When you do receive an offer letter from a company would you normally expect it to come with an expiration date and what would you expect that to be?

Also this article about Netflix's company culture is bananas: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netf...nks-1540497174

(WSJ is super paywalled but you can find ways around it, usually googling a quote from the article and clicking that link or visiting it from twitter)

And yet...

Offer letter expiration is fairly normal. Amount of time varies pretty widely. I've seen anything from a few days to two weeks. It is often a constraint that you can set yourself by letting them know where you are in the process with other companies and when you expect to have made a decision.

Have you or anyone you know experienced a negative reaction by stating something to the effect of
I feel that any company that would be pushy when it comes to accepting an offer with them is just giving you a preview of what it would be like to work there [pushy attitude].

Yes. Smaller companies can't match the FAANGs dollar for dollar, so they try to get themselves to believe that they all work there because their culture is super awesome and that they only want people who are similarly gung-ho about joining that particular company as a sort of defensive mechanism, so they don't like it when you shop around because they can't win the $ game. With FAANG it's just business. You kinda need to lead them on if your recruiter is being pushy about the timeframe.

Also, I would never generalize about a company based on anything their recruiter does. Those guys are hired for being sociopathic mercenaries who have the ability to get warm bodies in the door, and the normal people who work at the company close their eyes to how the sausage is made.

Ignore it. Only reason it will actually apply is if they're a small company and they already hired for the one opening they had. If they went through the trouble of bringing you in for an interview and giving you an offer, they're not going to rescind the offer... what, out of spite? Because rules are rules?

seriously people, this is 2018 and it's a crazy seller's market. be like erlich bachmann and put your dick on the table.

Yup - I'm there. Especially in the morning. It's just a big blur.

goofy, if you haven't mentioned the situation to your recruiter you should. Just tell him the truth - that you thought the interview went well, except it went long and you were a little ragged in the last segment. He will know the best way to communicate that to Bay Area Mega Company.

agree. recruiter wants to do that which maximizes the odds of you getting and accepting an offer.

Yes, and also I had some pretty hilarious push back once when I said "I'm going to get paid a bonus in a month, I won't quit my job until that's paid"

They basically said "we all made sacrifices to work here, check back when you're ready and we'll see if we still have a position for you"

OK but we're talking about like new car money here.

I think there's a good counterargument for this: it's a tainted data point. If 95+% of the engineers they hire are done so based on 5 interviews, they have no idea how disqualifying it is, or should be, if someone does worse on a 6th interview. They don't have an accurate sample size to judge that, and, tons of engineers who work there now could theoretically have been disqualified if they had been given a 6th interview that was used to judge their candidacy.

goofy - 95% of the interview is based on looking the part and not totally blowing it.

No one is going to penalize you for struggling a little on a 6th question - especially if you let your recruiter know. There's absolute no harm in telling him you thought you nailed it but maybe were a little tired and not expecting a 6th question.

Take care not to paint it as something wrong that the hiring company did. That won't go over well.

Several times I've been stuck on something and written up a long post to ask a question, but I've been pretty careful when doing it not to look stupid here and figured it out just before hitting post.

So, thanks.

Same here. Many many times on this and other venues. The question writeup is a powerful process that triggers all kinds of ideas.

Speaking of - on one one of my stack overflow meltdown issues - turns out I was wrong! Lol. Of course SO never figured it out because only the rules matter and being wrong or right is irrelevant. Still - time to just delete that account and start over.

FWIW this is the issue. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/messag...=873414#873414

SO sounds like OOT back in the [censored] days.

Btw I consider this thread a huge ace in the hole to my career. I can ask a question about pretty much any programming topic, except maybe stuff like COBOL, and get thoughtful responses from people I know are strong in their fields. You can't beat that.

Just out of curiosity - any COBOL programmers here?

Look at the amazing bash scripting discussion that we just had. You can't find anything remotely that useful by googling.

I actually made a point to show this thread to my new coworkers so they wouldn't think I'm just surfing the internet if I bring it up. And of course that also indemnifies me for all the other times they see me arguing in the Politics forum.

100x worse.

Think 2p2 - if users had to earn privileges for doing just about anything, users were routinely banned from features with no explanation of what they did wrong, About the Forums was the most trafficked forum on the site, most regs were obsessed with earning points, users with enough points could edit or delete your posts anytime they want, posts that the mods don't like were marked as "duplicate" for some spurious reason and automatically deleted in 7 days, and a bunch of other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head right now.

Bluefeet is/was a COBOL programmer. Last time I talked to him was probably 5 years ago. Don't know if his phone number is the same.

article really makes netflix look like a crazy hell hole. thing is, in that very article it also says that the national average for firing workers is 1.2% and netflix is at a whopping 1.8%. so is it really that bad?

and oh man the comments are insane. I guess netflix is some crazy anti-capitalist orwellian company.

I think I read something similar about amazon's workculture. It seems so paradoxical. Companies cry and cry about how hard it is to hire quality engineers, then they have this culture of firing at the drop of a hat, instead of actively working with people to improve.

but in that very article it says that they only fire 1.8% of employees while the national average is 1.2%. so it doesnt really make sense.

and given their compensation, they really dont have trouble attracting dev talent at leasst.

1.2% of what? The workforce per year? Because if that's the case I think that has to include a lot of big places that just routinely fire people like Netflix does, bringing up the average.

I've been working in this industry for 20 years. I can think of 2 people in that time period who were straight up fired. Maybe 30-40 were laid off (which I don't even think counts?). Average company size of 100-200, let's just say 100, so that would be 20000 employee-years, 1.2% would be 240 firings to make the national average.

Ya I really don't know. Would need to re-read the article.

And is also possible that a lot of the ppl they "let go" ate not technically fired so they don't fit that stat.

But there just seem to be some glaring contradictions in that article.

One thing that many people have told me about software engineering jobs is that they had never seen someone get fired. It's just about getting the job and then you're essentially set. Ime it's pretty much true.

So at the risk of sounding toxic a place with some fear of letting you go seems like a solid improvement over the industry average. You should never feel bad for the company if you leave for a better opportunity, and this is why.