That sounds great. At my current company, there are a ton of small, mostly independent teams of 5-10 people. My team has 4 and we’re basically like a startup. That’s how it feels.
Every other team is pretty much isolated from the others and you have no real visibility as to what’s going on in the tech side of the company. I feel like multiple projects that are basically the same get worked on in parallel and no one knows.
Is this kind of fog of war normal? It is a very successful company and I like it very much, don’t get me wrong. But it’s also really easy to slide under the radar here because of how isolated the teams are and I don’t need an environment where I can be a slacker. I liked the fast pace of the startup - everything I did felt like it had impact. Here, I just write a lot of vaporware or resolve issues that no one really cares about. And I don’t think it’s just me being new, either, I think many people are in the same spot.
I’m not very motivated by salary. I far prefer to be interested in what I am doing. That’s why I figure after I’m done with a larger company I can donk around in startups and maybe bink an exit. I dunno. No idea what I’m doing and just mashing buttons but it seems to work out.
I’m at a medium sized tech-ish company right now (Wayfair). I enjoy the mixture of startup and support. I do data science which has a mixture of wins and losses depending on how things shake out which adds to my stress, and there’s a big culture of working towards the bottom line here more than making things perfect. One day I’d like to try out a ANG job, interviewed onsite before @ goog (of course didn’t make it otherwise I’d be there), but for now I’m getting rapid promotion/responsibility in a growing company so I’m happy.
Aren’t a lot of these companies kind of like… evil? Of the big ones, I think google is the only one I can morally get down with. Maybe netflix, but I hate their business practices. Twitch would probably be a great fit for me.
I’m a little old for entry level, and people just usually assume I’m 22-25 instead of 32. Maybe if I was 40 it’d be different. No one really asks age at any point in an interview, so as long as you don’t look ancient I guess…
It’s easier in a remote environment. All anyone hears from me is my voice and most interactions I have are through IM. I think remote will help with the ageism a bit.
Rather than ageism, which I am still too young for, the biggest thing I deal with is what I call “singleism.” If you’re single with no kids it’s just automatically assumed you’re fine with being on call at weird hours or working weekends to push through a deadline. Whereas I notice people with kids and family tend to get more slack on this stuff.
A close friend of mine was very far along at Google and they wanted him to be some kind of further along thing where he was going to have to travel and he turned it down, they still were very demanding about him being on campus long hours. He could work from home or work during the relatively long commute, but still a lot of pressure to be on campus, so he quit. I don’t know how much money he was making, but I’m sure it was a lot. He moved to rural Wisconsin.
I assume not during covid, right? Most companies have transitioned to pure remote. My company is shutting down its main office. People are moving out of state and stuff already. I think this kind of pressure is a thing of the past but I could be wrong.
After writing a few articles and continuing to comb through my network, I had more work than I could handle.
I found out that companies have a really hard time finding experienced software engineers who are also good writers and started to wonder if the market might be bigger than I first thought. I was doing almost zero outbound sales and still being approached by 2-3 new clients per week. Several of my early clients had mentioned job opportunities, and people referred business to me from all over.
Sounds like there’s a ton of opportunity out there as a technical writer with real hands-on engineering experience - if anyone’s getting burnt out.
How much $ though? I have like 5 years of programming + a degree in English.
Solar is actually going really well now though and I haven’t had time to pursue much computer stuff (other than taking a C++ class with one of my kids).
eta: I’m liking C++, learning some stuff that I should have known, and it doesn’t seem like the development time is that much longer than something like Python - at least not as much longer as I imagined, which was a lot.
Kinda wonder how bad of a beat this was, my Uncle died just as I was getting going on programming, he was an old school Googler who was friends with Schmidt, I bet he could have got me in the door. Oh well.
Might be something good for me and my wife (PhD in English Lit) and perhaps one of my daughters. My wife is already “professionally” writing and has had stuff in places like WaPo, I think The Smithsonian, and others, but the pay is ridiculous. It’s like a couple/few hundred dollars for long pieces with editing that has required research and interviews. I could probably do some outlining of something technical and then review it.
Technical writing may pay much better since it’s very unsexy and requires fairly deep knowledge of a subject that’s hard for most people. Also tech companies have a lot more money than newspapers.
With you as a fact-checker/consultant that might be good enough. And you always have this thread and the 2p2 thread for stuff you don’t know - which are goldmine resources imo.
Does anyone know of a way to have Mac terminal remember it’s state and history in each tab when restarted/computer rebooted? Like how Chrome remembers tabs and history now. I would kill for something like that with terminal.
Yes I’m sure Super-Duper-VIM-CHOCOPIE-PUTTY-XTERM+ does that and 100x more. But I’m old, and I’ve been working with terminal for 10 years. I don’t need any of those other bells and whistles. I know how to get it to do everything I want, except this one thing.
Now I dread rebooting my computer because I can’t just scroll through my history in each terminal tab and repeat whatever tasks I’ve done in the last few months. I’ve tried playing around with their remember bash history. But of course it totally screws things up somehow.
Edit: ok googling yields a bunch of results that don’t sound promising, but maybe one will work.
Edit edit: The Window Groups in Terminal are so close. But it mixes the history of each tab together - which I’m pretty sure what happens with all this .bash_history stuff as well.
