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The Leck posted:I dont know your job history, but at my current place, senior is the title you end up with after a promotion a couple of years right out of school. There are several levels above that, and the titles are very stupid/confusing. So yeah, you could be a senior with just a couple of years experience, or 15+, depending on the company. One of the places I'm interviewing does Junior -> Associate -> Senior. It feels... weird? to go from "Software Engineer" to "Associate Software Engineer" yet get a pay bump but hey, whatever, the role seems wonderful.
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May 29, 2018 18:57
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strange posted:We had an interviewee for a senior role who seemed as lost as that. Their primary experience was 15 odd years writing a proprietary desktop GUI language which last had a new version in the early 2000s. I still wonder what they ended up doing. Their jobs go from Coding, to QA, to Help Desk, to unemployed. I know a few old programmers like that. It's very easy to hit 50 years old with a resume of long, loyal employment, but no new (or not enough) technologies learned. It's why I push programmers to stay up-to-date. And this was before QA turned into QE and became an automated wonderland.
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May 29, 2018 20:56
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Good Will Hrunting posted:One of the places I'm interviewing does Junior -> Associate -> Senior. It feels... weird? to go from "Software Engineer" to "Associate Software Engineer" yet get a pay bump but hey, whatever, the role seems wonderful. Im doing a second tour at a place and thanks to a change in contract supplier Ive gone from Senior Developer to Digital Developer. Sometimes you just gotta shrug.
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May 29, 2018 21:27
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Titles mean absolute dick. Been hiring engineering teams for quite some time now, no one cares about previous titles or what you think they meant - it's the experiences, how well you can speak to them and what you're looking for next. If someone is reaching out to you for a senior title, and you even think for a second that you can't do it because you're not "senior" enough, throw out the thought completely. They looked at your resume and deemed you worthy of a contact. As long as it's something you're interested in, go for it.
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May 29, 2018 23:47
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Thanks for the boost, thread. I got 15 emails today, have two tech screens set up already, and have a recruiter I'm working wit via reference that has another 4 ops. Time to gently caress around and get a new job.
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May 29, 2018 23:49
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Im on my second week of holiday, which is the longest Ive been off work in years. It feels fantastic. Im still not sure whether Ill go back refreshed and recharged or immediately start hating work again.
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May 29, 2018 23:52
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Jaded Burnout posted:Im on my second week of holiday, which is the longest Ive been off work in years. It feels fantastic. You'll be all refreshed and recharged for the first 3 hours. Then back to the old routine and feelings.
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May 30, 2018 01:07
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Doh004 posted:Titles mean absolute dick. Been hiring engineering teams for quite some time now, no one cares about previous titles or what you think they meant - it's the experiences, how well you can speak to them and what you're looking for next. That said, they can be useful as a quick and dirty way to establish expectations and BATNAs for salary when it comes to negotiating and salary research. Please negotiate.
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May 30, 2018 03:22
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Volguus posted:You'll be all refreshed and recharged for the first 3 hours. Then back to the old routine and feelings. I just came back from a weeklong vacation today. And while, yeah, by the end of the day I was pretty worn-down, I absolutely needed that vacation and it's made a huge difference in my outlook on life. My attitude towards my job is pretty similar, but I'm less depressed / more energized about everything else. That said, I have also had vacations where after I went back to work I went "wow, I do not want to be doing this any more." That's a sign that you need to find a new job or otherwise make a substantial change (in my case it was fleeing the Pacific Northwest and its eternal overcast). Sometimes vacation gives you that perspective reset that you need to realize that you don't like the direction your life is headed in.
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May 30, 2018 05:48
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On promotions: Does anyone have an end state in terms of their career? Or even know what they'd do when they get there? I'm getting into people management more; I've been a senior engineer for 6 years so it makes sense that I start taking on more responsibilities to be able to run my own team. Eventually I see myself in upper management if I want to keep the raises coming, but I have no endgame despite being 10 years into a 40 year career. Eventually I'm going to end up in a specific role for a long time, but with no idea what the end goal is or what to do when I'm there. Sorry if it's rambling or incoherent. I've just noticed that I keep pushing for progression wherever I work, but other than the money i'm struggling to see what else it could bring. My fear is grounded in the senior engineers who've been around at this place for 10-15 years and have nowhere to go, as they've backed themselves into a niche or career stagnation, and yet there's only a finite amount of promotions one can go through. So I worry that I will just never find a job good enough to stick at for a decade or more.
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May 30, 2018 08:37
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Is there an end state for a career other than "own all the property I want free and clear and also have enough money in the bank that I can live off investments/rent/royalties/etc"? Anything else just seems like nonsense to me.
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May 30, 2018 08:51
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No that makes sense, money is the easy part. It's staying happy knowing that i'm probably going to be in $ROLE_NAME for the rest of my working life at some point. Right now it's easy as I can always climb the ladder, but I have an aversion to sticking around for more than 3 years. I can always job hop, but at some point there's nowhere to go in terms of career progression.
Cancelbot fucked around with this message at 09:34 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 09:32
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I've been sat in a paddling pool labelled "individual contributor" for years now, so I've no loving idea.
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May 30, 2018 09:54
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My current plan is to retire in < 10 years, thanks to contractor money. Then I can do whatever I feel like doing! I'll probably do more Code Club/similar things, which I've done before and thought was a good way of giving something back.
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May 30, 2018 10:30
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BurntCornMuffin posted:That said, they can be useful as a quick and dirty way to establish expectations and BATNAs for salary when it comes to negotiating and salary research. Please negotiate. 100% this. Particularly in our field as for the past 8 (more?) years, we have had much more leverage than the employers.
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May 30, 2018 11:48
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I would love to retire someday.
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May 30, 2018 13:49
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an industry that has one of the highest profit margins is a weird way to phrase "much more leverage than the employers"
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May 30, 2018 13:52
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comedyblissoption posted:an industry that has one of the highest profit margins is a weird way to phrase "much more leverage than the employers" Are those mutually exclusive?
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May 30, 2018 14:08
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Software workers make a lot more than a lot of other types of workers, but the employer is still really making out in the arrangement above and beyond other industries. This arrangement suggests higher degrees of exploitation unless you believe that software employers are unique titanic ubermensch compared to other employers and more deserving of this extra margin. It's still fine to try to extract as much concessions as possible out of the employer of course.
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May 30, 2018 14:17
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Yeah, not too sure where you're going with this.
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May 30, 2018 14:31
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comedyblissoption posted:an industry that has one of the highest profit margins is a weird way to phrase "much more leverage than the employers" "Software engineers face a 3.6 percent unemployment rate, and are thus only half as likely to be jobless as the general populace with an overall current unemployment rate of 7.3 percent." There's no shortage of jobs right now. Devs have an especially good bargaining position these days. And if that fails, we can just flip companies and move on. That said, between H1B and college/bootcamp nerds not knowing their own value and how to negotiate, there is also a great deal of exploitation, which is detrimental to the development community. Therefore: Please Negotiate.
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May 30, 2018 14:51
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comedyblissoption posted:Software workers make a lot more than a lot of other types of workers, but the employer is still really making out in the arrangement above and beyond other industries. This arrangement suggests higher degrees of exploitation unless you believe that software employers are unique titanic ubermensch compared to other employers and more deserving of this extra margin. I think one thing that can be tricky to parse about an argument like this is that "exploitation" has a literal sense and a connotation. "Higher degrees of exploitation" literally means "owner achieves more profit per wage $ paid" but the connotation of the word suggests that the owner is doing bad things to the worker (and is treating the software worker worse than owners of other businesses treat their workers). I think cbo is on with the literal meaning.
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May 30, 2018 14:59
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BurntCornMuffin posted:That said, between H1B and college/bootcamp nerds not knowing their own value and how to negotiate, there is also a great deal of exploitation, which is detrimental to the development community. I'm sure this must've been linked in this thread before, but it's worth repeating: http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ e: also, http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ The big tech giants (or at least some of them) are prepared to pay software engineers absolutely absurd amounts of money (median compensation at Facebook is $240k, and that's over all employees, not just engineers). They can certainly afford it. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:42 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 15:34
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Cancelbot posted:On promotions: Does anyone have an end state in terms of their career? Or even know what they'd do when they get there? After a certain point, it's very hard to grow your career without access to the right opportunities. I don't know exactly what those look like for you, but I'm highly confident that most companies don't offer them. That's a large part of why a lot of people leave engineering at some point.
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May 30, 2018 15:54
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This is what I'm starting to believe; Optimistically: early retirement due to disproportionate salary. Realistically: switching careers in my mid-40s.
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May 30, 2018 16:12
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There's nothing wrong with finding the level where you most enjoy your work and just staying there. That doesn't mean stagnation in terms of what you work on (you can still learn new skills/languages/domains/etc.), it just means not changing the scope of your responsibilities. But yeah, I should really figure out what my 5- and 10-year plans are.
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May 30, 2018 16:53
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Well, my company has taken yet another step to ensure I never leave. Unexpected 9% raise. And last year I got a 12% bonus and was told that they don't have the final numbers yet, but I should expect something similar this year. I now make 60% more than I did when I was hired in 2013. 
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May 30, 2018 16:57
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Things get iffy staying in an individual contributor role because you will have to keep up to date with all the hot poo poo (unless you want to keep working for the same laggard company thatll stay on the same tech stacks for decades until you retire or something) and thats not exactly easy to do as you have more responsibilities outside work. Besides children, elder care is a big issue that oftentimes forces your location and thus limits career mobility almost certainly (the places that elderly retire tend to be utter poo poo for tech jobs, same with tourist towns). You dont have to be on-call as a manager in general, you tend to have more stability in projects, and your promotion is less based around skills that tend to deteriorate with age for most people. 20 year old me was a faster coder because I actually had the time and mental energy to memorize APIs somewhat, 40 year old me will suck at it probably but be a lot better with people unless I keep having to put up with management decisions that are based around feel-goods instead of actual business value. In that case Im going to be a raging alcoholic and die before 40 in which case it wont matter what your career goals are for a 10 year plan probably.
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May 30, 2018 17:51
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That said, I have also had vacations where after I went back to work I went "wow, I do not want to be doing this any more." That's a sign that you need to find a new job or otherwise make a substantial change (in my case it was fleeing the Pacific Northwest and its eternal overcast). Sometimes vacation gives you that perspective reset that you need to realize that you don't like the direction your life is headed in. I don't like my job and I know I need to make a change, but it's feeling extremely hard to push myself to do this in any effective manner at the level of burnt out I've reached and I have genuinely been considering just quitting, taking a month off - I'd probably go crazy after a month - and attempting to reset my brain and flush the toxicity of my current role out. Replying to recruiters, scheduling interviews, it's all so loving time consuming when you're getting PagerDuty alarms and trying to still contribute. It's baffling to me that a mini-gap in employment to be a full-time, self-recruiter comes off as such a stigmatized thing still, which isn't to say it's a huge deal but I can't imagine it would go entirely unnoticed. On the flip-side, I could just continue 1/2-assing my current role or, perhaps, regress to 1/4-assing it while looking and pray for layoffs.
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May 30, 2018 18:50
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Anyone have any experience with companies that have actual data governance roles? I'm looking into switching jobs from a more traditional role into a position with that title. Had a decent first interview where they said it's about 25% technical / 75% policy/requirements gathering etc... On one hand I feel like the fact that this company allows that role to exist and doesn't just make it a auxiliary duty of the data engineers or DBAs means they understand the complexity of managing large sets of data which could make it a good job. On the other hand I'm kind of on the fence about moving into a less technical role. Where do you go from that type of position?
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May 30, 2018 19:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's nothing wrong with finding the level where you most enjoy your work and just staying there. That doesn't mean stagnation in terms of what you work on (you can still learn new skills/languages/domains/etc.), it just means not changing the scope of your responsibilities. That's basically been my plan. I've been actively eschewing management roles, much preferring to staying an IC (I'm 38, BTW.) I mean, "gently caress you, pay me" is still the mantra at review time, but I'm not interested in a slightly bigger bump to move to a role that I would most likely hate. I'm not in the Valley, so I haven't seen ageism hit yet, and I really like that I could find another role in a few weeks if/when I get tired of my current gig.
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May 31, 2018 00:55
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I just received my first annual review after 16 months at this job. Feedback from my manager was uniformly positive and the only advice for improvement was to assert my ideas more strongly because he likes them. Management also says this qualifies me for the largest raise allotted in the current budget and that I should expect an email from HR about it in the coming days. My career has been so lovely to this point that I've never really received much of a raise before. What should I consider to be a good raise? How low of a "largest possible" raise should I consider to be a warning sign?
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Jun 2, 2018 16:16
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There are a lot more opportunities to remain IC out there; it's becoming more and more the path of least resistance nowadays in the opportunities I see popping up. Overall, I think that's a good thing. The trouble comes in figuring out which places embrace IC as a long-term career path and don't look down on folks who choose that. It's also important to be able to ensure that if you take a role that assumes the career path is just IC + $$, and you actually want to transition into management, that's clear early on so you don't settle in somewhere with misaligned expectations. I don't know how founded they are, but my personal fears tend to resemble some variant of this a lot: necrobobsledder posted:... 20 year old me was a faster coder because I actually had the time and mental energy to memorize APIs somewhat, 40 year old me will suck at it probably but be a lot better with people ... I don't particularly think that I'll be worse at the day to day grind of IC at 40, but I'll definitely be less interested in it. I'm already at a point where it's frustrating to see products being developed with management/process mistakes being made that I learned a long time ago how to avoid, and I'd like to be in more of a position to help out with that. My process for the past years has basically been a rinse/repeat cycle of "get hired as senior IC at small to mid-sized company, get promoted to engineering management, company goes under, get hired as...". The first stage of that cycle is like a nightmare where I'm being driven slowly insane by watching teams drive slow-motion into a brick wall, and I want to yell to warn them to avoid it, but nothing but a hoarse squeak comes out. So far I've always ended up back in management within a relatively short period of time of accepting any new job, but the first stage where you're just an IC trying to help people understand the mistakes being made and improve processes is a stressful time. speng31b fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jun 2, 2018 |
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Jun 2, 2018 16:36
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rt4 posted:I just received my first annual review after 16 months at this job. Feedback from my manager was uniformly positive and the only advice for improvement was to assert my ideas more strongly because he likes them. Without advancing to a new title/new responsibilities? Inflation is usually around 2-3%, so less than that is bad. Something that's in line with inflation is a "cost of living" increase and is not noteworthy -- it's generally expected. 5% is a standard "okay" raise. 10% is great. 20% means they are adjusting for underpaying you in the first place.
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Jun 2, 2018 16:39
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speng31b posted:I don't particularly think that I'll be worse at the day to day grind of IC at 40, but I'll definitely be less interested in it. I'm already at a point where it's frustrating to see products being developed with management/process mistakes being made that I learned a long time ago how to avoid, and I'd like to be in more of a position to help out with that. It's like a nightmare where I'm being driven slowly insane by watching teams drive slow-motion into a brick wall, and I want to yell to warn them to avoid it, but nothing but a hoarse squeak comes out. The most important thing by far for staying in this career long term is finding a group that actually listens to its senior developers and doesn't regard them as expensive code monkeys.
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Jun 2, 2018 16:41
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Amazon pinged me from a job board. Seems like they've got a number of roles I'd be interested in. There's a poster here who loves working at Amazon, and I have another engineering friend who also loves it, but outside of that I've heard a few bad stories. I'm guessing it really depends on the team? Also, last go-around I interviewed with a company and got an offer from 1 team (which, looking back, I should have taken) but didn't get an offer from the other which I was more interested in. I'm interviewing with the team I didn't get an offer from last time again, and they're going to screen me to see how far I've come with respect to ${language} - which is a bit disconcerting since I definitely think I'm maybe a 5/10 at best with it now, whereas last time I was a 3/10. The reason I didn't get an offer from that team last time is because they thought learning a new language + two frameworks would have been tough for me. I totally disagreed with that assessment and felt a little offended but whatever. JVM languages are JVM languages at the end of the day and it's not like they were writing some extremely complex library. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Jun 2, 2018 |
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Jun 2, 2018 17:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm guessing it really depends on the team? Amazon's pretty easy to get through. Just review their leadership principles beforehand and you'll be fine.
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Jun 2, 2018 17:30
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Amazon pinged me from a job board. Seems like they've got a number of roles I'd be interested in. There's a poster here who loves working at Amazon, and I have another engineering friend who also loves it, but outside of that I've heard a few bad stories. I'm guessing it really depends on the team? from what I've heard, the AWS side people really like it and it's cool and good and everyone is happy because they make shitloads of money. The retail side is a garbage business with like zero margins, and everyone who works there is either miserable or a sociopath. anecdotes != data though so  edit: by garbage business, I mean like the retail sector makes almost no profit already, and amazon's whole thing is driving what little margin already exist more or less to zero. Not that amazon.com is gonna die anytime soon. mrmcd fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jun 2, 2018 |
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Jun 2, 2018 17:32
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Salary looks very, very nice and there are lots of teams for me to choose from to interview with, so it sounds pretty cool? It's on their ad platform team and they reached out since I have RTB system experience which "lol advertising" but at the end of the day, the project I worked on at my last job and enjoyed most was our bidder. I'm not inherently opposed to working in the realm of advertising because it's just serving high volumes of content and writing data pipelines which can be interesting challenges - I guess I just really want to avoid the bullshit, messy adtech startups.
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speng31b posted:There are a lot more opportunities to remain IC out there; it's becoming more and more the path of least resistance nowadays in the opportunities I see popping up. Some of us relish the role of being an IC because it gives us time to privately consult on the side to double/triple the amount we can make. Sometimes, looking for the right IC role isn't about putting your eggs in the right basket, but rather about making sure that you always have more than one basket in the works.  I get that a lot of people don't have an entrepreneurial streak and just want to find a job that doesn't suck with a big paycheck. But... those truly awesome IC jobs are few, far between, and competitive. It's not so bad treading water at an average day job and then consulting/writing/whatever on the side. Seeing that this is the "oldie" thread, I would assume that most of the folks here have the technical experience to provide value as a consultant.
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