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Quitting a New Job

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Re: Quitting a New Job

#221

Post by syndacks »

asciident wrote: post #60
richardwhiuk wrote: post #27

> 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…

This is true. It takes a while for some people to really accept this, as it breaks the lone coder myth. There are some people who consider communication and influence to be politics, and think they can do their job solely by programming.

The people downvoting you are likely those you reference. Which is painfully ironic as this comment is should at the top of the thread: work is fundamentally a social endeavour, and if you expect to be promoted, you need to demonstrate the ability to think/talk/socialize/synthesize challenging problems that almost always require cooperation if not collaboration with others.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#222

Post by xapata »

vonmoltke wrote: post #176
xapata wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

I posted in the Who's Hiring thread non-pseudonymously.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#223

Post by bachmeier »

reffaelwallen wrote: post #199
bachmeier wrote: post #112

Completely different type of work, but I once quit a new job at a factory after two days. First day, I arrive early to fill out the paperwork and watch the HR job safety video. Video finishes and I wait for the HR person to return. After a few minutes, I go look for her, but can't find her so I go back to the video room. Eventually someone else (upset) comes in and tells me that I'm supposed to be working rather than…

holy, what industry?

I don't know. They never gave me any training, never told me what the product was or who they were selling it to. It might not seem possible to not know the industry, but I responded to a job ad, so all I knew was the address and the name of the company. I posted a longer version on my website: https://lancebachmeier.com/trivia/bad-job.html

Re: Quitting a New Job

#224

Post by ramraj07 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #174
ramraj07 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The word is thrown around too much because a lot of people are acting deservedly so? By definition if someone's called elitist, the target audience probably disagrees with that judgement. But again, if self reflection is being considered, the target audience should try to think if there's any base to the accusation.

In this case I or others are not alleging this person owes the company much. They should feel free to move as soon as possible if they don't like the commute or the work. It does look like the hardware place looks like a crappy deal. I'm just curious if the OP is truly doing whats in their interest or if they're overindulging their cushy position (being an in demand engineer) to their own long term detriment.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#225

Post by yibg »

dvt wrote: post #219
yibg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 val…

> As if the company should pay engineers whatever they make. You're attacking a strawman, no one in this thread is arguing that the company should pay engineers whatever they make.

Is it? The post I responded to was saying the company makes 2.5 million a month and they got a pat on the back. Sure, no one is asking for exactly what the company makes, but the implication is always they should get paid proportionally to the company's additional revenue due to their work. I'm just saying that's not how it works.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#226

Post by shuckles »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #214
shuckles wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original claim was that the teaching profession is systematically underpaid but in fact you’re talking about a very specific set of public sector employees whose compensation is more complex than just annual salary.

This 'very spesific set' is like 90% of all teachers. The argument was -you cannot get away underpaying developers, you get crap develipers and crap code. But compare teaching outcomes, and you will see that countries with better paid teachera have better outcomes in primary education, so we are suffering the consequences in both cases. Its just that we've chosen different tradeoffs

I haven’t made any arguments. You may be confusing me with someone else on the thread? In any case, the outrageously paid developers are probably less than 10% of all software engineers, especially if you consider that foreign engineers are part of the labor pool in a way foreign teachers are not.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#227

Post by richardwhiuk »

corytheboyd wrote: post #55
richardwhiuk wrote: post #27

> 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…

You can also quit working for other people and pursue your own projects or seek out contract work. Yes yes, easier said than done, but so is advancing along a company’s career path.

a) Contracting definitely requires huge amounts of communication - you need to constantly ramp up on new areas, and handover to people once you are done.

b) A contractor who can only provide a single headcount is extremely limiting, and will get treated like a capped IC.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#228

Post by mac01021 »

Tangentially, how many jobs do you normally need to apply for at once to have multiple offers on the table at once?

I once applied to 7-10 jobs in the same week. Of the 4-5 that decided to interview me, the interview processes didn't even interleave at all.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#229

Post by JoeAltmaier »

filoleg wrote: post #177
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Sure that's exactly the same thing. At least what I was talking about. Talk to me while I'm trying to get into the code, is like trying to talk to someone trying to write a book or balance a checkbook or really concentrate on anything at all. Re-casting it as simple cooperation is disengenuous. Sure you want to explain things to a teammate; that's entirely missing the point.

If I'm talking, if I'm listening to you, then I'm not coding. They are orthogonal activities, at least for me. Want me to 'talk you through' my design thoughts? Thanks for your time, goodbye.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#230

Post by srtjstjsj »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #209
lhorie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering that they colluded to avoid paying talent, it seems that do have some trouble. Having money isn't the same as spending it.
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