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Cryolite posted:A defense contractor near me contacted me directly saying they found my github and some other online profiles and wanted to talk about hiring me for a C# position. $170,000, 6 weeks vacation, 100% company-paid health insurance, 10% 401k match. Holy poo poo. Unfortunately they require a Top Secret clearance which I don't have, and they're unable to sponsor candidates. Heh. Just think how much your boss is making. My brother works as a dev for Booz Allen with TS clearance and got so bored with it he was gonna quit and they basically threw sacks of money at him until he agreed to stay. Keep in mind the military is just gigantic and has an even more gigantic budget. Plus just routine stuff like "software to figure out which base has this loving airplane part" often requires TS clearance. So you have enormous budgets that get minimal amounts of political scrutiny + continuous shortage of qualified staff = lots of contractors getting very very rich.
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Jul 30, 2015 02:16
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Mniot posted:"Soft Dev Anal II" The worst porn series. I don't even know why they made a sequel.
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Aug 1, 2015 05:37
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:My question was more about do I put that upfront on the resume or leave it out, and (secondarily) if I leave it out, do I substitute "contracting" or not. It might be in poor taste to put "death in the family" as an entry on a resume, just sayin'. I would just leave it out (that is just list the start end dates as normal for all your relevant positions) and if they ask you about it explain why. I wouldn't lie and put "Contracting" unless you were actually doing contract work during that time. Edit: Also a couple months is not that big a hole.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:45
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Ithaqua posted:Haha, yes he was. Ah, the good old NYC goonmeets. Yes, it is I. For my crimes I was curses by space ghosts to become and angry old computer man, wandering the world trying to hardball startups out of an extra 25 basis points of equity.
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Aug 8, 2015 05:52
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By the way, speaking of startups and job offers, I made this spreadsheet that compiles a lot of the research I've been doing about startups, VC funding, options grants, and how to price all of that and make a smart, rational choice when considering a job offer. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L-hwCRXKDwmOPqXCwQo4DM1cERYSgBIHM6Sp_Mye1Gc/edit?usp=sharing You should be able to copy it to your own google docs account to make changes to the inputs based on your own situation. The inputs are at the top: * The fractional stake your equity/options represent. DO NOT PUT IN JUST SHARES. Share number on its own is meaningless, you want them to tell you how many total diluted shares are outstanding and divide by that number. Ex: If there's 2,000,000 shares and they are offering you options for 5,000 shares, that's 5000/2000000 = .0025 = .25% = 25 basis points. * The exercise price. This is (strike price * shares). You might also hear the term "current 409a price" which is the price new grants are set at. So if your grant is 5000 shares @ $1.50 strike , put 1.5 * 5000 = 7500 here. * The opportunity costs. This is what you are "giving up" to join this company. At a minimum you want to put in (value of unvested equity/cash at current job + (salary cut * vesting period)) . So if you're giving up 10,000 in unvested equity and taking a $7,500 per year salary cut and options vest over 4 years, put in 10,000 + 30,000 = 40,000. Another thing to consider instead of salary cut is if you could get a higher salary/bonus from a different company or offer. Given these inputs, it will render a matrix estimating how much money you stand to make on various exit scenarios (acquisition or IPO) and dilution percentages (additional equity funding rounds). Cells are colored green if the outcome is better than your opportunity costs, and red if the outcome is worse. Keep in mind this is ONLY for successful exits. Failures or very cheap acquisitions where only the preferred investors get paid, any options or equity are going to be worthless. This also doesn't cover anything related to tax strategy re: When to exercise, ISO vs. NQSO options, and AMT avoidance. That could be a whole separate and long post. Anyways, I wanted to share this because I noticed that even a lot of engineers don't really understand how to price and evaluate these things when it comes to private and/or VC funded companies, just treating them like "lottery tickets" without any sort of rational analysis. In my opinion this is a mistake, because senior, experienced technical staff are incredibly valuable and can have a big impact on how well a company does. In the event that your "lottery tickets" do pay off, your equity is compensation for your part in making that happen, and you want make sure that's both competitive, fair, and in line with your risk tolerance. VCs, founders, and executive staff will take advantage of anyone who doesn't understand these mechanisms and/or isn't willing to negotiate.
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Aug 8, 2015 15:01
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Pollyanna posted:"Hey, my Kanban board is looking a little empty, is there anything good I can take up? Also, on what I mentioned during the last one-on-one, I'd love to maybe work on the SDK, or the data platform, or even on the front-end UI side, maybe." Well you could always do more "performance testing" and generate confusing graphs with so much crap you can't understand a thing. These go well with your boss's 5,000 word emails of useless information that are regularly sent to superiors to show how we're keeping on top of things! (tm) While the business spends months deliberating what products features to not release, and QA tries to figure out how git works. Wait that's my job, oops.
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Sep 9, 2015 18:03
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piratepilates posted:With a .600 batting average I think it's time to think about if it's really the luck of the draw. It also pretty much describes the start of the movie Office Space so it's probably a pretty common defect in manager/employee relationships.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:35
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You guys. I decided to teach myself some new stuff since I'm bored, and I'm going through nodejs tutorials. I can't tell if I'm old of if this is possibly to dumbest way to design software and the world has gone crazy. Please help.
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Sep 15, 2015 20:16
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Is HackerRankX different from any other remote code screen tool everyone seems to use now days? I've done like 4 or 5 of these stupid things now but I seem to remember people here finding HackerRank particularly bad for some reason. On a side note, I understand why companies want to do this whole "jump on skype and my favorite collaborative editing tool and do this 30 minute coding problem with me" thing, but I've got to say as someone who's already employed this is getting to be kind of annoying. I can't do these at the office by popping out for 30 minutes so now I've got to burn 1.5 - 2 vacation days to get your lowball offer instead of just 1. Weeeeeee.
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Sep 17, 2015 13:09
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piratepilates posted:Guice? Guava? I like protobuf too. I think the bigger problem is shops going "Hey I see Google's name attached to this, no need to be objective because it's obviously the best and most appropriate tool for the job. Meet your new engineering standards everyone!"
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Sep 22, 2015 12:19
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Cryolite posted:Are there any good resources out there for figuring out how much insurance, taxes, and all that actually cost as a contractor to make it worthwhile vs. being an employee? I've not done this, but health insurance is like 6-12k / year for a single person depending on how old you are and how good the insurance is. The self-employed portion of social security is an extra 6% in taxes up to the cap. But yeah, contractor rates are always going to be much higher than salaried rates to compensate for the fact you might not always be working full time, you're not paid for vacations or days off, the client has flexibility on how much to work you, extra expenses for taxes and benefits, etc. If you have lots of good gigs it can be very lucrative, but there's always the risk of lean years too.
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Sep 23, 2015 00:54
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One thing you can do is look at your W2 for last year. Look for an extra under Box 12, code DD. That number is how much your employer payed for their share of your health insurance. It's not taxable (the number is included for information and compliance purposes only) but you can use that as a data point to figure out what a health insurance plan costs, which is usually the biggest single cost in covering your own benefits. The other thing to look at is Health Sherpa or your states ACA exchange because that's probably how you want to get health insurance as a self-employed contractor. There's usually a bunch of other information in box 12 and 14 on what the employer payed for benefits if you look up the codes.
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Sep 23, 2015 16:19
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So this recruiter setup a 1st round interview and the company sent me all this information about how it was a tech screen using HackerRank and how VERY IMPORTANT it was that I have access to a computer with internet access and could talk on the phone at the same time, blah blah blah. Then the guy calls me and goes "oh yeah we're not going to do that, HR sends that to everyone but we don't really care about it." Also the job isn't even really development, more setting up and babysitting servers for this organizations bold new push into using Jenkins, Jira, and Github. I think I'm gonna have to dump this recruiter.
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Sep 24, 2015 16:50
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Skandranon posted:Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't mean that we actually, objectively suck. It's that the more capable you are in a given field, you are more aware of how much MORE there is to know and your own shortcomings. Thus, you will underestimate your overall abilities, whereas someone who knows next to nothing will overestimate their abilities. "It's just writing code, can't be that hard". Dunning-Kruger actually means that literally everyone rates themselves between a 6 and a 7 regardless of if they're a 1 or a 9 or a 6.5. http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/
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Oct 1, 2015 03:04
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MeruFM posted:enterprise fizzbuzz is a parody but mirrors my experience with java well. Something simple like a soap receiving endpoint extrapolated to 50 classes, of which 48 were created using some code generator. Java is a pretty great language and the core API is solid, but I cannot for the loving life of me understand why every single loving Java engineer does this. It's like everyone picked up "Baby's First OO Design Patterns" and decided that every 10 line task needed to be implemented in the most convoluted "future proof" way possible using 5 different interfaces and 3 layers of abstract classes wired together in Spring using half XML and half annotations plus some other hacked together crap. A key part of this approach is to invent your own ORM, serialization, and caching frameworks, write no documentation on it, then bury the source code somewhere deep, deep down in a 10 year old SVN repo guarded by a snarling dragon. Bonus points if you don't use curly braces on one-liner if statements and run that poo poo 3-4 levels deep.
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Oct 1, 2015 19:32
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https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter Don't know if this is old hat to the thread or not but I cannot stop laughing.
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Oct 5, 2015 18:39
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I've always assumed it means one of two things: - We'll make our devs do all the infrastructure and operations tasks as well. 2 jobs for the price of 1! - A cool title we gave to the sad sack who is stuck writing custom Jenkins and JIRA plugins for our shittactular code base and legacy architecture.
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Oct 9, 2015 20:56
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Based entirely on my experience as an undergrad and also interviewing fresh masters grads, masters degrees in something like CS are basically cash cows for universities without much actual economic value. If you want to get a research or academic job then a PhD is the way to go. A masters might get you a bump of $20k or so at the start of a career but if your good and have a few years experience there's not going to be any difference in pay. When I was in undergrad the masters students basically took the same classes we did, so it was more or less 3-4 extra semesters of senior level coursework with maybe an independent project as well. Also a HUGE number of masters students in most CS programs these days are basically foreign students with an undergrad degree from China or India, looking to get an American degree as a foot in the door for the immigration process (student visa --> company sponsorship --> green card). Universities, meanwhile, are all too happy to take their money and then farm them out with ungrad coursework and lab slaves to PhD candidates for a few years. Anyway, that's just what I've seen happening at my alma mater. There are a few careers where specific degree credentials unlock particular jobs and salary tiers but for the most part software engineering isn't one of them. Don't get a masters for money, get more experience and skills working and get paid to learn instead.
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Oct 15, 2015 17:57
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Doghouse posted:It seems like certain government / government contractor type places, like big defense firms, for instance, put more stock in more advanced degrees. For those kind of jobs your best bet if you want to maximize earnings is find a company that will sponsor TS clearance. Once you have that you can basically just hang a sign on your bank account that reads "put all money here".
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Oct 15, 2015 18:00
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Jerry Cotton posted:It's a universal fallacy that programmers share: because they don't actually ever have to do anything productive, they conclude they're not workers even though they still prostitute a good chunk of what meager number of decades they have been allotted to be alive - to be thinking, feeling persons instead of dust - being at the beck and call of others. Yeah but my 401k is on track.
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Oct 25, 2015 17:19
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Hadlock posted:Ok, but 7 years professional work experience, three years programming experience, I have a leg to stand on to ask $115? Basically my plan is to get them to name a number, and then point out I'm making 70 with no state income taxes, and 110 would effectively be a cost of living adjustment. I forget if that 110 number includes state income tax. Three years as a developer... Yeah probably 100-125k base at least for NYC (not sure how comparable it is to the Bay Area but they're both super expensive places to live with lots of competition for not completely terrible programmers.) Senior / Lead roles are around 135-160k in my reckoning, but you kind of hit a ceiling as an engineer after that, unless you get in on some crazy finance thing that makes it rain. What are your 4 years of not a dev experience in?
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Oct 26, 2015 03:52
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Hadlock posted:What is stock worth in a buyout? Reposting this spreadsheet I made for this exact question: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L-hwCRXKDwmOPqXCwQo4DM1cERYSgBIHM6Sp_Mye1Gc/edit?usp=sharing Save a copy to local account and you can put in your own numbers. For a private / startup company, you need to know what percentage your grant is versus total diluted shares. If they refuse to tell you the total diluted shares that's a pretty big red flag. The second two boxes you put in the exercise costs, and the "opportunity costs", i.e., what you're giving up for the total vesting period in extra salary, unvested stock, etc, to work at this company. The output is a grid of exit values at the top (what the company sells or IPOs for), and the dilution you'll experience from subsequent funding rounds. The grid cell tells you about how much your stock is worth in the scenario, and the color (red/green) is if that would be a "good deal" versus the opportunity costs. Note this is only for scenarios where the company has a liquidity event where common shareholders get paid out. Lots of startups fail outright or get acqui-hired with only preferred shares getting anything. There's a bunch of tooltip notes to hover over as well so look at those.
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Oct 26, 2015 12:31
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Also, if the company is public, then the calculations are pretty simple: Your options are set at X price, for whatever the stock is trading at the day/week you join. If the price then rises to Y, then your stock is worth (X-Y)*N-shares. If it drops below X, haha sucks to be you. For example, let's say you join the company and they give you 10,000 shares vesting over 4 years. The day you join the stock is worth $5. On your third year anniversary, the stock is trading at $9.50. You have 75% vested. Vest value (what you can exercise and take home today): (9.50 - 5)*7500 = $33,750 Unvested value (what you get if you stay and the stock doesn't move): (9.50 - 5) * 2500 = $11,250 If the stock price then drops to say, $3, then your options aren't worth anything. In that scenario, it's up to you if you want to say (standard is 10 years to exercise on option grants if you're still employed) or want to walk away.
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Oct 26, 2015 12:39
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Oh, the other thing to be aware of with private/startup companies: If things go REALLY, REALLY well for your stock, you can get into a sort of golden handcuffs situation with taxes. Let's say you company does awesome and your stock is worth $350,000 after 4 years of amazing growth and everyone loves you. Hooray, you're rich! Except, you're only "rich" on paper, in options on equity for a totally illiquid company. Plus, the when you exercise stock options, the IRS requires you to pay taxes on the "gain" from the exercise ($350,000) in this case. There are two types of options you get from a job: ISO and NQSO NQSO are the sort of cheaper options companies give out because of the accounting reasons. However, they have much harsher tax treatment, since you always owe tax on the gain as ordinary income. So for 350k, at a 30% rate, you'd owe $105,000 to the IRS the moment you pull the trigger. The good news is that for NQSO options you usually only get them with public, liquid companies, so you can just sell the stock right away to pay for the exercise and tax costs, meaning it costs you nothing out of pocket ("cashless exercise" is the term). Obviously for private startups, this isn't an option. ISO grants, however, have different tax treatment. These are usually what you get from private startups. For an ISO grant, you owe nothing when you exercise, and as long as you hold the stock for a year, when you do sell it you owe only the capital gains rate on the profit. So in a year you sell your stock for $400,000 profit, you pay $80,000, which you have since you just got a check for $400,000. HOWEVER, there is one very, very lovely catch. The AMT. The AMT calculations ignore the preferential tax treatment for ISO options and tax them just like NQSO options, meaning you need to cough up $80-100k in taxes, but you can't sell any of the stock to pay that tax bill. The AMT kicks in around the 250-300k gross income range, meaning you'll probably get hit if your options grant is big enough. So let's say your sitting on options worth 350k fully vested and you want to move on to something new. You have a few lovely choices - Exercise the options, pay a huge amount of money in tax and hope you can get that back one day when the company sells/goes public. - Stay at the company and don't exercise until they are going public/selling, so you can pay the tax bill. - Walk away from $350k - Find someone to loan you $100k collateralized with 350k in startup equity. For this reason, it's sometimes good to exercise your options as they vest, even if you don't want to leave, because if you do so before the 409a valuation is adjusted upwards, you can start the 1 year holding period right away, and avoid as much of the AMT as you can. The risk there, of course, if you might dump $5k into exercising and then lose it all if the company does tank.
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Oct 26, 2015 13:02
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The sense I get from my friends who live there and visiting a few times is that SF is where you want to live if you want a "city life" kind of environment to live in, with walkability and bars and lots of things to do close by. Once you get outside SF into the wider bay area is turns into pretty typical boring suburban spawl with highways and strip malls and subdivisions. The problem is that SF is pretty small (just physically, but population wise too) by "iconic world city" standards, so you will pay through the nose plus the souls of all your unborn children to live there.
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Oct 27, 2015 18:22
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https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter is the best recruiter.
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Jan 25, 2016 17:15
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Did a Google on site yesterday and this morning I'm worried it wasn't hard enough. I think I just leveled up in neurosis and imposter syndrome. 
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Feb 2, 2016 16:51
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Vulture Culture posted:Unless their hiring practices have changed, they'll probably call you in another three times over the next six months before making a decision The interview coaching session I went to the presenter said that they really don't want to do more than one onsite unless they screwed something up on their end. The example he gave was they once forgot to check if the candidate actually spoke English conversationally (???) so they had him come and have lunch with a few people (turns out he did) before giving an offer. Also it's funny how many other companies are now trying to clone the Google method but in their own half assed broken way. Anyone looking for a job now enjoy doing HackerRank style online code pad phone screens, followed by 6 hours of whiteboard coding graph and recursion problems.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:03
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Vulture Culture posted:DigitalOcean wanted me to write a web crawler that output a site map of assets. I told them I didn't have time for that poo poo. Yeah, unless they meant literally a simple tool like "scan document for <a> tags, add to graph and recurse for any URL on the same domain" that seems a bit excessive. I've had a few places give me offline coding assignments, but they were simple projects of an hour or two most, focused on algorithm design and no more than a few classes.
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Feb 3, 2016 00:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:
That's my commute now in NYC and prices in my neighborhood are $3-4/sqft to rent and $800-1000/sqft to buy. 
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Feb 5, 2016 03:10
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If you live in SF or NYC a fun game to play is multiply your monthly rent by 12, then divide by the number of rooms in your apartment, and figure out how many nice used cars you could buy per room for what it costs to sleep, poop, and shitpost in each one for a year.
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Feb 5, 2016 04:57
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Apparently the feedback for my SV BigTechCo interviews was good enough the recruiter is sending my file before the Council of Elrond on Monday. Also the big ole pile of money from my stock sale should hit my bank account by Monday too. If things line up well it's gonna be real hard not to burn down the whole office at my current job a week from now. PYF favorite accelerant and red stapler supply.
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Feb 5, 2016 21:44
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Yeah, at least in NYC/SF 150k (or up to 200k total comp) isn't that unusual once you're at the Senior/Lead/Principal level. Keep in mind that not only is it hard as gently caress to find people who are really good (and not insane), they often have to pay a head hunter 15-25k, people who leave take a lot specific knowledge about how your systems fit together, and even hiring an awesome new developer is going to be a few months of them getting up to speed with everything and integrated into the team. Probably the only thing non-technical managers hate more than signing a software engineer's paycheck is replacing them when they leave.
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Feb 6, 2016 22:42
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Illusive gently caress Man posted:Fwiw, I started at google in september at a relatively entry level position and I'm at like 110 base 160-170 total. I'm certain higher levels make much more than me How many years of experience do you have? I'm in the middle of the hiring process there, and the recruiter tells me that my current base (160) is "the high end for one level, but the low end for the level above it" so she scheduled my interviews to try and place at the higher level.
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Feb 8, 2016 14:29
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Ahh, cool. I'll be at 11 years in June, so it seems they actually pretty closely track the Junior > Senior > Lead/Principal compensation tiers a lot of other places do (although they use different job titles).
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Feb 8, 2016 14:41
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I had an Amazon (well Quidsi) recruiter tell me that they generally topped out at 150k for SWE too. Might not be a hard cap though, just general compensation tiers.
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Feb 10, 2016 15:00
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Rurutia posted:Yeah, I would expect this. But I was responding to someone who was pointing out the relatively 'low' base salary that someone had given for a Google Senior SWE. Just from what I've seen, it's not surprising for the large jumps in your total compensation (not including benefits) to be from stock and bonus increases rather than base salary. After semi-serious job searching for the past 6 months, I kind of get the impression that 150-170k base is the ceiling for most software dev jobs in NYC area. Stock options / RSUs can give you a big bump too, depending on how the stock does. I made like an extra 150k on my options at my current job, although that was with a 5 year vesting, so it's roughly an extra 30k /year. Several years back when our stock was half it's price they were also giving out huge RSA blocks every year which are worth way more now. Also, 110k for 2 years off a BS isn't bad at all.
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Feb 10, 2016 15:44
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Feral Integral posted:Hey so here's my poo poo: Look for a SDET job. Mediocre companies have QA teams that mostly to manual functional testing and fill out spread sheets, follow test plans, etc. Good companies have SDET engineers managing their whole QA and testing process, writing automated tests, perform performance and functional testing, and do complex software development to achieve those goals. They are also paid and treated like developers too.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:07
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Mortanis posted:Haha. That's a whine and a half rant. Where do you live? Unless it's somewhere with an absolutely atrocious economy anyone with halfway decent skills can get a much better job for better pay that doesn't treat them like garbage. Don't feel bad about leaving. This business isn't a charity, and you should be maximizing not only your earnings but your happiness and quality of life as well. Your boss sounds like an rear end in a top hat too.
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Feb 12, 2016 19:10
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I got an offer from a company today, and I'm almost certain I'm going to take it. Because of their own onboarding scheduling, I have the choice of either taking 4 weeks off or 8 weeks off. Money isn't really a concern so having a two month vacation like a European aristocrat sounds awesome, except I'm a little bit worried I'll be bored as hell for that much time off, considering I don't have a large contingent of unemployed friends. Then again maybe this is just my American worker Stockholm syndrome talking. Anyone taken longer-ish breaks between jobs? Was it actually relaxing and fun or after like the 4th week more like "whelp only 28 more days of daytime TV and video games!"
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Feb 18, 2016 21:55
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