance duty

long story short, ive been there a year. what is the shortest amount of time to be at a job before it doesnt look bad to be applying other places

if you do this regularly, at least two years. if it’s a one off it doesn’t matter if you can tell a good story. and I don’t mean complaining about how bad it is. come up with a reason that doesn’t make you look like you had problems, just that things didn’t work out. “I joined as a backend engineer and they’re mostly having me do ui work, which is not really my specialty”

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


My excuse will always be it didn't have growth opportunities I was made to believe.

SamDabbers
May 26, 2003



cjs: leaving on sunday to look for housing near my new job in a different city

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


I now have to choose between two offers.

A small robotics startup who's been at it for more than a decade and is close to doing big things. They need an image processing, data mining and machine learnings guy, which is a really good fit for me and seems like a great place to grow in terms of career.
Downside: they absolutely lowballed the offer. I will get more than my current salary but significantly less than the high point of my career (I took a pay cut to come to Japan) and I suspect also significantly less than the market rate for this position.
Upside: It seems to be an accomodating company in terms of working conditions so I am fairly confident that after I prove myself, the salary will go up up up and there will be less attention to man-butt-hours spent in the office.

A huge megabank, AI and trading algorithms. The salary offer is great (almost doubling my current number), but also below the market rate. I suppose that does not really matter as the job itself will be something that both offers great opportunities for career progression and it's something to put on the CV.
Downside: I have no background in finance and I am not really sure whether I will fit in with finance types. Also probably a huge focus on man-butt-hours and not so much on the actual work. It also seems kind of like a traditional Japanese company, which means that the attitude towards overtime could be a thing.
Upside: big bucks and I get to learn how an actual megacorp does business-critical software.

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

between the two i'd pick the bank tbh. a startup that's been around a decade isn't going to have any equity upside and thats the theoretical point of doing a startup. however i don't know what specifically working for a japanese bank or startup would be like, so i may be full of poo poo here

regardless here are my thoughts on the bank downsides you mentioned:
- if it's a bit undermarket then it sounds like it'd make sense to counter?
- it doesnt sound like lacking a background in finance would be a problem, i mean they gave you the offer after all
- as a programmer you likely wouldn't be interacting with the finance types (i'm assuming this means "traders")
- assuming it isnt a shitshow you could indeed get to learn a lot about the process of managing stable software

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


japanese megacorps can get loving intense tho

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


like in anime

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
i dont mean to discourage someone from advancing their career but if you rate your skills at "hacking one-off shell scripts to collect data" that does fall quite short of what's needed to build an application of any kind

rather than charging the gates with that kind of experience, you're gonna have to build some kind of small demo applications on your platform of choice and have them ready to demonstrate so that people can judge your aptitude

and if your platform of choice is the web, i don't say this often, but PHP would probably be your safest bet

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
jesus gently caress no that's a ban

use python if you can't think of anything else but there is no good reason to ever inflict yet another shitphpile onto the world

Symbolic Butt
Mar 22, 2009

(_!_)
Buglord
I feel like at this point doing a small app in flask http://flask.pocoo.org/ is easier than doing a thing in php now

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde

Sapozhnik posted:

jesus gently caress no that's a ban

use python if you can't think of anything else but there is no good reason to ever inflict yet another shitphpile onto the world
a novice who admittedly struggles with programming, writing their first web apps, will produce shitpiles regardless. at least with PHP they can do it quickly

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Feb 17, 2018

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
oh to be young again and believe that better languages/libraries make better programmers

Workaday Wizard
Oct 23, 2009

by Pragmatica
you would be right in 2000 or whatever but now that famous noob and hipste language python has acceptable web server libraries there is absolutely no need to go with php

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
a few months ago I received an algorithm from one of the data crunchers that i was supposed to reimplement in product, and although the keywords were python i could swear it was a QBASIC program

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Penisface posted:

I now have to choose between two offers.

A small robotics startup who's been at it for more than a decade and is close to doing big things. They need an image processing, data mining and machine learnings guy, which is a really good fit for me and seems like a great place to grow in terms of career.
Downside: they absolutely lowballed the offer. I will get more than my current salary but significantly less than the high point of my career (I took a pay cut to come to Japan) and I suspect also significantly less than the market rate for this position.
Upside: It seems to be an accomodating company in terms of working conditions so I am fairly confident that after I prove myself, the salary will go up up up and there will be less attention to man-butt-hours spent in the office.

A huge megabank, AI and trading algorithms. The salary offer is great (almost doubling my current number), but also below the market rate. I suppose that does not really matter as the job itself will be something that both offers great opportunities for career progression and it's something to put on the CV.
Downside: I have no background in finance and I am not really sure whether I will fit in with finance types. Also probably a huge focus on man-butt-hours and not so much on the actual work. It also seems kind of like a traditional Japanese company, which means that the attitude towards overtime could be a thing.
Upside: big bucks and I get to learn how an actual megacorp does business-critical software.

Personally I would be wary of speculating on future salary increases. You'll be working there a year and there's a good chance they'll lowball you again. I'd also counter offer the bank. Btw more often than not you don't need any knowledge of actual finance to work in a financial firm doing programming. I mean, these guys want to hire you and they probably know you're not a finance buff.

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Progressive JPEG posted:

between the two i'd pick the bank tbh. a startup that's been around a decade isn't going to have any equity upside and thats the theoretical point of doing a startup. however i don't know what specifically working for a japanese bank or startup would be like, so i may be full of poo poo here

regardless here are my thoughts on the bank downsides you mentioned:
- if it's a bit undermarket then it sounds like it'd make sense to counter?
- it doesnt sound like lacking a background in finance would be a problem, i mean they gave you the offer after all
- as a programmer you likely wouldn't be interacting with the finance types (i'm assuming this means "traders")
- assuming it isnt a shitshow you could indeed get to learn a lot about the process of managing stable software

Yup the keyword here is "japanese". The way things work here is sometimes really weird and unexpected.

I did ask the robotics bunch about equity and it seemed that it's something given out rarely and they can not guarantee I will get any. This kind of a red flag I guess, because to me it is a no-brainer to add conditions to the deal so that I only get equity if I stay at the company long enough and my performance does not disappoint. Another weird quirk is that they want me to open an account in the same bank as the company, I presume that's so they can save on transfer fees? On the other hand the people seem nice and around a third of the company is foreigners like me, so it can not be too bad.

Half of the time I have been thinking if the lowball offer is just some ruse to filter out people who are after a big paycheck, but that also seems kind of a dumb strategy as there is a 6 month trial period anyways. Plus, to play this kind of mind games is not good for building mutual trust.

On the other hand, bear in mind that both offers are for a japanese style permanent contract.

qhat posted:

Personally I would be wary of speculating on future salary increases. You'll be working there a year and there's a good chance they'll lowball you again. I'd also counter offer the bank. Btw more often than not you don't need any knowledge of actual finance to work in a financial firm doing programming. I mean, these guys want to hire you and they probably know you're not a finance buff.

I have thought about this. My plan would be just to do my best throughout the first year and become a not-easily-replaced asset. If by then they still choose to not to pay me what I am worth, I go out the door with a year of robotics image processing experience and find a place that will pay me. Either that or the salary does not increase that much but I get stock options or more lenient working conditions.

Thanks for all the feedbacks, I am probably going to talk to the robotics guys about the salary issue. But before I do, I just want to figure out the perfect diplomatic wording so I do not come across as a greedy and calculating type, because after all it feels like finally a job where I can use my many skills and it's one of those rare kinds of startups where I feel the product is actually useful to the world.

freeasinbeer
Mar 26, 2015

by Fluffdaddy

Coffee Jones posted:

no yeah that is an issue.

Large retailer in town (think of them as Sears or JC Penney) has a combination of stores and an online presence that drives 40% of income not to mention in-store purchases.

Previously the site was run by a combination of old timer FTEs and a horde of people from bodyshop firms that are there to be a bunch of clocksuckers who will turn a minute long process into days (environment variables managed via sql, need a sql script to modify that environment variable, need sign off on that script, need scripts for several lower and upper environments, need sign off on those scripts, no pushing to prod outside of a monthly release window ).
All hosted on prem. Everything from search to rendering is mashed into a single monolithic probably process.
Only after buy-in from the CTOs could they hire on people to melt this crazy iceberg, move rendering off to a collection of independent micro services, move off to Azure and pick a decent JS front end rendering technology and not have frontend devs require a copy of Visual Studio on their systems.

Organizationally it’s still the IT department. The cousin teams to the site who work on the POS systems for the stores deploy a ten year old version of the old rendering tech. They’re not pushed to do any better. The contractors only get their marching orders from their managers who are looking at retirement and haven’t cracked a book in years.


Anyway, some of these places could be adopters of React and Node in 2014 and be on AWS Lambda pre-announcement, or they could be held hostage by a greybeard and his big black tower of COBOL

comedy option: they could have decent technical staff that does cool things, with some rough edges, that is being outsourced to a SaaS firm for bullshit internal politics because they aren’t a tech company at the core.

and the SaaS offering is hot garbage with downtime’s for every deploy and loving up a move between data centers with a day worth of downtime. god what a loving mess this place is turning into. now I get to Pollyanna and job hop quickly.

freeasinbeer fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Feb 17, 2018

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Penisface posted:

I have thought about this. My plan would be just to do my best throughout the first year and become a not-easily-replaced asset. If by then they still choose to not to pay me what I am worth, I go out the door with a year of robotics image processing experience and find a place that will pay me. Either that or the salary does not increase that much but I get stock options or more lenient working conditions.

tbf this is what i'm doing at my current company. my salary is okay but given the value i'm currently providing over other employees, if my pay increase is not extremely significant when review rolls around then i'm going to be rapid firing resumes elsewhere.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


it's also worth mentioning that i'm only working this job because i was unemployed at the time and didn't have an alternative offer. if i did then i would probably not be wasting a year when i could just get the better figgies immediately.

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

Gazpacho posted:

oh to be young again and believe that better languages/libraries make better programmers

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/07/28/quick-doesnt-mean-dirty/ discussion of this exact use case

good tools are easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly. you can gently caress up in python by all means but it takes an active effort, as opposed to php where it's something that just naturally happens if you don't watch out for all of the pitfalls that originated from the fact that it was designed by a monkey

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

Penisface posted:

Half of the time I have been thinking if the lowball offer is just some ruse to filter out people who are after a big paycheck

actually that's a ruse to filter out people who are good at their job

Jimmy Carter
Nov 3, 2005

THIS MOTHERDUCKER
FLIES IN STYLE
Found out that QA division is pretty much universally built on Python, which I at least have a non-zero amount of experience with (my life’s story is ‘know just enough about everything so that you don’t sound like an idiot when asking someone for help’)

thanks for the advice YOSPOS, gonna spend the weekend pondering the bullet points on my résumé and figuring out what my greatest weaknesses are

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde

Sapozhnik posted:

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/07/28/quick-doesnt-mean-dirty/ discussion of this exact use case

good tools are easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly. you can gently caress up in python by all means but it takes an active effort, as opposed to php where it's something that just naturally happens if you don't watch out for all of the pitfalls that originated from the fact that it was designed by a monkey
you're severely underestimating the "active effort" that went into making that blog post, i.e. knowing about particular libraries, how to obtain them, what they are designed to do. note in particular where he lists some very easy (but crude) options for deployment and then opts for something harder

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Gazpacho posted:

a novice who admittedly struggles with programming, writing their first web apps, will produce shitpiles regardless. at least with PHP they can do it quickly
If you voluntarily start a PHP project and put that in your resume you will run into far more prejudice than if you use any other language, even a parody one.

Telling someone to do that is moderately bad technical advice and horrible career advice.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


freeasinbeer posted:

comedy option: they could have decent technical staff that does cool things, with some rough edges, that is being outsourced to a SaaS firm for bullshit internal politics because they aren’t a tech company at the core.

and the SaaS offering is hot garbage with downtime’s for every deploy and loving up a move between data centers with a day worth of downtime. god what a loving mess this place is turning into. now I get to Pollyanna and job hop quickly.

glad 2 be a verb

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde

ShadowHawk posted:

If you voluntarily start a PHP project and put that in your resume you will run into far more prejudice than if you use any other language, even a parody one.
the question's moot according to jimmy carters update but lmao if you believe PHP projects would detract from, rather than enhance a resume with no prior app dev experience

also in general join us some time in the real pro world where much worse solutions than PHP (and worse misuse of good solutions) exist, are even not hard to find

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

surely node is more relevant in 2018

Shaman Linavi
Apr 3, 2012

i decided to do aspnet to learn webdev and all it got me was ???

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


qhat posted:

tbf this is what i'm doing at my current company. my salary is okay but given the value i'm currently providing over other employees, if my pay increase is not extremely significant when review rolls around then i'm going to be rapid firing resumes elsewhere.

The people I interviewed with were also keen to know if I would be around for 3-4 years, which is pretty crazy considering how long the average foreigner seems to sticks around here. If they want that to happen and they are not totally oblivious, then in their heart of hearts they know that sooner or later they must either give me stock or up my salary.

I am not really greedy in terms of money, but I do not want to do what probably amounts to charity work so that someone else gets rich, especially if this is in a startup-style environment where everyone needs to work towards eventual profitability.

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


Gazpacho posted:

you're severely underestimating the "active effort" that went into making that blog post, i.e. knowing about particular libraries, how to obtain them, what they are designed to do. note in particular where he lists some very easy (but crude) options for deployment and then opts for something harder

oh come on, put "python website tutorial" into a search engine and you will get more or less the same stuff as in that blog post, and the added benefit over PHP is that whatever you learn using Python, you can put into use in other general purpose programming tasks because the language is usable not only for web development

for me it makes a million times more sense to start from a language that is widely popular, if only for the amount of documentation, tutorials, snack overflows freely available on the internet

PIZZA.BAT
Nov 12, 2016


:cheers:


Penisface posted:

The people I interviewed with were also keen to know if I would be around for 3-4 years, which is pretty crazy considering how long the average foreigner seems to sticks around here. If they want that to happen and they are not totally oblivious, then in their heart of hearts they know that sooner or later they must either give me stock or up my salary.

I am not really greedy in terms of money, but I do not want to do what probably amounts to charity work so that someone else gets rich, especially if this is in a startup-style environment where everyone needs to work towards eventual profitability.

yeah asking for a textbook vesting schedule in response to them wanting 3-4 years seems reasonable as hell

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Penisface posted:

The people I interviewed with were also keen to know if I would be around for 3-4 years, which is pretty crazy considering how long the average foreigner seems to sticks around here.

Honestly I translate this as "we're insecure because people regularly join and leave after a year or two because we don't pay well, and we want someone who won't do that". My odds are on the salary increases not being large.

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


qhat posted:

Honestly I translate this as "we're insecure because people regularly join and leave after a year or two because we don't pay well, and we want someone who won't do that". My odds are on the salary increases not being large.

That's an observant way to put it, thanks.

My interpretation so far has been that they don't want someone responsible for important business critical stuff to bugger off out of the blue because they have had enough of Japan. In this case of course it should be a no-brainer to have a stock options thing going, or - you know - pay their people their market rate.

Of course all of this is still Japan through a westerner's eye, so I am not sure if the red flags I see are actually that important and I am totally missing the actual ones because I have no idea where to look. :)

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qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Maybe. I heard Japan is a lot more about staying loyal with one company for a long time, rather than changing every few years.

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