692 karma · joined October 2, 2011
- Very very competitive salary and "deterministic" benefits (401k with good employer contributions, RSUs, cash bonuses, etc.)
Total comp is high, but the bonuses are super deterministic. There's 2 cash bonuses, both based on formulas that are published. 401K is just a contribution, not a match, RSUs based on performance (4 year vesting for each issue). You also get discounts on Intel products. There's also a very nice "kudos" system where you can send people small cash awards for promoting company values or doing a good job.
- Challenging working environment where neat technical problems are still solved despite not being a startup, possibly with modern tools and technologies (e.g. not a "we use CVS as our SCM" shop)
Intel takes sand and turns it into computers, and they spend several billion dollars a year making that happen. There's a lot of tough technical problems all over the place, like how do you make drivers and software for a chip that doesn't exist yet?
- no more than 40-45 hours a week expected as per company culture
Depends on the group again. Some managers will push you to work more than 40 (all the time, not just crunch), but you have to let them control you.
- Stable job (no serious failure possibility in the next 3 years or so for the company)
The company is definitely stable. In the event that your particular group is restructured or given the axe, there's retraining opportunities to keep you in the company.
- Possibility of working from home (even just once or twice a week to break the routine)
Most are okay if you work from home once in a while. Consult your specific manager on their views of structured or regular work from home.
- Main headquarters in SF bay area (where I'm located)
Santa Clara or Folsom would be the nearest sites, but both of them are huge.
There's free tea and soda in addition to the coffee.
- Homeowner Associations - they throw parties and stuff for the kids, there's probably a house or something they can throw it on. I remember one year for halloween someone had "The Great Pumpkin" playing on their garage door.
- Event companies. It's an interesting offering in addition to the standard inflatables and maybe jumbo movie screens. I could see it being a big thing at corporate events and college campuses.
- Student associations. Generally they have some money for this sort of thing so they own it and don't have to rent it. They probably wouldn't fund a kickstarter though because of restrictions on how they can spend their money.
This is why Microsoft and Google have defined contractor terms, and you can't come back for a period of time afterwards, etc.
* Holidays are the same (don't come into work!). Depending on the company it could be either paid or unpaid, but it's generally the same for everyone.
* Vacation is accrued based on the hours you work. Exempt employees generally have N days, and non-exempt would accrue N days if they worked 40 hours a week. Most of the time you have to work at least a year to get the days.
* Free meals are the same. Whoever is there gets the free food. If your part timers aren't there for the free lunch, oh well. Note - if you have contractors, I think giving them free food could potentially cross the line into them being an employee. My previous employer was always very careful never to give contractors freebies, not even free soda.
When I first started managing NFS storage, I had "Never use recursive" taped to my monitor so I would never do something horribly recursive across the NFS space.
You should aim for a 3.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale. If you're going for a particularly tough job, maybe 3.8. Less than a 3.5 cuts out a lot of more competitive companies, and less than a 3.0 is pretty much death unless you have a very good reason (this assumes you can get past the HR filters).
What will a 4.0/4.0 get you? Basically nothing, except for some extra bragging rights. My graduating CS semester only had about 5 or 7 people who had a 4.0, but most of us had job offers prior to leaving college. GPA will count for your first or second job out of college, then not matter as much.
Note, I went to a top 10 school for computer science. You may have to scale this somewhat if your school isn't as "rigorous" according to the biases of your interviewers.
In the standard Intel style (whitepapers, etc), trademarks to other companies are designated with an asterisk and a footnote to the effect of "These are trademarks from companies other than Intel. They own the rights to the name, and not us"
I had a few classes in college, where in a very 1984-esque fashion, failing (<60% correct) was passing. You just had to fail less than everyone else.
One framework I think is helpful is this: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/ask-ramit-how-do-y...
Talking with people about what a job actually entails, versus what the job posting says it does, seems really obvious when you say it, but sometimes obvious things need to be said. During my last job search I actually talked with people on my options, and found it extremely insightful between what I thought the job was and what it actually is.
Resumes are marketing documents, not chronological histories of your life. Still, even as a marketing document it shouldn't lie.
Could you elaborate more on the multiple narratives? If I have a long and sordid job history with multiple industries, am I picking only specific companies/positions that I worked with in my application, or am I picking bullet points within the company? I'm slightly confused why Tom Webb would be an iOS developer, Lead Front end, and Customer Service Manager. Maybe iOS, front end, and something else programming related would better illustrate the example. The example job application doesn't change going between Tom Webb and Tina Zuick to really drive this home.
If I have multiple narratives, do they each have unique URLs?
For example, my friend is a civil engineer. There's lots of civil engineering jobs in the US, but his wife works as a chemical engineer. Chemical engineering jobs are largely where either oil/gas deposits are, or large amounts of water (water for processing and/or waterways/railroad for shipping). So I imagine for them it will be where ever she needs to move he'll need to follow, versus the other way around, lest they end up in some place where she can't use the degree she spent 4 years getting.
I realize that date of publication of the particular article can be different from date of most recent publication, so I don't immediately throw out the site, but if it looks dormant I may leave and go to another site.
I know now to open up those links in incognito windows, but every so often I still have to go delete my "viewed items" on the site so the prediction becomes relevant again.
There is another situation, which I would argue is the "enterprise" situation, where you will want to pay your programmers to make the changes because they're fixed overhead rather than capital expenditures. This scenario comes because of an internal push to save money (adding significant capacity costs too much), or because adding any sort of capacity increases operational complexity more than it increases code complexity. It's a much larger scale than where TestingBot is at, but a problem they probably hope to encounter one day.
I'm glad they found a solution which seems to work out really well for their use case. Changing the algorithm to use the machine for an hour would imply that some tests may wait to be run, and that could be a bad thing for TestingBot (I'm not sure what their SLA is).
Going to their own "cloud" though will require them to either overbuy capacity or eventually make a push to increase utilization, so they may end up making that algo anyhow.
Not sure if we have 2 drops per cube. There's 2 ports, but I don't know if they're active, cabled but not hooked up to a switch, or not even run to the cube. Haven't bothered to test because our old Cisco phones had a pass-through port, and now I only have 1 device that could use an ethernet port.
Agreed. A coworker of mine rolled back to a restore point, which caused his computer to get kicked off the domain. He couldn't log in at all, so he had to call IT. The problem was his phone was a softphone on his computer.
sub $100 A-frame ladder with $2.99 overnight shipping FTW.
This was a huge realization for me after getting into the "real world". I suddenly had coworkers who had kids as old as I am. At times I felt like I had more in common with their kids than them, because they would mention things that happened before I was even born. I had worked at other jobs before, but excluding the managers, everyone was around my age.
In school, even 5 years seemed like a huge gap--"Wow, he's in college, I'm still in High School!", doesn't seem like that much.