**** so much this. We have lost a couple good engineers due to money and they even do the last minute offer match thing which is even more scummy

My company’s so stressed about turnover that i think they’d probably give us whatever we wanted within reason - they were battling with some prick for like a year that we were losing to amazon, offered him basically anything he want, then he kinda ****ed us over and bailed and left us with this failing project.

After seeing that i kinda dont blame companies for scumbag behavior, loyalty seems rare on both sides.

I just got an email that the other company I was close to being hired by is looking again for basically the same role. Maybe they should stop filtering by isGamer() - lol.

Even though it's similar to more money, and half the commute, I've spent the last 7 months getting this project going and building relationships with the developers, earning their trust. Maybe I'm an idiot but I just wouldn't leave a situation like that for greener pastures. I'd feel like **** about it.

Within reason of course - 50% raise? - I'm gone. But that's not happening w/o 3 months of aggressive interview prep and a ton of luck to get hired by a FAANG.

Yeah I once left a job and they asked me to stay and offered 50% more money. I was so ****ing mad. If you'd done that before I quit, I might have agreed to stay longer.

Typically though I don't leave jobs for advancement. What usually happens is that I accumulate more and more responsibility until inevitably and I am barely holding things together and somehow I can't find a way to shed these responsibilities, and so I leave so I can have a vacation for a year.

I feel like this is happening to me right now

OK, that's a bit of an annoying limitation, but shouldn't be a problem. I assume you know, or can guess, that optional parameters are just syntactic sugar. When the C# is transpiled to MSIL, the compiler simply adds explicit parameters to the call.

lol, that did look weird to me but I sort of assumed it must be right. Long time since I used Moq.

It depends on the company too. At one of the big companies I interviewed at, a couple of my friends there said it's easier to get hired at <your current level + 1> than it is to get promoted from within. (that probably applies more to the lower levels than to principal-area levels)

I wonder what goes on in the head of a person who thinks this is a better idea than just paying people more the first time they come to you and say they're unhappy. People can't leave so easily if you stop them from feeling the need to go on a job hunt in the first place.


I don't think I've posted about DBAM since starting, but since I'm now almost two months in: it's great, and I'm really happy with my choice. I think I would have been happy either way (between here versus Interesting Large Private Startup, which probably would have been a more familiar environment), but people always say that going to a BigCo is different and not for everyone, so I'm glad it feels like a good fit.

Everyone I work with is super smart and enjoyable to work with, and they've also been very helpful as I learn my way around projects that are larger in scale than anything I've ever touched before. At the same time, I've been able to contribute a bit in terms of general C++ expertise so it's nice to have moments where I feel like I'm making an impact and not just being a total drag until I get up to speed. And I'm feeling really good about where my career can go from here, whether it's within this company or getting some good experience and going somewhere else eventually.

There’s a lot of reasons for this but FWIW it is more or less a numbers game most of the time. The easier road is to stay put and deal with your current situation. Management counts on this. Also, it is pretty much expected and accepted that less experienced devs will move around a bit.


Given the hiring process you experienced not surprised that the working environment at that DBAM is good.

From a company's perspective it makes sense to not give raises. If someone gets a raise/promotion, suddenly everyone wants one. If you bring in someone from the outside at their current level + 1, no one asks for more.

Yea I see it here at my company now too. We have brought on some outside senior engineers that have been total duds. Our company has made the promotions harder to achieve ever since the pay standardization yet at the same time, they are willing to lower the hiring bar for seniors outside the company.

I have been shadowing some technical interviews and there has been some huge mismatch in feedback. I keep hearing this even from one of my managers: "Well... he/she is coming from Oracle as a principal with decades of experience, so it makes sense they are not that good at coding, but they probably are really good at system design".

But ummm.. all of our senior engineers are required to code here at our company, so how can you say that?!

You can't just hand-wave at a design meeting and then sit back and let everyone else do the coding. We have one bozo staff engineer that is like that currently. Completely disconnected from our day to day work yet likes to armchair quarterback while we are doing the dirty work.

My boss kinda does that. But he’s usually right

Oracle principal for decades imo:



Unless you need an expert in rent-seeking over over-billing.

Our apps all pretty similar in terms of underlying models. I have some coworkers that go hard in the paint copy/pasting code over and will 95% of the time copy extra or unnecessary code over and **** up namespaces and the like and their code is broken 100% of the time. This is epic though:

lead dev - can you write some tests for x

2 days later

coworker - I couldn’t find any tests like that in our other apps.

/ end of response /

Hahahahahahahhahaa

I can see the copypasta thing, but holy **** at "I couldn't find any test like that in our apps"

WAT

i can imagine that being my internal dialogue when i'm learning a new language/testing framework and being annoyed by the 100% test coverage nazi, but to say that out loud...

I don't think it's not wanting to write the test because there isn't similar testing elsewhere, it's being too incompetent to write the test because there isn't a similar test elsewhere to copy.

I mean, thats how ppl code. very few ppl have the time to actually learn how to create something. ofc, its all like abstractions and extrapolations and similarities. so there likely is some tests out there that do some or most of what he is trying to test. hes just not able to see it and obv cant follow it.

I'm not sure what's going on but I've been really struggling with attention to details lately. Things like making a Setter to set some needed value, but then forgetting to add a call to it. I used to never have focus problems like this. Anyone ever been through similar?

How's your sleep been lately? I've never had issues like that but my attention span dwindles when I don't get enough good sleep.

Yup sleep or hungover for me. Amazing how much just a little less sleep crushes you the older you get

Meh, I'm older than the hills and sure sleeping well is good for concentration, but I don't notice any difference now than compared to back in the day.

Hmmm duh it's probably sleep. I have a 1.5 year old at home and she's been waking up every night at like 1am lately.

Ok I need some advice about my job please, and let me preface it by saying "just leave" is not an option I'll really accept at this point so if you find yourself thinking that, you don't need to say it, I know it's gonna be the piece of advice handed to me. I'm looking for other solutions.

I mentioned before that we hired a proper product manager. Man I was so stoked about it - he had over 15 years experience with a lot of large companies and had done project management before so he spoke my language and knew exactly what I was missing and we decided last week we were gonna work closely together to get our organization into a good state.

Sweet. Well, unfortunately for the last several weeks I've had a big engineering project I basically had been given 100% responsibility for. During this time, everyone in management moved forward with this current engagement. Let's call it engagement Y. I've been finishing engagement X.

Engagement X was a huge PITA and fraught with problems but I finished it, I'm 100% confident that I delivered the correct thing and that it will give us very few if any problems going forward. Nice. Proud of it a lot.

In the meantime, probably in an attempt by my boss to shield me from taking on too much at once, engagement Y has taken off into a whole direction without me. I have not been involved in any communications whatsoever with this new partner, and not been invited to the daily calls. Ok. I invited myself to a few just so I could try to stay in the loop because I knew the day was probably coming they expected me to be 100% up to speed out of nowhere.

The product manager in this time was pestering me for task lists, project plans, etc. I had to pull him aside and explain to him that my role has largely been that of a developer/lead and less of a traditional PM. That I wear a lot of hats and I haven't been able to stay up to speed with this current thing he's asking for but I'd hurry to wrap up my project and jump on board with engagement Y and do it properly with him. He seemed fine with that.

This was last Thursday. Friday, I go to find him and he isn't there. I ask my boss where the product manager was and he got quiet then took me for a walk.

I guess this guy just bailed and my boss won't tell me why. It doesn't make sense to me - we had talked thursday about meeting on friday and then he's just not there. I know he was not fired - at least I don't think. I think probably some argument happened with my extremely opinionated co-founder and he bailed or something. I don't know. I know my boss emerged from one meeting looking upset and mentioned something about "lots of arguing" so my money's on that one.

Well ****. I was so excited to work with him. Now I don't know what to do. Luckily before he left, he convinced the people in charge that we need PM software. So I was working to implement that with the product manager, but now he's gone. Now of course they want me 100% up to speed on engagement Y and I am not, and how could I be? How could I possibly be up to date on this?

So, today I told the CEO and all the higher ups that I would continue this work but I am completely out of the loop on this project and it's not really my fault. I asked to be CC'd on all critical communications and I need invites to all the calls from now on. They said ok.

I still need to talk to them tomorrow though about what they actually want from me. Right now I don't have the tools, the infrastructure, or the political goodwill to do my actual job. Not only this, the CEO and my boss don't really seem to know what project management really is. If you ask my boss what I do, he would say "He runs the sprints" (we really dont have real sprints or anything remotely comparable to agile). I tried giving the CEO and my boss some literature and forwarded them various PM books I'd been reading but I know they probably didn't read them.

So my conundrum now is this - I am meeting with them tomorrow to talk about my role, what it's function will be in the company, and how they want me to proceed from now on. MY thing is that every PM thing I do is absolutely miserable and I dont have anything remotely resembling the organizational support to perform my job at a level I'm okay with. It makes me miserable to perform at a sub-par level (by my own standards, not theirs). I do not want to be miserable anymore.

At the same time, if I did have that support, I don't know that I still wouldn't be miserable. I like writing scripts and doing dev ops-y things sometimes because I know I can do it. So I'm almost wanting to suggest they hire a real PM with experience, they relegate me to mostly engineering tasks, and then I can help the new PM transition.

is this suicidal? I can also take the other path, getting more org. support and spending full time managing, but I honestly don't know if it's possible and I'm too inexperienced to know exactly what I need to do right now to turn things around. The CEO REALLY wants me in the management role because he thinks I am good at seeing the entire picture. I agree with him but this just isn't sustainable for me.

Only advice I would give is exactly what you don’t want to hear so I guess I’ll just wish you good luck. Seems like a ****ed situation.