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Quitting a New Job

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Re: Quitting a New Job

#201

Post by burnthrow »

novask wrote: post #197
burnthrow wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing that seems to count is your tenure, so don't fuck it up. You might not even get to the leetcode step if you do. This is flat wrong. Are you only applying to Fortune 500s or something?

How do you prove to the next company that you won't leave? You really can't. You can easily prove you've been working on leetcode problems. If they don't want to hire people with short stays, you can't really fix that. If they don't want to hire people who haven't practiced leetcode, you can fix that. So to an employer, does it really matter if you are good at leetcode if they feel you won't stay around long? So the…

> does it really matter if you are good at leetcode if they feel you won't stay around long?

Yes. Hard technical skills are even more important in that situation.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#202

Post by yibg »

dvt wrote: post #86
jfk13 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is all on top of the fact that engineers are woefully underpaid. I have finance friends that make literal millions in yearly bonuses. This is virtually unheard of in software, even though we provide orders of magnitude more value. That doesn't necessarily mean engineers are woefully underpaid. It may just be that your finance friends are obscenely overpaid. Though whether all/most engineers provide "orders of…

> 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…

every time engineering salary discussions come up something like this gets posted. We made the company $xx millions and we only get a tiny fraction of it in pay. As if the company should pay engineers whatever they make. What about:

1) All the other things that goes into making that money. Like sales, marketing, HR, etc.

2) Supply and demand. Doesn't matter if you made the company $xx millions, what's your market value?

3) Risk. If you and your team doesn't make the company money, should you not get paid?

Re: Quitting a New Job

#203

Post by jtonz »

war1025 wrote: post #134
_9omd wrote: 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…

> 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.

Personally I have found it to be quite accurate. The smaller the company you work for the likelihood of 'flexibility' in your role increases. Those companies just don't have the headcount to have a full suite of engineers so rely on people dipping their toes in other tasks to keep the machine ticking along (e.g. frontend devs handling deployment).

With a larger company you will typically find they have already hired specialists to handle very specific tasks. You can always do some things but more often than not the rigor of corporate structure says "If you need anything done in dev ops, please speak to _Bob_ and he will sort it out".

Jumping from the challenge of constantly adapting to different tasks to being there to only do a single 'role' can be quite jarring.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#204

Post by ClumsyPilot »

shuckles wrote: post #151
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we have this myth of meritocracy, but some proffessions are systemically underpaid like teachers - millions of future earnings depend on them, but noone ambitious wants to become a teacher, so our schooling kida sucks

Really great teachers could probably find a way to make huge incomes. I tutored competition math on the side to rich families’ kids for nearly $500/hr.

The whole point of my post was that we need the best teachers in the classrooms, not tutoring a few select rich kids.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#205

Post by ClumsyPilot »

vorpalhex wrote: post #129
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we have this myth of meritocracy, but some proffessions are systemically underpaid like teachers - millions of future earnings depend on them, but noone ambitious wants to become a teacher, so our schooling kida sucks

It's a supply and demand problem. There are a lot of folks who are willing and able to be teachers for a low amount of pay, but it turns out you can't live off discount engineers or finance people. I assure you, if SV could get away paying $12 an hour to engineers or finance, they would.

There are a lot of folks who are willing and able to be president for a low amount of pay. Might even do a better job than Trump.

The idea was that if teaching was a prestigious profession, we would see large returns on that investment. We have an entire underclass of population that is poorly educated, so maybe we shouldn't be living off 'discount teachers' as we are doing now.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#206

Post by dilyevsky »

carlineng wrote: post #160
Animats wrote: post #34

At Stripe and each of my jobs before that, I had had a short commute to a beautiful office, and got to experience the instant gratification associated with developing purely software-based products. Now, I was stuck taking a crowded train to a dark office littered with hardware parts, working on a product that would take many years to reach mass-market adoption due to pesky little things like manufacturing and road s…

"working on a product that would take many years to reach mass-market adoption due to pesky little things like manufacturing and road safety." I know that sentence was probably meant to be humorous and not taken too seriously, but it comes off as smug and disdainful. Manufacturing is very difficult, and road safety is anything but trivial. He joined the company because he believed in the mission, but then decided the…

Speaking from experience leaving a successful company with huge revenue and profitability(?) to a non-critical path role (I assume he didn’t join perception team there or something) in a company that has no real customers beyond some PoCs can be a huge culture shock.

The comment about safety is obviously tongue in cheek

Re: Quitting a New Job

#207

Post by wvenable »

filoleg wrote: post #63
whitepaint wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reply that I posted to another comment: Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn new stuff so they whine in…

>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…

> After being on the interviewer side myself recently, I think those people just don't realize how hiring actually works.

As an interviewer I've never had to give a coding test and I'm not about to start now. I've had people try and bullshit -- not really on purpose -- but asking specific questions weeds them out easily. Often times they don't even know they're failing the questions.

I have a less-technical manager come in on my meetings and by the end he could spot those people who failed without any knowledge of programming at all.

> Of course there are some edge cases where a great developer would fail a leetcode-style interview, but those exceptions are very rare and only seem to affirm the rule.

I did all this binary tree stuff in University decades ago -- I only have so much brain space and studying all this again is going to push out the interesting stuff I'm working on right now.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#208

Post by PebblesHD »

totablebanjo wrote: post #170
theptip wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power move is to have an offer in hand and then tell your company that you're considering leaving for , but you'd like to give them a chance to beat your new offer by . Some companies will flat-out refuse to negotiate in this way as a matter of policy, and some will really appreciate you giving them the opportunity to bid to keep you; it really depends on the company and their comp strategy. I think as long as yo…

Do you really think you’ll be treated the same by management if you pull that?

To ~howlgarnish’s point, this is how I got my most recent promotion and it was very much a case of myself and my direct manager arguing against an opaque HR/Payroll team who generally didn’t approve promotions. no egos to damage in our immediate area by pushing hard.

The biggest issue we encountered was arbitrary requirements in the paper documentation of the role we were aiming to move me into, including a ‘hard’ requirement for an engineering degree with honours, which suddenly became less of an issue when the argument was ‘im going to accept another role but you can match it with x salary and title’ in a polite discussion with department head.

This will only apply to very large companies though, ymmv.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#209

Post by pavel_lishin »

lhorie wrote: post #70
jnwatson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strongly depends on the company structure and the political structure. There are many managers that would rather have an employee leave than go to a rival team.

If there are rival teams, then doesn't that mean that by definition resources are allocated less efficiently? (and by extension that competitors will be able to outbid for talent) Some recent Apple threads seem to support the idea that there was intense internal competition and lower overall compensation at Apple, compared to other tech companies of similar caliber.

> If there are rival teams, then doesn't that mean that by definition resources are allocated less efficiently? (and by extension that competitors will be able to outbid for talent)

If they have enough resources, it doesn't matter. Google and Apple don't seem to have any trouble paying talent.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#210

Post by dilyevsky »

pearjuice wrote: post #50

Though I like the sentiment of the post, it's funny and maybe remarkable how software engineers are in such a privileged bubble most probably don't even realize. Quitting jobs after a year at arguably the most innovative fintech company because you didn't feel satisfied, taking a vacation, casually mentioning you can "hack" interviews by focusing on leetcode problems for some weekends, working somewhere for 2 days, t…

Nonsense. There are plenty of white-collar and even some blue-color jobs where it’s the same or even more extreme. Personal anecdote - when i was working low level construction jobs during pre-2008 boom two of my foremen quit without notice to grab a job somewhere else. A lot of companies don’t really optimize for tenured employees anyway so you get what you pay for in a sellers market
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