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cheese eats mouse
Jul 6, 2007

A real Portlander now
i keep a running gsheet list of my impact over the year. it’s easier to note it when it happens, like when a c level asks to see a UX research presentation or when there’s a shift in some big metric or when i get a shout out from a team member for helping them out.

it helps with writing year end reviews and pitching for that title bump. it’s also good for when your morale or self confidence is in the gutter to see the positive impact you make.

cheese eats mouse fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Dec 7, 2021

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qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Received this email today

random recruiter posted:

Hi qhat,

I'm working with ivy league founders. Google & Amazon acquired two of their startups, the 3rd went IPO. They are now building their next startup and your experience at Butts Inc looks great. They are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with a background like yours. Worth a 2-minute chat?

Thoughts?

Dumb recruiter
Actually lolling that someone thinks namedropping 'ivy league' and 'google & amazon' is how you sell a quality role. I know exactly the kind of moron who responds to this and working with people like that is a hard no.

Corla Plankun
May 8, 2007

improve the lives of everyone
i mean, 3 successful exits seems like a better resume than any leadership team i've ever worked with?

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
thats recruiter bein dipshit not foundin team

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Corla Plankun posted:

i mean, 3 successful exits seems like a better resume than any leadership team i've ever worked with?

not if you are planning on working at the company

CarForumPoster
Jun 26, 2013

⚡POWER⚡

qhat posted:

not if you are planning on working at the company

I'd happily work at an early stage company if the founders of the company had legit 3 exits. Not acquihires, but 3 actual unicorn valuations? Sign me up.

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news
if they pay you the big bucks, why the hell not

Corla Plankun
May 8, 2007

improve the lives of everyone

qhat posted:

not if you are planning on working at the company

If you work at a company that exits successfully you don't have to work anymore. Anywhere.

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

CarForumPoster posted:

I'd happily work at an early stage company if the founders of the company had legit 3 exits. Not acquihires, but 3 actual unicorn valuations? Sign me up.

an acquihire is probably a better exit for the rank and file than an ipo with lovely lockouts

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news
current interview status: talent screens are going great but 1st interviews seem like they will be challenging (haven't done any yet) but answering questions on stuff like GC and data structures etc is somewhat out of my experience, i've mostly worked in python (where data structures is "use a hashmap" and GC isn't a thing), and the limits that you face are rarely algo related but more system design/scaling/dev productivity/cloud bullshit

starting to get impostor syndrome :ohdear: or at least worried that my skillset aint what they're testing for

then again the TA people seem to like me and i can talk a good talk so who the gently caress knows!!!

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Corla Plankun posted:

If you work at a company that exits successfully you don't have to work anymore. Anywhere.

:rubby:

only if you’re a founder

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news

Corla Plankun posted:

If you work at a company that exits successfully you don't have to work anymore. Anywhere.

*if you don't get hosed over, which can often be the case

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news

hobbesmaster posted:

:rubby:

only if you’re a founder

even for founders too lol. some horror stories floating around where company sells for 1b or whatever, investors have preferred shares and get the first $X of any sale which conveniently happens to be > the sale amount, and the founders don't get a penny

Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem

Mr SuperAwesome posted:

even for founders too lol. some horror stories floating around where company sells for 1b or whatever, investors have preferred shares and get the first $X of any sale which conveniently happens to be > the sale amount, and the founders don't get a penny

if you as a founder sign up an investment with the terms "by the way founders get absolutely nothing even if the company sells for a billion dollars, it's gotta be two billion before you see a single penny" then lmao you kinda deserve it for not paying the slightest bit of attention to what is literally your job at that point

good luck dealing with the lawsuit from your co-founders that you also screwed over through your idiocy

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Corla Plankun posted:

If you work at a company that exits successfully you don't have to work anymore. Anywhere.

With what tech salaries are like these days you can achieve this within 10 years anyway and not have to deal with being a startup mule who ultimately gets screwed over by the founders anyway. And what makes you think past performance will replicate in your case? Who knows how many ventures these ivy league douchebags have spawned which have gone nowhere. Don't assume you can identify them, if you could, they would've been acquired already.

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news

qhat posted:

With what tech salaries are like these days you can achieve this within 10 years anyway

even in non-FAANGs and non-bay area if you are lucky

e.g. even in western EU saving 50k a year is 0.5m after 10y, stick that in S&P 500 and you can retire with more than the median salary annually, comfortably, if you play your cards right

thats my plan/hope at least, hopefully at least semi-retire at 40

e: you edited to remove FAANGs but seems we agree!

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Mr SuperAwesome posted:

e: you edited to remove FAANGs but seems we agree!

Yes we agree. FAANG was definitely correct a year or two ago but I think in 2021 it generally extends to any tech company in the S&P500.

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

qhat posted:

Yes we agree. FAANG was definitely correct a year or two ago but I think in 2021 it generally extends to any tech company in the S&P500.

but not tech at any company in the s&p500

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




Mr SuperAwesome posted:

current interview status: talent screens are going great but 1st interviews seem like they will be challenging (haven't done any yet) but answering questions on stuff like GC and data structures etc is somewhat out of my experience, i've mostly worked in python (where data structures is "use a hashmap" and GC isn't a thing), and the limits that you face are rarely algo related but more system design/scaling/dev productivity/cloud bullshit

starting to get impostor syndrome :ohdear: or at least worried that my skillset aint what they're testing for

then again the TA people seem to like me and i can talk a good talk so who the gently caress knows!!!

i love to get pair programming tests with some obvious non-python engineer who leads me into something nominally asking for a binary search, that can probably be bruteforced with dicts and then both of us sit there with “what now” faces as they ask me to optimise, and i tell them the lookup is o(1)

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i love to get pair programming tests with some obvious non-python engineer who leads me into something nominally asking for a binary search, that can probably be bruteforced with dicts and then both of us sit there with “what now” faces as they ask me to optimise, and i tell them the lookup is o(1)


lol big O poo poo is something i am also terrible at because i studied physics not compsci, so i usually handwave this poo poo away with "uhh IO or network is probably slower, yolo" but really dict lookups are o(1)?

themoreyouknow.gif

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news
i suppose also the reason you never loving need to bother with binary searches or any of the other algo bullshit* is because 99% of the time in python a dict is good enough for most of your problems and some other layer (DB, frontend, whatever) is way slower, and premature optimization is the root of all evil etc etc

which is the nice thing about python as a lang, and kind of the point of using it


*Except dynamic programming and recursive stuff for some hacker-rank/leetcode toy problems, that bit me when i tried them

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i love to get pair programming tests with some obvious non-python engineer who leads me into something nominally asking for a binary search, that can probably be bruteforced with dicts and then both of us sit there with “what now” faces as they ask me to optimise, and i tell them the lookup is o(1)

is it though


(seriously that’d be my follow up as an interviewer because I have no idea what the default hash table implementation is in python )

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


They O(n) lookup, but in the vast majority of cases, they are constant time complexity. A hash map trades off space with latency, so they take up generally a lot more space in memory than if you used a tree. The good thing is though if you hit a collision, the items you have to loop through will be next to each other in memory which means you get far less cache misses, which are going to be the biggest performance killers by far in a BST.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


edit mistake post

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news
how much do you reckon you can get away with in interviews by saying "yeah well i would aim for an XYZ approach (hashmaps, always hashmaps) but in my professional experience CPU/mem optimization has never been the bottleneck, only ABC" and elaborate on how you would solve various other bottlenecks

or is it just a crapshoot of company/interviewer/question and hope you get lucky (i presume the latter)

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


Bad approach if your interviewer is testing your algorithmic knowledge.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Well I mean that really depends on what they are asking of you. If what you are saying is true and directly relevant to the problem, even if it's just like "well technically it's this, but actually in reality this is a bigger concern", then go nuts. If your interviewer is an idiot and doesn't understand or care for some of the nuances of performance and optimization, and like that is what they are actually asking of you, well, you don't really want that person managing you. A trait that I look for in a senior engineer in an interview is that they are able to actually teach the interviewers poo poo they didn't expect, and what the senior engineer looks for in the interviewers is that they are receptive to that. So your mileage might very, I'd read the room and if it's appropriate to delve then go hog wild.

Arcsech
Aug 5, 2008

Mr SuperAwesome posted:

how much do you reckon you can get away with in interviews by saying "yeah well i would aim for an XYZ approach (hashmaps, always hashmaps) but in my professional experience CPU/mem optimization has never been the bottleneck, only ABC" and elaborate on how you would solve various other bottlenecks

or is it just a crapshoot of company/interviewer/question and hope you get lucky (i presume the latter)

high risk/high reward maneuver i'd guess. depends on whether the role you're interviewing for has CPU/mem bottlenecks (if it does... bad call), and whether the interviewer is one of those people who goes way too hard on algorithm/performance poo poo because they like to feel clever

if your interviewer is sane and you're interviewing for a role where that's true, probably puts you at the top of the list

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news
cool, decent advice, thanks. fortunately i think i am good at reading the room so that will help. i can probably blag away my weak point (algorithmic knowledge) against my strong points (running a PaaS cloud at moderate scale and all that associated operational knowledge) and present it in a way that works.

if they are looking for just algo knowledge and only knowledge i'm likely hosed but like you say you want to avoid managers/colleagues who lack said nuance

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


ultrafilter posted:

Bad approach if your interviewer is testing your algorithmic knowledge.

I'd argue that poo poo is really only suitable as a question from someone who has less than a year or two experience, or like as an off-the-cuff question in a phone screen to make sure you're not talking to a proper peasant. If I'm being asked what the time complexity of a hash map is in person for a senior position, and it's not intended to be something very nuanced, it makes me question what their expectations of senior engineers are, especially if they aren't receptive to a properly correct answer. But I guess it entirely depends on the role, my line of work is heavily in performance and optimization, so that stuff is infinitely more important.

Mr SuperAwesome
Apr 6, 2011

im from the bad post police, and i'm afraid i have bad news

Arcsech posted:

high risk/high reward maneuver i'd guess. depends on whether the role you're interviewing for has CPU/mem bottlenecks (if it does... bad call), and whether the interviewer is one of those people who goes way too hard on algorithm/performance poo poo because they like to feel clever

does much stuff ever have CPU/mem bottlenecks? or only in certain areas? IME i've never had to worry about that p much ever, the only times CPU/mem became relevant it was because we were doing something Very Stupid elsewhere, and you do the short term "thrown lots of money at it and scale" fix and long-term rearchitecture to something not stupid fix. but idk how much my experience here is relevant to other situations,. for reference: i've done mostly backend work, all cloud, not FAANG scale

Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


Heavy algo screens are cargo culting nonesense because the big MAANG boys do it, especially for python positions where you won't be writing your own c extensions for cython. Your gut feeling is right and the right people will prefer someone that can identify the real bottlenecks of webshit (architecture and db)

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Anything real-time, yes. Even if it's offline update jobs or whatever, yes, it can matter if your job is taking longer than you have overnight. The less important that work has to be done at a certain time, the less it's going to matter. I think there's very few jobs that you don't, at the very least, require some consideration for CPU/mem requirements, how much just depends on the role. That knowledge also tends to pay more, too, so learn it.

Good Sphere
Jun 16, 2018

a recruiter said a company that will interview me will ask me for my last job's pay stubs. i've never heard of a job doing this. i've been both permanent and contract. i looked it up, and it's illegal in my state to ask for this based on equity laws. it's gonna be weird telling them no

SeXTcube
Jan 1, 2009

I would tell them no even if it wasn’t illegal.

Arcsech
Aug 5, 2008

Mr SuperAwesome posted:

does much stuff ever have CPU/mem bottlenecks? or only in certain areas? IME i've never had to worry about that p much ever, the only times CPU/mem became relevant it was because we were doing something Very Stupid elsewhere, and you do the short term "thrown lots of money at it and scale" fix and long-term rearchitecture to something not stupid fix. but idk how much my experience here is relevant to other situations,. for reference: i've done mostly backend work, all cloud, not FAANG scale

I work on a database

most, but not all, of our bottlenecks are io based. but we can also do some pretty complex aggregations and number crunching. hell, I don’t even do much of that stuff myself, but it definitely exists.

we have also had problems due to e.g. doing something O(n^2) on a critical thread. performance isn’t super important in a vacuum but it can be super critical in context

hobbesmaster
Jan 28, 2008

Good Sphere posted:

a recruiter said a company that will interview me will ask me for my last job's pay stubs. i've never heard of a job doing this. i've been both permanent and contract. i looked it up, and it's illegal in my state to ask for this based on equity laws. it's gonna be weird telling them no

did that recruiter send you an email? just forward it to your state ag or whatever agency

Good Sphere
Jun 16, 2018

hobbesmaster posted:

did that recruiter send you an email? just forward it to your state ag or whatever agency

nope. phone call. same recruiter set me up for interviews for companies i've already had

CPColin
Sep 9, 2003

Big ol' smile.

Good Sphere posted:

it's gonna be loving awesome telling them no

Fixed

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raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice
ask for the request in writing, either you have a small chance to get them in Actual Trouble or you get to see some funny floundering

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