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zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
I've been at my current position for 5 years so I guess it's time to start looking around on principle. Plus the figgies seem real good right now, and we're pretty understaffed and despite our very shiny stack are having a hard time hiring. My jobs really cushy so it might be hard to leave but I want to start looking to see who's hiring.

I don't really want to list anything I did with like, WebForms and Silverlight because I don't want to work with those again. Is 5 years ago (in an 18 year career) too recent to start getting vague? I can sell what I was doing as performance tuning, mentoring, and technical oversight without embellishing even though my title was ".NET Developer".

If anyone asks me about it I have some fun perf tuning war stories where I can show I actually know a bit about the framework and don't just code farm out C#. And then I can talk about switching companies to get preview builds of .NET core running on Linux containers in k8s in 2016 so I'm not too worried about being labelled Mr Enterprise Suit if my resume doesn't scare people off.

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zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
Thank you. I've heard similar a lot but it hasn't quite clicked for me until now.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003

silvergoose posted:

is it theoretically able to run infinitely?

best joke my friends made in CS at school was shufflesort, the most important algorithm taught in CS 666. shuffle array. check to see if it's sorted. if it is, you're done! if it's not, repeat.

you can optimize this to O(1) in quantumsort, which takes advantage of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. After shuffling, if the array is not sorted, destroy the universe (implementation left as an exercise for the reader). All remaining universes are ones in which the array was sorted successfully.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
based on my time working in tech for CA elhi, nobody will notice or care. comrades abound!

just had my first non-recruiter/HR interview this round and I liked how it went. for technical assessments, how do people feel about doing hackerrank vs a meeting via google meet w/ someone? i'm leaning towards the latter because you can establish rapport, get more info about what working there is like, explain more thought process, etc. I don't know how hackerrank works for interviewing tho.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
humbling to have an interview go in a way that I thought was extremely good and then be told they're not proceeding. mostly wondering why I would come out of it with the wrong impression. landing on they probably just hired another candidate and it's not about me.

received a surprisingly, pleasingly personalized recruiter email last night -- from an AI-powered CRM company so I guess good job you have a good product!

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
just had an interview with a first-party recruiter for a US company. they were actually on PTO in Ukraine visiting their parents. it was like 10pm there. a great "show, don't tell" of what they mean by "remote-first" and "unlimited PTO".

I guess their motivation for mentioning that was kinda like the spelling mistakes in Nigerian prince emails to filter for the most gullible?

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003

bob dobbs is dead posted:

being on pto on the week of christmas doesnt seem very special....

of course, that part is cool and good. demonstrating that PTO doesn't actually mean PTO the first time I talk to someone in realtime didn't leave a favorable impression. I wasn't aware of internal recruiters earning commission so that does soften it a bit.

I'm moving forward anyway. best case I get pleasantly surprised with what else I learn of company culture, worst case I get PSAT-style practice doing tech screens

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
I bit on a few of those recently and those rounds of interviews are coming to a close this week. Some MANGA interviews coming up next week.. I'm at a place in my life where selling my soul for ridiculous sums of money and then bouncing in four years when options vest seems really attractive.

Before those I started interviewing at 6 places, 2 places seem pretty sucky but I went thru the interviews anyway just to get the practice.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm happy I responded to the Senior Staff Engineer (Front End) jobs because I got practice explaining to product managers times I "took a risk and it didn't work out" even if I wouldn't really want that job.

zombienietzsche fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jan 20, 2022

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
Speaking of putting a reasonable cash value on benefits, is there any reason to value "unlimited PTO" at anything over $0? For non-unlimited, each single day is about 0.5% of yearly salary right?

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
yes, and in addition it turns an entitlement / part of your compensation into a social problem. if I had 20 days of PTO a year as part of my comp and I took 20 days of PTO each year nobody is gonna say "loving ZN on vacation again!?". but mostly it not being fungible leads me to want to put $0 on it.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
as a digression on how much we all hate even thinking about deciding to think about cooking, I was asked a question recently in an interview that the interviewer didn't like my answer to. Apologies if this is the wrong thread it seemed like the place.

here's a lovely diagram of the portion of the system we were discussing:



requests for user data coming in through the load balancer, users-service has an in-memory cache of username to user-id and can quickly grab other user data from SQL by ID. mapping username to ID is slow. we have sticky sessions so we have reasonably distributed username/userid lookups across our three user-service instances.

the interviewer asked how to handle if we have a few users access extremely often and most users rarely accessed. he stressed we wanted to keep the mapping in-memory. I suggested an LRU cache in each process, just keep like our 2000 most recently accessed users for each instance and that should handle it. I could tell he didn't like my response though, any ideas what he was going for?

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
I'm getting mixed signals on how much you actually hate it but I too am sometimes a glutton for punishment so I understand completely.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
Congrats polyester, I firmly believe that the real figgies are the mental health we maintain along the way.

I've got some offers coming in, and an interview with Amazon next week. I believe Amazon is a net societal harm but it turns out there is a lot of money in societal harm. The offers I do have vary so wildly it's insane, like the series B startup offering 50% more in base pay, plus equity, for a fully remote Staff Engineer role vs a hybrid Principal Role in a more established org that is majorly strengthening its engineering team and developing it as a core competency. I assume I should factor in the risk that the startup might not be around in 2 years? I also assume that the Principal org also just doesn't know what software engineering costs and I should make them aware of the other offer. Money aside I'm leaning towards the lesser title as I think I'll be around more and better engineers to have as role models.

Edit:

qhat posted:

To use a video game analogy, it's like smurfing in the low ranks. Yes you are surrounded by idiots, but that doesn't mean running around with dualies no armor and getting called a hacker every other game isn't fun.

Oh yeah, we are definitely on the same page here and this is directly relevant to the two offers I mentioned above.

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
yes, thanks to this thread and BFC giving me a better idea what to target, my recently accepted offer is a 70% jump in TC rather than the 15% jump I was targeting (with a nice 25k signing bonus). Thank you all!!!

zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003
A large upscale retail company sends me rejection letters for the same application every 6 or 7 weeks since September or so. I've started replying to each one saying I'm glad I'm not responsible for their software if their CRM is that lovely but I doubt that ever gets to a person.

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zombienietzsche
Dec 9, 2003

AnimeIsTrash posted:

I did some online coding screening for them, and after the 2 problems I had about 20 questions about how I feel about company values.

I had these too. It was extremely obvious which answer the 'correct' one was for all of them, so I almost wonder if they're testing for enough social awareness to be cutthroat in the Amazon politics cesspool

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