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Tech company career ladders
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Re: Tech company career ladders
#12i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with my personality and charisma. i have absolutely zero intuition about what to say to other human beings. conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine. conversations that are very focused and intellectual always get a good response but i seldom meet people who want to have those even among engineers. 99 percent of the people i meet, even among "tech" people, i am rejected. i guess ill just scrape by.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#13i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with…
>conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine.
Basically, that's the problem. In order to establish a repertoire, you need to have more than dense interests. It's cool to be passionate about one or two hobbies. Lots of people have none, and this makes conversation dull. However, it is vital you can maintain ordinary conversation on lay topics too -- It's strange to not be able to talk about the local flair, family or relatives, hot vacation spots, annoying ordinances, and neighborhood politics. If you can't maintain a casual conversation about some the above, you are quickly deemed "dangerous", as you failed the "same species as me" test.
This is not an indictment of you. Just plain fact.
The good news is that it's straightforward to learn. Plain osmosis works. Find some meetups which you won't find totally repulsive (say, boardgames, movies, etc) and just listen to how conversations between normals work. You can literally copy and paste these and pass the "am I human" Voight-Kampff tests with this information.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#14>> What's the takeaway here? Know how the company works before you take the plunge.
This is good advice, but I think it's good advice for any company you join: understand how performance is going to be measured.
This is a key question that you should ask during the interview process. Remember, they're not just interviewing you, you are interviewing them.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#15i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with…
social skills can be learned
Re: Tech company career ladders
#16In my view a PIP is all (and only) about management expectations. A person that is being railroaded by incompetent management can outlast them by staying positive.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#17If anyone's wondering SDE2/L5 at Amazon is the first 'career' role on the engineering ladder.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#18I think this article unfairly paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case. I have plenty of friends at small companies who feel like their c-suite is filled with sociopaths and because the company is under the radar nobody cares how the employees of said company are treated.
This was definitely my experience at 2/4 of the startups I worked at
Re: Tech company career ladders
#19i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with…
This is what is generally referred to as "soft skills" in the industry, and is given way too little importance by engineers until it is too late. Obviously technical knowledge is important, but at the end of the day shit only gets done if people are collaborating and working well with each other.
Re: Tech company career ladders
#20Through all of this, if your manager isn't supporting you, you're probably doomed. Unless they do something that's obviously going to get the company in legal trouble, HR won't care. Remember, HR is there to keep the company out of hot water, and they are never there for you. This is very true in my experience and probably worth underscoring. How many of you feel like your boss isn't supporting you? Whenever that hap…
On the dark side, the real advice is to join teams where none of the engineers are supporting the manager. Ensure the manager is not a literal demon; just sidelined by engineers "who know best", and then do better. With only a trivial amount of work to meet arbitrary management deadlines, you'll be a hero or saint. "Exceeds Expectations" and promotions will rain down on you.