Before Eduardo Savarin was a US citizen, he wasn’t a productive foreigner; he was a teenager who had been targeted for kidnapping in his native Brazil. (http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/12/what-eduardo-saverin-owes-a...) His father was a wealthy businessman (which is why Eduardo had been kidnap-worthy), but I don’t know if he was wealthy enough to qualify for immigration to Singapore.
In a tech bubble, capital does not chase engineering talent; it chases whatever shiny thing resembles the last shiny thing that made headlines. And when the bubble bursts, the entire sector goes hungry for capital, even companies which, in a more sober market, would be recognized as good prospects for growth.
”The position just wasn’t a good fit for me any more.”
Imagine yourself on a date with someone you barely know, and listening to that other person go on a long rant about his or her ex. Does that make you more or less likely to want a second date?
In the cases I’m thinking of, “depends on what?” was met with more vagueness, or, in one case, “depends on what the client wants”. (This was at one of those companies whose business model involves a very small core product and a lot of per-customer consulting work to enhance it. Which is a perfectly respectable way to run a company, but the core-to-consulting ratio was too low for my taste.)
I (fortunately) didn’t build up a very large sample size, but there was one junior guy I spoke to who started his answer with “a normal engineer will show up at 9:00 and leave at 6:00...”. He did backpedal a bit when I questioned him more closely about the time expectations, and I had other reasons for choosing not to work for that company.
Unit tests was just an example. The issue is deeper than that.
When I ask a question in a job interview, it’s because I want to learn something about the company, because I want to know whether its corporate culture and its philosophy of how to run a software shop are in sync with how I want to work. If significant questions get the “it depends” answer, I take it as a sign that either the place is so chaotic that it doesn’t have a corporate culture, or that I won’t know what culture I will work in until I find out who my manager is.
Another thing to watch out for: (6) during an interview, if questions about work environment (e.g., “how do you manage unit tests?” which of course is code for “do you have unit tests?”) are answered with “that depends on the project/product/client”.
The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in interviews was “what distinguishes an employee at your company who meets your expectations from someone who is truly outstanding”? If the response was phrased in terms of hours per week, I knew that was not the company for me.
Speaking as former Nokia employee (they bought my employer in April 2010, I bailed at the end of this January), I think all the discussion about Nokia’s strategy is missing a very big factor in Nokia’s decline. Their corporate culture is deeply, deeply dysfunctional: my pet name for them is “The Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic”. I think (judging from some of the internal propaganda we received while I was there) that some people in upper management understand that there is this problem, but you can’t take a company of 100,000 people who were hired and trained and promoted to thrive in one kind of environment and then, two years later, have them adapted to another.
80% of the children surveyed said it was OK to buy and sell the robot, while 50% said it was not OK to put him in the closet. The authors of the study speculated that “we are creating a new ontological being with its own unique properties”, but this could just be an extension of a very old ontological being. Back in the ancient world, it was considered perfectly OK to buy and sell slaves, but there were moral and legal limits on what masters were allowed to do with their slaves.
I was in one interview at a local startup where there was a whiteboard in the room, but none of the engineers who interviewed me asked me to touch it; they were satisfied to ask questions of the form “what do you know about Java Foobar Technologies?” After an hour or two, I could feel the whiteboard... looming... blank... silently warning me not to take this job.
I think dynamic and static type systems will eventually meet somewhere in the middle. Haskell has a “Dynamic” type for those times when you really do want to include dynamic types in your program. And some researchers have experimented with “soft typing” systems for dynamic languages like Scheme and Python, where a type analyzer tries to infer the types of expressions from how they are used.
People have been writing murder mysteries for the past hundred years, and some people are still writing murder mysteries, and some people write them in the hope of selling millions of copies. There’s nothing wrong, in itself, with writing about a topic that has been written about before.
One factor here is that the people running Hollywood studios assume that men don’t want to buy tickets to a movie where the main female character is anything but the romantic partner of the main male character. (Yeah, the success of the Harry Potter series demonstrates that this assumption is bullshit, but... well... studio execs have a lot of practice rationalizing away exceptions like this. It’s like their assumption that white audiences won’t watch movies with a black main character, unless that main character is played by Will Smith.)
Regarding the hidden point: I think there’s an expectation in contemporary American culture that emotional intimacy is women’s work, i.e., they provide support and counsel and do other semi-therapeutic for their boyfriends, their husbands, and their female friends. Straight men are uncomfortable turning to other men for that kind of intimacy.
In cultures with a greater social separation between men and women, men can have intense and emotionally intimate friendships with other men, because there isn’t the same kind of expectation regarding women, and because a man will understand what another man is going through in a way that women, living in a “separate sphere”, would not.
When you hire a structural engineer to design a bridge, you aren’t worried that your enemy has hired his or her own structural engineer to undermine your bridge at its weakest points.
Well, in theory, this is true for any country. If you ship widgets to a customer in Madagascar and those widgets violate some obscure Malagasy law you never heard of, the Malagasy authorities could prosecute you. But if you didn’t have any assets or employees in Madagascar and never planned to travel there, and if there was no law or treaty in your home country that let them extradite you or attach your home assets, then you could just put their warrant in the trash.
Amen to what Steve says about a work queue. I've been in environments where, more than once, a dialogue with my manager would go like this:
Me: "My to-do list is empty."
Manager: "Oh, umm, let's have a meeting to talk about that... [consults calendar...] the day after tomorrow." Or even: "Yeah, I know, I'm still looking for something for you to do."
Now, if I had cast-iron balls, or an amulet that gave me a +5 bonus on my saving throw versus layoffs, I would respond to that with "OK, I'll just stay home tomorrow and check email on my laptop every few hours, just in case something comes up." But that's not how the game is played, of course.
I agree with the general point that you can’t give a blank check for anything, but I think your specific point about cancer is off-base.
Some quick google-fu teaches me that in 2008, $90 billion was spent in the US on cancer treatment. During the same year, $2.4 trillion was spent on health care in general. Given that cancer is [at least as of 2007] the second leading cause of death in the US, this proportion doesn’t seem blatantly wrong; I would want society to tackle some of the other well-documented inefficiencies in our health-care system before cracking down on chemotherapy.
IIRC one of these inefficiencies is that terminally ill people who would rather get cheap palliative care than expensive, aggressive, and uncertain treatment... can’t get the cheap care covered by insurance.
My cynical opinion is that most voters would rather have their poor neighbors go through an intrusive welfare system than simply receive checks, even if the simpler system would be cheaper.
There’s a perverse sort of transaction going on: you receive welfare in exchange for abasing yourself in front of a bureaucrat, acknowledging that the bureaucrat has the right to decide whether or not you belong to The Deserving Poor, and admitting yourself to be Deserving.
At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized.
If you frame your counteroffer as “I would take this job if you gave me $X more base salary or Y more vacation days”, then the guy across the table can decide which option is more offensive to company policy. It’s not your job, as the applicant, to decide in advance what terms the employer will accept. Your job is to communicate what you want until you either have a deal or feel comfortable walking away from the table.
At worst, you're just going to look like an entitled asshole from day one if you try to get special treatment.
Personally, I have better things to do with my time than count up how many days off each of my co-workers have taken and compare them with the numbers in the employee handbook.
One question I’ve been asked, interviewing at startups, is: “how do you feel about cash vs. equity?” For my personal financial needs, this is a no-brainer: cash is king, baby. But other HN readers might be in a position where their market-rate salary is $100K cash but they could see themselves getting by at $75K or even $50K... how should they answer that question?
I was once in a situation where two companies were interested in hiring me, and when the hiring manager for one of them found out I had nibbles from elsewhere, he said he didn’t want to make me an offer until I was absolutely sure that his company was the place I really wanted to work for.
Translation: “I don’t want to get caught in a bidding war for you.”
I went with the other company, which was, in fact, the place I really wanted to work for.
I spent approximately the past year looking for a new job (and accepted an offer this month). From my salary research regarding people in my situation, it seemed like a 10% pay hike makes the difference between a median salary and a 75th-percentile salary, or between 25th percentile and the median.
If I had asked for $100K in the salary-negotiation stage for any of these jobs, I would not have considered $60K a serious counteroffer. Either the company had a serious misunderstanding regarding my skills and responsibilities (maybe we need to discuss further what I am bringing to the table), or the company doesn’t have a lot of cash and is offering extra-sweet equity packages instead (that might be a good offer for some people, but not for me), or they’re just lowballing everyone (FAIL).
I don’t know specifically how to manage this procedure with recruiters, because in my most recent job search I found a position without using recruiters entirely.
But my general attitude regarding salary negotiations in the early stage is this: For any job that I apply for, I can go to salary.com, fill in the appropriate information, and get a range of expected compensation levels. Any recruiter or HR flapper can do the same thing. So I tell them that I expect to be compensated according to the market rate for engineers of my skill and experience level. If they’re not satisfied with that answer, then they shouldn’t be representing my interests, because either they’re stupid or they think I’m stupid.