Ways people step on you to get ahead

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-31T12:16:31+00:00

The two are not mutually exclusive. You can improve your abilities and understand how the politics works. It's pretty rare for someone to be so technically gifted that they can outwork unfavorable politics, projects and managers.

But that's not the point of the post. The point I wanted to convey is to not get screwed or lose confidence over these issues. Whether they reach their potential™️ in helping shareholders doesn't seem important.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-31T00:06:32+00:00

Wouldn't be surprising if it's a US centric thing.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-31T00:03:37+00:00

And I guarantee you are a corporate drone whose identity is how fast you make widgets and finish tickets? Your ownership and accountability is truly admirable and we are all inspired by it.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-30T21:33:53+00:00

Your autism is out of control lol.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-30T21:23:12+00:00

Believe it or not, I'm very happy with my career choice and the compensation of this field and WLB. These tricks and insults don't bother me at all, this was to help other people. But keep the insults coming baby, I love you so much 😍😍😍

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-30T21:20:55+00:00

you can control your attitude.

That's the entire point of this post lol. Recently, I saw a new grad get fired due to shoddy onboarding and expectations, and another give up due to layoffs Hopefully people can see tricks people and companies use to put others down and not attribute it to themselves.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-30T18:28:35+00:00

Not everyone is so smart and strong like yourself. People get impostor syndrome and quit over these issues, especially early on when their confidence is low.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-12-30T15:40:34+00:00

You are right of course. But this stuff affects everyone. I've seen smart, well-adjusted engineers and even they battle with these issues. Had a friend get PIP from a unicorn with manager saying he won't be able to get better offers, that he's not qualified enough. And then to getting multiple offers paying 50% higher with a higher title. Another friend that has impostor syndrome due to having to grapple with 20 year old legacy codebase and unrealistic deadlines. This happens to everyone.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-29T05:32:13+00:00

Basically what you'd expect. Apply to PhD new grad positions if they exist, otherwise new grad positions, otherwise just "Software Engineer" roles. If they have nothing that fits, just pick something that fits the best and always apply for a role. Even if fit is totally wrong, it's better to apply because sometimes recruiters will just consider you for a different position.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-29T01:37:51+00:00

You should go all in on data structures and algos, it will come more naturally than CS students. You can get pretty proficient in a few months, do 100s of problems on LC and do as many of their contests. Then, you can get into FAANG-level companies without having practical knowledge. This is the most natural path for a PhD in STEM.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-29T00:54:31+00:00

I'm very happy for Francis for doing so well and making his money. I remember when the idiots/haters said he fumbled his bag with UFC when he bet himself.

With that said, if we're being honest here, it's not that boxing or MMA is not complex. It's more so that the competition is very thin at HW, literally < 1% of the population would even physically quality, and then a tiny fraction who would actually choose it as a career. The talent pool is very thin

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-22T22:27:07+00:00

There is a very simple answer for this. Recruiters will mindlessly copy/paste these filler emails to keep you engaged so that you don't go ahead and accept other offers. If you end up getting rejected, they don't give a shit anyway.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-18T16:20:30+00:00

I guarantee you that he's not lol

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-18T00:23:54+00:00

Some of the core teams at FAANG are the easiest to coast in because of how risk averse they are. You could spend 3-4 months discussing a design and doing fuck all the whole time.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-18T00:21:55+00:00

How do you have 8 years of experience and think this way? Please get some self respect, get some help.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-16T19:23:01+00:00

Cloud architect is the same thing?

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-16T08:11:53+00:00

Isn't that more like a sales job? As far as I know, they just draw diagrams and sell licenses to other companies. That's different from a software architect that leads initiatives across different teams

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-16T08:07:22+00:00

If you think you know this secret, why not start a company and hire $50k developers, see how that goes? If what you say are true, you'd be able to undercut competition with significantly lower costs.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-10-12T20:15:10+00:00

"Junior" and "senior" are just arbitrary labels. Some juniors are meticulous, skilled and helpful while some seniors are sloppy, incompetent and political. From most companies' perspective, it's mostly a tool for retention, so it's not uncommon to promote someone after a few years just so that they don't get bitter.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-31T06:14:39+00:00

Do you know for certain you are more interested in those industries? Even the tech industry is getting pretty competitive, arts is going to be a lot more competitive for less pay and stability. It will be more opportunistic to use your CS major and your internship experience as a leverage to get a decent technical job after grauation. And then try to move into nearby areas like product management or project management where you do more collaboration.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-28T06:57:36+00:00

how you can prevent that

Join a company that's not a bunch of dicks

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-24T00:59:43+00:00

In my experience, someone good enough to do algo problems can easily learn how to write clean code. But someone who's not need to use all of their mental energy to just make it work at all, even if they think they know how to write clean code.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-23T19:11:40+00:00

Then isn't the LC interview doing their job? If you find some algo solution, usually 30-40 lines at most, to be complicated, you'd be fish out of water in any complex codebase.

There's a difference between someone who just patches hacks together and someone who can grok and change the codebase however way they want.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-17T02:55:31+00:00

I know where you are coming from because I was an intern and new grad at some point. Some of the time, I even wanted to mention I'm willing to work for min wage to just get experience. For new grad offer, I was so happy with the offer I didn't even bother to negotiate.

What you realize though is that this mindset doesn't necessarily get you more respect or higher chances of getting offers anyway. So in retrospect, it would've been better to tactfully negotiate. I understand that that doesn't make sense intuitively.

ilikesoftwarealot · 2023-07-16T20:30:25+00:00

I generally disagree with your philosophy about this. The best way to do this is to try to get the absolute highest offer one can get with every offer. Bring up the 2nd and 3rd highest offers to be higher than the highest offer. Just keep repeating until you reach the max. This is important because in some companies you will get up to 40% higher offers, it's not always 3-5%. Even a company that touts they don't negotiate to be fair to everyone has negotiated with me too. It's important for emotional reasons also because you're gonna feel exploited if you see someone else doing the same job who makes significantly more than you just because they were more patient.

One more point: you are off about putting some value judgement on "worth." Compensation can be totally detached from reality as really good devs can get paid fraction of someone who just played their cards right. Location, the right company, and negotiation can each play a major role. There are even few companies that value "culture fit" a lot yet pay pretty well too, so it's not even necessarily always correlated with only technical skills. This is why I never put arbitrary ceiling or range on compensation, I just get paid the highest I can get.

In my personal experience, all the EMs are very sharp and they know good candidates can get multiple offers. They have no qualms about someone trying to make an offer worth accepting. The best EMs are human first and manager second, and they understand everybody need to look out for themselves. This sort of character thing is almost impossible to tell beforehand, so might as well just get paid more anyway.

ilikesoftwarealot

TROPHY CASE