People have to eat. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.
Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.
It's good to see that despite all of the astroturfed "Journalism" on the death of remote work the data appears to show otherwise. The engineer market dictates the terms of employment. It seems that, based on this, remote is here to stay. That's good news for myself and others that would otherwise have very little reason to stay in tech. For example, the area I've lived in for the last 25 years has a small tech community. Mostly curmudgeonly old companies with a "tech" wing that is chronically underpaid. Think $90k for a senior a position. Given how expensive my house has become in recent years there's no way that's even possible to choke down.
Rails being the most in-demand skill is relatively unsurprising. It's becoming the web's very own COBOL. Millions and millions of lines of RoR code from over a decade ago needs to be maintained and these people are in high demand. I've seen a lot of new shops spring up that use RoR too. The trend with these places seems to be foreign developers and juniors powering the company. RoR, while it has it's problems, is still the perfect tool to extract any real power a developer has. It's about as close to WYSIWYG as we can come without going to dreamweaver.
It is interesting Python didn't make it into the in-demand skill list. I suppose the language is relatively niche still. It just feels like an in-demand kill to me because I work in data engineering. It's similarly interesting Go scored so high in demanded skills. Even outside my field it's still very niche despite all the posts you see. It leaves me suspect of their data somewhat.
If they banned IMSI catchers it just makes the job marginally harder. When I mean marginally I truly mean MARGINALLY. Right now a police officer can fire up some software, draw a selector box around a region, and pull everyone who was in that region inside some timeframe. They don't need an IMSI catcher for that. Cell phone data from advertisers is often enough. It's real minority report pre-crime level shit. This of course all ignoring the fact that IMSI leaking happens with EM emissions which can be argued are incidentally picked up anyway and therefore information that doesnt require a warrant. Like a license plate for your car.
We need much, much stronger privacy laws. But first we need to get people into congress that actually care.
> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical
Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.
However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.
Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:
1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.
2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.
Signal isn't overloaded. It's use here is the same as it's use elsewhere. It just requires contextual information to know what it means. A Qt programmer might think of signals and slots, a UNIX programmer might think of UNIX signals, etc. Jargon sure. Overloaded? I don't think so. Only thing here that bothers me is how vague the title is.
> Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work?
I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer.
Frequently. I've only recently maintained "tenure" in my later engineering years. Mostly because I don't want to fight with scrappy new grads for positions anymore. First piece of advice I can give you is ignore anything about "fun tech stack" or "culture". It's all bullshit. Of course, parrot the lines they want to hear about how these are the things you look for. Appear fun and excited to work in their "fun stack" in their "culture". Use this as cover for what you really want: money. At the end of the day money may not buy happiness but I have rarely met a happy person that can't afford to be comfortable. Beer coolers, pizza, ping pong, and "fun activities" don't buy you time with your family, friends, and neighbors. Money does.
Second piece of advice: never fall for the "find a job you love" trope. Remember this: if you do not own the company you will never love it. You may like it. Hell, you may enjoy it. But the specter of a layoff, getting fired due to a bad review, etc will always be just a few steps behind you. Always remember as a software engineer the pinheaded MBAs have you squarely under the "cost center" line in the balance sheet. And no, getting shares in a company does not imply ownership no matter how many times HR tells you so.
Fact of the matter is for the first two decades of your career you should honestly be looking to move on from any company in <= 5 years. So, a minimum of 4 companies in 20 years. You'll want to reduce that to a move-on-rate of every 3 or so years if you're in start up land. Loyalty is not awarded. Not here, and not anywhere else. That ship sailed 50 years ago.
The reason? More money and more responsibility. You have a chance to redefine yourself at every new job. These redefinitions can bring you more money and more power. More money and more power is very "sticky" and you'll find people who "fail up" execute this strategy brilliantly. You are more likely to see a significant raise via quitting than by staying around. This advice is universal. It applies equally to tech as it does to landscaping.
Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. Don't leave a company that values you and gives you good raises every so often. Evaluate carefully the opportunity cost. One example from my career: I had a job where I made $X where $X was a little below average. I liked the company and the people. I interviewed around after I got my second or third "money is tight" in a review (despite others seemingly getting rank and pay). I found a company that I could tolerate willing to pay me 1.3x $X. That is a slam dunk. Without question I put my two weeks in and GTFO. Especially when you are young this is very important. If your raise is 10% and a competitor offers you 15% you may want to weigh other facts. But when you're talking multiples of your potential raise...just leave. You are not married to the company and they are CERTAINLY not married to you. If you like your coworkers that much get their phone numbers and meet them at a bar. Despite the himming and hawing from your boss they're probably doing the same thing as you.
Their ESG score tells me otherwise. They can single handedly destroy a company or industry with this score. They control trillions in investment capital. They have seats in the largest governments.
You are either legitimately shilling for your employer or watch/read one of the several DOZEN news organizations they own. You need to wake up. The giant, along with it's daemon Aladdin, control the majority of money flow on the planet.
The main driver of RICO, however, wasn't to stop racketeering. It provided the provisions for the FBI to pursue mob bosses for hits they ordered. Prior to RICO it was very difficult to throw a mob boss in jail for such things.
All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
These interviews are not gutchecks. They are shibboleth checks.
I can design you a nice document, do the research, put the pieces together, etc with the big picture. I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents.
What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense. That's the purpose of the bloodsuckers I mentioned above. If you can train someone with little architecture experience to pass a senior level interview by just saying the right things and knowing the right hype tech then you're not hiring architects you're hiring grifters.
It's a problem that is endemic in this industry. You can't "gut check" 30 years of architectural experience unless you're legitimately asking the core questions of architecture. Every interview I've been in has had me studying stupid buzzwords from cloud technology and every interview I am asked how to use these technologies. As an example, I was once turned down because I didn't use Kafka. I knew what the underlying technology was and suggested using it but the fact I didn't say kafka eliminated me. The reason? I can only guess, but it's likely because the interviewer doesnt know much and was looking for a way to get into a debate over kafka vs protobuf vs whatever instead of discussing actual planning of a system. These debates are resolved after I take the problem back to my desk and think about it for a week. Not in an hour. In an hour the best I can give you is a block diagram with maybe some very rough fleshed out detail.
The humility check should be bi-directional. It has been my experience that interviewers tend to be the least humble people at a company. The power dynamic is obvious and it's not in the character at most startups where a "senior" engineer high on hopium can settle themselves into their rightful place.
Yeah, I don't think I want a job that asks such questions. I've done the webscale BS. I've done actual architecture that exists in reality. At this stage in my career there's nothing an interviewer can do but insult me.
You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some actual DD on me, then ask me real questions related to actual things.
If leetcode and all these other service went straight to hell tomorrow the world would be a better place. This entire "interview" industry is propped up by a bunch of leeches capitalizing on a recently extremely popular field. Then, injecting their BS to make the process harder thereby earning them dollars. The linked article is a perfect example. It's actually an advertisement if you look close enough designed by these exact leeches. This is just a reimagining of the bloodsuckers who run SAT/GRE/GMAT prep services and "ex-ivy-league recruiter consultant" bullshit. They are the same people and the only place they belong is all the way at the back of the breadline. That may be too generous for them anyway. There are better people that deserve the bread.
There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer. They "level the playing field" by asking me these stupid things. That is why it is insulting. I almost want to leave the industry entirely than have to do the process one more time. I don't need a 7 phase 360 interview with everyone including the CEO's cousin to insure I am a "culture fit". It was never like this before. It needs to stop.