That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. This is my first "new" job after being at the same place since college, so not a lot of experience interviewing for a senior position.

Like, just make **** up?

Obviously in that situation you have to be willing to live with the consequences if they call your bluff.

In my case I actually have multiple offers, plus current employment.

I suppose you could, depending on the industry and city, it's unlikely they are going to follow up and check.

It would suck if the said, sorry we can't have fun at Y and rescinded their offer though.

Maybe I'm being naive but yeah of course you can make stuff up, there's no requirement to be at all honest in haggling really? You don't need to even state where you have other offers, and of course those offers may not be real. The benefit of actually having other offers or actually earning a decent wage currently is you can bluff more freely / more believably, since you have backup options. It's a negotiation, not like a loan application where BSing your current income would be fraud. Right?

I think the ‘trick’ here is to not offer ultimatums or final offers. If you say things like I’m getting offered X at Y but I really prefer you guys but I need to pay off student loans so I’m having a hard time making a decision.

The point being to make it clear you have other options, give real problems you’re facing, but don’t back yourself into a corner.

The other good advice I like is to be flexible and have multiple things you’re willing to negotiate on: pay, vacation time, equity, things like that.

I got extra vacation time once by talking about how I wanted to match what my wife had (all true).

Edit: Also agree with what Dave wrote.

So one of the companies just emailed me and said they decided not to make an offer, they are looking for someone with more experience as it is a very technical role and I would be the first person on the team. I know I nailed all the interview questions, and I am pretty sure that personality wise I was a good fit, so I think they are being truthful.

I wish I could ask them why in the **** they made me take 2 days off of work and 3 days away from my family to fly halfway across the country and interview if they knew they wanted someone with more experience, it says right on my damn resume I have only been out of school 3.5 years. Of course, I don't want to burn any bridges so I just thanked them for the opportunity.

I'm actually a bit relieved because I got some weird vibes from the employees at that company anyways.

Other company called and said they are definitely moving forward and to expect an offer tomorrow, which also doesn't surprise me as the director is my old manager and most of the leads are people I worked with in my current job.

I think I am still in a good negotiating position because I have a good job now, so it's not like I have to worry about them pulling the offer if I try to negotiate.

Cliffs:
What I thought was going to be multiple offers turns out to be only 1
Other company wanted someone with more exp (why interview me then)
Still in good negotiating position due to having good job already

A classic example of something that is both incredibly common and to me, completely unacceptable.

KatoKrazy,

Where are you thinking about moving to for this offer?

Orange County

Other job was in San Jose.

Nice! Great place to start your family!

Kato, the company was probably being ****ty and taking a chance interviewing someone with borderline experience that they were going to have a really high bar to hire. It’s not that they wouldn’t hire you with your resume, it would just be rare.

I think this is still a ****ty thing to do. I think it’s mostly ok for a phone screen type interview since resumes are such bad representations of people but it’s pretty crappy for an in person with travel.

Honest feedback isn’t a binary thing either. You probably didn’t do as well as you thought on the interview (see reasons listed above - including ****ty interview proceeses) and they gave you the easy part of the feedback for why they didn’t hire you.

OC is great and the cost of living isnt anywhere near what it is in silicon valley.

Hi all,

This is just a general career question that I wanted to get some advice on.

I am moving to the NYC area in a couple of years and trying to get decide what sort of job I should try to get there.

I was a regular run of the mill programmer a year ago. I spent the first two years of my career at a web development shop writing classic ASP, spent the next few years at a medium size company doing VB.NET, and then 5 years writing mostly server side Java in a Fortune 100 company. I am a decent programmer who worked my way up to Senior level.

About a year ago, I moved to a job within the same company. I thought it would be programming, but it turns out its more of using a third party tool. I work on the IAM team and we use a tool called Sailpoint. It is pretty easy to use and it turns out my Java dev experience served me very well. I have quickly become really good with it. I have also learned some of the other technologies around IAM.

But I am trying to plan the next couple of years. In looking at IAM jobs in the NYC area, it seems they are pretty limited. But these jobs seem to go mostly unfilled so I am guessing there is not a lot of supply.

If I switch back to studying Java development, there would be more opportunities but I am pretty rusty in that and would need to get up to speed on the latest Java 9 and 10 stuff as well as probably improve some of my front-end development.

I guess the core of the question is this: Is anyone familiar with the job market enough to know if there are enough IAM jobs for me to apply for at a senior level? If so, how does jobs pay compare to a standard Java dev job?

I'm sure you all see it coming but..

Sorry. It is Identity Access and Management. It is part of Information Security at most large companies.

There's probably some truth to that.

I will give the director props, I received an unprovoked personal email from him today assuring me that it had nothing to do with my abilities and that I am well further along than the vast majority of engineers with my experience level, but that some of the architects convinced him that they need someone like me with three times as much experience.

I think it's a bit short sighted to let a good engineer with experience in the area you are building a team for to get away just because you haven't found the team lead yet, but that just shows the flaws in the hiring process.

I was leaning towards taking the OC job anyway if the compensation is enough, it seemed like a better fit (plus it doesn't hurt I can be within a 20-30 minute drive of work, Commerce, Bike, and Hawaiian Gardens if I live right off the 5 in Orange).

Having spent 12 of the last 18 months looking for work with a weird resume I'd say do both. Get your straight developer skills back in shape so you can apply to more positions. Especially if your IAM experience is more tool based than general knowledge (I don't even know if that's a thing though).

This to me is a red flag that the architects have long stopped coding and basically need a senior-lead-level developer to turn all their brilliant powerpoints into reality.

Having been a software architect for the last two years - I'm on the fence about whether the position should even exist. If you claim to be a software architect, but can't code a good reference implementation or internal framework - you're an overall detriment to the company imo.


Architect: "Hey when are you going to be done with this prototype framework that I'm going to instantly bill as a mature turnkey isoptropic solution?"

Me: "Do you mean isomorphic?"

A: "Yeah that." (note this actually happened)

Me: "Please don't sell it as that. I need to be there through a real implementation - into production. This is just a basic, skeletal start based on everything I currently know about requirements. I don't want to bloat it with a million bells and whistles that will never be used."

A (thinking): "Not my problem, I don't have to implement it. If that part fails I can just blame the engineers. But I can still take credit if it somehow works - even in name only. It's a freeroll."

A (actually saying): "Sure of course." (does the opposite)

A: "Oh yeah it needs websockets."

Me: "Why? We have no conceivable use case for websockets. We literally can use straight http form submits for most of the use cases we've dreamed up so far, and Ajax submits for the rest."

A: (Throws minor tantrum)

Me: "Is this just because it will look cool on your powerpoint slide?"

A: "..."

I don't get the idea of architects at all. I have never worked with any that seem to be contributing value beyond "I'll explain this to you on a call" I mean great you've parked yourself on top of this stack that only you understand but just having you around doesn't make things get done and certainly doesn't justify your salary.

I think it makes sense when you are building a physical product with hardware and firmware. Someone has to have the vision of what it is that is going to be built.

Yeah when there's a physical barrier that can't be undone it makes a lot more sense - like a system architect.

For a software architect that could include purchasing software or deciding on open-source packages to use. But they should also be able to create a working reference implementation which might have the beginnings of an internal framework. The problem with my company, was that despite lip-service to the contrary, at this point the architect was expected to "throw it over the wall" to the implementation team.

It was unclear how much engagement the architecture teams were supposed to have after this point. But since they bill at a high rate and fall under a different silo than the implementation team - that amount ended up being about zero. If the implementation teams had questions or wanted to make a major change, they were supposed to loop the architect back in. Well define "major", then throw in that the architecture team had no real enforcement powers and the implementation teams were already working to make an impossible deadline.

The kicker is that there were incentives for both sides to say the system worked, and we were contributing mightily to the ultimate production sites. Hence why my boss didn't care that nothing we ever built saw the real world. Corporate fun.

Sounds like you actually had a solid read on the situation given the Directors email.

I generally agree with you about letting someone good get away, but you also have to consider that hiring an engineer without a team lead can just be creating a bad situation that ends up with the engineer unhappy and leaving anyway.

I’ve had to turn down a few promising candidates (at the resume review stage) just because we don’t have any extra capacity to properly mentor junior developers (in my area). That’ll change in the future but I think balancing roles is a real thing.

I also don’t get the idea of architects. It seems kind of crazy to me. I’ve never worked at a giant mega-Corp so maybe I’m missing some problems they solve. But even there it feels like it would be better to encourage an environment where people have freedom to try new things (with justification) then have some person far removed from the actual problems and work telling them what to do.