My background is almost an exact copy of Cad's, except I started in game programming and could never fathom jerking off in law school.
IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
- Thread starter Traak
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It's similar. Gave up game programming because it pays pennies and went to ERP consulting for one of the huge firms. Then independent after a few years.
No clue why anyone would want to go to law school though. Uck.
No clue why anyone would want to go to law school though. Uck.
Noodleface
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Vinen
God is dead
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So glad I'm not in this situation. I have to brag online because I can't let the poor side of my family know how much I make. (The only person that makes more than I in my family is a person who may be Cad's neighbor... my Cousins wife...)
Yay coming from a poor bunch of Mexicans. Thankfully my cousin is as White as I am (we didn't get the pigment!) so it won't potentially give away who it is wkwkwkwkwk
Noodleface
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Yeah me and my brother both make more than our parents do and we are only one year out. They still try to buy us nice stuff on holidays like we are kids still.
Noodleface
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Also work has been killing me. Basically bending over backwards for our biggest business unit (Vinen could guess I'm sure) and it's just ridiculous. Trying to port old code to a new architecture and nothing fucking works. It makes me feel like I'm a terrible coder because I can't figure out how to make it work but the worst part is it was left open that there's a possibility it can't work. At what point do you throw in the towel and say we need to do it another way? Been on this feature for weeks now and everyday my soul is getting sucked out a little more.
Vinen
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I barely know the VMware Business Units anymore since they appear to be renamed yearly -.-
moontayle
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I'm not doing anything nearly as intense but it's a redesign of an internal tool that's going to consolidate three apps and a function of a fourth app into just one. A lot of what I'm running into in copying the design across has me doing a log of head-shaking.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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Looks like I'm moving forward with consulting for my old company and transitioning to full time after 6 months. I'll know for sure later today. Then it will be interesting to see what happens when I give me notice, hoping they want to hire me as a consultant as well for nights and weekends to help finish their upgrades and a couple big upcoming projects.
Noodleface
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My boss has begged me not to leave a few times now. The last 3 people to work on these features have left the company. One was laid off, another moved teams, and another quit for google.
Noodleface
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We recently had two people quit because they thought they were more important to the company than the actually were by trying the "If you don't give us more money we'll quit!" game. They both quit. One especially seemed to really regret the position he took on the matter. Both said they're coming back in 2-3 years to the company and our director said "No they're not" to my boss.
Noodleface
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I'm not looking to quit unless I found something better, but I got skipped over for my natural promotion because I changed jobs into another role against my choice around the time I should've been promoted.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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So, for you young guys, the "or I will quit" part of that threat is ALWAYS implied, no need to be said. Just makes you seem childish. Go ask for more money if you want to, but don't be an asshole until you have another offer lined up, and even then, don't be an asshole. When I was in tech I made double salary for months after I left jobs by asking for $150/hr to consult back to places after I left, and they'd always call and employ me 10-15 hours a week. The funny thing is, I was usually only actually "working" 10-15 hours a week anyway so I could get a lot of work done in that time, and they were happy about it. Haha.
No reason to ever threaten your boss, or let him know you will leave. If you are talented, they know damn well you have options and that you can leave. If they simply don't recognize your talent, then nothing you can do will educate them. You SHOULD leave. If you're not talented, then suck it up and be glad you're getting paid.
No problem talking to your boss and letting him know you're not happy about that situation. I got promoted to senior because I told my boss I was doing all this work above my job title for my project and the people who were actually supposed to be doing it weren't. She agreed because I already had a record of doing things a senior should be doing so the promotion was pretty natural. I just had to ask for it. I do get frustrated by some people I work with who have higher titles than me simply because they've been here longer but don't actually do the work required by their pay band. The one guy who quit especially was rattling off all these things he had to do as justification for getting more money. My boss just pulled out the requirements sheet for his job title and listed them off and they all basically aligned with what he had to do.
The problem with the two that left is they had a way overinflated opinion of themselves. They created this false perception around the company that the search engine they wrote/maintained is some God-tier level shit. It isn't. It is fucking terrible. Objectively fucking terrible. Untestable, unmaintainable, undocumented. It crashes all the time. Does it search it's indexes fast and can it index new documents fast? Yes. But it gives up way too much to do it. It is a spider web of every single anti-pattern in the universe all in a terribly written C environment stuck in 1984. They also actively poisoned any talk of moving from this custom engine to a Solr/Lucene or Elastic option. Personally I think the company is stronger now that they've left. They thought they were these legendary developers for whatever reason but they just hacked shit onto an already hacky code base.
Hilariously the head guy who left also was in charge of standing up our Hadoop stack. We use a Cloudera distro so I can stand one up on my OSX if necessary. It isn't hard. He tried to give Cloudera access to our search engine as their search engine packed with the distro. I can only imagine how hard they laughed when that happened. He was also convinced he had a job waiting for him at Cloudera if he ever wanted it. Nope. Turns out doing exactly what Cloudera exists to do (easily stand up a multi-server cluster) isn't what they consider a very hirable skill.
Cad
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No advice can fix an incorrect self assessment of your value. But its one of those things... your assessment will get corrected when "nobody ever realizes my value! Nobody appreciates me!" feelings you have. No, they are the ones who see you for what you are. There are shitty bosses that treat everyone like shit, but if you've been through 4 jobs and every one of them treats you like shit, you're probably shit.
Whats that saying... "If everyone around you is an asshole, it's probably not them."