The most funny thing is that I get no counter-offer. I always here (or rather read) "yes, we are impressed by your experience, it is really great, but you know, you wanted too much, we have lots of others who want much less". When I asked for a counter offer I get either no reply, or something like "We don't give counter offers at this moment, you wanted much above the average that we pay".
And I wanted just about the same money I was earning in my previous job.
From my perspective the job hunt is a one shot thing. I give some figure, they stop being interested. No negotiation, no counter-offer, no other things.
So it seems like the market is not that good for programmers, or I'm just so unlucky.
I believe wrt to this article, the counter offer they are talking about is a counter offer from your current employer, not a counter offer from an interview.
But from someone who has done his fair share of hiring, I'll tell you that I almost never entertain someone who asks for a lot more than I'm willing to pay. The reason is that you are very likely to be unhappy with your salary. No matter what your performance is like, you are probably going to be asking for a top up soon -- probably with extra to make up for the perceived deficiency when starting. No matter what deal we strike, this is going to be a point of contention going forward.
And while it might be uncouth to talk about it in these circles, if you are unhappy then you're going to complain to everybody around you about how little you get paid. If you are experienced and talented and worth a good salary, then you are likely already going to be paid a fair bit more than the average person on the team. So the result is that I've got an unhappy guy wandering the halls complaining about how ridiculously small his salary is, when it is already one of the highest on the team.
And then, when someone else on the team comes in and says, "alex-yo is getting X more than me and I'm way better than him/her", I have the distinctly difficult conversation where I have to tell them, "No. alex-yo gets paid a lot more than you because he/she is more experienced and has more skills than you. Let me enumerate all of the situations where alex-yo is performing better than you." And then that person, despite potentially being educated about where they can improve, is likely pissed of at me. So then they'll go to you and say, "Geeze, I'm only making Y. I should be getting paid at least as much as you." And you will be going, "....." because you know as well as I do that this person is only doing half of what you do.
At which point I have a bunch of guys pissed off at their salary, pissed off with me and pissed off with each other. Seriously, it's not worth it. So no, I'm not going counter your very high expectations with a low-ball offer. There are other candidates whose expectations are in line with mine. And even if you are worth the money, it won't be worth it for my team.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't always be showcasing top performers like alex-yo and encouraging the team to adopt similarly successful behaviours. And it's not that we should not be rewarding people who succeed in getting to the next level. But I'm not about to start hitting hornet nests with sticks for no good reason.
Or rather "The Disaster That Is Bitcoin Services Around Bitcoin". I'm wondering if there would be the same kind of article that dollars is very bad, because bank wants some money for wireing them e.g. to Europe, and the exchange rate between dollar and euro could change overnight.
Don't worry too much. You answers will be modified. Questions will be changed or blocked (so no one will be allowed to answer). Just because those people "who love answering questions" will know better. They even know if your question is a question.
I think you'd better have a blog. This way you can answer the questions you find e.g. on SO, but no one will change your answer.
There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators
That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people.
The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed.
Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address.
Yep, anonymity is funny. I'm not sure about the recordings, and presentations are not in English, and are made as a background for talking, so reading them would be useless.
This was not our experience. We posted for a full-time remote frontend position in our 100% remote company and only received a few inquiries. Thankfully one of them was the right fit but I'm dubious to your "thousands of people".
Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work for the next 30 years to retire.
However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job.
And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money.
I'm thinking about starting my own company with my own products. This will be much harder, but it's better to have this kind of job than none.
And I just stopped replying to the job adverts with "young team".
No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge difference.
> And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money.
Same (a bit older now but it started at the same age). I don't care about the salary: it is always more money that I can spend while working, and at the same time I am not going to get from any honest job the kind of money needed to do what I'd like .
The only time I got an interview, the guy wanted me to fill a leader/manager position. I had not applied for it, I had not written I wanted such a position, I had explicitly described the grunt work I wished to to. But that would contradict his mental model: "But... with your age, your experience, we thought you'd be a leader". Well, that's not what I wrote, that's not what interests me, that's not what I am good at. Impossible to pull this idea out of him.
For other applications, I don't know since I get no answer or off-topic answers sent by human robots fresh out of school. So I can just make hypotheses, like too many experiences abroad that doesn't fit the mould of my country, in too varied domains, with studies in different domains, and of course 'why on earth am I not a manager at my age'. I was recognised (at my own surprise) as a top guy in my previous job but I don't get a single chance to (at least try to) demonstrate it again.
So, basically, after only a quarter of the carrier our leaders now expect us to do, we are trashed.
During one of my interviews, a couple of years ago, I heard something like "Oh, you're over 30, and you were not a manager yet? Look, I have lots of CVs of people at your age, who are managers. If you are not, then it seems like your employer was thinking that there is something wrong with you. That's why we won't go with you further in the process".
I was arguing that in my previous job I was in fact a technical team leader, I was spending half of each day on showing people how to use databases, I was organizing trainings and conference talks. I just didn't get the job of course.
The most frustrating thing I experience now is that companies don't want to have a programmer in my age. And I cannot be a manager "because you don't have any experience in managing people".
That's sad, frustrating and depressing. Especially that I'm looking for a job now.
And there are some professions where someone has only recently started being truly useful in their '30s. I'm not in Silicon Valley but it sounds like a warped, sad place.
Yey, looks like people just watch presentations, not read it, that's why here is 1 comment about the content, 15 about how the presentation looks like :)
How about pressing space or right arrow key? If this doesn't work, make sure it's focused by clicking on a slide. Oh, and there are controls in bottom-right corner.
> Since time immemorial, the way to go forward in such pages is to press the left and right arrow buttons.
"Time immemorial"? Damn, I remember pretty clearly what life was like before Web 2.0, and I'm still in my 20s. The first time I encountered one of these presentations I was confused as hell, at least this one has the decency to put arrows to click in the bottom right corner, a lot of presentations don't.
>I remember pretty clearly what life was like before Web 2.0, and I'm still in my 20s
Well, I'm in my late thirties, and "before web 2.0" is "time immemorial" in tech years.
>The first time I encountered one of these presentations I was confused as hell
Yeah, but that should have been like 5-10 years ago. How come people still don't get them?
Heck I was confused as hell when I first encountered DOS, mice, GUIs, UNIX, browsers, etc back in the day. But we learn and move on. What puzzles me is that HN is not full of "average users" but devs and technies, and also the fact that such presentations are posted tons of times a month, and yet someone still asks...
(Sure, I can understand that this could imply a "fundamental non intuitiveness" of such UI, but whether it's intuitive or not when we first meet it, it should be second nature by now.
I believe in "idiom based design" over intuitiveness (which constraints us to UIs that we can understand at first glance, preventing designs that could need a little getting accustomed to, but be far more powerful in the long run).
And I'd argue it's not even that non-intutive. From games to Powerpoint, all kinds of apps use the arrow keys to navigate -- why wouldn't one at least try them?
The reason these comments keep appearing is because tech community is large & growing and each person encounters & is confused by their first presentation in this style at a different time. As much as I hate the relevant xkcd meme, it is pretty apt here: https://xkcd.com/1053/
> Mice
This isn't a good analogy because you are in control of whether you use a mouse or not. If it confuses you, you'll either stop using it or figure it out before participating on HN. OTOH you can surf the web for years without encountering one of these presentations, so it's jarring when someone else creates a web page that violates your expectation of how the web works
> And I'd argue it's not even that non-intutive. From games to Powerpoint, all kinds of apps use the arrow keys to navigate -- why wouldn't one at least try them?
Because people are used to navigating the web with their mouse, not their keyboard
I wouldn't call it 'traps'. I would call it 'read and understand documentation before writing code' like: what is 'is' operator, or how floats behave in EVERY programming language, or why you should sanitize EVERY user input.
So, basically, I can write such a list for every language I know.
I'd argue that a good programming language should rarely force you to go back to the docs. Anyway, for a list of weird language properties, check out this tag:
Relying on developers to read and remember every bit of documentation for every bit of code is more likely to end up with insecure code compared to introducing sane defaults with an explicit, expressive API.
Which is why any sane industry has lots of safety involved. We don't just shrug every time someone gets electrocuted to death and say "they forgot part c page 4 of the operations manual which indicates that the off switch doesn't work on tuesdays".
And the way we handle that is by designing systems to compensate for the fallibility of humans so that the human-computer system is more robust as a whole.
I think the point of the parent comment is that they should. I'm not even a regular user of Python (or dynamic languages in general), and yet the list of things in the article doesn't seem all that surprising.
Technologies:
15 years of full stack experience (programming, administering, DBA, organizing trainings, integrating different things using plenty of languages at the same time).
Commercial experience with: Java, C++, Python, PostgreSQL, SQL, GIS, Javascript, Ruby (and some more).
During all the years I have also used hundreds of libraries, and worked in dozens of different projects, and industries.
Many years of working remote in a multinational team.
The most funny thing is that I get no counter-offer. I always here (or rather read) "yes, we are impressed by your experience, it is really great, but you know, you wanted too much, we have lots of others who want much less". When I asked for a counter offer I get either no reply, or something like "We don't give counter offers at this moment, you wanted much above the average that we pay".
And I wanted just about the same money I was earning in my previous job.
From my perspective the job hunt is a one shot thing. I give some figure, they stop being interested. No negotiation, no counter-offer, no other things.
So it seems like the market is not that good for programmers, or I'm just so unlucky.