Live data from Hacker News

Quitting a New Job

yolken.net

171–180 of 246 posts

Re: Quitting a New Job

#171
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of the highest-paid engineers, AIUI, devote their considerable expertise to optimising ad click rates. I worked on an ad product with a team of 10 or so data scientists + engineers. I'd wager most of us made between 100k-175k + some tiny bonuses here and there. The product we built was making the company $2.5 million a month . But hey we all got some cool jackets and a pat on the back. Give me a break. Money t…

It typically costs an employer double what your pay is, once including benefits, matching social security contributions, etc. So your employer had 10 people it was spending 200k-350k a month on, so 2000k-3500k in expenses, for a product that made 2500k a month.

I dont think its double, its more like 1.6

Re: Quitting a New Job

#172
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past I saw an anecdote a few years ago about a hiring manager basically saying, "If you worked happily for a small startup, you will most likely be unable to put up with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise from now on" I've often wondered how much truth there was to that statement.

The bureaucracy sucks, but I think I could deal with that. The biggest buzzkill for me is working on such minuscule parts of enormous systems. In software, the results of your work are already pretty abstract, but working for a huge company, it's on another level, and I just can't find any motivation in it. It's never interested me, and I'm not sure why I thought it would for the right price.

> The biggest buzzkill for me is working on such minuscule parts of enormous systems

I think that was also part of whatever I saw had to say. But I don't remember where I read such a thing, so who knows.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#173

> the upper rungs of Stripe’s engineering individual contributor (IC) ladder put a lot of emphasis on cross-team coordination and other, managerial-like activities that I didn’t enjoy and felt I wasn’t very good at. That's just the reality of senior IC engineering positions. At some point, there's a limit to the amount that you can contribute by sheerly by your own work - to have a bigger impact, you'll need to need…

Does anyone else find it kind of funny that a lot of companies' "Individual Contributor" roles so many times involve contributions of others once they get past a certain point? Doesn't that mean it's no longer an "Individual Contributor" position?

Re: Quitting a New Job

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty rude. I know a few folks at stripe and I actually interviewed the author for another robitics company (which he passed on =)) and i can assure you he doesn’t “just know webcrap”

It's likely this person is good technically, and there might be a place for them in large corps where software engineers are just cogs, but their attitude and their resume suggests some issues: their resume is listed with year long stints in every major company, and their attitude suggests that apparently nothing can keep them happy. And also not interested in solving the most important problems (as evidenced by the…

As a both embedded and softbank venture (two separate companies in my case) survivor this could be a double whammy - ultra long hw development cycles with no pressure to be anywhere (softbank billions) so it can actually be a cush job compared to “webcrap”. So if that’s the case then I don’t see anything “elitist” about wanting to be in a more dynamic environment. Also this word is thrown around way too much lately

Re: Quitting a New Job

#175
post #128

I'm about a month into a new FAANG job, and I hate it so far. I can't decide if it's better to quit sooner as to not waste the companies time (and avoid suffering more), or if I should give it some more time. My team's work seems super boring, I'm not interested in the tech we use, the setup process has been a shit-show, and I'm feeling zero motivation. I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the pas…

Personally I would just work the minimum amount and do open source or other side projects (indie hacking) with the rest of the time. Then leave after 12-18 months.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#176
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These same employers may have a variety of software maintenance tasks that require recognizing a pattern of problem, knowing the appropriate algorithm from Ye Olde Textbook, and quickly applying it. These edge cases might exist, although I argue the more likely problem is that hiring is hard, expectations can be unrealistic, and so it’s easier to fall back on puzzles and call them an objective measure of technical…

I also measure my candidates' ability to fix bugs by learning the details of a language feature they're not familiar with, by finding examples and documentation. I find that many junior-level candidates scrape by with Stack Overflow, but sadly have little competence when it comes to reading documentation. Candidates for more senior roles have a similar problem regarding systems design. They can find and parrot little…

> Now I feel obligated to add that footer: We're hiring! ;-)

Side note: you should put some contact info in your profile so people know who you are hiring for anf how to contact you. :)

Re: Quitting a New Job

#177
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. Because they think that the employer should recognize their greatness by just looking at their resume and having a simple conversation with them, instead of assessing them on some skill that they have to brush up on. After being on the interviewer side myself recently, I think those people just don't realize how hiring actually works. I've seen some people with impre…

There are more cases that get under your radar: good developers that won't suffer a coding interview. Folks that don't do well with someone looking over their shoulder and talking to them while they're trying to work. Folks interviewing for a job that isn't simple algorithms. To be honest, most data structure wonks are great at scaling cloud services or massive middleware business logic. But not all programming is li…

> Folks that don't do well with someone looking over their shoulder and talking to them while they're trying to work

I am one of those people myself, absolutely cannot do it. But interviewing isn't like that and shouldn't be. It is more like, cooperatively working on a problem with a colleague and then presenting and explaining it to your teammates. That's a pretty valuable skill at work, even necessary, I would say.

The whole "loner dev in his cave" stereotype, most of the time, just materializes in the form of a dude writing code that no one can understand or maintain, with a cherry on top being that dude not being able to effectively explain it to other people either.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#178
post #110

I quit a job before even starting. They called me and told me that they had decided to pay me a good chunk less than we had agreed upon. I was in the last days of my two weeks notice for my current job. I had no option. Except that... five minutes later, my current boss made a counter-offer. And ten minutes later it was me who called those charming people to apologize for the inconvenience. After what they had done,…

Given their behavior, sounds like you dodged a bullet anyway, but this is also a good time to point out if you're job hunting while already employed, you should never give in your notice at current co until you have a signed employment contract from the new one.

I had a contract signed.

No idea what happens where you live, but in Spain, a signed job contract is not worth the paper it's written on. They could just fire me the first day (there's always a "test period" during which they can do it no questions asked).

We operate with some good faith assumptions. Actually it's the only time that such a thing happened to me.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#179
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of the highest-paid engineers, AIUI, devote their considerable expertise to optimising ad click rates. I worked on an ad product with a team of 10 or so data scientists + engineers. I'd wager most of us made between 100k-175k + some tiny bonuses here and there. The product we built was making the company $2.5 million a month . But hey we all got some cool jackets and a pat on the back. Give me a break. Money t…

Double your teams salary to get the cost to the company including benefits like health insurance (which are very real).

From their numbers, it doesn't matter much. Even if we take the highest number from their range ($175k) and double it, that is $3.5M/year for the 10-person team. That is still an order of magnitude less than $30M/year.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#180
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. Because they think that the employer should recognize their greatness by just looking at their resume and having a simple conversation with them, instead of assessing them on some skill that they have to brush up on. After being on the interviewer side myself recently, I think those people just don't realize how hiring actually works. I've seen some people with impre…

Leetcode focused on tricks and memorizing algorithms. I've rejected a good bunch of candidates that can pass coding tests while not having any good understanding of theory, hardware, OS, networking, security

>I've rejected a good bunch of candidates that can pass coding tests while not having any good understanding of theory, hardware, OS, networking, security

Those are valid points, fully agreed. I think the discussion of those topics must be included in an interview process and discussed in-depth too, leetcode-style problems are not sufficient enough on their own.

>Leetcode focused on tricks and memorizing algorithms.

Strong disagree on "memorizing" and only partially agreed on "tricks". Those "tricks" (like knowing that you should use a hashmap when you need a key-value datastructure, or memoizing [aka caching] repeated operations) are very useful in real life problem-solving situations at work. I can tell you for a fact, I don't remember almost any particular problem from leetcode, and I ended up solving certain problems multiple times on leetcode, because I couldn't recognize them at all. However, thanks to leetcode, I obtained a pretty solid intuition on which approach to use in a particular situation, and it helped me out in the workplace immensely (even if I don't directly implement those approaches or remember the specifics 99% of the time).

Post reply on HN