|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I'm being considered for a senior software engineering position, but I've got to ask: What does it mean to be a senior software engineer? I'm comfortable with my skills, but I know there's more to it than that. Any veterans care to chime in? That varies from company to company. In some places, it means that you've been working there for a long time or have been working in the industry for a long time, and thus has very little correlation to actual skill as a developer. In other companies, it's actually well-defined and has additional responsibilities, such as taking a bigger role in the architecture of applications or mentoring other developers.
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2014 22:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:24 |
|
|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Thanks for the thoughts. To pose one of my other questions again, what are some signals that a company is good or bad, in terms of leadership, communication, opportunity, process, etc.? If they don't ask you to write code at some point in the interview process, they're almost guaranteed to be bad.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2014 00:58
|
|
|
Pie Colony posted:how much free time do you guys find you get over a day? by which i mean time to just look at websites, blogs, maybe even videos or personal projects. also i guess overtime would be negative here. Depending on the day, a ton. I'm a consultant, and I work mostly remotely (which means from home!). Sometimes, a client falls through or gets blocked, and then I have bench time. We generally use bench time for improving our consulting service offerings and learning new stuff. Some days it just turns into a few hours of hacking on a personal project or answering questions on Stack Overflow. I very rarely work more than 40 hours a week.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2014 18:40
|
|
|
TodPunk posted:Second, middle management is a huge amount of politics where you straddle the interests and perspectives of two worlds, often at odds with each other (they shouldn't be, but I work in the real world). My first good boss explained to me that there are two types of bosses: poo poo funnels and poo poo umbrellas. You want to work for (and strive to be) a poo poo umbrella.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2014 00:22
|
|
|
Are you sure that you're not coming off as a smug prick when you're interacting with your co-workers? I'm not saying that you're coming across that way here, but it's something to be careful about. I've been in a similar situation before, and I ended up being a smug prick and no one gave a drat about what I had to say because of it, even when I was right. Some people hate being told they're wrong, or that they're doing things in a bad way. Especially if the person saying it is a lot younger than them. I've learned since then to never outright tell someone that their code/architecture is bad, even if it's so awful that your eyes bleed when you look at it. Instead of being confrontational ("Hey, look at this stupid poo poo, what the gently caress, this is a war crime, we should be using the Butthole pattern instead!"), ask questions and be constructive ("Hey, I was looking this code over, and I was wondering why we didn't write it using the Butthole pattern?"). Sometimes, you'll ask that question and get an answer that surprises you. Sometimes, something that looks lovely was written that way for a very specific, weird-but-valid reason. If it makes you feel any better: based on your post, I'd call you in for an interview. You sound like you know what you're talking about in terms of software development principles, and I don't care if you have 0 years of experience if you write good code. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Mar 29, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2014 08:56
|
|
|
DevOps / continuous delivery has been something I've been focused on for the past year or so. I always say "Deploying software is easy. Installing and configuring software is a nightmare." The fun starts when you have to deploy a web application that communicates with several pieces of middleware, and each piece is maintained by a different team with a different release schedule, and everything is backed by the same database where both teams are trying to make concurrent schema changes. Thank god there are decent tools to help with it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2014 19:27
|
|
|
I don't know why the length thing ever even comes up anymore. I get an email with an attachment. I open the attachment and look at it. Whether it's 1 page or 2 pages or 5 pages doesn't matter. [edit] I think mine is 3, but my current job takes up about 3/4ths of a page on its own because I wear a lot of hats.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2014 04:56
|
|
|
shrughes posted:Do you have a brain tumor? Serious question: Are you this much of a condescending prick in interviews, or is this an internet-only persona?
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2014 00:10
|
|
|
FamDav posted:if you'd like to be more specific: Those are awesome. I'd add a few: - Do you have automated tests? If yes: How often do you run them? Are there any "known failures" that are ignored? - Do you have nightly builds? CI builds? - Does the company pay for professional development? (books, conferences, training, etc) - What specs do developer workstations have? How many monitors? - What's the workspace like? (Open floor plan, individual offices, shared offices?). If open, is it relatively quiet?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2014 04:04
|
|
|
Hughmoris posted:I've frequently heard that COBOL programmers are worth their weight in gold but I've been curious if that holds any water. As a non-programmer that has been toying around with programming as a hobby, I've thought about picking up a COBOL book and seeing what I could learn. They're worth their weight in gold because they have years of knowledge on how to maintain horrible legacy applications. An inexperienced COBOL developer is of limited utility. Plus, you'd never get to work on anything even remotely resembling "cool" software.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2014 19:32
|
|
|
the talent deficit posted:am i totally out of line for asking for additional compensation for a 'remote' job that's only remote because the current dev team all prefer to work from home? i argued that they'd either be paying for office space or relocation if the job was conventional and they countered they think it's a benefit i'm not 'required' to be in an office and that other employees have given up ~20k in comp because of it Is the pay in line with typical compensation for a company in their city? If the company is based in the deep south where people live like kings on $80k salaries and you live in NYC or the like, you're totally justified in asking for compensation in line with your cost of living needs. They're totally justified in saying no. Occasional work from home is generally considered a perk. 100% work from home is considered a huge perk. I work from home most of the time, and yes, I'm being paid about 10-15% less than I would be if I took a different job (this is backed up by declined job offers). I consider the extra 4+ hours a day of sleep/leisure time to be well worth it. I figure I'm saving at least $10k a year in commuting/laundry/clothing expenses, and the value of an extra 20+ hours of free time a week is hard to quantify. Basically, to them, the conversation is going like this: Them: Good news! You don't have to come in to the office! You get extra free time and don't have to pay commuting costs! You: Well you should pay me extra for this convenience because you don't have to rent an office. Them: 
New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Mar 19, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 02:35
|
|
|
Che Delilas posted:It's because it usually is a benefit, except it's not "pay for your own office and tools." It's "use the tools you already have because you're a programmer and you have a powerful computer, and save potentially hours of your own time by not having to commute, and not have to put up with a bunch of distracting office noise or a boss looking over your shoulder because you're at home." Obviously that's not your situation, but I think that's how most people see it so I'm not surprised that they offer somewhat less money for that situation. A good employer will buy you the poo poo you need to do your job. I have a company laptop, but use my own keyboard/mouse/monitors. I don't ask them to pay for internet access because I'd be paying for that anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2015 00:00
|
|
|
in_cahoots posted:
It's not your problem unless they are actively being blocked by something that you hosed up, and even then it's not really your problem. This isn't unique to you, there are plenty of teams operating in different timezones or on different schedules. I frequently work with people that are 3 hours behind (I'm in US eastern time and they're in US western time). They know that if they have a problem after 2 PM, I may not be available. I know that if I have a problem before 11 am, they might not be available. We make sure that we communicate clearly and resolve blocking issues during the 5 hours a day we're both guaranteed to be working, and we show a little bit of flexibility with each others' schedules (I've worked 11 to 8, they've worked 5 to 2, or some other overlapping 9-hour period) MrMoo posted:The Agile Waterfall development model wins again. In the ALM business, we call it "agilefall" or "waterscrum" 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2015 00:51
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:Another thing to keep in mind, though perhaps not as useful as what wins said, is to be careful volunteering things you know if you don't actually like doing them. True, but also be aware that as time goes on things change. I used to hate, and be awful at, public speaking. Then I had to do some public speaking. It turns out at some point in the past 10 years, I actually magically became pretty good at it, and it was fun.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2015 04:52
|
|
|
kitten smoothie posted:The company I'm leaving does "unlimited" vacation and it is a goddamned scam because you aren't "entitled" to anything. Any time you ask for a day off it's the businesses' requirements over yours. Screw those policies, which are intended just to make the books good (due to California labor law) at the expense of the employees. I always say that companies that offer unlimited vacation are the ones least likely to let you actually take a vacation. So far it holds up. Benefit of working for a small company: I get (I think) 15 vacation days and however many sick/personal days, but I don't think anyone actually checks or cares. I don't actually know how much vacation I'm supposed to have, I forgot after it became clear 3 years ago that no one pays attention. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jul 1, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2015 04:47
|
|
|
Sign posted:Next week I'm interviewing a candidate to be my new engineering manager. I've never interviewed someone to be my superior before. Any advice compared to interviewing other non management engineers? Is it a technical role or a non-technical role?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 04:25
|
|
|
ProSlayer posted:Cross-posting from BFC negotiating offers thread: Job titles are meaningless between companies. If the title is important to you, ask them if they have rigidly defined job titles (e.g. pay scales based on job title and responsibilities) or if the distinction is more fluid. If it's the latter, they'll probably give you the title of Supreme Basketweaver Mk. III if you ask as long as it doesn't affect how much they pay you or your benefits. This is especially true since they've made you an offer. They want you to work for them. As an aside, I worked with a very large auditing firm that had rigidly defined job titles from the accounting world. So there were "junior associates", "associates", "senior associates", etc. To get salaries above a certain level (around 6 figures), you had to be a manager. The team I was working with was comprised entirely of interns and one junior associate who had one year of industry experience. Their manager hadn't written code in a decade. They were very upset that they had trouble attracting and retaining senior associates and didn't understand why the most senior people kept quitting. They also didn't understand why their software was a steaming shitpile of unmaintainable spaghetti code. Mniot posted:When I'm revising my resume, I use whatever titles I think best communicate to the prospective employer. I don't consider what my job title actually was. Therefore, I don't care what title I'm getting at a new job except where it affects what work they're going to let me do. I always recommend against doing that, especially if you put them as a reference. New employer: "Was so and so employed with you from 2010 to 2012 as a Senior Ninja Wizard Rockstar Developer?" Old employer: "No, he was employed with us from 2010 to 2012 as only a Wizard Developer." New employer: "I see... this person is a liar. I wonder what else they have lied about." Not saying it's a likely or common thing, but I am always wary about little things like that. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Aug 1, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2015 03:00
|
|
|
Vulture Culture posted:e: were you the guy that, er, removed something from the premises of the Church of Scientology in NYC? Haha, yes he was. Ah, the good old NYC goonmeets.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2015 03:45
|
|
|
Kallikrates posted:Last few jobs and interviews I got via references, but I recently moved to a new city and have zero network (so far). I think that means I should update my years old resume. Would this be the place to get a quick critique? Or maybe the newbie thread? The fonts are inconsistent. Look at Near Infinity Corporation vs Thermopylae Sciences + Technology. Tense was inconsistent for the first few bullet points of Thermopylae Sciences + Technology. The fonts are overall pretty ugly IMO. And it seems like poo poo is just randomly bolded. Everything is tightly crammed together and hard to read, especially at the top. Remove "interests". No one cares that you like rock climbing or "user experiences" (whatever that is) when they are evaluating whether they want to talk to you or not.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2015 19:12
|
|
|
Flat Daddy posted:Points in favor of junior You can just be a "developer". No junior/senior modification. I'd say the distinction is (roughly): Junior: Not expected to work without guidance on anything except very simple tasks. Needs to be watched fairly closely to make sure everything they're doing is good. Juniors may not know enough to know when they're doing something wrong or badly, so they need a higher degree of supervision. Does not participate actively in architectural discussions, although may be included to observe for learning purposes. Mid-level: Expected to work without guidance on moderately complex tasks. Needs less supervision; they can be trusted for the most part to do things well. They should be expected to know when to ask for clarification or guidance. Expected to play a role in architectural discussions. Senior: Expected to be able to work without guidance on most tasks and work largely unsupervised. Has a bigger role in architectural decisions.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2015 18:01
|
|
|
School of How posted:ssh prod  You should use some of those spare hours to set up a sane continuous integration/continuous delivery system.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2015 19:11
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:If you're young and healthy you can go as low as $2k/year for emergency-only health insurance, but it can be $10k+ for real coverage (or more if you have a family). If you're guaranteed 40 hours per week then you can hit 2000 hours with ~13 days off, but keep in mind that holidays and sick time come out of that, so you generally won't actually be able to get 2 weeks of vacation and still hit 2000 hours without OT. Tax-wise you're looking at another 15% between SS and having to pay both halves of the payroll tax. The cost of losing your 401k benefits should be obvious. Yeah, and "healthy" can very abruptly turn into "unhealthy", then you're major-league hosed.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2015 02:28
|
|
|
kloa posted:Yeah, even if I stuck around as a DBA, there's nowhere for me to move up to as long as the senior is around, so I'd have to eventually leave anyways. A few things: In my experience, it's really uncommon for smaller companies to have restrictions on the number of people with a certain job title, as in there is little to no "I can't move up to senior frobulator until one of the current senior frobulators leaves". The distinction between junior/mid-level/senior isn't something that is necessarily limited (like people reporting to you, or responsibility for budgetary decisions). If you only have one team, you can only have one team lead, but there's nothing stopping the team from being made up of 100% senior-level people. In fact, some companies prefer that. On the other hand, it's also really uncommon for them to give pay raises commensurate with the jump between ranks compared to what you can get by jumping ship with the new title. I got promoted to "senior" developer at one small company gig and they gave me $5000/year more. A few months later, I left for $20k more.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2015 15:29
|
|
|
I have a non-developer friend who got shifted into "devops", but his role is basically just maintaining and watching some CI builds that others set up -- he doesn't really do the "dev" part of "devops". Even with that glaring problem he still has recruiters beating down his door.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 18:30
|
|
|
mrmcd posted:- We'll make our devs do all the infrastructure and operations tasks as well. 2 jobs for the price of 1! Wow no. It's a culture that fosters communication between dev team and the ops team. It's not about shifting work from one to the other, it's about clear communication and better understanding of the big picture. I've worked in places where software was developed in a bubble, and then installed/run on QA/staging/prod servers in a bubble. Things went horribly wrong all the time and took ages to fix because no one was communicating.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2015 21:04
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:If you want to go the route of doing Angular, look into TypeScript as well. It will feel even more like C# and it gives you a semblance of type safety in JavaScript. Use VSCode for your editor. And use Angular 2. Angular 2 was written in TypeScript so it's very TypeScript-friendly.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2015 05:28
|
|
|
Noam Chomsky posted:Cross-posting this from the newbie thread since it's probably more applicable to this thread: You already got accurate answers in the other thread. Yes, it's increasingly common for there to be parallel career tracks for technically-minded people that don't want to move into management.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2015 16:22
|
|
|
Noam Chomsky posted:Another question: Career ambition shouldn't be the reason you pursue an advanced degree. Even an undergraduate degree doesn't matter that much as your career progresses, let alone a masters. If you wanted to do Ph.D studies in something marketable (machine learning) that could lead to really cool jobs down the line, but that's also less likely to pan out because it's a niche market.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2015 17:28
|
|
|
wwb posted:http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto comes to mind . . . But that guy is a self important cock so I have trouble taking him seriously. quote:I’ll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I’ll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I’ll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your loving rear end legally. Remember that I’ve studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I’m old, and I don’t give a gently caress if I kick your mother loving rear end or you kick mine. You don’t like what I’ve said, then write something in reply but gently caress you if you think you’re gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2015 23:19
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:One guy just rents cars when he needs them for camping etc @ ~$50 a day; after insurance, parking and normal maintenance, renting ad hoc sounds like a pretty good idea. We talked about zip car but renting seems to make more sense. Depends on how bad traffic typically is in the area. Renting cars sucks, it's an unfamiliar vehicle and they usually run like poo poo. I rent cars for work when traveling, or when traveling locally to a location that's over a certain distance threshold (past 80 round-trip miles or so, it's actually cheaper for the company and doesn't incur wear and tear on my personal vehicles) and I always hate it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2015 13:31
|
|
|
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). Either you keep having really good managers who get poached by other companies or projects or promoted, or really bad managers that they keep moving to a place where their awfulness won't be as much of a liability. Or promoted. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2015 23:06
|
|
|
minato posted:In my experience, a good presentation can take days to prepare, even if the author is an expert. And rehearsal time alone will take at least an hour or two. I think maybe a 5 minute presentation would be a reasonable ask to test someone's communication skills, but 30 is excessive. I routinely prepare and give presentations. A good one hour talk on a subject I know well takes roughly 1 8 hour work day to prepare and practice.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2015 02:43
|
|
|
E/N career chat: My yearly review is coming up in a few hours. I'm asking for a pretty sizable but justified raise (about 25%). I have all of my metrics laid out, I think I can swing it. A surprise Apple TV Christmas gift showed up at my house yesterday from my boss. My inner cynic says it's a harbinger of a really good review with a really bad raise.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2015 18:21
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:100% of the personal gifts from bosses I've received have been followed up with "you deserve a big raise, but..." Result: 17% raise. 5k bonus on top of that. It's not quite what I wanted, but it's in the right ballpark.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2015 22:57
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:How extensive was the case you put together for this? Many people here may find it useful. I actually didn't have to negotiate for it. I was looking for 25%, but 17% + 5k bonus put me within about 3-4% of what I was after, so I wasn't going to split hairs. I did try to push for it a little bit but I didn't push hard since it was a very generous increase. What I had in my notes if the need arose was: 1) My billability ratio (I'm a consultant) 2) The number of weeks I traveled for work the past year (I signed on with the expectation of 10% stated in the offer letter, I travel closer to 20-25%) 3) The salary of a former co-worker who was not as valuable as I am 4) A list of personal and professional accomplishments 5) An extensive list of the projects I worked on and the customer feedback 6) An extensive list of all of the times my co-workers gave me a shout out for helping them on their projects I could still do better by jumping ship to the tune of about 10-15%, but I also really like my job and my working environment, so it's a reasonable sacrifice IMO.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2015 00:21
|
|
|
wilderthanmild posted:As a bonus it would have involved moving to loving New Jersey of all places. New Jersey is awesome outside of the NYC-adjacent northeastern parts and the Philadelphia-adjacent southwestern parts. Here is your helpful guide to New Jersey: 
New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jan 25, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2016 17:14
|
|
|
qntm posted:That's dumb. That already happens, all the time. Don't you people have holidays? Illnesses? Family emergencies? Jury duty? Maternity leave? There's always one person who never takes vacation because they either think they're too critical, know they're too critical, or spend the bulk of every day babysitting their broken poo poo and are terrified that other people will discover how broken it is. That approach will help people in category #1 realize they're not, help identify what people in category #2 do that's so critical they can't take time off, and help find people in category #3 so they can be fired.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2016 00:54
|
|
|
mrmcd posted: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. I was fired unexpectedly at one point. I got a job within 3 days (two of those being a weekend) and ended up with 3 idle weeks. I did some travel during that downtime and it was awesome. So do that, go travel somewhere.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2016 00:37
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:What kind of questions about concurrency/multithreading would you ask someone applying to a job working on HFT-type systems? This is probably my weakest area for the jobs I'm looking at applying to. "How good are you at eating heaping piles of poo poo, then smiling and asking for more?" Every person I've ever known who has worked in HFT has been miserable -- long hours and unreasonable demands/expectations are the norm. The pay is very good, though.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2016 21:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:24 |
|
|
metztli posted:I make that (base) in Chicago and I've only been doing this for 3 years. No CS degree, no bootcamp, not in finance either. Ask for a raise or find a new job. Some companies have lower pay but tangible (or intangible) benefits. Like, I have a friend who makes less money than average, but the company has a 35 hour work week so he's in the office 8-4 and is home before rush hour, and thus can spend more time with his kid.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2016 06:03
|
|