|
JawnV6 posted:Principal engineers aren't management and aren't individual contributors. I went from senior to lead to principal at my last place, and you know what? It sucked. I had no actual clout to change things managerially that needed to be changed, like increasing head count on the ops team or stopping the relentless amoeba-like expansion of the complexity of the tech stack or forcing teams to deal with tech debt, but the title meant I was Chief poo poo-Shoveler and the person who was always the first to get called to clean up somebody else's mess, because I knew the infrastructure. I could bend people's ears all day about this stuff but not actually force any changes, and it was hugely frustrating, and was mostly why I quit and went elsewhere. Now I am aggressively pursuing a managerial track and making it clear I don't want to remain in engineering roles forever. I enjoy engineering and building things, but companies have clear-cut paths upwards for people in managerial roles and typically not so much for engineering roles. If I'm going to be in a position where I'm constantly consulted about things, I want to have the power to actually do something about these things, not just plead with other people who do have the power.
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2015 02:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:08 |
|
|
sink posted:I never suggested asking a manager about a coworker's personal life. That's nonsense. I suggested asking if everything is okay. That's it. Or don't go to the manager, go to the guy first. It doesn't really matter. I had a manager in a previous job who, after a while, started reliably missing Mondays. Then it was reliably Mondays and Tuesdays. Then it was reliably Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Then he went on disability. We knew something was up, but we didn't really find out until he went on disability. It definitely caused a lot of tension in the team, plus we were operating without a manager most of the time and lost our main avenue of communication with the direction of the rest of the tech group. Point is, you can bring it up with your manager without straight-up asking whether your co-worker is spending his days at the methadone clinic. You can just ask whether something's up with your co-worker in a non-specific way; if your manager says there is, you can probably leave it at that because you know it's on their radar. If they don't know what you mean, you can get it on their radar.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2015 19:35
|
|
|
The "dick move" is his co-worker not showing up to work and avoiding obligations. If it's a legitimate issue and it's already been worked out with management, bringing it up with the manager is no harm, no foul. If it's a legitimate issue and it hasn't been worked out with management, then it provides an opportunity to do so. If it's not a legitimate issue, then it's a step on the path to removing somebody from the team who's not carrying their weight. Even in the United States of Libertopia there exist a fair number of short-term disability provisions for white-collar workers, his company probably has them, and his co-worker can use them if that's what's necessary. It's not his job to play team policeman, that's the manager's job. Confronting somebody about delinquency may sour things permanently between him and that person. Companies have HR departments and management chains to deal with this kind of thing. Let them deal with it instead of being a vigilante. This isn't about not having empathy, this is about protecting yourself from interpersonal repercussions and having the people whose job it is it to deal with personnel matters deal with personnel matters.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2015 14:32
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:You can, but your commute will be 45 minutes each way on a good day. I live in New Jersey across the Hudson from Manhattan, can see my office building from my apartment window (<2 miles as the crow flies), and if it takes me less than an hour one way it was a good commute. I would love to have a reliable 45 minute commute.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2016 04:27
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm looking to move on from my first actual dev job that I've been at for 2 years. Are there any extra good sites for finding smaller, younger companies looking for engineers? I've seen a bunch of interesting stuff on Angel.co, and a bit on Stack Overflow but less so there. Beyond that I have no idea where to look. (I'm in NYC) I gave Hired a try when I was looking around in Midtown/Lower Manhattan around a year ago. I ended up taking an offer not from Hired, but the experience was generally positive, although I didn't advance to a serious stage with any of the companies on Hired.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2016 04:56
|
|
|
Doh004 posted:Echoing what Chutwig said, try out Hired. Got my current job through them. Haha, Plated. Has the SVP of Eng tried to jam Hadoop into everything yet? That was his parting gift when I worked with him before.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2016 01:00
|
|
|
mrmcd posted:Seriously. What is so bad about that place that they have to freelance this army of clones built from the DNA of Gil Gunderson crossed with Patrick Bateman? As an employee of Bloomberg who deals with recruiting from our side pretty frequently, I'd like to get your feedback on what they're doing (what position(s) are they recruiting for, which office, etc.). I myself was recruited to BB via a 3rd-party recruiter rather than in-house recruiting. My team has like 4 headcount we're trying to fill right now, so it'll be funny if they're spamming you trying to fill these positions.  Knowing which recruiting firm or firms are the worst is helpful as well. Since Pollyanna's thing mentioned Clojure/RoR, I have an idea of which teams they might be trying to fill for.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 18:50
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:Nah it's a form letter that pulled two things from your skills section. They're not actually using clojure and ror they're just showing they "read" your resume. It's all c++ I bet. That depends very much on what team they're recruiting for.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 19:21
|
|
|
mrmcd posted:stuff Around when did you go through the interview process? The lack of regimentation in the screening/interviewing process has been an ongoing issue and Strongly Worded E-mails on this matter have been dispatched with regularity; additional data points are helpful. We also do have a lovely tendency to do too many on-site callbacks. I and other people have been working on making the point that we should be ready with the up-or-down after the on-site and we should not be calling people back for a second on-site to get grilled by a director/VP-level person. As far as dress code goes, shorts and T-shirts are normal in the engineering division. Showing up to an interview that way with one of the financial products groups might not get a person far, but they're a totally different culture. I interviewed wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, which is the same stuff I normally wear to work, and the last guy I hired spent the entire day wearing his North Face. mrmcd posted:Also, when I did my Google interview, one of the interviewers asked me what I thought about Bloomberg, since I was working in finance at the time. I said something non-committal along the lines of "I dunno, I hear it's either good or terrible depending on what part of the company you work for." I asked why he asked and he just shrugged and said "we interview lots of good people from there who seem to want out really really badly." I can definitely think of reasons why people would want out, depending on the group they're in, but that's common to any large tech company. chutwig fucked around with this message at 19:41 on May 6, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 19:39
|
|
|
Pollyanna posted:This was from Full Stack Solutions, if that helps. In any case, I'm in Boston, and I'm not looking to move, so I'll have to pass unless they accept remote work (probably don't). Yeah, we don't do 100% full remote. Our main engineering centers are NYC, DC, and London. Since BB apparently spams the entire tech world mercilessly with headhunters, if anyone else has gotten stuff from us or our contracted recruiting hellminions and wants an honest appraisal of how it feels to work in fintech, I will be happy to supply information on what it's like to work here. (tl;dr: you are allowed to wear shorts, work-life balance is pretty good, some of the tech can be... venerable)
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 23:57
|
|
|
lifg posted:Whenever I read about the CAP theorem, it gets mentioned that fintech is rumored to have amazing uptime *and* great handling of partitions, but it never gives details. What are you people doing so right? Most BB stuff runs on an in-house database engine called comdb2, which is due to be open sourced at some point. http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p1377-scotti.pdf is a paper that was published about it recently. I had beers with Alex Scotti a few times before he left to go work on RDS-related things at Amazon, but I've never used comdb2 myself. My natural reaction to encountering something developed in-house is to turn left quickly, and there are a fair number of such things given the company's age and tentative steps into the world of open source, but things are changing. MySQL and PostgreSQL are used pretty widely as well for internal/infrastructure use (my team for example uses MySQL+Galera), but anything that appears in the Terminal is coming from a comdb2 instance somewhere. As far as fintech having amazing uptime, it tends to be very conservative, because the markets go apeshit and people melt down when we gently caress up (disclaimer: I was not the cause of any of these outages). Skandranon posted:It's probably the biggest house of cards built out of Access and Excel that will end the world. I can deny without reservation that any part of the Terminal runs on Access or Excel. chutwig fucked around with this message at 05:42 on May 7, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 7, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
Arachnamus posted:How real is the "core systems full of COBOL" thing? I've never heard anything about COBOL, but other old languages, yeah. Writing new things in said old languages is Forbidden, but the code will probably be around for a while. feedmegin posted:Is it as bad as the Solaris 7 SPARC box with gcc 2.7 I was semi-responsible for until about a year ago? Not that bad. Pollyanna posted:(ﾉ∀`)ｱﾁｬｰ At least in the case of BB, people are disinclined to mess with things because an outage or mistake on our end typically has serious ramifications for the markets. The history of the Terminal is an unbroken line stretching back nearly as long as I've been alive. At an institutional level, it's not being tone-deaf and moronic; it's the result of cost-benefit analyses that conclude that at the present juncture the risk of doing something is too great to justify it. Individual people within the institution can seem tone-deaf about it, but that's probably the fault of them inadequately communicating that reasoning as it relates to business priorities. BB's approach has been to gradually apply increasing pressure to migrate to Linux, occasionally with the stick but mostly with the carrot. My job is working on infrastructure and tooling that allows people to take control of their application infrastructure, and once teams get used to the new way of doing things they uniformly agree that it speeds up both their workflows and applications. The important thing from my perspective is to focus on the general use cases and not freak out about stuff at the margins. Will BB have non-Linux platforms around in 5 years? Probably, but I'm not especially worried about that. If my infrastructure vacuums up some percentage of internal applications over the next 5 years, there's a greater chance that management at the top will see the state of the long tail and say "alright, let's do that moon landing project to stick a knife in [LEGACY THING HERE]".
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2017 17:01
|
|
|
lifg posted:^^^ What does the non-Linux tech stack look like in your world? In my personal world it mercifully looks like nothing at all, because I only deal with Linux on x86 (though I am certainly interested in the trajectory of ARM in the server world). For the company as a whole, it's Solaris and AIX as far as non-Linux platforms go. (I'm pretty sure sharing that is okay, given that we put them in job descriptions.) I suspect it's the kind of environment that any veteran of an 80s/90s tech company would readily recognize.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2017 19:58
|
|
|
ultrafilter posted:I've seen at least one company with a minimum vacation policy, but that seems to be pretty rare. I've heard that BB will ask you questions if you don't use your vacation and basically tell you that you need to take them before you burn out completely. For the record, BB does 20 days per year (prorated if you start after the 1st of January) and you can roll over 5 into the next year. Sick days are unlimited within reason. We don't get a lot of standard holidays (no week between Christmas and NYE for example), we generally just close when the NYSE is closed.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2017 03:21
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:I can't wear business casual ever again, which rules out probably about 40% of NYC due to financial jobs. I don’t know where you worked, but my daily uniform is jeans and a hoodie. I am doubtful that business attire of any sort is required anywhere in NYC fintech nowadays, unless they only want to hire people above 40.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2017 22:37
|
|
|
CPColin posted:That smart apostrophe sure did a number on that quote! coding horror detected Good Will Hrunting posted:I was at Morgan Stanley. JPMorgan and UBS also have business casual dress code and Barclays too (the former I interviewed at last go around the latter I know people) I would describe those as actual banks rather than fintech, fintech being places like Bloomberg, Reuters, hedge funds, HFT shops. Pure finance is a different kind of shitshow.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2017 23:52
|
|
|
redleader posted:US dev salaries are loving ridiculous. Might as well cash in while the getting’s good. I’m always shocked at the abysmal pay devs get in the UK and other countries.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2017 23:43
|
|
|
Xerophyte posted:Yeah, my US employer was very surprised to learn that they couldn't just fire 2 senior software engineers at my old office that they felt were surplus to requirements. First there was a 4 month notice period for any termination, then the engineers made a kerfuffle about the last in-first out laws Sweden has on employees within the same role and the engineer's union lawyers forced the company to terminate the 2 most junior engineers instead. I am slightly surprised to hear that about Sweden, because I had understood that one of the cornerstones of the Nordic model was high flexibility in labor markets; i.e., you can hire and fire relatively freely but it's relatively low-risk for individual employees because of the comprehensive nature of the social safety net. Obviously here in Freedomland control is skewed strongly towards the employer, and even the wildest possible permutations of the governing American left would not produce Denmark 2.0. However, if your skills are in demand and you know how to play the game with some degree of effectiveness, you can make a substantial amount of money. It's a high-risk, high-reward environment. I'm not sure what to think of the current labor market for developers in the US, and whether it's really a bubble. The people that brought Trump to power are discontented blue-collar workers who didn't see that their ancestors were living in a bubble; they were making lots of money for unskilled labor due to extreme demand in the post-WW2 era, and a combination of automation, sagging demand, and cheap overseas labor has eviscerated them. At what point do these elements catch up with us? Demand doesn't seem likely to sag any time soon with the importance of technology to modern society, unless everything goes all Interstellar on us and we all have to become subsistence farmers. Cheap overseas labor hasn't made a serious dent thus far; if anything, the crap code you get out of Tata/Wipro sweatshops has underscored the importance of having talented developers. Automation seems the most likely to me with the rise of machine learning, but maybe ML-generated code won't be useful for anything but replacing the kind of stuff management would've tried to outsource.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2017 22:12
|
|
|
Realistically, I think the largest threat to us is ourselves and the companies we work for. It's become increasingly apparent to everyone that large tech companies like Facebook and Google are in no way the benevolent information spreaders they like to portray themselves as. They're in it to gather as much personal information about their users as possible and use it to make as much money as possible. We need to be way more conscientious than the tech industry has been, before regulation in the West causes these companies to pick up all the high-paying jobs and move them to jurisdictions China Russia that care a lot less about pervasive information gathering and manipulating public opinion, or even consider it a bonus.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2017 00:08
|
|
|
Xerophyte posted:As an evil pinko socialist I find the notion that your compensation and hence quality of life should be equal to the value of your labor to be a lousy way of building a society and sort of fundamentally dumb, but it's very enshrined in the US labor market and the entire current corporate techie version of the land of opportunity story. Hence, high risk, high reward, as you mention. I'm not shy about taking personal advantage of that right now. Not entirely sure where that puts me in the hypocrite scale. Human nature's a hell of a thing. As long as skilled workers can make way more for writing code in the US than they can in their own country, they'll keep coming here, even if they claim to be evil pinko socialists. I'm not faulting you for making that choice; if I were fundamentally offended by the way the US economy works, I would've jetted on my Danish passport before it expired. Whether a person believes their talents are from Providence or favorable genetics, is it evil to try to maximize the amount of money you can make from those talents?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 00:53
|
|
|
Pie Colony posted:I can't help but think this is all some elaborate troll. You guys don't actually ask FizzBuzz, do you? Or worse yet, sit there while the candidate writes out a solution? Describing the problem and having the candidate write it out might take 10 minutes, which in an hour-long interview where you also want to talk about their background and have them ask questions is a significant amount of time. And if they do end up solving it, as hopefully most candidates passing your HR screen do, it's a completely useless signal for determining whether the person is actually a good coder. There are so many better softball questions to ask, I can't help but feel anyone asking FizzBuzz shows zero value for their own time. I always ask Fizzbuzz, for these reasons:
That’s it. Nobody gets asked Fizzbuzz on site. I don’t ask hard problems on the phone screen, but very few people finish all of them, and nobody ever like scrapes by and barely solves all 4 in an hour. People either don’t finish the first 2, or they burn through all 4 in 30 minutes and then we have time to bullshit.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm about ready to move on from my current position. I've gotten tired of not having effective immediate leadership and I don't really think there's scope for me to advance my career here. I have a potential in on a mature team with a good mix of experienced devs and newbies, doing a lot of data warehousing, slicing along different axes, exposing data for analysts, etc. In that respect it's pretty similar to my current job, just bigger and more established. The one potential stumbling point is that for the past ~decade I've been working adjacent to the life sciences, writing software to be used by scientists for their research. This position would be basically pure software; the data's all just business application stuff. So I'm a little worried that I won't find it motivating. Motivation can come from many places. Feeling like you're on a team that has its poo poo together, instead of on one being headed up by a bunch of Peter principles, can be a huge motivating factor. Not being The One Person Who Has To Do Everything can be motivating, because there's less pressure on you. Maybe you would find it fulfilling to mentor some of the gumshoes on the new team as well.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2019 16:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:08 |
|
|
iloverice posted:My partner is a senior dev at a series C startup and is thinking of quitting. The stress is unreasonable and unmanageable. Any constructive feedback she gives to her manager and skip-level is largely ignored. On top of all that, she has ADHD and her workplace doesn't understand what that means. One of her coworkers took a medical leave a little while ago for the same reasons and she is now looking into that option (doctor's appointment this Friday). Has anyone taken FMLA for burnout? I am currently on FMLA while getting treatment for persistent depression/anxiety issues. If your partner has a reasonable relationship with her doctor then it should not be difficult.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2021 20:45
|
|