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

stupidmonkey

Not Smrt
<Gold Donor>
1,698
3,661
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."
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,828
13,341
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.
Every time I hear about Cloudera I'm taken back in time. One of my exes brothers is VP of sales for them I believe. Or was it a different company he went to work for and his wife went into HR there... I can't remember now. I'm getting old.

Also, to echo what Cad was saying... why on earth would you ever threaten anyone in your profession with an ultimatum? Ridiculous. Just ask for what you feel your worth, and if you're worried about it being seen as dissent make sure you have another job lined up before you do it. Never make veiled threats, there's no need. At my previous job I felt I was being underpaid so I went and had a good discussion with my boss, asking for a $25k/yr raise (which at the time was 1/3rd of my salary) and just laid out all the bullet points for why I felt it was deserved. No threats, just asking. And they agreed and gave it to me, and if they hadn't I would have found another job.
 

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
14,163
606
I wasn't there for the actual conversation but it kind of went like this. PersonA was the pseudo-boss of PersonB. PersonA left more voluntarily for a new position mainly because he was getting his power stripped from him. He continued to email PersonB saying "You deserve way more money than they're giving you." I assume these emails also pretty much said that if they don't give PersonB more money he should leave to work for PersonA. So armed with the recommendation from PersonA he deserves more money PersonB went to the director asking for more cash. He was told no. Everyone knew PersonB was leaving if he got that answer. He didn't directly say "Money or I walk" but it was certainly implied. This also makes way more sense if you knew these two guys. It sounds pretty sterile in just this few lines of text but this was months coming to a head.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,828
13,341
So they both didn't give an ultimatum and handled it precisely like any sane, well-adjusted professional would. Boy did you paint a way different picture in your original telling of that story.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
45,420
73,489
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.
Yep. In most cases if you're valuable, bosses will be motivated to pay you only as much as they think you need to stay at the job and do it effectively. So when you ask for more money you're increasing their perception of how much they need to pay you to keep you. If you make threats it just sounds like you're quitting anyway. The only time I'd say threats are needed is when you ask for more money, they have a special '6 months performance evaluation', you wrek their evaluation and they try to ignore the raise anyway. Some people call that strong negotiation and you need some strong negotiation of your own.

In other cases asking for a raise only gives them reason to tell you what they really think of you which might translate into, "I hope you quit but I'm too nice to fire you until you just asked for more money.".

A lot of people have an inflated sense of value, especially middle aged dudes. Some guys will bust their ass for a couple years, do amazing work and be super valuable, then keep that perception of themselves as they slack off for ten years. You see the same with gaming too.
 

ShakyJake

<Donor>
7,626
19,250
Any positive opinions on recruiters coming at you on LinkedIn? I'm starting to receive emails that seem like people who are genuinely interested in my skills. I tend to shy away from most social networking sites so not sure if there are any "gotchas" to LinkedIn.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,828
13,341
A lot of people have an inflated sense of value, especially middle aged dudes. Some guys will bust their ass for a couple years, do amazing work and be super valuable, then keep that perception of themselves as they slack off for ten years. You see the same with gaming too.
It was a sad day when I realized I wasn't Varsity material in StarCraft anymore.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
I get loads of recruitment spam too but you should read each one because I've got a few that were legitimate interests in me.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
19,360
-17,424
Regarding linked in, if you are looking then its great. If you are not, just ignore them. If you have in mind a certain figure, then ask recruiters to only email you when they have something that meets that number.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
45,420
73,489
Good think about recruitment spam and linkedin in general is that recruiters can look for specific skills amongst a large number of people. When you're just shitting out resumes to various jobs semi-related to your expertise you'll be an awkward fit but it's not a big deal because after a year you'll learn the skills. But if you happen to be an expert in COBOL, machine vision, perl and relational databases, there might be a perfect job you can fit into, hit the ground running and add a lot of prior expertise where a company needs it. That can command a starting salary higher than random jobs you might apply to.
 

ShakyJake

<Donor>
7,626
19,250
Yeah, this particular recruiter speaks of C# and Angular. I consider myself pretty darn fluent in C# but Angular? Really just a basic understanding. I've written a simple web app using it, but that's about it. So I'm kind of hesitant to respond since I automatically think they are expecting an expert.

Am I looking? Sure, for the right offer.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
19,360
-17,424
Regarding angular, if you are willing to work on it, make sure you are not the expected expert, Angular has a pretty bad learning curve, and the documentation is horrible.
I came from the server side and my experience on knockout helped a lot, but angular is plainly retarded. They have concepts such as service, factory, providers that if you are not strong in JS, you will not understand fully.
For example
angularjs - Service vs provider vs factory - Stack Overflow
We rewrote our first angular app 4 times, in 3 months.
 
349
1
Hearing about all of your co workers makes me laugh but it does make me wonder. Maybe somewhere on a different internet forum, the same shit talk is being said about you
smile.png


Just an observation/bathroom thoughts. This isn't targeting towards anyone specific, I just know their are two sides to every story.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
45,420
73,489
Hearing about all of your co workers makes me laugh but it does make me wonder. Maybe somewhere on a different internet forum, the same shit talk is being said about you
smile.png


Just an observation/bathroom thoughts. This isn't targeting towards anyone specific, I just know their are two sides to every story.
I am 100% confident that my coworkers talk shit about me, but it is more geared toward, "Tuco just likes to slap together systems and drive his robot around.".
 

moontayle

Golden Squire
4,302
165
Overheard today that the more senior android dev here was let go after disappearing into the wilds of India. I sort of expected it but was hoping she would find her way back so I didn't have the life of an entire product riding on my junior dev ass, but such is. I'm sort of excited though. Besides, this gives me a chance to clean up her code without someone bitching at me in the process. I seriously think it might have given me aids. Or the flu at least.
 

ShakyJake

<Donor>
7,626
19,250
Fucking code reviews are the bane of my existence. This one guy refuses to listen to anything I say. And I am trying my best to word my comments in such a way that they would not be construed as attacks.

He always falls back to "it's consistent with the rest of the application." Yes, but 90% of the application is shit. So is that justification for writing shitty code?

Furthermore, I hate people who copy/paste shit without understanding what it does.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
19,360
-17,424
Hearing about all of your co workers makes me laugh but it does make me wonder. Maybe somewhere on a different internet forum, the same shit talk is being said about you
smile.png


Just an observation/bathroom thoughts. This isn't targeting towards anyone specific, I just know their are two sides to every story.
His side last month was...

"Well remember that architecture i was pushing for 2 months ago.. I don't want to use it anymore... I realized it it was not for this company... It requires a full time work on the DB that fullstack developers dont do..."

Translation. After realizing he as alone on the boat of maintaining XML and SP, plus realizing the non re-usability of his architecture he quickly changed his tune. Trying to save face about it, but after giving me 1 moth of unnecessary headaches of "Why don't you want to try new things? Why are you so close minded"??
Mind you my main argument was SQL xml work is not OOP, just string/xml manipulation.