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Quitting a New Job

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Re: Quitting a New Job

#51

Post by PeterisP »

whitepaint wrote: post #13
0x445442 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but I'm getting the feeling a developer's best option these days for maximizing pay increases is to spend their free time on Leetcode. Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective.

> Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective. 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 n…

We're looking at a target audience of people who already can "do quite bit with computers", know all the algorithms they need for the job they are going to do, and don't really want to spend time on leetcode because they would rather be doing or learning something else, or perhaps they have done leetcode or stuff like that a lot ten or twenty years ago and they wouldn't learn anything new, just re-adapt to do useless things quickly once again.

I'm not trying to denigrate it by labeling it useless - competitive problem solving/"sport programming" is a fun activity and can be a rewarding hobby, but it's important to recognize it as such, as a hobby that's only tangentially related to most actual development work once you move above a certain base competency level ( I'll grant it that it is useful for people without much practice in actual programming to do a bit of it.)

It's a problem from the industry perspective if we as industry have many people spend a lot of time doing things that don't benefit the employer (since grinding leetcode doesn't make a non-junior person better at their development job, it's an orthogonal skill) and that doesn't benefit themselves personally (we're talking about people who don't want to do leetcode just because they enjoy it) but only through the zero-sum game of competing for jobs effectively by "peacock signaling" of who invested/wasted the most effort in leetcode. This is effectively a lose-lose competition, spending a lot of everyone's time without a net benefit.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#52

Post by jfk13 »

dvt wrote: post #29

I've done this before. Got an offer while I was still interviewing with a few other companies. Accepted the offer then a few weeks later another, significantly better, offer came through. I have absolutely no qualms about it, and I don't put the tiny stint on my resume. My work and expertise speaks for itself. It's sad that job hunting has become rife with Machiavellian machinations in the past three decades, but thi…

> 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 magnitude more value" may be questionable. Some of the highest-paid engineers, AIUI, devote their considerable expertise to optimising ad click rates. "Provide value"? Hmmm. To whom? Not humanity in general, I think.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#53

Post by st1x7 »

spectramax wrote: post #14

This statement is just sad "After a few weekends of furiously-paced Leetcoding".

I don't think it's sad to prepare for the interview process. I see it this way - whatever you do at your current job might be very specific to your current tech-stack/product/problem-domain/team/company. When you're looking for a new job, you can't possibly learn the stack or problem domain of each and every company that you will interview with. In that sense it's great that you're assessed on more general skills like data structures and algorithms. Those few weekends of brushing up on skills you had anyway allow you to apply for a wide range of jobs. You then pick a new job and specialise in it until the next time you need to switch. Sounds healthier than most of the alternatives.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#54

Post by lhorie »

MattGaiser wrote: post #5
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

> As I noted in a previous post, switching teams is a lot easier than switching jobs. I didn’t do this before I left Stripe because there weren’t any other teams that I was super enthusiastic about at the time. But, in retrospect, I probably should have given this a try before quitting. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one t…

Does this solve the other problem, that job hopping is the best way to get a raise?

In my experience, no. I did an internal team transition at a company several years ago, and while it gave me a pretty good salary increase, it was not as big an increase (percentage-wise) compared to my wife's job hopping during roughly the same time span. I hopped jobs a couple more times a few years later and currently make three times more than I did back then. Some of this is attributable to differences in pay levels between cities but there's generally just a lot more room for negotiation with a new company than there is within the same company. I know many colleagues that left a company because of the ease of negotiating better offers outside of one's company.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#55

Post by corytheboyd »

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.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#56

Post by macintux »

icedchai wrote: post #49
macintux wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We also hired a c-level exec who came aboard apparently having already accepted a different offer and came on for under a month to collect pay and get some juicy stock. At a previous job, I worked fairly closely with a sales representative who, it turned out, was working in sales “full time” for two different tech companies in different fields. Needless to say, once he was discovered he was jobless (unless, of cour…

How was he discovered? It would be easier to do this nowadays, given the whole remote thing.

The other employer found out, IIRC, through his LinkedIn profile and contacted us. Been several years though so I’m only moderately confident in that memory.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#57

Post by microtherion »

I was set to criticize OP for never having tried out the commute, until I remembered that I once took a job without having worked or lived a single day within 9 time zones of the place of employment. It's somewhat par for the course for foreign hires, and indeed, some of them discover they (or, even more frequently, their partner) don't enjoy the location.

I did ask them to show me what a typical office would look like, though.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#58

Post by monkeybutton »

r00fus wrote: post #37
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

> As I noted in a previous post, switching teams is a lot easier than switching jobs. I didn’t do this before I left Stripe because there weren’t any other teams that I was super enthusiastic about at the time. But, in retrospect, I probably should have given this a try before quitting. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one t…

> But after I announced my departure, a few engineers from other teams came up and told me they wished I'd let them know before quitting, since they would have been glad to have me on their team instead. You know I know folks who've actually taken these kind of opportunities and sometimes it works, but other times it results in a) you finding out there are problems with the transfer (headcount or manager blocks trans…

I've done this and having a strong manager advocating for me made all the difference.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#59

Post by swyx »

whitepaint wrote: post #30
spectramax wrote: post #14

This statement is just sad "After a few weekends of furiously-paced Leetcoding".

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…

because leetcode problems tune for a narrow set of jobs. many software jobs bear no relation to leetcode problems in practice. so the sadness is either that employers might be continuing interview processes that bear no relation to the real job (not always true, but also at least partially true), or that OP feels like he needs to grind leetcode to get a job, when he may have other practical skills and experience that would serve him better in the job search.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#60

Post by asciident »

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.
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