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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

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Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#341

Post by scarface74 »

nickff wrote: post #332
paypalcust83 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Trivial Pursuit: Code Monkey and Engineering Edition is the interview game, that's not a place a sensible person would want to work. A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia. Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they…

Well, I think it depends on what the rewards are for getting the job. If the pay, benefits, and accreditation (resume boost) from holding a position at a given company are sufficiently valuable, it is definitely rational to play the game. Full disclosure; I have never done an interview like this, or tried to land a job at a major 'tech' company, though I do have a degree in engineering.

I think I might have found a hack - a way to work for $large_tech, not to have to move to the west coast, work remotely and not be required to do leetCode - work in the cloud consulting division of either Microsoft or Amazon. I’ll know by the end of May if it works.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#342

Post by slg »

_ah wrote: post #305
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

The best developers only have 10 years experience. 10 years is enough to understand software, process, and the rest at a deep level. You may have expertise in a particular area. You know pretty much all the things that are available to know. After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 1…

Java - first released 24 years ago.

C - first released 48 years ago.

Python - first released 30 years ago.

C++ - first released 35 years ago.

C# - first released 20 years ago.

VB - first released 29 years ago.

Javascript - first released 24 years ago.

PHP - first released 25 years ago.

SQL - first released 46 years ago.

R - first released 26 years ago.

Those are currently the top 10 most popular languages according the TIOBE Index. The idea that everything turns over immediately is maybe true in the valley, but it isn't close to being true industrywide.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#343

Post by dang »

jamespollack wrote: post #328
war1025 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer. Congratulations. You are still getting paid the same. Boosts in productivity need to come with boosts in pay, otherwise the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for.

exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?

Self-respect?

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#344

Post by strgcmc »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #23

"To replace out MediaWiki with a Java-based alternative (XWiki) ended up taking a total fo 24 dev-years over 4+ calendar years for the team, not counting the interruptions to pretty much every other team at Amazon as their pages were getting constantly migrated and un-migrated" I would love to hear more about this. I'm guessing that's a cost of at least $4M? How was this approved? How did they allow it to continue fo…

There's a roughly ~12,000-word postmortem document that took an additional 2+ months to produce after the fact, which the OP has lightly quoted or summarized from in his post (including what you quoted). It really is an impressively magnificent failure at scale, but there's nothing really fundamentally earth-shattering about how this project went so far off the rails. Mistakes were made, but IMO nobody was outrageously negligent.

The OP's assertion that it was primarily due to slavish devotion to InfoSec's insistence of getting off PHP-based MediaWiki, is incomplete and misleading. The team itself opted into the migration, and by their own admission in their own postmortem document, they wanted the opportunity to get off MediaWiki (killing two birds with one stone, both as a technology upgrade and as an InfoSec compliance thing), but they fundamentally vastly underappreciated the scale and complexity of the project (some top line #'s: ~4M total documents, 1.7M unique pages visited daily, 600K unique MAU, etc.). What probably doesn't come through in talking about this, is that the wiki is far from just a simple collection of text-based wiki pages in the standard sense; it serves more like something akin to an unholy abomination of a Wordpress-like platform with endless amounts of plugins and macros and templates, and gives you just enough programmability to be dangerous.

The primary reason it took 4+ years, was essentially down to going through multiple rounds of failed migration attempts, including failed attempts at producing automatic translations of wiki's from one platform to another (which proved to be incredibly complex, due to the nature of how customizable MediaWiki was and how many teams had gone and done so many interesting/advanced things with it, which was great... except it made automatic translation/migration near-impossible).

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#345

Post by PopeDotNinja »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #323
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't become a developer until just after my 40th birthday. I'm 45 now. I'm doing just fine.

Same for me, but it may actually be easier if you're 42 with two years of experience than twenty years. You're cheap, not specialized, and trainable.

Yes to being trainable, but good luck getting training. I jumped straight into mid-level roles. No one would take me seriously for a junior role, so I used failed interviews to learn how to sound more experienced than I was. Then I got in over my head and failed my way up for a couple years. That is also my anecdotal evidence for software engineering interviews being crap. If someone w/ less than idea experience makes you think they have enough maturity to do the job well, maybe your interview kind of stinks.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#346

Post by falcolas »

jonfw wrote: post #244
falcolas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you. SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. EDIT: To provide a small anecdot…

> They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours So now we've hit the real root of the problem. If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role- than ageism may not be why it's getting harder to find jobs. It isn't 'ageist' to disagree on the value of prior experience.

Salaries over time are rarely based upon prior experience or knowledge; they are the function of normal annual salary adjustments combined with 5-20% increases when job hopping. Which is, if you perform well, roughly equivalent a 4% annual compound interest.

As they say, compound interest is king - companies are just not willing to swallow the fact that the compound interest is in this case working against them. And yes, it’s working against employees as well: after all, no amount of technical experience can fight against 20+ years of compounded interest.

EDIT:

A $60k starting salary, compounded annually at 4% for 20 years, will be $131k. At the age of 50, they’re knocking on the door of $200k. 60 brings them to around $290k. Just by doing their job.

If anyone is to blame for the “unnaturally high” salaries of those over 40, it’s the companies themselves, plus a bit of math.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#347

Post by downerending »

llarsson wrote: post #33
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

If you chose the word "desperate" deliberately, would you mind telling us/me why someone with two-to-three decades of experience becomes "desperate" for a job? What did you work on during those years? Did you keep up with the industry? I am asking out of interest for both you and me. For you, I want to help you regain confidence that is rightfully yours, because someone with your experience should not need to feel de…

Not OP, but I have an answer. Had to take some time off to deal with the fallout from a nasty divorce. Afterwards, was financially "desperate" due to alimony (which assumes that you never take time off and can always get a new job that pays the same as your prior one).

Turns out that it really is hard to get a job when you don't already have one.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#348

Post by 29athrowaway »

You become more productive by delegating work to the computer.

The better you are at delegating work to the computer, the more productive you will be.

Algorithms are elegant, data is not. If you are not careful, then data will leak into your program and you will end up with special cases for everything.

When this happens, your job becomes a glorified data entry job.

But you can be smarter than that and create abstractions over data that are reusable. And most likely that will involve types too.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#349

Post by downerending »

Glyptodon wrote: post #317
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

I can tell you that age will not matter all that much if you look at rather rough, atypical positions like universities, city governments, and small/medium businesses (all unfortunately mostly not hiring right now). They could care less that you're in your 40s, but they'll try to hire you like you're in a different industry and do things like validating that you can use Excel, have people who don't know the position…

This is kind of what I did, and recommend. Salaries are humble, but it's nice to have an employer that's grateful rather than dealing with contempt (of the sort we're seeing here).

And you can end up with an amazing amount of freedom on technical choices, etc.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#350

Post by scarface74 »

paypalcust83 wrote: post #326
nickff wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those tests aren't really about engineering skill. The interviewer is checking to see how much you want the position, how hard of a worker you are, and how smart you are. If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail. If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview. If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied t…

If Trivial Pursuit: Code Monkey and Engineering Edition is the interview game, that's not a place a sensible person would want to work. A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia. Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they…

I had the same attitude pre-Covid. My local market (Atlanta) has completely tanked. There are still jobs out there, but salaries have imploded and I don’t think they are coming back for a couple of years.

If I didn’t have any other option besides the standard r/cscareerquestions “Learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” , I would.

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