I sympathise - I moved to Taiwan to be with my girlfriend and I'm having almost zero luck job hunting here so far; it's definitely not helped by the fact that my Mandarin is terrible, but at least I have plenty of free time to practise! I wish you the best of luck; I went through this once before in my home country and it felt rough until I finally landed a good gig after months of nothing - hang in there and do what…
I’d recommend looking for remote work and not jobs at local companies. Taiwan even has a special visa for those earning a minimal salary from a remote tech job with tax benefits. I don’t know what tech jobs pay in Taiwan but do know that salaries for graduates are very low, which is why so many young people moved to China to work in the 2010s.
This post title struck a chord with me. I was PIP'd from Amazon earlier this year and am currently on a medical leave which is going to end very shortly. I'm going to have to go back to work and probably will just take the severance and GTFO because culture in my org is toxic and unreasonable, and my first PIP was designed from the start to be impossible. I was a high performer, but have no real mentors. I have a cou…
I got PIP'd twice, passed the first and took the money the second time. Some advice from my experience.
Talk to your doc / therapist, you might be able to extend the medical leave.
Apartments may take into account your bank account balance as something that helps your approval.
If you decide to stay and do the PIP project, realize that it's really about putting a good plan together and executing to that plan, communicating when the plan has a problem etc. Try to remove ALL the ambiguities in the plan before building whatever it is and design each part at one level below where you'd normally do it to make sure you don't have things that come up that surprise you. Everything other than your PIP work doesn't matter - no CRs, no help with design specs, oncall, nothing. Make sure to get sleep and exercise - if you combine stress with lack of those two things you just make things doubly bad.
If you do pass the PIP, change orgs immediately. You need a new start without baggage (my mistake was I got re-orged under a manager that was instrumental in trying to PIP me previously, and then I stuck around to finish my current project instead of immediately leaving).
2014 was basically peak ZIRP and startup era. I don’t think this could be replicated today. I know way too many people from Google/Meta layoffs who are still looking despite willing to take pay cuts, just to keep the lights on.
Everyone, literally every person I know laid off at Google and Meta were subsequently rehired by the same company. It's strange.
What scares me about this thread is it seems remote work even for devs is much harder these days if you have to be in the bay area and then still struggle.
Despite all the talk, believe it or not, there are still open positions -- I work for a large telecom in the Bay Area, and I'm told we have 8,000 unfilled positions. But let's drill down a bit -- what is gone is the insanity -- we no longer pay $200,000 a year for dev-ops, you can no longer bring your dog to work. And, yes, we still have management that INSISTS if they can't see you in the chair, you must be scheming with a competitor. The jobs are there, but folks, we call it work, for a reason. If it were fun, we'd call it play. Mind you, I would completely understand anyone who said "I don't want that lifestyle anymore -- it was killing me!" But when you say that, you also say I don't want the paycheck. Decide what you will put up and what you won't put up with. I need medical coverage from a company that will be there, so I make my peace with the choices. I'm well paid, and well covered, but there is a price. Also, when you do shop around, remember, you know what you're worth -- both on the high and low end. Everyone talks about not selling out for a low salary -- but be careful. If someone is willing to pay you substantially more than you're used to, either you'd had a problem for years you didn't know about, or, why is everyone else refusing this job... And, as a final note, it's always easier to get a new job when you have one, so don't turn away what I call the "temporary job". I knew someone who was unemployed at the time -- and we had an open position that paid about $130K. He informed me "I will not work for people who do not value me and pay me at least $147K!" Now why it was $147K, as opposed to $150K, I have no idea, and at the moment, he was making nothing. So I don't understand. When I joined this company, I took a 30% cut. I wasn't happy about it, but a 30% cut is better than a 100% cut. (See I did pay attention in math class!) However, getting back into the workforce let me meet people again, and by blessed circumstances, meet people who moved me up over 20 years such that I've made back far more than I lost.
This post title struck a chord with me. I was PIP'd from Amazon earlier this year and am currently on a medical leave which is going to end very shortly. I'm going to have to go back to work and probably will just take the severance and GTFO because culture in my org is toxic and unreasonable, and my first PIP was designed from the start to be impossible. I was a high performer, but have no real mentors. I have a cou…
I got PIP'd twice, passed the first and took the money the second time. Some advice from my experience. Talk to your doc / therapist, you might be able to extend the medical leave. Apartments may take into account your bank account balance as something that helps your approval. If you decide to stay and do the PIP project, realize that it's really about putting a good plan together and executing to that plan, communi…
What do you mean "take the money" ? Is it some kind of payout to leave ?
Not to be dismissive of people in this position, but speaking as someone with a regular ass boring job outside of the bay area, saying you're "terrified" sounds like you're far more worried than you need to be. The standards at jobs around the country are so low, and people in general are so bad at their jobs. You might not LIKE the other work that's out there, but you could always find a software dev gig, or IT anal…
You know, this probably also describes me and my strategy (I’ve only ever lived in the city I was born in and I’ve just found work here as needed). Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much, but for various reasons I really need my health insurance, so layoffs are pretty nerve-wracking for me as well.
You mention some great points but I'm not a fan of the "focus on soft skills; being amusing in interviews has always been my superpower" advice. That's not scalable and means nothing given the limited context.
Fair. I'm not suggesting he should focus on being amusing in interviews - just that soft skills have value and sometimes in surprising places. Time invested in them is unlikely to be wasted. Time spent grinding leetcode not so much. His milage may vary; my main message is that we're still in the inflationary universe stage of professional computing so despite the current undeniable demoralising blip a career change i…
The guy mentioned he has social anxiety and autism, the likelihood of him being able to improve his soft skills meaningfully without a long (and costly) therapy is unlikely to say the least.
Fair. I'm not suggesting he should focus on being amusing in interviews - just that soft skills have value and sometimes in surprising places. Time invested in them is unlikely to be wasted. Time spent grinding leetcode not so much. His milage may vary; my main message is that we're still in the inflationary universe stage of professional computing so despite the current undeniable demoralising blip a career change i…
The guy mentioned he has social anxiety and autism, the likelihood of him being able to improve his soft skills meaningfully without a long (and costly) therapy is unlikely to say the least.
Perhaps? Soft skills includes stuff like writing though, not just schmoozing.
Try being an (old school) sysadmin / platform / DevOps person that doesn't have terraform/ansible/python skills. Never needed it, always been overkill, and every single job wants it in the space now.
I've made my own homegrown ansible type tools and everything else under the sun. But grown organically and not requiring learning a different DSL.
I've worked in the industry so long everything recommends "senior" level to me, which I am eventually in each job I'm at, except I don't have a those two skills that everyone apparently requires, which makes it real weird finding anything.
You should be able to find a lot of SWE jobs with your languages. Those are pretty solid.