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

Tenks_sl said:

Had a phone interview with engineering at that company I was talking about and pretty sure I took myself out of the running by saying "I like to work 9-5 40 hours" when he asked if I'm adverse to staying at the office until 7 or 8. Not that I wouldn't when required but he framed it in the manner that lead me to think they may have a crunch week once a month. Working that much may be fine if I lived downtown or if I didn't already have a family and established career. But these days give me the benefits, the guaranteed work week and the vacation.

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Which is what is normal and expected with start ups. Like I said, they throw all these ridiculously "cool" sounding perks at you to make people forget about how shitty the work life balance usually is.

Khane_sl said:

Which is what is normal and expected with start ups. Like I said, they throw all these ridiculously "cool" sounding perks at you to make people forget about how shitty the work life balance usually is.

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Depends how you define start-up.

The company he is looking to join sure the fuck ain't a start-up. It's been around years so he would get somewhere between jack and shit equity.

Yeah I don't think the job will be for me. When I told them my salary their response was "Yeah we can probably get you where you need." Which means to me "Here is like 5k more." I have the world's most relaxed work schedule where I work from home 1 day a week and generally do absolutely nothing. I work 9:30-4:00 days I'm actually in the office (and work out twice a week for an hour on the company dime as well) and just kind of do whatever I really feel like doing, get 5 weeks vacation, full sick time off as well, about 8% my salary in retirement per year ... I mean there is really no reason to leave. If they were going to beat my salary by like 30k then maybe I'd consider working 50 hours a week. But they won't. So they can find some college grad to burn out. Even beating it by like 10k would probably not be enough to shift my morning commute from ~7minute to what would be ~40m.

I would like to work on what they're doing, though. Graph analysis on a big data scale is something I'm very interested in but it is also something my company is actively investigating as well. Unfortunately I think I'll have to drop in a new search engine before I can really work on it, though. So probably a few more years.

Vinen_sl said:

Depends how you define start-up.

The company he is looking to join sure the fuck ain't a start-up. It's been around years so he would get somewhere between jack and shit equity.

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I agree with you but they are still selling it that way. Lots of new companies do. They try to make it sound sexy to guise the problems. That is exactly how my first job was at TheLadders.com. New company but not really a start up anymore back in 2005, but they did all the same crap. Beer in the fridge! Ping Pong table in the office! Everyone hangs out! We have movie nights! It's awesome!

Then I had to work 70-80 hours a week constantly and even slept in the office some nights. And had shit benefits.

Khane_sl said:

I agree with you but they are still selling it that way. Lots of new companies do. They try to make it sound sexy to guise the problems. That is exactly how my first job was at TheLadders.com. New company but not really a start up anymore back in 2005, but they did all the same crap. Beer in the fridge! Ping Pong table in the office! Everyone hangs out! We have movie nights! It's awesome!

Then I had to work 70-80 hours a week constantly and even slept in the office some nights. And had shit benefits.

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I don't think I'd be in the 70-80 boat but it certainly sounds like 50 is considered a normal work week and 60 isn't out of the norm. The move just makes no sense for me right now. My boss has even promised to work his ass off to get me promoted next year (and I know this guy personally it isn't just talk) and that would increase my salary by probably 10-15k just next year.

Tenks_sl said:

I don't think I'd be in the 70-80 boat but it certainly sounds like 50 is considered a normal work week and 60 isn't out of the norm. The move just makes no sense for me right now. My boss has even promised to work his ass off to get me promoted next year (and I know this guy personally it isn't just talk) and that would increase my salary by probably 10-15k just next year.

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Yea sounds like you've got it good. I'm in the same kinda boat. Gonna take a ridiculous offer to get me to leave this place.

Khane_sl said:

Yea sounds like you've got it good. I'm in the same kinda boat. Gonna take a ridiculous offer to get me to leave this place.

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Good situation to be in... unless your wife is in it too.
If she wasn't so tied to her job we'd move to the bay area to help consume the last remaining water. I have an open offer to relocate...

Her company has all the benefits (Beer, Catered Food, Pay, Outings, Beer, etc...) without the drawbacks (Everyone works 9-5 with the exception of prod-down situations)

I don't have experience with Cassandra but you can google pretty easily how to stand up an HBase. But just standing one up and putting a key into it isn't exactly learning it nor is it very impressive. The hardest part is learning how to arrange your use cases' data effectively and efficiently and selecting a good key/column family structure.

I have a spotify playlist that is both my workout and programming list. Sometimes I'll avoid the death metal and just put my spotify on an artists' radio station that is pretty easy listening like Killers or Fun. I tried the whole classical thing and it wasn't for me.

My new favorite thread.

Changed careers a few months ago after graduating with a degree in mobile application development (Android). Found the perfect job. Was going to work as part of a three person team as the junior guy on a proprietary system for digital signage. Sign the employment agreement, show up two weeks later and the hiring manager (my team lead) took a new job elsewhere and the other person I was supposed to work with is in India because her father died and we don't know when she'll be back. I'm sort of lucky because my Director is understanding of the situation and the current system works, they just hired me to start in on adding functionality. Doing my best but with only classroom experience I feel like I'm flailing most days and I literally have no one else to talk to since no one else in the group ever worked on the system. So I read books on advanced Android functionality, sit on StackOverflow and the Android Programming subrediit, and write shitty test apps to see if some of the things they want to do might be possible and pray the other person I'm supposed to work with comes back soon.

I could get behind Lambdas if I were allowed to use them. Android Java implementation is still 1.7. It's kind of funny too since Android Studio just released 1.2 and it's basically IntelliJ and some of my code is now saying "You can do this using lambdas" even though I can't.

I listen to Foo Fighters radio on Amazon Prime most days.

Deathwing_sl said:

Can't listen to music at work because it means I can't hear people coming and alt-tab away from not doing work fast enough. I really hate open cubicle designs.

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I'm full yolo and don't alt tab for shit. Everyone knows that Starcraft will be on my second monitor at work all day erry day.

Deathwing_sl said:

Yeah, I'm the other end of the spectrum. Even if people know I'm getting my work done, I'm still wary of letting them see me not doing work. Like, why risk it?

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ROFL. I use noise cancelling headsets and browse whatever the fuck I want (even SS sometime)