Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

adamconrad.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 447 posts

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#181

Post by jleyank »

notreallyserio wrote: post #133
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…

> What are you planning to do with all that financial independence? Read more, improve my cooking skills, learn how to play chess, try out a month-long vacation, play video games, learn some art skills, exercise... I'm sure I'm missing some things. I can do a little bit of these a small amount of the time but it's not enough to enjoy, as long as I'm working. Maybe there are jobs I'd enjoy but I kind of doubt it. I ha…

If you’re in the us, make sure your pile is big enough to cover health care 55-65, kid college expenses and parental care. These are big bucks. Get as much as possible paid off before you pull the plug.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#183

Post by 0des »

heavyset_go wrote: post #170
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of the time constraints required in an interview. At my job, the assumption is that you won't have enough context and experience to be effective in the job until you've been there for 6 months. You can't fit 6 months of prep into an interview. Good interview questions are ones that boil that 6mo+ of experience down to something that can be explained in 5 minutes and solved in 45. Ideally you'd just work…

At-will employment means that any period is a trial period if the company wants it to be.

No post body was provided.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#184

Post by rsanek »

heavyset_go wrote: post #170
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of the time constraints required in an interview. At my job, the assumption is that you won't have enough context and experience to be effective in the job until you've been there for 6 months. You can't fit 6 months of prep into an interview. Good interview questions are ones that boil that 6mo+ of experience down to something that can be explained in 5 minutes and solved in 45. Ideally you'd just work…

At-will employment means that any period is a trial period if the company wants it to be.

I've long thought that it might be interesting for an interview model to emerge where a trial period of weeks/months is the expectation. I think this might resolve much of the current frustration with programming inteviews. But I also recognize that doing so would be significantly different from how essentially all other companies operate, and if it weren't communicated clearly enough, could result in negative PR for a firm trying such an approach.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#185

Post by lostmsu »

kleinsch wrote: post #169
adamsmith143 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you people out there really setting up a daily calendar to deal with childcare? 4:30 - 5:00 Change Diaper 5:00 - 6:00 Bounce on knee 7:00 - 8:00 Contemplate on the poor life decisions that lead to this scenario

Man the 22 year olds in this thread are hilarious. Yes. With a one year old, esp during COVID, childcare time is time you can’t leave the house, can’t relax, can’t do anything productive. So yes, you make a schedule - you pick them up from daycare, watch them for an hour while I study, then I’ll come make dinner and do bedtime.

We usually get a couple of hours after that.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#186

Post by alephnan »

anyfoo wrote: post #135
cebert wrote: post #124

Is something wrong with software engineering interviews that one could reasonably need to spend months prepping for interviews? Leetcode problems can be fun and interesting, but seldom represent problems and skills I employ daily as a more senior software engineer. Studying these problems won’t help me much at my current employer and likely wouldn’t after I passed the interview gauntlet at another firm.

There are plenty of passionate software engineers who think those problems are actually fun. Independently of that (I don't think it's an immediate red flag if those problems are not fun for you, or not fun for you in that specific setting etc.), a lot of it is actually a glimpse into how working with that person might be. I.e. what ideas do they form, how do they communicate them, how do they respond to feedback, ho…

> There are plenty of passionate software engineers who think those problems are actually fun.

There are plenty of passionate software engineers who don’t. Competitive programmers maybe. I like writing naive code that does something useful, where useful sometimes mean performance. When you revisit or just step away from the problem, you’ll have an aha moment of how to solve it more efficiently, or more elegantly. The Leetcode style interview expects finding that insight in the first 5-10 minutes of the interview. Here, more grinding increases the probability you arrive that rote insight. Rote memorization is not very fun, especially for software engineers who like assembling complex things from simple primitives and first principles.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#187

Post by rsanek »

maxfurman wrote: post #21

This whole process seems a bit psychotic. Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer? Is "has memorized some number of coding problems" really a test of engineering knowledge? I suppose it's appropriate that after all that work, the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless company on the list.

> cram

It's interesting that this read to you as cramming. To me, the mention of the use of Anki (spaced repetition) as well as his approach to revisiting past questions he had trouble with suggested the opposite.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#188

Post by nostrademons »

robocat wrote: post #156
nostrademons wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not in normal economic times. I "retired" at 33 (still doing other things, but without steady cash paycheck). Lived cheaply, worked hard, saved up a ton of money. I went back to work in 2020, right after interest rates were dropped to zero and the pandemic stimulus went out, because I figured that every single retiree, no matter how old, was about to get reamed by inflation. Have been right so far, and IMHO it'…

Can you give a broad outline of your investment strategy in a high inflation environment? I am older than you, but one issue that I need to contend with is being in a demographic that will contain a lot of other retirees, so I believe I need to financially be better off than other retirees of my age to have a reasonable lifestyle (and I am unsure how to avoid thundering crowd effects for my generation). Reasonable =…

For steady inflation that's not already priced into rates/prices/etc, the solution is pretty simple. Borrow a lot of money at low, fixed rates. Invest in hard assets like real estate. To the extent that you invest in equities, invest in businesses with a lot of pricing power and little competition. Their profits will tend to go up more than the rate of inflation, and then stock prices tend to track profits.

Problem is that inflation is rarely steady. Typically you get stops and starts. Inflation will rise, and the Fed will try to contain it by raising rates. Then the raised rates create a recession, all asset prices fall, the Fed flinches and drops rates. Inflation takes off again. Repeat for a decade or more.

In an environment like this, you can't lever up too heavily, and you need to actively manage. Otherwise you'll get reamed by the busts. Optimal strategy is to buy surviving high-growth stocks right as the recession gets to its peak, as everyone feels like everything's going bankrupt, and then hold them as rates drop and the economy recovers. Then sell right as the Fed signals it's going to get tough on inflation again.

Optimal strategy is pretty hard to execute. Failing that, it's often best just to buy & hold profitable, low-competition businesses.

The demographic time-bomb of everybody retiring at once and trying to cash out of the market at the same time is another issue. There's no real fix for this: living standards are going to have to drop, for retirees or workers or both (and more likely retirees). The way to profit from it is to look for companies that are successfully automating parts of elder care, and then invest hard in them.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#189

Post by yoyohello13 »

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?

Reading these responses is pretty upsetting. No wonder big tech is so evil. So many talented developers willing to sell their soul for more money. No thought to whether what they’re doing is causing harm to the world.

Re: Changing jobs during the Great Resignation

#190

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

heavyset_go wrote: post #170
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of the time constraints required in an interview. At my job, the assumption is that you won't have enough context and experience to be effective in the job until you've been there for 6 months. You can't fit 6 months of prep into an interview. Good interview questions are ones that boil that 6mo+ of experience down to something that can be explained in 5 minutes and solved in 45. Ideally you'd just work…

At-will employment means that any period is a trial period if the company wants it to be.

Yes, and if they pull that trigger too frequently they'll earn a reputation for firing people, which isn't a great way to attract talent.
Post reply on HN