Can you do a post-mortem on what happened there?
93 karma · joined February 17, 2022
Get a dog, go to dog parks. Dog people are friendly and easy to start conversations with.
Is it just a time sheet/app where developers track their time or is it spyware like Upwork's screen capture tracker?
Be wary of any developer who agrees to install spyware. These are either entry level developers or really crappy devs.
I have both worked as freelancer and hired freelancers. I find these spywares extremely insulting. We are not high school kids working in fast food joint. We are professionals & business owners.
As a freelancer, if a company asked if I would install spyware on my machine, it indicated that it was probably badly run company. If it was optional I would ask how many other devs had the spyware on their machines. If there were more than 1 or 2 devs, it just meant I would be working with bad devs and just declined contracts. Same if it was required. Pretty much all those companies had issues with their devs and had to scrap projects or start over.
And when I hired freelancers, if a freelancer indicated they had no problem with spyware, it set off all kinds of red flags. And every single time if I hired such developer, they were horrible and needed a lot of hand holding.
With books & written tutorials, I can scan whole page in 1-2 seconds and skip if needed. And if need to retrieve information from previous sections, I can either use find command. In case of physical books, it is still faster then scanning through videos.
But as a father, this is horrible work schedule. Culturally, it is totally acceptable for fathers to just provide but not really interact with their kids. Also there is an aspect of heroism of fathers working long hours to provide. And then, unfortunately, for some there is no option but to work long hours because they need extra money.
But some men would rather stay away from their children and let moms or grandparents raise the them. And I do know some such men. They stay late at work to avoid their families, they even bring their gaming laptops to work, so they can game after 5 and avoid their families. Honestly, work is a walk in a park compared to being a good father.
But it is hard to tell who is avoiding their families, who is staying late because of cultural pressures, and who really need to work late hours to provide for their families.
Sadly though I did meet a lot of students in my CS program who were in it for money and openly admitted they hate programming, logic, etc and cannot wait until they get a job and then move into management.
Until this job search, I usually had two interviews, one technical screen and one behavior interview. And this was for senior roles. And usually, I almost always got offers. Most of the time, I was deciding between two jobs.
I think everyone is trying to replicate FAANG's success by copying their hiring practices. Maybe this is a hazing ritual to find really obedient workers.
Either way, we have to play this game and keep trying.
This was my 4th application where I was rejected after final round. A lot more where I didn't get past initial screening etc. Feeling down right now.
I have 15 years of technical experience, I never got a chance to specialize but I can handle everything, DevOps, database, frontend, & backend. Perhaps that's my fault for just getting work done instead of focusing on my career. Perhaps I am getting really old for this industry. Maybe I really should go in the management.
Tolerance is just a word that means that you are okay with things that you find annoying/repulsive. E.g. you were annoyed but tolerated flight delays.
Philosophy of tolerance is that you belief that all people deserve to live in peace even if you don't agree with their lifestyle, skin color, religion etc. AND if you really believe in it, you will fight against any ideas that disagree with this philosophy.
The tolerance as philosophy is not a logical problem. It is dealing with human behavior. It doesn't require that in order for you to adhere to it, you must also tolerate intolerance. Though in my view, sometimes it is okay to stay quiet when your racist uncle is whining about "others" at family dinner.
In Texas, severance package has no impact on unemployment payments. I was laid off once with 3 months of severance pay and also got full unemployment payments.
In my current tech company, there have been many layoffs, they all usually got 2-6 months of severance.
A few suggestions, at least, I am doing these for myself:
* Volunteer to mentor and lead without official title * Read books on management * Improve public speaking skills * Seek mentors and be mentor to others * Focus more on building my network instead learning new of technical skills
But other teams seem to replicate AWS pricing models, I assume to stay competitive with it.
If my business runs of AWS, then rate limit or even reclaim some servers if storage is in S3.
The nightmare scenarios that keep showing up in news are the reason that I stopped playing around in AWS/Cloud.
They only know to press some buttons and then send some reports.
Looking for single family residence since we have kids now, and it seems if we want to live in similar upscale neighborhood with good schools, we will need to put 25% towards mortgage & HOA. 2 years ago, it would have been only 12-15%.
It is not their concern what I do on social media. It is unfortunate that there is so much power imbalance that most employees are afraid to criticize their employers in public.
I know 2 SWE in the company who actually discussed this with their managers and got okay in writing for their consulting businesses.
EDIT: Really curious if SWE actually read their contracts or they just assume that they are not allowed. I don't remember my contracts from earlier jobs. It would be interesting if we can have a site like levels.fyi for contracts.
Many, sadly, low income families have to work two or more jobs. We in tech make enough but what if you are bored and need more challenges.
My current second job is family but I know multiple single engineers (or in one case, with grown up kids) with 2 jobs. They work 16+ hours each day but with pandemic there was nothing else to do, so might as well do more work. At least, one guy is pretty open about it with both of his employers. Others hide it but they get the work done.
Also you can list 2 jobs on your resume. When I started my career, I didn't had very high paying tech job, I did freelance work on the side and listed on my resume. Never been problem.
Your company doesn't own you.
Makes me wonder if those engineers who worked for Nazis through IBM felt any remorse later, or if they were able to compartmentalize their work from their personal lives.
At the same time, thanks to these ads, I remember spending a lot less time in front of screens compared to current kids/teens.
Now I am just a team lead and just trying to climb the ladder.
It happened to me, someone filed taxes with my name. Took almost a year before IRS fixed this and then they locked my account. So now every year, I need to use the pin.
Also file police report/FBI report, I think you can do all this online. When my identity was stolen they told me to do this although they knew no action will be taken. The reason is if someone use your identity to commit a serious crime, you will have an official police report to proof.
In end, it really sucks. You will need to keep paying for credit/identity monitoring services forever and occasionally take actions against events like some random credit card account opening up in some random state.
I am on same path, trying to climb up ladder but want to do only one job well instead of two mediocre jobs.
However, programming is my hobby, and my plan is to keep it as a hobby and do it after work. Perhaps I will contribute to open source or write small utilities to automate some boring management task.