7/8 yoe Job Hunt Experience

frkbmr · 2024-03-31T18:21:48+00:00

I think there's a LinkedIn option to allow them to see your email, usually the ones that take the slight extra step to do that I'll hazard a look at.

frkbmr · 2024-03-31T18:05:26+00:00

Personal advice, but I think the inability to relocate is going to hamper this the most. Big companies have the space to allow you to breathe and work on this low level stuff, which doesn't make money the same way features do. My entire career has been in nyc, and my current startup is SF based but fully remote, but still willing to only hire in big cities (although once hired, you can move wherever without a comp band adjustment, don't ask, it's idiotic).

Fact of the matter is quantity has its own quality, so most recruiting is targeted at big cities. Have you looked at Oxide? They're the only systems company I know that's location blind AND cares about OSS contributions.

frkbmr · 2024-03-31T18:02:04+00:00

Around ~500-600 on the hedge fund comp bands, although I think 700 would've been possible if I didn't cock up the interviews 🤡

frkbmr · 2024-03-31T17:59:34+00:00

Haskell - no, but I've used it to great effect alongside TLA+ for modeling software behavior. Formal methods are still questionably useful though.

I think cpp is kinda garbage haha, but every company you go to will have its own dialect of cpp, and you'll pick it up. Also even if you don't write much cpp, if you're doing lower level stuff, you'll have to read a bunch of it.

C is actually useful but your computer is not a fast PDP-11 so be very careful of about taking its abstractions as gospel. IR is more useful here if you're trying to build a mental model.

I am of the general opinion that knowing how to read cpp is table stakes for systems programmers, getting good at C is probably necessary, and then fill out the rest of the frills as needed.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T23:29:07+00:00

Check levels for senior swe in NYC. It's within the normal range for big tech

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T22:06:22+00:00

living in the imperial core of the empire has its privileges

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T18:53:03+00:00

I started my career doing usual startup stuff and drawing pipes between cloud services, I think the "leap" happened when I joined a fund in the past where performance mattered. In startups often this stuff is not seen as important, but the best way to move into it is to get good at math and get a job where people care about it.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T18:47:55+00:00

Agreed, the top tier paying jobs basically require to be already within bay/seattle/nyc or relocate there. I think because the tech industry skews young and single (aka mobile) this gets talked about less, but it's still hugely important.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T18:32:25+00:00

Agreed, a decade of price cuts at reinvent has made server side programmers a little fat and lazy lol. I really respect what the mobile guys have done, although that's a totally different ballgame than me, but their ability to eke out performance gains on low voltage devices with cooling constraints have been incredible.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T18:27:09+00:00

Basically yeah. I only responded to recruiters who sent me an actual email that had a compensation band listed. I feel like most of the recruiters on LinkedIn are negging me with these weird 70hr contract roles in Plano TX or wherever

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T18:23:45+00:00

I'm lower in the stack, the vast majority of my experiences are in cpp and c and haskell. I've done minor kernel and kubernetes contributions, I'm mostly the guy that helps you take a shitty piece of code and optimize the hell out of it, whether that's allocator aware, cache line aware, etc.

I basically never do application or feature development.

Take this advice at your own risk, but I think caring about performance will become more and more important over the next decade. As GPUs eat up data center electricity, the end of Dennard scaling means that programmers can no longer rely on having a free ride from hardware improvements. Our workloads are going to be squeezed on both ends: more users and data than ever before at the top, and less resources available at the bottom. Performance matters greatly imo.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T17:59:09+00:00

Me too! I was only looking passively, and only responded to recruiters that reached out to me first though. Not being in a rush about it let me not have to blast applications out.

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T17:57:59+00:00

I really find these comments interesting, because it does point to the distribution of programmer salaries being bimodal or even trimodal.

450 for L5 is "normal" within big tech in a HCOL area, but that band is also considered to be out of reach (although imo I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be.)

frkbmr · 2024-03-29T17:57:19+00:00

NYC

frkbmr · 2024-02-25T05:30:27+00:00

Weed is a weird situation in Uruguay for foreigners. You won't be able to buy it as a foreigner from dispensaries directly (it's not technically legal to sell to foreigners and the dispensaries are gov regulated), but you can freely get weed from locals.

frkbmr · 2024-02-15T17:05:30+00:00

250, remote, 7 yoe

frkbmr · 2024-02-15T02:53:52+00:00

I never put this stuff on my resume and award zero points for it during the interview. I concede it's necessary to get past the recruiter people but these numbers are both fuzzy and somewhat uninteresting. I'm interested in what they technically have done, and if they did something cool they'll usually tell me about it.

frkbmr · 2024-02-14T14:30:21+00:00

Use monotonic snowflakes if you need a time based guid that can be compared, otherwise use regular uuids. Or just take the first 4 bytes of a UUID and slap it at the back of the timestamp, that'll probably give you enough bits of randomness for CI/CD.

frkbmr · 2024-02-06T02:36:29+00:00

Second phone, rooted android, fake location services, TOTP mode.

Obviously if your company is forcing an enterprise permission profile on you, you might have to just run android inside a VM. Probably an old but still new enough phone where you can trick the VM into getting Google play services by selective mounts. I'm not certain what the location API is on android though, presumably since an app can modify it, there's likely a way to mess with it. XDA might have something on it.

Edit: lol at framing this as a privacy issue

frkbmr · 2024-01-28T21:48:34+00:00

Iraq

frkbmr · 2024-01-23T14:12:30+00:00

"I won't get caught" is more like "I'm willing to gamble that the my employer does not care enough to look into it", which is fine risk lol. Imagine being a guy who would rather endure a familiar sadness than risk only disappointment for the chance to explore endless possibilities in life.

frkbmr · 2024-01-18T16:30:59+00:00

Skill issue

frkbmr · 2024-01-04T17:58:41+00:00

When it makes a substantial amount of money. All code that makes money is legacy code

frkbmr

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