IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Tenks_sl said:

I was out for my friend's bachelor party and was talking with another one of his friends who also works in the IT field. He is working for a start up now in the medical space who have 15m of VC they need to burn through this year and was asking if I'd be interested to join once I told him about working in the realm of Hadoop and graphical databases. I'm just not sure if I feel like leaving the cubical and the safety of my guaranteed work hours to jump towards a "sexy" start up. He guaranteed he could beat my current salary assuming I wasn't just making up my knowledge set but I've always had somewhat a negative outlook on companies with on-site chefs, hacky sack circles, kegs instead of water coolers and unlimited vacation. All that sounds cool in a vacuum until you realize you're working 70 hours a week. Heclaimedto work 9-5 the vast majority of his weeks with just a few 9-7/9 crunchtime weeks. Has anyone worked in one of these start ups and what was your experience? Did you like it? Hate it? Learned to hate it?

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Wait, do they really have all of that stuff? I'd hate it because it's all bullshit meant to attract 20 year old douchebags. People our age don't give a shit about the "wow" factor. Vacation time is awesome, good pay is awesome, good work schedule is awesome. Chefs and beer in the fridge and ping pong in the office generally is a sign that you will NEVER be leaving the office and the hours and stress are ridiculous. They try to appease you with things you normally wouldn't see in a work environment to hide that fact.

Healthcare huh? BIG time opportunity in healthcare IT by the way. It's the most ancient, archaic, in need of updating technology infrastructure across the board. To give you an idea the main healthcare IT standards board known as HL7 is just now building and releasing a recommendation/specification for a service based architecture. Currently almost all real time data trading in healthcare is done over a very basic, very low level protocol called MLLP and there is no encryption or security built into it so you HAVE to use VPN tunnels to do any data trading.

Khane_sl said:

Wait, do they really have all of that stuff? I'd hate it because it's all bullshit meant to attract 20 year old douchebags. People our age don't give a shit about the "wow" factor. Vacation time is awesome, good pay is awesome, good work schedule is awesome. Chefs and beer in the fridge and ping pong in the office generally is a sign that you will NEVER be leaving the office and the hours and stress are ridiculous. They try to appease you with things you normally wouldn't see in a work environment to hide that fact.

Healthcare huh? BIG time opportunity in healthcare IT by the way. It's the most ancient, archaic, in need of updating technology infrastructure across the board. To give you an idea the main healthcare IT standards board known as HL7 is just now building and releasing a recommendation/specification for a service based architecture. Currently almost all real time data trading in healthcare is done over a very basic, very low level protocol called MLLP and there is no encryption or security built into it so you HAVE to use VPN tunnels to do any data trading.

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Yeah the entire time telling me about all their in-office perks he clearly thought he was winning me over but none of it was really working for me. He said the CEO is really trying to bring a west coast start-up feel to the midwest and a few of his VCs asked him to move to San Fran and he declined (and a few pulled out because of it.) I wouldn't mind getting out of the large-scale business red tape where it feels like only 10% of my job is actually programming these days and into more of a "This is our problem, solve it" style requirements. But the guy I was talking to is a really, really, insanely smart guy. Like in 8th grade we played this online RTS game called Empires and he was terrible at it. So he took it upon himself to write a hack for it. He was writing NES emulators in high school then 4.0'd his degree in college. So if he trusted the company I have to imagine it is pretty legit.

I also wouldn't be joining at the ground level. I'd be more of the "ramp up" phase. They already have their stuff in 100 hospitals in the mid west.

Doesn't seem like there's any reason to not go in for an interview unless you're worried your current company would find out and take action against you.

By the way, the software is already in 100 hospitals? That ain't really a risky start up. They've already got market saturation. That's A LOT of hospitals man.

Yea all those 'sexy benefits' actually do work when applied to the right people in the right organization. Sounds like a decent opportunity from the marketing.

lendarios_sl said:

Any stock options? My fear with that type of work, is that is two year frantic phase, and then it is sold to another company. At that point other people make millions and those putting 70 hours week, noticed they lost two years of their lives.

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Sounds like they're well past the frantic phase. They are already to market and have 100 hospitals as clients. To give you an idea of how many that is, most states don't have even half of that amount of hospitals. Colorado has like 50 hospitals. Connecticut has 40 or so. Yes some other states like California have over 300 but 100 hospitals is very high market saturation in the midwest.

lendarios_sl said:

my last company worked in the healthcare field, specifically with 270/271 and hl7. There is a giant untapped market in the verifications field. Maybe his friend is overselling when he said they are at 100 hospitals, maybe it means 100 medical locations, maybe, either way, the difference does he gets paid at the end of the rainbow, or not.

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He already stated his friend told him they could beat his currently salary.

Tenks_sl said:

I was out for my friend's bachelor party and was talking with another one of his friends who also works in the IT field. He is working for a start up now in the medical space who have 15m of VC they need to burn through this year and was asking if I'd be interested to join once I told him about working in the realm of Hadoop and graphical databases. I'm just not sure if I feel like leaving the cubical and the safety of my guaranteed work hours to jump towards a "sexy" start up. He guaranteed he could beat my current salary assuming I wasn't just making up my knowledge set but I've always had somewhat a negative outlook on companies with on-site chefs, hacky sack circles, kegs instead of water coolers and unlimited vacation. All that sounds cool in a vacuum until you realize you're working 70 hours a week. Heclaimedto work 9-5 the vast majority of his weeks with just a few 9-7/9 crunchtime weeks. Has anyone worked in one of these start ups and what was your experience? Did you like it? Hate it? Learned to hate it?

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Beating your salary is nice. The big money for startups comes from getting stock grants/options early on and then the company doing well and getting bought out. I worked for a Healthcare related startup and I thought the stocks worth a few months pay once vested were meh... until we got bought out by a multi billion dollar company and they turned into 15 years worth of pay. Our CTO cashed in with 8 figures (This was a ~5 year old company). So if its a startup that really does value the IT side and will let them benefit if the company does well, then its great. We almost never worked more than 40 hours a week and on the rare occasion we did, we'd get comp time. Maybe my experience is more of the exception... I dunno, it the only startup I've worked for.

I've read reviews on other startup type companies on glassdoor and some sound horrible though. Like perma mandatory 50+ hour weeks for several years.

Hachima_sl said:

Beating your salary is nice. The big money for startups comes from getting stock grants/options early on and then the company doing well and getting bought out. I worked for a Healthcare related startup and I thought the stocks worth a few months pay once vested were meh... until we got bought out by a multi billion dollar company and they turned into 15 years worth of pay. Our CTO cashed in with 8 figures (This was a ~5 year old company). So if its a startup that really does value the IT side and will let them benefit if the company does well, then its great. We almost never worked more than 40 hours a week and on the rare occasion we did, we'd get comp time. Maybe my experience is more of the exception... I dunno, it the only startup I've worked for.

I've read reviews on other startup type companies on glassdoor and some sound horrible though. Like perma mandatory 50+ hour weeks for several years.

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You had a pretty sweet and very rare deal there Hach. Most people burn the midnight oil when working for startups because they don't usually have the capital to hire the full team they need. The first company I worked for out of college was a startup. I was working 70+ hours every single week. Worst job I ever had.

Healthcare is a different animal though, there is so much money and so much opportunity in the IT field. I've worked in Healthcare IT for the last ~9 years now and have done very well with it. My last job was technically a Healthcare startup as well but by the time I was hired they were already to market and had a decent client base. Best job I ever had. Until they got bought by a private equity firm that is.

Khane_sl said:

You had a pretty sweet and very rare deal there Hach. Most people burn the midnight oil when working for startups because they don't usually have the capital to hire the full team they need. The first company I worked for out of college was a startup. I was working 70+ hours every single week. Worst job I ever had.

Healthcare is a different animal though, there is so much money and so much opportunity in the IT field. I've worked in Healthcare IT for the last ~9 years now and have done very well with it. My last job was technically a Healthcare startup as well but by the time I was hired they were already to market and had a decent client base. Best job I ever had. Until they got bought by a private equity firm that is.

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A lot of it is it luck. I got into a start-up I knew would at least be acquired a few years down the line.
We ended up only being purchased for ~150 million so my stock ended up at? 50K. Was pretty sad. Least there was a pay-raise and stock-bonus for signing on with the new company.

The upside is it was an in at my current company where I am able to pull 250-300/year w/ Bonus and Stock. I've more or less decided to stick it out for the long term or until a start-up in a technology field I enjoy shows up. Fuck Healthcare (HIPAA can go fuck itself), Fuck Social-media (I want to do something that's useful).

Wife on the other-hand... waiting for her company to go public or whatever. Going to be a NIIIIICE payoff on that one. We hope :3

lendarios_sl said:

Read the opening sentence of my previous post.
Salary is not where the payout is.
Good luck Tenks.

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This.

Doesn't sound like he would be joining the company early enough to really make money.
Only the first few employees make bank in the vast majority of start-ups.

I turned down an offer two years ago when a company wouldn't tell me what % of shares I was getting. They were just like HERE IS 50,000 LOLZ

I'm like.. uhh I'll take my yearly shares followed by 20% target bonus which I nearly double.

Palum_sl said:

NoSQL is worthless in at least 90%+ of implementations I've seen thus far since there's no reason for it except A) because it sounds sexy B) apparently you might as well add a random middleware file system layer instead of just defining data structures in your application like normal or C) because someone thinks that dumping a clean and efficient relational database is a good idea when they are dead wrong.

There are a lot of good use cases for a legitimate NoSQL 'database', but very few companies seem to have them. Once you get out of the strict data science realm into the application arena, it starts to become a bit fuzzier as to the practical use. What's the difference between, as you say, storing shit in flat files and coding your application to use them as you wish? I suppose some measure of consistency, but it's really just a whole bunch of resource libraries at that point. About the only time I've considered it for projects are ones where we have vast amounts of data which needs to be reorganized 'quickly' by analysts instead of DBAs. Ultimately, though, user/stakeholder (not to mention developer) knowledge of SQL and derivatives is so ubiquitous it's hard to sometimes figure out times where throwing more hardware at building expensive views on a relational databaseisn'tmore cost effective than building custom NoSQL solutions to lead to the same end result. Sometimes an extra DBAischeaper than all the headaches and hassle of starting fresh.

I haven't really played with some of the more recent SQL Server 'integrations' with Hadoop file system, do they cooperate fairly well now?

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Hadoop and NoSQL are different things. The Hadoop file system is best used as a "Data Lake" where you just dump everything from important to almost worthless data and then run analytics on it. Integrations with RDBMS is not really the point, just dump the data in to Hadoop. Lets your data scientists go wild without having to dig into every other system. You can also productionalize their work and push it back to your Operational DBMS to serve to users which is a common use case for recommendations and such.

NoSQL is a multifaceted world but in general is more a replacement for traditional RDBMS for specific sets of use cases. There are several flavors from shit flavored project killing piles of crap (MongoDB) to column stores (Cassandra,Hbase,Riak) to Memory KV stores (Redis,Couch,Aerospike). The use cases for column stores (my specialty) is that they can scale way out and some (Cassandra,Riak) have inherent geodistribution and uptime guarantees due to the peer to peer nature of them.

Use cases for Cassandra which I work for the vendor? Well go to Target.com and look at an item, the prices/promotions/recommendations/store inventory cache/shopping cart/wish lists etc are all served from Cassandra. The same is true for a majority of the major retailers. Go to Netflix and resume a movie or pause or do pretty much anything... Cassandra. Go to turbotax.com and do your taxes... Cassandra. Apple serves 10PB from Cassandra across a bunch of their services. View your data from your Nest thermostat...Cassandra. It solves big problems for companies that need to be up and fast.

Whats the downside of both Hadoop and NoSQL? They don't play well in a world where you have app devs, database devs, dbas, ops, etc. This kind of tech fits a more microservices based architecture and a DevOps mentality so there is a big culture change to handling more in the application and being full stack developers etc. Not for everyone today but it is not a trivial set of use cases and the space is expanding rapidly particularly with IoT taking off. If you have a highly relational data set that fits on a single machine where 99.99 is enough and your read volumes are manageable then RDBMS is still the best fit, and will be for a long time... this is also a LOT of the use case problem set. Not going to tell anyone than RDBMS is dying, we are just pulling the use cases where it doesn't fit into newer purpose built technologies.

Oh and learn these techs, they PAY big.
Tech skills that will get you $110,000+ - Business Insider

The only problem with that list is while a lot of that stuff is here today and paying well, it might be gone tomorrow outside of things like platform as a service, because all that is, is utilizing the technology most developers already know in a different way.

Lol wtf Sqoop is on the list? That project is not only kind of shitty and kind of deadware but there are only a handful of commands.

But I guess since my resume would feature buzzwords like Hive, MapReduce, NoSQL, HBase, Sqoop, Big Data and Cloudera I need to get a raise!

CnCGod the new place I was talking to uses Cassandra instead of HBase. Is there really much difference I need to know in terms of actual interaction, key design and table design or do the differences mostly lie in the operations and backend? I also assume Cassandra doesn't run ontop of HDFS.

Tenks_sl said:

Lol wtf Sqoop is on the list? That project is not only kind of shitty and kind of deadware but there are only a handful of commands.

But I guess since my resume would feature buzzwords like Hive, MapReduce, NoSQL, HBase, Sqoop, Big Data and Cloudera I need to get a raise!

CnCGod the new place I was talking to uses Cassandra instead of HBase. Is there really much difference I need to know in terms of actual interaction, key design and table design or do the differences mostly lie in the operations and backend? I also assume Cassandra doesn't run ontop of HDFS.

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Interaction and key design will be significantly different from a syntax perspective. The physical storage format is fairly similar to hbase in that it is BigTable inspired and speaks in SStables. Hbase still uses thrift and the concept of a "row key" with a bunch of key/val pairs "columns" which often need to be overloaded or store a serialized object (Avro,Protocol buffer etc). Cassandra has implemented a new language called CQL on top of a similar physical layer. You have a partition key which is subset of columns in a "Table" that are required to show uniqueness for a set of "rows". Each row in a partition is defined by a simple or composite clustering key, this clustering key's values become the "cell" names for the storage cells. The non-key columns are stored in the cell value. The data modeling is similar to hbase in that you need to model to answer questions as opposed to modeling in 3NF and joining. The major difference is because Cassandra is p2p and designed to be fault tolerant it random hashes the partition key to distribute it around the cluster evenly. This means you can't do range queries on the partition key, only the clustering key.

Syntax for Cassandra is a lot different through CQL, you use prepared statements of CQL and deal in result sets and can issue requests asynchronously and use futures to process results. The other difference is the driver manages all connections, it gets state information from a 2-3 contact points about every node in the cluster and handles the connections to and load balancing across the nodes in the cluster. This means adding a new node doesn't disrupt the client and as soon as that node is marked as up and serving requests, it will be utilized. It will also blacklist slow or dead nodes. The other important part of the code side is choosing consistency. CL=1 means as soon as one node responds that owns the record you acknowledge. CL=Quorum waits for a quorum of the nodes to respond giving strong consistency if used for both ready and writes. CL=LOCAL_ONE and LOCAL_QUORUM make sure to use the local dc only for this guarantee. This setting can be set on a per query or issue of a query basis so lot of control on "tunable" consistency.

I could go a lot deeper into the architecture as well but a quick few lines, Cassandra handles SStables on the local file systems of the nodes and does the replication and distribution at the database level. It also supports multi DC replication out of the box and has no other moving parts besides the Cassandra JVM. So no Zookeeper, no extra work for HA of the region server etc. Lot less fragile than Hbase or any master/slave architecture.

I think the way the list works is that those skills get buoyed by each other as part of "hadoop". It is just a numerical analysis of salary average for folks with that buzzword in their skill list. I can tell you that those numbers are pretty real, my customers complain about the lack of talent and high prices constantly but then end up paying us 300-400$ an hr to staff it.

Hadoop and NoSQL are growing faster and faster both in traditional enterprise (banks, retailers, medical,etc) and tech. Netflix has 7000 nodes, apple has 75000 of cassandra alone, SOE is huge, etc the list goes on.

These guys can't find enough folks to staff these projects and are constantly hiring with a bit of desperation.

CnCGOD_sl said:

I think the way the list works is that those skills get buoyed by each other as part of "hadoop". It is just a numerical analysis of salary average for folks with that buzzword in their skill list. I can tell you that those numbers are pretty real, my customers complain about the lack of talent and high prices constantly but then end up paying us 300-400$ an hr to staff it.

Hadoop and NoSQL are growing faster and faster both in traditional enterprise (banks, retailers, medical,etc) and tech. Netflix has 7000 nodes, apple has 75000 of cassandra alone, SOE is huge, etc the list goes on.

These guys can't find enough folks to staff these projects and are constantly hiring with a bit of desperation.

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This stuff isn't even difficult.

The main issue with Developer/CS/Whatever jobs is so many people think they are hot shit... but they suck. I swear when I interview Senior Engineers 90% of them are a NO after a minute. I don't even have to get to a technical question...

My company is one of the highest paying in the country (Ahead of Google) as perhttp://www.glassdoor.com/blog/americ...ing-companies/so it's not like pay is an issue in attracting talent.