71–80 of 594 posts
This seems like something that will become especially prevalent this time around given the much higher level to which salaries were pushed during the bubble.
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Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it? For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
> Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it? If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation. > I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. Bu…
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it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it. You took 37% paycut and you’re happy with it? Why?
OP didn't take a pay cut. OP's pay was zero. OP took a job that would provide an income that happened to be 37% less than the one OP had before.
He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.
Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement. Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement. Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.
Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.
Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time. A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume.
A year of launching an unsuccessful venture? Running coding classes for the underserved? Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch? That's a lot better, both at the time and in retrospect.
Side projects are also a good way to get hired. You meet people.
You also learn stuff, and stuff of the type you can't learn in a job.
You can also do the equivalent of an acquihire. If you want to work for the world's #1 drubble maker, and you spend 6 months developing a drubble startup, guess who'll come out the most knowledgeable and passionate about drubbles at the interview? And perhaps even bring in some helpful IP?
Your back story is "I tried to go it alone; I think I can do a lot more good with the backing of a company."
- Have perspective. Several years down the line when you're in a new company/career/life, you will recognize this layoff was a necessary thing to happen for you to "get there."
- It's going to take a while. Every job I ever got, took waaaay longer than it should have. Things happen. Roles get filled internally, headcount goes away, etc. Job finding is inherently filled with friction, so if it takes 6 months or more, don't interpret that as "I am bad/this will never work" - it's just the nature of the beast.
- Be in sync with your family on what matters. My wife was very clear that she was going to be fine if it took me longer to find a role I was really excited about. We were lucky that we could afford that, and it's good to be explicit.
- There's no stigma in layoffs but you can generate your own stigma in how you talk about it. Don't be bitter and do provide some color. My answer why I was looking was "the company took a big revenue hit with COVID and had to reduce headcount. The strategy was to cut from areas that were further along in technological maturity, such as (my area.) We lost a lot of senior tech talent, including myself. I am really grateful having worked there, though!" This is 100% true to what happened and how I feel, and it's a great answer because it makes is clear I wasn't fired because I was bad, and shows some maturity and perspective.
- Be aware that your next job may not be your perfect job. It should be good enough that you MIGHT want to stay there, but at the very least can be a launching pad for your real next role. When you are laid off, the question isn't "do I see myself here the next 10 years" but more like "am I pretty sure this will be an interesting / worthwhile year and a half"
- Don't be negative. The author posted some spreadsheet about how rough his job search was and then was surprised that a company wasn't interested in him. I don't think this is the same as "truth can hurt you" - more like "companies are on the lookout for red flags, and if you are the kind of person who complains in public, maybe you are going to be a negative culture fit." That's doesn't mean they want yes-men, but there's a big difference between people who feel an obligation to dissent (strong positive) to perceived complainers. Complainers are poison.
> Hard Truth #6: Honesty can only hurt you I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here. Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) publish…
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
Hey everyone, author here. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result. Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile. [0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
> Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers. So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this? I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't ge…
Hey everyone, author here. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result. Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile. [0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
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Embrace distributed WFH and you can spend 4 hours in the morning, have a nice picnic, play some basketball, have a couple beers, then retire to your room to do another 4hrs. Or just fuck off some days and counterbalance it by doing hyper focused 12hrs days some other time. Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn us…
That wasn’t an option until a few years ago, and it being an option coincided with the crescendo of a 14 year bull market. Having a few beers before your afternoon shift isn’t likely to viable for long.
If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.
(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)
This is how the world becomes a worse place - perhaps if working for the company developing this is life or death for you or a loved one, I can see why.
But otherwise, consider doing something else.