441–450 of 771 posts
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Is it low-mid for "much of the US" or for much of the Silicon Valley venture crowd?
From the Stackoverflow survey, it would be below the national average (the mean), but I don't think there's actually many regions that pay the national average. SV pays more and most of the rest pays less.
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That’s roughly equivalent to 120,000 Euro/year once normalized for taxes (~50% for self-employed, ~30% for employees). I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.
Hold on, 700€ x 215 days worked (you don't count vacation time when freelance) = 150 500. Now, give it half to the taxman, and you're left with 75 250€ / year. And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc. So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.
I spent almost a decade at Amazon. Their system for removing low performers has two key flaws. First, the mandatory minimums. If an org is full of superstars, the org still has to ensure it has at least X% turnover per year, so a superstar has to go. Usually well-performing devs whose manager wasn't skilled enough to convince the larger group that all of their people are superstars. It's cruel, unfair, and harms the…
I’d love to see the data correlating PIPs of reports to manager tenure. I bet there is an inverse correlation. So to prospective hires, ask your hiring manager how long THEY have been a manager AT AMAZON before you waste time going through the whole interview process.
I had a manager who was one of those org-psychopaths you speak of and it was entertaining to watch him tear apart managers of other teams. Absolutely shred their OP1 docs and argue that their team was working on utter bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong there was a lot of good stuff about Amazon, their operations culture is second to none, but a lot of the ways I saw people being treated and bad behavior from managers being tolerated rubbed me the wrong way. I absolutely saw PIP being used reactively to block a transfer to my team, for instance.
The pip quota is a HUGE perverse incentive here. Choosing someone to put on pip is hard because it is in manager's best interest to protect their core team from pip. So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team. The other pathological result is hiring dummies just to put them on pip, again protecting the core te…
> So if someone is too good for your team, you put them on pip. They are going to leave anyway, so putting them on pip does the least damage to your team. This sounds like a lie people tell themselves after being PIP’d. Engineers have an average tenure of 1.8 years. You can’t guarantee you’ll hold together anything. No manager PIPs someone for just being TOO good. It’s already difficult enough to find competent peopl…
OTOH, I think I'd be insanely stressed about being judged unfairly for things outside my control (or even being made into a sacrificial lamb) in an environment like that. Even if they kept telling me everything was fine, I'd feel like I had the sword of Damocles hanging over my head all the time.
Stories have two sides, someone on blind posted the following, and no one's challenged it so presumably it's true: > The guy made 24 CRs in his entire career at amazon, all in just one CDK package. > 50% of his CRs are merged without approval. > So, yeah, there you go !
What is a "CR"? And a "CDK"?
I've only seen it written in typescript so node-module and package-locks are a thing.
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We could create a developer filibuster. Create lists of terrible teams and tell people that they are good for interview practice, but little else.
Wasn't there a website for rating college professors? Seems like a similar idea.
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It’s difficult to not feel empathy for people you have a relationship with. Even if a manager is incompetent, they will get the benefit of the doubt from vs a lowly engineer whom the Senior Manager does not have a personal relationship with. There are very few Senior Managers who take the time to look beyond what’s immediately presented to them.
So M2s+ are expected to have empathy for M1s, but M1s are not expected to have empathy for engineers. And, M2s+ having been M1s prior to being promoted, have to develop empathy when becoming M2s+. Have I described correctly the situation? Legend: M2 - senior management, has other managers reporting to them M1 - first layer of management, has workers / engineers as direct reports
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A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.
One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee. It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s roughly equivalent to 120,000 Euro/year once normalized for taxes (~50% for self-employed, ~30% for employees). I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.
Hold on, 700€ x 215 days worked (you don't count vacation time when freelance) = 150 500. Now, give it half to the taxman, and you're left with 75 250€ / year. And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc. So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.
I used 4 weeks, and by my experience that's generous (not talking about paid leave - all the freelancers I know are workaholics and don't take much leave, but maybe that's a US thing).
5*48 = 240 days, which works out to around 84000 EUR. Or 120,000 EUR - 30%.
Regardless, 700 EUR/day seems in the ball-park for a generic all-around developer.