Job thread

[HaemishM]

You get what you're willing to pay for. Way too many bosses don't understand that especially when it comes to employees. Of course, generally any business that relies solely on freelancers for its services is likely a shady as fuck shitstand filled with complete cunts who underpay and overcharge while dodging every bit of the responsibility you should expect from an employer.

[apocrypha]

They do have a core of full timers, but it sounds like they're all paid pretty poorly too, so of course they don't exactly give their all to the job.

Honestly, I'm so sick of the way that UK employers are these days. Mostly I'd rather stay poor than have to shovel shit for these cocksuckers.

[Rasix]

Apparently work is serious about the "no more working from home" comment by our VP and have turned it into a full blown initiative.  If our site wasn't an official center of competency, I would have been asked to move to Houston.  Supposedly this is to aid in Agile efficiency and teamwork, but since my scrums are run out of Houston, it just means I have to take one scrum call from the car and the other the second I touch down in the office.

This wouldn't be so bad if we actually had some perks still and the site wasn't out in the middle of fucking nowhere (for Tucson, so use your imagination). Back in the day we had free coffee, cheep vending, and a semi-disgusting cafeteria. Now, nothing. Houston has perks, but it's Houston. I visited a few weeks ago and it just seemed like a Texas-sized version of Phoenix, but with the added joy of 90% humidity.

This is just fucking dumb. 

 

[Selby]

Apparently work is serious about the "no more working from home" comment by our VP and have turned it into a full blown initiative.

This seems to be a real thing in the last 3-4 years I've noticed.  Whereas before they were happy to have people working from home getting everything done, suddenly the new executive level of thinking is "everyone moves to ONE central location regardless of whether it makes sense or not" and to aid in that, they demote the people who don't relocate without outright firing them (but usually keeping them at a pay grade or two above on responsibilities and work) and mandate that anyone who works remote cannot advance beyond X level on the corporate chain.  A company my ex works for is in San Diego with many east coast clients and they had several offices across the country servicing them.  The new CEO and his VP cronies have shuttered almost all of the offices except 2 and everyone who works remote was either laid off or bumped way down in grade if they didn't relocate.  Oh, and people are expected to maintain California business hours regardless of where they are, with very few exceptions.  It's like these new bosses have to be seen as "doing something" and the idea that stuck was "eh, make everyone work in one office."

So if you can imagine living in rural Texas or KY and being asked to relocate to San Diego to keep your job, oh and the company isn't going to help you nor are you going to get a pay increase to compensate...

[Yegolev]

There seems to be a suit brewing against HP for shedding older workers for younger ones, and while I feel like remote workers like myself were also targeted, I figure there isn't much to be done on that front.

[schild]

Houston has better food, people, and neighbor cities than Tuscon.

[Torinak]

Apparently work is serious about the "no more working from home" comment by our VP and have turned it into a full blown initiative.

This seems to be a real thing in the last 3-4 years I've noticed.  Whereas before they were happy to have people working from home getting everything done, suddenly the new executive level of thinking is "everyone moves to ONE central location regardless of whether it makes sense or not" and to aid in that, they demote the people who don't relocate without outright firing them (but usually keeping them at a pay grade or two above on responsibilities and work) and mandate that anyone who works remote cannot advance beyond X level on the corporate chain.  A company my ex works for is in San Diego with many east coast clients and they had several offices across the country servicing them.  The new CEO and his VP cronies have shuttered almost all of the offices except 2 and everyone who works remote was either laid off or bumped way down in grade if they didn't relocate.  Oh, and people are expected to maintain California business hours regardless of where they are, with very few exceptions.  It's like these new bosses have to be seen as "doing something" and the idea that stuck was "eh, make everyone work in one office."

So if you can imagine living in rural Texas or KY and being asked to relocate to San Diego to keep your job, oh and the company isn't going to help you nor are you going to get a pay increase to compensate...

It's really hard for remote workers to be visible. It's pretty much impossible to play office politics remotely, too. That makes it super-easy for higher-ups (especially new ones) to decide remote workers are unessential and eliminate them one way or another.

And it can be especially brutal when the higher-ups decide that "remote" means "anyone who doesn't work right where I do". At some companies, even working at HQ but in a different building can be detrimental to one's career.

Have you started to get the big lie yet that office(s) will be closed, or remote working won't be allowed anymore, but "nobody will lose their jobs"? It can be true technically--the company just expects you to drop everything and relocate to a super-HCOL area with absolutely no changes in compensation, but they won't directly fire you or eliminate your position.

[Merusk]

Interesting this is happening as studies showing that working from home is a productivity increase of ~13% per worker.  Just heard that on Marketplace this morning and was surprised it was that high.

The downside being they saw worked hours/ week increase, meaning you may not be driving but you're going to risk your work/ life balance.  

It's like these new bosses have to be seen as "doing something" and the idea that stuck was "eh, make everyone work in one office."

So if you can imagine living in rural Texas or KY and being asked to relocate to San Diego to keep your job, oh and the company isn't going to help you nor are you going to get a pay increase to compensate...

Yes, that's exactly what it is. those of us in old corporate environments said this would be the endgame 4-5 years ago. If middle-managers can't sit around fucking-up people's days by shuffling them willy-nilly from fire to fire and the worker-bees increase productivity, upper-managers are going to puzzle that out eventually. Middle managers start getting pressured to prove their worth, so they 'consolidate the team' so they can "keep better track of the day to day activities, because the department isn't seeing the returns it should."  

Of course it's not. You're paying the overhead salary of a useless corporate leech whose compensation is 1.5-2.25 additional worker-bees.

As for the relocation, it happened all the time to blue-collars from the 70's through the 90's. It's white-collar's turn at the mill. We're all working-class, and as a nation eroded that 'buffer' of 'uneducated rubes' so we're the grist now.

[Rasix]

Houston has better food, people, and neighbor cities than Tuscon.

Houston doesn't contain the house I just built.  Far from either of our families, which is actually important to us.  Plus, it wouldn't work with her job. Houston is pretty much a non-starter at this point.

This is either a Ginny level or sub-Ginny level mandate.  Which just means it's IBM following some dumb trend they heard might help the abysmal Agile transformation process. The wording on it is really vague, which means they have no idea what they're really doing and someone just said GO.  Because it's all hands on deck until they actually sort out some sort of coherent policy. Literally what my boss just told me before he went on vacation for 2 weeks. 

I can understand being a home being more productive.  I have a better chair, desk, food, drinks, AC, etc etc etc.  I don't have to sit there and grimace all day if I have back spasms.  My allergies can be better managed (and I can get my shots). It's easier to deal with child care, I save money on gas, and my aging car doesn't have to a damn commute that's 100% city driving.  At least it's just a 30 minute commute compared to 45 at my old place.

They do actively discriminate against remote only people.  But I wasn't remote only as spent 2-3 days per week in office. Remote only folks pretty much are stuck at whatever level they're currently at and their reviews are waaaaaaaaay lower.  I had a co-architect that I considered more productive than myself and even did a lot of the fluff crap I didn't like doing. Management chain pretty much tanked her reviews until she quit and found something local.  Luckily she already lived in Austin.

Feels good to vent.  This is just a really silly one-size-fits all policy that's been handed down with almost no lead up or seeming forethought. Our current situation really worked well for our life and this just makes everything less convenient until they possibly unstick their heads from their asses.

[Chimpy]

You should start sending your resume out to storage vendors that aren't in the process of losing their customers faster than they can gain new ones. That or hope that C-level management decides to sell the storage division off to Lenovo soon as well. All of the former IBM x86 engineers I spoke to say that the transition was refreshing and they actually like their jobs now.  

[Rasix]

Ugg.  Don't remind me how bad this guts internal transfers. You're boned if your site isn't doing anything interesting. Moving to an analytics division or one of the specialist industry fields is likely damn near impossible.

Fuck, I've got to buy a fridge now. My officemate just moved buildings, and he's taking it with him. My LaCroix cache is probably sitting on the floor getting warm.

[KallDrexx]

Lol that reminds me.

So this shitty company I left a year and a half ago (everything I've heard shows they are going to be bankrupt come October) fired their old acting CTO (didn't have the title but essentially was doing that job) and hired a brand new CTO.  The company had a huge reputation for being very liberal about working from home, so much so that some people did it up to 4 days a week (but they still were productive, well most of them). 

The company at this point had been through several massive rounds of layoffs, so the new CTO decreed that everyone must come into the office every day, no more working from home.  He claimed it was hurting morale having people not work in the office.

Besides the fact that getting rid of perks is about the opposite of raising morale, he failed to see the irony in the fact that this is an Orlando based company (100% of the tech teams are in Orlando) and he lives in San Francisco.

[HaemishM]

Even at the small place where I work (less than 50 people now), the push against work-from-home is growing. It's the "if we don't see you, we can't be sure you are actually productive" bullshit. It's got nothing to do with actual numbers of billable hours, or work produced. It's just "I can't see you and it makes it slightly less convenient for the people in the office" thing. Which is a fair point but... it's also total bullshit. I am no less productive at home than I am at the office, so long as I actually have shit to work on.

I think the push is coming from the fall out of all the jobs that have been shed in a lot of white collar industries since 2008. They've cut actual worker staff down to the fucking bone over and over again, and like Merusk said, the ones picking who gets the chop are usually the middle managers whose actual production is near to fuckall. Since all their departments have been cut to the bone, but profits still haven't rebounded to pre-2008 levels, something must be done to get back to the good old days. Only... there's no one left to fire but the middle managers. And they can't possibly let on that they are useless paper pushing fucks whose only role is to be the shit channel in the "shit rolls downhill" river.

So it must be those work from homers lazing off.

[Yegolev]

An accurate summary.

[Rasix]

It's funny that my team thrived for more than a year when we had no actual first line manager.  And this was in the middle of a new product release. Only thing I've needed a first line for was to sign off on my promotion. We did fine with getting all of our edicts from emails and our second line spending 5 minutes on evaluations based on nothing more than instinct.

That's all they seem to do for me nowadays. Sign off on my bonus, tell me about promotions (or lack there of). They can't spend any money on us. I can't even get authorization to order a $15 ethernet adapter for testing a product feature. They have no input on my work.

For all of the crap people like to heave on government employees, my wife seems to do more as a manager there than any of my managers have done here. Maybe because they actually get to do something other than micromanage costs.

[Merusk]

Government managers have to prove their usefulness to a raft of budget committees and 'waste hawks' who comb through the public records looking for any reason to tell their congressperson why funding should be allocated elsewhere.

Corporate managers just have to be buddy with 1-2 other executives and be adept at taking credit for other people's work while shifting the blame away from themselves.

Any company larger than 50-60 people has this problem. Few have CEOs/ C-Levels who give enough of a shit to actually pay attention to it while ALSO not falling-victim to the, "Well Manager x has been here FOREVER. I can't just get rid of them" syndrome.

My last firm fell into that pit. One studio was ~27 employees at the time I started looking elsewhere. Of those, 2 were Principles (Senior VP), one was a V.P., Five were Directors and then you had the Senior/ Junior "workhorse" positions. 30% of the staff were people not expected to do work 8 hours a day.

No reason for it outside of "Well they're talented and they've been here a long time so we HAD to promote them to keep them." 

No, you don't have to increase your overhead like that just to retain people. YOu also don't have to keep the useless mid-level manager just because your senior manager says they're awesome. They go on fucking vacations together, of course they're going to say their friend is awesome and shouldn't be fired.

Meh.

[Ard]

Welp, they just laid off my boss, who I liked, and our local HR rep today.  Only question now is if they're going to lay the rest of us off soon or death by a thousand cuts us to make us quit.  I'm betting on the latter    Time to put serious effort into finding a new job.  Anyone hiring software developers with a lot of experience in the Seattle area?

[Sky]

For all of the crap people like to heave on government employees, my wife seems to do more as a manager there than any of my managers have done here. Maybe because they actually get to do something other than micromanage costs.

You may have something there. Part of my disconnect with workplace conversation in this thread is that I have a couple great directors and our meetings are actually extremely productive. We can't sit down in the same room to just chat without having our notebooks because we'll quickly devolve into a productive meeting! It's really, really nice (and wasn't always that way, but it has been for 11 years now).

As far as remote work goes: I just got off a session with our Italian vendor and I love working with that guy. Once my brain shifts to his accent, of course. Dude is uber competent and a joy to work with after a string of less competent interactions with staff, patrons and other vendors. We work so well together (also his programmer in Croatia, who I work even better with) that the boss sometimes nervously jokes I'll leave to be his agent in the US (no chance, really; though if I was closer to retirement...).

[Hawkbit]

My wife was bugging me about applying to these today: https://www.goodreads.com/jobs but I'm more front-end and don't think I could make it through their OOP questions. Looks like they're somewhere around the Amazon campus.

My best friend just started at Amazon as an engineering manager a few months ago, if you end up applying to an Amazon position I can set you two up for a talk. Just let me know.

He mentioned recently that most of the experienced devs he knows are not making it through the Amazon phone screens, whereas the inexperienced but fresh from school applicants are doing great. He's trying to figure out what is going wrong with the interview process, because he's worked with these folks that are failing interviews and he knows they can solve the problems. Not sure if there's a failure in the interview process, or if the new students coming out of school have a new way of looking at problems. He's a bit confused right now though.

[Paelos]

Cracking down on 50% or more teleworkers or remote workers doesn't really do much because they only represent about 3% of the total workforce. Also skilled labor is getting easier to find meaning there's a big push-pull between owners and workers on what is a fair wage. The photography thing is a good example. This owner knows that photographers are out there looking, so he tosses out a low end wage. Skilled people won't touch it because even if they need work it's not worth their time to get involved at that wage, and the ones that do take it do bad work.

Now a good business owner would evaluate that position, inquire of his freelancers what they are normally looking for, check his margins against his clients, and then make an adjustment. All of that would require actual analysis, which 95% know absolutely fuck-all about. They do know about pouting like children when they don't get their way because FUCKING EMPLOYEES.

That's why any good small business has somebody in the system as their accountant/CFO/Controller who steps and and makes them understand how much potential money they are fucking off with shit work, and where the potential savings are in a higher wage with better full time employees.

[Yegolev]

He mentioned recently that most of the experienced devs he knows are not making it through the Amazon phone screens, whereas the inexperienced but fresh from school applicants are doing great.

This is somehow unsurprising.

[Ard]

He mentioned recently that most of the experienced devs he knows are not making it through the Amazon phone screens, whereas the inexperienced but fresh from school applicants are doing great. He's trying to figure out what is going wrong with the interview process, because he's worked with these folks that are failing interviews and he knows they can solve the problems. Not sure if there's a failure in the interview process, or if the new students coming out of school have a new way of looking at problems. He's a bit confused right now though.

This exact thing just happened to me a few days ago.  8 phone calls, 3 tech screens and a rejection, after a ton of prep work and no real problem with the questions asked.  I have no clue what happened either.

[Merusk]

You're too expensive or had answers meaning you can't be moulded to the company groupthink.

[RhyssaFireheart]

You're too expensive or had answers meaning you can't be moulded to the company groupthink.

Probably one of the biggest reasons, especially if you've been working in the field for a while.  This is the problem my husband is running into - he's got 24 years of experience, which puts him at the very top of his position bracket, but even though he has experience doing the next step up level of work, it wasn't under that job title so hence, he doesn't really have experience.  It sucks.

[Ard]

I'm pretty sure it's actually not in this case.  I know how much Amazon pays for those positions, and they're significantly higher than I currently make.  I could be wrong though.

[Trippy]

Welp, they just laid off my boss, who I liked, and our local HR rep today.  Only question now is if they're going to lay the rest of us off soon or death by a thousand cuts us to make us quit.  I'm betting on the latter    Time to put serious effort into finding a new job.  Anyone hiring software developers with a lot of experience in the Seattle area?

Amazon

[Hawkbit]

My understanding is that Amazon has a salary cap and the difference is made up in signing bonuses, typically paid over two years. There's three pillars of 'fit', with one being technical and one being compensation. I don't remember the other, probably culture or something.

I'm serious though, Ard. If you end up with an Amazon job req I would be very happy to ask my buddy meet up with you. I've known the guy for 25 years and he's trying to groom me for Amazon, but I just don't have that kind of stamina. I know he has some significant insight into the hiring process which might get you a leg up.

[Ard]

I've already gone through 3 job reqs there.  I came in as an internal referral from an old coworker at another job who actively tried to poach me for his team.  This whole thing washed out weird in a way that makes me not even want to consider trying a 4th.

[Hawkbit]

Sorry man, and I totally appreciate that. If I see other postings I'll let you know.

I would say to stay away from Allrecipes and their parent company Meredith Digital. Our only office is at 4th/Pike in this town. The place is weird and has gone downhill over the past five years. I'm starting to actively look now, too.

Good luck.

[Ard]

Yeah, Glassdoor clued me in on that meltdown there last winter when I looked into it in the spring when I started half-assedly looking for a new job.  That sounded even more impressively insane than what I'm going through right now.

[Sky]

You're too expensive or had answers meaning you can't be moulded to the company groupthink.

I blew a job with a pentest company because of #2. Was talking to a guy and we got along really well and I had a stronger skillset and would bring a ton to the department. I mentioned that as a musician I didn't appreciate pirating music (though I don't mind a little casual sharing, the guy was talking wholesale torrenting an entire collection of music and he made more money than me and still hadn't graduated college).

He replied that they were pentest, they were paid to break the rules.

I pointed out that a) they were paid to break the rules under very strict contracted guidelines and b) he was a networking guy, not a pentest guy.

Apparently pointing out reality to this kid killed my chances. So thankful I have a job I enjoy and don't have to suck up to some cunt still in college with an entitlement issue and inflated self-image.

[Viin]

I'm looking for mobile developers (android *and* ios) in the Seattle area if anyone knows anyone. Preferably someone with Comp Sci background or SDK development experience.

[Strazos]

For all of the crap people like to heave on government employees, my wife seems to do more as a manager there than any of my managers have done here. Maybe because they actually get to do something other than micromanage costs.

Exactly. While people love to give shit to "gubmint pencil-pushers," the reality for has been that the vast, vast majority of folks are there to put in effort, do a good job, and actually care about what their organization is doing. Admittedly, my perspective may be a bit skewed, but for what it's worth I haven't had a bad manager/superior yet (in seven years, encompassing like 10-12 people over 4 assignments). One was kind of annoying in certain ways, but they knew what they were doing and they were good at it. The rest were all folks I continue to think very highly of...which is the complete opposite of my experience in the private sector, which mainly consisted of me being horrified that the organization didn't collapse under its own weight of utter incompetence.

Biggest draw back is the pay - you won't get rich, but it's generally sufficient IMHO.

[Yegolev]

I'm looking for mobile developers (android *and* ios) in the Seattle area if anyone knows anyone. Preferably someone with Comp Sci background or SDK development experience.

Wrong corner, but I'll look around.  I don't know anyone looking to leave Weather just now, but thing will probably be different in 2017.

[Viin]

Biggest draw back is the pay - you won't get rich, but it's generally sufficient IMHO.

At least you have a path to get rich once you are done traveling the world on the government dime.  
(aka advisor to congress peoples and presidents, military contractors, etc etc)

Though I just learned that Kai Ryssdal on Market Place was in the foreign service, now he's an NPR radio host! Not sure that pays awesome but hey ..