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bonuses differ in reliability between companies and sectors in techland from "you should just expect the pink slip next week if you dont get it" to "you should also play the lottery if you got it because lady luck loves you today"
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Jan 29, 2021 19:51
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bob dobbs is dead posted:bonuses differ in reliability between companies and sectors in techland from "you should just expect the pink slip next week if you dont get it" to "you should also play the lottery if you got it because lady luck loves you today" This is a nice endcap to this discussion
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Jan 29, 2021 19:57
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I can't see myself changing my behavior due to a (potential) bonus. Given that, any bonus seems like a combination of sham wage and/or profit sharing discounted at 100%.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:59
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if you work in finance, thats a coherent sector where you know going in itll be the 'no bonus means you just wait to get fired' attitude. you can bank on it about as well as you can bank on the salary unless theres another apocalyptic recession yet again
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Jan 29, 2021 20:12
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Confirming this. I've gotten the bonus for the entire tenure at a retail finance company, and yes, if you don't get it update your resume. My current place has rolled them into base pay recently, which is great, but the compensation is still bellow market, which is not.
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Jan 29, 2021 21:16
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There's a lot of talk about attending bootcamps, but has anyone ever taught at one? Or taught/tutored in some other formal environment? Recently, I've been feeling the need to give back. I'm thinking about becoming an educator. Does anyone have advice on how I would go about that?
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Feb 1, 2021 14:52
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Ither posted:There's a lot of talk about attending bootcamps, but has anyone ever taught at one? Or taught/tutored in some other formal environment? I teach at one. I happened to meet the director of the program (before he was director) at a workshop and have run into him at a few meetups before. He reached out to me with the opportunity since he was needing people to teach... so I guess networking. If other programs are like the one I'm involved with they are dying for teachers so I would honestly just contact all the programs in your area and see if there is any openings.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:02
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A colleague of mine participates in a program that provides computer touching classes to public schools. He finds it very satisfying. As for the regular boot camps: lately they became so scummy and exploitative in my area that I would not be able to do such a thing. I was toying with the idea of starting a meetup-like free coding class but then the pandemic stopped it in its tracks.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:03
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if you take an amazon dev job, it has a strong chance to be hell on earth! but take it anyways and job-hop out after you can't take it anymore, that's gonna be bigger total comp. a ____ major (tech major, logistics major, pharma major) is usually run basically as a weirdo suzerainty where the departments barely have anything to do with each other except the philosophy of "me against my brothers, me and my brothers against my cousins, me and my brothers and my cousins against the world" so there's not such a thing as consistency, whereas a 200 (really a 20) person company has no choice but to be consistent This was the case when I worked in a bank of all places. Infra (or at least one of the infra groups) would constantly take servers in the dev environment offline for maintenance with no warning or notice, every server would have at least one unique response format because no one from the dev teams talked to one another, and having your code broken by someone from a different team jumping in and changing things without notifying you was normal and expected (we had no unit tests, of course). Management knew about this but didn't care. The codebase was also one colossal monolith that assigned merge conflicts for resolution seemingly at random, but if you knew how to game the system you could kick the can down the road to the next person, so eventually a brand new hire was stuck unraveling a 1000+ line monstrosity because he didn't know how to avoid responsibility yet.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:13
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gbut posted:A colleague of mine participates in a program that provides computer touching classes to public schools. He finds it very satisfying. I helped organize a free coding club for a bit. The idea was just a weekly meetup to hack on personal projects or interview problems, with a mix of junior and senior people so you could find help if you needed to and otherwise socialize and network. It fell apart after a while. I'm on the fence between "the particular circumstances of this situation caused it to fail" or "the idea is bad". Circumstances: - the main senior developer who helped organize everything got a new job and relocated - a couple other seniors had babies and no longer were available for anything after hours Idea being bad: - the number of juniors (and non-coders) outnumbered seniors 10:1 and this ratio only got worse as the club became more well-known - a LOT of brand-new non-coders showed up weekly and a significant chunk of time was spent helping them set up a dev environment only for them to disappear and never come back - several non-coders were under the impression we would provide computers?? and/or expected it to be more like a bootcamp where there would be hand-holding every step of the way - finding a location to have the meetup was always a giant PITA, we didn't want to endorse any particular company or require a lot of $, so we floated around various coffeeshops and public library meeting rooms. The final straw was a person who kept showing up to "work on their startup" which actually was some insane cryptocurrency-adjacent thing and they monopolized entire meetups to try and convince all the juniors to work on their thing for free. This person did not code at all and was convinced that "open source" was actually just a word for "free labor". After being asked to leave, they harassed a bunch of the organizers at which point the remaining organizers just decided it really wasn't worth it. Last I heard this person has been banned from the local makerspace for similar antics.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:20
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Yeah, that sounds familiar. My take was organizing something more akin to an afterschool program, providing laptops (cheap cromebooks, or maybe get a few older macbooks) and teaching basics of programming. I was interested in the program my buddy was in, but it was 7am and different school every week, so it was a bit hard to fit my schedule. Then, the familiar story: I had a kid and a few weeks later the pandemic hit. I'm still really interested in the idea, maybe even partnering with the local public school directly, but it's been shelved for now. Once it looks like it could happen again I'll start fundraising. I live in a very poverty affected area and I would like to remove the barriers to entry as much as possible. I already have experience as I used to teach "web design" evening classes way back and I provided, according to my students, the best experience they had with those programs. Knowing that keeps me want to do it again. But also I want to avoid teaching bootcamps as they are either multi-$K crappy programs or take like 10% of your first year gross if you get an industry job, which ends up being the same, just a bit delayed.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:02
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What a nightmare. I always thought about attending a similar thing in Seoul or organizing something myself, but never did out of fear for something like that. I guess the only way to make that work would be to make it a sort of private social club with a vouch system or something like that.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:19
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Love Stole the Day posted:What a nightmare. I always thought about attending a similar thing in Seoul or organizing something myself, but never did out of fear for something like that. It really was fun for a while when it was just me and the other organizers and a few juniors we invited via word-of-mouth. Just having a non-work dedicated time to play around on side projects was really great, and the juniors who were actually juniors (as in, had working dev environments and were practicing interview problems and so forth) said it was really helpful. I have thoughts of re-establishing the club in a strictly private social capacity (no public website, no publicizing it via the local bootcamp), because until it got eternal-Septembered it was one of my favorite networking experiences. It actually felt like I got to know people for real, not just the stilted conversation of all the "networking events" that are so popular.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:43
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If you're interested in teaching, check with your local community colleges. You might get the opportunity to teach or assist in teaching a class there.
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Feb 1, 2021 16:46
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Ensign Expendable posted:This was the case when I worked in a bank of all places. Infra (or at least one of the infra groups) would constantly take servers in the dev environment offline for maintenance with no warning or notice, every server would have at least one unique response format because no one from the dev teams talked to one another, and having your code broken by someone from a different team jumping in and changing things without notifying you was normal and expected (we had no unit tests, of course). Management knew about this but didn't care. now you see, microservices is basically the formalization of the suzerainty and having diplomatic things under the auspices of the over-suzerain to get the vassals to agree on an interface and then gently caress off and use the interface for communication only so thats why microservices for a 20 person company doesnt work, they dont have the suzerainty yet
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Feb 1, 2021 18:22
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bob dobbs is dead posted:so thats why microservices for a 20 person company doesnt work, they dont have the suzerainty yet My experience has leaned more towards that small companies are 2 Agile 4 U - and doing things like ensuring that each service is versioned is too - gasp - waterfall. Or at least, that's my understanding from when our mission-critical microservice introduced over a dozen breaking changes over the course of the autumn.
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Feb 2, 2021 08:26
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How do y'all decide between similar offers? I've been interviewing for a senior role and got a couple companies lined up, but I'm struggling to decide between them. The comp is very similar - one company is about a dozen engineers, and the Dir. of Eng. is a guy I've worked with before, and he's a solid bloke. The other company is around 30 engineers, has a more interesting product, doesn't really have a great growth path past senior. Tech stack is similar, devops is still virtually non-existent at both. I guess everyone's criteria is different, but are there any red flags/subtle green flags that you look for when deciding?
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Feb 3, 2021 00:21
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IT BEGINS posted:How do y'all decide between similar offers? I will always choose to work with someone I've worked with before and liked.
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Feb 3, 2021 00:33
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Agree with vonnegutt. If they're otherwise similar, I'd take the job with the person I know is good to work with rather than roll the dice. Plus you've also mentioned that job B has less opportunity for growth. Really the only pro you've listed for job B is "more interesting product." How important is that to you? And does the product being more interesting mean the work is more interesting?
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Feb 3, 2021 15:33
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I'm struggling with an interesting opportunity, and curious if i would ruin my future career options. Has anybody taken the lower paying, more interesting option? I'm doing corporate boring web and mobile app full-stack development at a company, and have been for quite a while. I've been a Senior Engineer without promotion for the 4 years I've been here, and since I took on people leadership about ~1 year ago and am now managing people I'm being put up for promotion to Principal Engineer, which is mostly a management position here. My wife works in a university research lab, and I've occasionally helped them out some, and even done a small amount of official paid consulting. I have a really good relationship with her lab's PI, and they've joked for years that I have a job offer with them if I ever wanted. Now the department chair and PI are actually trying to make it happen, and they're putting together an incredibly interesting-to-me package that involves both developing open-source human genetics software, helping them design and maintain a large-scale data processing pipelines, and helping cloud-migrate some of their tools as the university is moving their biorepository to a cloud solution. This department doesn't own the biorepository, but consumes it, and they're pretty concerned that their current usage pattern would result in a bill of untold millions to AWS if they just naively continue doing things as they were before. I know and would really enjoy all of the people I'd be working with, and I'd be working with my wife sometimes but not always, which sounds pretty great to me. Her PI mentioned casually that they ordered another Petabyte of disk for their on-prem storage last month, they're growing about about 500TB/year of the lab's own data. Here's the catch: It's a huge pay cut. They just are not capable of paying me what I'm getting right now, because of University pay scale rules, regardless of what they title me as, because I only have a BS. If I had an MS they could match my base pay, but not my current total cash comp. I would have the opportunity to get an MS for free while I'm there, including in a data science degree that I think could open doors for doing some really interesting, highly compensated specialist work supporting data science at more prestigious tech companies after this. Obviously the university would like to have me there for years, and they're mentioning basically that if I get an MS they could pay me more, so if I did decide to do this I'd likely try and rush through a masters. I'm fairly certain that getting to do this stuff would make me a better engineer all around. I'm salivating at the bit of using a $300k/year IT hardware purchasing budget to run workloads that would cost several million per year to run in AWS, as well as the chance to do HPC work. They're unhappy with their current server setup, and looking to bring me in to use this latest new batch of fresh disk to set up & tune Ceph (or similar), and fix their HPC job queue. I'm feeling pretty bored and directionless with CRUD react and mobile app development, and corporate microservice Kabuki where everybody is fine with 7 network calls and application-level joins to get any bit of information. I'm also concerned that the type of work that I'd be doing for the university pays less, even at corps, despite being more complex and being a rarer skill-set. I also haven't gotten a masters because my understanding is they don't carry much weight in corporate hiring, and I'm about 10 years into my career, it seems to late to be doing a masters without wanting to do a major change of direction.
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Feb 4, 2021 21:58
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Twerk from Home posted:I'm struggling with an interesting opportunity, and curious if i would ruin my future career options. Just from the way you talk about them, it seems pretty clear that you should take the University job. It sounds like it will open at least as many future career options as it closes. Unless Engineering Management is where you really want to be, I don't think you're missing out on much.
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Feb 4, 2021 22:08
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Twerk from Home posted:I'm struggling with an interesting opportunity, and curious if i would ruin my future career options. this is not advice, but not only does that sound super interesting to me, it also sounds like you think it's interesting. is getting an MS something you'd consider? because then it becomes even more appealing.
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Feb 4, 2021 22:20
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I switched from webdev work to university work and it was a great way to pivot my career. You get to work with interesting people on interesting projects, and when you leave you'll be well positioned to work in the relatively exclusive scientific software world if you want. The main things to consider that I can think of are:
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Feb 4, 2021 22:30
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I've done the big pay cut twice, once to go back to school and another time to move from a highly compensated but dead-end job in a toxic financial services firm to something that's much more interesting and less miserable. In both cases it was a good choice. The thing you have to keep in mind is that every job switch should advance your career somehow. When you're starting out that mostly takes the form of improved compensation or titles, but as you get more senior there are other possibilities. You can either be doing more interesting work, or something that sets you up for a transition out of the standard IC path. This comes with both: you're doing something that you definitely consider more interesting than what you're doing, you're taking a lead role on a system, and you get a free graduate degree. It's a big step forward, and as long as you can handle the pay cut, it sounds like a good opportunity.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:01
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I just did somewhat the same about a year and a half ago, moved away from NOVA working lovely DoD contracts where everyone was a contractor and out to backstab everyone else and moved back to my hometown, pretty big pay cut, but cost of living is way cheaper and there's not 20 miles of red tape to actually implement new features and such. Also much less stressful.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:10
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If you like management stick with where you're at for another year or two then re-evaluate your options. If you want out of management, take the interesting IC role at the uni.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:39
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I haven't done this kind of jump, but a friend of mine at a previous company left to work on something that was similarly interesting to him at a pay cut, and he has only had good things to say! Also, thanks vonnegutt and HappyHippo, I'm going to go with the job where my friend works.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:41
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I switched from webdev work to university work and it was a great way to pivot my career. You get to work with interesting people on interesting projects, and when you leave you'll be well positioned to work in the relatively exclusive scientific software world if you want. I really appreciate all of this feedback guys. I'm seriously considering this mostly because of the department chair stepping in, which is a more reliable funding source than one single lab. The specific lab is massively over-funded right now, they got multiple R01 grants that they thought were long-shots and underspent their budget by millions last year, but I know that may not last forever. My current company's culture has given me a chance to be the full lead on systems design already, leadership are huge believer's in the "two pizza" team thing, and every team is free to choose whatever techs they want. My team ended up inheriting projects from several other teams after a re-org, so at the start of last year our tech stack included (for one customer facing experience) Javascript, Typescript, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, and Go on Mobile (which I didn't even know was a thing). Also, there's no "infrastructure team" or anything like it, so everybody chooses how they host stuff. A couple of brave teams of 3-5 engineers are running their own K8S clusters, which we have hundreds of across the company, but most are doing lambdas for everything, and my group has had the best experience with ECS on Fargate as a comfortable middle ground. I've spent a lot of the last year working to reduce the breadth of our tech stack while still delivering new features, and it's been exhausting.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:57
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Can I have your uni job if you don't want it?
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Feb 5, 2021 00:05
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Twerk from Home posted:I've spent a lot of the last year working to reduce the breadth of our tech stack while still delivering new features, and it's been exhausting. Holy poo poo man that sounds like hell, if you're excited about this other opportunity and can stomach the pay cut I say do it I think you'll end up a lot happier. My current job doesn't sound even a quarter that stressful and I still dream of something more chill for less money once I suck on the golden teat a little longer. Also if you're interested in that Masters, does the university offer any way for staff to enroll in courses or programs, maybe part-time and at a discount? If you're interested in a Masters on a personal fulfillment level that could be a fringe benefit, and if you stayed at the university long term would even have some financial ROI.
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Feb 5, 2021 00:08
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Twerk from Home posted:I'm struggling with an interesting opportunity, and curious if i would ruin my future career options. 1. How long would it take you to get a masters, and what does a smaller salary really mean to you? I'd look at what programs they'd offer, the full aid package through the job, and see what the actual position support for your continuing education looks like. Then you can sketch out what that interim financial picture looks like. No reason to add another level of stress to a job change & pandemic. 2. It's sounding like you'll kind of be a department of one. As long as you're confident you can operate without the safety net that comes with other people to work with, there's huge opportunities there. You get to set your own standard. 3. Odds are the people in the lab didn't get into their field of research to get really good at coding. You make their lives easier and they will take a bullet for you. I'm an analyst in health care, and it does not get old being told "I've heard you're the guy" by total strangers because I created a way they can do their jobs painlessly.
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Feb 5, 2021 02:00
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Twerk from Home posted:I'm struggling with an interesting opportunity, and curious if i would ruin my future career options. You're obviously excited about it and its probably better long term for your career, if the pay cut isn't going to put you and your wife in a bad place financially do it.
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Feb 5, 2021 02:13
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How commonplace is it to have your offer/contract inspected by an attorney before signing? i.e.: to check for any squirelly stuff like non-compete clauses or the like. I've never done it so far and I'm sure I have no reason to expect it from this potential offer, but two different programmers I've talked to mention they still run any new contract by a lawyer. If I should be doing so, how would I go about finding a decent attorney for California labour laws? The easy solution of googling it just seems to yield a bunch of lawsuit happy, ambulance chaser style law offices.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:32
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Jan posted:How commonplace is it to have your offer/contract inspected by an attorney before signing? i.e.: to check for any squirelly stuff like non-compete clauses or the like. I've never done it so far and I'm sure I have no reason to expect it from this potential offer, but two different programmers I've talked to mention they still run any new contract by a lawyer. In california, most of the things I care about aren't enforceable. I've never had luck amending contracts regardless.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:52
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Jan posted:How commonplace is it to have your offer/contract inspected by an attorney before signing? i.e.: to check for any squirelly stuff like non-compete clauses or the like. I've never done it so far and I'm sure I have no reason to expect it from this potential offer, but two different programmers I've talked to mention they still run any new contract by a lawyer. I had a lawyer look at the first programming job agreement I signed, tell me to get a couple of things changed, and asked for them. all my requests were rejected and I signed anyway, so for me it was basically 300 bucks lit on fire. I have a more established career now and might have more clout to ask for alterations, and 300 bucks isn't a lot of money at this point in my career. I would probably do it again if I saw something in a contract I didn't recognize.
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Feb 6, 2021 22:34
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Chances are that, if it's a big company, they have their contract prescribed by the legal department, and it would be a huge hassle for them to cater to each individual. Smaller companies tend to be more flexible that way.
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Feb 6, 2021 23:19
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Yeah, they already had to slightly delay my offer letter because they had to reword part of it to take my visa transfer into account, apparently, so I imagine they have to adapt somewhat. But it's true that there is very little that could be a nuisance that's actually applicable in California. I'll just see what comes in and do my due diligence. Speaking of due diligence, has anyone actually asked for salary ranges as is allowed to applicants by California law? The terms of my offer are better both in terms of salary and benefits, the place looks fun to work at and my current startup is running out of runway so I'll pretty much definitely take it. I just have such little experience as to what salaries look like in figgieland that I'd like to see what their own ranges look like, but not enough to annoy a future employer if it's something that tends to irritate them.
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Feb 7, 2021 00:30
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gbut posted:Chances are that, if it's a big company, they have their contract prescribed by the legal department, and it would be a huge hassle for them to cater to each individual. Smaller companies tend to be more flexible that way. It’s usually easier in big than little because the legal staff is in house. I’m at a 900 person division of a much larger company and we definitely update offer languages in house usually in a few days. My director level team even has weekly legal office hours for anything that would come up.
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Feb 7, 2021 00:35
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bob dobbs is dead posted:
Are we talking about Walmart labs? https://careers.walmart.com/technology/technology-software-development/walmart-labs
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Feb 7, 2021 12:38
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walmart labs is itself a 6000 peep org. they got both the pie in the sky r&d peeps and the nose to the grindstone ecommerce peeps, yeah
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Feb 7, 2021 12:52
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