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Ask Slashdot: What Do You Wish You'd Known Starting Your First "Real" Job?
itwbennett writes: ITworld's Josh Fruhlinger asked seasoned (and some not-so-seasoned) tech professionals what they wished they knew back when they were newly minted graduates entering the workforce. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best advice has more to do with soft skills than with tech skills. To wit: 'When [managers] say they are suggesting you do something, it's not really a suggestion — it is an order disguised as a suggestion. Plain-speaking is a lost art at big companies and corporate double talk is the name of the game.' What's your best piece of advice for the newest among you?
How to negotiate for a better salary.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's better to ask forgiveness than to get permission.
Like a kid in a candy store your manager will want more, More, MORE! of your time if you let them. It's a feedback loop to encourage more hard work from you. Advice: pace yourself so that when it is really needed and really an emergency you can show up to slay the dragon. You control how much time you spend thinking about this job, not them.
Hire me...
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Is that I would never stop working the rest of my life, and that I should have held off working as long as I could.
...and when.
-Listen more, talk less, especially when you're young.
-Always meet a commitment you make.
-Keep every e-mail.
-Show up five minutes early to every meeting.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Before you start suggesting changes on a system, first learn why something is done the way it currently is. it's usually for a pretty good reason.
You have to own your career.....no one else will do it for you. Negotiate a good salary. If you ever get passed over for a raise or a promotion, start looking for a different job. If the choice assignments aren't being given to you, look for a different job. Take ownership of your education....learn new skills before you need them and make yourself invaluable to the company. Take on the hard challenges.
Link is to slide show site littered with click bait adds. While the topic is a useful discussion to have with new graduates, link is to garbage site....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Focus your job search on:
- Government work
- Start-ups
- Prime government contract work
Otherwise you will training and managing H1-Bs. They don't tell you that in school.
In any organization with 20 or more people at least one of them will be a complete asshole.
Save more on 401k, Roth-IRA; leads to tax reduction. Also live frugal. You never know when your job will vanish -- so the quicker you get a nest-egg, better. And for any tax deferred savings time is your friend; so earlier you start is better. And set your goal to be financial independence.
All companies are out to screw you. So you are a fool. A complete fool, if you give the company any loyalty.
Do not be afraid or feel bad to jump ship to another company that is offering something better. Also don't ever be afraid to ask for more money, because I guarantee you are underpaid.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sounds like a Fortune 500 company I worked for in Silicon Valley. The company is unwilling to train employees to get certified because they might leave and make more money at a competitor. Never mind that employees are training themselves to get certified and leaving the company to make more money at a competitor because of the lack of training. While the best and the brightest are leaving, the unmotivated employees are becoming more entrenched in management and discouraging others from getting certified. Corporate dysfunction at its best.
1. I would not do the same things second time around, wouldn't be doing full time university and full time work, I would quit the university, do full time not for 5 years as I did but for maybe 4, move onto the contracts then as I did at first, but not do contracts for 10, instead do it for 5 and start my own business 6 years sooner after getting just enough experience anyway.
2. I wouldn't bother buying and fixing and renting/selling properties as I did on the side, that diluted my effort and pulled me back from starting my own real business.
Basically if I could talk to myself 20 years ago, I would tell myself to skip college altogether, work right away (as I basically did anyway, but I did full time studies and full time job, which was unnecessarily difficult). I would make sure to explain to myself how to properly save money from much younger age and tell myself to start the business much earlier.
You can't handle the truth.
If you code, and your manager doesn't code, or if you admin and your manager's area of expertise is 'management' and not 'system administration' stop wasting time and just get out. It's not going to end well.
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills
She'll end up being the ex-wife.
Is the one you create.....Start your own business. Even if it's a failure financially, it will be a success long term.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The year in France is a great idea. When you finally have the time you don't have the body and the people you meet will change your life.
I wish I'd known about 401k matches, 457b, 403b and what an IRA is.. then what a Traditional vs a Roth is.. and that work is "work" not a place to express yourself, or practice your own personal morals.
It's a competitive.. generally disarming place where a lot of unsavory people [can and will hurt you] if given the chance.
Always keep your guard up, keep your mouth shut.. and be on the look out for an ambush.
Possibly off-topic but now that I am a very seasoned tech worker facing retirement starting investing in your future literally is my vote. There is nothing like time and compound interest so new grads, setup and contribute to that saving plan (401k, 403b). Pay yourself first, you will not regret it.
When I started I poured everything into a shit-ass job and they were MORE than happy to squeeze more and more out of me (because recent grad + .COM bubble burst, insanity, etc). After 6 years I was completely burnt out, extremely cynical, suffering depression and anxiety issues (which I'm still dealing with.)
After I quit that hellhole I went somewhere "normal" and I had a really hard time adjusting to not having to have everything done simultaneously as quickly as possible, I got my nights and weekends back and I didn't know what to do with myself. It was surreal.
That place started to go south (after it was gobbled up by a capital investment group) so I went to my current place which is even better still.
So the lesson I would give to my younger self is that don't be afraid to keep looking around for opportunities, sometimes the grass really is greener.
crazy dynamite monkey
Literally 24 hours after posting my resume online a recruiter called me, claiming to be from a local company I'd wanted to work for. Only after I accepted the job did I find out this recruiter was working for a contractor and my position was a temp. I wish I'd asked more questions as this set me back to square 1 three months later.
Being right isn't enough. You have to be popular to effect change.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
All of the major mistakes I've made over the years fall into the category of not playing well with others. That often occurred when I became overly committed to getting the job done. Big mistake. I eventually turned that into a simple motto: "It's more important to get along with others than to get your work done." Basically, you lose more points for being a social problem than you gain for being a technical answer. The penalty for the former can be quite severe. The reward for the latter usually is minimal.
Corny as it may sound, a simple prevention/cure for this problem is to read, follow, and live the advice in "How to Win Friends and Influence People," by Dale Carnegie. (Available for free at your local public library.) That will also help you in all other aspects of life, since the same dynamic applies throughout. Heck, even those ISIS folks also could benefit from it - especially them.
IMHO, this should be required reading for everyone entering the workforce. Since I've begun practicing those principles, every aspect of my life has improved. Oh, except that I get more annoyed at people who remain clueless on these simple - and now obvious - principles.
She said I should become a Forester. She was right, the stints I did which required field work always made me the happiest. Maybe not Forestry but perhaps, Geology, Conservation, etc.
Listen to mom. If you are just starting out, bail before you get too frustrated and unhappy. There are too many BOFHs out there.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Always have a copy of every email you got.
At the end of the workday, I make a backup of all my emails.
If something is important is discussed or agreed on always have it in written form (email, paper). "You told me to do this and this, but now you are telling me that I should have done entirely something else. Here you email (and stick it to manager's face)."
I wish I'd known that because I was good at something didn't really mean I'd enjoy it. Almost 20 years into IT and I'm still trying to figure out how to get out of it, not because the work sucks, but because mgmt sucks and office life is not for me. I only do it for the money, for years because I was married and had to provide, now there just isn't anything else I can do with the same earnings potential. I love technology, and have been dorking around with computers since my first (Vic-20), but just because I understand it, and it seems to come easy to me, doesn't make one iota of it enjoyable. I keep thinking with the next job it'll finally be the "one," then I meet the management team and realize it's just the same old crap in a new cube. Had I stayed in the service I'd be retired or close to it by now, and likely spending my days playing with fire and mud (as a potter).
I had major problems with multiple women hitting on me at the same time. The married ones really became a huge problem for me and them.
* That no matter how much you think you know, there is someone who knows more. That's called humility.
* That you will, invariably, look back at yourself in 5 years and think you were an immature kid/idiot. That's called growth.
* That the best managers are the ones who aren't necessarily domain experts, but whom are enablers and gurus in the sense that they guide you. That's wisdom.
* That little thing called a 401k? That you don't care about? CARE ABOUT IT. Max it. Then forget about it.
* That getting wound up in your co-workers drama is the worst thing you can do; stay clear, so that when the bomb goes off, you don't get hit with shrapnel.
* That being dependable, friendly, and willing to share your expertise is the only skill that *really* matters in the long run.
It's pretty much universally frowned upon by management, and if the relationship doesn't work out, both of you are stuck being around each other all day every day for the foreseeable future, which can be pretty horrible. OTOH, I met my wife at my first job out of school (but wisely, she refused to date me while we still worked together).
Fuck you and your vertically sliced pickles, Jerry!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Some people are backstabbers and have shit instead of compassion
Get *everything* in writing and don't trust anyone.
I started in the early 90s.
1. Recruiters are full of shit.
2. When relocating, compare lifestyles. For example, if you have a 40hours/week, live within 20 minutes of work, play tennis and swim and have a 800 square foot apartment; figure out how much it would cost to have the same life in the new place. For me to move from metro Atlanta to SF Bay area, I would say quadruple my salary.
3. Software is a 24/7 52 weeks a year job. If you're not working, you're learning. There's no down time.
4. I wish I went into something medical like my wife. She works 36 hours a week, gets overtime when she works over 40 hours, and isn't in front of a computer all day. She makes $40K a year more than me.
5. And ... I wish I knew how much this profession would change in 20 years. When I started, all you needed to know was a language - 'C' - and everything else was a "nice to have" - but you could still get a job if you were close. Now, it's these laundry lists that you have to meet 100% of the requirements or you "don't have the skills".
6. I discourage young people from tech - unless they really love it - and tell them to go somewhere else.
Design work is the easy part. Getting a team to agree on specs, timetables, features, and actually sticking to those agreements is very very hard.
The upshot is that if you are very, very lucky you might spend 20% of your time doing design work, mostly less, and that is at pretty good outfits.
1. Please, do what you love, love what you do...
2. See #1 (otherwise, life sucks...)
3. Keep commute time minimal
4. Have a life outside of work, really, enjoy life, or at least try...
5. There is always something that is due ASAP
6. There will always be someone you really dislike at work, deal with it 7. Start contributing to 401k, max out your contribution, or at least do company match if it's available. Remember, it's cumulative, the earlier you start, the better off you are.
Off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more and possibly better suggestions...
1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.
If you have a problem elevate it. Bad news does not get better with age. The sooner you let your supervisor or management know there are problems the better. Like dropping your car off at the service station. When would you like to know the car won't be fixed on time? 5 Minutes before it is due or as soon as they know. My answer is "As soon as possible".
you'll never know, when you'll need to prove that you spent time on something. and, if you want to make a career, don't be humble and think that your work speaks for itself. advertise yourself - you won't get fired for bragging, just promoted.
See http://www.nbc.com/saturday-ni...
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Don't believe them. Don't trust them. Always have an escape plan ready. As fast as possible, put yourself financially into a position where stupid decisions on the part of management do not force an crisis on your part.
The phrase "Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance." is no joke. Young people in the workforce are often exploited by less-capable old people, who have greater experience in manipulating others.
Maybe not so much how to negotiate, as how to not low-ball yourself. Also, it would have been great to know what 'stock options' were.
When you get to a position where the person in front of you has to quit (or die) for you to get ahead, move on...
However, never run *away* from a situation, only run to something better (with more opportunity), often the grass appears greener elsewhere, but you should do your homework.
Oh yeah, and accumulate as many brownie points as you can along the way, they will come in handy...
If you don't check, you may find that you are working for an unethical jackass after you move across the country to take the job..
I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.
I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.
"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."
Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.
That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.
Love sees no species.
"When [managers] say they are suggesting you do something, it's not really a suggestion — it is an order disguised as a suggestion."
A suggestion for managers: if you could do the job yourself, then you'd be able to provide orders on what to do. Until then, say what you want at the end and either help or get out of the way.
Because if you give an order as a suggestion and I don't take your suggestion and you decide to fire me, you'll end up without the work being done and nobody to blame.
And if it's an order and you order me to do it, I WILL do it. Because if it's a bloody stupid idea, it will be because it was YOUR stupid idea.
The reason why you were "suggesting" was so that you wouldn't be blamed for it falling in a heap.
You were always going to take credit for it working, though.
Oh, and treat your workers better: without them you'd be out of a job unless you could do the work, and the pay will be shit, because you don't think it's worth more pay.
- try to learn whatever they're willing to teach
- if it "seems" dumb, tedious, or backwards: don't immediately assume you know better. Instead, assume that you don't have all the information (because likely you DON'T: someone else has very likely tried whatever you're going to suggest many, many times).
- At the end of the day, this is a simple transaction: they are PAYING YOU MONEY to DO something. Odds are, that "something" isn't "check your instagram account" or play "words with friends". Just fix it in your head that you have nothing better to do elsewhere at all, and try to internalize (or pretend) that you really give a shit about how well your task is done.
- you're not a precious snowflake.
Don't be anything like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Millenials in the Workplace)
-Styopa
It is annoying to write down everything, but when PHB gets off the phone with you, they immediately start morphing everything that was said into their version of what they think you said. If you don't do this, you will find that you over-committed even when you didn't and you will hear all sorts of things that everyone else thinks that you promised.
At the end of each call COVER YOUR ASS. Eventually, if you are lucky, they will stop calling you altogether and will simply START with email, since you aren't letting them get away with the famous "I thought you understood what we discussed" reality bending mechanism. You probably won't have to re-forward it PHB when they lose their mind in 3 weeks, but if you do, you will have it.
To: PHB
cc:team
June 2015 Release
Thanks for talking this through with me, I will go forward with A, B, and C as discussed and I appreciate that you agreed to delay D, E, F until after the milestone build is stable for the June 2015 release.
Nobody gets promoted for doing their job well. It's not a medal you get for being good at what you do.
You have to find a way to do the job of whatever position you want to be promoted to. That way, promoting you into that position isn't as risky.
This might seem like a Catch-22: you need to do the job to be considered for it, but that's the way it goes.
Clarify with your manager who is allowed to give you tasks. In a lot of environments, all requests from higher-up MUST go through your manager for prioritization. Make sure you know where and when this applies but it's probably most of the time, so just tell people "you need to go through my direct manager so we can track the things I need to work on". If you let four different people dump tasks on you, you'll get buried and you won't get your responsibilities done.
This bit me pretty hard my first few jobs and still does to some extent. Make sure you know what you're supposed to work on. If your plate is already full, don't branch out to other tasks. People are really good at overstating or understating the importance of what you need to work on, and you aren't the one who sets the schedule. It might be urgent for task A to get done this week, but maybe it's even more urgent for task B to get done by the end of next week, and if task B takes more work to get done...
Quit school sooner, you'll learn more. You can fill in the blanks in the theory when knowing "why" rather than "how" becomes important.
Things are done they way they are done because it works, don't try to optimize a process until you understand it intimately.
I would have liked to know by that time that I should actually be doing something else. This was a bad career choice.
1) Document everything you do, and then document it again
2) Never, EVER speak out against management, or disagree with the "vision" set forth by the C-Execs. I've seen some very high-level people summarily walked out for opposing the prevailing trends
3) See also #2, it is not your job to have vision. It is your job to do as you are told.
4) Plan on spending no more than 5 years at a job. You will either quit in disgust, be laid off, or be fired. You may make it longer, but in general, job-hopping is the norm.
5) Don't hold back. Brag about everything you do, to everyone who will listen. I guarantee you every other little mushhead your company hired is doing the same. Speak out, or be the one who disappears one day and nobody notices.
6) With respect to #2, always adopt the CEO's, Director's, or your immediate Manager's vision as your own, and champion it as if your life depended upon it. Your job certainly does.
7) It doesn't matter how right you think you are. You can be right, or you can be employed. Pick one.
8) Special situation: If your immediate manager is one of those #2 types, you must reach out to other managers AND your director to make sure they know you are behind the "vision" 100%. In some circumstances you may elect to try to move under a different manager so you are not labeled.
9) Companies label. They do it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. If you get labeled, you'll be a terminal Engineer-III. You'll never make principal. Ever. Anywhere. Labels follow you no matter where you go. I've seen it happen to too many otherwise brilliant people who just didn't play the political game well enough.
10) Being an Engineer is actually nothing like you see in Office Space or Dilbert. It is actualy far, FAR worse.
When you start with lower pay with a promised raise in X amount of time... It's not going to happen. They'll stall and say they can't afford it as long as possible.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Maintain your network from college - they could be your key to a better role
- treat college like a job, study 9-5 and put in that little bit of extra work for a 1st class degree
- hone your people skills, getting involved in amateur dramatics or other such activities at college can help with communication
- try to get a graduate role at a blue chip - they have structured graduate programmes and your CV will look much better
-
NOT to be so naive! 21 years old, fresh out of electronics school. Moved to Houston Tx. Believed everything the recruiter said. Got there, found out it wasn't what I thought it was. Stuck it out a year, just for the work experience. Came back to my home state, found another career in electronics and have been with it for 3 different companies for 33 years. Current one, 17 years. Take everything a recruiter tells you about a "major" corporation with a grain of salt. 18 months after I left the one in Houston, they laid everyone off and closed up shop, moved it to Dallas. Couple computer companies had that building for a while, northwest Cyprus, Tx area. Don't know who has it now.
'When [managers] say they are suggesting you do something, it's not really a suggestion â" it is an order disguised as a suggestion. Plain-speaking is a lost art at big companies and corporate double talk is the name of the game.'
It's brainstorming. I do this all the time. Employee presents a problem, I say "well I'd probably do X". Now you can either go do X or go "well I was thinking of doing Y, what about that?". Then we can have a discussion about it. Keep in mind that when you ask your manager a question, his job is to make decisions and to do it quickly.
Incur no debt and work for yourself. Avoid the mill at all costs. One seldom ever checks out once on the path.
Also, it would have been great to know what 'stock options' were.
Simple enough, they are the hybrid offspring of lottery tickets crossed with artwork.
* Usually they're not worth the paper the offer is printed on.
* Occasionally they'll be worth a few bucks, enough for a nice dinner or entertaining night.
* In rare cases they'll be worth a notable amount of money.
* In extremely rare cases both the lottery aspect and the fine art aspect will conspire. The company succeeds in the lottery of business, and you will have kept them long enough for them to achieve some value and not sold them for a nice dinner or entertaining night. These extremely rare and extremely lucky individuals discover unexpectedly they can buy a mansion and retire early.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Rule 1 - YOU are probably the only person you will ever meet who can write code.
You may land in a team with many good coders, this is a lucky break. Most of the time any vendor, customer, or co-worker you work with won't know anything at all. You are just going to have to do their coding too. Vendors will give you broken XML documents that you have to parse, customers don't understand SSL, data center employees don't know how to ps -e | grep
Customers cannot possibly be expected to get off IE6
Nobody but you can do anything. Just accept it and deal with it, you will be much happier.
I wish I'd known about corporate psychopaths and how they enjoy bullying those that don't have power to fight back.
If I had that knowledge, I wouldn't have stayed that long in a place that was detrimental to my mental and physical well-being.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Like a kid in a candy store your manager will want more, More, MORE! of your time if you let them. It's a feedback loop to encourage more hard work from you. Advice: pace yourself so that when it is really needed and really an emergency you can show up to slay the dragon. You control how much time you spend thinking about this job, not them.
We have to meet ROI guidelines. Pace yourself and we're shipping your job overseas or look for some God of programming to do your work in a quarter of the time - that's why we wait 6 months for a brilliant guy instead of hiring a very intelligent guy who could do the job if our ROI metrics weren't there. (I shouldn't have said that.)
-Yours,
a PHB.
Most people are terrible at salary negotiation. Based on various studies with some degree of variance, overall they suggest about 55% of men do not negotiate their wages, and about 70% of women do not negotiate their wages. That is NO NEGOTIATION AT ALL.
Bear in mind that a lot of people are pretty desperate to get a paycheck. You can pretty easily take yourself out of the running for a lot of jobs by trying to negotiate salary (or by doing so clumsily) particularly when there are multiple qualified candidates for the job. Not saying that more folks shouldn't negotiate their salary but many times they are not negotiating from a position of strength. It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky. I've been in both circumstances myself at different times so I understand how hard it can be to negotiate when not getting the job at all is a worse outcome than getting paid a sub-optimal amount.
That said I agree completely with what you said. Negotiation is a very valuable life skill. The sooner you get good at it the better.
Don't let fear of change keep you from getting higher-paying jobs. To quote Shia Lebouf, DO IT! JUST DO IT!
Get accepted at Grad school, quit the job, stay out of the workforce as long as possible.
The obvious response to which is, "Sure, but in exchange, I'll need copies of the pay stubs for those working for you in comparable positions."
To which the company will likely say "thank you for your time and we'll show you to the door".
To be clear, I agree with you but being right carries a non-trivial risk of not getting the job. That may or may not be a good thing.
Don't take your job home with you, if at all possible.
It is a little easier said than done in tech jobs with on-call rotations and whatnot, but it took me a long time to learn to disconnect after leaving the office. Bringing work stress home to other family members sucks for everyone involved.
However, while at work do your job the best of your ability and seek out more skilled people to expand your knowledge. You are going to see a lot of people being very lazy. Resist the temptation to join them.
and then spent the next year or so checking out Mexico instead of staying up all night messing around with C code.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
1. You're sunk if you don't make friends or fit in. You can't whinge about your career immobility if you've got nobody to advocate for you. Also, office bullies will pick on you if you're a loner.
2. "Being yourself" is something you should do on your own time and is standard Hollywood nonsense. Be the person your company wants you to be. That's what they're paying you for.
3. If you notice at company gatherings that the management has a "uniform", be mindful and dress accordingly, especially if you want to get promoted eventually.
4. Keep the drama quiet. Your workplace might be where your friends are at, but it's not where you conduct your personal business. You're there to do a job as a professional.
5. Recognize that when the management is clearly lying to you about the stability of your job, jump ship as soon as possible. Don't join in the mass delusion.
6. If your boss waffles on helping you grow your career, move on. Yes, you are responsible for all of that, but sometimes the boss is the gatekeeper, and there's nothing worse than a boss that stifles an employee that clearly knows what he/she wants from his/her career and doesn't find a way to accommodate it, and asking him/her to wait another year for funding or for the next development cycle to clear is a sign that they're blowing smoke at you.
7. Boredom is a sign that you're becoming obsolete. Learn something new before the management can make you feel too helpless to defend yourself as an employee or to a prospective employer.
And finally...
Fuck the haters. There are always going to be people that are going to find a reason to hate you, and they're the same kind of people that will try to amass a crowd to hate you, too. Don't even give them the dignity of a response beyond "I understand your concerns, but let's agree to disagree."
-LaurenC
My friend who has a law practice, would offer a salary $3,000 below what they'll pay.
If someone counters, they'd offer that +$3,000.
If they didn't take it, they'd move on to the next candidate.
What does the law firm have to do with it - Chewbacca? It's all manipulative. You THINK you are doing well but they have their limits.
While you should comply with company policies, you can always archive the emails in a variety of formats.
Doing this may invite the wrath of the company legal department if discovered. This creates a VERY real source of potential legal problems for a company should they get sued. In most companies this would be grounds for immediate termination with cause if the actions taken conflicted with their email retention policies.
Be good at 2 of the following 3 things:
1. Be reliable and work hard. Be on-time to work and meet deadlines.
2. Be nice to everyone (i.e. be likeable). Treat everyone the way you want to be treated (presumably with kindness and respect).
3. Be competent at what you do - possibly even the best in the office (the "go-to" guy with the big problems.)
Examples:
1 + 2 = The incompetent but "he tries hard", punctual guy that everyone likes.
2 + 3 = The cool guy that's perpetually tardy, misses deadlines, etc. but gets the tough things done and is a go-to guy.
1 + 3 = The talented office ahole that everyone needs. To the extreme: Steve Jobs.
If you don't do two of those three things, you'll be out of a job sooner rather than later.
Everything you will ever achieve in your career will depend on other people. Learn to work well with others. If you have ambitions to achieve something noteworthy you are going to have to get a lot of people moving in the right direction. This is not easy but it is critical.
She'll end up being your next ex-wife.
FTFY
The grass, in actuality, is usually greener somewhere else - that is, if you find yourself often wondering about this on the job.
(unless of course you're the one pissing on the grass you're standing on.)
If you're thinking about it too much... get your resume out there and find a new opportunity to exchange mana for money.
Your first job could be the best job you'll ever have and it could be your last job. But, it could also be the worst job you'll have.
Be honest with yourself. If it's not working, don't be afraid to move on. It's not worth being miserable when you're just starting your career. Don't quit impulsively, but if things don't feel right, ask some older friends if what you're experiencing is normal or not. You don't have the experience yet to know better, but your elders do.
My first job was as a software engineer at a site everyone over 30 has used (it's still around, but not as popular). It was the early days of the internet. At my 6 month review, I got "dinged" for going home one morning at 3 am when everyone else stayed through the night. This was after two weeks of 18 hour days. I was doing more harm than good coding at that point. I was being paid $33k/yr and had no stock options. I was told everyone had to do this to keep up with "Internet Time". Over the next few weeks, most of the senior developers (back when senior developers were actually senior with 10+ years' experience) quit en masse. It took me a few more months to realize that this was not normal and leave as well. I would have been much better off walking after the first month.
-Chris
Stay inside the IT framework, no matter how dysfunctional it is.
I did this in 1999, told my new boss to just get me a spare PC and I could handle the morning report printout ourselves. Want a change? Done in minutes, not months. Those web postings? Simple, couple lines of VBA to FTP. Another report? Sure. The Access database can manage all those mapping locally outside of Oracle. Corporate goal calculations? Err, why not. Daily compliance reports? Ok... Just give me admin on a SQL Server and I'll manage the tables...
Then it broke on vacation, so I had to modem in from FL. I became tied to this beast as the sole programmer supporting a dept of 8 people. I never got a budget for hardware upgrades, never got awards or credit for project management, since this thing was off the books. It took 7 FTEs to rewrite the mess after personal life & management changes in 2009.
In retrospect, I should have let IT do it and played the beurocracy. It would have made me happier in the long run.
I think this is overlooked by 95% of all people in the industry new or old. Go and spend some money on a chair. For the most part you are going to be spending 6-8 hours in it 5 days a week for a very long time. If you are willing to drop 1000-1500 for a bed which you spend comparable time you can spend $200-500 every 10-20 years for a good quality chair. It makes a giant difference in your time at work.
I have had the same chair for the last 15 years and it was worth every penny i spent on it. Yes your work may supply nice chairs but very often if you move offices or companies you will loose that chair. Get one you own and love!
Seriously. I thought all the shite jokes about corporate America were made up. I was very wrong.
file:
Everyone lies...
Two things never to forget:
1. CYA: Cover Your A$$ - always make sure that you have documentation to back up what you say happened in the course of a given project. If it isn't documented, it didn't happen. Always get written acknowledgement from all parties involved in any kind of agreement (email is fine).
2. Companies are in business to make a profit. Everything a company does is for this purpose. Even when companies treat employees well, it's only to increase profits. The executives who run the show would lay you off tomorrow if they thought they could do so and improve their bottom line, and they'd lose not a wink of sleep.
Always look to your employer to fund your learning. It's much "cheaper" than doing it yourself; you can do this in many creative ways.
Starting out as a naive new engineer, I thought that my boss would have at least some interest in seeing my career progress. WRONG.
No matter how nice and friendly your boss seems to be, their motivation is to get more work out of you cheap. They are not interested in your future. Promotions mean more pay, and they don't want to pay you any more. They are not interested in your well-being. Nothing personal (usually), just business.
You must be your own advocate. You are the CEO of *your* business, and you are selling your time to another company. Make sure it is worth your while, because the other guy will do everything in their power to low-ball your compensation.
Don't be cocky. You may be good, but you're never that good that you can't be fired. Don't piss people off. Keep emotionally neutral in all your dealings. Think about your boss's situation before making demands.
Live frugally when you start out. Sock money away so you can survive for extended periods without a job. You may never need to tap those funds, but knowing that they are there will give you strength in your negotiations. If your boss senses you are terrified of losing your income, they have you by the balls and you will be their bitch working every Saturday. Deny them that advantage by being willing and able to walk out the door at a moment's notice.
Be only as loyal to the company as they are loyal to you. If they *are* working with you to increase pay and promotions, great, but more often than not they will drag their feet on these things. If there is simply no promotion or pay increase potential, look for greener pastures.
Pay attention to the fiscal health of the company. Remember that it can be costly to replace an employee, so they may want to negotiate to keep you on board, especially if you have been bringing value to the company. Don't make crazy demands when the company has had a bad quarter.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Do not ever get a job in the IT field if you value your soul. Mine was crushed in a measly 4 year stint for the most popular locally owned IT service company in my area. I worked in the service area for walk in customers. I was under the impression that my job would be to diagnose and repair computers. My actual job was to answer the phones for the business to business IT section of the company, and forward all their angry customers to their voicemails, as the business IT "pros" were busy "in a meeting" or they left an hour early (hard to come up with valid excuse as to why customers server is down because X employee wanted to go home and play GTA V) TL;DR Avoid being a pushover like me. man it felt good to quit working that shit hole though.
We're all going to screw up at some point. If you are honest and forthright about your mistakes it tends to go over a lot better than when you try to hide them and it comes out later. I'm not saying you have to shout to everyone everything you've done wrong. But, if you hit the wrong button and cause lost productivity or take down a system you can aide in getting things put to rights a lot more by being honest than by trying to cover your tracks. And, you'll gain trust when you're honest about such things.
I've seen people who try to hide their mistakes, they tend to not last long around here once their behavior becomes known.
Also, if you don't understand something just say so and ask for clarification/help. The worst thing you can do on a project is say "yes" and walk away scared and not sure you know how to do it. Ultimately someone will be depending on your work, and when you don't deliver it can impact not just you but your coworkers. If you don't understand how to fill out a document, file a request, write a piece of code, etc... say so! Ask for guidance or an example. I assume when I delegate work that you know what to do, and I also assume that if you don't know you'll ask me for help.
If you ask a manager why the company is doing something, and he/she tells you "it was decided", then start looking for another job. That answer demonstrates one or more of these things: incompetence, subterfuge, malfeasance. You don't need any of them.
Secretaries can make your life miserable, if you piss them off. Usually via office politics and gossip. Then again, they also happily stab their "friends" in the back, so avoiding them is your best bet.
If you have never heard of a programming language the company uses, there is a good chance it is not a good language to work with and you should probably stay away. If a business wants you to program in RPG for OS/400 systems, run away.
They will try to have your jobs ...
They will steal from you desk/wallet/anything
They will spread false claim about you
They will try to
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I wish I could tell my young self to go find a promising startup or start something on his own... I didn't know, at the time, how much harder that would be once I have a family with children.
Being young & single, you can move any time, you can switch jobs any time, you can work 16 hour days and actually enjoy it, and you can lose your job and not care too much.
That's the time to go for it, to chase the big ideas, to go for broke. You don't get that chance again without very significant risks.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Nothing you do in school, no project, certainly not a "keystone project", can come anywhere close to the complexity of a real-life engineering, IT, or software project. All of the things like best practices and methodology you were learning in school were methods for managing complexity, and yet they could never actually show you real complexity like you're going to see in the workforce.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
That between 70 and 80 percent of all homicides are unsolved thanks to lax enforcement and witness pools drying up in the face of the war on drugs. That boss you want to murder? Go ahead.
My diagnosis came at least 20 years too late. When I went to school and university, Aspergers was widely unknown. My life would have been MUCH easier with the correct diagnosis.
Things I wish I'd known, in no particular order:
1. Source control concepts (branch, merge, tag, revision, conflict, etc.). Ideally some hands-on experience w/ the most popular options. This wasn't even touched on in my undergraduate program.
2. How to accurately scope projects and manage my time.
3. The importance of making sure you're always working on something that will help you land your next job. If that isn't the case then it's time to start looking for your next job right now.
I realize this would be difficult as a first-job type, but be very careful about taking on added responsibilities without any discussion with the powers-that-be about compensation. It is very easy for a "go-getter" to take on a lot more but never be recognized for those added responsibilities.
If nothing else, annual reviews should be an opportunity for you to bring up your now changed job description. As others have mentioned, salary negotiation is a key skill. If you are doing more for the company, you should use that as a negotiating advantage.
Oh, and start saving in a 401(k), IRA (Roth or otherwise) as soon as possible.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Excuse me while I hijack this comment.
You should QUIT while you can. Start you own business while you are able to live with your parents, sleep in a car, eat beans and rice, etc.
If you wait until you have a spouse and kids, you are locked in. Your options become limited.
Also, LISTEN when you are told to start a retirement account NOW. Don't wait even a month.
If you are not the entrepreneurial type then get your attitude adjusted. You are part of a team and not just some cog. It's easy to think that but you'd be surprised at what happens when you stop thinking that and act like a team member. People start coming to you, relying on you, and you start getting promoted. Don't sit in your cubical and bitch and moan. If your environment that precludes that, then find another environment. You've already decided that you are not going to work for yourself so find the best people to work for.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
2) If they don't give you a real promotion in 3-5 years, then they never will - but another company will give you the promotion. Make contacts.
3) Finding a place where you are happy is worth more than that promotion or the extra money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It is okay to say, "I do not know." or "I need to do some research and get back to you."
If you have ANY hesitation about making a change to a production system, DO NOT MAKE IT. We all have shot ourselves in the foot at one time or another. Learn from our mistakes. Do not be that guy (or girl).
Until you get good at estimating how long it takes to complete a task or project, double your estimates when someone asks you how long it will take you. It is better to over estimate and get it done sooner, than to under estimate and have people waiting on you. (BTW - Any non-trivial task will ALWAYS take longer than you think it will.)
Before making any changes, make sure that you have a good backup and that you have tested your ability to restore it. Yes, it will make things take longer but it is better to have a fallback position. This is doubly true in production. NEVER MAKE PRODUCTION CHANGES WITHOUT A BACKUP.
Be humble. The days of being a jack of all trades IT practitioner are dead and gone. There are too many things to know and not enough time to learn them all. By and large, IT people can be cooperative and supportive.... if you are humble. If you act like you know everything and fail to ask for help, you will find everyone lining up to watch you fail and snickering at you when you do. Check your ego at the door, learn from others and when you have the opportunity to, help others out when they ask for it. Do not be that dick who tells everyone to RTFM. Having said that, if someone asks the same question over and over again... feel free to tell them to RTFM. Nothing is worse than a freeloader. We all have jobs to do and while helping new people out is part of the job, doing their job for them is not.
1) No political decision improved a technical solution
2) All decisions are political
3) Commitments made by you are set in stone. Commitments made by management are set in Jell-o. In a microwave.
4) Being wrong may get you fired eventually. Your boss being wrong and blaming you will get you fired sooner. Telling your boss they are wrong will get you fired right now.
5) Contrary to popular opinion, if you find something you love, only try to make a living at it if you can be your own boss. Doing it for someone else will wring every last drop of joy out of it.
I may be having a bad day...
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt = [citation required]
If I could give some advice to my past self, it would be to immediately start living on half of my income. That way, I could have paid off debt immediately and started saving.
I wasn't interested in finances back then, but great blogs have cropped up since, like Mr. Money Mustache.
It's about early retirement and I'm not so much interested in that. But after ten years of working for the Man, I wanted to start freelancing. Turns out that if you have a family, you want to have quite a bit of money stashed away when starting.
So I kept working in a job I lost interest in, just to save half a year of income. Only then could I make the step towards starting a business for myself.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
After graduating college, it would have been nice to successfully apply for graduate school.
After graduating grad school, it would have been nice to successfully apply for post-graduate school.
After graduating post-grad school, it would have been nice to successfully apply for a second post-graduate program.
Then, retire.
Of course, one could retire after college and miss all the mess.
My advice... don't have sex with the office cleaning lady in your desk area. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon, even if it's not explicitly stated in the office rules.
As a manager, here are the two pieces of advice I'd pass on:
1. We don't use passive voice in our memos. College is wrong. I've been out of college for a long time, but I always want to write to the business writing prof I had and let him know. We stress active voice.
2. I picked this up from a Murawski course (which deals with active voice writing). It was, "Doing work is bringing your supervisor a solution, not problems." That is, me going to my boss and saying, "Hey, I've got a problem here," isn't doing work. The work is going to my boss and bringing him or her a solution to the problem. Now, sometimes you get stuck and need help, and that's fine, and I'm happy to help - but your goal as an employee should be to bring me proposed solutions to problems (or, better yet, just take care of it, if you can).
That being said, I've been remarkably successfully at Wallying my last 4 years by being very friendly to the executive secretary. She knows everything.
I wish I could go back in time and tell my 18yo self to a) open a savings account b) set up an automated weekly transfer of some small amount into it.
How to deal with the crippling depression and alcoholism that are by-products of the whole process.
10-20% is absolutely WORTH it. Thanks for the advice!
Don't act impulsively, but when things start turning bad, just move on. I was placed under a manager that was trying to build an empire. Unfortunately he wasn't a good leader, or a good engineer, or good at cost and schedule management, or good with suppliers. He had 45 minute "stand up meetings." It became the running joke that the only reason he remained is that he had compromising photos of someone high up. My blood pressure would start to increase as soon as he came into the room. But I had good work to do, so I let it ride. He had asked me to do some business development work to generate some leads. I did the work and found, in particular, one great lead that would be perfect for us. I put the package together and tried to get approval to continue the pursuit... crickets. Several months later and I'm in a meeting regarding staffing new business and this comes up and everyone is saying how great it is and how my boss is so good at this sort of thing. No attribution for me at all, and no recognition at annual review time. I worked for him for two years. I should have bailed much sooner.
There is no such as "career" - just a series of jobs.
That doing something for the money is the wrong reason and that doing something that combines your passion and an income is the better option, even if you initially earn less. I did a career switch from teaching performing arts to spoiled brats who often couldn't appreciate and went into FOSS-centric web-development at the turn of the millenium. I came on board just in time for the crash, but I never regretted it. Staying in my "real" profession with the only realistic occupation would've killed me. Or brought me into a mental health asylum.
I would go back to performing arts on the spot. As a performer and/or choreograph with the right crew and the right amount of funding. But not as a so-so paid overworked excuse for a nanny for spoiled kids of the wealthy who have no idea what life is like in the real world and are too spoiled to appreciate good art. The best students I had were those who came in from middle to low income families - they felt like they had stepped into paradise. Which the school basically was. And the appreciated it and behaved accordingly. Those I still remember with warm thoughts. The others I sometimes sort of hate, hoping they ran into some serious lesson somewhere on the way into adulthood.
It was roughly three years into teaching that I noticed I never wanted to become a teacher in that field, that I wanted to perform and that there was no money in performing. I left that field, went into IT and never turned back. Being your Type A 80ies computer kid and RPG nerd did help with that.
I'm getting by as an experienced part time webdev, consultant and software architect and fiddle with FOSS technologies on the side when I'm not out dancing. Feels great.
Any newcomer should consider switching job and hobby if things turn out to be a drag - it's what I did and it worked great for me.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There are a series of jobs you do, some more enjoyable than others, but mostly they all suck, and eventually you retire and die. People who talk about "building a career" are just masturbators.
If you don't switch over to management in the first 24 months of your career, you will be forever stuck in Development (for good or bad).
HR departments have learned that most people will accept whatever low-ball initial offer is made, and companies take advantage of that fact. Of those that do negotiate, most of them do a poor job of it, using the lowball offer as the starting point for negotiating.
Anchor price Apparently it works in salary negotiations too.
for #1 - like Clark Howard (AM radio but he's often very good on practical stuff - Every hear someone old say "dammit, I ended up with too much money!" Didn't think so..). Learn what a deliverable is and deliver them. In fact, under-promise and over-deliver. Once you're sure you know EVERYTHING about something, take five and ask "what did I forget / not think about". Better yet, do that with someone else in the room. Get a mentor or friend whose criticism you trust. Better this get done by someone you like than someone who can fire you. Want to impress people with your individuality and your passionate feelings? Put them into your work. That's why you took X career in the first place. Feed your awesomeness into your work rather than making people think your true self lies somewhere else (cat / car / frisbee collection / mustache wax collection / etc. - this sort of thing is perceived as tedious and leads co-worders to first think, then hope you have much better things to do than force yourself to work with them). Learn to think like your customer and like your boss. They may but always be right, but you'll be less deer-in-the-headlights when the inevitable pushback comes. Focus. Multitasking is a cruel invention to test your character. Draw a line for work's encroachment into family and friends and make it plain that you will work like a dog for your scheduled time, but after that, crossing it will be done only in cases of a problem needing doctors or lawyers to help fix. Of course there will be exceptions, but you can always make exceptions, moving that line the other ways is an order of magnitude more difficult. Better yet, be the sort of person who lets colleagues share the good parts of your life - parties, get-togethers, etc. so they see the value of the rest of your life and you theirs. Talk to those above you and below you in an organization. Find out ahead of time what they see as absolutely necessary to define success and use that information to work with them. Everyone has different agendas and personal goals, but define the common goals as soon as possible and make sure everyone pulls in the same direction, they can spin off their own little pieces as well.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Act reasonably in the sense relating to others on a adult-to-adult instead of parent-child or child-parent, in addition don't let emotions dictate actions. Also some people may seem like jerks but they know their stuff, don't write them off. Compared to some that are great to party with but you will never learn much from them. There may be supervisors that are total "alpha hotels" but they are very good at keeping the money rolling in, nice guy would be more pleasant to have as boss but a moot point if the division gets canned and you are out of job.
mfwright@batnet.com
1.) Don't invest your money with that Mutual Fund that lost your retirement fund.
2.) Don't work for the company that you put millions of dollars of overtime into for 10 years that promised ownership and bonuses and then let you go with a pitiful two month's severance.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
..source control.
That would have saved quite a bit of time. They probably mentioned it at university, but I remember skipping a few lectures here and there.
Say whatever you want at university, no one gives a shit, because you're paying to be there. Offend the wrong person at your first corporate job and you could lose your whole career.
... the manager is not your enemy.
A manager is like a valve: it's their job to modulate pressure. The manager is getting enormous pressure, via marketing, from customers, to get you to do more work. They will pass on to you as much of that pressure as you'll let them. If it's too much, then it's your job to press back - that gives the manager the weight they need to push back at marketing. But if you don't apply pressure back at them, they've got nothing to press back with.
A lot of managers also don't understand this. They think their job is to apply pressure one-way, down to you. That's because they're not trained to do their jobs. You can train them, using the single, simple piece of wisdom in the above paragraph. "Middle management" is so called for a reason - they're a two-way valve.
1. Start saving early.
2. Live below your means.
3. Keep debt to a minimum. Never put on a credit card more than you have in your savings account.
4. Debt isn't evil, but you should treat it as if it was. Keep it to a minimum.
5. If you're buying a house, don't take out a mortgage for more than three years gross salary. And when you do get a mortgage, get a fixed mortgage.
6. Invest as much as possible in low expense ratio index funds.
7. Open up a Roth IRA early and maximize my investment in it every year.
8. NEVER use an investment advisor. Read a book instead. (Common Sense on Mutual Funds by Bogle is an excellent start. If you want something simpler, The Boglehead Guide To Investing)
9. NEVER buy investments through your insurance company.
10. When you start having kids, start a 529 plan for each ASAP.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
That the job would mostly consist of long hours, tedious work and the boss taking all the credit for your work.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
Spoken like someone who has never been in a big financial or social hole or had a severe medical condition. Sometimes hard work and talent and making good decisions isn't enough. If you grow up in a depressed area with a poor family there is a non-trivial chance that opportunities are going to be hard to come by. Sometimes people have severe medical conditions that put them in a financial hole or make it difficult to work. Get sick and you might find yourself in a deep financial hole through no fault of your own. Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation because someone ripped you off.
It's easy to say luck has nothing to do with it but that simply isn't true. It is a LOT easier to get opportunities if you are in a good financial position to start with. It's a lot easier to make money when you already have money. That isn't to say you can't make it if you don't have a silver spoon but it is a lot harder and that is a matter of luck. Being healthy is largely a matter of luck. My mother suffers from ALS and cannot work and that is NOT her fault. Your romantic notion that all that matter is hard work and fiscal discipline is a nice story but a false one.
Rules for deciding on a job/career/etc.
1. This is about money.
2. If you find you're thinking about what you want to do and you start to think it isn't about money... study Rule #1.
Other sage advice that had I known it and not been virtually surrounded by morons that kept telling me "to dream big" and "with these scores you can be anything" and other bizarre bullshit that has about as much to do with reality as the bible, simply because I was really really smart. These morons lead me down one blinding disappointment after catastrophic decision after another. These are people I trusted and loved. People in positions of leadership and authority... of learning institutions... in the military... in the government... in the church... and big business... and many other places.
1. Choose your career from the top %1 earners. Period. Go back and read that again. Keep reading it until it sinks in.
2. You have about 5 years to make this decision, after that you're locked in and there are no do-overs and there is no going back. Get ready to live with it.
3. Work the averages on everything. You are not special. You are not special. You will not be the best in your field. Those people are already there.
4. You will not enjoy this. You will likely hate it about 50% of the time. Unhappiness is inevitable... make it worth your while. I call this one the "Better to serve in heaven than reign in hell." rule.
5. When you think you have enough money saved... double that amount. Then double it again in 5 years and double it every 5 years thereafter.
And the final rule: You are the only one looking out for you. Everyone else, from the receptionist to the executives to every single government/business/organization/church/club/etc you've ever encountered, would grind you up into cardboard packing filler for an extra few dollars on their bottom line. If you ever begin to believe this isn't true, you're wrong and probably are already being lead to slaughter.
I've never heard of this happening (to programmers).
I hire people all the time and I've had to say no to great candidates who wanted more money than we could pay. I've also turned away applicants who thought they were worth more than they were. Most companies have a budget and they aren't going to exceed it. They know what local market rates are (unless they are idiots) and are unlikely to pay you more than that. If you live where I do you probably aren't going to get a six figure salary as a programmer but the cost of living is a LOT lower than in Silicon Valley so the net result is often better.
I've messed up negotiations pretty bad, too (by telling them that I was going to give my current company a chance to counter-offer....it ended with the hiring manager yelling at me for a while), but they'll still come back.
That is VERY unusual. Most employment negotiations do not go anything like that. I'm not a programmer but I do have two masters degrees, an accounting certification, and a lot of experience as an engineer and I've had times when it has been REALLY hard to find work better than flipping burgers. If you are luck enough that getting work hasn't been a problem, congratulations. Unfortunately that doesn't describe most of the working population.
I wish I had understood myself better and that the cool stuff I wanted to do and explore was more in academia and/or starting my own company than being an employee. If I could turn back the clock in my era I would have got a CS PhD so I had the choice of academia and research labs. And I would want my young self to really really get that working on things you really give a damn about in the way you think best is way way more important than a steady paycheck.
Put the maximum you can, into your 401k, right from the start.
The goal is US$1+million by retirement.
Start right away, and the Rule of 72 works for you.
Wait, then you sweat it out as retirement looms closer.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
IT pays pretty well but it blows as a career. Go into something you can tolerate doing for a long period of time and at which you think you will excel. Sure there are challenges in IT and some interesting work but no one I have ever met who doesn't have some personality defect is happy work in IT.
Wish I'd known the increase in house prices, then I'd have got a no thinking manual job, 4 mortgages, 3 of them being buy to let.
Not all job offers are as good as they seem and even if you are getting a lot more money you may find the work environment so unpleasant that you wish to go back to your old job with a smaller and more humane company, only to find that it is not even remotely possible.
Never go to work for a company that hires mostly people out of the military. I thought I had found a dream job when I was hired by Ross Perot's EDS in the early 70s. I had not been in the service, but got a fill of a company run like the military. I was always taught that the way to go up in any company was to do the best job possible and to be reliable. But this is not how it works in the military or a military company. You are expected to do your job as stated above, but you are never supposed to have any ambitions to climb the ladder. You are expected to simply do what you are told and if they should need you to go somewhere, that you dutifully go there, even if it is far beneath you current position and/or skills. The military is for yes only people who are taught quickly that the orders you are given is all that matters. I had to leave EDS and worked my up into the position that I wanted to career in after only 9 months in another non military company. Stay away from companies that like to hire people coming out of the military! You managers have always been order takers and that is what they expect of you.
It's not supposed to be this way for tech types, but politics apply equally if not more than in any other position. If you can't play nicely with the people around you, you're not going to make it. Don't be a pushover, but pick your battles wisely. Most importantly, try and figure out how the things you do make everyone money. And do those things the best. If you're making money for everyone else, trust me, you'll be promoted.
1. Read "Consider Your Options".
2. Prepay ISO options instead paying at time of exercise. This avoids a huge AMT tax bill that will consume thousands for accountants to do your 43 page 1040 tax form with 6251 - that asks questions about things like 'enter other taxes not mentioned in instructions'. You get to do the entire 1040 with and without 6251, at the end the instructions say: 'pay the larger of the two'. If you prepay, you skip ALL OF IT.
I wish I'd known that loyalty and initiative will be punished by the insecure and incompetent ones above you.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
If she cheated on her last fiancee, she'll cheat on you too, eventually.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
First: get everything in writing, although that's not foolproof as a manager will re-imagine conversations in a way beneficial to him. Always have a copy of your contract.
Second: don't work for free. They'll take take take, and then decide that less than minimum wage is too much money so you should resign.
Third: ALWAYS contest a warning. Every single fucking time, even if you think you're in the wrong. My employer issued a warning that's more illegal than drug trafficking - they just made up some shit wholesale, claimed I was making decisions beyond my grade even though I was following specific and documented instructions. They gave me a warning for taking breaks, for coming in late after giving me permission to take time-in-lieu. They gave me a written warning, then threw in a whole bunch of stuff that happened months later.
Fourth: If the manager surprises you with a "quick chat" on a topic you've emailed him about, he's trying to avoid a written record of what he said. Tell him that you're not comfortable speaking off the record or without a witness, ask if you can record the conversation on your phone, if he refuses then ask him to arrange a mutually convenient time.
Fifth: don't make friends with senior staff members, because you'll feel like you're betraying them when you find out they've betrayed you. They exploit this position, too. Case in point: I was given a warning for (not) doing some stuff (due to overwork). Rather than be a responsible employer and take unrecorded and unpaid overtime into account, they lied in the warning and told me to quit or be fired. Fast forward 19 months. My replacement has done exactly the same things and has received no warnings at all.
If you are less experienced you are trading your time to develop skills, if you are more experienced you are trading your skills for more time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
is not given, it's taken. You can nearly always count on getting responsibility without authority. Also, many of the comments here have applicability to large corporations. personally, I prefer small companies, WAY, WAY, better. Usually there's far fewer a55h0l3s, there's more freedom, and less political gamesmanship.
Please have respect for people with different abilities, especially children.
Everyone should retire once before getting married, or at least before having kids. Retirement doesn't have to be forever, but before you are 30 some things are much easier.
...then they probably actually really are idiots.
Don't throw up on the CEO's wife and children at the office Christmas party.
Get a job before you graduate, any job. The workplace is not the uni.
1. Never go into software or system test.
2. Never stay at the same company more than five years.
3. Never tell your boss what you really think. (They don't want to know the truth.)
That's an interesting answer kids, pretend to be self-reliant by sponging off others and start a business when you have little experience on how to do anything involved with it. Why would we want the kids to have their attitude adjusted to that?
A different answer is to get some skills together so you have something to sell first. If you can't keep it in your pants long enough to get that far before having kids then why do you think you have enough self discipline to run your own business anyway?
This "get your attitude adjusted" shit is condescending and hilarious in this suggestion where an "entrepreneurial type" is supposed to sponge off their parents. It sounds more childish than entrepreneurial to me.
Avoid any job that requires you to answer your phone at 2 AM
HR is full of liars and assholes at any company with more than 50 people.
Oh - and to get out of disclosing prior salary - "nondisclosure agreement" - certainly they don't want you to violate that agreement, do they?
Hi, I agree with the jist of your comment. Most of the software work is about moving data from A to B so you can process for some needed result.
I would encourage you to think that the frameworks and software stacks that make the task of moving the data around are there to free you to think of the bigger picture. What result do you want from the software? What is the deliverable result?
If you are more interested in the low-level implementation/framework details, then you should focus on that. There are lots of projects that have "elegant" ideas but are too slow... if you like moving data around then you will have tons of opportunities to focus on it.
"Don't be good at anything you don't want to do for the rest of your life."
Those were the words of my first supervisor on my first day, and after almost 10 years experience in software development, no truer words have been spoken to me since.
That "Dilbert" isn't fiction.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Corollary: Always be on good terms with the supply sergeant.
Lots of good stuff in this thread, but in particular:
1. Max the 401(k) immediately and put it in index funds.
2. Humility. There will always be someone smarter than you- listen until you can ascertain.
3. Don't be a doormat, but be helpful and friendly and free with info until someone screws you. A lot of people hoard information thinking that it gives them job security- it doesn't, really. What if they got hit by a bus? You're *much* more valuable as a team player that helps things run more smoothly.
I learned that some bosses are not just obtuse, but can be ass holes that can try to ruin your entire career. If you get a first job and your boss is a jerk, get them fired or cap them. They aren't there for you, they are there for them. They will make your life miserable in the present and possibly well into the future.
The key is to keep this simple truth in mind: it's a job. You do it to survive.
Don't let your sense of self-worth and your identity get tied up in your view of your career. Your job does not define who you are, you do it because someone is paying you to do it for them.
There is satisfaction in doing the work well; and it is nice if the work fits with your personal tastes, but if you refuse to let it define you, you will be the happier for it.
And as a definite plus, it will strengthen your negotiation position. If it is just a job, it's easier to walk away if the compensation does not suit you.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Seriously. Work is slavery, and every day you delay dropping out and moving to a commune / buying a cheap van and learning to climb / living under a bridge just makes escape harder. Every year worked is another brick in the jail you're constructing with your own hands.
It's too late for me, I'm stuck on the treadmill: mortgage, kids, the whole nightmare, just treading water and hoping not to die before retirement (assuming I can afford one).
Get out while you can, kids.
Not because of money, but the probability of you landing your preferred job first time around is unlikely...
There was an article kicking around somewhere which had a pretty good analogy with a peak finding algorithm: Imagine you are on a hilly terrain and you have a limited viewing distance, if you go to the tallest visible peak you will probably not find anything close to the tallest peak... but if you meander more randomly at first around the landscape (to learn about the landscape) and gradually have a more directed tendency toward the end of your "seeking period" then you have a much higher chance of finding one of the highest peaks.
For jobs one persons high peak can be another persons low, this isn't because company x is better than company y or job a is better than job b, it's just that everyone is different, so you have to do your own meandering.
In the beginning you notice how / what happens, but why is more important. Even teams working closely might have very different ways of working and prioritising future work.
Getting some other team to do something, even something they need (from your strong opinion) to do is always a case of selling it to them. They are probably not going to buy it for the same reasons you would. Understand what drives them and how they prioritise (quality, saved work time, less errors, money) and use that criteria to explain why it should be done.
Having a colleague you can openly discuss problems and issues with is invaluable. When you bring those issues up to management you should have already thought of solutions. Bosses that are happy to brain storm problems do exist, but most of the time they have plenty of problems of their own and will value even half baked solutions highly. Take your time to really think it through from different angles, your boss might be mainly interest in keeping to the budget (if thats how he is measured).
Many people mention salary, to me having interesting work is far more important especially starting off. Notice when you are no longer learning, see if you have further opportunities in the same company or need to look elsewhere.
How you act and what you know while starting in a new job might affect how you are seen in the future. If you grow a lot but are still treated as a junior try to analyze if it's out of habit or deserved. You might have to change employers to get a fresh start as a more senior employee (both for salary and general perception among colleagues).
It has been a great many years since I was fresh out of school. I now own my own company and employ nearly 50 people.
The way I got to live the dream is by being honest and having integrity from the get go. That means saying what is on your mind, professionally and personally, and above all, being NICE about it. Also, being flexible and eager to go outside my comfort zone was a huge help in learning everything I had to learn to go out on my own. The biggest mistakes I see "green" engineers make are:
1) Getting defensive. You're going to be wrong. A lot. You have a lot to learn, and a winning attitude is to accept this and seek out learning opportunities. There are certain school I just won't hire from anymore because they program their students with ultra large egos, probably to compensate for the ultra large price of tuition. There isn't much room for ego in an Associate Engineer position.
2) Getting lazy. We all realize you've been busting your ass to get your degree, and that being a good student is more than a full time job. But, you don't get to stop working hard just because you graduate.
3) Closely related to being lazy is: doing the bare minimum. You'll likely not be assigned enough work to keep you busy for 40 hours, but it will generally be expected that you spend the remaining time seeking out learning opportunities, reaching out to people for new work, and generally being eager and inquisitive.
4) Pigeon-holing: I see this one a lot too. Having your first real job is scary, and often I've seen new grads learn their first new skill, get comfortable with it, and then not want to do anything else. I would say the first 10 years of your career are not the time to specialize in something. The first 10 years are for exploring different skills and use cases and finding out what you're really good at.
I think the top three things you can do during the first year in your new job are:
1) Get to know everyone you can and what they do, and learn something about it, and how it ties in to the overall goals of the company
2) Be helpful. Offer to assist more senior engineers with testing, documentation, or whatever. You need to learn how to do the mundane and seniors will definitely appreciate your help in doing some of those tasks.
3) SAY SOMETHING when you get into trouble. If you're getting behind, don't know how to do something, or need help, SAY IT. You will not get in trouble for not knowing what to do, and the only way to learn is to ask. "I don't know" is not an obscene phrase.
I wish I had known beforehand about a lot of things. For instance I had no idea of how many people - young, old, both genders - I would have had to torture, rape, mutilate and kill. I mean, there's only so much people you can rape in a day. I wasn't so keen on desecrating corpses as well, there are people who are filled with glee at the idea of defiling someone's dead body and raping rotting corpses but you've got to understand it can't be everybody's cup of tea. There's also this cannibal clause that says you've got to eat some poor sod's flesh for some reason I can't quite get. I'm just thankful we can cook it beforehand, some other guys have a raw deal. I mean, I'm OK with the pillaging and plundering and I know burning houses with the people locked inside is part of the job, and mass executions may be called for now and then, but some stuff is pretty much fucked up. What exactly do you get from cutting off children's hands, hanging them on a tree and have the parents worship the Hand Tree? That's not what I had in mind when I decided to work for the Republican Party.
Develop a skill set and the self discipline to work 100% remotely. Then you can work for a company in an expensive city while living anywhere you want.
Sure, not all companies will hire 100% remote employees, but it opens up your job search to the entire world instead of just the companies within driving distance of your house. It also allows you to work on multiple contracts at the same time.
Your employer can print your wages on a giant billboard next to the freeway if they want to. I don't know where you got this idea that pay is legally protected. Granted, lots of employers try to keep pay secret to improve their negotiating position (and to facilitate blatantly discriminatory pay scales: see,e.g., Lily Ledbetter). In fact, it *is* illegal for a company to have rules that prevent employees from disclosing their own pay or discussing pay (Part of the National Labor Relations Act).
Some employers (Costco) actually publish ALL their employee's salaries/wages.
...that I would've known that the project manager and other guy that I was supposed to work for were going to not decide to show up that day -> fill out paperwork and go home. Then end up working for a completely different project manager that I never met before after spending a week in limbo... ...I guess it was better than they're saying after a week, oh we're sorry we have no fscking ide what the fsck we're doing and there isn't actually an opening... they were cheap SOBs to boot.
I wish I had lived more frugal, saved early, and bought with cash.
I thought that once I got my new job I was living the American Dream. The problem was that everything I had was bough via credit cards or loans so I was actually funding someone else's American Dream.
In short, get to a point that you have 6 months of savings and using only cash as soon as you can. Because negotiating for a salary becomes a whole lot easier when you don't have to have a check as soon as possible.
And don't talk about sex, politics, or religion. Also--HR is not your friend
Turned an idea in to the suggestion box. Distict manager fired me and TURNED THE SAME SUGGESTION IN for a $50,000 bonus, in 1970.
Live like a bum and travel the world. Unless you drink or use drugs money won't really be a problem. (If you spent winter in hot climate)
1. ASAP save 3 months living expenses. VERY hard to do, but gives you an amazing amount of confidence if/when you hate your current job
2. Be nice to everyone, ESPECIALLY the receptionist (if a human). You can always back down on this when you realize someone is a jerk/loser/scumball.
3. Work harder than other newbies until you can get the lay of the land
4. Stay at least 1 beer behind at business related parties. Listen three times as much as you talk.
Be nice to everyone, at least professionally courteous. Some of the worst people will get promoted and you could end up working for them.
Employers do not generally see a return from n00bs until 2 years. Until then, n00bs are in the weak position. After then, the n00b has experience and bargaining for a raise is possible.
I've never heard somebody complain about accumulating too much money. I have heard complaints that someone shouldn't have spent all that time at work, and should have spent more time with his family (haven't heard this from a woman, personally).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
He's a manager. They lie. Especially in CS.
But in a clever way, so you can't prove it. He says they are looking for 'talent', that is management speak for the top 10% of people in CS. They aren't looking for recent graduates, no matter what the 'accreditation', and certainly not average or even above-average people. They are looking ONLY for the (mostly mythical) top 10% performers.
That is why CS is such a horrible career choice. How in the fuck can you throw away 90% of the trained people and expect people to pursue that career? Do you think the same happens with doctors, nurses, electricians, plumbers, engineers, teachers, and so on?
Of course not. But programmers and other CS professionals have to either be in the top 10%, or be unemployed and unemployable. I personally know plenty of average and above average quality programmers and others trained in CS with absolutely no job prospects. A field has to have room for average and above average people (60, 70, 80th percentile) - to operate otherwise is statistically unsustainable. (Especially because people's performance varies dramatically over time - up and down - due to a huge number of variables that they do not personally control.)
It's ridiculous, but if the companies can't find people willing to work for them - they made their own bed (by pushing people out of the career), so let them fuck themselves in it.
As someone who started as a programmer out of university, and has grown a quite successful career, my number one piece of advice is to now work on your social skills as much as your technical ones. Learn to build and sustain relationships - projects and work will come and go, though it's far more likely the people you meet will stay in your network for a long time.
Ultimately it's you with the skin in the game and It'll help you stay relevant, get better and generally figure a ton of shit out in the long run.
Oh yes, and in case it's not evident; don't limit to tech in terms of what you think you might improve at, for a lot of us tech folks learning yet more tech stuff is not really where the biggest gains are.
Be professional - always.
Shut the fuck up. Probably the best advice you'll get here. Most of the time you're not required to respond.
If there's something politically tough to do, get others involved.
Things other people with they knew - never get your fun at the same place you get your pay check. After hours - go home, go someplace else. Don't mingle except on those rare occasions. Seems like this never ends well.
Find out WHAT your company is SELLING and HOW they're doing it.
Casteism
Plan your retirement by 40;
Casteism
How completely untruthful the business world is. In terms of my first job: "We'll call you soon" "This is all the salary we can afford" "We need to keep the salaries of similar positions at the same level"
one's a spec sheet, the other's an advertising pamphlet
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
It's always easier to cut expenses than to raise your income; it's always easier to buy low than to sell high.
A suggestion is not a command "disguised" as such. It's your boss reminding you of the parameters of your job, the one you previously agreed to perform and probably assured you'd perform well. Now you're wasting your bosses time by having them remind you of your own job, and you want to complain they were nice about it?
There is no "art" to plain speaking when people struggle with vocabulary and comprehension.
If you end up working in a unionized environment:
1) Always be changing positions, and applying for new jobs leveraging whatever projects you've recently been involved with. Ideally never stay in a position longer than 3 years. Do not expect any promotion, or any manager to go to bat for you or trust them, you have to do everything yourself, be mercenary.
2) Do not expect your union to do anything for you other than collect your dues.
I think it is funny that 90% of the comments for this topic are on negotiating/bargaining salary with management. I bet a big percentage on here would either be promoting unions as a tool for the workers, and another big percentage would be saying that unions are full of overpaid idiots. What many people do not understand about unions, is that they are pretty much all about "collective bargaining". Which means, if I don't think I am getting paid enough, I cannot go to my manager and ask for more money. I can't negotiate on my behalf for a better salary, it is done "collectively" by the union on behalf of everyone. There are a whole pile of union rules, however every single manager will know how to bend or break the rules, and most unions (at least from my experience) are toothless entities. So in a sense, the union is more of a disadvantage, as you do not even have the ability to do it yourself, and the union itself is pretty powerless to do anything for you. In fact many times management will blame union rules for a failure to follow through on promises. Anyway, I wish someone told me at the beginning, that you need to only look out for yourself, use positions only as stepping stones to your next better position and move on, keep doing that until you are content where you are, then stay there. Don't trust management, ever. If they say there is a delay, or they are looking into it, unless there is a contract in front of you to sign, be applying for opportunities elsewhere. I am the guy with the most experience, both in terms of years and content, the most competent, have more responsibility, and capable, yet I am the lowest paid guy in the room. Yet I have also struggled over the years to get out of hole of staying on one position too long, because largely the competition can cite other positional titles, as well as what is mentioned in this topic a lot, previous HR salary comparisons. Going to the unions reps will get you blank stares, shrugs, and emphatic pats, but not much else.
Anyway when I first started out, I had the idealistic understanding, that you get a job, and if you are good at it, be loyal, try to improve the business, and increase your knowledge, responsibility, and function they they will promote you in salary and position. This is wrong (at least in a union environment). Management will be more than happy to let you do all that without any additional compensation. If you want to get ahead, do it yourself, be a mercenary, the job is there to provide you with things for your next application/interview within a year or so (or less). Stay too long at any one position and you risk getting stuck there...
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
> Is it worth trying to find a local personal finance adviser you can sit down with face-to-face?
Not yet, because right now you're what financial advisors call a "sucker". Financial advisors are "sales advisors", salesmen selling financial products, often on commission. Before talking to them, you should educate yourself and never, ever buy a financial you don't fully understand. Later, if you have a million dollars and an education in investing, it may make sense to hire a non-commissioned advisor. For now, keep it simple.
There are some complicated financial products, but few of them consistently outperform the simple approach of investing in the broad market, using an index fund. MOST millionaires became millionaires by following the "get rich slow" approach of consistently putting money into low-risk investments every month, then just letting them grow.
Some basic terms:
Mutual fund: A bunch of people "go in" together to pool their money and buy a bunch of investments, normally many different stocks.
Mutual funds are typically low-risk because you're not betting on one company, you have a bit of stock in many different companies.
Index mutual fund: A mutual fund that is set up to be like investing in all of the companies in a market index like the S&P 500. An S&P 500 index fund should get about the same results as investing in all 500 well-known companies would.
Over the long term (10 years or more), an index mutual fund will have an average return of about 8%-9% per year. It won't be much higher, or much lower, because it's not greatly affected by one or two companies doing well or doing poorly.
Expense ratio: How much it costs to run the mutual fund, which is subtracted from your earnings.
Low expense ratios are below 1%. For simple "get rich slow" approach which most millionaires use, we prefer the expense ratio be below 0.2%.
One company which offers very good index mutual funds with low expense ratios is vanguard.com.
One last point - if you spend your money every month, ten save what's left, you probably won't save much. On the other hand, if you first put away x% in savings / investments, then spend the rest, you're on your way to becoming a millionaire (slowly).
These are the rules I've learned over the years: 1. show up on time, don't leave early 2. don't talk negative about employees, customers, the company, or products 3. do what you are told 4. attend company functions
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See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
Also, it would have been great to know what 'stock options' were.
* In extremely rare cases both the lottery aspect and the fine art aspect will conspire. The company succeeds in the lottery of business, and you will have kept them long enough for them to achieve some value and not sold them for a nice dinner or entertaining night. These extremely rare and extremely lucky individuals discover unexpectedly they can buy a mansion and retire early.
Also, you can fall victim to having lots and lots of pre-IPO or pre-investment-round options which can be diluted to the point of worthlessness. If you are not a founder of the company and driving the ship when the options are massaged through the funding rounds, do not consider any options as future earnings. Consider them as worthless trinkets, then you can only be pleasantly surprised when they will, hopefully, be worth enough for a night on the town 5 years down the road.