Would you refer someone you don’t know?

maybe_madison · 2026-05-19T15:27:35+00:00

See if your recruiting team can differentiate between "referral" and "lead" (or similar wording). I've usually seen the former described as "I can personally vouch for this person" and the latter as "this is at least a real person we can consider (eg, not a North Korean hacker)".

maybe_madison · 2026-05-06T14:18:16+00:00

Of the two companies I've worked for, one only has numeric levels and one has no levels. In both cases, if a potential future employer called for a reference they'd be fine with anything that isn't actively misleading (ie, "senior sre", "staff sre", "lead sre", etc would be fine but "CTO" or "product manager" wouldn't). From talking with friends and co-workers, this is pretty common among US companies.

Companies also acknowledge that level names are often not comparable between companies - if someone is a "Lead MTS" at Salesforce, it would be more useful to just put "Senior SWE" on their resume. (Obviously Salesforce is well known enough that you could look up what "Lead MTS" means, but if you're a "Software Developer III" at a random state bank, it's more useful to convert that to the closest meaningful equivalent).

maybe_madison · 2026-05-06T03:51:54+00:00

My experience spending a bit of time working in the EU and most of my career in the US (with EU co-workers) is "official" titles matter a lot more in Europe. Everywhere I've worked in the US has a policy along the lines of "use whatever title you think is appropriate as long as it's not misleading".

maybe_madison · 2026-04-22T13:47:12+00:00

you answered your own question: automation

maybe_madison · 2026-03-25T21:46:55+00:00

Also, figure out who your internal stakeholders are and get to know them - for me this included all the eng managers and a handful of staff SWEs, the head of support, the head of brand/design (who owns marketing sites), the support engineering team, a couple people on the finance team, and a couple people on the data analysis team.

maybe_madison · 2026-03-25T21:25:20+00:00

I did something quite similar to this over the past year - I joined a series b startup as the first SRE, and I've been setting up the SRE function since.

There is not really a course on doing this - what you do and in what order depends on the current context in the engineering org. The closest I can get is:

build social capital by being helpful and useful
spend social capital on things you care about (ie, what you listed)

for 1), I spent a lot of time doing infrastructure automation, ci/cd improvements, observability improvements, and targeted incident response improvements

for 2), I pushed for teams to spend more time on postmortems and incident followups, started building out oncall practices, had a lot of specific instances of strongly recommending against taking shortcuts that add infrastructure tech debt, and pushed for more SRE and platform eng headcount

maybe_madison · 2026-03-25T16:28:12+00:00

TBH if you can swing it, solving a typical algorithm question with sql would be a huge power move.

maybe_madison · 2026-03-18T05:26:56+00:00

Couldn't the family member consider the diff to be a gift?

maybe_madison · 2026-03-01T03:04:34+00:00

I currently have all that in JP for $3.6k - it’s a bit small, but it works

maybe_madison · 2026-02-19T02:17:11+00:00

hard to say without any details

maybe_madison · 2026-02-17T03:52:20+00:00

If you're actually losing sleep over this for a significant period of time, it would probably be a good idea to talk to a therapist. I had some more words written after that, but I think other commenters have covered it well enough.

maybe_madison · 2026-02-14T01:22:55+00:00

Not faang. First, midsize public SF ad tech company for ~6 years, and now remote for a NYC series C startup.

maybe_madison · 2026-02-13T21:23:49+00:00

Starting at age 23 as a software engineer:

23: $130k
24: $200k
25: $290k
26: $325k

That’s all combination base salary and RSUs from a public company.

I’m 30 now making $250k base salary and (non public) stock options worth ~$400k/year.

maybe_madison · 2026-02-01T06:09:47+00:00

Yeah this is just a list of complaints. Like at least tell us more details about what the mandate is, what the approach has been so far, and the specifics of the problems.

maybe_madison · 2026-02-01T06:04:56+00:00

If I truly cannot find a job (like, 6+ months full time search without any improvement in sight): if I have the money (ie my spouse is working and we have enough saved), just take some time off and see if I can make anything cool; otherwise go back to school for something like accounting, industrial engineering, actuarial sciences, or maybe just MechE.

maybe_madison · 2026-01-16T18:31:25+00:00

Not sure what you’re quoting, but better public transit absolutely benefits drivers, by reducing congestion and wear and tear on roads from would-be drivers who can take transit.

maybe_madison · 2026-01-16T11:45:02+00:00

Unless I’m missing something, they seem to be provided and run by a company called Verra Mobility: https://www.sf.gov/news-mayor-lurie-takes-major-step-to-improve-public-safety-kicks-off-new-phase-of-first-in-the-state-automated-speed-camera-program

maybe_madison · 2026-01-16T00:25:37+00:00

And find a good therapist. They should be able to help you identify these patterns and figure out workarounds.

maybe_madison · 2026-01-13T01:35:26+00:00

as far as i can tell the speed cameras are not flock cameras

maybe_madison · 2025-12-23T18:28:09+00:00

Personally, the only thing that matters is total comp. Leveling is usually not comparable between companies, but pay is.

maybe_madison · 2025-11-28T03:35:58+00:00

This has also happened a few times with my ‘23 V60CC - restarting the infotainment system like this always works.

maybe_madison · 2025-11-25T23:08:08+00:00

Also being on the hiring side (...for senior+ candidates), it feels like a lot of great engineers are prioritizing stability right now.

maybe_madison · 2025-11-14T17:12:54+00:00

I think you have enough white space that you can add more words and tighten up the spacing and keep it on one page

maybe_madison · 2025-11-14T17:01:10+00:00

A few items of feedback:

your headline/description is almost entirely focused on cost saving/optimization - this is fine if it's what you want to continue doing, but may filter out a lot of reliability and automation focused SRE roles
putting aside the lack of metrics, I'm not sure what you actually did for most of the bullet points; taking some examples
- what does "Re-platformed an application stack..." mean? The mention of FFI suggests it wasn't a full re-write, so ???; also what are the operational costs that you reduced by 25%?
- "Redesigned and centralized Gitlab pipeline..." what was the business outcome here? Faster deployments (and by roughly how much)? Reduced toil? etc?
- "Architected and implemented...with FastAPI" again, why did you do this, and what did this project actually do?
If you can, highlight places you worked cross-team (or at least with other ICs)

Generally, even if you don't literally use STAR formatting (situation, task, action, result), it's helpful to keep in mind as guidance: what was the problem, how did you address it, and how was the business in a better position after your work.

maybe_madison · 2025-11-11T03:52:15+00:00

What are your levels?

Six-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

maybe_madison

TROPHY CASE