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Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

adamconrad.dev

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Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#431

Post by munificent »

everdrive wrote: post #411
munificent wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I definitely get being cynical about software, and a lot of it is either disposable trash or actively harmful. But I think we working in tech massively overlook the many many positive benefits of software and how much it improves the lives of people on a daily basis.

I've learned how to fix my own appliances from online videos, stayed connected with friends through email, found stuff to do and avoided getting lost in unfamiliar cities through navigation, unwound with games, discovered new music and shared my music with others. All of that was because of or mediated by software. Could I have done it without, maybe. But I did use software for it, and tech deserves credit for that.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#432

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

rand846633 wrote: post #270
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invariably big companies are causing some harm as a side-effect of their business. They’d usually be better off if their business didn’t cause this harm. This means they employ people whose entire job is to reduce the harm. If your goal is to make the world a better place, these roles can be a good opportunity to do that given the scale involved. From a utilitarian perspective, it’s easy to argue that a person in tha…

Why would you judge someone purely for their individual actions and not for the action of the group they are actively contributing and thereby enabling? If you are, let’s say the boat mechanic of someone making a business of dumping toxic chemicals in the sea, then you are clearly doing evil. Similarly, if you are doing “harm reduction” at Facebook, you are still enabling them to exist, thereby enabling them to get a…

Capitalism is destructive, America is destructive. There’s valid arguments to remove yourself from the system or work within it to make it better.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#433

Post by aliyfarah »

justinlloyd wrote: post #418
aliyfarah wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Lines of code has nothing to do with the difficulty of the question, especially for recursion/backtracking types. "Invert a binary tree" is an example of an infamous question [1] that a lot of people stumble on and it's only 3 lines of code.

I shouldn't have called you a liar though, just saying those are very impressive results for someone who has never done these questions before if true.

[1] https://twitter.com/i/web/status/608682016205344768

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#434

Post by justinlloyd »

aliyfarah wrote: post #433
justinlloyd wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Lines of code has nothing to do with the difficulty of the question, especially for recursion/backtracking types. "Invert a binary tree" is an example of an infamous question [1] that a lot of people stumble on and it's only 3 lines of code. I shouldn't have called you a liar though, just saying those are very impressive results for someone who has never done these questions before if true. [1] https://twitter.com/i/…

You are correct, lines of code is nothing to do with the difficlty of the problem. I spent close to three weeks writing 12 lines of Python. Two of which consisted of print statements. A "clean-up" pass removed three more lines. I consider that to be some of the hardest code I've written in recent memory.

If I was asked to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard I would stumble too. Inverting a binary tree, I can walk through the algorithm, or I can bang out the code. And yes, it's three lines of code, but I had to look up what "invert a binary tree" means. Put a pen in my hand and I'd freeze up. It is trivial to solve through either recursion or iteration. I understand how to, but if I was asked to solve it in an interview, I'd definitely question why. I cannot think of a single instance whereby I'd want to legitimately flip a free left to right in its entirety. I can think of dozens of esoteric tree operations that I would need, and have used, but inverting/flipping left-to-right completely is not one of them.

I consider the person in that tweet far smarter than me.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#435

Post by solarmist »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #316
solarmist wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t an IQ test that’s been created that wouldn’t benefit from practice. That’s why the materials are so highly guarded for actual IQ tests. So technically true, but reality doesn’t have any true IQ tests either.

Yes and no. They have patterns to create IQ tests, and those patterns change less frequently.

Yes, and humans are amazing at pattern matching given any kind of hints, so just knowing the themes, etc give a person a leg up.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#436

Post by Apocryphon »

munificent wrote: post #431
everdrive wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I definitely get being cynical about software, and a lot of it is either disposable trash or actively harmful. But I think we working in tech massively overlook the many many positive benefits of software and how much it improves the lives of people on a daily basis. I've learned how to fix my own appliances from online videos, stayed connected with friends through email, found stuff to do and avoided getting lost in…

Orthogonal to your point perhaps, but the problem with tech is that monopolistic megacorps are the ones who are both delivering that helpful content to you, and the surveillance technologies, dark-pattern Skinner box digital addiction devices/platforms, and whatever other negative things associated with tech.

Maybe we need antitrust action just so we can better separate the “good” software companies from the “bad” ones.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#437

Post by jmchuster »

sarchertech wrote: post #246
jmchuster wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because i know a lot of doctor friends, but months of prepping to then get paid more than they do seems way unfair in my favor.

The median software engineer salary isn't anywhere near the median doctor's salary. I don't know that most engineers could make it through FAANG interviews even with months of prep.

I was going off more of FAANG salaries, comparing the work you put in to get a FAANG job vs the work you put in to get a doctor job.

Huh, i guess it probably is true that "most" engineers couldn't make it, but i guess my viewpoint is skewed because "most" of my engineer friends could and do make it, with "months" of prep being an upper bound, more closer to "weeks". So, it is a bit selective, but i don't know how selective it is relative to people who are able to get into medical school.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#438

Post by oblio »

dangus wrote: post #408
oblio wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook makes roughly 1.5 million in revenue for each employee. They can afford that tax, easily.

Absolutely, I mean, I certainly don’t feel bad for them. Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is . It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision. No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform. They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. I…

They can just start making hardware. They have the money for it.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#440

Post by throwaway9278 »

everdrive wrote: post #350
claudiulodro wrote: post #8

It's wild to me that his way of figuring out what companies to apply for was to make a list of the top-paying ones and just pick the top 10 highest-paying. Is that a common strategy? No thought about product, industry, impact on the world, just $$$. It looks like it worked out for them though, since I guess they got like a million dollar offer, so maybe I'm the one approaching this the wrong way?

I just don't think many or most tech companies have anything positive to offer the world. All these companies simply exist to make money. Generally speaking, most companies just exist to make money. To the extent that they improve anyone's lives, is that they support the economy and allow citizens to pay taxes. There are certainly some minority of tech companies which do good in the world, but actually getting hired…

Billions of people use facebook to connect with their friends. Billions use google to find information they need. Hundreds of millions use Amazon to get affordable stuff quickly. 10s of millions of people use Dropbox to store and sync their files.

Seems like this is a lot more than most companies have to offer, no?

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