101–110 of 166 posts
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For every engineer on six figures there will be many many of them on five figures. We read about six-figure engineer salaries because people write about them. $100k is well above the US median. I don't think there should be an absolute expectation that every engineer position earns $100k even at 10 years experience. Some will, but many won't.
Actually, BLS says about $110k is the US median dev salary.
What I'm trying to say is that many times we don't want to see the "luck factor".
Assume in a job interview there is a 90% of probabilities to be rejected. Maybe because of your background, maybe they closed the process, maybe there is somebody that is not as good as you but earns waaaay less, etc. That's life, and that's hard.
My advice: accept it. It's happened to me and it's hard. But life goes on and we shouldn't worry about things out of our control.
However, IMHO, if you don't care for work-life balance, look for positions in startups. You'll learn many new skills and also you'll somewhat "restart/refresh" your career.
If you don't want to work in a startup (job insecurity, no work-life balance, etc) my advice for you would be start looking job at a medium-size company, and change jobs each 1.5-2 years. After several changes, your network would have increase and hence, the probability of having delivered some opportunities.
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If you're in a position of privilege then there is zero reason to tolerate that behaviour from an employer. If you're in a minimum wage job scraping by then it's understandable that you would tolerate uncomfortable situations, because it's a question of survival, however if you're a software engineer... just walk. You're making a choice, every day, to be treated poorly. The moment an employer mistreats you is the mom…
Not so easy to walk when I've built skills in unmarketabke tech and have to support a family with multiple medical issues.
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If you're in a position of privilege then there is zero reason to tolerate that behaviour from an employer. If you're in a minimum wage job scraping by then it's understandable that you would tolerate uncomfortable situations, because it's a question of survival, however if you're a software engineer... just walk. You're making a choice, every day, to be treated poorly. The moment an employer mistreats you is the mom…
Not so easy to walk when I've built skills in unmarketabke tech and have to support a family with multiple medical issues.
You can’t change the past, or outsourcing - but you can change your circumstances
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> Almost always asking for "meaningful" jobs. What even is that? There are lots of companies that are always "looking to higher" but they aren't actively highering, bullshit "job opportunities" are everywhere. > Feeling attacked about their profile, but not changing them to accommodate. Their profile should be an honest description of their abilities. Suggesting they change to "accommodate" sounds like you are sugges…
> There are lots of companies.. You can find meaning in anything if you look at it the right way, even if you're writing soulless fintech code to steal from the poor, there are probably interesting challenges in there.. How facebook manages to infer so much about their users based on the data they're stealing? Interesting problems even if they're distasteful. > Their profile should be an honest description ... They m…
You'r advice is to depend only on your network? No serious developer with a network would do this.
You don't feel you can turn down jobs, in 2021? You have an abundance of work from your network but can't afford to turn down the shit jobs in place for higher paying jobs? I don't think so.
Your advice is laughable any senior would recognise you don't do what you say, you wouldn't follow your own advice. I think you are just trying to front on some one with no job to make yourself feel successful.
Your advice boils down to "If I was you people would just bring me work, LOL get gud" as advice this is obviously useless and arrogant the real point behind it is to make yourself feel better about your position as you put it "a somewhat less privileged background" you think you are the only one who has overcome adversity? I don't think you have faced real adversity. Your attitude of just be successful and people will bring you work is all the proof I need that you have not done a days work in your life.
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If you're in a position of privilege then there is zero reason to tolerate that behaviour from an employer. If you're in a minimum wage job scraping by then it's understandable that you would tolerate uncomfortable situations, because it's a question of survival, however if you're a software engineer... just walk. You're making a choice, every day, to be treated poorly. The moment an employer mistreats you is the mom…
Not so easy to walk when I've built skills in unmarketabke tech and have to support a family with multiple medical issues.
A company will hire you when they have confidence that you can meet their needs, so your goal is to find roles that you're confident you can deliver value to and then help the hiring managers share in your confidence. That's it. You need confidence. A technology match might be a component of delivering confidence but it is not a fundamental. My most recent software engineering job hired me because... I was the candidate with a specific experience _outside_ of software engineering, as they valued that experience _more than they valued my experience with the technology they use_!
I don't know what motivates you, whether it's internal or external, but on the chance that you're motivated by external factors... I have a challenge for you to complete. First part is to be completed this week: explore job boards (e.g: linkedin, stackoverflow, workatastartup) and look at many different roles, but rather than focus on the requirements or technology, consider what the day to day is like for each role and decide if you think you'd be capable of it. Make notes of each role you look at, and keep track of the commonalities between roles you think you can do day to day and the commonalities between roles you think you can't do day to day. Then, next week, compile that information into a single document that represents things you're confident you can do, marrying up to the language used by hiring managers.
The goal is to get to a point where you can look at a job posting know whether or not you can give the hiring manager confidence that you are a good candidate. You don't need to be the best candidate, you don't need to be a genius or expert, you just need the hiring manager to think "Yes, giantg2 could do this job" ... and then it's a numbers game: find jobs you're confident about, apply with a bespoke application that emphasises why you're a candidate they can be confident in, and repeat.
There'll be hard days and I don't mean to downplay the hardship of the situation you're in, I absolutely appreciate that "just be optimistic" is unhelpful at best or offensive at worst... but that really is the key, and so anything you can do to bring yourself the optimism and energy to apply to new jobs will pay dividends. You deserve to be happy at work, you deserve to be treated with respect, and there are companies out there that will give you that, you've just got to find a way to get yourself into the right mindset.
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Creativity isn't a Big 5 trait.
You can substitute the word openness for creativity in my post, it doesn't really change the argument. The words are made up anyway, they did a factor analysis over lots of questionnaire responses and then found the largest contributing factors. Then they kind of eyeball the questions and tried to come up with a word that described the kinds of questions in that cluster. Openness is prob more accurate, but creativity…
Creative people can thrive in many companies. You're right startups tend to be good for novelty seekers.
In my area (middle eastern United States), once you hit the local salary average for software engineers, opportunities to take the next step up seem extremely rare. There is a never-ending set of jobs for people with 0-3 years of experience at below-average salaries. These aren't interesting at all - mostly legacy software support or quirky data analysis roles.
My last two job interview experiences were unproductive. I interviewed with a local but larger company. Very good experience with 3 of 4 interviewers but the hiring manager gave off negative vibes. I got an offer for 20% less than the minimum salary figure I gave them before starting the interview process. Declined. The other interview process was for a remote-only company. I made it through all their interviews and successfully handled their programming challenges. No offer - I had a friend there who told me I made it further than anybody who didn't get an offer but they were concerned I hadn't been building more complex software at my current job despite my performance during interviews. I was quite bummed about that.
I'm debating just doing leetcode for the next 3-4 months and taking a shot at FAANG. On the one hand, I have great work/life balance and probably job security for the next 10-15 years. But I make a below average salary and have started wondering if I'll regret not experiencing the FAANG interview gauntlet. Ego-driven if I'm honest with myself.
Alternatively, I may work for another 3-5 years and then go teach math and programming in a local middle school. I taught programming as an adjunct at the undergraduate level and mostly enjoyed that. Heck, I could even take a teaching assistant gig in the local school system and consider myself retired. I am a little worried about bureaucracy in that environment though.