@suzzer - what you are experiencing is pretty standard actually. I agree it is like totally fckd up. Think some of the recruiters are looking for H1-Bs specifically?

Nah they're all just run out of Indian call centers. They match one word on your resume to a job and reach out. Doesn't matter where the job is. I have Java on my resume so most of the ones I get from these spam recruiters are Java jobs.

Yeah, I did, although I did actually have three jobs offers. I don't think there is anything too complicated. Ask for more money. If they say no, say that you are willing to work there for what they offered even though it is lower because {insert bull****}, but you hope they will consider you paying more later on after you prove yourself valuable.

Also, are you sure working through recruiters is really necessary? It probably hurts your ability to negotiate for more money if they have to pay a recruiter as well.

I have only negotiated up on contract to hire, and it was basically by telling them I wasn't interested at all at the lower price and being able to walk away.

My buddy was unable to get higher than 55/hr for a 6 month contract to hire, but then somehow negotiated 120k full time after the 6 months so shrug to all of it

I negotiated $10k over my offer for my last job

When I used to do contract work on the side, I negotiated a huge effective increase for myself when the company got bought. About 50% per hour over what I'd been paid before, and a minimum payment per week regardless of how many hours I'd worked.

This is accurate I think from my experience.

I guess I just run real bad on being able to negotiate upward.

I only got a bunch of extra worthless shares.

I didn't negotiate for my last job I just named a number that was 50% higher than my last job at the same level (lead engineer) and after a long pause the recruiter said "yeah we can see our way to that".

Did you see the recruiter and your new manager high five after that?

In 2006 I quit my job to play online poker. A year later I went busto and started looking for a job. At the time I had 3 choices to choose from:

• $60/hr gig with my old job
• $100k with a small consultancy that does web-apps for medium sized clients
• $95k (I think) with a travel startup in Manhattan Beach (super close to me)

I chose door #2, which was ok but super boring. I got laid off when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and they lost all their clients (played poker for 2 more years then got my most-recent job).

What I'm now stressing about is I wonder if door #3 was TripAdvisor? I had never heard of the company. They really wanted me because I "hacked" a whiteboard problem about random results by basically doing myHashMap.keys() (in Java). The manager thought that was the coolest thing ever and wanted to hire me on the spot. Which is funny because it's not even random. The whiteboard giveth the whiteboard taketh away.

Now I have to figure out where I stored old emails from 2007 to see if it was TripAdvisor and I'd be a millionaire by now. Maybe I don't want to know, like those DNA tests for incurable late life diseases.

suzzer, we PM'd about the job I just moved to Orange County for where I countered $15k higher in salary and $15k/yr more in RSUs and they accepted pretty quickly. It can definitely be done, and I would suspect most employers expect you to negotiate up the initial offer.

Well I'm about to try to get $5/hr more from a gig that I was pretty much offered 5 minutes after the interview and really wants me. And I have to agree to accept if they offer it (which means nothing of course - but I don't want to break that). We'll see how it goes.

I don't think I'd ever make an offer where I'd agree to snap accept if they match unless I was really far along in the job search and had basically already decided to go with the company either way.

At the very least I'd be asking for a really high number before saying I'd accept if they agreed to it.

I'm pretty close with the university. It's a cool opportunity to be the microservice architect from the ground up (all in AWS). Also - they're the only actual offer I have in hand. So they have that going for them.

FWIW - I've had a lot of soul searching about that interview yesterday with greybeard. It was obvious he didn't fit in at that company. I'm willing to bet that despite his amazing technical expertise, they regret hiring him. My big revelation is that everyone's worst fear in my job interviews is that that's what I'll become if they hire me.

And you know what? On my worst days it probably is. It's pretty freaking hard to do this job for 20+ years and not become a bitter old crank. You really have to lean against it.

But big companies have a ton of bitter old cranks. So you fit right in. You can even be the 3rd most grumpy "greybeard" in the office, and get a big win out of not being as bad as old Bob.

how the hell did you go busto at online poker in 2006 ?

2007 - I was playing on Stars (not Party) and I sucked.

Rusty, I'm sure pycharm is great, but I don't think it would benefit me. I don't have extensive python experience, but as a Rails developer, I find:

Not useful:
* Aside from critical sections of code, I'm not big fan on automated testing. But even then, I'm able to choose which specific tests to run and see which ones fails.
* If I need to debug, I just print the value in question (proper Rails way is using binding.pry), query the database or I write a CSV file
* Emulated vim. I've used an emulated version of vim in QtCreator for C++ and vim for windows, and they're not the same, especially without a tiling manager

Might be useful:
* Navigating to where a function is defined is useful if you're new to project, but I'm familiar with mine. Even if I'm unsure, using `git grep` (or my 2-character alias `gg`) is sufficient
* Changing function names is nice and safe, but doesn't happen often enough. Also `git grep` or `sed` is usually sufficient

Useful:
* Managing imports. I can't imagine how annoying manually managing imports would be in Java, so I assume python would be the same. Luckily, you don't have to worry about this in Rails.
* Autocomplete. Vim has some autocomplete addons, but they don't feel the same as Eclipse's


Personally, I like to be surrounded by nicely tiled terminals (i3). I can see code side-by-side, run git commands on any random terminal, go to any terminal or workspace without having to touch the mouse, and use real vim.

You mean implementing it right? It's actually has a pretty simple, but interesting solution. Curious what others here come up with if they care to think about it.

It was basically like "randomly pick these things". So I made a hash and called .keys() on it (or whatever the Java command for keys() is - I forget).

It's not remotely random, but it could work in a pinch for one iteration.

You probably should spend some time at least evaluating a proper debugger even if it's not inside an IDE. It can be a pain to get setup on a project, but there are occasionally those times where a debugger crushes prints in productivity.

I don't know about vim keybindings because I'm an old emacs users (pycharm is about 90% of the way there, they don't have some stuff I really like from emacs, but they have some other stuff that gets the job done)

The windows tile just fine. I have screens big enough to have the horizontal space divided into 3, so I can either have 3 full height panes or I can split some of those if required. I have 2 monitors so I can see a lot of code at once (although I tend to use the 2nd monitor for chat windows, log windows, etc)

Most of the other stuff I mentioned can be handled in other ways. But that's the "I" in IDE. I know where my functions are too, but being able to just jump to them instead of opening a file, searching for the fn name, etc, is really nice. 1 second vs 10s and if you go git grep for it, probably 30s. Also it'll jump into library/package code which is also nice - I spend less time lookup up docs and more time just looking at the function I'm calling

Nothing beats IDE instant compile checking and auto-complete in compiled languages imo. Or does VIM do that now?

It always cracks me up how every time I need to find my iPhone I have to go through 3 or 4 Apple web pages that tell me how great Find my iPhone is before I find one that links to the actual product.