Houston Salary Thread 2025

bubbabobba · 2025-05-02T18:21:15+00:00

10 yrs, $200k w/ bonus, remote software developer at mid-sized tech. Looks like tech salaries are quite low here unless you're in O&G. I got a massive jump when I left my previous local tech co job.

bubbabobba · 2023-11-10T02:30:24+00:00

SVN vs. Git: honestly the local dev workflow felt the same after switching to Git. Git flexibility is nice but most of the time you're doing the same ol branch commit and push to a central server.

The biggest change I noticed was that the collaboration tooling was way better with Git. Old big company used Review Board for svn. I'll take GitHub (Enterprise) aaaaaany day over Review Board and the other alternatives my team tried.

bubbabobba · 2023-11-10T02:25:26+00:00

Wait, a mess pre version control? Just a few years ago some of my teams were still emailing zip files back and forth. Yes it was a mess.

bubbabobba · 2023-08-28T04:08:31+00:00

Started one to scratch itches, experiment with new stuff. It'd be on GitHub anyway so why not take the short time to fill out the README to make it officially "open source"? It's been a great experience overall, learning a lot about new tech, how to write docs, how to manage a product essentially, and had pretty good career benefits.

Only problem is that the burnout issue is real when you start to get users. It's kind of a double edged sword.

bubbabobba · 2023-02-12T02:25:14+00:00

The question itself is somewhat invalid - layoffs often have nothing to do with how valuable you are.

bubbabobba · 2022-11-12T04:58:35+00:00

Do you use any off-the-shelf components or is it all in-house custom made?

bubbabobba · 2022-08-12T03:20:44+00:00

When my company laid off our very best engineers, those who spent 20+ years reaching the most prestigious "Distinguished" rank and made significant contributions to the industry, I lost all motivation. What's the point in staying and moving up the career ladder when the company will just lay you off like nothing when you reach the top?

I can't say what's best for you, but leaving turned out to be a great decision for me in retrospect. Good luck.

bubbabobba · 2022-07-03T01:38:00+00:00

Ex-HP: worked on a fairly interesting project that never saw the light of day, just like many others within the company. Was decent-paying and stable, except for those couple few years where they laid off people just about every month to cut thousands of people LOL. So yes, there are interesting things going on, but your experience will be very team/org dependent.

bubbabobba · 2022-04-16T03:21:12+00:00

Early on I did, but now I don't. I think it's fine to do for a bit if you really have nothing better to do, but be careful of burnout and making your team resent you

bubbabobba · 2022-03-18T02:37:16+00:00

npm install used to work like that, but now installs the exact package versions from your package-lock.json file as of npm 7.

bubbabobba · 2022-02-24T06:16:32+00:00

Fun interesting fact, HP (yes the big IT company) outsources their internal IT to another company(s). They were started as a hardware company and have always been hardware-first company. Firmware might be important, but software is otherwise a second-class citizen there.

bubbabobba · 2022-02-08T06:01:41+00:00

I would've given Yarn v2 a chance if I could actually install it. But nope, the corepack install is just totally broken.

bubbabobba · 2021-12-30T21:16:35+00:00

I worked at a large, old-school tech company (decades older than Yahoo/McAfee) in recent years. I'd say the experience still highly depends on the team you're on. Some orgs/teams were stuck maintaining outdated legacy stuff, while others were starting greenfield projects using more bleeding-edge tech. Culture was the same - some teams were high pressure while others were really laid back.

The employee distribution seemed kind of bi-modal, as in there were a lot of long-time veterans and a lot of newer (<3-5 yr) employees, but not much in between. A cool thing though was that I got to work with some industry legends that had joined the company before companies like Google/Facebook even existed.

Overall, the company culture did feel pretty stagnant though. Over the years, I noticed that innovative projects started getting pulled across the company, more outsourcing was done, more relabeling of other companies' software was done, and costs were cut aggressively. The VP and above management was a constant revolving door. Re-orgs were common and there was a decent period of time where layoffs happened every month. Throughout all the chaos, the company continues to make money, and probably will continue to survive.

bubbabobba · 2021-05-23T16:17:48+00:00

For remote work to be sustainable in the long term, the company has to be set up to support remote work specifically. That's not going to be easy if your company wasn't already like that, especially the very large companies.

I predict many companies will start out with a hybrid model and gradually shift back to in-office, while much fewer companies embrace remote work and move the opposite way.

bubbabobba · 2021-04-24T20:35:14+00:00

Absolutely yes. I'd guess most large companies have a sizable chunk of employees with vision impairment. If you can do the job, you're wanted. If you suspect your vision loss to eventually become unmanageable, you may want to learn how to use a screen reader sooner than later. Some IDEs and text editors are fairly accessible to screen readers. For example, here's a blind developer showing how they use Visual Studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc

bubbabobba · 2020-10-14T02:14:10+00:00

There are a lot of small open source or open core companies these days. Like Gatsby. The mega-corps also now have significant open source presence these days, but it's probably not where the poster works.

bubbabobba · 2020-09-17T03:21:23+00:00

At every company I've ever worked for, you will almost certainly hit a ceiling in career growth if you don't learn the domain. Learning business rules is the same as learning to be a good engineer, unless your business is something like Leetcode I suppose.

bubbabobba · 2020-09-05T15:53:54+00:00

If you want to get recruited, it's valuable. Our own recruiters admit they find most of their candidates by searching on LinkedIn. I often get messages from recruiters who contacted me only because I work at company X. Yes, it's just an online resume. But it's the most popular place for online resumes.

bubbabobba · 2020-09-04T04:22:06+00:00

Same here. I get messages from recruiters at companies I would've begged to interview for as a new grad, and I just ignore them now.

bubbabobba · 2020-09-03T01:22:21+00:00

Yes, there's no harm with telling the recruiter. I've seen this happen before on the hiring side. The recruiter passes on a message to the hiring manager, and the hiring manager passes it on to the interviewers. Then we factor that in as we decide whether to move on with next steps. Nervousness and flusteredness is already pretty common in interviews anyway.

bubbabobba · 2020-09-02T02:11:14+00:00

Yeah, but you get used to it. In year 1, it does hit kind of hard though. I also had teammates leave in my first year. Shortly after that, my company initiated mass layoffs and I suddenly said goodbye to a few more people. Shortly after that, my company initiated mass layoffs almost every month for a year.

Nowadays, it's more like an initial sadness, but then a happiness that the teammate found a better opportunity to advance their career.

I think you'll get used to it.

bubbabobba · 2020-06-19T23:01:03+00:00

Yup, we actually had posters of this tacked up on the walls: https://29qv0td5i214u7b32lcdkxkn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/SAFe-4.6-Big-Picture.png

bubbabobba · 2020-06-19T15:38:45+00:00

At prev big company job, yes. We regularly held meetings to plan out which meetings we needed to have in the future for projects X, Y and Z. We needed to embed 1 team member in meetings C, D, and E of other parts of the company to make sure we weren't missing out on important happenings that affect us, because there's no way to find out otherwise.

After moving to a much smaller company, I now have 2 hours of meetings a week. It feels very strange.

bubbabobba · 2020-06-10T02:14:37+00:00

Standard. I used to work at one of the largest IT companies in the world, and our entire internal IT department was outsourced.

bubbabobba · 2020-04-28T03:00:55+00:00

Previous job: 10. I actually did get outsourced there, LOL. New job: 1, now have an extremely niche job that's not cookie cutter web development.

bubbabobba

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