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Steve Ballmer, sweating and arythmically clapping to a deafeningly silent audience of his own employees: "moral capitalists, moral capitalists, moral capitalists!!!!"
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Aug 1, 2020 05:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ultimately the criticism here is that any of the big tech companies, if given the opportunity to do something awful in the name of profit, will do the awful thing. The fact that some have been less awful than others speaks more to an uneven distribution of opportunities to be awful, moreso than it does to the companies' respective levels of virtue. this absolves individual employees from the moral/ethical consequences of their daily decision to keep working at a company doing awful things. tech workers more than anyone have options - presumably insert-name-of-awful-company-here hires people who are able to get jobs elsewhere. Fate Accomplice fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 05:31
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Volguus posted:If we forget about all the products that they killed, businesses they forced to go under and general anti-competitive behaviour for which they only got a slap on the wrist, they yes, all Microsoft did was release a bad Windows and anger slashdot users. All I'm seeing is a list of things that the current generation of tech oligopoly are far worse at, accomplishing things that 90s tech companies didn't even dream would be possible. Sure, today's tech generation is getting a 30% cut of everything sold on their platforms, collecting constant location and activity monitoring from each of their devices, building comprehensive shadow profiles for every human with access to the internet, and building a shadow "gig economy" with the explicit goal of destroying the concept of steady employment, but did you hear that Microsoft once included a browser API in their operating system? Sure am glad that nobody does that anymore. By the way, what did folks do with their wage collusion settlement check? Buy something nice?
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Aug 1, 2020 06:39
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Progressive JPEG posted:All I'm seeing is a list of things that the current generation of tech oligopoly are far worse at, accomplishing things that 90s tech companies didn't even dream would be possible. Sure, today's tech generation is getting a 30% cut of everything sold on their platforms, collecting constant location and activity monitoring from each of their devices, building comprehensive shadow profiles for every human with access to the internet, and building a shadow "gig economy" with the explicit goal of destroying the concept of steady employment, but did you hear that Microsoft once included a browser API in their operating system? Sure am glad that nobody does that anymore. Yes, today's tech giants (Microsoft is still one) do worse things than what 90s giants did. How does that absolve Microsoft from their past sins? Why am I supposed to forget and forgive, just because now others are worse? Do you just hand-wave the austro-hungarian atrocities in WW1 because WW2 was bloodier?
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Aug 1, 2020 07:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ultimately the criticism here is that any of the big tech companies, if given the opportunity to do something awful in the name of profit, will do the awful thing. The fact that some have been less awful than others speaks more to an uneven distribution of opportunities to be awful, moreso than it does to the companies' respective levels of virtue. this is not just limited to tech companies. money is a brain disease, and the pursuit of it a mental illness
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Aug 1, 2020 07:56
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Volguus posted:Yes, today's tech giants (Microsoft is still one) do worse things than what 90s giants did. How does that absolve Microsoft from their past sins? Why am I supposed to forget and forgive, just because now others are worse? Do you just hand-wave the austro-hungarian atrocities in WW1 because WW2 was bloodier? Do I hand-wave browser API integration when talking about powering genocide? Yes.
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Aug 1, 2020 09:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ultimately the criticism here is that any of the big tech companies, if given the opportunity to do something awful in the name of profit, will do the awful thing. The fact that some have been less awful than others speaks more to an uneven distribution of opportunities to be awful, moreso than it does to the companies' respective levels of virtue. Most companies would do the same thing. The big tech companies just have more opportunities.
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Aug 1, 2020 15:26
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Ensign Expendable posted:L Granted, you're hoping the company is smart enough to recognize that, but does it hurt you to "remind" them?
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Aug 1, 2020 15:26
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ketchup vs catsup posted:this absolves individual employees from the moral/ethical consequences of their daily decision to keep working at a company doing awful things. To be clear, I wasn't trying to absolve anyone of anything. Working in big tech is a bit of a deal with the devil -- good wages/benefits in exchange for enabling some pretty terrible abuses. redleader posted:this is not just limited to tech companies. money is a brain disease, and the pursuit of it a mental illness ultrafilter posted:Most companies would do the same thing. The big tech companies just have more opportunities. Yeah, the problem seems to be one of aggregation of power. You get too much power in one place and it'll be abused. Big tech is more noticeable simply because it has so many opportunities to create new markets / build new platforms. Most companies are operating in domains that have been around for centuries or millennia, not years...we're more inured to the abuses that occur in those systems. The more powerful some organization is, the more oversight the public should have over it to prevent such abuses, regardless of the domain it's in. (but of course in America we also need to fix our broken-as-gently caress culture and instill some sense of civic responsibility before public oversight will accomplish anything worth a drat)
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Aug 1, 2020 16:30
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ultrafilter posted:What's the statute of limitations on those things? Yes, they were bad, but a lot of that was literal decades ago under a completely different management team. Are they stained forever because of what Bill Gates did? They are still trying to make LinkedIn (together with its funny data policy) a thing, operate in china, IIRC MS-owned GitHub bought npm and fired all Black devs, oh and I think they are doing business with DoD? TooMuchAbstraction posted:Ultimately the criticism here is that any of the big tech companies, if given the opportunity to do something awful in the name of profit, will do the awful thing.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:24
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piratepilates posted:How much of this is based in reality, and how much of this is a contrivance of my own self-doubt? Do I still have a shot at getting a Good Name on my resume, or are those doors closing fast? How much do I need to worry here? i just switched jobs and my experience is that this is a very real worry. my last three roles were all startups with my tenure being from seed to series a/bish. one had a great but quiet exit (years after i left), another a disappointing exit (just after i left) and the last is in the process of self destructing. i got offers from three "name" companies (including two that you listed as future targets) and all three lowballed me on level and comp because i didn't have "pedigree". i actually worked for a FAANG (but closer to it's infancy than to now) and for a "name" game developer but neither of those roles were at a senior level. two of the offers straight up told me they discounted my experience because of it's no-name nature. the third didn't say it but it was heavily implied i ended up going with a fourth company that's both a name (tho definitely tier b) and also growing explosively that gave me both the title and the opportunity to go back to the tier s/a employers in a year or two and get the level i wanted my advice is that the faster you can get out to a name company the better. the longer you wait the longer to get that social proof on your resume
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Aug 2, 2020 06:26
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Doing java dev for the first time since college after having done C# since forever. I kept telling recruiters I didn’t have any relevant Java experience and they kept blowing me off. Honestly, I should have just lied to them. It’s not like “Sure I have Kubernetes Experience” and then the interview winds up - “We wanna A-B test this app, 90% of pods have V1 10% have V2 ... Go!”
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Aug 2, 2020 08:00
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FAANGs (at least the ones I've interviewed with) don't give a poo poo what's on your resume - nobody except the recruiter will look at it anyway. If you can pass the interview, they'll make an offer. I'm not saying that the interview process doesn't have its own problems, but seriously - nobody cares at all whats on your resume unless you're don knuth or some poo poo they also care way less about what ecosystems you have experience with, because you're not gonna be using open source hotness, you're going to be using their internal poo poo anyway
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Aug 2, 2020 08:15
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bob dobbs is dead posted:tech majors give a poo poo about exp from other tech majors bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 08:16
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As far as pedigree and stack goes, yeah. General domain (where "domain" might be eg linux device security) stuff is very important then, though. But you'd be looking more for experience solving x type problems more than "really knows puppet/envoy/whatever". Basically as you go up the ladder, you need to have more specific expertise (and it becomes more likely that you're skipping the regular funnel). That's more for staff/principal/etc than senior though, senior pretty much follows what I said as far as I've seen. My experience is also more with the infosec side of things than the swe side. From what I've seen they're pretty similar but I imagine there's a lot more variance with swe poo poo since that's such a larger set Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 08:25
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> FAANGs (at least the ones I've interviewed with) don't give a poo poo what's on your resume - Even at senior / principal tier? You’re being asked to set technical direction for your immediate group of groups, effectively what goes on JIRA is the side work to your real job. Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 08:34
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I have no idea what happened such that my response is above your post, but here we are. At higher levels your job is telling other people what to build. You need experience telling other people what to build for that, but nobody's gonna care if it was (eg) puppet or chef. The important thing is you know how to deal with five digits of web servers or some poo poo (I'm clearly making up examples now) and can keep your mid levels from blowing up the world
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Aug 2, 2020 08:50
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But to be fair, the high level hires (above senior I mean) seem like they're more knowing somebody than they are going through the regular funnel. That's not exactly caring about pedigree but it's not exactly different, either. I could be wrong there tho
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Aug 2, 2020 08:53
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I hired on at L5 (~= senior engineer) at one of the Google offshoots with my only big-name experience before that being a junior dev over a decade prior at Amazon. My impression is that the bar gets exponentially higher for L6 on up; you're unlikely to hire at L6+ without having high-level people to vouch for you. But L5 is also considered to be "high enough" to be a capstone for your career.
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Aug 2, 2020 14:47
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my situation: I was hired on after a six month contract to hire at a FAANG-adjacent SaaS company. The manager who'd hired me on had been there for several years but our team was split into several pieces with me placed under a newly hired manager. Our leveling is SDE1, SDE2, Senior, Principal I make a big show of wanting to be hired on as an Senior, but the offer turned up as SDE 2. I pushed back some more, and my manager pulled out the levelling guidelines which are super open to interpretation. My guess is that New Manager doesn't want to rock the boat much, and I'm new and I'm not wanting to rock the boat much, but the Patrick McKenzie sitting on my shoulder says that I should have pulled the hiring manager, his boss the CTO, and my current boss into a meeting. So now, it's a much higher hill to climb to justify the promotion come review period. Thing is, once you're at a high level it's not hard to make moves and keep that level, like I had a Principal leveled coworker (oAuth specialist) come in, only work for a few months and then leave for a FAANG, also at a Principal level. Pay isn't an issue and I suppose I should be lucky that I'm working given how a number of new hires here are from companies who are severely affected by COVID.  *really* don't like comparing myself to my college classmates while surfing IinkedIn, "Distinguished", "Group Lead", "Principal, but been with $CLOUDPROVIDER since day one.", "Principal, but been with $POPULAR_MOBILE_OS since day one.","Basically The Guy who set up the backend of a popular MMO-like", "Founder of company with a hundred person headcount"
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Aug 2, 2020 18:08
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It gets worse. Soon ex-coworkers will be CTOs, and you’ll look at them on LinkedIn and think, “but that guy was a schmuck.”
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Aug 2, 2020 19:32
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then you sit down and you realize the schmuck ratio of ctos is about half
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Aug 2, 2020 19:34
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the talent deficit posted:i just switched jobs and my experience is that this is a very real worry. my last three roles were all startups with my tenure being from seed to series a/bish. one had a great but quiet exit (years after i left), another a disappointing exit (just after i left) and the last is in the process of self destructing. i got offers from three "name" companies (including two that you listed as future targets) and all three lowballed me on level and comp because i didn't have "pedigree". i actually worked for a FAANG (but closer to it's infancy than to now) and for a "name" game developer but neither of those roles were at a senior level. two of the offers straight up told me they discounted my experience because of it's no-name nature. the third didn't say it but it was heavily implied I think this is going to end up being the direction I go in the future (next job opportunity or two). Cram leetcode problems and practice the "right" answers to interview questions, get good at flattering interviewers, and try to get a job at a "trophy company" for my resume. Even if it doesn't end up being the case that it's as important as I fear it would be, I want to nip that fear that it'll be an issue sooner rather than later. Get that stamp from Google or wherever that I can put on my resume, go in to interviews for roles further down the line with "why yes actually I did work for Google, and before that a YC company..." and hopefully have to give less thought and anxiety over this kind of thing. The one thing I definitely do not want to be doing is having a wife and kids and aging parents, and also have to find time to study for algo interviews and worry about if I've built a good enough "brand" for myself. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 22:05
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I'm a bit long in the tooth to go down the Resume route. I restarted my career in my early 30s by moving to US. Nothing I've done before mattered any more. I've also learned that even at FAANGs you usually end up doing tedious work unless you came in as an expert or have a really good support in your management stack. Or so I've been told by people with that kind of experience. I also feel like I don't want to work for anyone who looks for those markers in my resume. I'm past the point of wanting to work for money alone, gamble on startups that will try to overwork me, and what matters to me now is the quality of my everyday life. I guess it's time to start my own thing on Haskell stack, or whatever I'm supposed to do now. Or maybe videogames. I hear those are popular.
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Aug 2, 2020 22:49
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quality of life and videogame dev: never the twain shall meet
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Aug 2, 2020 22:52
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bob dobbs is dead posted:quality of life and videogame dev: never the twain shall meet but playing videogames is so much fun, wouldn't making them be just as fun??? Making an indie game seems like a fun experience though, as long as you are in a good enough position to start with that you aren't worrying about making payments on time.
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Aug 2, 2020 22:56
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I was trying to paint the picture of a man lost in his pursuit of happiness, destined to toil in a c-list company until he's found to be too expensive, while also too acerbic, to tolerate. A man so out of touch that he would squander his gains of previous decades on an entrepreneurial equivalent of a red Corvette. That man is me, and for the love of all that is sane, I'm e: ghod, so many typos. and that "waiting" auto-correct for "quitting" was some Freudian boolshit by my phone. gbut fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 23:02
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piratepilates posted:...lots o’ anxiety... If it helps alleviate your anxiety, I’ve never worked at a FAANG-level company in my 17 years, and I’ve never had problems getting jobs. I study up a bit for interviews, I don’t burn bridges, and I steadily learn new things. It all adds up over time. I guess I can come back when I’ve been doing this for 40 years and give you another update, but my low-stress methods have worked so far. My career is fine. I’m not gonna be tapped for those VP of Technology jobs, but I enjoy my 30-40 hour weeks.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:04
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Do not do indie game development unless you can afford the very real risk that you'll spend 1-3 years working on your game and get basically nothing in sales.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Do not do indie game development unless you can afford the very real risk that you'll spend 1-3 years working on your game and get basically nothing in sales. if you can touch computer normal-like, dont touch video game
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Aug 3, 2020 01:14
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Not for a living, at least not working in any remotely big gamedev outfit. But making games is fun. Just view it as more of a sabbatical or retirement option than a job.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:18
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I worked at an ~200 employee game studio that actually had good work life balance and not much bullshit. The pay though was substantially lower than any other software engineering job in the area which I ultimately left over.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:29
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I'd always pictured the games industry as a great place to work if you wanted to die of a heart attack in your 40s
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Aug 3, 2020 04:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not for a living, at least not working in any remotely big gamedev outfit. But making games is fun. Just view it as more of a sabbatical or retirement option than a job. A sabbatical is definitely the best way to think about working on an indie game full time. If you're lucky you might get some money at the end of it, but you shouldn't plan on it.
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Aug 3, 2020 04:35
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Progressive JPEG posted:I'd always pictured the games industry as a great place to work if you wanted to die of a heart attack in your 40s I've known people that died of heart attacks in their 30s.  The only advice I give young people about breaking into games is: don't. If they'll take it, they'll be better off. If they don't, it's likely they would have been better off as well.
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Aug 3, 2020 04:48
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Plorkyeran posted:A sabbatical is definitely the best way to think about working on an indie game full time. If you're lucky you might get some money at the end of it, but you shouldn't plan on it. Just learned that sabbatical is a thing with British companies. I've only ever known about it in the context of academia. E: paid, I mean
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Aug 3, 2020 05:12
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By the way, is there an SH/SC or CoC discord/slack?
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Aug 3, 2020 21:51
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piratepilates posted:By the way, is there an SH/SC or CoC discord/slack? There's a CoC Discord, I sent you a 1 day invite since no idea how open this forum is right now.
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Aug 3, 2020 21:58
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Hughlander posted:There's a CoC Discord, I sent you a 1 day invite since no idea how open this forum is right now. Got in, thank you!
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Aug 3, 2020 22:03
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i didn't mean to give the impression you'll be unemployable without a "name" company on your resume. if your desired career arc includes a senior/staff role at those kind of companies tho it's important to have a pedigree to point to and the sooner the better imo
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Aug 4, 2020 03:50
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