201–210 of 231 posts
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Do so at your own peril. Google is approaching 100,000 employees. The vast majority do boring data pipelines for CRUD apps. Top-tier company != top-tier employees.
You're forgetting they all read all the way through cracking the code interview, the most difficult math book in history.
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> Improving old code bases From my experience, I think there's a great need in large tech organizations for people that are able to advocate for and drive initiatives that can scale up efforts to improve old codebases.
I agree, but that won't happen until large tech organizations incentivize and reward maintenance work. See this related HN discussion about someone who left Google partly because they were not promoted for their documenting and bug-fixing efforts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241
They do though, through platform teams. The React team at Facebook, for example, goes to enormous lengths to ensure they aren't hopelessly breaking their downstreams even as they try to pay off previous code debt (e.g. the context api efforts).
What makes it difficult for people to "sell" maintenance work (specifically for product work, as opposed to platform work) is that it usually gets framed in terms of maintenance vs new features, as opposed to e.g. improvements in reliability given some metric, etc. Another problem is that developers have a very strong tendency to want to dive straight into coding without necessarily doing the legwork of gathering metrics to show that some work is actually worth doing. This often gets a pass with new features, because it's easier to get people excited about shiny new things, but maintenance work is inherently going to get people asking for "data" to satisfy their reptilian brain's aversion to risk.
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Assuming a $200k income, a modest 2bd Bay area house, 2 preschool aged children, between mortgage/rent (4k/mo), childcare (20+k/child/year), car, food, taxes, and other basic life expenses, it's totally possible not to save 50%. Unless you meant as a childless single person making 200k/yr. Then yes, it's easy.
> Assuming a $200k income... 2 preschool aged children... childcare (20+k/child/year) Does $200k not seem low for a two-income family? Does paying for childcare not seem strange for a one-income family?
Not really, even in the BA, unless they are both in tech or similar; $200K is nearly double the median household (not individual) income for San Francisco & San Mateo Counties.
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What makes you say that?
2 weeks is the norm for regular jobs, but top tech companies are really struggling to fill top talent spots these days. While it is perfectly legal to give only 2 weeks notice, it's normally better to ask your manager how much time they'd reasonably need to fill your position, then have a conversation. So, I'd re-phrase the original conversation as "Hey Jerry, got a minute? Look, I don't think this is working out. I…
Where I live, it's perfectly legal to say "I quit" and leave immediately.
About a year ago, I quit my job at Apple because I wasn't able to apply my technical skills in my role and I was not successful in transferring to another department (full blog post: http://minimaxir.com/2017/05/leaving-apple/ | HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14270897 ) Despite the loss of a salary and frustration in getting another job (Tweetstorm about data science job hunting: https://twitter.…
I'm currently about to quit Microsoft and am going through the exact same set of questions in my head. I joined the company a few months ago and am blown away by how bad the culture is - or how badly I fit into the culture, take your pick. If you don't fit the culture, it's time to leave.
I don't work at MS but generalizing a companies culture by working for a few months is silly. I've worked for 3 years at a big 4 and have seen excellent culture and poor culture and something in the middle. Don't generalize a company by your departments poor culture, there could be shining stars elsewhere.
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You're forgetting they all read all the way through cracking the code interview, the most difficult math book in history.
Coding interview books: how to use bit fields to save a marginal amount of memory while making your algorithm work only with values of n <= 64.
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Yeah that struck me as a little strange. If you have a "top tier tech job" then I don't really understand the need for two years of savings. Do you think you won't find a job before two years? I guess it depends on location. I've left jobs multiple times to take a few months off to work on stuff before job hunting again and I definitely didn't have more than one year of savings.
Are people at top tier tech jobs (FANG) so secure in their jobs that they aren't saving for retirement? I had two years of living expenses saved up after two years at my first job out of college making 63K. Yes it was a cheap city, but I decided I wanted to start saving early after I noticed tech companies had so few employees over the age of 40. No, I wouldn't be living grand if I had to rely on these savings, but i…
Also, FANG comp packages have significant equity components and IMO it would be foolish to rely on that portion of comp for anything important; you can treat vested RSUs as windfalls to add to the retirement savings but should not rely on RSU grants to meet your goal of x% savings rate. New grads will have nothing vested for a few years so their ability to save is especially limited during that time.
How about just quitting because you don't get good work (whatever that definition might be)? I find it hard to believe that most people in so called "top tier" tech companies do compelling work. Not everyone gets to work on de jour areas, most people work on maintenance and improving old code bases (BTW, there is nothing wrong with this)
These self-congratulatory articles are always a bit off-putting. I'm not sure if they're meant as a humblebrag, or what. Yes, we get that all jobs can suck. Great, you've got savings. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back for doing what countless billions of people have done in their lives: quit a job. But don't consider yourself a daredevil for jumping with "only" a 2 year savings 'net'.
It was certainly useful to me.
That's it. We don't need to project out his intentions any further than that. You're allowed to share your experience and your thought process without it always being some altruistic "save the starving kids in Africa" type message.
The beautiful thing about the internet and the distribution it provides is that you can write content for your niche and actually reach those people fairly easily.
As an extreme example: do you go into Ferrari owner forums and criticize everyone there for being self-congratulatory and living in too much excess? I hope not. Leave them alone and let them have fun with their cars.
Quitting a top tier tech job isn't the difficult part. The difficult part is figuring out what to do next. I quit my job as a Head of R&D for a major tech/publishing company and started https://tradedash.io (crypto desktop trading platform) with an old friend of mine who also quit his job as one of the first employees in a major fintech unicorn. For both of us, it was hands down the best decision we've ever made care…
Because the author is delusional and thinks people actually give a shit about their "top tier" company...which most likely just sold ads on the internet.
Is this person not allowed to put his own thoughts down on his own personal website? It's not like he's getting on CNN and preaching.
You know, in this day in age you really need to give more then a two weeks notice. Maybe 6 weeks or more. I've had to fire clients before by giving notice and I always try to work out the best possible scenario where the least amount of damage is done. I even had to deal with yelling, screaming, threats of lawsuits. I always keep my cool and do everything I can to de-escalate the situation, stay professional, etc and…
The taboo of not giving two weeks notice is something that benefits the company only, the same as not discussing salary with other employees.
You can even put a number on it if your new position is getting a raise. Whatever your yearly rate/26 is, is how much money you are losing by being nice to an entity who will walk you out the door the moment they are done with you