I feel like the cycle turned one of making power point presentations of how the product has all the required features, but the overarching story and experience does not feel quite right. And I have been looking for advice on how to convey the importance to polish up the product.
If that's not been your experience, lucky you, but I've witnessed and been involved first hand in my share of expensive failures that I don't particularly want to repeat.
You may have confused Google with Yahoo?
Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers. Makes sense from their perspective, nobody wants to deal with other peoples problems, but we can't all just fall into early Googles haha
Anywhere desperate enough to hire based on skill doesn't have the capacity for fun projects
software engineering is the most forgiving middle-class industry when it comes to education credentials and pedigree, and FAANG is even more forgiving than the industry norm.
it's actually kind of amusing that the most desirable SWE jobs are the most lax when it comes to considering your background, while the least desirable SWE jobs are the most strict about requiring specific degrees
you can leetcode your way into most of the major tech companies that people actually want to work for without a degree.
is it unlikely? sure, but the important thing is that it's possible.
think of any other comfortable middle-class career, and how much gatekeeping there is. you can't do some equivalent of leetcode to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a financial professional. you have to pay up and go to school, and it better be a good one. then maybe you'll get a job, but there's no guarantee
> Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers.
Requiring a degree, especially at lower levels, isn't necessarily gatekeeping. I've been on the hiring side at 3 companies and every job listing we've made has had dozens of applicants for one role. Given the choice between two juniors who are otherwise equal(read: no experience), one with a (CS/engineering) degree and one without, why would I ever hire the latter?
If neither can code, neither are getting hired anyhow. I never have to hire a body for that seat. I'm only interested in people who can do the job.
In the incredibly unlikely event that I've got 2 decent coders with no job experience to choose from, and I really can't tell whose code I like better, then I might look at their education.
But to be honest, in that situation, I'm likely to pick the self-taught coder over the one with the degree. All the best coders I know were self-taught, and there's a ton of self-teaching necessary to get up to speed on a new codebase, and also to learn new skills as we change technologies over time. I want someone who needs less hand-holding to learn.
I actually have a degree because I thought I needed one to get a job. (And an initial job-search seem to confirm that.) Later, I got my first job over someone that looked much better on paper because I had better actual skills. My next (aka current) job didn't care about my degree, either. I've been in the industry for about 17 years now, IIRC.
IMO, degrees are a crap-shoot. Some companies might require or prefer them, and others will do the opposite. Everyone should focus on what works best for them instead of catch-all advice like "Go to college".
They are never really "otherwise equal" though. If they are, your interview process sucks.
You seem to imply that when an interview process doesn't suck then all hiring choices are a clear cut win for one of the candidates.
A hiring manager should know which skills the team currently needs.
> You seem to imply that when an interview process doesn't suck then all hiring choices are a clear cut win for one of the candidates.
Yes, this is exactly what I implied in my previous comment. Do one more round of interviews (asking different kind of questions), if you _really_ can't decide.
The engineer who can come up with the biggest number, wins.
We follow SAFe agile and do our innovation work in IP sprint at the end of PI. Of course half of the IP sprint is dedicated to planning for the next PI. :-)
I will leave it up to you to form an opinion….
IP: Innovation and Planning
PI: Program Increment
Your sentence about salaries resonates; the Google I joined had a lot of folks for whom the salaries were a nice side-effect for a job they were intrinsically motivated for, the Google I left seemed to have many unhappy people that were fearful of leaving that salary behind.
This is when a Google employee told Wired the company needed to start focusing more on gathering information about people.
I wonder how much this used to apply to the Valley as a whole.
As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane.
It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well).
The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well).
I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money.
“other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism.
Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”).
I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it.
So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.
It is allowing me to play with UX, and that’s something I enjoy.
I'd suggest looking at my HN handle, but here's one:
The bit about finding ones "tribe". Yes, it happens for us engineers, when there are many smart people in "the room". I would not value it over finding purpose though. Purpose in technical perspective, as well as ethical perspective. There is a lot of feeling alone for many of us, because most of us cannot be around similar minded people a lot. What makes me feel more alone though is, when I meet bright people, who do not care about the ethical aspects of their work or hobbies. So personally, I do not think I would "find my tribe" in a FANG or similar company. I highly doubt it even, no matter how smart people there are.
Interesting way of putting it. And it also jives with the fact that Google+ always looked half-baked even from a pure UX perspective, and is now dead altogether. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that Google leadership should have tried to move in that direction while still meshing with the existing "sense of mission and purpose", not just suppressing it.
And when it materialized and they started to shove Google+ down everybody's throats it was a tipping point for many faithful Google users, too - any trust and good faith that was still there was instantly depleted.
After all these years I still miss this, can't explain exactly why. Maybe it is the nostalgia of the 2006-2008 years when everything seemed still open and doable when it came to things on the web.
the day google reader was shut down was probably one of the saddest i had ever been for a piece of software.
You were a perfect specimen to get exploited by a big corporations. You had knowledge and you were willing to work for the sake of it. That's why we need laws that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. It's scary that you don't even realise that.
They didn’t care about the money is very different from they weren’t paid good money.
I don’t disagree that corporations will exploit you given the opportunity, but software engineering is a very low priority on that list.
I can't believe people defend these companies. Stockholm syndrome?
It's the same as colonisers offering locals tat for their gold.
That's what corporation would say about an employee wanting to be compensated fairly. Such behaviour in the past sparked communist revolutions, which have not ended pretty for the greedy capitalists.
It does, salaries are the single biggest post-revenue capital expenditure for FAANG.
That's after tricksy things that inflate those numbers, such as using a large number of contractors to decrease the employee count. I don't disagree that these companies could afford to pay more, but not like a ton more. Like, if they decided to put all profit toward workers, it would probably result in like...doubled salaries, which is a lot, but calling it a pittance is a reach.
There's all kinds of valid stuff to discuss in terms of companies paying people in weird ways: the abuse of non-engineers and especially vendors. The weird rules about locale-based pay. This one is weird mostly because the data doesn't bear you out as much as you seem to think it does. Especially when things like improving the conditions of TVCs and making them FTEs will further reduce that profit per employee margin (I believe it would put the profit per employee below 200K for all the companies I mentioned).
So like presuming that these companies start to treat the second-class people better, you're looking at a 20-30% raise for the swes. That's nice, don't get me wrong, but its not anything like the abuse you're making it out to be.
If you take this idea, and apply it to say McDonalds, the ratio of compensation for a worker vs. overall profit is much lower than tech companies. Take your soap box and apply it there vs. trying to rescue upper middle class workers with health insurance, houses, and retirement savings.