I don't know.

Wait, how do you not know?

I think he's saying he doesn't know whether the low-ball offer was made by the vendor or its client, not that he doesn't know whether he would be working through a vendor or directly for the company.

Ah, that makes sense.

Apple does hire from third party contractors like TekSystems. Most likely Dave was interviewing with the 3rd party rather than Apple.

I'm aware that Apple uses 3rd party vendors. I thought TekSystems was only for bringing talent overseas, or am I thinking of someone else? I didn't deal with TekSystems when I talked to Apple 2 years ago.

Regarding the unnamed company, I don't know if they were using a vendor or if I'd be working direct, so I wouldn't know who I'd be technically working for or who is responsible for the low-ball offer. I was contacted by umpteen recruiters over 12 months, and those that mentioned the pay in the emails gave the same number. I didn't inquire further when the one I spoke to told me the going rate.

Talking to recruiters is a shot in the dark regarding pay. Some say I'm over-charging, some say I'm selling too short, and then you have some that don't LOL at the company for offering below JR-dev wages for extremely technical work.

I think this is a bit of a goalpost shift:

Sure, maybe, if you want to work at the best place to get the best job and get paid the most then get to work coding on the weekends (or maybe don't, since he apparently works at Amazon anyway?). I don't think that applies to "a boutique app firm in downtown Austin".

I think the issue he's talking about is more that every tech company thinks they're special snowflakes that are entitled to hire superstars and treat their interviewees as such (same thing that led to the LOL take home project from Bee Technologies posted a couple days ago).

I've gotten a few jobs from my youtube page, which is kind of funny because I mostly make no attempt to try to make good videos. Most of them have no sound, no description and terrible production values. Almost all of them I threw up there to show one of my friends something. I have no idea how people even found my videos, they all have super low view counts.

ETA: contract jobs

mostly disregard anything posted by me after 10pm obv.

In my interviewing experience, "a boutique app firm in downtown Austin" is synonymous with interviews at 8pm with a full office of people who aren't going home any time soon. Many of those companies have highly demanding work schedules and aren't ashamed to tell you that a normal work day is from 9am to midnight "once in a while. Actually, we've been on crunch for the past 3 months, so, we've been working on Saturday too."

I'd consider having a side project the bare minimum of working in many of those places.

Why would you work for such a mismanaged company?

Yeah I don't get it. I've been working in Austin for 11 years, and in tech for over 20, and I don't even *know* anyone who's worked someplace like that. Whatever place that is, it's a bull**** factory.

but how the hell can those ppl have a side project if they are coding 8-midnight 6 days a week?

It would be hard to know anyone that works like that since they aren't seeing daylight at all.

A response I got for that is onboarding a new customer or something like that, though who knows the real reason. I guess this is why my attitude about free beer, playrooms, and so on is so negative.

I learned to ask about working hours during interviews. Most were surprised that I wasn't willing to work like that.

Edit to add: Victor, I'm saying that having a side project proves that you are at least capable of keeping up, and thus it isn't a surprising prereq in that context.

I'm skeptical that management really makes time for these side projects. Sure you can spend all day Friday at work working on it. But ultimately you still have the same primary project responsibilities. Oh you say you're overworked? Noted. We'll make sure to tell the project manager to assign you less points (LOL points) next sprint. Oh yeah, and we'll also mark "meets expectations" on your next performance review.

At my work they came up with one of these things where we were supposedly an cross-department "tiger team" assembled to be "self-guided" and we could do "whatever we want". As long as it sort of fits in certain parameters.

Unfortunately me and the other web dev picked from our group were already working 60 hours/week on our 1.0 release on a new tech stack. I explained that to the manager who got the unfortunate task of making sure we stayed "self-guided". She said "Well we'll have to see about freeing up some bandwidth". Which was utter bull**** because w/o us the project fails and if the project fails our life sucks.

So we did our best but everyone on the team knew we had no time. Turns out the whole thing was a vanity project of a senior director who used it to pad his resume and jump ship to Amazon. Ooh we came up with some animations. I'm sure he made it sound like some ground-breaking new way to motivate and empower millennials. Lol.

We also had a VP force this horrible "gameifaction" app thing on us for two years, get it featured in a bull**** book, then use it to jump ship to a much better job. The book implied we all loved doing it, when in reality our managers had to browbeat us about it constantly - to do the bare minimum - and we made their lives hell for it. I have a feeling upper management used it to see who had way too much time on their hands.

My buddy (coincidentally, same other web dev from my team that got put on the tiger team) hacked it and gave himself a million points. I was amazed how he took the leap of faith that he could just undo it with a negative number. The second year he did the same thing and couldn't undo it. So there he sits on the leaderboard for days with 10x more points than you can possibly achieve. Big scandal. I think he wound up on probation for it and left soon after. Great success story though! GAMEIFICATION! AWESOME! Motivate your employees to spend 100 hours training to win a cheeseburger.

Anyway I'm sure the whole "work on whatever you want" is actually done right at a few places. But just like "unlimited vacation", I suspect it's bull**** at most places.

Oh yeah lol - my job for the last 2 years has been pretty much "work on whatever you want, or don't, no one cares". It sucks donkey balls. I hate it.

tl;dr - suzzer is skeptical of "10-20% side project" time budgeting. Then goes into corporate shenanigans story time.

My first job has a side project that I'm doing alone. I've spent 40-50 hrs on it and probably 15 of those i've done during work hours, rest nights and weekends.

That seems weird for someone who has barely been there 40-50 hours.

Sometimes I read this thread and have no idea what we're talking about.

Edit: Suzzer, I appreciated the TLDR.

Dave, I stayed late on a Friday at work recently (which is rare since I'm remote) and it was a ton of fun. I really enjoyed the free food and booze and had a good time with people I rarely interact with. There were even people there that didn't drink! And even a kid! It definitely wouldn't be my typical Friday night, but fun nonetheless.

I still find your raging hatred* of free food, booze, and games amusing.


* Yes, I took some poetic license there.

I actually don't think this is true. I can't imagine the "best jobs" give two ****s about outside coding because the "best jobs" generally require a bunch of skills that aren't really exercised in side projects (aside from some rare popular / useful open source type projects).

I think we operate on different time scales

For a second I thought we were working at the same company. But it seems like the term "tiger team" is a known word.

Some of my co-workers got sucked onto that team and they have been working long hours and weekends. I get annoyed with just being on-called; can't imagine myself being pulled into that team.

Unless you are one of the founders or have large equity, putting extra hours like that is a sucker's game.

Yeah in my situation they used the term unofficially for us for a side project. But I think generally it means you're on call for the most high-priority problems. We had Oracle's "Tiger Team" helping us on some mission-critical issue that was costing $millions, and I wouldn't want to be those guys.

Turns out the problem was because we had an ATG hook (aka droplet) that locked out a DB table, replicated on 4 tabs on the same page, which got hit 100s of times/second - when everyone tried to log on at the same time for NFL games. Totally our fault - but the tiger team had to spend a lot of time helping us figure it out.

Nah, I get that. At a prior job, I would go with the crew and eat lunch on Friday. It was a lot of fun since I really liked all of them. Some I shared an office with while others I only saw once during that lunch. This wasn't organized by the company, but from the various workers over hangouts.

In contrast, there was a job where they had "company get togethers," which involved free food at a nice restaurant + lots of wine. While I'd rather eat at McDonald's with friends, I'm what you'd call a "party" drunk, so even though we all hated each other for the most part, alcohol ensures that I'll be your best friend during those few hours. Luckily everyone else was a party drunk, so going in totally hammered and downing another two bottles of wine was the standard play.

A friend / manager is a disaster in the making, and any manager who acts like I should be their drinking buddy gives me pause. I suppose that the long hours is just another consequence of this style of mismanagement, and adding in the free beer and dinner at night is just adding to the problem. This is coming from someone who's been a manager more than a cog, and yes, I'm horrible at management.