|
I'm a Rails/JS developer trying to fast-track my way into a management or architect role. I spoke to my boss (he is C-level; I work at a small agency) about my career plans and he made amenable noises but suggested that he'd be more comfortable with that if I had some certifications under my belt. He didn't give me any specific guidelines or goals for certifications to pursue other than he saw me "in a generalist role" and so I'm a bit lost in choosing something helpful, especially since web development moves so fast that from an engineering point of view, certification is meaningless. I have $1800 of company budget with a promise for more next year if I use this wisely. What certifications are worth pursuing, especially considering my mid-long term goal is a track change to a more strategic role?
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2015 04:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:34 |
|
|
baquerd posted:The PMP comes first to mind here. You can also look into other process certifications, such as ISO. As I get older, I'm less and less interested in learning the new way to iterate over a collection in hipster.js every six months. Becoming an engineering manager seems like a good way to not have to do that while still
|
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2015 06:48
|
|
|
I have a phone screen with Amazon and I'm intimidated because I've never interviewed with a bigcorp before. Is there anything in particular I should be prepared for?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2015 02:48
|
|
|
Urit posted:That's why I'm trying to figure out how to transition more to an official software development type role, because I love the part where I'm solving the problems, but I hate the part where the problem is just "how do I get some lovely code to behave just long enough to work" with no way to fix it. I have some bad news for you about software development
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2015 01:00
|
|
|
Blinkz0rz posted:I've got stock options at my new company but really have no idea what that means or how I take advantage of them. What sort of stuff should I know? Anything I should be careful about? Stock options are pretty much what it says on the tin - they give you the future options to buy shares of stock in the company that you're working for. When a company is formed, it issues a number of shares to its founding members and reserves others for later options (the "options pool"). You can think of a share as being like a currency, in that they have a fluctuating value which the officers of the company and market forces can influence. When the company takes outside investment, it can issue more shares, which dilutes the value of the shares. If the company performs well, the market can decide that the company's worth more, which increases the value of the shares. (For a simple example, a company's worth a million dollars and has a million shares; each share is "worth" $1. Suddenly there's two million shares but the valuation hasn't changed. Each share is worth $0.50. But doubling the shares let the company expand like crazy and brought the company's worth to ten million. Each share is "worth" $5.) The "future option" part means that you can, at some specified point in the future, buy some number of shares at some fixed price. So in our example above, you join when the company's worth a million, I say okay, in a year you can buy 10,000 shares at $1 no matter what the shares are selling for on the market. A year goes by, the value's gone up, you buy your 10k shares at a $1 apiece. Options generally "vest" over time, so rather than a one-time event, you can progressively get more options over time. So I might say that starting in one year, over the course of four years, you can buy 48,000 shares. The first month you can buy 12,000, and each month after you can buy 1,000 more as long as you're still employed by the company. This is, under ideal circumstances, to encourage employee retention. Making matters more complex is the fact that investor shares are "preferred", which means if the company gets sold for a loss (or liquidated), the investors get paid first. Later investors and non-preferred stock gets paid out of what's left over, which will probably be nothing. So assuming that options are a significant part of your compensation package, you'll want to know (or, rather, might have wanted to know before you signed anything) how many total shares there are, what the option price is, how many shares you can buy using your options, what your vesting schedule is, whether or not the company is planning to take further investment, and what their growth strategy is. There are also significant tax implications surrounding options, so be sure to talk to a tax professional before you buy any.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2015 06:19
|
|
|
A diplomatic way to go about it is to tell your manager that you're concerned about the project's timelines because you're feeling blocked on tasks ABC due to needing XYZ from your co-worker and he's been hard to get in touch with lately. You could also ask your co-worker what the most convenient way to get in touch with him during work hours is for times when he's out of the office and something urgent comes up. (This assumes a certain level of professionalism on their part, naturally, but I think it's better to try a bit of honey first before going for a confrontation.)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2015 02:43
|
|
|
What if I hate fun, driving, and the lower middle class all at the same time?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2015 11:43
|
|
|
Cicero posted:I'm curious how often people at other companies find themselves changing managers. Just found out today, I'll be getting my sixth manager soon, and I've been here a few months short of two years (and I haven't really changed projects at all). In also just short of two years, I've had either 4 managers or none, depending on how I interpret "manager".
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2015 03:05
|
|
|
Cryolite posted:Can I get a critique of my resume? My boring enterprise .NET LOB job looks more and more like a dead-end and although I don't quite have the portfolio for it yet I want to see if I can move to Scala or a more JVM-focused position doing cool poo poo. Reword/omit the "previously abandoned as unworkable" clause. I know you're going for "turned hopeless project around" but that's not the only way that it can be interpreted. I'd also consider highlighting the tech talk in a different light. It reads as "I gave a lecture one day," not as "I did exhaustive research on thing and presented it to the organization, which went on to save $X or make $X more as a result". If you can stick dollar amounts on your bullet points, that's usually a good way to improve a resume. I'm ambivalent about the "tech I'm teaching myself" section. It's unconventional, sure, but some people might look at it and think "oh this guy's interested in new technology and continuing to learn, good for him". Other people will look at it and think "wtf, did this guy just fall off of a turnip truck". The kinds of industries you've worked for seem more conventional and by-the-book, so I'd probably suggest getting rid of it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2015 03:58
|
|
|
Cryolite posted:Sorry, I meant per hour. That was a typo. I just edited my post. $60/hr * 2,080 hours a year = $124,800 for the year. That means working all those hours without any time off, so realistically I'd never get that much. A rule of thumb I've heard for contracting is to take your hourly rate and multiply it by 1000 and that's an estimate of how much to expect to keep after additional costs and expenses and not always having 40 billable hours a week.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2016 02:55
|
|
|
Management at the company I work for is planning to introduce 360-degree reviews. Myself and several of my colleagues are deeply unhappy with this idea, because we feel like it will undermine our present culture of collaboration and replace it with one of suspicion. Is this worth fighting a political battle over or is it wiser to just cut my losses and  out?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 05:22
|
|
|
I don't hate the idea of 360 reviews on principle, but in this particular case my worry is that they're going to be designed & implemented as anonymous backbiting performance reviews rather than a tool to unearth favoritism or communication issues. My company isn't bad, on balance, but one of senior management's negative traits is passive aggression, and my spider sense is that this initiative is going to feed that.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2016 20:50
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:My parents are skeptical of my job (which has improved quite a bit recently!) and are starting to not-so-subtly push me into going back to school/the military via getting an infosec job (long story). What the heck? "Child, please give up your job in one of the most highly paying professions in human history to join an organization where other people actively want to murder you in order to eventually wind up with a job which severely restricts your future options into a narrow track where the largest customer is the federal government." "Child, please give up your job in one of the most highly paying professions in human history to pay other people mid-five-figures a year to teach you something so that you may eventually have a job where the average entry level pay is less than what you currently make."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2016 03:51
|
|
|
I've seen it used as a junior PM role/a fig leaf for people wanting to move from dev into PM.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2016 06:48
|
|
|
taqueso posted:I scored an interview with a company that I thought would be perfect for me. I know how to do the things they need done, they build things I enjoy as a hobby, and they are located in an area I would be happy with (not quite my ideal location, but pretty close). Now I am dealing with HR stuff that is rubbing me the wrong way. Should I judge the company based on HR? I was worried they might be too large and corporate for me, and now I think I am starting to see some of that. Additionally, the internal recruiter told me the top end of their salary range yesterday and it isn't what I expected. Possibly close enough to what I want that I could negotiate up, but disappointing to see that their stated max is below the median salary for the area (which is below the median for the country). In situations like this, I suggest following your instincts and walking away. The heart knows things that the mind never will, and it would be terrible to wind up working in a poor work culture for poor pay because you don't want to pass judgment on a company.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 02:48
|
|
|
Volguus posted:Well they are saying that it isn't a problem, but are they representative of the whole spectrum? I mean, US has 0 vacation days mandatory, but I don't think anyone here is even considering not having at least some vacation days from their employer (however laughable it may be for a german the 10-15 days of vacation americans get). We started the entire discussion from a google employment offer. Well, let's be serious, if you're good enough to work for Google, you're good enough to work anywhere. You don't have to worry about a thing, as probably already have several jobs that you can pick from at any point in time you feel like it. And get at least 20% pay raise when you're hopping jobs. Thanks for your input on US employment law. How are the First Nations doing?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2016 02:57
|
|
|
How weird is an interview that's formally structured with alternating opportunities for questions? I mean the interviewer asks a question, then the interviewee asks a question, and so on.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2017 10:00
|
|
|
Dogcow posted:I don't know if it's still in business but there was some search engine that specialized in finding everything you ever did online, I tried it once and it dragged up usenet posts I made in 1996 Isn't it called Google?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2017 10:35
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:If you spent a few hours doing a take home assignment, how would you feel if the person who reviewed it had spent maybe a cumulative 5 hours (writing incredibly simple automation scripts) with the language you chose to use and would be the person assessing you? Sure I can see how it runs, if he did the features adhering to the spec, did anything obviously boneheaded, etc. and I will without whining or saying anything to anyone. Anyway, management is my boss, he's the VP of engineering on our side. But it feels unfair to the candidate. I would want the most checked-out, idiotic, and unobservant member of the team to be the one who reviewed my code, provided that they're not also hostile to new blood.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 03:13
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:So I've been getting feedback for a while related to being proactive on a team and reaching out to get work done as opposed to taking a more reactive role where work is handed to me and I just send it off to review. It ranged from seeming unfocused on the work to be done, to seeking out work and getting involved without prompting (hackathon mentality), to the rest of the team working overtime whereas I wasn't so much, which is hard to tell since I'm one of two developers physically in the office and the other works remotely a lot. This kinda feels like making excuses, though. It's definitely taken a toll on perception of me as an employee and I would be lying if I didn't say some of it was due to slight burnout and dissatisfaction with the job. Still, I'm not happy about it. Being criticized that other people are taking OT while you're not is insane. I'd have hit back by asking why the rest of my team is so incompetent that they can't do their work in 40 hours.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 03:57
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:I'm pulling an effective 9-to-5 each day, and while I'm there I'm productive and working on all the tickets and pieces of work that I need to get done, so I'm not sure what the problem is there. Of course, there's tickets that are slow due to dumb blockers like laggy, broken deployment pipelines, unfamiliarity with tech, etc. - nothing takes exactly as long as you think it will. And productivity is hampered across the organization by issues with project management (our new org lead that just replaced the 3 highest people in the office had a big ol' rant about it today), so I have a bit of an issue with taking a lack of productivity personally. Dunno if it's possible to convince anyone in the organization of that, though. I don't like playing therapist for an internet comedy forum stranger, but you sound extremely unhappy and like you're in an organization which makes you miserable. You'll save thousands on therapy bills later and possibly on months/years of income lost or diminished due to burnout by finding a new job.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 19:18
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:I wouldn't be personally rattled (just ready to check out, instead) if there was an agreement of sorts. I don't believe it exists outside of "you, do more overtime". It's a legal distinction. Computer professionals are among the types of employees who aren't entitled to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 21:12
|
|
|
It exists because developers tolerate it. If companies started losing their dev staff every time a project manager said "crunch time," the practice would quickly end.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 22:18
|
|
|
lifg posted:On the other side are times when you can naturally relax, like the week between Christmas and NYE, and often a couple weeks in August when executives like to all go on vacation. Oh, sure, there's always reasons why it might be tolerable. I think that your comparison is only apples-to-apples if the company policy is that you don't have to report to work on those days, though.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 22:34
|
|
|
Over time, places that ask for a lot of overtime or otherwise have abusive practices get a bad reputation and will have trouble attracting quality talent. It's not immediate and doesn't provide recompense directly to the people who suffer by those practices, but there are long-term economic costs to it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2017 07:55
|
|
|
vonnegutt posted:This was presented as a rule of thumb for any kind of career, not just tech - it seems like the tech field regards "job hoppers" differently in general. I've heard of some hiring managers in tech looking at people staying in a position longer than 5 years as a negative, thinking they haven't kept up with modern tech, and some who even recommend that new devs always switch jobs after 3 years in order to build their resume, even if they're happy where they are. It can be luck-of-the-draw on who reviews your resume, even within the same company. When I review resumes, I don't care how long the average tenure of a candidate at a job is unless there's a compelling reason to (ie, if I know the candidate is going to be assigned to a project with no end in sight). On the other hand, one of my non-developer colleagues has bounced candidates for not sticking around at past jobs long enough for their taste. CPColin posted:"The international team in SLO are mostly senior leads; most of the actual developers are in India." vonnegutt's experience mirrors my own. I would run screaming.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
CPColin posted:I've got this lunch tomorrow, so I'm working tonight on figuring out how to ask the right questions and give this job a fair shake. Unemployment benefits don't last forever, after all! (But I don't want to set myself up to be miserable, of course.) I'm sure you'll do the needful.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2017 07:27
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:What is stopping me from quitting a job and THEN going job hunting? Is it always 100% necessary to have a job lined up before quitting, or is it just best practice? If you work in an industry or locale where it can take 6 months to find a new position, or if you have significant risk of ruin and no savings, it's good advice to play it safe. But if you're a single person with enough savings to cover a few months of no income and no children, it's not the end of the world (and it might make you feel better to eject from a bad situation). I forget what the term of art for it is, but leaving your job counts as a trigger which gives you the option to buy insurance on your state's ACA marketplace. If your insurance needs are low ("what if I get cancer?") then you can look for an affordable plan on there.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2017 21:24
|
|
|
If someone tried to make me sign that contract, I'd resign my position at their company on the spot.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2017 06:40
|
|
|
The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Oldie Programming: He seems to want to engineer our own version of Kafka
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2017 15:42
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:It's a React/Elixir thing, so I'm up for it. I'm more concerned about getting screwed over as an employee and what a contractor status means for paying taxes, health insurance, total compensation, etc. What kinds of questions should I ask re: that? Contracting is basically starting your own company where you sell business services to clients. This is different from an employer/employee relationship in many ways -- you have a lot more freedom, but you have a lot more responsibilities (and among those responsibilities is to stand up for yourself, since clients try to do unacceptable poo poo all the time). They're going to cut you a check and you're going to have to do all of the bookkeeping yourself regarding giving the government its tax money. You're also going to have to pay self-employment taxes. Hiring a bookkeeper/accountant will save you money and grief here. You can have whatever health insurance plan you want (* that you can actually get) because you'll be paying for it. You can have as much time off as you want, because you won't be getting paid for any it. You can work from wherever you want, because you'll be paying for your own equipment. And so on. It can be more money if you don't mind being a mercenary and having to drum up business. On the other hand, it can be a lot less compensation if you're bad at negotiating or let the company walk all over you. (Cautionary tale: I once worked with a contractor who was charging less per hour than I was making per hour in salary as a FTE. On top of that, they paid extra tax, their own health insurance, had no PTO, no 401k, nothing. They had far more technical experience than I did. Don't be that guy.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 20:59
|
|
|
metztli posted:Among management, the thing being suggested is we change the current system and have one of our team leads handle all of the offshore teams and no in-house team, as maybe then that person would be able to see ways to improve performance since they have a more comprehensive view and might be able to more efficiently handle problems that come up. The cons of this are that the offshore teams will still rotate talent, the lead will likely wind up in a position where they don't care about the people they're supposed to be leading as a result, and in general it seems weird to devote resources to helping another company get better employees which we will not get to benefit from. That position is a goat. In time, whoever leads the offshore "team" will come to be blamed for its inefficiencies and failures, which they can't control because they stem from another company taking advantage of yours. All of the negative feelings about that will attach themselves to the internal manager who's overseeing it. I'd avoid it like the plague.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 16:31
|
|
|
Mniot posted:I'm not sure what's wrong with taking a counter-offer. I mean, yeah your current job doesn't appreciate your true worth but neither does the new job. If the only thing at issue is that you want more compensation (more money, less commute, more vacation) and it takes slapping them with another offer to get it, are they really going to hold it against you? In my experience, yes. You might get what you want in the counteroffer, but many bosses will resent you for playing the game.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2017 02:28
|
|
|
Achievement unlocked: received call from drunken recruiter
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2017 01:18
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:But now you gotta tell us about this conversation. There isn't much of a backstory to it. A recruiter called me and pitched me on a role, I liked what I heard and so I told him to go ahead and present me at my W2 rate. A few days pass, the recruiter calls me and is obviously shitfaced, said something like "I've been having some trouble holding it together today" in the pleasantries part of the call. Eventually he gets around to telling me that the client passed because I wanted too much money. He started to insinuate that maybe if I lowered my rate, he could work something out. I politely told him that my rate's my rate and I'm not changing it, he started to argue, I hung up on him.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2017 19:20
|
|
|
Sinten posted:Given my lack of mentors and experienced people I trust, I turn to you for advice. Should I stay here for another year and give my boss more pushback, knowing that the market is hot and the consequences for me won't be very severe? Should I brush up on CTCI and hit the job boards? Should I slowly fade in my current position and start going to meet-ups and network my way into a job without the dehumanizing experience of endless take-home assignments, smug pedants and smoke and mirrors? Is my job experience common and will happen anywhere I go in this field? Help, I just want to build cool poo poo and go home at the end of the day! Find something else and leave. You're dealing with a passive-aggressive person; he won't fire you but he also won't fix the situation. The only way to "solve" it in any conclusive way is to persuade your skip-level to fire him and replace him with you, and it sounds like you don't want to go down that road. Networking is a good idea, especially if you're a good talker and don't shy away from conversation. (This can also be a way to discover mentors, even outside of the professional/coworker relationship. I've gotten amazing advice, information literally worth tens of thousands of dollars, for the price of a cup of coffee or a meal.) You might want to look into consulting/contracting -- that can be a good way to leverage good communication skills as well as technical ones.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2017 04:30
|
|
|
Is there a good place to look for remote contract opportunities? A lot of freelancer places seem geared toward designers or people in Belarus who can work for $10/hr.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2017 21:44
|
|
|
Thanks. Somehow I totally blanked on StackOverflow careers.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2017 23:51
|
|
|
I look forward to the JavaScript vs COBOL turf wars of 2027.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2017 00:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:34 |
|
|
Sinten posted:How do I resist the urge to tell my boss to eat poo poo (in a sterile, corporate way) and walk out? I have enough financial security to not need a job for years, so there's no risk of not making rent or starving before I can get another job. The reasons I have to stay around is to get paid for suffering through interactions with my dumbshit boss, to avoid awkward conversations during interviews, and to have more negotiating power with newly undiscovered dysfunctional teams that don't know that my work situation also sucks. But it takes so many hours out of my week and is making me deeply unhappy. Anyone else been in this position before? How did it go? Your first objection isn't important if you have cash reserves described in "years" and live in a place where there are many companies who need your skill set. Your second objection doesn't matter so much in our field as in fields like marketing, where a person's skills are hard to empirically evaluate in a short period of time. Your third objection assumes a false premise: your negotiating power is already insanely high because you have years of cash on hand and can't be pressured by time or need, which is the main leverage a corp has. If you're miserable, leave your job and hunt for a new one full time.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2017 23:21
|
|