251–260 of 283 posts
Just apply to any large companies.
FB gets over 15,000 applications for each posted vacancy. Your cv is weeded out by an automated system that's difficult to game. Even if you have a contact at the company, your odds suck. You are just as likely to win the lottery. Perhaps buying scratch-off cards isn't such a bad idea.
i'm currently without a job and i'm 40+. and i cannot find something new because every postion is instantly filled with someone better.
In a traffic jam, you're not going anywhere fast, even if you're in a Lamborghini.
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Maybe I'm misreading, but this sounds like a defeatist take. Why would a 50yo be slower? I'm in my early 50s and at the absolute top of my game. I'm a principal eng at a medium-ish company and spend a lot of my time mentoring the "kids" and providing direction to engineers that don't have the same well of experience to draw on. I would naturally assume that an IC in their 40s or 50s is much faster than someone in the…
> Why would a 50yo be slower? Well, our intellectual abilities decline as we get older. I don't know at what age effects become apparent but it's unavoidable so maybe i'm a bit defeatist indeed :) In my case, I can feel my memory isn't as good as it used to be and I do feel slightly slower to pick up things. I don't think it affects my job though. Performance isn't unidimensional. Regarding being faster than someone…
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> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer. Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on…
I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched. I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer
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> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer. Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on…
Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships. Did your firm just…
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This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostl…
That place sounds great. I complain about more than an hour of meetings a day and am told that is unrealistic. This is a small company with under 30 people. Half of them seem to go to meetings all day long.
Meetings are work.
I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.
And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.
If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.
Meetings are work.
Iam at 41, but I learned 100X in my last 2 years than i was at working in sales for a domestic company for 10 years. Currently pursuing my passion - Startup in workplace collaboration. Moral: Age is just a Number.
Up to a point and then you start feeling getting older. I started noticing while approaching 50. I can no longer push as much as I used to. I need to take breaks. Etc.
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I really don’t understand that - if you have 20 SREs why would you need to be on call more than 3 weeks a year? If you do get called frequently then you should probably be working shifts anyway.
20 SREs, assuming two different time zones, means ten weeks per year. You need two people in the same continent for the same 12h shift, so that one can drive, take the train home, shower, etc. Within five weeks, you have gone through the entire team. If your pager response SLO is not that strict and is not impacted by such routines, then you probably can't justify staffing a team of 20, either.
You can do it with 5 but that leaves little room for covering illness and holidays, and you tend to end up paying overtime.
If you are getting frequent call outs out of hours, you need 24/7 coverage at a skill level high enough to reduce the total call outs to just a handful per year.