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Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

adamconrad.dev

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Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#411

Post by everdrive »

munificent wrote: post #125
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comp is king, everything else is window dressing; only the comp pays the bills and gets you closer to financial independence (wealth is options, options are freedom).

What are you planning to do with all that financial independence? If the answer is, "Live a meaningful and satisfying life." then... some people seek out work that gives them some of that while they are earning money. Obviously, the idea that work can provide all of the meaning in your life is a toxic meme that leads to people being exploited. But the idea that work should provide no meaning is equally toxic. You're…

>some people seek out work that gives them some of that while they are earning money.

But do they find it in tech? I could understand if we were talking about doctors, firemen, artists, etc. But tech work is mostly just companies trying to push products. This isn't really evil or good, it's just economics. A lot of tech companies seem to attempt to adopt language which suggests they're doing good, but I couldn't name very many which do something other than push products. I can't remember what language they used years ago when I worked at the apple store, but it was something like "enriching lives." And a lot of the employees seemed to really believe it. Yes, if you just buy a mac rather than some other computer, your life will be "enriched."

I'm not trying to be cynical; I definitely think there are some tech companies which do objective good, but these companies are in the vast minority of the tech field. If most people in tech sought "meaning" then the field would suddenly become extremely crowded around the few companies which actually produce good for the world.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#412

Post by sokoloff »

thwayunion wrote: post #46
ForHackernews wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting expenses also gets you closer to financial independence: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si... In fact, it's doubly effective. If you can learn to reduce your expenses by $10k and live happily, not only do you have an additional $10k to save/invest, but you need less each year to live independently.

> If you can learn to reduce your expenses by $10k 1. This is crazy to me. I could maybe cut $3K by taking a huge hit to quality of life (that would probably not be sustainable with a full time job anyways). Getting the other $7K would involve either homelessness or cutting back on eating and visiting family. How do salary earners manage to rack up $10K per year of purely unnecessary expenses? 2. That number is still…

Having multiple late model cars in the household, often via leases (meaning expensive comprehensive insurance is also required). Buying a $15 lunch and three $5 coffees per day is probably an extra $20/workday ($4800/yr) more than a viable alternative. Two extra nights of eating out rather than cooking food at home might add another $100/week. Paying someone $100/wk to come clean your house is more than half of that “impossible” $10K/yr (and $100/wk is cheap for a cleaner in many cities).

No one’s saying it’s completely free from trade-offs , but a lot of people have leaks in their bucket that they mindlessly assume are “required” when, in fact, they’re small luxuries and should be considered that way. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but rather just means you should consciously determine if they’re actually worth the tradeoff to you.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#413

Post by hintymad »

lenova wrote: post #261
hintymad wrote: post #61

I don't quite get the study plan, as it sounds more like cramming. Nothing wrong with cramming per se except that what you learn does not stick, and you will have to repeat the process when you need to switch jobs again. I think a better system is to regularly study fundamentals and always deep dive in your work. Case in point, I've never had problems passing interviews by FAANG or other hot startups, I always got ti…

> I don't quite get the study plan, as it sounds more like cramming [...] > I think a better system is to regularly study fundamentals and always deep dive in your work. Is it safe to assume that you don't have young kids like the author does?

I do. People underestimate the effect of continuous learning for years. Think about this: a semester of college CS course has 2 hours of lecture and one hour of tutorial per week, plus on average 15 hours of homework. That’s 18 hours a week. Now go check how much time you spent on your phone. Let me guess, 4 hours, at least? Cut it in half, and you get your 2 hours back. Besides, deep dive in work is part of the job, so you can usually have some additional time. More importantly, we are not in college pursuing perfect GPA any more. Instead, we can follow 80-20 rule. All-in-all, if we can spend 6 hours a week, that’s 1/3 of a course’s load, more than enough to cover a single course. In 10 years, you would cover at least the content of 20 courses. Trust me, you would cover way more because knowledge converges and you will learn faster as you will be able to connect more dots.

10 years look long, but pass quickly. That’s why my approach is a system: it does not guarantee success, but it maximizes then chance of success and happiness.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#414

Post by djcapelis »

wayne-li2 wrote: post #336
djcapelis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not everyone is a twenty year old second generation immigrant with no family wealth who needs a lifeboat. Are you under the impression the blog post author is? Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the…

I didn’t try to assume anything about the blog post author. But it’s irrelevant — I was commenting on the comment calling people in general soulless for maximizing compensation. I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to. I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”. But I live in a VH…

I get VHCOL cities, I live in one and bought a home here in 2020. You may not be at the point where you don’t have to optimize for comp yet, and that’s okay. But when you are, I hope you take the opportunity to do so.

And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in comp increases faster than working on something you care less about. :)

Good luck out there!

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#415

Post by caffeine »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #399
caffeine wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And it’s a good one. Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time. Also, it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.

As someone who recently left a very well compensated position at a hedge fund, I disagree with all of this. >Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time. Having the company not waste your time is not in the top 10 most important factors for job satisfaction. And anyway, that just means you have less down time and less personal t…

> As someone who recently left a very well compensated position at a hedge fund

Why did you leave?

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#416

Post by dragonwriter »

jseban wrote: post #340
dragonwriter wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the primary purpose of your job is to raise funds for the things that actually matter, what other method would you use? Primary isn’t sole, and even if it was, all jobs aren’t equal in other ways, so the tradeoff varies by more than just compensation. Particularly, for someone without a myopic view but whose sole concern is providing money is sustainability of working conditions, because burnout is a thing.

Yeah but why entangle your need of helping others, with your employment? That just seems like making your life unnecessarily complex, especially when altruism is fundamentally opposing the goals of your organisation.

> Yeah but why entangle your need of helping others, with your employment?

Nothing I said is about your need to help others, it's about the long-term viability of your own working arrangements for you.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#417

Post by justinlloyd »

3qz wrote: post #288
justinlloyd wrote: post #277

For years I have run in terror at the leetcodes I might be thrown by a tech company that thinks it is a FANG. Looking at the "Blind 75 Must Do Leetcode" problems, I must say, I am disappoint. I just spent four hours on a Friday evening going through each of the problems, and have so far solved 40+ of them, in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases. Some of them…

> in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases You wouldn’t get through the interview. Most questions have a very easy brute force solution, but the answer they’re looking for is the optimal one. There’s also time constraints. Figure out the runtime complexity of your answer and compare it to the solutions.

Understood. So what I should be doing is trying create optimal solutions. Obviously completely optimal solutions on some of them could take hours, if not years to come up with. Those would be "you either know it or you don't" or you're the equivalent of Mozart when it comes to code. I am thinking I will work on some of those solutions today.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#418

Post by justinlloyd »

aliyfarah wrote: post #362
justinlloyd wrote: post #277

For years I have run in terror at the leetcodes I might be thrown by a tech company that thinks it is a FANG. Looking at the "Blind 75 Must Do Leetcode" problems, I must say, I am disappoint. I just spent four hours on a Friday evening going through each of the problems, and have so far solved 40+ of them, in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases. Some of them…

Please stop lying, you absolutely did not solve 40 leetcode problems in 4 hours. That’s 6 minutes per question, most competitive programmers can’t even do that.

I have nothing to gain by lying. You're logic is flawed because you're assuming all questions took six minutes. Rotate Image, Robber II were all under two minutes, many others too. Coin Change and Robber and Merge Two Sorted Lists were under a minute. That leaves plenty of time to solve slightly more difficult problems. A half-dozen or so lines of C, C# or Python solves most of the problems in the set of problems that I tackled.

Have you looked at these problems? They're trivial.

Rotate Image (medium) https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-image/) is 7 lines of code, because I have to use a temporary variable to do the swap. It is a simple matrix transpose. 5 lines if I could allocate more memory.

Merge Two Sorted Lists (easy) https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-two-sorted-lists/ is 6 lines of code. Walk two lists and do a comparison.

Remove Nth Node from End of List (Medium) https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-nth-node-from-end-of-li... is 7 lines of code. Create a stack, walk the list, pop off the stack, remove the node from the list.

Number of Islands (medium) https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-islands/ is 12 lines of BFS code.

Coin Change (medium) https://leetcode.com/problems/coin-change/ is 5 lines of code.

I did not provide optimal solutions, which may be why competitive programmers take more time to solve the problems. I will see how I do when I start hitting on some of the hards.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#419

Post by wayne-li2 »

djcapelis wrote: post #414
wayne-li2 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t try to assume anything about the blog post author. But it’s irrelevant — I was commenting on the comment calling people in general soulless for maximizing compensation. I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to. I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”. But I live in a VH…

I get VHCOL cities, I live in one and bought a home here in 2020. You may not be at the point where you don’t have to optimize for comp yet, and that’s okay. But when you are, I hope you take the opportunity to do so. And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in…

Thanks for the well wishes. These are questions I’m constantly wrestling with, and I’m a liar if I said I had life figured out.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#420

Post by 3qz »

justinlloyd wrote: post #417
3qz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases You wouldn’t get through the interview. Most questions have a very easy brute force solution, but the answer they’re looking for is the optimal one. There’s also time constraints. Figure out the runtime complexity of your answer and compare it to the solutions.

Understood. So what I should be doing is trying create optimal solutions. Obviously completely optimal solutions on some of them could take hours, if not years to come up with. Those would be "you either know it or you don't" or you're the equivalent of Mozart when it comes to code. I am thinking I will work on some of those solutions today.

> Obviously completely optimal solutions on some of them could take hours, if not years to come up with.

Yep. Once you know the common patterns then most of the easy questions are pretty easy to solve optimally in 10-15 minutes. A lot of the hard questions seem impossible unless you’ve seen the problem before and I’m not sure what an effective strategy for those is.

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