The United States is a victim of British imperialism and experienced a coup attempt back in January of 2021. Singling them out seems a little unfair when they’ve experienced similar struggles
I hate downplaying how much some people seem to be struggling (and that's probably why we don't hear about it much) but let's say for certain pockets, the tech market is pretty hot right now.
I know some (former) CDK alumni and I'm not surprised. Notorious for paying below market in engineering and IT. A place to cut your teeth but not to stay.
That's highly variable. In my area of the company the pay is very competitive (and I don't have to worry about any Enterprise Java, as per another comment of yours ;-)). But I don't work anywhere near IT, nor on the DMS.
The real problem IMO is that Brian MacDonald is focused (again, this is his second shot) at squeezing the company for every penny so he can make a buck turning it public again. I hate to see all the work people are doing 24/7, but a little part of me is giddy with the thought that BM is getting bent over hard by this. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
> Notorious for paying below market in engineering and IT
Why assume that good people are only driven by money and pay? Further that good people know all the opportunities and can get a job paying better? Also there is no evidence that I have seen that the places that pay better don't suffer from cyber attacks or ransomware.
A bigger part of the problem (maybe) is the fact that there is a vast amount of info published which helps people improve their hacking skills and make more attacks possible than would be the case if that info was not as easily available. (Note I did not say anything that indicates it wouldn't still be possible or happen but that it wouldn't be as easy to do).
> Why assume that good people are only driven by money and pay?
Ah that's easy: Because CDK Global does not utilize the kinds of technologies or operate in a market where it would attract engineers who'd take the job out of passion or curiosity. It's a dime-a-dozen Enterprise Java shop that sells software to car dealerships. It is also not a startup that offers you equity upside.
If you want a job where you get to write Spring Boot Java that gets deployed to AWS for a "mature" employer you're spoiled for choice; and orgs with the same tech stack will pay 30+% more.
Who would invest in building a company to compete in this market? It's limited in size, has deeply entrenched competition, and technological progress hasn't unlocked an obvious improvement or efficiency that can be capitalized on.
Best case, this startup gets bought out by a larger competitor. Worst case, they get crushed by it.
they do. there are a couple of large competitors and several small ones. the reason there are not more boils down to: a high barrier to entry, since software suites (not individual products) are often needed, and the high cost of retraining folks using older systems in order to use your new, better product.
Another way of looking at it is CDK's main product is an ERP tailored to the automotive industry. These aren't systems with short setup times and there is major risk to trying to replatform you're accounting system. How do you pull of an ERP migration while you're existing one is down? Further, almost everything the dealer does from inventory management to service is integrated to this system of record either directly or via data integrations.
Some of the smaller mom-and-pop stores just use small business accounting systems like quickbooks but those get pretty tedious to maintain with any sizable number of sales or employees per month.
My hot take is auto dealers are a notoriously painful enterprise sales cycle due to network effects aka "good 'ol boys" club (anecdotally from folks in tech who have to deal in this industry).
Many are also not tech-savvy. Many dealerships are inherited within a family that has owned them since the 1950s if not longer. They are cash cows for the owners and there's little motivation to try new things. When they are forced to, like when internet sales and marketing became a thing they had to deal with, they just go with the same system that all their fellow dealers are using.
There also isn't space to grow. It's not like running a dealership with hyper efficiency is going to lead to being able to open another dealership. The market is largely saturated and in the rare event that an existing dealership comes for sale, you'll be competing with massive PE-backed conglomerates that can pay nonsense prices for them.
It's still very much a dinosaur industry. I suspect the names (i.e. Tony Jone's Toyota) in dealerships and dealership gorups are typically 70+ years or older by now. Children might be taking over and running things now but dad is still likely "chairman of the board" and makes final expense decisions.
A lot of the operational stuff, especially the folks already in India, were outsourced to Genpact. The people went too. Not as many in the US, but a few.
You underscore the same thing I noticed as well: To have a decent career as a software engineer you need to be a tenacious problem solver. Even the not-so-great devs are tenacious.
There are tons of smart, hard-working people who have a mentality of "You should be able to do everything correctly and have it work correctly the first time, or maybe on the second try with some minor adjustments". And I think these people will find no joy in being a software developer and typically don't survive bootcamps.
Software engineering is like digging a hole, where every time you strike your shovel down you either hit a huge boulder or a giant lead lined pipe no one told you was down there. It would take some kind of a mental disability or achieving a state of enlightenment to not be frustrated by being constantly blocked and held down when you want to run, which is the real definition of this job.
I think you’ve also gotta be comfortable being in a pretty dark place a lot of the time.
It’s like being a plumber if your tools did surprising things or simply broke and required repair regularly, you had to learn totally new (and usually not any better) tools every year or two, and you did the actual work with a crappy remote-control robot, mostly crammed into dark spaces, with no schematics or plan or even ability to personally see the outline of the general area you’re working in and lights that only illuminate about 2 feet ahead.
Lots of the time all your shit you need to do the other shit is broken or is lying to you, and you’re also in some awful little mess that you can’t be sure there’s any real way out of because you can’t goddamn see anything.
“Ok time for standup!” now try not to slip and say “fuck everything, I hate life, all of this is bullshit and I’m pretty sure we don’t even need to be doing it. No blockers.” Keep on your mask that presents you as employably-stable.
It kinda fucking sucks. I get why people don’t want to do it.
[edit] oh and it’s that plus all the usual offices-suck dehumanizing , quietly degrading, pointless-feeling, politically- and ethically-nasty (cf Moral Mazes), boring shit that people’ve complained about in much the same way since the 50s or so (e.g. Yates’ Revolutionary Road)
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.
You're going to have to provide evidence, as in actual bona-fide promotions handed out, or Tenure committees expressly spelling out and counting this as a factor in their decision
The context here is salting so it would likely be omitting prior employment or education/training. I personally think this is completely reasonable in all cases.
Non-salting example: over a decade ago I omitted an entire year of professional experience as a PHP developer when trying to get hired as a Python engineer, because I didn’t want to get pigeon-holed as “PHP dev who can maintain our crummy legacy PHP codebase nobody wants to touch”.
Anyway it would be extremely problematic if employers were entitled to full and complete honesty from applicants but had no equivalent obligations from their side. If businesses had the choice they’d pick the status quo over mutual transparency.
I lied about my potential value (by understating it) to an employer for (longer term) personal and professional gain.
Going back to Union Salting:
Often times the "salt" is a star employee; they're always on time, never say no to a job, pick up shifts nobody wants to take to ingratiate themselves both to management and their colleagues. They don't ask for raises and never complain to management. Their intention is to organize workers and so they want to be the sort of model employee a manager will keep around.
The reason why this practice is allowed is because its illegal for unions to walk into an establishment and talk directly with employees about organizing while they're "on the clock" and on premise.
The parent didn't think they were irrelevant at all, they thought it might signal to the company that it could extract more value by assigning them work they didn't want to do.
Well intentioned hiring managers and teams lie all the time. If they let the truth flow they wouldn't be able to do their jobs. These people don't even mean to lie.
Ah, but it’s not a characteristic of SQLAlchemy tho. It’s how Python evaluates statements. Both Peewee and the Django ORM work on the same principle with default values.
The intent is to pass a callable, not to call a function and populate an argument with what it returns.
Correct, it's not specific to sqlalchemy - I'm just saying I notice this a lot with sqlalchemy. Probably because it was the first significant bug I had to figure out how to fix when I introduced it in one of my first apps. I guess we never forget the first time we shot ourselves in the foot.
I don’t understand how you can move fast in software development without at least some rudimentary observability in place (logs). You’d see a 500 and likely an IntegrityError exception and that would give you a huge clue you’re not setting your PK correctly.
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