The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Maybe not the right place, maybe better for Sunday, but I'm not in a great mood. What is up with senior software engineering hiring? All the job postings seem to be premised on the idea that you don't learn any transferable skills in your career, only domain-specific ones. If you want a senior position doing X, you'd better have been doing X for multiple years already. I get that makes sense for principal-level jobs where the whole point is to hire a world expert on X, but a senior still has to ramp up as part of a team anyway. Surely this state of affairs is really suboptimal, given (I hear) how hard it is to find good people. Where are the companies hiring smart senior SWEs who have been doing X to do Y and just figuring on an extra bit of ramp-up?
Lol, I wish it was only like this for.. Seniors! At Least it makes sense there.
All the junior jobs around me are asking for AWS,K8s,A thousand disjointed frameworks that no sane person should ever use in unison blah blah blah
I thank God I was born with an IQ above 130, otherwise this shit seems impenetrable/unsustainable at the pace its going for even above average joes.
While HR handles recruitment, it seems to me from the Reddit CScareers sub that job requirements are often written by programmers and programmers are extremely guarded about their jobs; they don’t want a 10x superstar coming in and taking their jerbs or making the comfortable 10-hour-a-week arrangement look obvious to their superiors. Hiring a truly exceptional natural talent is like being hot and having a 10/10 join your friend group, you may be fine but everyone now looks worse by comparison. Best to hire someone upper-mid tier.
Or programmers are more aware of the costs of having a bad cog in the machine and know that there are a lot of "programmers" out there who're basically charlatans that clearly weren't prepared by their schools or their own independent study (lots of people see programming as an easy way to an upper middle class life, no need for grad degrees or credentials)
I think fear of a bad one is way more relevant than fear of a great one.
This is likely what's affecting people on cscareerquestions which is more likely to involve angst from hyper-selectivity on the low end* (as with dating, it's the lower tier types that can't get jobs that dominate the sub and create most of the angst, the better-off people either show up and then leave when they're hired/married or just dispense bits of advice as elder statesmen).
Honestly, as someone who was a very mediocre programmer at best , I can't even blame them. A lot of people survive or just do the time in school and work without really stretching themselves or developing true experience. But it may take a while for this to become clear. People can skate for a while, depending on their role.
But the costs they impose on any project can be...substantial. Even slight delays can be hugely problematic. The last thing you want is a fucking drag you can't trust to perform tasks on a complex project.
* The conventional wisdom is that if you have a couple of years of track record you'll do pretty well in the job market from then on. (Though in Canada the glut of skilled labour may make it worse for everyone.)
My boss likes to gripe about this. Late Gen X and early Millennial Russian IT professionals are overwhelmingly geeks. They became programmers not because IT was the hot new thing, but because they had a PC at home and fell in love with it. Late Millennials and Zoomers, who grew up in the era of FAANGs, overwhelmingly view IT as a lucrative job. You can still find people whose eyes start to shine when you give them a complex problem to solve in the latter cohort, but they are few and far between. The majority have completed a Python/JS/testing/data science course and are probably competent in that specific area, but their competence is severely limited.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No.
No sane programmer would ever write the monstrosities you see in JD's. It would forever ruin anyone's credibility as a programmer to put the shit they put together. I recently saw one asking for LISP experience... LISP !!!
Also I'm with @ArjinFerman here. A lot of programmers want to work with a 10x. A 10x in a team raises the skill level of everyone else in the team. Instead of spending hours on a bug, you can just ask the 10x. My founder CEO is a 10x and I gained like a 3x experience multiplier just talking to him.
I mean no ill will but you have a very warped idea of what it is like being a programmer. Which I wouldn't fault if your only source is reading their accounts on reddit.
More options
Context Copy link
There's not that many superstar programmers, and I'd probably pay money myself for the chance to work with one, if they were the mentoring type.
It seems to me though that a lot of programmers have established their little niche where they fulfill their job requirements in well below their allotted 40 hours a week. Some guy coming along and working even close to that much who is (even similarly) capable is obviously going to stand out to management, questions are going to be raised. I don’t think this is unique to the job of course, sales people often say the same thing.
They can ask all the questions they want, what are they going to do, fire me? I'll have another job by the end of the week. A guy like that is probably less then 1 in a 100 or even a 1000, and most of them never bother applying at an average company, so if they happen upon one, their only workable strategy is to have the 10x guy literally replace 10 people. Even that can backfire if he gets bored of the place and quits. It's either that or do what I recommended earlier, and have the 10x help to lift the rest up.
More options
Context Copy link
Theres 2 classes of programmers. The ones working in large MNC's who work 10 hours a week and write a function a week. And those working in more flat companies where an entire website gets made in a weekend (because the tech lead or CTO is actually present and not in meetings all day). You will get wildly different accounts depending on which one you are talking to.
Sometimes it boils down to (run by people from Sillicon Valley) vs (run by people not from Sillicon Valley)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everywhere. FAANGs and FAANG-wannabes use leetcode-style exercises. Other companies just poach, I was hired by my current employer for being orthoxerox, not being a world-class expert in data lakes (because I knew practically nothing about data lakes).
But this doesn't work with random candidates. If I get scheduled an interview with an external candidate that is reportedly a very good Rust programmer that is willing to give Spark on Scala a try, I immediately have a few questions:
FAANGs solve this by having a lot of slack. When you can hire 100 senior SWEs each day, you can afford to shuffle them around for a few months and then fire 50 that didn't get up to speed.
Poaching solves this by giving you a long-term view of a candidate: you need people that are curious and get shit done, knowing someone for five years is the best way to find out if they are both.
TLDR: use your network. Keep in touch with wordcels that have left your company for greener pastures and ask them if they have an opportunity for a cool guy like you.
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
Having lots of different experiences without looking like you're job hopping (so 3+ years per job) is another one I can think of. But then you still need to get past the initial HR filter that screens for buzzwords.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presumably the whole system works because people lie on their resumes. Not sure why companies would want to optimize for this.
Because HR is retarded
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link