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

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alavaz

alavaz

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Noodleface said:
Onboarding at Dell EMC has been a NIGHTMARE.

On day 5 I talked to HR because I couldn't access payroll or timecard or anything. It took them TEN days to figure out that all.my login shit went to my Emc email address.... I quit emc 4 years ago. The email doesn't even exist anymore. How?

So they talk to ADP and start getting shit sorted out. Takes a few days to get into the system. Stuffs starting to work now. But ten days?!

Then I'm informed because of this they need to request a check for my first week because I wasn't in the system. whatever. Then they tell me oh yeah your bonus, you'll have to request that from "somebody" because that got lost in all this.

But that's not the end. My access to every system, every server, every service is going to my old emc login. It's been a battle.. no one can figure out what's going on

My favorite part. The system says I've been working here 7 years..
Click to expand...

EMC had real wacky customer account system too. They would create new site IDs for like every equipment order and then I guess associate an email domain with that site. So I'd buy say an Isilon, go to login to the customer portal for it with my army email account and 1000 different US ARMY sites would pop up.
 
Mist

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Noodleface said:
Onboarding at Dell EMC has been a NIGHTMARE.

On day 5 I talked to HR because I couldn't access payroll or timecard or anything. It took them TEN days to figure out that all.my login shit went to my Emc email address.... I quit emc 4 years ago. The email doesn't even exist anymore. How?

So they talk to ADP and start getting shit sorted out. Takes a few days to get into the system. Stuffs starting to work now. But ten days?!

Then I'm informed because of this they need to request a check for my first week because I wasn't in the system. whatever. Then they tell me oh yeah your bonus, you'll have to request that from "somebody" because that got lost in all this.

But that's not the end. My access to every system, every server, every service is going to my old emc login. It's been a battle.. no one can figure out what's going on

My favorite part. The system says I've been working here 7 years..
Click to expand...
Request the 4 years of back pay that got lost.
 
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Mist

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alavaz said:
EMC had real wacky customer account system too. They would create new site IDs for like every equipment order and then I guess associate an email domain with that site. So I'd buy say an Isilon, go to login to the customer portal for it with my army email account and 1000 different US ARMY sites would pop up.
Click to expand...
Name an enterprise vendor that's product support registration process isn't awful.

Me and my boss just created a massive stack of PDFs that explain how to register a business partner account for the top 15 different vendors who's products we sell/support. Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, EMC, Netapp, Juniper, Extreme, Fortinet, etc etc down the list.

Every one of them is a shitshow, clicking the wrong radial button at any step can make your account into a 'not quite a business partner account' and not associate you with the support IDs for our mutual partner customers, and then requires you to talk to like 8 different departments to get your account fixed.
 
Noodleface

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alavaz said:
EMC had real wacky customer account system too. They would create new site IDs for like every equipment order and then I guess associate an email domain with that site. So I'd buy say an Isilon, go to login to the customer portal for it with my army email account and 1000 different US ARMY sites would pop up.
Click to expand...
I bet the Dell EMC system is worse
 
Nija

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I have been remote for about a decade. I started in the office and negotiated a few WFH days a week after 6 months. Eventually went to full time remote after I moved out of the area.

I actually have two jobs, both remote. My only scheduled hours during the day are 8am-2pm with a break for lunch. What do you want to know?
 
Foler

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stupidmonkey said:
Yep, but not for a startup.
Click to expand...
Nija said:
I have been remote for about a decade. I started in the office and negotiated a few WFH days a week after 6 months. Eventually went to full time remote after I moved out of the area.

I actually have two jobs, both remote. My only scheduled hours during the day are 8am-2pm with a break for lunch. What do you want to know?
Click to expand...

I guess how you both got into it, what exactly do you do (software engineer? What languages/stack?) and did your initial physical location play a factor?

More or less any advice on getting from A to B.

At this point I'm full stack, html/case/vanilla JS but really been focusing on backend Java, spring, parallel programming and now Android. Java/Spring/Android I believe will continue to be my focus.

This may sound clique but I want something challenge, full believer in eat what you kill. Having been out of work for 1.5 years now, 1 year due to being a full time caregiver for a family member whom had Parkinson's and cancer and then passed away - I'm OK with taking a job that doesn't even pay awesome, and my financial situation, thankfully allows me this flexibility.

Like I'd rather do something I can pour my heart and soul into and that'll help me rebuild my resume than make 120k a year rebooting ec2 instances at capital one.

A really good friend of mine who has runs a startup app has been meaning to spin up an Android version for a while. He's been running the app in iOS for like 6 years and he's starting to scale, think his monthly revenue is like 25-35k now, decent numbers on CLV and churn. Talked to him 5 months ago and offered to help spin up the Android version in return for a % of monthly revenue the Android subs bring in for it. Said he is wasnt really ready to make the Android jump yet as he was about to launch his app in another city.

He just called me 2 days ago and seems more interested... If I could do this for him it would be a huge deal for me, I get to fully "own" the Android product and push it towards success. Ya I won't make bank but I have enough savings that I can do this for solid experience and a resume builder which is what I need.

I think the only hangup between us is negotiating what this looks like pay wise. I'm kinda thinking of doing requirements gathering, coming out with a 1 year road map, and then just asking for % of monthly revenue. His biggest concern I think is coinciding iOS and Android releases which I'm not worried about since I have 100% free time, am borderline workaholic and his iOS dev just does this part time for him. Does coming up with a feature road map, taking a portion of monthly revenue, and maybe just making it a one year contract sound good?

I've never done freelance and we both can benefit from this since he can't quite on board a full time sde yet.

Sorry wall of text. Appreciate all the help/advice everyone in this thread has given. Many beers are owed.
 
alavaz

alavaz

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Noodleface said:
I bet the Dell EMC system is worse
Click to expand...

As far as I know they haven't combined them. The dell system was always surprisingly decent. I mean it was buggy and didn't work consistently, but at least somewhat intuitive. Dell lets you self dispatch parts too without calling support and sending them a bunch of logs.
 
Lendarios

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Going to be moving to another City. Boca Raton from Miami.

Ill be doing Mon and Fri from home and in site the other 3 days. The drive to work is still going to be 1 hour. =(
 
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ToeMissile

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Noodleface said:
Onboarding at Dell EMC has been a NIGHTMARE.

On day 5 I talked to HR because I couldn't access payroll or timecard or anything. It took them TEN days to figure out that all.my login shit went to my Emc email address.... I quit emc 4 years ago. The email doesn't even exist anymore. How?

So they talk to ADP and start getting shit sorted out. Takes a few days to get into the system. Stuffs starting to work now. But ten days?!

Then I'm informed because of this they need to request a check for my first week because I wasn't in the system. whatever. Then they tell me oh yeah your bonus, you'll have to request that from "somebody" because that got lost in all this.

But that's not the end. My access to every system, every server, every service is going to my old emc login. It's been a battle.. no one can figure out what's going on

My favorite part. The system says I've been working here 7 years..
Click to expand...
Not surprised -
I'm at a subsidiary/biz unit of xerox, we merged with another group that had some geographic overlap. It's been a shit show, so i can only imagine how Dell/EMC is even if it has been a couple years.
 
Foler

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Lendarios said:
Going to be moving to another City. Boca Raton from Miami.

Ill be doing Mon and Fri from home and in site the other 3 days. The drive to work is still going to be 1 hour. =(
Click to expand...
Thoughts and prayers. Despite living in FLA my whole life I've never been to Miami, just driven through, traffic sucks!

Haven't been to Boca Raton either. Safe to assume it's mostly retired rich community? Come north and visit me on the coast bud.
 
Foler

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Noodleface said:
I'm surprised you're having such a hard time. Is there something were missing? I've been offered a lot of jobs and I don't think I'm very good at what I do
Click to expand...
Hmm.

I think it's a mix of things noodle.

First, my work background is in C but not embedded which puts me in a weird position. No embedded people want me and few people use C. I think I've negated this though by more or less becoming full stack over the past 6 months with a focus on Java. So I feel like I have/am really overcoming this.

I think another red flag is the (at this point) 1.5 year work gap. Became a full time caregiver for a family member who has Parkinson's and cancer. He passed away end of last year. Work gaps really hurt, maybe not so much if you're an industry vet, but no one could give a fuck about your situation. It's hard but I'd make the same decision over again.

Third I think location, Central Florida, not much going on here but DoD with simulations being huge and of course space coast right there. I've only been looking for jobs out of state but my theory is, why would a company in a place like Boston look into me when they have so much local talent available unless I'm a unicorn? And I'm not a unicorn, yet.

Fourth, like I said I've had a ton of interviews, interviewed with palantir, Amazon, got that C1 offer. So it's not like I don't have potential I guess. I just suck at codeshare coding interviews. I've grinded for months but it's not my strength. I also want a job that is challenging (hence skipping C1).

Honestly i think I just need to put shit in perspective. Took 1.5 years off programming. Came back, taught myself full stack, Java focus, within a 3 month time period nabbed multiple interviews with reputable names and got a really good offer.

All things relative to my situation I feel like that's pretty good right? I just need to actually believe that and not just say it and keep fucking going at this right
 
alavaz

alavaz

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Fill in that 1.5 year gap with "freelance" projects or get your buddy with the phone app to say you worked for him part time or something like that. I probably would've also taken that C1 job for a year then started applying. It's always easier to find a job when you have one.
 
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Louis

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For the last 6 weeks I was going through a promotion process of going from an engineer role to management after slaving away to get it. Then my company began the process of being acquired by a competitior 2 weeks ago.

HR finally sends me the promotion for acceptance yesterday and said there would be no pay increase as the acquiring company said shut that shit down. The bump would have been about 20-25k and while it would have only lasted for 6 months it will impact my severance and retention payouts as well.

My role is also extremely critical for the merger as I basically handle every aspect of the deconversion with no one I work with being remotely knowledgeable about any of it. My initial plan was to work to the end and only apply to jobs that I REALLY had an interest for in the meantime, but I think I became much less picky out of spite now.
 
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Jasker

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Random questions I thought you guys might be able to answer: I have like 6-7 years experience in IT (support and light administration and networking) but I have a gap in employment for two years.

When I was working, I worked in a few small cities and NYC. My resume is overlong and have gotten experience on a good amount of stuff. Though, I don’t remember all of it.

I started working again 8 months ago and just ended the contract.

So I have a decent resume, but a lot of the highest quality stuff was from 2011-2015.

1) what do I do and say about having such a big gap of employment? (2 years) 2016-2018

2) there’s an organization that will pay for my certifications in upstate ny.

I’m thinking to solidify my old experience and be attractive to employers despite having a large gap in employment, and to prove that I still know what I’m doing...I should take and pass a few certifications, and put it on top of my resume.

I’m thinking of A+ Network+ Security+ all within like a four-five month time frame.

I can pass the A+ with only like a week or two of review I think. I’m not clear on the others.

Do you think these three certifications are a good bet? If not, what certifications would be?

Again, I’m IT support, junior system admin with very light network admin skills. And would be applying to IT support and junior systems admin roles.

I’d be applying in NYC, pretty much anything decent, and aiming for 50k-80k salary, all depends on where/what/etc. When I worked there before I was making 75k.

Appreciate any feedback you guys can provide.
 
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Kharzette

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I have a ton of huge gaps and it never seemed to bother anyone. Gotta have those gaps for hittin the everquest pipe now and then :D
 
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Kharzette

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I've almost got VS Code up to the level of the old visual studios, back before it was a bloated piece of crap. Just a few little problems left to fix, and the most recent monthly build crashing alot with the built in term.

Yesterday I decided I'd try to fix that crash. Why not it's open sores! 6 painful hours later I managed to get it to compile. It's cool MS have drunk the open sores coolaid but damn they went full on like needing-20-strange-build-tools-with-goofy-names. What you have blert 12.6? You fool! You must have blert 11.4, and never ever use blort 6.9!

The built-from-source ver can't see any extensions so I have to figure out what I need and manually install them. The crash bug is after debugging so I grab the omnisharp extension and hit go. Turns out the debugger program it attaches to isn't open source and has a different license and so can only work with official microsoft builds. So yea basically unusable and wasted an entire day and couldn't even attempt to reproduce the bug I wanted to fix.

So I've only got two annoying problems left (other than the crash). The first is the problems window. If your project file is anything other than the simplest possible form it flips out and can't find anything inside referenced packages and libs. This causes many many thousands of undefined this and that errors to flood the problems window making it useless.

When it does work sometimes, it digs down into bin and obj and throws up problems with generated code, and annoyingly sticks all of that at the top. I'm sure that will eventually be fixed by someone.

The other problem is probably unique to me. I like to use tabs alot to sort of arrange stuff into columns. It comes from coding in pure c where you'd do all declarations at the top (which I still tend to do). So I do like int<tab>bleh<tab>=69; Older visual studios were smart enough to not try to complete anything if you were tabbing away from a known type. The newer stuff not so much. Sometimes it is just a harmless annoyance, other times it completes some horrible monstrous thing that completely ruins your groove.
 
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