I got rejected by Amazon and the National Federation of the Blind.
The National Federation of the Blinds said it was curtains for me.
The best part of these stories is how boring they are.
The unkind reading of the site is that Twitter will hire any old body.
That's also the unkind reading of Twitter.
I technically work under one of those guys I spend more time seeing random people share his internet musings than I do talking or getting direction from him.
Interesting, and it seems like an invitation to humblebrag (or just brag, perhaps).
I got rejected by that webserver. Or more accurately, it rejected my request to actually render a page, rather than a directory listing.
On topic because of rejection: When applying for jobs on-line and "salary required" is a required field, what do you do? I'm thinking maybe 115% of what I currently make so I might get a raise.
It sounds like most tech companies are shitty interviewers.
6: My impression is that the correlation between being well known on the internet and being a good programmer is zero and perhaps even negative. I believe this is true both for individuals and for companies.
I read HN and keep up with what's popular. I also know a fair number of people who work at companies whose engineering blogs are widely regarded as being great. And when I ask about how they actually operate, most of those companies have extremely poor engineering practices (teams get paged 100+ times per week, user data exposed in QA/test, no staging for deployment, basically no testing in many entire departments, etc.). And yet, these companies have reputations as having great engineering departments because of some blog posts. I don't understand why people don't ask how things actually work at these companies.
Actual programmers who work in sane environments probably think I'm exaggerating the 100+ number above, but that's a real number from a team at a startup that people think has great engineering practices. Most of their teams are down at something closer to 10 pages a week, which is still absurd.
I don't understand why people don't ask how things actually work at these companies.
That sounds harder and boring.
On-line job application forms don't suck nearly as much as they did ten years ago. Go somebody, whoever you are.
Non developer here: is "paged" a term of art in that field?
That's when they make the developers read all those pages and pages of stack traces when their code crashes.
That would not be a term of art then.
So why would they be paged so much?
They would receive pages when the site or some component thereof is experiencing errors.
Ahh. Because their engineering practices, etc.
Do they get actual pages? As opposed to emails or texts? If yes, how. If not, why are they called "pages"?
Oh, this is for tech people. Of course they're doing fine and switch jobs all the time.
If not, why are they called "pages"?
And another thing, why do we talk about "dialing" a phone???
So, I stayed up last night binge-watching Mr. Robot. Hell of a plot twist towards the end of the season.
26: But everybody dialed a phone for several decades. Paging was never so common and barely existed for twenty years if we are, as I think we are, talking about some message being delivered to a portable device. Lately, I've only also heard the term from doctors and they are talking about an intercom system.
But when pagers existed they were used to summon on-call people, doctors or sysadmins alike.
That's true. I guess they existed for as long as floppy disks and those are now "save" buttons.
29: I know at a state hospital they refer to calling someone's name out over the intercom as paging. I think that I see a lot of doctors with old-fashioned pagers.
Are these pages automated or do they represent staff specifically paging other staff?
32: Isn't that a pre-pager activity that lent its name to pagers?
33: almost certainly automated.
12: the thing is, none of that stuff is incompatible with having a great engineering department.
"Paged" is going to live on as a fossil term, because "pager duty" got canonized as what you called your on-call period doing ops to the extent that there's a pretty well-known (paid) monitoring service by that name.
Paging over an intercom or loudspeaker system must have existed before the hand-held personal pre-cellphone pager thingies. So, the verb lives on while the noun "pager" was born and died.
What I want to know is, what's a "diplomatic cable"?
It's a cable that tries not to be too blunt about things.
Huh, I wonder if the etymology of the loud-noise-maker is related to the high school juniors working in congressional offices or to the assistant to a feudal lord.
Seems like it would have to be...
Didn't paging start with having a page go aboit calling someone's name, like in the senate, then that moved to paging via intercom etc and then to a pager device.
"Pager" is a less silly name than "summoner".
Huh. The noun initially referred to the device (person), then became used for the act, then was re-nounized for the device.
Also yeah interviewing for tech jobs sucks.
42 And not as hot and lecherous as a sparrow.
In daunger hadde he at his owene gise all the girles of the diocise
Trigger warning!
Call for Phillip Morris with Lucy & Desi
(There is just SOOO much in this advertisement.)
The unkind reading of the site is that Twitter will hire any old body.
The unkind reading of the site is that tech dweebs yet again take navel gazing to the next level and pretend like 1. They already didn't learn all about rejection from their dating lives and 2. That rejection is something special in the tech world. Every godamn job involves a bunch of interviews where you don't get hired. Oh no, "jazzychad" dealt with rejection from Slack for three whole days before his Apple offer! Go drown in a vat of Mountain Dew you twat.
"What I want to know is, what's a "diplomatic cable"?"
It's the traditional 600-foot separation maintained for reasons of protocol between ambassadors of different countries which are not on speaking terms, to avoid embarrassing incidents where they have to pretend not to see each other.
We have pages in libraries. I mean as a job description, people, usually high school age in public libraries or undergrads in academic libraries, whose job is to page or retrieve books that are requested by patrons, reshelve same and other similar duties.
49: They're good for WAY more than that.
What I find interesting is that these people are not bragging about working at $INTERESTING_STARTUP, but rather $ESTABLISHED_TECH_BEHEMOTH. Whatever that says about the state of the industry today, its probably not good.
When applying for jobs on-line and "salary required" is a required field, what do you do? I'm thinking maybe 115% of what I currently make so I might get a raise.
This is one I hate because it's often phrased as "salary expectation" which is a really difficult question to answer. What salary do I expect you'll offer me? What salary would I expect you to offer me if you actually wanted me to take the job? What salary would I expect to be offered in order for me to take the job? What salary am I reasonably entitled to expect from you, or just generally? With perfect knowledge of my personal, professional and financial situation, what salary would I expect you to offer? If you had such perfect knowledge but I had the same level of knowledge about you and you knew it, what salary would I expect you to offer?
If they'd just say "what is the minimum you'd need to be paid in order to take the job? Because that's what you'll get if we offer you the job" then my life would be much easier.
re: 49
We don't, or we don't call them that.
re: 52
These days increasingly I get infuriated by job adverts with no indication of salary range. Particularly since 'risible and insulting' is increasingly an option, as in 'you want me to work managing a team of about 20 people, running strategy for an entire division of a large cultural institution, while controlling 7 figure budgets, while paying me less than we pay an entry level developer? And where _we_ pay 20% less than market rate for than entry level developer?'
I got tapped up by an agency recently to work for a ... learned society.* Where the salary was about 2/3 of what I currently make, and where what I currently make isn't brilliant.
* probably that one, yes.
53: That's what I'm trying to keep them from knowing.
When I have been asked recently, I've taken my currently salary and added about 10-20%, yeah. Ironically, the one position I interviewed for a year or so ago, I was all prepared to turn it down if they offered it to me, or at least to come back with a high-ball salary expectation, but ... they didn't offer it to me.*
* it didn't help that I went to the interview after a night in the ER with my son, and that I was struggling to conceal my scorn for their questions, and the people asking them.
I think they want you to put $0, because working for $FUTURE_FAILED_STARTUP is so much fun, or at the other extreme working for more than $0 at $SOULLESS_GIANT_HIVE just isn't gonna happen as soon as they fix the last 1000 bugs in the AI programmer replacement ... oops, there goes my pager. Again.
55: well, you don't tell them the truth, obviously.
Where the salary was about 2/3 of what I currently make, and where what I currently make isn't brilliant.
Somebody in administration gets to count holding salaries down as an accomplishment is what I assume. AIMHMB, they're shoving me out because they don't want to have a person listed with my (rather modest) salary for even one non-faculty position even though the money to pay me isn't coming from their budget. The pay tops out at about 80% of what I make now and starts at "You're shitting me."
They have a posting for a position requiring a Ph.D. and three years experience in a classification that starts at $35k/year. (They'll pay more than that, of course. That's a theoretical minimum.)
Fuck it. Pharma can't be that evil.
60- That's not much more than what grad students working towards a PhD get, and certainly less than post-docs. Why would anyone with a PhD ever take that job?
Maybe it has terrific opportunities for peculation.
I am amazed ttaM hasn't started exploiting the immense opportunities for blackmail inherent in working in a university library. Identify the most important books in the collection, move them somewhere else, hide them, and, in their place on the shelf, leave a small note reading "if you want to see this copy of Theophrastus von Hohenheim's 'De Vermis Mysteriis', leave £50 behind the cistern in the gents."
62: Trailing spouse/partner, need work to get green card, false consciousness.
Anyway, like I said, that was a theoretical minimum. I think the real floor is somewhere between $45k and $50k.
NIH Postdoc salary rates: $43-$56 for 0-7 years experience. The 3 years in the job listing would be $48k. Is it really just a postdoc?
So the listing should read "Shitty pay without career advancement"
It does if you know the the job classification structure. If you don't, the "salary commensurate with experience" will be misleading.
re: 63.2
I'm sure the 'if we fire ttaM our entire digital library and all associated infrastructure dies a fiery death' thing might have occurred to some people, at some time. That might work in terms of not being fired* but it's hard to monetise it.
* I work hard and know what I'm doing, so I'm already right at the end of 'people to make redundant in the event of a funding disaster' list, but still ...
Have you tried going to job interviews in Philadelphia and being very open about doing so?
Also hard to monetize, but couldn't you at least put in a digital "[My boss's name] is a giant cock" on every 35th page of certain obscure manuscripts? I'm not telling you to do that, but I'm not not telling you to do that either. It's one way to live through the ages.
That is the kind of thing that scribes used to do. Do it in Latin and no one may notice.
If somebody did that to me, I'd just over-write the 'i' in 'is' with 'ha'.
Lots of library jobs don't involve regular handling of physical material.
Responding to something upthread.
The unkind reading of the site is that tech dweebs yet again take navel gazing to the next level . . . Every godamn job involves a bunch of interviews where you don't get hired. Oh no, "jazzychad" dealt with rejection from Slack for three whole days before his Apple offer! Go drown in a vat of Mountain Dew you twat.
I think that is the obvious reading of the site, but I also think there is the potential for the site to have significance beyond just saying, "sometimes you have to deal with rejection."
At it's best I think a site like that is a response to the idea, discussed in the affirmative action thread, that it's possible to consistently rank candidates into "qualified" / "not qualified." The reason why it matters that jazzychad was rejected by one company three days before being hired by another is that it reveals how arbitrary the decisions are.
I don't think there's an easy path between that site and somebody being able to argue within the HR department, "there's nothing sacred about the way we currently do things; it's clearly wildly inconsistent, why not try something else." But if there were that would be a valuable outcome.
The reason why it matters that jazzychad was rejected by one company three days before being hired by another is that it reveals how arbitrary the decisions are.
Before gswift comes back with "but isn't that obvious?", let it be pointed out that it is not obvious according to the internal "we are the perfect meritocracy!" mythology that many tech dumbasses endorse.
77: Jesus, are people really letting their kids out into the world thinking it's a meritocracy anymore? I've pretty much told my daughters non stop that it's all about jumping through the right hoops and kissing some ass so that you get ahead enough to have stability and the income to do the things you enjoy in your downtime. No one clued me in on this when I was younger and in retrospect I'm kind of pissed.
I'm pretty sure that's not a sufficient condition.
Jesus, are people really letting their kids out into the world thinking it's a meritocracy anymore? . . . No one clued me in on this when I was younger and in retrospect I'm kind of pissed.
I think you've answered your own question. Of course there are people who aren't clued into that. (and, of course, there are people who haven't had significant experience of arbitrary rejection and so feel like their own experience is one of merit being rewarded).
argue within the HR department, "there's nothing sacred about the way we currently do things; it's clearly wildly inconsistent, why not try something else."
I should add, this is an active and on-going conversation within the tech world (heck, it's something I'm aware of and I'm not really within the tech world).
Jesus, are people really letting their kids out into the world thinking it's a meritocracy anymore?
It's more something that software people tell each other, because they're so rational and manly or some shit.
At a college career fair, a Midwest healthcare company handed my resume back because GPA was too low, saying "save the paper". I went on to spend two great internships at Microsoft where I've continued full-time for over two years now.
Ha! That's got to be Epic Systems. They do have a really aggressive GPA screen. Despite all my experience and advanced degrees, I bet I couldn't get an interview there because of my college grades. (I hear stories about it at home: university-style unchecked growth of campus, megalomaniacal CEO, famously not-great software, cottage industry of startups who help clients deal with the badness of the software. I hope good local things can arise when it all falls apart.)
You pretend to pay me and I'll pretend to work.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/180404/gallup-daily-employee-engagement.aspx?utm_source=genericbutton&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=sharing
> the thing is, none of that stuff is incompatible with having a great engineering department.
Some of it (no staging setup) might be ok for research projects, but for anyone deploying to prod that alone is a sign that there aren't any adults in the room and that your users are going to suffer. Same for not having tests.
If you're getting paged 100+ times a week, the mean time between pages for the on call person is less than 1.68 hours. There's no way the on call person is going to be able to respond effectively after one or two days missing that much sleep while on call. Most likely, people just don't respond to pages during off hours and there's massive downtime.
I would view more than 1 page per week (on average) to be a sign that either the ops/SRE crew is incompetent and unable to implement proper monitoring and automated mitigation, or that the dev team is incompetent and unable to not regularly break things in unpredictable ways. At most startups where I'm familiar with the internals, both of those are true.
The good news is that the business/product side of things matters a lot more than engineering and you can have really terrible engineering and still make a lot of money.
Whenever this topic comes up I use this image.
||
Does have tips on how to run a reading group effectively? This is in a professional setting and the intent is mostly pedagogical; there's an interesting document about something that happened so the goal is both for participants to learn and talk about both the subject of the document and the effectiveness of the document in communicating that subject.
I'd like to avoid having a lot of "so what did people think?" followed by awkward silence.
|>
So my interview to move from being 'Acting Head of $foo' to 'Head of $foo' is tomorrow. I'm eminently well-qualified, but I am surprisingly nervous. Powerpoint presentation, and all.
[Manly encouragement.]
The best preparation is to know what the fuck you're talking about, which I think you have covered.
Make sure you figure out how the Powerpoint clicker works in advance.
[Not sure why I am going presidential for this, but, google-ability, I suppose.]
Yes, I can't quite prepare for having a boss who is driven by whim.*
* I also have, and I hate saying this because it makes me sound like some men's-rights-activist prick, a sneaking feeling that she has quite a strong gender bias in her choices.**
** I know this because I've been on interview panels where the panel -- 50/50 male-female -- was unanimously in favour of a male candidate, and she over-rode the panel and forced a repeat of the interviews, in the hope that her favoured female candidate got it.***
*** one of the panel members basically resigned over this one, and one of the others made a formal complaint at a higher institutional level.
The best preparation is a good offense. Or something good luck.
It turns out that when they ask about your current salary, they check that you tell the truth. It's good that I'm inherently honest.
re: 94
They can do that? I'm pretty sure there's no way someone could find my exact salary, unless it was someone within my department. They'd know which grade I am, as that's pretty predictable as we have a university wide grading scheme which is harmonised with national scales. So anyone with the remotest knowledge of our type of institution would know I was within one of maybe two pay grades, so they'd have a rough range. But the range would be from somewhere around 10% less than I currently earn, to around 15% above.
They ask who to contact at my current employer to confirm. So, I would have had the option of taking a page from sit-com logic and giving them a friend's number. Except that the person checking is a former employee of my current employer so probably wouldn't buy it if I gave them some guy's cell phone.
94: whoever answered that question was a moron. There's a reason the most you ever get out of former employers is confirmation of title and dates of employment.
I'm amazed they would contact your employer about your current salary. Surely that lets them know that you're looking for a new job, which you might reasonably wish to keep in confidence?
Also why the fuck is your employer just telling any rando who calls up what their employees are making? What's to stop employees from doing that and then figuring out who's making what?
98: IME prospective employers typically ask if they can contact your current employer, for exactly that reason. I guess this is what happens if you say yes.
99: what's to stop employees from asking each other?
101: I've actually worked places that straight-up said that was a firing offense. Illegal as hell, but hey.
That's why Glassdoor was invented, right?
102: yes, I know, I almost worked at a place that had a similar policy. If only there were some agency that enforced laws related to labor policy.
97, 98, 99: It's possible they will only confirm the pay grade range. I have no idea what they will do. It's also possible that salaries information is public because of who I work for. Also, this is not for the job I was talking about earlier.
First, I'm not trying to hide that I'm looking for work. My current employer said that to stay here than a few more months, I'd have to shift into another position, one of those underpaid positions I mentioned above. I've already told them I'm leaving if they don't meet my current salary, but I like reinforcing the point. It probably won't help me, but it might help the next guy.
Also, the potential employer who wants to confirm my salary has basically said they would hire me. I said that they had to pay me more than I make now (not that bluntly). They responded with hemming about their HR department and job classifications. I take the current request as a promising sign that they are pushing this. HR can't understand if my vita indicates I'm worth paying well or not so they're just asking for proof that somebody else paid me prior.
My salary is on grants anyway. Are those public?
It's sort of like being a high school senior again. Everybody knows I'm leaving, I'm lining up recommendations, going on visits to different campuses, filling out forms, and trying to hide the alcohol on my breath.
And the writing on the wall says "Safety School" again. But that worked O.K. last time.
82:
Software isn't a meritocracy, but it's probably still more meritocratic than whatever other crap people are doing these days. So I think software people tell each other that not because it isn't false, but because it's less false than it is in, say, marketing.
As far as I can tell, at startups, luck dominates all other factors. I've run into a fair number of early employees at companies that have made them moderately wealthy. Those folks often end up in a leadership role elsewhere and completely tank because there wasn't really anything to their success other than being in the right place at the right time.
At large companies, there's still a lot of luck (though perhaps not as much), and a large fraction of what isn't luck also isn't what most programmers would consider merit.
As someone whose career has benefited greatly from being in the right place at the right time, I don't see how I can attribute the majority of my success to anything other than luck. When I look around at other people who have had similar levels of success, I see similar levels of luck involved in their success.
It's possible that programming is more meritocratic than other fields, but if so, that's a depressing thought.
101 has also been a firing offense at a previous workplace of mine.
Best of luck, ttaM.
110:
Oh yeah, it's definitely depressing. This isn't so much a positive statement about tech I'm making as a negative statement about everything else.
106- Only if you're being paid a standard stipend like the postdoc schedule above. I'm paid by a number of grants as well, and while the total amount of the grant is public, the breakdown spent on various people's salaries, benefits is not. In fact I'm sure that if the public knew our (entirely reasonable given the field and location) salaries paid out of government funding they'd have a cow- there was a breathless article in the paper today about how the state university pays some long-time professors <gasp> MOAR THAN THE GOVERNOR! who's at $150k.
That's why Glassdoor Unfogged was invented, right?
Let's all post our Governors' salaries!
Let's see if urple found a slice of pumpkin pie yet.
Late to this but best of luck, ttaM.
Getting the respect of other programmers is fairly meritocratic. When a bunch of people are working on the same code base, its pretty easy to figure out who is good and who sucks.
Translating that respect into money is considerably more difficult. There is only so much that you can level-up before you hit management - and programming skills are pretty orthogonal to management skills.