lol

I connect with every recruiter that reaches out, so someday I have an arsenal of recruiters to reach out to.

Definitely worth following up! Is that through LinkedIn? Why wouldn't they spell out the word speak though? Haha weird. Let us know if it turns out to be legit or not.

I'm chatting with him tomorrow morning at 10:30am! Will follow up here with what I learn.

Yeah through LinkedIn. And yeah not spelling out speak is quite annoying to me lol

Holy shit!! Nice!

Clearly his time is worth a lot of money, so he can't waste it by spelling words out all the way

It's always finance. This was for a data engineering role at Citadel, out in New York city.

How did the call go? The salary makes slightly more sense in NY since it's like the most expensive place to live but still, that's a lot of cash.

Went fine. Just describing the role, team, business etc. What they'd be looking for and if I'd be interested in going through the application process

Gotta do research on the company, calculate what the compensation would have to be to make up in the COL increase and to justify a move. It's finance in NY so long hours

Here's this to give you a ballpark
Looks like the COL increase is almost entirely in housing.

haha whoops! How did people react?

I thought I was muted! But then the room stopped talking and someone said "Kyle what are you saying about Jesus"

Luckily someone in the room was like "are you finally looking at the relevant transform jobs" and I lied saying "yea there is so much involved" and the guy was like "yeah that was me last week"

But truth is, I was saying it about the progression of this meeting

haha good save 😂

lol i guess. i still feel like a failure though

hahahaha

omg

still have so much growing to do... 🙂

I am surprised things like this don’t happen more often

lol wow @spkaplan think very little of us huh?

Haha, I am just surprised I haven’t done it myself or heard someone in one of my meetings do it

our team is 2nd line of defense. at max i am paged about 2-3 times in the week and on call once a month

I'm primary on call probably twice a year (ish) and it lasts a week. If there are any production issues on the site or in any of our b2b products I have to be the first responder and orchestrate a solution. Sometimes that means restarting a service or fixing something that I'm familiar with and other times it means I have to ping the owners of the product and get them involved if I'm unfamiliar and can't figure it out on my own. I have had wake up in the middle of the night or stop doing what I'm doing before but its not horrible. Usually, the company policy is that if it's not business hours, just put a band-aid on it and we'll figure it out in the morning when we have the right resources.

How about you?

I'm interested in knowing how your oncall works. My team has a ticket queue which the oncall is responsible for managing. Each ticket has a different severity (sev1-sev5), with only sev1 and sev2 tickets resulting in pages. Oncall is expected to go through all the tickets during the work day, but if paged for sev1/sev2 is expected to respond with 15 minutes at any time during their oncall rotation (nights, weekends, etc). Basically no work other than the oncall operations are expected from people when they are oncall.

Is that similar to yours?

We have 7 people in our oncall rotation. So I'm oncall once every 7 weeks.

Ah, that's a bit different than mine. If the production pager goes off and it's noon on a Monday, I might not really need to do anything except monitor the situation because the owner of that product will just chime in right away and pick it up. I can go the whole week without really having any "pager duty" if I'm lucky. I'm also only in charge of responding to pages that result from errors outside our expected thresholds. If people want to file a bug/ticket, that goes through JIRA and ends up on the backlog.

We also used to have to respond to customer complaints and emails sent to help@payscale.com as part of our "consumer" on call rotation and that sucked (and took up more of my time) but we have a dedicated customer support department for that now.

Damn responding to customers directly? That would be awful. Doesn't seem like an engineers job.

Yeah, it was a leftover artifact from when the company was tiny. It wasn't too much work but definitely wasn't my job. I think that task was gone by the time I came back from my internship though. Growing pains I suppose..

It was a lot of "I want to delete my profile" and "my companies name or address has changed". Some companies or schools also want us to take down their page because they don't like the gender or wage stats we display but we are just displaying data we've collected so we aren't legally required to do anything 🤷‍♂️

Our on-call is pretty manageable. We only have 1 online (i.e. realtime path) component that would require immediate attention if it goes down. Thankfully that component is bulletproof (knock on wood). So our on-call mainly consists of fixing failures in our offline components, and assisting our data scientists with experiments. Any of those issues can always wait until daytime hours. We also have a team in Belarus who covers on-call from 10pm to 10am. The main purpose of our on-call as I see it is to prevent other team members from being randomized by things that come up during the spring.

Bulletproof huh...

Just meaning it seems to never have any issues 😉

Not a CS student but happy to get involved if they think it would be valuable

I think you have two options. Considering you work in computer science/tech/software/data area I bet it is likely Amber would be happy to have you get involved in the CS department. She also offered to connect anyone with her equivalent in other departments (e.g. Math department) if you are interested in engaging with the Math department. Let me know what you think.

Is there something specific you guys are working on? I'm already involved in this thing so I think they should be familiar with me? Unless not?

cse.wwu.edu

CS/M Scholars | College of Science & Engineering

Original URL: https://cse.wwu.edu/computer-science/csm-scholars

Nothing specific is decided quite yet. We are currently emailing to determine some first steps. She has suggested various ideas such as student sessions to discuss soft-skills that are important in the industry. I suggested mock interviews, because that is something I found really helpful. Would you like me to send her your name and let her know you are interested? Maybe/hopefully we can collaborate.

Oh yeah, I’m sure they would be happy to have you involved. I can’t imagine why not.

That sounds really helpful for students! Yeah feel free to send my name to her. Would be happy to help

Awesome! I'll send her your name and email address.

Hey @andelink, I have two email addresses for you, gmail and amazon. Which would you prefer I send to her?

gmail please

Thanks! That is what I guessed, but wanted to confirm.

I just pinged my manager asking how I can refer/direct a student to Expedia university recruiting. I will keep you updated.

Thanks man!

Yea we have tons of internship opportunities. I can get them an interview here. Just need a current resume.

Sweet, I'll reach out to him for his resume

Here's Ivan's resume. I'm pretty out of touch with what is expected from student resumes. Any feedback on this?

Ivan Chuprinov - Resume Color.pdf

@andelink Generally looks good to me. Some notes:
• Recommend he puts his projects (assuming they are not from cs classes) on github and link to them. Recruiters would love to see that. And polish the projects if they are in a rough state. This can take some time, but is very valuable.
• The line “Effectively communicating technical information” does not bring much value IMO. Generally, being a mentor implies you can communicate technical information effectively, so I don’t see value in mentioning it specifically.
• Regarding the Tutoring Queue project, I would recommend he mention what value his project brought or what problem it solved.
• If the Micro-Make project was part of a class project, I would not mention it. That is just my preference to not mention projects that everyone who took the same class also did.
• If he worked on any of his out-of-class projects with other students, mention that is was a team project. It will show he can work well with others.

On another note, I am still trying to get my manager to tell me how to refer students to University Recruiting.

@andelink Expedia has already filled all of its 2019 internship positions.

@spkaplan Thanks for the feedback! I will pass this on to Ivan.

Related to internships: how did you guys go about finding internship opportunities?

I got lucky at the wwu job fair in fall. One thing I forgot to mention above is that the Expedia University recruiters recommend he start looking for internships in the fall to early winter. I know that isn’t very helpful now, but hopefully it can help next year.

This is the most recent one I have handy. Might be my most recent one period. I don't think I've written one since I got my job here at PayScale.

Resume11.4.15.pdf

Sweet, thanks for sharing.

• Sounds like you worked at DIS Corp while still finishing your degree?
• When did you start at Payscale? Was it right after graduation?
• Would you say the "current" date on the resume is sometime between Sep 2016 and Dec 2016?
• Did you have a Github projects at the time of graduation? Do you have Github projects now?
• Do you mind if I share this with one of my mentees?

• Yeah, they asked me to stay on part time for my last year
• I interned at PayScale during Summer 2016, went back to school for Fall quarter, graduated in December and started working full time on January 4th 2017. So yeah, right after graduation.
• No, I'm pretty sure this draft of my resume was created on 11/4/15. Either that or I forgot to change the timestamp in the name of the file!
• I have a Github but I never really advertised it. I think it's a good way to advertise yourself though, I just never really made a strong effort. I contributed to a couple projects during school (chess and senior project) but that's about it.
• No, that's fine with me. How many mentees do you have? Also, it's cool that your doing this. Good job giving back 👍

Thanks for the details. I'll pass this onto to my guy.

Two I guess. This last one just messaged me on LinkedIn asking to connect. I like his initiative. We just got off the phone. He's a Math major with a CS minor graduating in a month. No job lined up and it's pretty late to start looking for internships. I told him any extra-curricular work he can demonstrate will help set him apart from other graduates. Doesn't have much so I told him to try to find some Github worthy projects he's worked on and put them on there. He'll be happy to hear you put some school projects on there.

All good stuff! Just advise him not to put any school projects on his Github for courses in which the professor explicitly disallowed it. I seem to remember some professors said they would retroactively fail a student if the student posts the program after the course ended. I am not sure it is possible, but I never wanted to call the bluff.

Consider just interviewing with or consider working for? Two separate things for me. I'd interview with companies I don't care to work for just to get good at interviewing and then I'd interview at the companies I'm interested in.

Companies I'd be interested in working for (in no particular order):
• Netflix
• Uber
• Google
• Airbnb
• Apple
• Maybe Facebook (only for the pay + benefits, fuck everything else about them, and still idk)
• Maybe MSFT
• Maybe Snapchat
• Amazon (if I move I'm more likely to move internally than externally)

I have a copy you can borrow.

I invite you to consider Amazon. If you are interested, let me know and I can refer you.

You hit the nail right on the head, Kyle! I am interested in both “would interview with” and “would work for” 👍 Thanks for your input!

Yeah, those are some obvious candidates as far as good comp goes. I don't really have anything to add. I think the role almost matters more than the company though in terms of job satisfaction. I also have a copy so you can borrow from whoever you happen to see next. Let me know if you want to come check out PayScale.

I'd interview with any of the companies that recruiters reach out to you about. If trying to get a job at one of the bigger tech companies, I'd want my "practice" interview rounds to be at companies that are still known. Some companies with seattle area offices that come to mind are: expedia, payscale, qualtrics, zillow, redfin, tableau, lyft, rover, offerup, chef, niantic, nintendo, blue origin, ebay, t-mobile, dropbox.

The job itself matters most yes, but I'm going to still try to optimize compensation for a while. If you burnout, it'll be easier to get a job at another company if you are coming from a big name.

I am building 2 lists: companies to interview at but not interested in working at… and a list of companies I want to work for. I agree, I want the companies I interview at to be large enough so they are at least somewhat similar to those I want to work at.

Good list of companies. I am definitely missing some of those.

Thanks for the offers guys. I will try to remind one of you to bring the book next time we hangout.

It’s kind of crazy thinking about the prospect of switching jobs 😮

Scary right? Too easy to get comfortable, but I think it's the most important in both our field and our age to continually:
1. Re-evaluate our market worth
2. Keep up with changing/desirable tech and skillsets

You won't get the best offer you can get by staying put at a company and simply work to get promoted there. It is challenging to interview and intimidating to actually seek out a new opportunity when your current one is comfortable. So I admire your efforts and wish you the best

@spkaplan do you care if it’s pdf?

Totally agree and thanks Kyle!

@tiaalexa The pdf would be a great start! I can get the physical copy from someone when we meet next.

let me send it to your personal email

I guess in addition to comp, I find myself interested in companies whose engineering blogs I like. Uber and Airbnb have good ones that come to mind. Might be worth poking around for those when looking at companies

That is a good idea that I haven’t heard mentioned before. Coincidentally, I have spent a bunch of time reading Uber’s engineering blogs about Michelangelo. I love that they make some of their work/findings available to the public.

Yeah their Michelangelo work is awesome. It's great when companies share what they've built internally

The people on Blind talk about leetcode being a big part of interview prep. A fair amount of it is in jest, but still rooted from experience. If I were interviewing I'd leetcode

This thread has good discussion on interviewing and negotiating:

us.teamblind.com

Thank you, blind!

Original URL: https://us.teamblind.com/s/wPaKCDzO

I also recommend these ones as well, which *don't require a Blind account*:
•
• (this one is about Seattle specifically)

Blind

Tech Careers: Google offer | Thank you Blind | AMA

I started heavily using Blind about 3 months ago when I started preparing for my job search.Today I received an offer from Google and I owe Blind a huge thank you for my success, from preparing for the interview to negotiating the offer, I probably w...

Original URL: https://us.teamblind.com/s/rCUrEZE4

Blind

Compensation: Top 5 Paying Tech Companies in Seattle

Aside from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook...who are the top 5?

Original URL: https://us.teamblind.com/s/h7RqKmBM

My manager who got a Principal Scientist offer from Google and then turned it down said he'd spend 2 hours a night with Cracking the Coding Interview and Leetcode while interview prepping

/
At this point I'm just rambling

I have to ask.. why did he turn that down?!

He used it to get Amazon to do a "dive and save" - i.e. told Amazon he had an offer from Google for TC of $X and that for him to stay at Amazon he needed his TC to be increased to at least $Y. Very few people succeed at this at Amazon.

He told me after evaluating the Google offer (which required relocation to California) and Amazon's counter offer that, after taking into account higher cost of living in the Bay Area and the inconvenience of moving his family, the Amazon counteroffer was worth more to him than the Google offer.

Awesome stuff Kyle! I will look through the links more thoroughly tonight.

Cool report! I'll have to take a closer look later but just by glancing at it I'd say that there numbers are slightly higher than ours tend to be which seems pretty standard for our data set and model.

Salesforce!

Boo

They're a big competitor of ours lol, but that's awesome! I'm guessing they'll let you work remotely

I thought I remembered that being the case. I don't know almost anything about the CRM space...lots to learn!

Yeah, the manager was very open to potentially 2 days remote starting mid-2020 and other ex-coworkers I know there, say that Salesforce is generally very open to working from home a majority of the time and maybe close to 100%.

But, the WFH is a minor motivation for me. I am primarily excited, because I will be incredibly junior. I haven’t met anyone on the team yet with less than 5-6 years of experience. I am excited to learn like crazy and soak up as much knowledge from them as possible.

Oh yea that'll be super nice. That is a good thing about joining a well established company/team

It sucks when everyone on your team is in their 20s -.-

Yeah, that is my life right now haha. I love my team members, but everyone has less industry experience than me, so I don't receive much critical feedback on my code and designs.

I feel that struggle

Congrats @spkaplan !!

Thanks @andelink! 😊

Congratulations!

WHOOT

Just 2 more weeks and then 2 weeks off 😂

omg swaggy

Congrats on your unemployment lol

Capitalize "data" under Technical Skills-->Focus section/

I would recommend, for lines that slightly overflow to a new line, to try to fit them onto the previous line. Examples:
• "Supported scientists with feature engineering and ML productionization efforts, as well as business users with engagement metrics and customer behavior analyses. ".
• "Lead on data architecture and pipelines laying the scalable foundation for the org’s personalization-related APIs and ML products, such as"
• "Admin of the data lake (mix of Amazon Redshift and S3/Glue), owning access, data ingress/egress, monitoring, health, and data quality"
• "Owned the GDPR compliance/enforcement of our various data systems, including S3, Redshift, HDFS, DynamoDB, & ElasticSearch"
• "Significantly improved visibility of top-line, bottom-line, inventory, pricing drivers, customer shopping behavior (Share of Wallet, basket-building, etc.) and web traffic results at all levels of the organization (including senior management)"

Overall it looks very solid 👍

IMO, you can remove the words "the org’s" in the first bullet under Data Engineer II section.

You do a very good job of explaining your direct involvement/role in each project.

"customer-grain" --> "customer-gain"?

Thanks for the feedback Sam! In a meeting rn will take a closer look in a couple hours

For sure man!
I really like your resume. It makes it very clear all that you have accomplished. You provided a lot of great detail where detail counts.

If you can get it down to 1 page I think that would be awesome. Maybe reduce from 3 bullets to 2? From what I've read (cracking the coding interview), recruiters spend less than 30 seconds per resume so it's important to keep it as brief as possible so you can be sure they read the important parts.

Jeez 30 seconds is short

I would aim for 1 page for sure. I would first focus on lines that just barely go onto the next line. That will buy you a good amount of space.

Thanks all. FWIW here's the resume I'm sending companies. I've taken maybe 50% of your suggestions here. I trimmed the last part off and I got my latest professional experience section (Data Engineer) to single-line bullet points only. The rest below that I don't care about.

kyle-andelin-resume-20191111.pdf

Looks great!

I avoid doing so. It can be a double-edged sword. Keenin is totally right that it helps them know if they can afford you, but it also can be used against you. If you low-ball yourself, they may make you an offer lower than they otherwise would have. I recommend reversing the question on them by, politely of course 🙂, asking what they consider someone with your skills is worth. This gives you the leverage instead of them and is totally professional.

Yeah, this is what I've seen suggested as well

Hmm that's interesting. I haven't heard that suggestion. Thanks for that!

They talk about it a bit in cracking the coding interview

Minor: be consistent ending bullets with periods or not.

Is it possible to share it (or a copy) as a Google doc so we can highlight and comment right there?

Yeah, I'll get a share link

Thanks!

That link should give you permission to view and comment.

@brandon Got a little carried away 🙂

haha not a problem! Thanks for the feedback!

@brandon Let us know when you're ready for a second go?

Sounds good. I've been picking away at the comments but there's a couple I'm not sure how to address yet. I also need to consolidate a lot now and it's been tough.

No hurry :)

Colsolidation is really tough, especially because you have to try to understand where someone reading your resume is coming from, since they have a very different perspective than you. It is so hard

Yeah, exactly. Putting everything in terms they will understand and value is hard.

Ok, I managed to trim it back down to one page. Bring on round 2 if you're willing!

Oh dang! Congrats on the new gig! And Chicago sounds exciting! Sad to see you go though

Thanks - i’m very excited!! I’ll be visiting quite a bit for the first year. Doing long distance for 6 months until Michael can move

Wow, that's exciting! Congrats! 🎉 Definitely looking forward to seeing you and hearing more about it before you leave.

Shit, that's awesome! That'll be a cool experience! Can't wait to hear more about it

tentative date of a party or gathering is oct 5th!

can’t wait to see you guys before i go!!

Congratsss! 🎊 So glad you got the role you were looking for!

Shit, I'll be gone Oct 5th 😞

NO

Huge congrats man!! Sounds like a very cool job!

CONGRATS BRANDON!!!!

Does this mean you'll have free tech to hand out..?

Thanks guys!

Oh shit dude that's awesome!! Congratulations!

Where is your office located?

Thanks! It's in Redmond. So, I'll need to see how the commute is and might need to make changes if it's unbearable. They have a shuttle that comes to West Seattle though so at least transportation is provided and I'll have wifi on the way to and from work.

Yeah bring a book or something and you’re good! When do you start?

^^
Yea the shuttle seems pretty nice!

Onboarding is supposed to email me tonight or tomorrow about the whole process. I'm going to put my 2 weeks in tomorrow and I'll probably take a week off so I'll probably start in 3 weeks or so.

*Thread Reply:* None

congratulations

Posted using /giphy

In this case you describe, I’d chat with them and do the interview for the interview practice. Should help with confidence. If you don’t get an offer, it will tell you that there are areas you could work on. I’d go all the way to an offer letter if possible. Not sure how that works with smaller companies / students though.

When do you graduate?

Should be next Fall if I've added it all up correctly. The company is FAST, who I'm sure you've all heard of since it seems they like Western. They did say they're looking for people to fill full-time positions, so I'm assuming they're trying to pick people up for next summer and after.

Without a doubt do any interview all the way to an offer letter. It is great practice, and you can always be honest with them when you turn them down, explaing that it isn't the right fit for you.

+1 on everything. Interviews always are great practice. Also, if you do get it- it’d be good leverage to help with negotiating other offers. I guess it’s internships but still good to do

Nope haha

I hate this stuff. So much.

Lol, no, thank goodness

i really enjoy that in school but no, never used

Not unless you want to be a systems/OS developer... even then probably pretty rare 😂

I remember hearing that Google asks bit manipulation questions. Of course, take it with a grain of salt, since every interviewer is different

So many concepts to cover. Can you guys quick/merge/insert/bubble sort off the top of your head?

I know the general idea, but can't do all by hand at the moment, but I did recommend cramming that for interviews, as you mayyy be asked about them.

I am confident with stacks/queues, trees/graphs/tries, and their common algos (bfs, dfs, pre/in/post order traversal, recursive and iterative) but realized I don’t have simple array sorts down. For sure going to squeeze those into my brain.

It sounds like you're in a pretty good position with all that memorized 👍

ha reason why i switched to tpm

jkjk!!! but i only knew that stuff when i was interviewing

i got a lot of oop questions and design pattern stuff

Design is something that you don’t need to grind out whenever you want to interview. Hopefully it’s something you gain with your experience. Like I’m going to do a light review of some design material but it’s mostly just talking about our field/professional work so it’s much more interesting to me than algorithms

I completely agree. I think design questions are the most insightful interview questions.

totally agree, main thing they will ask is what you currently worked on and being able to explain your projects

Oh jeez, it would have to be a lottt. I like visiting the Bay area, but I would have to be paid A LOT to live there.

I think SF is an amazing city, but yeah it would have to be a lot. At least 25% increasing simply for the cost-of-living difference. +10% for CA state income tax. So at least 35-40% bump just to get equal take home income. There may be other tangible differences I’m forgetting about.

And then you’d need it to be worth uprooting your established life here. So I’d probably need a 100% increase in TC.

That is pretty much what I was thinking 😉

I agree, at least 100%

Nice, congrats!

I didn’t interview for either company, so I don’t know how tough they are from firsthand experience. How much have you prepared so far?

lol thanks but don’t congratulate me yet. The hard part is still to come

I was leetcoding for their phone screens which I did early last week. Since then I’ve eased up on the prepping. I still need to prepare for the behavioral and design stuff, as well as do whiteboard practice

It’s hard to say. I would lean towards saying you can do enough preparing before then, but its near impossible to say for sure, since it depends so much on you personally and the companies.

i would have a break in between if you can

Good call. It would be ideal to have time in between to take away and apply any learnings from the first interview

Yeah, I agree. I also want to do fb first because I’d rather do better in the Lyft interview

It's just a real pain in the ass because they are doing the interviews in their Bay Area offices, so I have to fly down for them. A one day interview requires two days off work.

Both are in bay area!? even fb?

Yeah, the interviews are. The job would be in Seattle.

Right, of course, but I am surprised a company as large as fb is making you go to bay area

That is a bummer though

Yeah and time is a factor right now. The later I push out the less likely it will happen before the new year.

The plus side to back-to-back days like this is that it's only one trip down, and less disruption at my current job (which I am running thin on since I just took all of last week off)

Related to interviewing, or in general?

Interviewing. As if you were asked that in an interview. Look for examples of “degree of failure”

I have bigger failures and smaller failures. Wondering if there is an optimal failure to talk about

Ahhh, I see.

Interesting question…

Actually I wonder this about every behavioral question they might ask. With years of experience you can choose from a number of professional experiences/projects - how to choose? Just most recent? Some other criteria? Idk

Related to this question, I'd answer with the one where you learned the most from your failure. Turn it into a positive 😉

Smart Keenin. I like that

I definitely agree with Keenin’s point. If you explain a failure you learned little from, that won’t be much of a story. Additionally, I would bias slightly toward more recent occurrences.

Talk about how a team scenario failed to show the importance of other roles and team dynamics matter so it’s less on your performance.

Hmm to me that seems a bit like deflection and may show an inability to be self-critical. Any good company wouldn’t reject someone because of their failures (within reason). Not owning ones failures (or unable to be self-critical) might be a red flag though. I certainly wouldn’t want to see an interviewee blame someone else and not be able to demonstrate their fault in something.

But who knows, I could be wrong in my thinking

More good ones:

haseeb qureshi

Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer

When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...

Original URL: https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/

haseeb qureshi

How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation

So you know the first 6 rules. You’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation, you’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies, and now it’s time to move into the actual negotiating. ...

Original URL: https://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/

I rarely use my laptop at work but my desktop is Windows too.

Nah I’m gonna pass

Very interesting… my team isn’t the most social. Eng team does weekly chats but EM in my opinion is not the best at prioritizing “getting to know” his team.

My team is relatively anti-social too. That is probably why my manager is trying this out haha

That’s a bummer your manager doesn’t try to get to know the team

Yeah it’s a bummer but the EM and myself share a manager. Starting today we will have a new manager and he seems much more easier to jive with than my previous one.. Hoping it’ll rub off

My last manager was super smart and great at tactical strategy but could not get to know people on a personal level.

I think culture your manager establishes is crucial

We started doing virtual happy hours I think every two weeks. Our daily stand ups were formerly just slack updates but now have switched to VC. We have a meeting tomorrow to talk about extended WFH practices so I imagine more might come out of that

Glad to hear you like the virtual working sessions. idk how much I would like that

That's a lot of time on the phone 😳 Would keep people connected and honest though. We have standup everyday and two "tech review" sessions a week but those all existed prior to WFH. They are just VC now.

Alex Kipman just did an AMA this morning to discuss WFH strategies and one of the things that came out of it was a permanent "water cooler" channel/video chat room where you can go and join a call with other people in the org just to hang out for a bit. We'll see how that goes... not sure I'll ever participate lol

Yeah the water cooler thing isn’t really my style either

GitLab’s Data Team handbook if anyone was curious: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/data-team/

GitLab

Data Team

GitLab Data Team Handbook

Original URL: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/data-team/

I am fortunate enough not to have had any yet. Only a frustrating manager at Expedia

Nice. I hope you never have to.

The senior engineer on my team (my immediate coworker) published a PR that broke ~80% of our tests in this particular project. For reasons I will not get into here, these tests are not run as a part of CI/CD and thus do not block or show up in his PR. Also note that the test failures are isolated to our dev environment. His changes are fine when ran in prod. But if anyone were to pull his changes and then run in dev, the tests would fail.

The fix is one line change, I kid you not. One. Fucking. Line.

But no, he didn't want to update with his PR with an additional commit to fix the problem. He wanted to address it in a subsequent PR. So I just spent literally an hour trying to convey what was wrong here. Literally one whole hour. And it culminated with him dismissing my Slack messages and wanting to hop on a call.

I can't understand if I am at wrong here or if he is at wrong here. But why do I have to fight so hard for the correct thing to be done. Do we push breaking changes? No. Why just why why do I have to work so hard for something so painfully obvious

Maybe I should have let it go? idk, but I feel like that is the wrong thing to do. Even if he was fast to follow-up with a new PR for the fix, someone could pull those changes and then have their tests fail for no reason related to them. Why should we voluntarily let that happen?

Real question: do I bring this up with my manager? This is not the first time something like this has happened. I have lost so much time to this fucking guy being stubborn and wrong. Like fuck

I’m not gonna bring it up with my manager. But when he asks me “how’s brad?” I just have to smile through it. It’s weird. Ugh. Anyways. Sorry for the rant.

I would try and think about how this can not happen through process (proposing an idea in retro) is always a good option or in the team in general.

Maybe approach it as, yes this sucks but this is how we can avoid it. And above all, don’

t throw the guy under the bus

The team will feel the tension. It’ll just be like let’s make sure we don’t let these slips happen and be held accountable

Good suggestions. Process > trust

yep!! this worked well in my team

we had a similar issue

Wow, that is a tough situation. Now that I think about it, I do have more trouble on my new team (with the engineers who have more years of experience) not following the best practices. They focus more on getting the job done and let somethings go by the wayside (e.g. clean code, enough tests, taking the simplest approach, long-term maintainability, etc...). This isn't anything like pushing code that breaks 80% of tests, but it is somewhat similar. That is a great suggestion Tia! I definitely agree with Tia that retro is a good time to bring it up and phrasing it like "how can we improve our processes?".

Yep - our team actually does engineering principle debates and see what we could incorporate within the team and have opportunities to discuss as a group.

It doesn’t have to be this big formal thing, but more of making sure everyone has the same understanding and leveraging different experiences / perspectives.

But that is a tough situation and I’d be very upset / frustrated about it. Every team has these issues, so you’re not alone or wrong to feel the way you do!

I think I just needed to vent and tell someone/anyone about my wasted hour. Maybe I should have let it go? These occasions really make me question whether or not I’m arguing for something unreasonable or my “standards” are too high or something. Makes me feel bad.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I would say bring it up and see if others agree

YES i had one previously that did

Glad to hear I’m not alone lol

OMG YES, my 2nd manager at Expedia did this literally all day every day. She wasn’t technical, and didn’t know anything.

She would turn a 30min meeting into 90min and just ramble

That’s rough lol

I wonder if these folks really think they’re helping when they do this

ugh - I had the WORST grooming session. I love it when the EM rambles nonsense of this doesn’t address the use case - do we want to do this or this or this or this and FINALLY settling on an item (I already pitched) 20 minutes later.

Not my boss but I do not like the EM I partner with

Also my tech leads dont actually take initiative on stuff

Dang Tia it sounds like the leaders around you are lackluster. That's tough to work with, sorry to hear that. As a TPM what do you do here? How do you whip them into shape?

Lazier than ever

Ready to return to the office for catered lunches

My life is slipping

My closet is a mess, laundry undone, body unwashed

I eat broccoli every day for lunch and trail mix the remainder of the day for sustenance

I no longer take pleasure in prior hobbies

Cons:

• no free coffeee


• miss a office chair + standing desk


• sometimes I get lazy and watch tv but more rare


• more meetings being remote

• easy to work out immediately after work (i did this before but still kept on routine and with uncomfortable chair I do this often)


• make my lunch and will take this habit when returning to the office


• listening to more music with lack of people coming to my desk


• more focused and start my days early — full 8 hours actually working

I set rules for myself to avoid some of those things kyle ^^^

1. I shower and dress like I would if I were to go into an office.


2. I carve out 30-45 minutes for lunch and take the full time to cook something and sit down and eat.


3. We have chore responsibility and frequently defined in the house to avoid a queue of dishes, clothes, etc to be washed.

Sometimes we are lazy and not perfect BUT so far it’s helped

Honestly, I'm liking it a lot more than I thought I would. At this point, I don't really want to be expected to commute to the office 5 days a week anymore.

It took some getting used to but I feel like I'm at least as productive at home now compared to when I was in the office, probably more. I work on my own schedule and am less prone to interruptions because all meetings and communications are filtered through Teams (Microsoft's Slack). I'm thankful for the work space and amount of space in general I have at home. I know some people that don't have dedicated places to work at home and this has been harder for them.

I've also adopted some more healthy habits since quarantine started. I take an extended break in the middle of the day to work out and make lunch with Kelli and we are eating out and drinking less than before. I'm working out 6 days a week and it was just hard to make time for that after a commute home from a long day at work.

Now, that being said there are some things I miss about the office. The level of human connection definitely feels dampened but I think it would be a lot worse if my team wasn't as good about using video when meeting with one another. I also miss white boarding. It can be harder to share ideas without being together. I still want to have a desk at work, I just want it to be more normalized to WFH a couple times a week if you want to.

Also, another bonus perk to all of this is we have been spending less money 😄 Less gas money, less prepared food, etc

Great, well-thought-out response! 👏

lol oh boy where to begin….

At Sirqul — I had a really creepy co-worker who told me a story about how he was speaking with his wife on wondering which coworkers were single or not in the office and then mentioned my name because he thought I was single.. He then proceeded to tell me that she asked “why is a women working there”??? and that it was “funny she got offensive”… (yes his legit words) and he laughed it off like isn’t that funny..?

He said this in front of the whole office which was 9 dudes.

At Sirqul — my boss got mad I missed too much work because I had the flu … (I threw up at work) and then awkwardly made me buy my coffee on our 1:1. (we were in line at a cafe)

At Hotwire - I had an extremely lazy and bad engineer who basically fucked up our repo because he couldn’t use git and said his sourcetree was “broken”.

He was the most annoying person to “pair with”.

At Expedia - I had a manager who is now the program lead so we are teammates and she is the type of person who is scattered… pings you on slack for questions like
(New Message) Tia
(New Message) had a question
(New Message) what is x??
(New Message) I need this by (10 minutes later)

She also just adds to anyones plate and wants to standardize everything like a common runbook across application and stuff like that.. She also tries to influence engineering excellence but not an engineer.

Your Sirqul experience sounds like a straight up nightmare...

Your Hotwire experience makes me feel a little better thanks lol

Yeah what a time… this is probably why I went out and drank too much

But now I am more put together

Nice 👏

I also drank a lot at Amazon to cope

Now I am more put together lol

Look at us go 😁

Nope

Same. A friend of mine just shared it with me saying he used it a couple years ago when he was interviewing with 40+ companies. I was surprised (i) by that number of interviews, and (ii) that I had never even heard of it.

Lol cool concept but I do not think I apply with that many places in parallel to make it worth it

It was surprising. He said he interviewed with 43 places, and only got offers from #41,42,43

That sounds exhausting

Thoughts:

• This is cool!


• Before even getting into the content, having a website at all helps distinguish you a bit from those that don’t.


• The MOST valuable thing to an interviewer is to see code you have written for a project. Provide Github links. This gives them the best idea of whether you can build clean/solid software. However, I don’t recommend to include class projects, because everyone did the same project. It is best to highlight projects you did outside of class, on your own volition. As an interviewer, I want to get to your code quickly and look through it. As an interviewer, I will often ask a candidate questions about the code they have written.


• Regarding whether to make the website itself very interactive, etc… I think depends on what kind of role you are going for. If you are looking for a role with a front-end focus, then yes. I have only done backend work myself, so when I interview someone for backend work, I would rather see their code for a project than an interactive website. But ultimately, it depends what kind of role you are interviewing for.

Thanks for the thoughts! For context, I'm graduating this quarter and I've only had a years worth or professional experience at this point. I don't have too much in the terms of personal projects aside from this site; it's my first real personal project. Would you have slightly different recommendations for my situation, or is it just to get some personal projects out as quick as possible? If it is to get them out as quick as possible, are there certain smaller projects (so not a whole self-hosted website from scratch haha) that pack a bigger punch, in your experience?

This is very cool and just including it is going to make your name more memorable so you're on the right track. I think Sam's points were spot on. If the frontend is the focus, it needs to look good. If backend is more of a focus, keep the site simple and make the link to your github really big and bold. 😆

I remember when we were getting ready to graduate Sam had the idea of collaborating on a github project so that we had something to put on our public github that wasn't class work. The project was a console based chess game in Java where the main focus was around object oriented design. It was a cool idea because each chess piece has unique characteristics but can also inherit from a base class. Object oriented design was an important topic to be competent on for the sort of jobs/internships we were looking at.

Also, don't get too worried about "only having 1 year of professional experience" because most of your classmates don't have any. I think I'd encourage you to iterate on your professional experience section some more. I want to see specific languages and frameworks (Java, Spring, JUnit, JavaScript, Groovy, etc) you worked on as well as how you applied them. What are some of the projects and deliverables you have accomplished in your time there? I think that info is more important than the bullets your currently have. This advice goes for your resume as well.

Also, if you are graduating soon I would encourage you to iterate on your resume a bit more and apply to a couple companies just to get an idea of what your options are. Interviewing is a skill on it's own and it's a good idea to get some experience now so you aren't stressed when you get the call from that company that you really want to impress. And you can always say no if you get an offer and aren't interested in the job.

This is a crazy time to be interviewing because you can probably find a bunch of listings for remote jobs that don't even require you to move.

+1 to getting some interviewers done early, so you get some practice in.

I think of interviews like penalty kicks in Soccer. They have nothing to do with soccer, but they can determine the outcome of a game. Interviews have very little in common with being a good software engineer, but they determine whether you get a job as a software engineer. So, it is good to practice interviewing and taking some interviews for practice.

I did mention a lot of the languages and frameworks you mentioned under the technologies section, but that leads to another question, I suppose: is there a better layout to my page to highlight certain aspects? Your other advice is great, I'll try to better capture my experience. A final question, hopefully: since I have a limited amount of time to spend currently, would it be better to work on personal projects to showcase or study and practice for interviews and their puzzling questions?

I just got similar advice from my boss, start applying now and just see what sticks while keeping my eye out for something that actually interests me.

If I had to choose between the two with 3 months left before you graduate, unfortunately I would recommend studying for interviews. There is a huge difference in interview performance between someone who has practiced interviewing for 1-2 months and someone who hasn’t at all. They may be equally good engineers, but one will do better in the interview, which unfortunately is how we determine who to hire.

Of course, if you have the spare time, it would be ideal if you could do both. But if you had to choose only one, I would say interview prep.

Would be good to hear what others think though 🙂

Responding to your earlier question, I would choose a project that focuses on and showcases a specific piece of technology (e.g. web services, REST API, distributed systems, Databases, Spring, Gradle), or programming concept (e.g. object oriented). As Brandon mentioned, we did a command line game of Chess (no fancy interface, etc…), but it demonstrated we could work on a project with others, use Git, use Objected orientied programming.

Yeah, I would put that concepts and technology section at the top (this goes for your resume too). I also think you should probably focus on the resume right now because that is what most companies are going to ask for (even though the site is way cooler). Happy to look that over if you want to post an updated draft of that as well.

I'm with Sam. You have to prioritize the interview prep. The personal project probably isn't going to have as big of an impact. I would suggest reading the first ~100 pages of Cracking the Coding Interview and then leet code, leet code, leet code (this is just what I did last time). You need to write out the problems, talk out loud if you can, and time yourself. Kelli had some window markers that I used instead of a white board and it made a huge difference when I started writing the code out.

Alright, thanks all for the advice! I have an idea of how I should proceed from here now, which is nice haha

It's looking good! I like that you moved education to the bottom. I ended up adding a lot of comments. Some of the questions I want answers to, some are just prompts to make you think, and some are both.

I don't have a vote for the project yet because I need more information. I also think you might be able to get away with more than one of them. Especially if you keep the description brief and have a link to a git repo with a readme.

Yea, I wasn't too sure about including links on a resume. Seems like resumes are usually on paper and a link would be weird... But should I add some?

Yeah, I guess it could go either way but I feel like github links are usually pretty human readable/typable. I guess a link to your github profile would work too.

Also, resumes are actually exchanged mostly digitally these days if you think about it.

Yea, that's fair. I'll make some changes tomorrow, thanks all!

Yea, I wasn't too sure about including links on a resume. Seems like resumes are usually on paper and a link would be weird... But should I add some?

Super late to this. We got talking about job hunting offline. I'll poke around my network and ask about new grad positions. Will let you know.

Looking at this thread for the first time, gonna add my two cents. Sorry in advance for the wall of unorganized text. And these are just my quick thoughts after a first pass through all of this.

Most importantly: I think it's awesome you have all of this content already. Really dope and more than what I could quickly share with people about me and my work. I think there are a couple things could help it be really impressive and polished.

Also I took an edible an hour ago so this is my high feedback.

Quick notes/questions:

• On your website profile (), clearly link to your LinkedIn. On your LinkedIn, clearly link to your website.


• Your profile page is sometimes written in 3rd person and sometimes in 1st person. Should be consistent. My personal preference is 1st person. It's friendlier, more welcoming, imo.


• What is JATAS? Does it stand for something?


• On your resume you mention Graduate Program Monitor website. Can you link to the website? From your description it sounds like it is still live today and used by people.


• I wanna see your code. If there is anything you can move to Github, that'd be super. (The site is driven by... something. Can you just commit and version the site files (and any assets) in a Github repo? Or any of the Matrix stuff?)

For the website....

When I land on your site (either the home page or your profile), I struggle to know what to do / where to go next. I don't design websites, so I don't have concrete suggestions. But the content you want to surface is (i) your profile, and (ii) your Cool Stuff articles/posts. Maybe put your articles on the home page instead of a separate page? Maybe ditch the Cool Stuff page altogether? If you wanna keep that page, consider making it so that doesn't 404 and instead redirects to .

Regardless of whether you keep the page, I would really emphasis that the Cool Stuff write-ups are your own original content/articles. I just thought that Cool Stuff was just random tech stuff you thought was cool. Wasn't clear for me that you wrote them until clicking on the articles. And if am reviewing your job application, I probably wouldn't click on the links if I didn't think you were the author. And do they have dates?

Is it possible to transclude part of the articles in a scrolling news feed type style? So I can peak at the article content without needing to open a new window/tab and then only actually navigate to the article itself when I know I am interested in reading the whole thing.

Speaking of original content: what did you do vs what did Alec Jackson do? On the site design/creation overall as well as what articles? To find the articles written by you, I need to open up every article and check the author. Too difficult.

And honestly I think having a second person on your site as the owner/creator takes away from the focus - you. I just start wondering about what did Alec do here vs what did you do. Too many times I clicked on an article and did not see your name. Even the website - who actually built it or what pieces of it?

I would consider making your own personal website without Alec (or anyone else). You don't even need to design/build it from the ground up. It's about the content on it and showing you have an interest in tech outside of school/work. Actually this might be a good opportunity to get some GitHub action going by using for your site. A clean site can do wonders for engagement and sentiment.

Also! Your Matrix setup and home server and everything is actually usable and something you put together (and wrote about!). Highlight it for sure! I definitely think this is noteworthy. What are your top few things you would want people to see when visiting your site?

Thanks! A bit too much for me to get around to tonight, but I'll definitely come back to this tomorrow!

One thing I'm having a hard time doing is separating our work out because that was just never something this site was really about. It was more born out of curiosity of what we could do and a want to try new things, not with the pure intention of being a representation of us as individuals. Separating the work gets extra difficult when I always had a focus on more of the backend stuff and Alec on the stuff you can actually see, as well as the fact that Alec took more electives that had him write articles, so he also has most of those. The main three things I worked on, besides my personal page, were the Nginx server, the Matrix server, and MariaDB. Bit of a word vomit with no clear question, but I'm having a hard time applying a couple of your points, which I think are valid in a certain context, and I guess I'm just wondering if you have any further insight. The last thing I want is for this site to be a detriment to me in some way.

Hmm yeah, I can see the challenge. I don’t think it would be a detriment in any way. And if thats what the site is built for then that’s fine.

Thinking about how you might tweak things in order to highlight yourself a bit more and make it more digestible in the context of resume review would be a good exercise to do, but completely optional. I’m just approaching this from the context of trying to get a job, which is different from the original intention of the site

You might want to explore how to create a subdomain and "sub-site". You could brush up on your frontend skills since you didn't do that part the first time around and it would allow you to create your own personal site without changing this co-created one. Basically, just a new set of urls/pages that link to each other but not back to the other shared site.

Yea, we already have some stuff like that set up, just not for our personal pages. I ended up just setting up a GitHub Pages site, pretty rudimentary so far tho

Damn nice @tiaalexa that is impressive! I bet you feel great too. I felt great when I was accommodating my London partner timezones by doing weekly syncs at 7:00am LOL

yeah it is so nice and just to be done early… this may change once I potentially switch teams and work with EUR/Seattle 🤷

Every year /year and a half I get the itch. I am getting ready to interview for a new team. For me, I want to change the problem space and people.

I have been most familiar with breaking down monoliths into microservices and now interviewing for data platform teams so I can expand my knowledge in an area I am not familiar .. plus the management will be more focused on my career versus the org looking good

It's common to switch every ~2 years I think. But I think as you become more senior you are expected to stay longer for impact and longer-term projects.

I joined Lyft ~8 months ago and I'm in the process of switching teams now teeth

What is making you switch?

The team I'

whoops

accidentally hit enter

redo

The team I'm joining is the team I was supposed to join when I started at Lyft (team A). I was really excited for their roadmap and the day-to-day technical work. Some shit get moved around and my manager lets me know I'm actually going to be working on this other team (team B; my current team) for a few months and then will switch over to team A. I was under the same manager though - he led both team A and team B. But I never switched back and actually got reorged to a different manager. But now head count has opened up on team A and I'm the person they reached out to first. I got to know that team while working under the same manager and we all get along well. I'm excited to join for real this time and they seem really excited too. Also, the work is just sooooooo much better than what I'm doing now. It's more platform/framework development for the data org itself - rather than being in the data org and writing pipelines using the existing platforms/frameworks. Different skill set and career/growth trajectory and I don't want to miss this opportunity.

So that's why I'm switching even though I haven't been there a year. So they need to get PBP/HR to approve it but I've been assured it won't be a problem 🤞

Also, my current (and primary) teammate don't work well together so I'm looking forward to a change of teammates

ahh got it got it. that's so exciting!!! very cool and happy that you'll be in a better team soon

Thank you! I'm really excited 😁

Props for remembering!

Nope. Gotta get that guap first. Are you?

I am thinking about it, but for the future, not going to make a change anytime soon...like you said, gotta make that guap first

Nice yeah I’ve thought that when I “retire” I will do something like that. Not sure what yet. And nothing grand, but like something more meaningful than our tech jobs. Have any ideas?

I am thinking along the same lines as what you described. Currently, I want to do something related to climate change.

Yes actually. This is a long term idea and not sure how I could actually make this into a profitable business.

But I want to find a way to build a grocery experience that is affordable, sustainable and also can be a market where there is access to goods that support minority owned businesses.

I know a lot going on in that sentence but one day I would love to start a business when I retire or maybe on the side where I can do some good in the world

But I mean I am "bringing the world within reach" so

I love the vision!!

thanks all!

I am in a situation where I have been managing (just TPM role) a team in India and Hungary. We have had 3 people and now one on the way where someone is leaving.

All that left have said it has nothing to do with the team or project. More on uncertainty of travel. This team has all engineers on rotations to build something new.

We don't really have a EM and the PM is about to leave on mat leave. I am trying really hard to find ways to invest in the team.

I have been working with the team to figure out ways of working. Things I am piloting -

No meeting Fridays.
Day Aways 1x a month - full day to just learn something new
Team Games every 3 weeks - 1 hour to play jackbox or some sort of team activity.

I am now adding a check in with each engineer every 2 weeks. This way I can surface any info to leadership to try and keep people happy. The team is full of senior engineers or high performing 2's. Management wants to keep but their current manager within the brand is in India and lots of attrition there.

My question is - would you feel comfortable chatting with your TPM? This is also to just get to know my team more on an individual basis since there is no office to actually chat in and naturally bond

Also I know that I am going WAY outside of my role. But I also lack trust in others right now and I really enjoy the people I work with so I am doing anything I can to keep them happy

I wish I had a TPM and I would love to have regular syncs

Yeah reached out to a few different devs and they say they enjoyed TPM syncs

+1 to No Meeting days

Day Aways seem cool. Wondering does that take the place of No Meeting Friday one week per month? Or does that end up being one week per month where there are two days with no meetings?

Recurring team socials are always hit or miss imo. Can easily become too forced and not as enjoyable, but every 3 weeks might be alright. Depends on the team I think

Day Away replaces a No Meeting Friday - risky putting on a Friday but we shall see.

Yeah team socials can be hit or miss. Giving it 3 weeks but these folks really miss social time. One engineer wanted to code over bluejeans just so they could chat so hope they will enjoy it

great then 3 weeks sounds perfect

At Amazon I had No Meeting Fridays and it was great. At Lyft it is No Meeting Tuesdays. pros/cons for either. I think I'm a bit more focused on work on Tuesdays than I am Fridays. But I love both

Yeah I push for Fridays because I work with folks in India and I hate that we have standup like 5:30pm their time

I want them to enjoy US centric rules as well aka sometimes you end at 3:30pm

Ahh yeah I didn't consider that. Definitely do Friday then let them have their weekend start on time. I think that's a great idea

Thanks for being a sounding board! I just dont want to assume and get folks opinion on stuff

You gotta be a “force multiplier”

This is the same feedback I get usually

ah yes that is the other phrase.... any luck on how to do this

so far i've only referenced thinking about this article

Medium

Scaling yourself when working harder is not an option

Last year I found myself hitting a personal limit on how much work I could execute on simultaneously. At one time, I was concurrently…

Reading time

5 min read

Original URL: https://medium.com/product-field-notes/scaling-yourself-when-working-harder-is-not-an-option-4236886a562

Yeah that article reflects some of my comments. Low-hanging fruit in this area is documentation, recorded trainings/brown-bags, and delegation (like the article mentioned). Basically you are a proven contributor with a high-bar of quality output. People trust you and your work and if they could have more of you, they would. If they could have you do more of the tasks rather than divying up the tasks to others, they would. So how can you either (i) free up your time on automatable shit so you can do more important work, or (ii) get others to do work like you at your same caliber. So suppose your team doesn't have runbook on ops or something, write that up. Or if people come to you a lot to ask how to do XYZ, write a wiki on frequently asked questions to cover these things that you can point people to rather than spending time with them on it. Mentor one or more juniors so that their work is highly influenced by you and your style/quality of work.

^ a couple quick thoughts

This has also been said to me in the context of more cross-functional or cross-team/org influence. Working in such a way that my output doesn't benefit just my direct team, but can also be leveraged and used by teams across the org for a wider net of impact

Yeah for me it'll be slightly different. I am trying something new where every engineer will own a workstream. A workstream definition is a feature or tangible outcome (usually at an epic level).

Being an owner they will create tickets, run the grooming session for that time and coordinate with me to help me determine the priority of individual tickets. What they know is the outcome and the timeline. The requirements are somewhat there but sometimes it requires to meet with folks and figure it out. I am in a migration project so it's straightforward but that's what I am doing to free up my time.

How do I invest in processes so the team can keep going. We also started spot grooming in slack so we dont need to jump in an hour call but there is visibility of pulling tickets in. We shall see but the goal is that I build the trust and ownership within my engineers at all levels.

I see it as basically expanding your influence. I.e projects that touch multiple teams or organizations. Leading an initiative where multiple teams and stakeholders are involved and report back to you.

Yeah that is a good point Keenin. I have found some ideas on where the org should invest time in which will expand influence but in order to be able to invest time there, I need to delegate tasks in parallel.

So scaling is essentially

1. Delegating small stuff


2. Expanding influence across business units/teams/etc

That’s how i see it. Looking at your manager and their manager, you see how far their reach is and all the projects/teams they touch.

And usually, from my experience, the projects that involve more teams, are inevitably multi-quarter lol

This is an awesome thread (taking notes)

Set up a confluence page to address how do I scale with a 2 step program lol.

1. Delegation - wrote out everything i do and what I can handoff or adjust working models so I have less influence

Screen Shot 2021-01-28 at 7.42.09 AM.png

2. Influence - first I identified gaps that are in the org and what tasks we should to do invest our time in to address the gaps

Screen Shot 2021-01-28 at 7.42.36 AM.png

damn

Shit, nice work Tia :the_horns: That is very organized and actionable information to review by yourself and also with your manager to discuss areas they would like to see you dial up or dial down your attention/efforts.

And yeah, I think it's all about making the people around you more efficient, being a good teacher/educator, and being the "go to" person when people want an opinion or answer regarding projects you are a part of. That's what I have been focused on as I work on "scaling myself" up to a senior/team lead role.

Thanks Brandon! I met with my manager and he was really receptive to it. I think he also wants to make sure I get to work on the technical stuff because that is what I enjoy more but I have been filling gaps in areas (product and EM) which is fine as a temporary step.

My boss actually is sharing my doc to help someone else out to which is good. He gave me some choices about how I can extend my role and fully supports me delegating some stuff off as a step 1 to get there.

Wow, go all of us making 💰 moves

I love the mini community we got here

Have you been interested in the manager path for a while now and have considered the transition thoughtfully?

Me personally I have several more years of being IC before I consider management. May not even go into management if I continue to do well as an IC.

I think it depends on what areas you want to grow in your career. I will say I jumped from dev to TPM with not as much IC experience but I think if you continue to grow and make sure you don't become stale and enjoy the EM work then go for it.

When my manager has asked about my interests in the past, I have always answered with something very similar to you, Kyle… “I see a lot of value in staying an IC for at least a few more years to continue building the skill set before deciding whether to go the manager route vs stay IC”.

My main unknown in this situation is whether this role might be kind of a hybrid between IC and manager, since I will be reporting to my current manager who would then potentially deal with all of the managerial stuff above him. In other words, I might be somewhat isolated and be able to still focus more on the technical side of things 🤷 At the core I guess I am wondering about the balance between meetings/planning vs tech work I would be doing. This is one of the questions I plan to ask him.

I am very confident that if I tried the manager role for at least 1 year (just guessing a minimum reasonable amount of time) and wanted to go back to IC, that they would support my decision/preference.

Agreed with @tiaalexa. If that's where you want your career to go, then this may be a good opportunity to start. Your first manager job should be at a company you've been IC at for a while and ideally have a good relationship with your to-be manager. You should have a good support system and it sounds like you do. Ideally, I would also want it to be understood that I may not like or be good at being an EM, with an option to go back to IC if it doesn't work out.

You two make great points. I am taking notes as we speak 🙂 I wasn’t planning to take a manager role this soon, if ever, but I am tempted to try it out, b/c of exactly what you said Kyle about it being a good environment, good to-be manager, etc… and if I have an option to go back to IC at some point if Im not feeling it

My main unknown in this situation is whether this role might be kind of a hybrid between IC and manager

Great point. I will definitely ask about his expectations of me, if I were to take the role, and how I would be assessed.

I haven’t heard of ICM equivalent at SF

(taking notes)

As long as he/she knows it's temporary and your long term goals I would consider it BUT... let's say that person left. Would it be easy to go back to just an IC?

Consider best and worst case scenarios

Great point!

Generally, it is easy to move around SF, and my org is very progressive in providing folks with new opportunities, so don’t think it would be a problem, but you make a great point nontheless!

Congrats Sam! What would the composition of your team look like? Would you have a dedicated PM? How many reports? If you are being given an Technical Manager position then I would guess you would still have some time for coding but it would probably be less hands on the larger your team is. I see this as your boss wanting to trust you with the design/architecture decisions on that team which is very cool! You would probably have more meetings but that's just because you would have a broader influence. You would also have to deal with 1:1 meetings and stuff like that.

I think it's a cool opportunity if you want to spend more time on "big picture" stuff. More architecture and decision making, less coding/scripting.

It's a hard choice! If the team is small and you will still have a manager that manages the larger (three) team, then it might be more like a "team lead" engineer role which I would personally be excited about.

Thanks! The team would be roughly 5 engineers and PO/PM (SF calls then Product Owners 🤷).

I am thinking same thing about the role potentially looking more like a “team lead”, which is more intriguing to me. I will be clarifying this with my manager before making a decision.

Cool! Keep us posted on what you decide!

With out a doubt!

Sooo, I am giving the manager thing a shot. I have told myself I will give it a go for at least 1 year and then reassess at that point.

Mind if I pick your brains a bit?
If you recently got a new manager (especially someone who used to be an IC alongside you), what are some things you would want them to do in the first few days, first month, etc…?

First days, establish expectations of you moving in the role and what you're looking for out of the team. Sync with your PM/TPM if you have one on a working model and just get to know one another.
First month, take observations and identify gaps and work with the team / your peers to experiment on processes or work to fill those gaps.

also CONGRATS 🍾

Congrats @spkaplan!

First off, I agree with @tiaalexa on all points

Next I will share my own experience with this:

If you recently got a new manager (especially someone who used to be an IC alongside you), what are some things you would want them to do in the first few days, first month, etc…?

Wow that's long. Sorry for the vent. Hopefully you can glean something helpful out of my bad experience.

You could see some experiences on Blind with "manager peer" "manager teammate" "manager colleague"

we did not need him to take our sprint items midway through the sprint because he was worried about them not getting done.

Thank you @tiaalexa and @andelink that is all super helpful!

I don't have any new advice. I think you're going to kill it though! Did you get clarity around your title and what your manager expects from you? I think checking in with them regularly will be important.

I think Kyle makes a good point. Because managing is a new job/role for you it should definitely be your top priority at least until you feel like you have settled in and "taken command". There will be a lot of new things to learn!

That being said, my manager does a lot of coding and prototyping still but he is a principal engineer and has been a manager for a while as well so he's probably learned how to juggle things appropriately.

I absolutely agree. Once I wrap up my current project, I will be doing very little coding for a while so I can focus on understanding what it means to be a manager and such.

Yeah, i checked w/ my manager on the role and responsibilities. At salesforce, the manager role is a classic manager.. no hybrid w/ IC. Im sure I can do some coding if I find the spare time in the future, but coding is not part of how i will be assessed in the role.

Gotcha 👍

Personally, I’m thrilled to have a manager in this group. Your perspectives will be very interesting. You gotta share the deets. Like what are the tools managers have that we don’t know about. What is the most bs you’ve seen in calibration cycles. Who is the dramatic engineer that you don’t like managing and how do you deal. Can you see that I’m using the company laptop for leetcoding and blind

You are going to grow so much in different ways we mere ICs won’t

Also: do you get a comp change immediately or at the next perf review?

When do you officially start as EM?

I will definitely make sure to pass on any EM secrets I uncover 😉

ty u r doing the lords work

No comp change, since Manger is the same level as Senior Eng. However, my manager was recently promoted from Sr EM to Directory, so there would be room for me to be Sr EM under him at some point

Sr Manager is same level as Lead Eng, but Sr Manager seems to much less attainable lol

my manager was recently promoted from Sr EM to Director

Sr Manager seems to much less attainable

What levels are the engineers you are leading?

I appreciate those words of encouragement Kyle.

I’m long on $SPK

I will have 3 seniors and 1 normal (not sure how to call this…they are not senior, but not associate…just eng). There are 2 Leads that will report to my manager, but be working on my team for now. My manager has them reporting to him, so they can switch between teams when needed

If you want a book to read check out “The First 90 Days”

lmfao normal

It goes associate —> normie —> senior?

Salesforce level naming is weird. They have AMTS, MTS, LMTS, PMTS. MTS is “Member of Technical Staff”. I think it must be left over from old Salesforce days or something, because it sounds so old

SMTS between MTMS and LMTS?

Oh yeah, missed that one…

Updated version: AMTS, MTS, SMTS, LMTS, PMTS.

Gotcha gotcha. That’s pretty common, higher level ICs reporting to director while partnering with different teams in the org

Right now I’m reporting to director (two kinda) but that’s only because the manager was fired and they haven’t backfilled yet LOL

Ooh, that sounds like a good story 😏

It’s actually very juicy and I legally can’t say why he was fired and how he’s responding

Was he a spy?

Not a spy

Isn’t that what you would say if he was a spy? 😉

Idk what to say I’m innocent!

Alright alright I believe you.

You've passed the test

lololol it’s actually fairly serious I don’t want to be any part of it I’d maybe speak vaguely about it in person or on a call - or if I can find it already mentioned someone online

In order of what I've most commonly seen:

1. LinkedIn


2. Personal email


3. Instagram

Are you being asked for something surprising? Or given something surprising lol

lol welllllll.... this is very unprofessional of me but an attractive team member is leaving and he added me on instagram. I asked to stay in touch and he suggested that first over 1 and 2 (which is usually what I see as well)

and I found out that I am one of his first coworkers he has added as well

I put this in this channel because of the irony

lit

congrats, go get it

Posted using /giphy

Posted using /giphy |

Nice!!!

Yikes, I was not 😬

rarely copy/paste

yah the code i see is never good enough for me to use directly

Yeah, same

same, just reference it and implement myself.

Congratulations @tiaalexa !!!

Thanks!!!!! Pretttttty stoked

Humble brags are always welcome! Huge congrats!!

That's awesome!

🍾

Lately I've been caring less about the product and more about how interesting/enjoyable/technical my work for the product is

But it flip flops

Mainly how interesting my work is. Can't control the product really, but I can choose what type of work I pickup

Yeah good call okay - ty fam

Current product: the work is technically challenging and interesting, but I don't particularly care much about the product itself.
Ideally: I would love to work on a product I love. Hopefully some day when the paycheck doesn't matter as much.

New laptop in the mail, arriving tomorrow, woot! Ever need an upgrade?? Drop coffee on it

#ManagerTips

Recovery time objective?

Should have clarified…. Return to office

Ah, no solid word from salesforce yet.

Still waiting...

Current state is we can work from home through at least 2021

Will covid ever end…

Way to go man!!

Make that dough 💰

Thank you! I’ve grown so bitter with being a T4 so long. Literally everyone thought I was being promoted to T6 (staff; levels aren’t public info at Lyft) and I’ve been mentoring two T5s for the past 1.5 years since joining as a T4… I just fucked my interview I should have come in as a T5. I got a unanimous YES from everyone in my promo committee so they didn’t even need to meet to discuss just pushed it through. My manager said the committee feedback was largely just surprised I’m a T4 given my work and delivery and professionalism blah blah blah so I am going to try to shoot for T6 in one years time. I already wrote my T5 promo packet as if it was for T6 so hopefully I can just reuse it and then add another year of awesome work to stack it up 100000

That is fantastic! I couldn't be happier for you!

That's awesome dude, you deserve it!

Ready to retire soon? 💰

I would love to! But I have years to go if I want fat fire

$25M

jk

everyone stay calm... STAYING F**ING CALM

🙃

Not sure. I haven't tried or heard of the capability to do so inside salesforce

That's good

I don't think I would look even if i had the opportunity

I wouldn't want to either

btw, seen you playing lost ark. How do you like it?

yeah, i don't want to see how the sausage is made 😄 just make good software

mixed feelings on lost ark so far. I haven't gotten to level 50, which is apparently where all the fun starts due to end-game content

once i get to 50 i will see if it gets more interesting

i havent played WoW, so I don't have much to compare it to of similar the genres

Ahh gotcha. It looked fun to me, like a game I would want to try. Hopefully lvl50 comes soon and is fun for you

fastest way to get to level 50 is to just run through the main missions and nothing else. I think ive heard it can take as little as 12 hours. I am probably around 12 hours and at level 40 now. leveling seems pretty linear, so I figure I am 4/5ths of the way

Please tell us your process for doing so

I am still learning, but this is how I understand it so far. There are two parts:

• Raise

• Managers are given a budget that equates to enough money to give everyone an X% salary increase, where X is the same for all engineers.


• Now, I can give everyone X% raise, but if I want to reward someone for being a high performer by giving them, for example, X+1%, I have to give someone else X-1%...which is tricky. What if I have a high performer, but no under performers? The incentive to reward for high performance is muddied by that fact. It wouldn't be such a problem if X was higher than what it is. If X was, for example, 10%, I wouldn't feel bad giving someone 8% in order to give a high performer 12%, since 8% is still good (not considering the current inflationary environments for simplicity).

• Bonus

• Everyone has a % target bonus that came with their original offer (let's call it bonusPercentage), which is a percentage of their salary. Then the company provides a companyMultiplier based on company performance. Then I have to assign them an individualMultiplier. Similarly to raises, I have enough budget to give everyone a 100% individualMultiplier. If I want to give personA more than 100%, I have to give personB less than 100%.

Yikes. Not good to be on a high performing team. Could perhaps incentivize not helping teammates as much as one would like.

enough money to give everyone an X% salary increase

Thankfully my team is super collaborative, so it doesn't seem to be incentivizing folks to not work together. If anything, folks will just leave to other companies.
X is 4 this year. Same as last year 😑

Yeah the not working together thing is an extreme example I've heard people talk about in the Amazon URA context.

4% for everyone, or less than 4% for some to give high performers more. Is this in base salary or does it include RSUs? Same with the bonus allocation. That's rough.

I sympathize with managers during this time because I know they want to give their ICs more money and to walk out of these comp discussions feeling really good, but are constrained by things out of their control.

it is sure tough not to just given everyone X% raise and 100% individualMultiplier

Same as last year

btw, this is a 12-prong question - go ahead

4% for everyone, or less than 4% for some to give high performers more. Is this in base salary or does it include RSUs? Same with the bonus allocation. That's rough.

This is the easy route and would be very tempting. How many ICs do you have? Is there really no standout engineers? I feel like on every team I've been on there is clearly one or two (usually one) really high performers that the team leans on.

This is especially brutal with the CPI-based model hitting 7.9% last month. And the CPI basket is a poor measurement of our actual spending these days, I wager inflation for more typical expenses is higher

Did you make the tough decisions?

My standout engineers got rsu refreshers, so that helped a lot. One of them is in Canada and has a very low salary, so we were able to also give her a huge raise, since we had new hires that we took money from, since they aren't expecting a raise already. My lowest performing engineer got 90% individual multiplier for his bonus, so not a big hit.

refreshers are way too rare at salesforce. it is super common to leave after rsu cliff at 4 years

Hmm, I am inclined to say you should keep it on. How much effort would it be to host it elsewhere?

A decent amount of effort, depending on the route I take, and it isn't something that I necessarily want to revisit haha. The CSS and a portion of the site are on my GitHub, and I'll probably set something up to notify me if the site goes down, and then I can let him know. So, as long as it wouldn't be like a major red flag if it's down, then I'll probably just leave it as is for now.

Personally it wouldn't be a big red flag for me, but I also don't typically have candidates with personal sites since we are a backend team, so I don't want to speak for managers hiring for front end engineers. So, take what i say with a big grain of salt 😄

I'm mostly looking for backend positions anyway so it should be fine haha the point of it was mostly to show that I could do everything necessary to host a site on a Pi, more than the site itself

Gotcha, yeah I wouldn't worry about it, personally 🙂

Awesome, thanks!

Exciting!

If you find any job listings here that interest you, let me know and I will refer you.

salesforce.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Search for Jobs

Original URL: https://salesforce.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site

Resume tip: For your bullets under Fedex Ground, quantify as much as possible. For example

• Spearheaded and optimized the development of new API services..., optimized in what way and by how much?


• Developed and maintained multiple SpringBoot REST APIs that created access to a variety of data and relationships stored in an Oracle database., Numbers such as TPS and number of clients/customers calling your APIs will help give a sense of the importance of your service.


• Wrote and refactored a number of SQL queries... , what was the motivation for refactoring (e.g. maintainability, performance)? If performance, quantify the improvement.


• Contributed to the design of, and worked as the primary developer on, full-stack applications throughout their whole life cycle, from concept to release., Name a few services as examples. Again, can you give numbers such as TPS or tp99 to illustrate any stringent technical requirements.

Thanks! I've always struggled with that as I've never had access to or been aware of those details. The best I could do with my current information would be something like "with a 500ms average response time for 1000 concurrent users" or something along those lines.

Do you have access to logs in Splunk, or metrics from your service?

That's a good question... I'll go check if I still have access to our old services, but management is constantly shuffling which teams are working on which services, and we have no users for our current one as it is too new.

Ah gotcha. If you can get numbers like that, cool, but don't stress if you can't 🙂 If you can't get access yourself, can you ask someone currently working on the service(s) for those numbers?

Looks like I still have access, but now I have to learn Splunk and AppDynamics 😆

You probably only need splunk, assuming your service logs incoming api calls, which you can use to calculate TPS. Start by googling for a splunk query to give you TPS, then tweak it for your use case

Don’t worry about listed job requirements! They for some reason don’t matter

Edit: actually reading the thread for the first time, and see now that Splunk wasn’t a listed job requirement and I totally misunderstood the previous two messages

Good, because I haven't found any for salesforce that don't require at least three years of experience lol

If you'd like, I can also forward your resume to my recruiter, and she can see if she has teams looking for folks with your amount of experience.

That'd be awesome!

Your resume is in the hands of my recruiter. She supports a bunch of other teams.

Graduate Program Monitor – Capstone Project

• A website built for WWU’s Computer Science graduate program …

@spkaplan: Amazing, thanks a ton!

@andelink: I can see if I can find it, it just isn't much to look at without being able to access the admin portion.

Fair enough, was curious to look if it was handy

You are officially referred in the Lyft hiring system

@r.taylor The recruiter from Salesforce will be reaching out soon

@spkaplan - So, back on your recommendations for resume updates.

• Is TPS/99 still worthwhile if the APIs haven't had time to be widely adopted? As in, maybe 10 calls a minute with an average response time of 10ms (post gateway, so maybe not true response time).


• Similar question for number of users, the services are so young that only a few other services are currently calling them, at most. How should I frame this?


• Name services, how and why? I'm just trying to ascertain the value in saying something like, "like the Station Service Area Management Service and Organization View Service", which is how I initially interpret it.

Great questions! It is pretty subjective how you decide to include these data points in your resume. If they are young services you worked on, then instead of highlighting the number of requests or customers calling your service, I would focus on the fact that you delivered a new service, onboarded the first customers, and that the customers have been using your service with, hopefully, 0 significant issues for X months, years, or whatever. Shipping a new service and successfully onboarding the first customers is an impressive task.

Name of services isn't too important probably, but it is helpful if you can convey what use cases your service supports within the company. In other words, without your service what in your company would not work? This helps highlight the importance of your service and it demonstrates you understand what role your service plays in the company, who your customers are, etc...

Oh, and, what timeframe should this data be from? A day, week, lifetime?

Again, pretty subjective. I would use whatever timeframe you feel is enough to give a fair representation of your service's tp99. Probably a week or month is fine.

Awesome, thanks for the quick reply! I'll process your answers, make some adjustments, and probably have a few more questions in the near future 🙂

Alright, took a crack at it, but some of it just feels like fluff...

• Spearheaded and optimized the development of new SpringBoot REST API services through API-first development techniques alongside Swagger/OpenAPI code generation and abstraction, reducing development time for new endpoints by 16 work hours.


• Contributed to the design of, and worked as the primary developer on, full-stack applications throughout their whole life cycle, from concept to release, and on-boarded initial users, who encountered no significant issues in the first six months and experienced an average response time of less than 150ms.


• Wrote and refactored a number of SQL queries that sent and fetched large datasets across multiple tables and conditions, improving readability and maintainability and ensuring an average response time of under 50ms.


• Created and maintained OpenAPI contracts and documentation that thoroughly defined the requirements for APIs based on business discussions and established a point-of-reference for future business discussions.

@spkaplan - Also, aside from any normal edits for the above, is there anything that I may just be missing that might look good? Like, how you said, "without your service what in your company would not work". Is there anything like that that I should prioritize? Sorry for bugging you on it, just trying to finish it up and get it to Devon.

Spearheaded and optimized the development of new SpringBoot REST API services through API-first development techniques alongside Swagger/OpenAPI code generation and abstraction, reducing development time for new endpoints by 16 work hours.

• What was it previously / what is the percentage change here?


• Can you annualize this? Like 16 hours ** number of new endpoints per year = X hours saved annually . Big number good

Contributed to the design of, and worked as the primary developer on, full-stack applications throughout their whole life cycle, from concept to release, and on-boarded initial users, who encountered no significant issues in the first six months and experienced an average response time of less than 150ms.

• Change “on-boarded” to “onboarded.”


• “who encountered no significant issues in the six months since launch”

• sounds a little less like there were issues at the six month point 🤷

• “… and experienced an average response time of less than 150ms”

• This is saying the initial users of your service had response times of less than 150ms?


• The 150ms means nothing to me. Is that good? Sorry if I’m displaying ignorance but I actually don’t know how to really think of this. Is this commonly known as really good?


• Is this about a specific service you launched? Or is this for all the full-stack applications you mention earlier in the sentence?

Wrote and refactored a number of SQL queries that sent and fetched large datasets across multiple tables and conditions, improving readability and maintainability and ensuring an average response time of under 50ms.

Created and maintained OpenAPI contracts and documentation that thoroughly defined the requirements for APIs based on business discussions and established a point-of-reference for future business discussions.

• What are the types of API requirements are you talking about here? Like the actual API interface, as specified in your OpenAPI contracts? Or technical requirements like TPS, latency, uptime, etc?


• What do you mean by “established a point-of-reference for future business discussions?”

The bulletpoints were getting too deep, and my responses to the individual questions might not matter if you don't care, so I threw it in a post for reference but won't put them in here. It seems the main point is that I wasn't able to quantify my points in a meaningful way, so what might mean more to you than time? I can use a percentage for the work hours, but not for the response times since there is no point-of-reference for the new services.

Answers

For response times, exact values probably don't matter too much. I would focus whether you delivered response times that met your customers' needs.

Would a percentage of the given SLOs/SLAs be better? Like "with response times averaging less than 10% of the initial SLAs" or something?

Or, less specifically, what is the proper way to communicate that we did in fact meet our customers' needs?

Yeah, that conveys you focusing on customer's needs and delivering well within their needs.

What about when referring to the SQL queries? We didn't have SLAs or anything for them, so should I just not quantify the time?

You refactored the SQL queries, right? Did you improve the runtime? If so, by how much absolute or percentage decrease? Or did you simplify them for maintainability?

Maintainability. I have no point of reference for a decrease.

Ah, then probably no way to quantify anything for the sql queries🙂

Percentages are good

Awesome. Thanks, both of you!

Got this now:

Experience

Can you share the diff

Okay, that'll take a minute though.

lol thanks

I tried. Bold is new, strikethrough is old:

Diff

I think that reads better claps

When you say you wrote SQL that sent data, does that mean you loaded tables?

Oh, I forgot that diff

There, I updated it. Just copied what you said. I assumed that the "improving readability and maintainability" covered the XYZ portion? Or should I actually describe the function of the queries? That might be weird...

Sometimes the purpose can be useful, but it might not be in your case

Was just trying to sniff out the outcome/impact from you

I see. Okay, then, I think I'm happy with where it's at. Thanks, again!

What position/level was that for?

It was a mix of backend and de positions

Leveling not sure. Usually the design/architecture interview performance dictates the level a candidate comes in at

I am baby! S3 Buckets 🪣

Nice! When did you start?

Feb14❤️

How are you liking it!?

Loving it! So much to learn and do, it's been great so far. Haven't joined oncall so check back in a few weeks 🥲

Glad to hear it! You joining tomorrow's call?

Hopefully, depending on work haha

Wow, quite the project!

Yeah no kidding. Considering replying with “I don’t think this is a good fit” LOL

Nah, you got this 💪

It’s more about the time it would take. I’m lazy

Oh yeah, it definitely seems like it would take a good amount of time.

I guess depends how much you want Chainlink

Yup, and I'm not really sure. Maybe I could moonlight there while keeping my job at Lyft

I heard rumors of people doing that during covid wfh

Just seeing this and seeing they expect you to make an account and actually pay them for their service in order to do the project… like wtf. Can't they just make you a burner account? Too much effort lol

Sure you're reimbursed, but shit…

Yeah lol

Reminds me

They sent an updated version

Senior Software Engineer project - v1.0.pdf

haha, they updated the instructions part way though?

Wooow… so it's a page shorter, but I have no idea what changed at first glance

Yeah 100%

The problem is I like my team, org, culture, so much. work life balance is also great

Same here. For the first time I would feel bad leaving for a new job

ha same 😄

I would hate to end up in a bad cuture/team/etc... and have it not feel worth the extra money

Yeah but that will always be a risk anytime you change jobs. IMO it’s not a reason to stop you from interviewing and seeing the sort of offers you can command. And if you do accept one, you can always bounce back to your last gig

IMO it’s not a reason to stop you from interviewing and seeing the sort of offers you can command

And if you do accept one, you can always bounce back to your last gig

Hmmm yeah, I see what you mean about being a manager vs IC. That’s more gray for sure

Org charts. Source

Yeah, so true. My org is the only competent one...

"My TC is more than my house - four 400K+ remote offers in a LCOL area (Software Engineering Career)"

TL;DR: I'm moving from HCOL (NYC/SF) to LCOL area (Midwest USA) to be closer to family and bought a house for 350K. My spouse is getting a COL adjustment (salary is getting cut) so I thought I would try to get a higher paying job to makeup the difference. I ended up doing better than I thought.

Old TC: 275K
New TC: 420K
YOE: 5

From @enBT65:
Study leetcode, system design and pay for mock interviews, then interview at the most famous tech companies and take the highest offer.

— — —

I’ve always wanted to write one of these posts and now I can! As the TL;DR says, I’m moving to a LCOL area to be closer to family and my spouse is getting a pay cut in salary due to cost-of-living adjustment. I’ve been at my current company for a while, so I figured I would try to get a new, better paying job to makeup for what they’re losing.

This post is going to outline how I was able to get four 400K+ TC (first year) offers in a LCOL area.

This post is mainly aimed at other people in LCOL area to show what kind of offers are possible with enough interview prep, negotiations, and luck. Though other people may find it interesting/useful as well.

The Offers:

Datadog SE2: 190K base/450K RSUs/100K sign-on bonus
First year TC: 400K
4 year avg TC: 300K

Google L5: 200K base + 15% bonus/490K RSUs/50K sign-on bonus
First Year TC: 440K (due to RSU vesting schedule)
4 year avg TC: 350K (not including refreshers)

MongoDB Senior SWE: 200K base/800K RSUs/30K sign-on bonus
First Year TC: 430K
4 year avg TC: 400K (not including refreshers)

Airbnb Senior SWE: 215K base + 20% bonus/650K RSUs/50K sign-on bonus
First Year TC: 470K
4 year avg TC: 420K (not including refreshers)

It was a tough pick between Airbnb, MongoDB, and Google. There were things I liked about each of them. I ended up with going with Airbnb due to a mix of comp, WLB, team fit, and interesting work/impact. They were also the most cash-heavy offer, which I put a premium on - especially during this current economy

When I first started my job hunt, I had Google in my sights due to the allure of FAANG. I tried to get Google to match Airbnb, but the offer I listed above was the best they could do even with VP approval.

Also, MongoDB has unlimited PTO and 20 weeks parental leave and has really interesting tech. But I went with Airbnb because there were more experienced people to learn from on the team.

I don’t know why MongoDB is shit on so much on Blind. It’s a great company - look at their Blind score. More people should check them out.

One thing to note is that now is definitely a tough time to interview. Multiple companies are going on hiring freeze and have high interview standards.

Tech screens/onsites I failed:

• Uber


• Multiple startups

• Meta


• Lyft (onsite canceled)


• Stripe (I passed the onsite for L3 and was in team match when they told me they were slowing down hiring and wouldn’t be moving forward with me)

*Thread Reply:* None

Image from iOS

Image from iOS

Super interesting post

This is definitely something my team has struggled with, and it was recently exacerbated by a complete rotation of developers, except for me, left to give all the KTs necessary 😬

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I think it is just one of the downsides of remote work. It's just not an environment for spontaneous interaction, somebody has to make that first contact. I do think that the "somebody" in that last sentence can be a number of people in a number of ways though. There can be a mentorship program at the company, leads can play match-maker like you said, or the team can work to create a culture of pulling in SMEs when doing related work. That last one is something the UX designer on my team is a huge proponent of, he asks us to sit on a call with him pretty much any time we're doing UI work to try to recreate that in-office experience.

It also just helps if everybody on the team is at least friendly. I've noticed that on days where we are maintaining a semi-casual chat for one reason or another, people tend to reach out more or drop random work questions into that casual chat.

In short, I think it's a problem with no easy solution, but can be mitigated with culture adjustments at almost any point in the process.

This is definitely a downside of remote work. I personally feel like I don’t have enough visibility/context into what all the different workstreams on the team are and how I contribute to them (or how I can contribute to them). I would like to be more involved or at least have a complete working knowledge of them. For BUS factor reasons, but also just personally I like to have a holistic up-and-down familiarity with everything on the team.

I’m on an applied science team composed of four scientists, three server swes (myself + two others), and a couple of rotating android/ios engineers who split their time between us and other teams. Oh and a TPM. Here are our scheduled syncs:

• 30 minute Monday morning standup (includes the mobile devs and a two person sister team).


• One hour Wednesday standup with just the core team (not the mobile devs and sister team). More detailed and in-depth discussions than the Monday standup.


• Bi-weekly Monday afternoon sprint planning with just the core team.


• Every-other-month one hour retrospective with just the core team.


• 30 minute weekly on-call handoff for us engineers, but of course its just ops stuff.


• I believe the scientists have an additional one hour long bi-weekly meeting for themselves, engineers don’t attend.

my team operates more as a group of high performing individuals

I personally feel like I don’t have enough visibility/context into what all the different workstreams on the team are and how I contribute to them (or how I can contribute to them).

I’m a fan of slackups, where threads can form for any more in-depth discussion. Still the burden is on the reader

What are you doing now?

What are you doing now?

1. We have a very similar meeting schedule as you


2. We use slack heavily for discussions, but as you said burden is on the reader. Recently we have started having a dedicated slack channel per project, where the engineer can post regular updates for others to follow along and provide input. This has helped some.

2 is a good one for sure

Main thing off the bat, is to add numbers and metrics. You want to quantify the work and improvements you did. I.e. like your description about decreasing page load time at payscale

If I see “passion” in one more résumé I’m gonna scream

It’s fine, just a personal disdain

I have a passion for stacking racks and I’m a go-getter for the scratch and optimize the synergies to think out side the box on how to collect them bags and back up the Brinks trucks

I will preface this that I don’t know what a good resume is. I don’t know anything. By the time I look at a resume it means that I’m interviewing that person soon, that’s all. No decision making happens with the resume at least by me.

My understanding is that resumes are (i) for getting to the phone screen phase, and (ii) topics for conversation during the onsite.

We’re at the stage in our careers where we could list only titles/companies on our resume and still get to the phone screen, meaning our resume is only being used as conversation fodder for the onsite. So really the only essential thing for us is that we must be able to talk in great depth and detail about anything we list on our resume. Need it be truthful? Nay. Need it be impressive? Nay. Need it be something I can speak about convincingly? Yay.

That’s my opinion and I could be wrong about all of it.

----

Now, I will critique your resume raw with the first thoughts that come to mind.

Format
Does this guy love numbers? Numbers in the title/header are disproportionate in size to everything else. All I see is 425 and 1994. Same with forward slashes /

This guy is making me copy paste his linkedin to view it. It’s 2022 PDFs support hyperlinks. I’m not physically printing this resume unless I’m interviewing you in person, which may never happen thanks to covid. Does he not follow advances in the Portable Document Format?

I’m squinting to see the dates of this guys job history. It doesn’t look like space was an issue. What’s he hiding?

Profile

… with a passion …

In my current position

Senior Software Engineer | Microsoft, Mixed Reality, Microsoft Mesh

I have a passion for stacking racks and I’m a go-getter for the scratch and optimize the synergies to think out side the box on how to collect them bags and back up the Brinks trucks

This is great. I need a new lens. Thanks for taking the time!

The blob of text is atrocious though

Indeed. Good thing it’s mostly for reading and not wall art

Context: most of my feedback will probably be around making things specific enough that it is clear to the reader that you know what you're talking about. One of the main things I don't like to see in resumes is a lack of specificity, b/c without specificity, I can't tell if the candidate really knows/understands the work they did.

Notes:

• Profile

• Can "API development" be more specific? API development on what kind of system? Possibly "backend web service API development"?


• "distributed systems" - Great keyword, never remove it 😄


• "scalable cloud architecture via Azure cloud services"

• It comes across that you are highlighting your experience with cloud/azure, which is great.


• The "scalable cloud architecture" part is not quite clear, mainly due to the word architecture being too widely used and therefore is almost meaningless nowadays 😅 What exactly did you develop in a scalable way?

• Skills

• Technology

• Any experience with container orchestrations (e.g. Kubernetes), Infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform)?

• Focus

• This bullet is a bit repetitive with the Profile. I would consider removing the line.

• Experience

• Microsoft Mesh

• "Led the design and implementation" - Were you the owner of the design? If so, I would suggest finding a stronger word than "led" to make it clear you were the directly responsible owner of the design. As for implementation, did you lead other engineers? if so, how many?


• "Developed services in ASP.NET" - Is this a catch-all for all your work on the services? It isn't a very strong line b/c it isn't very specific. Anything we can do to make it more specific, or highlight a specific accomplishment?


• "Focused on mentorship" - your message is great, but the phrase not specific enough. How many mentees did you have? Were they all on your team, or other teams as well?


• "widening impact across broader team objectives" - your message is great, but the phrase not specific enough. Can you highlight specific team objectives you influenced/impacted?


• "advocating for best practices" - your message is great, but the phrase not specific enough. Can you call out specific best practices that you influenced the team to start following?

• Mixed Reality

• "Developed a cloud driven" - Were you part of team doing this development, or did you lead a develop it all yourself?


• "Developed a cloud driven" - What do you mean by "cloud driven"?


• "Developed a cloud driven data analysis platform for IVAS contract with US Army" - It is missing the impact. In other words, what did your data analysis platform enable and for who (e.g. an upstream customer/team)?


• "Led sprint planning and design discussions to fuel customer driven development." It is not clear to me how leading sprint planning and design discussions is related to customer-driven development. Is your intent to say that you led sprint planning and design discussion with a strong focus on your customer?

• PayScale

• "A distributed system comprised of serverless functions, queues, and blob storage in the cloud." - Missing the verb.


• "created written proposals to fuel discussion around architecture decisions" - "fuel"-ing discussion is good, but I would instead highlight what "architecture decisions" you specifically influenced with your written proposals.


• "and advocated for best practices" - Same as before, mention specific best practices you influenced the team to start following.

Thoughts on Kyle's awesome reply

My understanding is that resumes are (i) for getting to the phone screen phase, and (ii) topics for conversation during the onsite.

So really the only essential thing for us is that we must be able to talk in great depth and detail about anything we list on our resume. Need it be truthful? Nay. Need it be impressive? Nay. Need it be something I can speak about convincingly? Yay.

If I were interviewing you I’d drill you on your distributed systems and data pipelines skills, since you listed them.

I had “senior” in the job listed on my resume, but then I saw other more tenured engineers like staff+ never once mention “senior” so I removed it from mine. But then an old manager of mine reviewed my resume and told me to put it back on ¯_(ツ)_/¯ idk just an anecdote for you. I have kept all other levels off my resume though like SWE I, SWE II, etc. You don’t want your resume to limit what level you are being considered for. Only your interview performance should do that. On your resume, the only indication of level should be the contributions you describe. For example, with your resume, I’d have one Senior Software Engineer Microsoft section that has two subsections/projects: Microsoft Mesh and IVAS Contract. Don’t list SWE II or your promo date on there.

Takeaway
Solid dude, good mate, strong hire.

Sam’s comments are excellent. Exactly the questions that come to mind.

@spkaplan I’d love your manager insights. How much does a resume matter? Maybe from my reply you can tell, but I don’t value them very much

@andelink You nailed it with:

My understanding is that resumes are (i) for getting to the phone screen phase, and (ii) topics for conversation during the onsite.

Those bonus points matter more when you are targeting a role where you'd be expected to make larger technical decisions for the team, influence other team members' projects... i.e. tech lead rather than just a solid/experienced engineer.

In Brandon’s case some things to consider 1) his promo progression speaks to his development/progress as an engineer.

Extra bonus points come when I can tell the candidate understands the bigger picture...not just their projects, but how their projects fit into the team’s/org’s/companies goals/accomplishments/objectives.

Love it! 😍

This guy is going straight to the phone screen for sure ✅

It does look quite good! +hyperlinks for 100

Thanks guys! I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

@brandon Are your ready for me to share your resume with my recruiter? No commitment, just would be a call with her to let her know where you're at and what you're looking for.

Yeah, that would be great! I'm on my way back from NY today so this would be a good time to get the process started.

Cool!
@brandon nit: I would suggest putting your name in the resume file name.

Oh yeah, the version I have been using has my name in it. I'll send it to you later today when I get home.

No worries, I changed the name :)

Hi-Tech 🧑‍💻

still reading... 😄

It’s a massive post. Followed up with a massive self-reply as a comment

oh shit, i didnt' see the self-reply...the reading continues

We have bi-annual review cycles where it’s expected to give and receive peer feedback. They recently changed the model to “anytime feedback” and any feedback you receive through the anytime feedback tool will show up in your perf review for that given half.

I give only positive feedback through the tool. Negative feedback I give in-person

This about sums up my experience at Microsoft as well.