rudyrigot

Not all tech jobs are like that. Also, different tech jobs will appeal to different people, which is fine. Maybe this one job is not the best fit for you, and there may be another one out there that is.

If I were you, I’d try a job as different as you can in a company as different as you can, for the sake of making sure the situation will be different. You might still land in a situation that’s not for you, of course, but that should mitigate the risk that you’d land on the exact same problems.

Moved from France to the US in 2013, mostly because opportunities in tech don’t compare, and also because for all the great things French culture has, the gloomy/whiny tone of the culture was always difficult for me.

It was hard for a while on precarious immigration visas, but then we got our self-sponsored Green Card in 2015, and it’s been smooth-sailing since. The Green Card path I chose took many years to prepare, starting far before we immigrated; and tons of continuous hard work to prepare. It’s hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

It’s worked out pretty fantastically for me and my family, so I regret nothing. We became naturalized citizens last year.

Every culture is different and there is none that is for everyone. That’s why it doesn’t make much sense to me that people would want to spend their whole life where they happened to be born, without trying anything else. I think everyone should live abroad a little while, no matter where.

I work for a FAANG-like company right now, and used to work for Apple, and worked for startups too. Some thoughts.

• Engineers in large tech companies are neither better nor worse engineers than in startups on average. They just work on different things.

• Large tech companies are a lot more heterogeneous than it looks at first. I had a great experience with talented and respectful people at Apple, while a friend of mine was in another engineering division also at Apple, and… not so much. It’s so large, it can’t be the same throughout the company. It wouldn’t be surprising that your team is struggling to hire quality talent, but some others have an easier time, for all kinds of reasons.

• But each company does have some common cultural traits you’re likely to find throughout all its teams though. My current company takes a lot about the importance of work-life balance, while Apple told us at bootcamp on day 1 that we’d be working our asses off. In both cases, it turned out true.

So, one FAANG might be wrong for you, but another FAANG might be better. And one team in a FAANG might be wrong for you, but another team in the same FAANG might be better.

One reason I like larger companies is because once you’re in, they’re so large that it’s easy to switch to another role all the while having a lot of insider information about what you’re getting into, way more than if you were to switch companies. But yeah, a lot of the time they want to keep you on one team for a little bit first, so at least they’re getting some ROI on their efforts to find you.

Ooooh, ok then yeah.

Sounds like he didn’t actually have a liquidity event? In which case, his net worth is mostly paper money, so while I’m sure he’s doing nicely and I wish him for this money to become real money eventually, it is just not the case at this point, so he’s probably not as crazy rich as you’re thinking. At this point, he probably can only liquidate some of it with board approval, and can’t do it too much because of the signaling risk that comes with it.

When taking a group of hundreds of millions of people with the same trait (such as their nationality), it’s easiest to compartmentalize and expect them all to think the same and behave the same. So when inevitably individuals or subcultures in that group have differences, it’s easiest to call it hypocritical.

I’ve been a European in American companies where saying “I don’t like that VP” in public would raise serious eyebrows, and I’ve been part of other American companies where saying “the VP Product is a fucking idiot” in public would make everyone laugh. It’s not the first time I hear GitHub fancies itself to be a bit edgy in culture, and I’m personally not into it, but it doesn’t make them hypocritical because some other guy you know, and you need to put in the same bucket, is different.

Have you considered a product role on a technical product?

We’re on my developer salary in a modest Chicago suburb house, which is enough for us by itself, so my wife was able to leave her job to focus on our 6yo daughter full time, with little financial concerns. We can pretty much last like this indefinitely, if nothing changes.

We were living in the Bay Area a few years ago, and then a couple of years in Chicago itself, I’m very thankful we happen to find ourselves in a more affordable area as this is going on, because everything would have been much trickier...

Am I the only one to feel like the Hey people are basically having a faked marketing-driven temper tantrum?

Not to say that Apple applies their rules fairly (I wouldn’t really know, but I’m willing to trust there are issues). Just that each communication I see from Hey feels entitled and self-dramatizing. It doesn’t feel like they’re helping their own case...

Yes, we did it at Kenna Security. About 300 paying customers, but over 1000 with trials, and overall about 6B vulnerabilities being tracked (the largest table in aggregate). Some of the tables were business intelligence data accessible to all customers, so they were on a “master” DB that all could access; and some of the tables were fully multi-tenant data, so each customer had their MySQL DB for it.

The motivation was that we were on RDS’s highest instance and growing, with jobs mutating the data taking a less and less excusable amount of time.

The initial setup was using just the Octopus gem and a bunch of Ruby magic. That got real complicated really fast (Ruby is not meant to do systems programming stuff, and Octopus turned out very poorly maintained), and the project turned into a crazy rabbit hole with tons of debt we never could quite fix later. Over time, we replaced as many Ruby bits as we could with lower-level stuff, leveraging proxySQL as we could; the architecture should have been as low-level as possible from the get-go... I think Rails 6’s multi-DB mode was going to eventually help out too.

One fun piece of debt: after we had migrated all our major clients to their own shards, we started to work in parallel on making sure new clients would get their own shard too. We meant to just create the new shard on signup, but that’s when we found out, when you modify Octopus’s in-memory config of DBs, it replaces that config with a bulldozer, and interrupts all DB connections in flight. So, if you were doing stuff right when someone else signs up, your stuff would fail. We solved this by pre-allocating shards manually every month or so, triggering a manual blue-green deploy at the end of the process to gracefully refresh the config. It was tedious but worked great.

And of course, since it was a bunch of Active Record hacks, there’s a number of data-related features we couldn’t do because of the challenging architecture, and it was a constant effort to just keep it going through the constant bottlenecks we were meeting. Ha, scale.

Did we regret doing it? No, we needed to solve that scale problem one way or another. But it was definitely not solved the best way. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

It is magnitudes simpler to hire an American, immigration laws make sure of it. Any employer will readily hire qualified American candidates, they’re just fully aware that those qualified candidates won’t happen through this local newspaper channel for this kind of job. Americans who would apply to that specific ad would only do so to run interference, hence keeping their wording irrelevant.

Why wouldn’t a qualified American candidate run interference then? One reason: most candidates for this kind of job are educated enough to be aware that the economy and the job market are not fixed-sum, so a foreigner being hired today doesn’t meaningfully change their own odds at being hired tomorrow. It’s kinda like saying that new graduates entering the workforce take jobs away from people in the workforce, when factually an economy grows with more people in it.

Author here. You're basically summarizing my entire article in a much (MUCH!) more digest and straightforward way. So, yeah, absolutely +1000 and thanks for that!

Author here. I can't really agree with the view that there is a static mindset to being a good/bad developer, and you're one of those and that is that. I think there is an entire spectrum of less-experienced/less-insightful developers to more-experienced/more-insightful developers, and that an individual can absolutely transition from the former to the latter group by building experience and with the right focus. You can view my article as merely an attempt to help less-experienced individuals get there faster with the focus that I believe will carry them further.

Author here. I agree that being able to produce advanced value is also a factor of the work environment; and not only the engineer's ability to be in touch with it, but also the environment's ability to keep the engineer in touch when they should be. I didn't think of it, but I think it's a great point.

Author here. +1. I didn't mention the multiplying effect of also empowering people, but we agree that the take that defines a "10x engineer" as someone who cranks 10 times more code is irrelevant, even though I have seen it used as such, a lot (mostly as a joke, I must say).

Author here. Fortunately, none of the engineers I was referring to are on my team. ;) Still though, I believe you're looking at this right, and by worrying about that, I believe it shows that you are part of the solution rather than the problem. I was working for an employer that was grossly under-using me in the past, and just like you, it felt so useless I had the feeling I could work another similar job simultaneously (I got involved with a lot of non-work-related stuff at the time). I couldn't leave because of visa ties; but as soon as I could, I did, and the growth of my career could finally resume. I consider that year to have been a temporary pause on my career progress, I'm glad it could be that temporary. I know there are many good reasons to stay in a non-perfect job; but are you considering that your knack for doing the most useful thing for your employer could be better valued by another one?

Therapy. I started it out mostly out of curiosity and a sophisticated misunderstanding. Turns out, after a couple of sessions, I started realizing that my therapist was particularly impactful on me when we'd talk about work-related events, exactly because while I think I have a healthy approach to my personal life, I often let work stuff get the better of me when things get intense. Over time, we're taking about better ways to plan potential events ahead, and think really hard about what could really go that wrong when something happens, and it really helps putting things in perspective. I totally advise it.

It's all about business/user value. You're not solving useful problems if they're solely technical and don't solve anything useful for someone else. Solve business/user problems with technical solutions, and (1) people will like you more, (2) feeling useful is gratifying, (3) you'll feel more productive with less code, since you'll be focusing on the right output vs code.

I'm afraid the point of parole is that it can be decided at the border, at the entire discretion of the custom officers, without needing change in laws (hence why Obama is doing it this way). So, even if there was a guideline about this, you're getting zero guarantee that you will be admitted in next time.

On the other hand, living 6 years in Paris where there's no tipping but also has ridiculously poor service culture gets one to build some positive opinions about tipping too...

Absolutely, even if the salary doesn't imply any commitment from the employer, and that it's not one salary, but an interval (like, $150k-170k). When I was looking for a job recently, I exclusively focused on Hired.com and AngelList, exactly because their postings have salaries.

Why does it matter? To me, it's actually not about the money, but about ensuring that what I understand of the job title is what the employer understands of the job title too. Job titles are currently very loose in the industry, and if I see a posting for a "Lead Full-Stack Software Engineer" for $80k, I will immediately understand that this title does not mean to me what it means to the employer, and will save everyone a lot of time.

TechMeAbroad is a website that is basically what you're asking for.

In my experience, big companies tend to have algorithmic "puzzles" for interviews; smaller companies tend to test more your builder skills, actual engineering skills, the ones they'll need (although you find exceptions on both sides).

If you feel that you can build good software, and just suck at puzzles (I'm right there with you), then maybe you should consider targeting smaller companies. Not necessarily young startups, but not a big 4, for sure.

Also, statistically, in a job search, you will fail A LOT. You can totally poorly fail 70% of your interviews, and still be a perfectly great engineer, that's not a crazy rate. You won't find the job of your dreams if you try only once; I don't believe it's likely that you will find the perfect job for you even if you try 5 or 10 times. So don't let ONE failure take the best of you, and improve your odds by trying a lot more.

Write better tests.

Thanks a lot ckluis! From what we've seen so many times of the gap between what recruiters expect from a job applicant, and what graduates can show off after a regular school, we 100% agree with your insight. :)

Techcrunch puts it better that we do: "Here’s the problem. Learning technology-related skills in 8 weeks is really, at best, the tip of the techberg. We’re selling students an unrealistic short-term outcome. Because of this illusion, we are saturating the market with students who understand very little about products or engineering, yet still expect to get jobs that require years of experience. As any experienced product or web engineer will tell you, it takes at least a few years to wrap your head around how the web and business work together." (source: http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/29/graduated-from-an-engineeri...)

Code is one of the many skills solid software engineers must be great at; and we believe only real projects such as the ones we do at Holberton School can build up the real experience and skill variety recruiters expect from solid engineers. More and more companies are taking on a "no-bootcamp" policy, because the bootcamp trainee are saturating the job market, and recruiters are noticing they don't fit the bill as well as students with project history.

Hm, it's definitely good advice, we're going to look at ways to make it clearer. Thanks a lot, arenaninja!

Thanks stevepm! Fixed!

We think Full Stack not in the web stack. But more of "every layer of a system" - from the servers, infra, to the front end of an app.

Trying to define "startup culture" could feed your reflexion. I did that a few months back, and made a blog post about it: http://rudyonweb.net/what-startup-culture-actually-is/

Hope that helps!