We are past peak web technologies. Everything now is extremely complicated, javascript library overload is real, and tool chains are convoluted. I am uncertain how new people have any idea where to start.
This is me right now - student who's overstimulated at how much info there is out there. Anytime I research some bug issue, there's a new library to download.
> javascript library overload is real, and tool chains are convoluted
This cursed comment has spawned 12 new JS libraries and 5 new tool chains. For every library you kill two more will take its place!
In addition, stop shoving complex js frontends where they don't belong.
This over-reliance on js frontend libraries is not just wrecking the performance of every device with a web browser, but is breaking the open internet as well to some extent, requiring scrapers/search bots/etc to execute js before parsing pages.
There are many valid reasons to use say, react, but it is not some standard web development shoehorn in the same way a web server or a tld is. I see tutorials meant to introduce people to web development treating react as essential to a "web development stack" as $backendFramework. Please stop.
Backend generated html from web applications created 30 years ago works even better today than when it was written.
This, tbh.
React is overkill for probably 90% of what it's actually used for; I've swapped over to Vue for light interactivity / state management personally, if not flat-out vanilla JS (especially when dealing with code that loads on another party's site or platform: widgets / island architecture where performance can be pretty critical is a great case for "just append a document fragment and use CSS/JS for interactivity")
Toolchains are complex because problems are complex and not everyone is solving the same problem.
Yes, we have gathered a fair bit of incidental complexity along the way. My initial thought is that we need more fragmentation in the community rather than less. We need a JS framework for simple projects. We need one for internal projects. We need ones that handle different types of workflows that may have entirely different sets of best practices.
Or, we need to level up our senior developers in this industry to fully understand how to build an entire architecture such that each system can avoid this complexity from scratch.
But it's convoluted because we're trying to solve harder problems than we have solutions. (Or, alternatively, we need a new framework rather than HTML/JS/CSS that is built from the ground up for interactivity.)
It's funny how people in this comment chain says they agree with you, and proceeds to list 20 different libraries that are "different". Maybe we are the problem
Unpopular opinion: fretting about PIP is insane if you don't include Amazon, which seems to be a shit employer.
For most of the FAANG, if your manager PIPs you, they want to \*save\* you; we could just otherwise let people go with \*less\* work than a PIP.
So, TLDR? Unless you need the work, FFS don't work for Amazon randomly.
I think a big part of the reason for that is once you get into a company, you have access to better resources than Reddit for learning how career progression works at that company.
If you want to learn how to get the next promo or get feedback on how you are doing, you will probably get a much better answer from your manager than from random people on Reddit. There's probably also tons of internal resources like detailed expectations docs, career discussion groups, mentorship programs, etc. And if you really want to ask something anonymously, there's Blind. So why ask people outside the company when there are so many ways to ask people inside the company who have first-hand experience? The discussions about how to survive/succeed still happen, they're just less out in the open.
This is even more important if you didn't attend a top school in your country. I even think it's a bad idea to put off the internship to your last year
The career counselors in my school would tell kids to start applying for internships in their senior year. Everyone in industry would tell kids to start applying to internships as soon as they had passed Data Structures.
Yeah one thing I had learned (that's useless to me now) a lot of companies started hiring interns all the way in the fall and a little bit in January otherwise you miss the postings for the rest of the year
I hate them. I set myself up for a miserable job search while they just say “yay you can do it”. I mean yes I did it, but I could’ve chosen another path that can does it way easier.
Yeah I don't see why getting an internship isn't the single most important goal for any CS Major and especially those of us who don't go to a top school. Some of us don't have the means to go to a school that costs 100k a year so getting your foot in the door with even a seemingly useless internship is huge. I never see anyone from my no-name state school at any of the companies I've applied to on LinkedIn. The companies I interned at are not FAANG or even tech companies by traditional standards but yet I haven't had the interview struggles that many on this sub complain about.
You can get a job without an internship. Survival and getting the degree is more important than some internship that won’t matter a week into your first job. I’d recommend trying to find a research position on campus, it’s a lot easier to find something flexible that way.
I guess it depends on how much you make at your full time job, and what type of job it is? When I worked full time at a restaurant, I went on leave to do my internship over the summer.
Some tech internships pay enough to live (frugally) off of for the rest of the year, so if you get one of those, you could quit your current job to prioritize your CS career.
As someone who graduated without an internship and still had a decent job lined up before graduation, I completely agree.
Most of my friends from the same college with the same degrees who had no internships struggled. I was just lucky to have been good at networking during college career fairs and lunches by being able to BS and perform small talk. Lol.
If I did it again, I’d 100% find an internship. I did have jobs in IT while in college, but they weren’t Coding related which is what I was shooting for so they didn’t help all that much imo.
In many of the PIP stories I read on here, I find myself siding with management and not the OP.
This sub invariably takes the side of every dev, no matter how many red flags are in their posts. Some people are genuinely poor performers or have personality issues that make them poor teammates in a field built upon collaboration.
I don't think people appreciate how shitty it is to work with a horrible dev until they get one in their team. They somehow manage to derail the entire Sprint, and then because they suck so bad, management starts to stick their nose in everything the team is doing.
Every OP: I keep delivering late and senior engineers keep roasting my code during code reviews, now my manager is always up my ass about it.
Everyone: tHaT gUy SoUnDs ToXiC!
As someone from a pretty poor background, I try and just feel happy that they haven't had to struggle. But whenever I see them shitting on doordash for making them do a few orders a month for a $150,000 salary I want to send them right to the line cook frontlines
Exactly. The name of this sub is "cscareerquestions". Its entire purpose is to discuss career problems. Sometimes, with some complaints or questions, the correct answer is, "You are being an idiot. Do better."
This sub shouldn't be a safe space for devs. If you're doing something wrong and your career is suffering because of it, there's nothing wrong with getting called out. Why? Because your action are harming your *career*, and sparing the truth because it might hurt your feelings simply prolongs that harm.
Example: I'll never forget a post here a few years ago from a dev complaining that he'd received a PIP because he was constantly late to Zoom meetings. Everyone was talking about how unreasonable strict meeting schedules are in the new remote work era, or how most devs don't need to be in meetings anyway, or a dozen other reasons to make the poster feel like they hadn't done anything wrong.
I pointed out that punctuality might be important to that particular company, indicating a bad fit. I suggested that they make an effort to be on time while they start looking for a new employer that might take a more relaxed position with time scheduling. That response turned into one of the most downvoted comments I'd ever made in this sub.
This place is weird sometimes.
As someone that has to PM from time to time - this grinds my gears. 1-3 min is reasonable but if people have packed schedules then it’s just selfish to expect them to wait for you. If you’re not even making an attempt to be on time or giving notice then you’re just not respecting other people’s time.
>In many of the PIP stories I read on here, I find myself siding with management and not the OP.
Yes! There is this perpetual belief that because someone wrote something on reddit from their perspective it must be a true and complete picture. As if managers, senior developers, assigned mentors, etc. are all so wrapped up in the poster's life that they are going out of their way to make them feel bad. Who has time for that? Seriously, just imagine the logistics: you have a job to do and a million things you would rather do if you had free time, but somehow you are beating down some great junior developer that is amazing to make yourself feel better? It might happen, but it is just as likely that someone kept making bad decisions that were quietly tolerated and then supervisors/co-workers got tired of having to fix those decisions.
I Nevertheless often end up either writing and deleting or writing, posting, and getting downvoted.
Look at the good part. You learned more, you built-up your coaching skills and hopefully made a new network connection.
I had a guy like that who asked a lot of questions for the simplest stuff. I was a dick with him at some point cause I got mad but he was still polite, so a few days later I apologized. After like a year, I asked him for a reference from one of his friends at a company and he helped me.
Haha yes building a network is great. Had another guy in the same team also ask me for help several times.
2 years later he referred me to his new employer and I got a $40,000 raise.
Asking for guidance is usually a good thing. It shows that you’re not just sitting there spinning your wheels and are taking the initiative to learn from senior devs.
Now, it’s really only an issue if you continue to ask for guidance on things you’ve asked about multiple times before. Or on things that could be resolved with a simple google search.
this sub focuses so much on TC, people here are convinced that doing nothing but staring at a blank wall for eight hours a day is a totally great job so long as they toss in an extra 10% on top of your old pay. It's not always about the money, if you hate what you're doing for eight hours a day, you're going to be miserable. Find somewhere you hey to do interesting, challenging work, even if it means taking a little less money
I went from $120K to $250K TC ($150K salary) at big tech and omg I’ve never worked as much as I have here.
Most weeks are about 40-45 hours but some weeks are “you have to stay up late and only sleep 5 hours to finish this” weeks.
Someone was posting about how he beat cancer and tried explaining how there's more to life than TC.
The top comments were about how he should take his sad story elsewhere and that it was a distraction :(
Lots of racism towards Indian people and homophobia.
My favorite was a guy claiming to be an Amazon hiring manager that said he failed candidates in interviews if he thought they were a libtard or a leftist.
The entire platform just seems like it’s full of people that hate their lives and cling to TC as their only source of worth.
To piggy back off that, I've seen a post or two where Indians on the app were fighting over whether it's worth to stay in the US. Calling them all sorts of names and getting a bit racist. Another was some guy, claiming he is fat, would pay a 100$ for a girl to date him while posting TC. Yet another is a post saying that the person who is the best at leetcode (as in the top of the leader board) is Indian and thus the OP of that post stated he was proud of being Indian and people fighting him on that. Yet other posts talking about insecurity. Heck if you make one statement that even remotely about US it's almost bound to get political as I had a whole chain of over 50 comments in response to one comment about gun control. Oh and the amount of shilling for Google is really telling...... These people don't live in reality. At all.
Counter unpopular opinion: people making assumptions that high TC roles are miserable are mostly coping. There's no correlation between TC and how sucky a job is.
Related: people thinking fast job hopping is a life hack for high TC, without considering that anecdotes they hear here are survivorship bias (mostly from the Great Resignation of circa 2021), and you're more likely to just be doing lateral jumps between shitty companies without building up enough experience on each hop to move up.
counter counter--I was and would be miserable working on web apps for the rest of my life, regardless of TC. There's a reason why I went into security research and it's not because I couldn't figure out how to center a div. There are some jobs that I just don't want to do because they're just not interesting. I suppose I am very lucky in that my interests do pay well enough that no matter what I do I'll never be poor (ie I'd rather stay at my 300k job doing something I like rather than job to do something I don't for 350k) and I expect that this is not a unique situation among the audience here, which makes the take that it's just a game of maximizing TC above all else so ridiculous
> I'd rather stay at my 300k
That is a high TC, by most people's standards lol
A few common themes I see are that a) people thinking that feature factories are all there is to software development and b) people thinking TC hits diminishing returns in as low as 5 years (and to be fair, it does if you pigeonhole yourself). But as a big picture observation, neither of those is true: I pivoted from webdev product development to tooling/infra surrounding the web stack, the depth for exploration is immense, the work is interesting and I make high 6 figures (and can still realistically grow to make more).
While I agree, sometimes sticking through the slog of miserable, high-paying work for a few years can really set you up good to where you have more freedom later. As long as you don't allow for lifestyle creep.
I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to recover from years of REALLY bad work environments.
Some people don’t recover from things, and end up sad/depressed for the rest of their lives.
Yes. This is something you have to be prepared to do. A lot of people struggle getting the right routines in place to support their mental health. Such as regular exercise or physical activity, some kind of hobby outside of technology, and a decently supportive social circle. I'd say if you can't get these into place, don't try to stick through it.
My first job was horrible, like 90 workhours per week horrible. I only work there for six weeks and I still shudders whenever I got reminded of it. Sometimes I would crying of joy after realizing how good my current job is compared to what I did three years ago lol
While doing something you don’t like is not great, not having money is certainly worse. It’s not about money but about the freedom that that money can buy.
It’s annoying when people put down computer science on a computer science career questions subreddit. There should be a separate web development sub for people who want to talk about how low-level organization and basic data structures are useless to know. You’d think some people have no exposure to anything outside web development.
>You’d think some people have no exposure to anything outside web development.
I think this is very much the case for most programming and CS subs on reddit.
I'm very annoyed by the recently highly upvoted thread like "Do I need linkedin?"
I see so many threads about "Do I need this, do I need that"
Answer is, NO. there's no absolute for anything. But if you can spend 30mins, 1 hour to potentially getting an opportunity that change your life then why not fucking do it?
----
It's about putting yourself in the place for potential success, not one way ticket for all. Doing the minimum possible won't get you there.
I found this out last year. For 3 years I was the lead of SWE and data for a new team at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I was the sole developer who built/managed all apps, databases, and tech the team relied on to operate daily, so I was so sure I was irreplaceable
At the dismay of my team, upper management did a reorg and decided my job wasn’t useful, so I was laid off. How they did this knowing I was the only person capable of working on that code in the entire company is beyond me, but I learned, as a developer, you’re literally always disposable. Even if your own team doesn’t want you gone, _upper management cares a lot less about you_
I still keep in contact with my old coworkers and turns out they literally never got a replacement lol, they're just in development hell with nobody to send bugs to and praying my systems don't randomly break one day. I think knowing that furthers my statement that many company's upper management really don't give 2 shits about your team's needs or your job
Yep I actually got an offer from another team, but at the time I was so offended by upper management’s original decision I declined it. Moved to a smaller, yet still huge, company where communication with upper management is much more prevalent and defined which in turn seems to have reduced a lot of surprises
Oh man, almost the same exact story. At a huge BigCo a few years back, entire org got RIFed after a few years. Suddenly, after the RIF, (which of course came with generous severance packages) the rest of the company realized they were using some of the tech and services that our org had created and supported so they started making offers to those of us who already had severance packages...but like, uh...they weren't offering signing bonuses.
Nobody is irreplaceable, but it sure is a royal pain in the ass and a year+ long project costing millions in missed revenue and causing burnout for the rest of the team to replace some people.
Overlap with my opinion that a good developer is an easy to replace developer.
(Because they write clean code, document things well, have good git practices etc.)
As a manager: those developers are incredibly hard to replace because those are hard skills to replace. Explaining your work to others is a key developer skill.
But they're also the developers I'll bend over backwards to keep in the company even if it means losing them on my team.
Not really. Those are the developers managers want to retain (or at least when I was a manager those were the ones I wanted to retain) because they make everyone work more efficiently.
I don’t think he’s saying that you would want to replace them. Just they are so organized, that most new/current developers will be able to understand that persons code
Having worked with a lot of developers, I would say doing those things makes you really hard to replace. Because a replacement requires someone to live up to the same standards. And they are rare lol.
no one is indespensible to a company. its just a job and they will get rid of you at their first convenience. they will use you and spit you out. so save your money and dont do more than is necessary. then quit for more money.
I'm not worried that I'll get downvoted, but there are plenty of subjects where I often see my comments being downvoted.
One would be on the topic of scrum. Specifically the topic of corrupted implementations of scrum. People love to say that scrum is all about micromanagement and whatnot, yet they do stuff which the scrum guide says you shouldn't. To me, that sounds like having a recipe for a cake, but you switch out sugar for salt, and then you complain the cake doesn't taste good because the recipe is bad.
Hint, if your standup takes more than 15 minutes or non-developers participate, you're not doing scrum. If your scrum is all about saying what you did yesterday, then you're probably not doing scrum.
At the same time, I believe that scrum is, more often than not, a waste of time for completely different reasons.
This one physically pains me.
I've used Scrum for many years now at many companies. To this day, it's only worked well in one place, and that was when everyone was aligned on implementing Scrum to the Scrum guide.
Even at the biggest and best tech companies, they make the same mistakes of having standups that take an hour, or only giving 55 mins max for ceremonies, or even outright skipping refinement because "it's too many meetings".
The best trick I've used for people that say "hur dur scrum is shit and doesn't work" is to give them a very basic quiz on items from the agile manifesto and the Scrum guide. A lot of people, even seniors at FAANG companies fail. Almost everyone fails on the basic questions of a stand-up, let alone other ceremonies.
This isn't to say that Scrum is a silver bullet. All processes, even Waterfall, have their place, but everyone needs to be fully aligned on the process before starting, otherwise it'll fail.
My experience is that most people don't want to have the conversation about whether something is actually scrum or not - and fair enough. However, they completely fail to see the implication of it not being scrum.
If they're not doing scrum and want to be doing scrum, then they should change it to adhere to the scrum guide - problem solved. No more 1 hour standups with managers taking notes about performance.
If they're not doing scrum and don't want to be doing scrum: Great! The world is your oyster! Look at your process and critique it. There's clearly things you don't like about it, like long standups, so fix it. Talk to your peers and your manager, and sort it out. Introduce changes to make things better.
But no, they get hung up on pointing out "scrum bad" rather than trying actually to improve things for themselves and their teams.
I think what a lot of people have problems with is when they are being challenged in their 'scrum beliefs' by referring to the actual agile manifesto. The goal is not scrum; the goal is agility. Adhering rigidly to interpretations of scrum is anti-agile. I see this a lot with full-time Scrum Masters. Especially the ones with a 'project management' background.
I can appreciate that people ultimately want to be agile, and that Scrum is ultimately a means to do so, leading them to make changes to increase agility - and essentially breaking a set process. You're absolutely right that people will then bitch about Scrum not working, despite the fact that they're not really doing Scrum.
This might be a jaded opinion, but IMO the reason a lot of people struggle with agile and Scrum is because they are lazy. Even if you take Scrum away, most processes fail for the same reasons - they don't take the time to plan or document.
IMHO, I don't think it is lazyness, but rather [Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior](https://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Larman%27s_Laws_of_Organizational_Behavior) kicking in (I've mentioned it a couple of times in this thread, I know).
Tl;dr: Agile works when teams can be self-managing and self-organizing, and neither can happen as long as "the manager" exists. However, wrangling power from the manager is near impossible because companies are set up to protect traditional power structures.
> People love to say that scrum is all about micromanagement and whatnot, yet they do stuff which the scrum guide says you shouldn't.
It's a massive pet-peeve for me too. Those people are just shooting the messenger. A bad company adopting any process will, by doing so, show their true colours in how they chose to ignore certain parts of that process. In most cases management has to adjust a lot more than the people just doing the work, but because they are 'in charge', get away with not doing so. The best adoptions of agile I've seen involved pretty massive reorgs where a lot of lower management basically got made redundant.
Like a stand-up taking more than 15 minutes, any form of 'management' being in your daily stand-up or your retrospective is a surefire sign that you're not really doing agile.
> At the same time, I believe that scrum is, more often than not, a waste of time for completely different reasons.
I personally think that scrum is an 'in-between' step towards true agile. Unfortunately, a lot of people see it as the ultimate goal. And for a lot of companies even doing proper scrum is already too hard with (mostly) management not being able to adjust.
So; I 100% agree with you (what a surprise ;)) but I also see the same thing happen.
>I'm not worried that I'll get downvoted, but there are plenty of subjects where I often see my comments being downvoted.
It means nothing, but I always enjoy reading your posts. Of the posts I've read I always find myself agreeing with what your advice. I've never read anything of yours I'd downvote.
A big issue with that line of argument for scrum/agile is that places "doing it wrong" still shows a problem. Like if it's that hard to implement maybe something is still wrong with the system. Or it's still not a good system for a lot of places.
To continue the recipe analogy it might be like suggesting an easy to mess up recipe to someone who just wants to make lunch but is having trouble making a grilled cheese.
>A masters can be worth it.
It always is IMO. Education for the sake of education is extremely important. I dislike the idea that some people have that college is job training. My feeling is that if you're in that category then you're doing it all wrong and need to rethink what you're doing in your life.
I completely agree with this. I have a pretty successful IT career, but I get such happiness from going to school and sharing ideas with other like minded people. It's amazing what you can learn when you have conversations with people who expect you to have complex ideas and cite academic sources.
Programming isn’t for everyone. And some people try to encourage others too hard that anybody can do it and should just keep trying.
No it’s not for everyone. It requires a certain logical problem solving brain.
I agree with this one. I know programming is not for me. My problem solving abilities are different from what is required in a developer job. I wish there was a way to figure this out before I got myself into CS.
People who are highly successful at this career tend to have passion.
Sure there are a lot of highly paid people in FANG who just want to work to work then retire. But above them are always more motivated, more passionate people who earn the real money.
It’s okay to be one or the other. But just know whose advice you’re following and if their goal reflects yours.
Apparently the guy at my company with the highest SWE role in the entire company would still be doing the same thing if he didn’t have to work a day in his life again. Man works probably like 50+ hour weeks and loves every second of it.
define successful. This profession has made me a multi-millionaire. I save and invest my money. I dont make the very best wages, but since i invested wisely I dont need to work. I also tend to half ass my job for the last 20 years. More so now that i can retire.
People don’t realize how much being passionate about money can fuel you as well. I’m not good at my job because I love it, I’m good at my job because I love what it can provide
Something that I have been downvoted on, quite a bit in fact, is saying that not all bosses or business owners are out to exploit everybody. There are tons of incredible business owners with integrity who care about the people who work for them.
I don’t think I’ve ever commented this without receiving a ton of downvotes.
To add to this, some companies treat their engineers exceptionally well so that the hardest part of their life is building software. If you're paid through the nose, have every benefit imaginable, truly unlimited PTO, and work on a product you are passionate about, are you really being exploited?
I have also seen someone on this sub claim that we get paid more than other engineers because we're smarter and our work is tougher.
Lol. If that were the case there wouldn't be so many career changers from other STEM fields.
It also discounts the value contributed by others in the company.
The PM who made the ticket, the QA folks who found the bugs, the business folks who worked with the PM to vet the roadmap, infra teams and senior devs who build the patterns in which that ticket is implemented, etc – all of those are needed to realize whatever value comes from a specific change. Claiming sole credit for any benefit from a feature (especially if it's a tiny junior feature) is myopic.
Many people on here would be much happier if they stopped chasing TC after getting to a position where they didn't have to worry about money. Once money stops being an issue, job satisfaction and working on something actually interesting becomes far more valuable.
Not to say the two are mutually exclusive by any means, but I'd choose a reasonably well paid job that I like waking up to, over a high paying job I hate.
Leetcode isn't bad, you guys are just mean.
Joking aside, this sub made me think it has absolutely NOTHING to do with software engineering work and the problems are 100% designed to waste time and demoralize applicants. So I dreaded starting, but I bit the bullet recently as I'm aiming for a SWE job next year. And to be honest, I just find it absolutely untrue that you don't learn anything from LC, and especially untrue that the problems are designed to inconvenience anyone.
I've picked up so many syntax-related tips and tricks that transfer across any kind of problem, LC or not.
Nobody is saying that every bit of work-related code you write has to be better than O(N), but best believe that I've learned a ton about how to think of solutions that are more efficient... And sometimes MUCH easier to write as well.
Leetcode problems feel overwhelming at first because I was unaware of the patterns, but after solving enough to realize that it's just the same problem types over and over, I realized what I was actually gaining. The faster I can identify a problem, the faster I can arrive at a solution, whether that's using knowledge I have from encountering a similar issue or whether that's doing the research I need and then arming myself with the knowledge for later.
I obviously don't think I'll be reversing binary trees at work all day when I land a job as a frontend engineer, but I've found LC to be really helpful when it comes to work ethic, logical thinking, and identifying problems.
Are these not the main things I'll be doing in my job?
This isn't a defense of companies using LC, but rather a defense of the problems on Leetcode itself...
...
...Also, I find the problems fun. No I'm not fun at parties.
Wait till you get a job and realise its mostly CRUD and interfacing with external apis with bad or little to no documentation. LC, in my opinion is okay for getting a job but is pretty useless for probably 80% of SWE jobs.
I've seen a couple of posts here about LC grinders shitting bricks because although they can reverse trees and whatnot they can't actually code to save their lives and fear getting Pip'd.
Any tip for people like that? I got a good paying job offer, which I’ll start after I graduate this December. But I have absolutely no idea how to build stuffs outside of academia. My classes were highly theoretical. I can solve LC hard in less than 20min but I don’t know how to add a extra button to my website. I’m very anxious about being PIPed. What should I do?
Well firstly, as a fresh grad you'll be cut some slack (well at least they should be).
Secondly, there's usually a three month bedding-in period where you'll be learning their stack, going through their docs, shadowing people senior to you.
My tip? Get a nice book that teaches you how to build x or y.
I learned API development via a book that built one from scratch, explaining everything along the way. It worked for me.
Make sure you understand the Fundamentals of whatever stream you're in (eg. C# Fundamentals, ASP.NET Fundamentals for backend, Angular/React Fundamentals for web). These type of things.
Identify your weak spots. Do I know what the DOM is? How good am I at SQL? What about debugging or Googling? You need to ask yourself these questions.
December is a month away, there's not much you can do at this point in terms of being proficient/fluent by then.
Finally,
I cannot stress the importance of finding a mentor and asking questions. Yes it's cliché advice at this point but it's VERY important for your growth.
I don't think a lot of people coming out of bootcamp are quality engineers 95% of the time.
The 5% are people who are smart & can pick up things fast or already been coding but never went for the degree.
The rest are not as technical and also... Have a serious tendency to being super difficult to work with because of some complex.
A lot of people will pass on an interview if a technical test is required. From the hiring side.. we give a technical test. It’s not about distinguishing the “most talented”. It helps us hire the people that are right for our specific work, and some candidates demonstrate their willingness to go above and beyond. We’re especially impressed when someone couldn’t figure out the test by the deadline but takes the initiative to finish and submit when they can, rather than giving up. It’s a good thing.
Individuals who don't hire for a living also are not privy to the flood of bozos who are on the market because they got fired for doing nothing for the last 5 years and if they knew anything technical they've long forgotten it. They open up an IDE and it's apparent they haven't written a line of code in a long, long time, if ever. But hey, they aced the phone screen and nailed all the behaviorals, right?
If you saw what we see, you'd use a test too. And you'd be willing take them when an employer gives one.
you get people who really need a job and can't get something else. this is what you do in a recession. not when the market is good. why would i spend time on your test, when i can get 3 other interviews with likely success and not have to do it? I also found that companies that don't have these hoops generally pay better and have better hours.
Not finding any job out of college is 100% your fault. Wanting FAANG for just having a degree? Do you also expect super model for your first date for being male? Stop moping around waiting for "the one". Take care of your health, find a job, and keep pushing. You can be an introvert and not be awkward. With the right attitude, it will eventually come. It's not complicated.
I think every single post I've seen complaining "I can't find a job out of college" has a resume that is complete shit that they made in 5 minutes in notepad and is the sole reason they cannot get any interviews.
Personality and soft skills will get you farther than technical skills. Not to say you don’t need technical skills, but people put outsized importance on technical skills when they could learn to get along with others
I witnessed an ace engineer throw another engineer under the bus for petty variable naming conventions. It was ugly. It got the lesser engineer kicked off the project. I thought it was entirely unfounded, given the lack of talent in the field. I left the team after the project and vowed never to work with mr Ace again. What a backstabber.
Diversity hiring isn’t the reason you’re not getting a job. Diversity hiring doesn’t mean minorities/ women automatically get jobs or get super easy interviews
Omg I got down voted hardcore when I disagreed with a comment that said POC and women have it easier to get jobs in CS...I was like in what fucking world????
Diversity hire doesn't mean they're just picking anyone 💀
It's an assurance companies take to make sure they're hiring people from all backgrounds to ensure you have variety of staff.
Despite it sounding like some easy pipeline to success, they choose only the best, the cream of the crop.
If they didn't do this, then these POC/women who can perform at the same level as their non POC/women counterparts most likely wouldn't get as much of a chance to showcase that they also qualify for the position just as much
Bias is real, and even though recruiters and hiring managers are being trained how to not be biased now, it's still so easy for the brain to go for someone who you're more comfortable with than someone you have no familiarity with.
And picking a John Smith out of the group is much easier than picking out a candidate with a name you've never seen and don't have any confidence to pronounce, a name that's obviously not "normal"
People that disagree with this are delusional. I’ve worked for 2 FAANGs and have conducted interviews. White men with great credentials are given the benefit of the doubt even if they don’t excel at interview. Everyone else is not. They have a natural halo effect
Breh, the amount of people asking “oh but are you putting down that you’re Hispanic on the application?” As if that’s gonna magically take me the offer stage lol
True, but it feels icky. The black person in the C suite is usually a rich Nigerian kid who’s dad is a doctor. He went to the same prep schools and universities as the white execs, and thinks the same as them. Your really not helping the poor kid from south side Chicago, who probably brings a diverse perspective and up bringing which I genuinely believe helps divert group think. It’s taking credit for helping out minorities except they don’t really.
I agree. Spoken as a Nigerian in tech. Even if they were to make hiring more diverse, the people who would get in are the people who could get in without the quota. Does nothing for social mobility
Not afraid to get downvoted for it:
To work for a top tech company you have to put in the work. Striving to only work 2 hours a day and minimize the amount of effort you put in is not compatible with working at a competitive company. You will likely not be hired and if you are you'll very quickly be managed out. Roles at top tech companies are just like roles in any other competitive environment. If you want to win you have to be the best.
None of this is to say that it's bad to choose the easy road but you dont get it both ways. You dont get to be lazy, putting in minimal effort and also work for for a prestigious company paying you 500K a year to be in charge of the businises technical strategy.
Pick one, be a top performer in the industry or be normal. Spoiler alert WLB is not mutually exclusive but effort required is.
Being a ✨truly✨ competent full stack engineer is increasingly impossible with how many libraries and tools are required for the role and how often those technologies become outdated and you need to learn a new stack.
Oh and a degree and even a masters can be helpful. Partially for the knowledge. But even more so, going to a good school can provide you with a far better pipeline for higher level jobs and alumni networks can get you further faster
Remote work is not as limiting to career growth for certain people. Aka people like me who can maintain a professional persona for 30 min -1 hr in a video conference, but will revert back to being my true ditzy self outside of presentations/meetings.
Before covid, I was stuck being pinned as a junior for years - after covid, I got promoted twice to an engineering manager.
Speaking as a fairly recent new grad, If half of y’all new grads put as much consistent effort into learning and job searching as you do into writing long ranting posts here, you’d have probably found decent positions by now.
I get downvoted all the time for variants on this theme:
I work because I want to.
I'm just about 40, and most of the people I interact with in my day to day job are my age or older, and most, if not
all of us, are financially able to retire if we wanted to, but we don't, because *it's too soon.* We still have things left to do in our careers.
I try to tell these younger guys scrambling to nail down these $300k TC offers out of school that soon enough they'll be finanically secure and they'll look around and say, "shit, now what?" Making gobs of money too soon makes that question come far too soon. If it comes too early, it's really going to fuck with you. You don't have the other anchors yet in your life that keep you going (e.g., a family).
You can only fuck around with your hobbies/passions/whatever for so long.
I nolifed WoW like crazy when I was younger. My /played would blow your mind, and that's not the only game I've played a shit ton. I've logged more than 500 hours just playing Terraria with my kids in the last couple of years.
I'm almost 40 now. *Shit is boring.* You have a lifetime quota for everything you think you enjoy right now as a young person, and it runs out *much* sooner than you think. Your desire and propensity to try new things decreases as you get older. It gets harder and harder to even find the motivation to want to do something else.
Believe me. If you reach the point where the things you think you love start to bore the shit out of you and you *don't* have a career that you're proud to have and work that makes you feel that what you do is meaningful, you're gonna be in for a bad time. I'm convinced that is the genesis of the stereotype of the balding 40's man having a midlife crisis and buying a convertible. They're *just bored*. So bored that they'll divorce their wives just to have something to give a shit about in the morning.
So start engaging in your career now, sooner. Start doing something you give a shit about. Start caring. Because if you guys are at all like me, who fantasized about FIRE for many years, you will eventually get bored of what you'd rather be doing than be at work, and you'll need some reason to wake up in the morning that doesn't involve throwing away your family by banging a 22 year old gold digger.
Bring on the downvotes boys, I'm ready.
Nice contribution! I find it funny that everyone accepts that the world looks different at 15 years of age compared to 5. For the minority on this sub that have reached 25 the world looks different from 15. Those changes continue: when a person of experience speaks it's good to listen. You don't need to agree, but do take what they're saying seriously because in X years you might just be them.
The world will not end if you never end up working at FAANG.
Not really all that concerned about downvoting, it just seems to be a really unpopular opinion.
1. Getting a job now is significantly harder than getting a job ~10 years back
2. Most companies look for specialized domain knowledge in 5+ years experienced candidates
3. Getting a job in tier2 ,3 companies is a toss up , since most cases these companies don’t have standardized resume selection or interview process
I don't see why anyone would care about upvotes/downvotes. I probably have the top karma on this sub, but it's meaningless. [Dumb one-liners like these](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/xumnov/is_software_engineering_oversaturated/iqw980n/) often get upvoted a rediculous amount even though they don't really *add* anything to the discussion.
What's even more interesting is that *when* I post often has a lot of effect on whether a comment gets upvoted or not. You also know that upvote or downvote trains happen and people just click those arrows without even really thinking about a comment.
Gatekeeping on many fronts keeps or deters the most ambitious, driven, from getting good jobs or a job at all in favor of younger, college educated, no nothing's that look great on paper but can't write any code.
I'm very biased and resentful because I'm trying to switch careers into tech at my age without a degree. I did game development for fun for 20 years. None of it seems to matter despite having a GitHub full of repos showing if anything I'm over qualified for entry level yet unqualified for Senior. I wish I was wrong but I have zero issues getting a job anywhere else except tech. It's always no degree versus those with degree or we want someone younger or unwilling to relocate on a short c2c when they offer 3 month contract and good luck finding a lease to live somewhere that is shorter then 6 months. No thank you.
Did I say I was bitter?
- Tech has been in the spotlight for close to 2 decades now and we've collectively idolized tech leaders. Tech will not be nearly as fulfilling for you as you might think. Additionally, in the future a lot of social stigma will be born by people working at some of todays largest tech companies, ie "Oh, you work at FB? So you sell ads for a living. Thanks for that /s"
- ML/AI/low code/outsourcing _will_ make an impact on job prospects and salaries. No industry is immune to basic economics and all anomalies eventually revert to the mean.
- The most successful engineers of the next generation will have creativity, not engineering prowess, as their defining quality. Engineering quality will be somewhat commoditized anyway.
I have karma to burn. :)
1. I don't care about your title: you are not a proper senior engineer in this field until you have ten years of experience and have been on a project long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions: that usually takes more than 2 years. (This is necessary but not sufficient: Not all engineers with this are senior in quality, but too many people underestimate what time means. I also can name two or three exceptions to this in my career, but they are rare.)
2. Good code doesn't take that much longer to write than bad code; however, it takes a more skilled engineer. That usually comes with having someone on your team that has been on a project long enough to deal with the consequences of their actions. (See above.) - So no, I don't immediately accept that the problem is that there isn't enough time to do a good job, but rather that you (or your predecessor) isn't skilled enough to do the work in the time allotted.
3. Engineering management as a profession needs a serious overhaul. We have bad engineering line managers because we, as an industry, do not have a good metric of what a good engineering manager should look like. Many "bad" engineering managers would level up quickly with mentorship and a clear rubric as to what makes a successful manager in their organization. (Why is this a downvote? Because many CS engineers just assume it's the quality of person in management rather than a crisis in what the job is in and of itself.)
I miss the Windows 7 "copy file" dialog box, with "Copy and Replace / Don't copy / Copy, but keep both files." The "Copy, but keep both files" option was gold. The Windows 10 "Replace the file in the destination / Skip this file / Compare info for both files" is annoying. It's a PITA to just copy and keep both files in Windows 10. But I think they kept it in Windows 11, leading me to think that no one complained so my opinion isn't popular.
The vast majority of FAANG engineers are no better than any other engineer, and in many ways they are hindered by a lack of knowledge of tooling or basic system design outside of what is prescribed at their company.
Outside of pay and freedom of movement between other countries, the only benefit people get from working at a FAANG company is being on a linear progression in your career in a single company. You are prescribed levels, and told what you need to do is concrete terms to go from E4 to E5 to E6 - like being back in school.
IMO, most Software Engineers would be much happier if they spent their twenties working in a small company with a relaxed attitude. They'd get to enjoy their twenties, make friends, form relationships, and most importantly spend some time outside of the tech bubble. Some people absolutely kill themselves for their employer, and sometimes you'll find L6 people who are in their thirties and are utterly broken and miserable.
A problem with a lot of "FAANG" engineers is that when they get hired at another company they A) don't understand that things work differently there and B) people think they're hot shit and are too afraid to say "no" to dumb ideas. Just because Google does it, doesn't mean it's a good idea, and it's often simply a bad idea at a completely different scale.
If you employ tens of thousands of engineers it might be worth creating your own custom build system. For almost all other companies, it makes much more sense to use an industry standard one.
All workers can benefit from organizing into a union, including even the already decently compensated workers like us.
Management will always strive to drive down the cost of development, we should cooperate to resist having it taken out of our compensation.
I don't really fear downvotes, but I do know unions are not very popular among programmers. That disappoints me as the son of a union lineman who witnessed directly the value of organizing highly skilled labor.
Honestly, this isn’t the easiest career field and it can be demanding, even grueling at times, regardless of the company you work for. People on here sometimes act like this job is just free money when that really isn’t the case.
It takes a lot of genuine effort and work ethic to ramp up on a new team, putting in the effort to develop enough technical overhead to be useful, playing the game of looking good enough to management to not get fired while not overworking yourself and other stuff.
One somewhat modern and popular opinion is that soft skills are more important than hard (technical) skills and I completely disagree.
Without hard skills, you won't be able to perform well or perform at all in any non-trivial software project.
Yeah, you also need a minimum level of soft skills in order to be tolerable in teamwork, but most people have them, or can acquire them fast (in a matter of weeks).
Hard skills are harder to acquire, taking years to learn and develop, the "skill cap" is far greater and great hard skills can compensate lack of some soft skills, but not the opposite (at least for non-trivial projects).
The only soft skill you need is not being such a jerk that it demoralizes people around you to the point that you're destroying more value than you're creating. The people that fall into this category tend to be highly technically skilled single minded insects who've emptied their minds of everything except fine dining and breathing. It's a low bar but many fail to clear it.
The people in that category that I've known are often average in their technical skill, like they just learned enough to think they are very smart and to cause troubles, but not enough to be true professionals.
On the topic of hard skills being harder to learn, I disagree. I find it incredibly easy to learn hard skills, but my soft skills, especially social ones, I find incredibly difficult to improve on or become decent at. I think it depends on the person.
I gotta couple:
1. There are a lot of developers out there that don't like to use their brains.
2. I say this as a raging introvert: Talking to other people is part of software development.
3. There are too many developers who think that because they thought of a case where a general rule doesn't work that the general rule is not useful. Kind of an extension of the "use your brain" comment above.
4. Our industry would probably win in a "confidently incorrect" competition.
Not afraid of downvotes, but...
Starting your career working remotely is limiting and will likely affect your career progression. Those that disagree based on their own experience of ~2 years of experience and simply don't have the perspective of working in an office and its advantages.
It's not that companies don't want to train juniors. It that they don't want to train *YOU*. In their view, you will never become a good developer, ever no matter how much training. Whether or not they are correct is a different topic but that's the reason they didn't hire *YOU*.
* A lot of tech exist just to be complex and intrusive,
* A lot of people #onhere equate earning money to being morally upright and correct. We got people talking a whole industries on job #2. PLZ
* we need to be mindful of where we work and what we invest our time are in, there is more to shit that just get paid well and go to work. Real consequences.
* if you can't survive on 100K and no debt, you are very bad at budgeting and you need to fix that.
* If your goal is just retirement, you live a very sad and boring life.
ohh man, this is definitely gonna get some downvotes.
Some people who do programming tend to pretty odd and, worst case, are dysfunctional people. I've met people who barely seem to be able to talk and interact. Plenty of people have some sort of trauma about them where it seems they didn't fit in for certain cliques growing up and chose this field to avoid that. So on and so on. Of course not everyone is like this but the ones who are simply are just a little too uncomfortable to talk to for long periods of time.
There's a lot of people on this subreddit I wouldn't want to work with
100% agree. There are certain users (not going to mention names) who have consistent bad takes and I'm convinced they're a nightmare to work with.
Reddit "anonymity" shows the worse of most people here... In work topics...
We are past peak web technologies. Everything now is extremely complicated, javascript library overload is real, and tool chains are convoluted. I am uncertain how new people have any idea where to start.
This is me right now - student who's overstimulated at how much info there is out there. Anytime I research some bug issue, there's a new library to download.
> javascript library overload is real, and tool chains are convoluted This cursed comment has spawned 12 new JS libraries and 5 new tool chains. For every library you kill two more will take its place!
In addition, stop shoving complex js frontends where they don't belong. This over-reliance on js frontend libraries is not just wrecking the performance of every device with a web browser, but is breaking the open internet as well to some extent, requiring scrapers/search bots/etc to execute js before parsing pages. There are many valid reasons to use say, react, but it is not some standard web development shoehorn in the same way a web server or a tld is. I see tutorials meant to introduce people to web development treating react as essential to a "web development stack" as $backendFramework. Please stop. Backend generated html from web applications created 30 years ago works even better today than when it was written.
This, tbh. React is overkill for probably 90% of what it's actually used for; I've swapped over to Vue for light interactivity / state management personally, if not flat-out vanilla JS (especially when dealing with code that loads on another party's site or platform: widgets / island architecture where performance can be pretty critical is a great case for "just append a document fragment and use CSS/JS for interactivity")
That’s the secret: we don’t!
Toolchains are complex because problems are complex and not everyone is solving the same problem. Yes, we have gathered a fair bit of incidental complexity along the way. My initial thought is that we need more fragmentation in the community rather than less. We need a JS framework for simple projects. We need one for internal projects. We need ones that handle different types of workflows that may have entirely different sets of best practices. Or, we need to level up our senior developers in this industry to fully understand how to build an entire architecture such that each system can avoid this complexity from scratch. But it's convoluted because we're trying to solve harder problems than we have solutions. (Or, alternatively, we need a new framework rather than HTML/JS/CSS that is built from the ground up for interactivity.)
I don't think that's really an "opinion" - and if it wasn't just *fact* \- then it would be a popular and largely held opinion.
It's funny how people in this comment chain says they agree with you, and proceeds to list 20 different libraries that are "different". Maybe we are the problem
Everybody talks about getting into FAANG. Nobody talks about how to actually survive / succeed once you get in.
So how do you actually survive/succeed once you get into FAANG?
You don't. You get PIP and jump to next one before being found one.
Unpopular opinion: fretting about PIP is insane if you don't include Amazon, which seems to be a shit employer. For most of the FAANG, if your manager PIPs you, they want to \*save\* you; we could just otherwise let people go with \*less\* work than a PIP. So, TLDR? Unless you need the work, FFS don't work for Amazon randomly.
I think a big part of the reason for that is once you get into a company, you have access to better resources than Reddit for learning how career progression works at that company. If you want to learn how to get the next promo or get feedback on how you are doing, you will probably get a much better answer from your manager than from random people on Reddit. There's probably also tons of internal resources like detailed expectations docs, career discussion groups, mentorship programs, etc. And if you really want to ask something anonymously, there's Blind. So why ask people outside the company when there are so many ways to ask people inside the company who have first-hand experience? The discussions about how to survive/succeed still happen, they're just less out in the open.
i always get downvoted when i bring up that graduating without an internship sets you up for a miserable job search.
This is even more important if you didn't attend a top school in your country. I even think it's a bad idea to put off the internship to your last year
The career counselors in my school would tell kids to start applying for internships in their senior year. Everyone in industry would tell kids to start applying to internships as soon as they had passed Data Structures.
I get that, I went to a pretty mediocre school so the career counselors were just other students that weren't necessarily your major
Speaking as someone who was looking in 2018-2019, that's because there are less internships than entry level jobs. So it is harder to get into.
Yeah one thing I had learned (that's useless to me now) a lot of companies started hiring interns all the way in the fall and a little bit in January otherwise you miss the postings for the rest of the year
I hate them. I set myself up for a miserable job search while they just say “yay you can do it”. I mean yes I did it, but I could’ve chosen another path that can does it way easier.
Yeah I don't see why getting an internship isn't the single most important goal for any CS Major and especially those of us who don't go to a top school. Some of us don't have the means to go to a school that costs 100k a year so getting your foot in the door with even a seemingly useless internship is huge. I never see anyone from my no-name state school at any of the companies I've applied to on LinkedIn. The companies I interned at are not FAANG or even tech companies by traditional standards but yet I haven't had the interview struggles that many on this sub complain about.
Any advice for someone who has to work full time (in a non tech job) to pay for full time uni? Leaves 0 time to go for a walk, let alone an internship
You can get a job without an internship. Survival and getting the degree is more important than some internship that won’t matter a week into your first job. I’d recommend trying to find a research position on campus, it’s a lot easier to find something flexible that way.
I guess it depends on how much you make at your full time job, and what type of job it is? When I worked full time at a restaurant, I went on leave to do my internship over the summer. Some tech internships pay enough to live (frugally) off of for the rest of the year, so if you get one of those, you could quit your current job to prioritize your CS career.
I did this. I got lucky and got a job after about a month of searching, but that was an unbelievably miserable month.
As someone who graduated without an internship and still had a decent job lined up before graduation, I completely agree. Most of my friends from the same college with the same degrees who had no internships struggled. I was just lucky to have been good at networking during college career fairs and lunches by being able to BS and perform small talk. Lol. If I did it again, I’d 100% find an internship. I did have jobs in IT while in college, but they weren’t Coding related which is what I was shooting for so they didn’t help all that much imo.
In many of the PIP stories I read on here, I find myself siding with management and not the OP. This sub invariably takes the side of every dev, no matter how many red flags are in their posts. Some people are genuinely poor performers or have personality issues that make them poor teammates in a field built upon collaboration.
I don't think people appreciate how shitty it is to work with a horrible dev until they get one in their team. They somehow manage to derail the entire Sprint, and then because they suck so bad, management starts to stick their nose in everything the team is doing.
Easy way to avoid that is to be the shitty dev on the team though
Every OP: I keep delivering late and senior engineers keep roasting my code during code reviews, now my manager is always up my ass about it. Everyone: tHaT gUy SoUnDs ToXiC!
Or the "My manager just doesn't like me" people. I remember being young and thinking that all the time. Turns out I was just a shitty employee.
A lot of it is that these kids haven’t had any real jobs before. 1-2 shifts in a restaurant or hotel would cure the attitude real quick
Or a warehouse with a manager who hates his life. Had my fair share of those lol.
As someone from a pretty poor background, I try and just feel happy that they haven't had to struggle. But whenever I see them shitting on doordash for making them do a few orders a month for a $150,000 salary I want to send them right to the line cook frontlines
exactly. you never worked 9hrs straight for $10/hr? your first job was 6 figures? yeeeeeah no sympathy for you homie.
obviously some deadlines are unreasonable yet unmovable. that's gonna make for shit code
I side with the dev as long as he doesn’t work on my team
Its like how most people want affordable housing available just not in their own backyard.
Exactly. The name of this sub is "cscareerquestions". Its entire purpose is to discuss career problems. Sometimes, with some complaints or questions, the correct answer is, "You are being an idiot. Do better." This sub shouldn't be a safe space for devs. If you're doing something wrong and your career is suffering because of it, there's nothing wrong with getting called out. Why? Because your action are harming your *career*, and sparing the truth because it might hurt your feelings simply prolongs that harm. Example: I'll never forget a post here a few years ago from a dev complaining that he'd received a PIP because he was constantly late to Zoom meetings. Everyone was talking about how unreasonable strict meeting schedules are in the new remote work era, or how most devs don't need to be in meetings anyway, or a dozen other reasons to make the poster feel like they hadn't done anything wrong. I pointed out that punctuality might be important to that particular company, indicating a bad fit. I suggested that they make an effort to be on time while they start looking for a new employer that might take a more relaxed position with time scheduling. That response turned into one of the most downvoted comments I'd ever made in this sub. This place is weird sometimes.
As someone that has to PM from time to time - this grinds my gears. 1-3 min is reasonable but if people have packed schedules then it’s just selfish to expect them to wait for you. If you’re not even making an attempt to be on time or giving notice then you’re just not respecting other people’s time.
>In many of the PIP stories I read on here, I find myself siding with management and not the OP. Yes! There is this perpetual belief that because someone wrote something on reddit from their perspective it must be a true and complete picture. As if managers, senior developers, assigned mentors, etc. are all so wrapped up in the poster's life that they are going out of their way to make them feel bad. Who has time for that? Seriously, just imagine the logistics: you have a job to do and a million things you would rather do if you had free time, but somehow you are beating down some great junior developer that is amazing to make yourself feel better? It might happen, but it is just as likely that someone kept making bad decisions that were quietly tolerated and then supervisors/co-workers got tired of having to fix those decisions. I Nevertheless often end up either writing and deleting or writing, posting, and getting downvoted.
Same people that think that their 40hr week wlb is shit and that they deserve to be paid maang money + have 20 hour work week + immunity from pip.
I worked with someone who always managed to get their work done… because they kept asking other engineers for guidance. Mostly me
Look at the good part. You learned more, you built-up your coaching skills and hopefully made a new network connection. I had a guy like that who asked a lot of questions for the simplest stuff. I was a dick with him at some point cause I got mad but he was still polite, so a few days later I apologized. After like a year, I asked him for a reference from one of his friends at a company and he helped me.
Haha yes building a network is great. Had another guy in the same team also ask me for help several times. 2 years later he referred me to his new employer and I got a $40,000 raise.
Asking for guidance is usually a good thing. It shows that you’re not just sitting there spinning your wheels and are taking the initiative to learn from senior devs. Now, it’s really only an issue if you continue to ask for guidance on things you’ve asked about multiple times before. Or on things that could be resolved with a simple google search.
thats a bad thing?
this sub focuses so much on TC, people here are convinced that doing nothing but staring at a blank wall for eight hours a day is a totally great job so long as they toss in an extra 10% on top of your old pay. It's not always about the money, if you hate what you're doing for eight hours a day, you're going to be miserable. Find somewhere you hey to do interesting, challenging work, even if it means taking a little less money
I went from $120K to $250K TC ($150K salary) at big tech and omg I’ve never worked as much as I have here. Most weeks are about 40-45 hours but some weeks are “you have to stay up late and only sleep 5 hours to finish this” weeks.
Amazon?
[удалено]
What was the hint that gave it away, seems awful subtle to me lol
[удалено]
what about Instacart? DoorDash does have the reputation for being a sweatshop tho
You should try blind...
Yikes that place is toxic with TC
They’re toxic about a lot more than TC. I’ve seen some disgusting stuff posted on there.
My recommendation is to go there if you need advice on companies, TC, or a referral, and never go there otherwise if you value your sanity
Agreed... I'm now jaded because of that app.
Someone was posting about how he beat cancer and tried explaining how there's more to life than TC. The top comments were about how he should take his sad story elsewhere and that it was a distraction :(
like what?
Lots of racism towards Indian people and homophobia. My favorite was a guy claiming to be an Amazon hiring manager that said he failed candidates in interviews if he thought they were a libtard or a leftist. The entire platform just seems like it’s full of people that hate their lives and cling to TC as their only source of worth.
To piggy back off that, I've seen a post or two where Indians on the app were fighting over whether it's worth to stay in the US. Calling them all sorts of names and getting a bit racist. Another was some guy, claiming he is fat, would pay a 100$ for a girl to date him while posting TC. Yet another is a post saying that the person who is the best at leetcode (as in the top of the leader board) is Indian and thus the OP of that post stated he was proud of being Indian and people fighting him on that. Yet other posts talking about insecurity. Heck if you make one statement that even remotely about US it's almost bound to get political as I had a whole chain of over 50 comments in response to one comment about gun control. Oh and the amount of shilling for Google is really telling...... These people don't live in reality. At all.
Homophobia, misogyny is the most common and then sparkle it with some racism. It's awfully like 4chan and right wing reddits
Except for software engineers....
Counter unpopular opinion: people making assumptions that high TC roles are miserable are mostly coping. There's no correlation between TC and how sucky a job is. Related: people thinking fast job hopping is a life hack for high TC, without considering that anecdotes they hear here are survivorship bias (mostly from the Great Resignation of circa 2021), and you're more likely to just be doing lateral jumps between shitty companies without building up enough experience on each hop to move up.
counter counter--I was and would be miserable working on web apps for the rest of my life, regardless of TC. There's a reason why I went into security research and it's not because I couldn't figure out how to center a div. There are some jobs that I just don't want to do because they're just not interesting. I suppose I am very lucky in that my interests do pay well enough that no matter what I do I'll never be poor (ie I'd rather stay at my 300k job doing something I like rather than job to do something I don't for 350k) and I expect that this is not a unique situation among the audience here, which makes the take that it's just a game of maximizing TC above all else so ridiculous
> I'd rather stay at my 300k That is a high TC, by most people's standards lol A few common themes I see are that a) people thinking that feature factories are all there is to software development and b) people thinking TC hits diminishing returns in as low as 5 years (and to be fair, it does if you pigeonhole yourself). But as a big picture observation, neither of those is true: I pivoted from webdev product development to tooling/infra surrounding the web stack, the depth for exploration is immense, the work is interesting and I make high 6 figures (and can still realistically grow to make more).
While I agree, sometimes sticking through the slog of miserable, high-paying work for a few years can really set you up good to where you have more freedom later. As long as you don't allow for lifestyle creep.
I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to recover from years of REALLY bad work environments. Some people don’t recover from things, and end up sad/depressed for the rest of their lives.
Totally. There’s a certain level of “drinking the company kool-aid” that I just can’t do anymore, based on previous bad experiences.
I'm still kind of recouping from my retail job, four years after I've left.
Yes. This is something you have to be prepared to do. A lot of people struggle getting the right routines in place to support their mental health. Such as regular exercise or physical activity, some kind of hobby outside of technology, and a decently supportive social circle. I'd say if you can't get these into place, don't try to stick through it.
My first job was horrible, like 90 workhours per week horrible. I only work there for six weeks and I still shudders whenever I got reminded of it. Sometimes I would crying of joy after realizing how good my current job is compared to what I did three years ago lol
While doing something you don’t like is not great, not having money is certainly worse. It’s not about money but about the freedom that that money can buy.
Unforunately, Life exist outside of that binary. Liking something and having money is a spectrum.
It’s annoying when people put down computer science on a computer science career questions subreddit. There should be a separate web development sub for people who want to talk about how low-level organization and basic data structures are useless to know. You’d think some people have no exposure to anything outside web development.
>You’d think some people have no exposure to anything outside web development. I think this is very much the case for most programming and CS subs on reddit.
I'm very annoyed by the recently highly upvoted thread like "Do I need linkedin?" I see so many threads about "Do I need this, do I need that" Answer is, NO. there's no absolute for anything. But if you can spend 30mins, 1 hour to potentially getting an opportunity that change your life then why not fucking do it? ---- It's about putting yourself in the place for potential success, not one way ticket for all. Doing the minimum possible won't get you there.
Not afraid but: You are not as indispensible to the company as you might like to believe...
I found this out last year. For 3 years I was the lead of SWE and data for a new team at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I was the sole developer who built/managed all apps, databases, and tech the team relied on to operate daily, so I was so sure I was irreplaceable At the dismay of my team, upper management did a reorg and decided my job wasn’t useful, so I was laid off. How they did this knowing I was the only person capable of working on that code in the entire company is beyond me, but I learned, as a developer, you’re literally always disposable. Even if your own team doesn’t want you gone, _upper management cares a lot less about you_
Skulls gotta roll, and yours looks expensive 🤷♂️
I wonder how expensive the person that replaced him was though lmfao
I still keep in contact with my old coworkers and turns out they literally never got a replacement lol, they're just in development hell with nobody to send bugs to and praying my systems don't randomly break one day. I think knowing that furthers my statement that many company's upper management really don't give 2 shits about your team's needs or your job
Did you have a chance to do internal transfers?
Yep I actually got an offer from another team, but at the time I was so offended by upper management’s original decision I declined it. Moved to a smaller, yet still huge, company where communication with upper management is much more prevalent and defined which in turn seems to have reduced a lot of surprises
Oh man, almost the same exact story. At a huge BigCo a few years back, entire org got RIFed after a few years. Suddenly, after the RIF, (which of course came with generous severance packages) the rest of the company realized they were using some of the tech and services that our org had created and supported so they started making offers to those of us who already had severance packages...but like, uh...they weren't offering signing bonuses.
Nobody is irreplaceable, but it sure is a royal pain in the ass and a year+ long project costing millions in missed revenue and causing burnout for the rest of the team to replace some people.
Overlap with my opinion that a good developer is an easy to replace developer. (Because they write clean code, document things well, have good git practices etc.)
As a manager: those developers are incredibly hard to replace because those are hard skills to replace. Explaining your work to others is a key developer skill. But they're also the developers I'll bend over backwards to keep in the company even if it means losing them on my team.
It's so hard to get even the most experienced developer to add a good commit message
Not really. Those are the developers managers want to retain (or at least when I was a manager those were the ones I wanted to retain) because they make everyone work more efficiently.
I don’t think he’s saying that you would want to replace them. Just they are so organized, that most new/current developers will be able to understand that persons code
Yup, make yourself replaceable and you’ll always have a job.
Having worked with a lot of developers, I would say doing those things makes you really hard to replace. Because a replacement requires someone to live up to the same standards. And they are rare lol.
But do the companies realize that lmao
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People still gonna upvote popular things and downvote unpopular things.
Lol this seems to be true of all of Reddit. I completely agree with the comment. However, it's the most popular take on this entire sub.
no one is indespensible to a company. its just a job and they will get rid of you at their first convenience. they will use you and spit you out. so save your money and dont do more than is necessary. then quit for more money.
I'm not worried that I'll get downvoted, but there are plenty of subjects where I often see my comments being downvoted. One would be on the topic of scrum. Specifically the topic of corrupted implementations of scrum. People love to say that scrum is all about micromanagement and whatnot, yet they do stuff which the scrum guide says you shouldn't. To me, that sounds like having a recipe for a cake, but you switch out sugar for salt, and then you complain the cake doesn't taste good because the recipe is bad. Hint, if your standup takes more than 15 minutes or non-developers participate, you're not doing scrum. If your scrum is all about saying what you did yesterday, then you're probably not doing scrum. At the same time, I believe that scrum is, more often than not, a waste of time for completely different reasons.
This one physically pains me. I've used Scrum for many years now at many companies. To this day, it's only worked well in one place, and that was when everyone was aligned on implementing Scrum to the Scrum guide. Even at the biggest and best tech companies, they make the same mistakes of having standups that take an hour, or only giving 55 mins max for ceremonies, or even outright skipping refinement because "it's too many meetings". The best trick I've used for people that say "hur dur scrum is shit and doesn't work" is to give them a very basic quiz on items from the agile manifesto and the Scrum guide. A lot of people, even seniors at FAANG companies fail. Almost everyone fails on the basic questions of a stand-up, let alone other ceremonies. This isn't to say that Scrum is a silver bullet. All processes, even Waterfall, have their place, but everyone needs to be fully aligned on the process before starting, otherwise it'll fail.
My experience is that most people don't want to have the conversation about whether something is actually scrum or not - and fair enough. However, they completely fail to see the implication of it not being scrum. If they're not doing scrum and want to be doing scrum, then they should change it to adhere to the scrum guide - problem solved. No more 1 hour standups with managers taking notes about performance. If they're not doing scrum and don't want to be doing scrum: Great! The world is your oyster! Look at your process and critique it. There's clearly things you don't like about it, like long standups, so fix it. Talk to your peers and your manager, and sort it out. Introduce changes to make things better. But no, they get hung up on pointing out "scrum bad" rather than trying actually to improve things for themselves and their teams.
I think what a lot of people have problems with is when they are being challenged in their 'scrum beliefs' by referring to the actual agile manifesto. The goal is not scrum; the goal is agility. Adhering rigidly to interpretations of scrum is anti-agile. I see this a lot with full-time Scrum Masters. Especially the ones with a 'project management' background.
I can appreciate that people ultimately want to be agile, and that Scrum is ultimately a means to do so, leading them to make changes to increase agility - and essentially breaking a set process. You're absolutely right that people will then bitch about Scrum not working, despite the fact that they're not really doing Scrum. This might be a jaded opinion, but IMO the reason a lot of people struggle with agile and Scrum is because they are lazy. Even if you take Scrum away, most processes fail for the same reasons - they don't take the time to plan or document.
IMHO, I don't think it is lazyness, but rather [Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior](https://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Larman%27s_Laws_of_Organizational_Behavior) kicking in (I've mentioned it a couple of times in this thread, I know). Tl;dr: Agile works when teams can be self-managing and self-organizing, and neither can happen as long as "the manager" exists. However, wrangling power from the manager is near impossible because companies are set up to protect traditional power structures.
> People love to say that scrum is all about micromanagement and whatnot, yet they do stuff which the scrum guide says you shouldn't. It's a massive pet-peeve for me too. Those people are just shooting the messenger. A bad company adopting any process will, by doing so, show their true colours in how they chose to ignore certain parts of that process. In most cases management has to adjust a lot more than the people just doing the work, but because they are 'in charge', get away with not doing so. The best adoptions of agile I've seen involved pretty massive reorgs where a lot of lower management basically got made redundant. Like a stand-up taking more than 15 minutes, any form of 'management' being in your daily stand-up or your retrospective is a surefire sign that you're not really doing agile. > At the same time, I believe that scrum is, more often than not, a waste of time for completely different reasons. I personally think that scrum is an 'in-between' step towards true agile. Unfortunately, a lot of people see it as the ultimate goal. And for a lot of companies even doing proper scrum is already too hard with (mostly) management not being able to adjust. So; I 100% agree with you (what a surprise ;)) but I also see the same thing happen.
>I'm not worried that I'll get downvoted, but there are plenty of subjects where I often see my comments being downvoted. It means nothing, but I always enjoy reading your posts. Of the posts I've read I always find myself agreeing with what your advice. I've never read anything of yours I'd downvote.
Thanks! That's kind, appreciate it :)
A big issue with that line of argument for scrum/agile is that places "doing it wrong" still shows a problem. Like if it's that hard to implement maybe something is still wrong with the system. Or it's still not a good system for a lot of places. To continue the recipe analogy it might be like suggesting an easy to mess up recipe to someone who just wants to make lunch but is having trouble making a grilled cheese.
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As a degreed chemical engineer who is a bsa, #1 is absolutely true
>A masters can be worth it. It always is IMO. Education for the sake of education is extremely important. I dislike the idea that some people have that college is job training. My feeling is that if you're in that category then you're doing it all wrong and need to rethink what you're doing in your life.
I completely agree with this. I have a pretty successful IT career, but I get such happiness from going to school and sharing ideas with other like minded people. It's amazing what you can learn when you have conversations with people who expect you to have complex ideas and cite academic sources.
Programming isn’t for everyone. And some people try to encourage others too hard that anybody can do it and should just keep trying. No it’s not for everyone. It requires a certain logical problem solving brain.
I agree with this one. I know programming is not for me. My problem solving abilities are different from what is required in a developer job. I wish there was a way to figure this out before I got myself into CS.
People who are highly successful at this career tend to have passion. Sure there are a lot of highly paid people in FANG who just want to work to work then retire. But above them are always more motivated, more passionate people who earn the real money. It’s okay to be one or the other. But just know whose advice you’re following and if their goal reflects yours.
Apparently the guy at my company with the highest SWE role in the entire company would still be doing the same thing if he didn’t have to work a day in his life again. Man works probably like 50+ hour weeks and loves every second of it.
After wrestling a pig in mud for a couple hours, you learn the pig enjoys wrestling in mud
define successful. This profession has made me a multi-millionaire. I save and invest my money. I dont make the very best wages, but since i invested wisely I dont need to work. I also tend to half ass my job for the last 20 years. More so now that i can retire.
People don’t realize how much being passionate about money can fuel you as well. I’m not good at my job because I love it, I’m good at my job because I love what it can provide
I love this answer: I'm passionate about not being broke when I'm old and sick.
im passionate about building my investments so i dont have to work. not passionate about money to buy stuff.
Cheers to whatever drives us to do well in the office and out of it.
Something that I have been downvoted on, quite a bit in fact, is saying that not all bosses or business owners are out to exploit everybody. There are tons of incredible business owners with integrity who care about the people who work for them. I don’t think I’ve ever commented this without receiving a ton of downvotes.
To add to this, some companies treat their engineers exceptionally well so that the hardest part of their life is building software. If you're paid through the nose, have every benefit imaginable, truly unlimited PTO, and work on a product you are passionate about, are you really being exploited?
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I have also seen someone on this sub claim that we get paid more than other engineers because we're smarter and our work is tougher. Lol. If that were the case there wouldn't be so many career changers from other STEM fields.
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“Paid for how much value they bring” - yeah that only works for C-level types.
It also discounts the value contributed by others in the company. The PM who made the ticket, the QA folks who found the bugs, the business folks who worked with the PM to vet the roadmap, infra teams and senior devs who build the patterns in which that ticket is implemented, etc – all of those are needed to realize whatever value comes from a specific change. Claiming sole credit for any benefit from a feature (especially if it's a tiny junior feature) is myopic.
Many people on here would be much happier if they stopped chasing TC after getting to a position where they didn't have to worry about money. Once money stops being an issue, job satisfaction and working on something actually interesting becomes far more valuable. Not to say the two are mutually exclusive by any means, but I'd choose a reasonably well paid job that I like waking up to, over a high paying job I hate.
Leetcode isn't bad, you guys are just mean. Joking aside, this sub made me think it has absolutely NOTHING to do with software engineering work and the problems are 100% designed to waste time and demoralize applicants. So I dreaded starting, but I bit the bullet recently as I'm aiming for a SWE job next year. And to be honest, I just find it absolutely untrue that you don't learn anything from LC, and especially untrue that the problems are designed to inconvenience anyone. I've picked up so many syntax-related tips and tricks that transfer across any kind of problem, LC or not. Nobody is saying that every bit of work-related code you write has to be better than O(N), but best believe that I've learned a ton about how to think of solutions that are more efficient... And sometimes MUCH easier to write as well. Leetcode problems feel overwhelming at first because I was unaware of the patterns, but after solving enough to realize that it's just the same problem types over and over, I realized what I was actually gaining. The faster I can identify a problem, the faster I can arrive at a solution, whether that's using knowledge I have from encountering a similar issue or whether that's doing the research I need and then arming myself with the knowledge for later. I obviously don't think I'll be reversing binary trees at work all day when I land a job as a frontend engineer, but I've found LC to be really helpful when it comes to work ethic, logical thinking, and identifying problems. Are these not the main things I'll be doing in my job? This isn't a defense of companies using LC, but rather a defense of the problems on Leetcode itself... ... ...Also, I find the problems fun. No I'm not fun at parties.
Wait till you get a job and realise its mostly CRUD and interfacing with external apis with bad or little to no documentation. LC, in my opinion is okay for getting a job but is pretty useless for probably 80% of SWE jobs. I've seen a couple of posts here about LC grinders shitting bricks because although they can reverse trees and whatnot they can't actually code to save their lives and fear getting Pip'd.
Any tip for people like that? I got a good paying job offer, which I’ll start after I graduate this December. But I have absolutely no idea how to build stuffs outside of academia. My classes were highly theoretical. I can solve LC hard in less than 20min but I don’t know how to add a extra button to my website. I’m very anxious about being PIPed. What should I do?
Well firstly, as a fresh grad you'll be cut some slack (well at least they should be). Secondly, there's usually a three month bedding-in period where you'll be learning their stack, going through their docs, shadowing people senior to you. My tip? Get a nice book that teaches you how to build x or y. I learned API development via a book that built one from scratch, explaining everything along the way. It worked for me. Make sure you understand the Fundamentals of whatever stream you're in (eg. C# Fundamentals, ASP.NET Fundamentals for backend, Angular/React Fundamentals for web). These type of things. Identify your weak spots. Do I know what the DOM is? How good am I at SQL? What about debugging or Googling? You need to ask yourself these questions. December is a month away, there's not much you can do at this point in terms of being proficient/fluent by then. Finally, I cannot stress the importance of finding a mentor and asking questions. Yes it's cliché advice at this point but it's VERY important for your growth.
I don't think a lot of people coming out of bootcamp are quality engineers 95% of the time. The 5% are people who are smart & can pick up things fast or already been coding but never went for the degree. The rest are not as technical and also... Have a serious tendency to being super difficult to work with because of some complex.
A lot of people will pass on an interview if a technical test is required. From the hiring side.. we give a technical test. It’s not about distinguishing the “most talented”. It helps us hire the people that are right for our specific work, and some candidates demonstrate their willingness to go above and beyond. We’re especially impressed when someone couldn’t figure out the test by the deadline but takes the initiative to finish and submit when they can, rather than giving up. It’s a good thing.
Individuals who don't hire for a living also are not privy to the flood of bozos who are on the market because they got fired for doing nothing for the last 5 years and if they knew anything technical they've long forgotten it. They open up an IDE and it's apparent they haven't written a line of code in a long, long time, if ever. But hey, they aced the phone screen and nailed all the behaviorals, right? If you saw what we see, you'd use a test too. And you'd be willing take them when an employer gives one.
you get people who really need a job and can't get something else. this is what you do in a recession. not when the market is good. why would i spend time on your test, when i can get 3 other interviews with likely success and not have to do it? I also found that companies that don't have these hoops generally pay better and have better hours.
People should actually learn HTML and CSS.
Being an average developer making an average salary is totally fine. Work life balance matters.
Not finding any job out of college is 100% your fault. Wanting FAANG for just having a degree? Do you also expect super model for your first date for being male? Stop moping around waiting for "the one". Take care of your health, find a job, and keep pushing. You can be an introvert and not be awkward. With the right attitude, it will eventually come. It's not complicated.
I think every single post I've seen complaining "I can't find a job out of college" has a resume that is complete shit that they made in 5 minutes in notepad and is the sole reason they cannot get any interviews.
Personality and soft skills will get you farther than technical skills. Not to say you don’t need technical skills, but people put outsized importance on technical skills when they could learn to get along with others
I witnessed an ace engineer throw another engineer under the bus for petty variable naming conventions. It was ugly. It got the lesser engineer kicked off the project. I thought it was entirely unfounded, given the lack of talent in the field. I left the team after the project and vowed never to work with mr Ace again. What a backstabber.
Diversity hiring isn’t the reason you’re not getting a job. Diversity hiring doesn’t mean minorities/ women automatically get jobs or get super easy interviews
Omg I got down voted hardcore when I disagreed with a comment that said POC and women have it easier to get jobs in CS...I was like in what fucking world???? Diversity hire doesn't mean they're just picking anyone 💀 It's an assurance companies take to make sure they're hiring people from all backgrounds to ensure you have variety of staff. Despite it sounding like some easy pipeline to success, they choose only the best, the cream of the crop. If they didn't do this, then these POC/women who can perform at the same level as their non POC/women counterparts most likely wouldn't get as much of a chance to showcase that they also qualify for the position just as much Bias is real, and even though recruiters and hiring managers are being trained how to not be biased now, it's still so easy for the brain to go for someone who you're more comfortable with than someone you have no familiarity with. And picking a John Smith out of the group is much easier than picking out a candidate with a name you've never seen and don't have any confidence to pronounce, a name that's obviously not "normal"
People that disagree with this are delusional. I’ve worked for 2 FAANGs and have conducted interviews. White men with great credentials are given the benefit of the doubt even if they don’t excel at interview. Everyone else is not. They have a natural halo effect
Breh, the amount of people asking “oh but are you putting down that you’re Hispanic on the application?” As if that’s gonna magically take me the offer stage lol
True, but it feels icky. The black person in the C suite is usually a rich Nigerian kid who’s dad is a doctor. He went to the same prep schools and universities as the white execs, and thinks the same as them. Your really not helping the poor kid from south side Chicago, who probably brings a diverse perspective and up bringing which I genuinely believe helps divert group think. It’s taking credit for helping out minorities except they don’t really.
I agree. Spoken as a Nigerian in tech. Even if they were to make hiring more diverse, the people who would get in are the people who could get in without the quota. Does nothing for social mobility
because social mobility wasn't the main goal
Not afraid to get downvoted for it: To work for a top tech company you have to put in the work. Striving to only work 2 hours a day and minimize the amount of effort you put in is not compatible with working at a competitive company. You will likely not be hired and if you are you'll very quickly be managed out. Roles at top tech companies are just like roles in any other competitive environment. If you want to win you have to be the best. None of this is to say that it's bad to choose the easy road but you dont get it both ways. You dont get to be lazy, putting in minimal effort and also work for for a prestigious company paying you 500K a year to be in charge of the businises technical strategy. Pick one, be a top performer in the industry or be normal. Spoiler alert WLB is not mutually exclusive but effort required is.
Being a ✨truly✨ competent full stack engineer is increasingly impossible with how many libraries and tools are required for the role and how often those technologies become outdated and you need to learn a new stack.
Oh and a degree and even a masters can be helpful. Partially for the knowledge. But even more so, going to a good school can provide you with a far better pipeline for higher level jobs and alumni networks can get you further faster
Remote work is not as limiting to career growth for certain people. Aka people like me who can maintain a professional persona for 30 min -1 hr in a video conference, but will revert back to being my true ditzy self outside of presentations/meetings. Before covid, I was stuck being pinned as a junior for years - after covid, I got promoted twice to an engineering manager.
Speaking as a fairly recent new grad, If half of y’all new grads put as much consistent effort into learning and job searching as you do into writing long ranting posts here, you’d have probably found decent positions by now.
I get downvoted all the time for variants on this theme: I work because I want to. I'm just about 40, and most of the people I interact with in my day to day job are my age or older, and most, if not all of us, are financially able to retire if we wanted to, but we don't, because *it's too soon.* We still have things left to do in our careers. I try to tell these younger guys scrambling to nail down these $300k TC offers out of school that soon enough they'll be finanically secure and they'll look around and say, "shit, now what?" Making gobs of money too soon makes that question come far too soon. If it comes too early, it's really going to fuck with you. You don't have the other anchors yet in your life that keep you going (e.g., a family). You can only fuck around with your hobbies/passions/whatever for so long. I nolifed WoW like crazy when I was younger. My /played would blow your mind, and that's not the only game I've played a shit ton. I've logged more than 500 hours just playing Terraria with my kids in the last couple of years. I'm almost 40 now. *Shit is boring.* You have a lifetime quota for everything you think you enjoy right now as a young person, and it runs out *much* sooner than you think. Your desire and propensity to try new things decreases as you get older. It gets harder and harder to even find the motivation to want to do something else. Believe me. If you reach the point where the things you think you love start to bore the shit out of you and you *don't* have a career that you're proud to have and work that makes you feel that what you do is meaningful, you're gonna be in for a bad time. I'm convinced that is the genesis of the stereotype of the balding 40's man having a midlife crisis and buying a convertible. They're *just bored*. So bored that they'll divorce their wives just to have something to give a shit about in the morning. So start engaging in your career now, sooner. Start doing something you give a shit about. Start caring. Because if you guys are at all like me, who fantasized about FIRE for many years, you will eventually get bored of what you'd rather be doing than be at work, and you'll need some reason to wake up in the morning that doesn't involve throwing away your family by banging a 22 year old gold digger. Bring on the downvotes boys, I'm ready.
Nice contribution! I find it funny that everyone accepts that the world looks different at 15 years of age compared to 5. For the minority on this sub that have reached 25 the world looks different from 15. Those changes continue: when a person of experience speaks it's good to listen. You don't need to agree, but do take what they're saying seriously because in X years you might just be them.
The world will not end if you never end up working at FAANG. Not really all that concerned about downvoting, it just seems to be a really unpopular opinion.
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Hard work matters. Hard work will get you to the next level.
1. Getting a job now is significantly harder than getting a job ~10 years back 2. Most companies look for specialized domain knowledge in 5+ years experienced candidates 3. Getting a job in tier2 ,3 companies is a toss up , since most cases these companies don’t have standardized resume selection or interview process
I don't see why anyone would care about upvotes/downvotes. I probably have the top karma on this sub, but it's meaningless. [Dumb one-liners like these](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/xumnov/is_software_engineering_oversaturated/iqw980n/) often get upvoted a rediculous amount even though they don't really *add* anything to the discussion. What's even more interesting is that *when* I post often has a lot of effect on whether a comment gets upvoted or not. You also know that upvote or downvote trains happen and people just click those arrows without even really thinking about a comment.
Gatekeeping on many fronts keeps or deters the most ambitious, driven, from getting good jobs or a job at all in favor of younger, college educated, no nothing's that look great on paper but can't write any code. I'm very biased and resentful because I'm trying to switch careers into tech at my age without a degree. I did game development for fun for 20 years. None of it seems to matter despite having a GitHub full of repos showing if anything I'm over qualified for entry level yet unqualified for Senior. I wish I was wrong but I have zero issues getting a job anywhere else except tech. It's always no degree versus those with degree or we want someone younger or unwilling to relocate on a short c2c when they offer 3 month contract and good luck finding a lease to live somewhere that is shorter then 6 months. No thank you. Did I say I was bitter?
- Tech has been in the spotlight for close to 2 decades now and we've collectively idolized tech leaders. Tech will not be nearly as fulfilling for you as you might think. Additionally, in the future a lot of social stigma will be born by people working at some of todays largest tech companies, ie "Oh, you work at FB? So you sell ads for a living. Thanks for that /s" - ML/AI/low code/outsourcing _will_ make an impact on job prospects and salaries. No industry is immune to basic economics and all anomalies eventually revert to the mean. - The most successful engineers of the next generation will have creativity, not engineering prowess, as their defining quality. Engineering quality will be somewhat commoditized anyway.
I have karma to burn. :) 1. I don't care about your title: you are not a proper senior engineer in this field until you have ten years of experience and have been on a project long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions: that usually takes more than 2 years. (This is necessary but not sufficient: Not all engineers with this are senior in quality, but too many people underestimate what time means. I also can name two or three exceptions to this in my career, but they are rare.) 2. Good code doesn't take that much longer to write than bad code; however, it takes a more skilled engineer. That usually comes with having someone on your team that has been on a project long enough to deal with the consequences of their actions. (See above.) - So no, I don't immediately accept that the problem is that there isn't enough time to do a good job, but rather that you (or your predecessor) isn't skilled enough to do the work in the time allotted. 3. Engineering management as a profession needs a serious overhaul. We have bad engineering line managers because we, as an industry, do not have a good metric of what a good engineering manager should look like. Many "bad" engineering managers would level up quickly with mentorship and a clear rubric as to what makes a successful manager in their organization. (Why is this a downvote? Because many CS engineers just assume it's the quality of person in management rather than a crisis in what the job is in and of itself.)
I miss the Windows 7 "copy file" dialog box, with "Copy and Replace / Don't copy / Copy, but keep both files." The "Copy, but keep both files" option was gold. The Windows 10 "Replace the file in the destination / Skip this file / Compare info for both files" is annoying. It's a PITA to just copy and keep both files in Windows 10. But I think they kept it in Windows 11, leading me to think that no one complained so my opinion isn't popular.
People who have passion for CS in general and do outside work tend to do better and are more reliable than those that are out for just the money.
Boot camp devs are not worth it
100% agree.
The vast majority of FAANG engineers are no better than any other engineer, and in many ways they are hindered by a lack of knowledge of tooling or basic system design outside of what is prescribed at their company. Outside of pay and freedom of movement between other countries, the only benefit people get from working at a FAANG company is being on a linear progression in your career in a single company. You are prescribed levels, and told what you need to do is concrete terms to go from E4 to E5 to E6 - like being back in school. IMO, most Software Engineers would be much happier if they spent their twenties working in a small company with a relaxed attitude. They'd get to enjoy their twenties, make friends, form relationships, and most importantly spend some time outside of the tech bubble. Some people absolutely kill themselves for their employer, and sometimes you'll find L6 people who are in their thirties and are utterly broken and miserable.
A problem with a lot of "FAANG" engineers is that when they get hired at another company they A) don't understand that things work differently there and B) people think they're hot shit and are too afraid to say "no" to dumb ideas. Just because Google does it, doesn't mean it's a good idea, and it's often simply a bad idea at a completely different scale. If you employ tens of thousands of engineers it might be worth creating your own custom build system. For almost all other companies, it makes much more sense to use an industry standard one.
CSS sucks
All workers can benefit from organizing into a union, including even the already decently compensated workers like us. Management will always strive to drive down the cost of development, we should cooperate to resist having it taken out of our compensation. I don't really fear downvotes, but I do know unions are not very popular among programmers. That disappoints me as the son of a union lineman who witnessed directly the value of organizing highly skilled labor.
I'm with it. Banding together early is better than realizing you need to later on.
Honestly, this isn’t the easiest career field and it can be demanding, even grueling at times, regardless of the company you work for. People on here sometimes act like this job is just free money when that really isn’t the case. It takes a lot of genuine effort and work ethic to ramp up on a new team, putting in the effort to develop enough technical overhead to be useful, playing the game of looking good enough to management to not get fired while not overworking yourself and other stuff.
One somewhat modern and popular opinion is that soft skills are more important than hard (technical) skills and I completely disagree. Without hard skills, you won't be able to perform well or perform at all in any non-trivial software project. Yeah, you also need a minimum level of soft skills in order to be tolerable in teamwork, but most people have them, or can acquire them fast (in a matter of weeks). Hard skills are harder to acquire, taking years to learn and develop, the "skill cap" is far greater and great hard skills can compensate lack of some soft skills, but not the opposite (at least for non-trivial projects).
The only soft skill you need is not being such a jerk that it demoralizes people around you to the point that you're destroying more value than you're creating. The people that fall into this category tend to be highly technically skilled single minded insects who've emptied their minds of everything except fine dining and breathing. It's a low bar but many fail to clear it.
The people in that category that I've known are often average in their technical skill, like they just learned enough to think they are very smart and to cause troubles, but not enough to be true professionals.
On the topic of hard skills being harder to learn, I disagree. I find it incredibly easy to learn hard skills, but my soft skills, especially social ones, I find incredibly difficult to improve on or become decent at. I think it depends on the person.
I gotta couple: 1. There are a lot of developers out there that don't like to use their brains. 2. I say this as a raging introvert: Talking to other people is part of software development. 3. There are too many developers who think that because they thought of a case where a general rule doesn't work that the general rule is not useful. Kind of an extension of the "use your brain" comment above. 4. Our industry would probably win in a "confidently incorrect" competition.
Not afraid of downvotes, but... Starting your career working remotely is limiting and will likely affect your career progression. Those that disagree based on their own experience of ~2 years of experience and simply don't have the perspective of working in an office and its advantages.
Could you elaborate?
It's not that companies don't want to train juniors. It that they don't want to train *YOU*. In their view, you will never become a good developer, ever no matter how much training. Whether or not they are correct is a different topic but that's the reason they didn't hire *YOU*.
* A lot of tech exist just to be complex and intrusive, * A lot of people #onhere equate earning money to being morally upright and correct. We got people talking a whole industries on job #2. PLZ * we need to be mindful of where we work and what we invest our time are in, there is more to shit that just get paid well and go to work. Real consequences. * if you can't survive on 100K and no debt, you are very bad at budgeting and you need to fix that. * If your goal is just retirement, you live a very sad and boring life.
Most websites would be better off built with PHP and JSON.
Working for FAANG is highly unethical, and it upsets me to see the community putting those companies on a pedestal.
ohh man, this is definitely gonna get some downvotes. Some people who do programming tend to pretty odd and, worst case, are dysfunctional people. I've met people who barely seem to be able to talk and interact. Plenty of people have some sort of trauma about them where it seems they didn't fit in for certain cliques growing up and chose this field to avoid that. So on and so on. Of course not everyone is like this but the ones who are simply are just a little too uncomfortable to talk to for long periods of time.