As for "manager equivalent"- that may be where you come from. In my world, a manager is equal to a normal engineer-
How strange your planet is. I've never worked anywhere where a manager didn't get paid significantly more than a "normal engineer" (excepting very junior managers, e.g., and engineer who had just switched over).
Yeah, very different. Dealing with budget, scope, schedule- that's a PMs job.
By PM do you mean "project manager"? I didn't know those still existed. If you mean "product manager" that seems quite strange - they prioritize requests and are certainly present when building t roadmap, but none of the engineers work for them so they can hardly commit to a schedule.
Especially budget- I've never had to deal with that in my career
I didn't say budget. I said funding - as in, this project is funded at 4 engineers for 6 months. Sure, abstractly related, but the (not-really) fungible resources with which you fund projects are engineers. From the overall group of 30-50 people, who's doing what this year, who will work on which projects against which deadlines. And on up the chain, of course, as each group at each level has to justify the number of people who will be in the group against what it plans to deliver. Fortunately, I'm only ever involved at the "leaf" of that - we have 6 months, we need for people, we're only going to get 3, so what do we jettison from the scope? That sort of thing.
You asked how people were looked at 20 years in. My point is nobody worries about that when you don't hold an employee for more than 4
Who cares how long anyone has worked at that company? That's nearly irrelevant, past the early months. Industry experience in important, though. Of course, experienced doesn't always mean good, but working at a given level generally does require enough years working at the level below it for even the sharpest guy. Some lessons you only learn the hard way.
The question is, what do you image the people with 20+ years experience are going to be doing, on average? What does that role look like? Too many companies have no answer, but in time that's 1/3rd of your workforce.
It's not hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy, it's the recognition that there must be an engineering career path that doesn't involve being a manager.
Friend of mine is a dev manager at Amazon. Amazon doesn't have a "Senior SDE" title in the first place. SDE-3 is the equivalent though, and it's not a paygrade you'll find many people with fewer than 10 years experience in. Amazon technically has Principal Engineers, but from what I hear they're vanishingly rare and there's no clear career advancement path to there.
I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft, where again you didn't see many people in the "senior" title (which is actually 2 pay grades) with fewer than 10 years experience. Principals weren't that rare, but there were still 5 principal-level managers for every principal engineer.
HP is an odd duck. It used to be an old-school engineering company with old-school titles (much like Compaq and DEC). For a while HP software was the drain for all the companies and people who couldn't quite make it. Now it's where the drain flows.
The work a mid level and a senior does isn't significantly different- its just expected to be done better/faster.
Sounds like you're talking about someone with less than 10 years experience. No one hires me to be faster than a young college hire full of energy, much less faster than the 3 of them you could hire instead of me. My job, as with senior engineers throughout history, is to ensure the team avoids costly mistakes, and to solve the problems no one else can solve. (I occasionally solve problems no one else can see, but not regularly enough to be a principal engineer, I guess.)
Your system has what 5 levels? Pointless
Most companies on the left coast (and most old-school engineering companies I know about) have 6 paygrades below principal (or just 5-6 grades, for mid-sized companies). Titles are all over the place, but you have: * 2 for junior engineers (the bottom one just for people you're taking a risk on, so you can minimize the risk - no one stays there for more than a year). * 2 paygrades for mid-career engineers, mostly so you can give someone a promotion at around 5 years into their career, just so they can see that promotions are a real thing, but no real difference in responsibility. * 2 for manager-equivalent engineers - "senior" by the old titles.
You start leading project teams somewhere mid-career, but it's not like it's always the same crew. You're given a project, help work out/negotiate scope/schedule/funding, then deal with all the inevitable panics and hit your date. But half your time is design reviews for other teams, best practices work, that sort of thing - you're generally expected to show that your influence was larger than just your team, come review time. Very different from "a mid-career guy, except I type faster".
Programming is very different. Really most employees change employers every 2-6 years
No, it's an argument against thinking systems become safe by detaching them from the internet.
There's no such thing as "safe". That's not how security works, Detaching systems from the internet makes them safer, and that's a Good Thing.
In this case, I applaud moving back to mechanical keys. It's a mature security system, the weaknesses and their mitigations are well understood, and it matches people's expectations about what behaviors are safe. I also suspect it's not particularly expensive at any sort of scale (once it makes sense to cut your own keys, and have staff trained to do that - it's not like key blanks are expensive).
If it wasn't connected to the Internet in some way, how in the hell would someone compromise it remotely?
Dial up? That's how ATM hacking used to work - heck, maybe it still does. Dial-up connections are still used in a variety of embedded applications for remote maintenance, perhaps because it gives the illusion of not being on a publicly accessible network (despite being on the oldest such network).
Yes, jackoff, it's my fault I had to leave Mathematica running for a day or two on a non-trivial problem.
This tells me that all of your work IS trivial.
Why are you not running that on a cloud server? Or on 100 using the parallel version, to get results in an hour? Broke student? Doesn't Wolfram Research offer a cloud just for Mathematica?
Monsanto doesn't own farms, but almost all farmland in America is farmed by large corporations. Dig into US agricultural subsidies some day - it's the dirtiest, most corrupt area of government.
Completely ignoring the fact that monied interests are more than happy to use their power to exploit you for profit
So you're saying Hitler wasn't so evil, since he attacked Stalin? Look, centralized power is bad, because power attracts assholes. Obviously the trade-off is sometimes worth it, but one should be very skeptical in every case, demand proof that every new power really is a net positive.
The worst bureaucrat at the worst Soviet agency did not have a personal, vested interest in screwing you over for financial gain.
Yeah, you don't understand how that worked, do you? They very much screwed people over for their personal financial gain (at least, at the top). Under capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under communism, the powerful become rich.
Whats the only institution that can stand up to car companies that don't care if you die in a fire?
What's "regulatory capture"?
You make as much sense as al the people saying "government is too corrupt, and the only way to fix it is to give the government more power".
Wow, all the ad hominems. No actual arguments or science, as expected, just "reeeeeeeeee - out-tribe, out-tribe".
You might consider that humans were on the scene for many millennia, but didn't flourish, didn't start the climb to civilization, until 10k years ago when this unusually warm period began, unlike the narrow peaks of previous inter-glacial eras.
Can humans evolve to have elephant's ears to cool down
My opposable thumbs work quite well for that, thanks.
Never seen that at the 8 companies (10 with acquisitions) I've worked at. Never seen "Lead" as a title, except at Microsoft where "Lead" is just what they call first-line managers. Leading a team is a project-by-project thing, though as a senior engineer you should always be leading a project. And I've never seen "junior engineer" as an actual title. It's just numbered SDE titles until mid-career.
The title structure I'm talking about is what is common at non-software engineering companies, and some of the bigger software companies that push back against title inflation. You have several numbered grades of SDE or MTS, and some people will finish their career there. You have managers and senior engineers. You have directors and principle engineers. And you have VPs and Fellows.
I've certainly also worked at places where "senior" was a mid-career title, not equivalent to a manager (or only to a very junior manager). That's certainly common.
Are you working at places where most of the workforce is in their 20s? Where no consideration has been given to what your career looks like in your second twenty years as an engineer? If the kind of company you work for sees heavy drop-off in the early years (as opposed to exponential expansion of the field), then, wow, sounds like an unpleasant place to work.
Yeah, title inflation is normal. It's cheaper to give a title than a raise, But it's different at the Big 5, and at "real" engineering companies, where senior generally happens at 8-10 years experience for the smarter engineers, and you're expected to start leading projects by 3-5 years experience if you're sharp.
My job history shows a continuous deflation in job title, though my pay always went up. From "senior principal" to "senior" 5 jobs later.
Principal is quite rare at big software companies, typically less than 1%, where it should be around 3% (as at "real" engineering companies). But that's a pay grade equivalent to directors, and is generally for people with 20+ years experience and top-notch skills and leadership ability.
In addition to salary history, Employers in the United States often ask for tax forms or permission to obtain tax transcripts. Sometimes this is to prove who you worked for without contacting them. But other times this is used to see your salary history, and/or prove it is what you said it was.
I've been in the business through a quarter-century and 8 employers (and many more interviews). I've never heard of such a thing, and would tell any such company to fuck right off.
"Senior" is a victim of title inflation. At a company that takes title seriously (only a few large companies), you are a lead for years before you're a senior dev. Senior dev should mean that you're in a manager-equivalent paygrade (and not a newbie manager), and you generally have to do work at the next level for a while before getting the matching promotion. If it's easier t become a senior dev than a dev manager, the title isn't honest.
OK, but those countries are not the US. Here, no employer will say anything about you other than dates of employment for fear of lawsuits. I think there are better tactics than lying, myself, but salary history doesn't come into it.
This isn't true for software developers. Hiring managers know devs suck at salary negotiation, but they also know they're competing with other hiring managers. Heck, I had one job make one offer then raise it by $10k and throw in a $40k hiring bonus after I had already accepted just to make sure. Of course, that was as a senior dev. Some companies are really quite desperate for senior talent.
Nonsense. You don't know how large companies work. The cost to the hiring manager is exactly "1 req". Salary doesn't come into it. Large companies can afford you, as long as you're not way out of line with the market. The hiring manage is usually desperate to find anyone qualified, and will delight in the cases where market rate is a large boost over the candidate's current salary. We as a left-coast company love to interview people from elsewhere just for this reason - the "shock and awe" of the salary disparity between the left coast and most other places is enough to overcome any trepidations about relocation.
I'm paid well, so I always provide my salary in the first call with the recruiter. No point in wasting my time in they're not in the ballpark.
When young and underpaid, I would respond with "my salary is a joke, and the punchline is $X". Any large employer is going to pay you at least market rate if you're a software developer, and that certainly worked well for me, getting a 40% raise when I left my first and third jobs.
So, in my experience, if you're below market, you might as well say so and make it clear that's not going to be OK. If you're at market, there's no point in hiding it, since that's what they'll assume anyway. If you're well paid, then you really want to tell them upfront. All the cases point to telling the recruiter your current comp package.
History before that is none of their business, though.
UX is an made-up buzzword by UI guys trying to pretend they're no graphic designers, when good graphic designers are the main thing needed (but everyone and their dog was claiming to be one, at the time). I'd say power steering is actually a different UI than old-school, as the controls just work differently. That's certainly the case for power brakes, power windows, and so on. You might argue that the smooth ride and quiet cabin of the Mercedes S class is part of the user experience that's not part of the UI, but it's hard to find a software analog.
SRB warpage was a dangerous issue though. The SRBs were made in sections and set sideways on train cars for shipping long distances, just so they could be made in the right senator's state. That's a problem with leadership above the NASA level, though.
I didn't see a link to a patent, but from the description it could also be for a humidifier, which can also be used to scent a room, or dispense some inhaled medicines. TFA might be making some assumptions as to the scale of the device.
But who knows, Apple might be making bluetooth eCigs next, color-coordinated with Beats headphones.
but they are UX, I don't know what you have against calling it that, because UI is how it looks (and in UI the look is functional yes). Behaviour such as popups auto opening as soon as you open a page are clearly UX because it is nothing to do with the design of how it looks and everything about how it behaves.
Nonsense. It's all UI. A command line is a UI. My car's steering wheels and pedals are a UI. A remote control is a UI. A UI where things slide around and hide themselves and whatnot is all UI. I'm the user. It's the interface.
climate change (which is already happening, perhaps irreversibly).
Climate change is always happening. "Irreversibly" is scare tactics. There's nothing mankind can do to keep the climate stable long-term, because climate is not a stable thing. But the Earth has been 90% covered with glaciers, and the Earth has seen CO2 concentrations 10x today (first the one, then the other). It's self-correcting, on geological time scales. A snowball Earth threatens mankind's existence as a species - one most of the oceans are covered with glaciers, there's just no ecosystem left. A warm Earth doesn't. Oh, there may be transition costs, even war (another thing that will always be with us), but it hardly threatens the species.
Slashdot Mirror
As for "manager equivalent"- that may be where you come from. In my world, a manager is equal to a normal engineer-
How strange your planet is. I've never worked anywhere where a manager didn't get paid significantly more than a "normal engineer" (excepting very junior managers, e.g., and engineer who had just switched over).
Yeah, very different. Dealing with budget, scope, schedule- that's a PMs job.
By PM do you mean "project manager"? I didn't know those still existed. If you mean "product manager" that seems quite strange - they prioritize requests and are certainly present when building t roadmap, but none of the engineers work for them so they can hardly commit to a schedule.
Especially budget- I've never had to deal with that in my career
I didn't say budget. I said funding - as in, this project is funded at 4 engineers for 6 months. Sure, abstractly related, but the (not-really) fungible resources with which you fund projects are engineers. From the overall group of 30-50 people, who's doing what this year, who will work on which projects against which deadlines. And on up the chain, of course, as each group at each level has to justify the number of people who will be in the group against what it plans to deliver. Fortunately, I'm only ever involved at the "leaf" of that - we have 6 months, we need for people, we're only going to get 3, so what do we jettison from the scope? That sort of thing.
You asked how people were looked at 20 years in. My point is nobody worries about that when you don't hold an employee for more than 4
Who cares how long anyone has worked at that company? That's nearly irrelevant, past the early months. Industry experience in important, though. Of course, experienced doesn't always mean good, but working at a given level generally does require enough years working at the level below it for even the sharpest guy. Some lessons you only learn the hard way.
The question is, what do you image the people with 20+ years experience are going to be doing, on average? What does that role look like? Too many companies have no answer, but in time that's 1/3rd of your workforce.
It's not hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy, it's the recognition that there must be an engineering career path that doesn't involve being a manager.
Just admit it: you want food that doesn't have chemicals.
Friend of mine is a dev manager at Amazon. Amazon doesn't have a "Senior SDE" title in the first place. SDE-3 is the equivalent though, and it's not a paygrade you'll find many people with fewer than 10 years experience in. Amazon technically has Principal Engineers, but from what I hear they're vanishingly rare and there's no clear career advancement path to there.
I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft, where again you didn't see many people in the "senior" title (which is actually 2 pay grades) with fewer than 10 years experience. Principals weren't that rare, but there were still 5 principal-level managers for every principal engineer.
HP is an odd duck. It used to be an old-school engineering company with old-school titles (much like Compaq and DEC). For a while HP software was the drain for all the companies and people who couldn't quite make it. Now it's where the drain flows.
The work a mid level and a senior does isn't significantly different- its just expected to be done better/faster.
Sounds like you're talking about someone with less than 10 years experience. No one hires me to be faster than a young college hire full of energy, much less faster than the 3 of them you could hire instead of me. My job, as with senior engineers throughout history, is to ensure the team avoids costly mistakes, and to solve the problems no one else can solve. (I occasionally solve problems no one else can see, but not regularly enough to be a principal engineer, I guess.)
Your system has what 5 levels? Pointless
Most companies on the left coast (and most old-school engineering companies I know about) have 6 paygrades below principal (or just 5-6 grades, for mid-sized companies). Titles are all over the place, but you have:
* 2 for junior engineers (the bottom one just for people you're taking a risk on, so you can minimize the risk - no one stays there for more than a year).
* 2 paygrades for mid-career engineers, mostly so you can give someone a promotion at around 5 years into their career, just so they can see that promotions are a real thing, but no real difference in responsibility.
* 2 for manager-equivalent engineers - "senior" by the old titles.
You start leading project teams somewhere mid-career, but it's not like it's always the same crew. You're given a project, help work out/negotiate scope/schedule/funding, then deal with all the inevitable panics and hit your date. But half your time is design reviews for other teams, best practices work, that sort of thing - you're generally expected to show that your influence was larger than just your team, come review time. Very different from "a mid-career guy, except I type faster".
Programming is very different. Really most employees change employers every 2-6 years
Sure, but how is that related?
Yes. I take that as an axiom. The non-trivial question is, how do you cope, if you're stuck with it?
No, it's an argument against thinking systems become safe by detaching them from the internet.
There's no such thing as "safe". That's not how security works, Detaching systems from the internet makes them safer, and that's a Good Thing.
In this case, I applaud moving back to mechanical keys. It's a mature security system, the weaknesses and their mitigations are well understood, and it matches people's expectations about what behaviors are safe. I also suspect it's not particularly expensive at any sort of scale (once it makes sense to cut your own keys, and have staff trained to do that - it's not like key blanks are expensive).
If it wasn't connected to the Internet in some way, how in the hell would someone compromise it remotely?
Dial up? That's how ATM hacking used to work - heck, maybe it still does. Dial-up connections are still used in a variety of embedded applications for remote maintenance, perhaps because it gives the illusion of not being on a publicly accessible network (despite being on the oldest such network).
Systemd is Windows-in-training.
Yes, jackoff, it's my fault I had to leave Mathematica running for a day or two on a non-trivial problem.
This tells me that all of your work IS trivial.
Why are you not running that on a cloud server? Or on 100 using the parallel version, to get results in an hour? Broke student? Doesn't Wolfram Research offer a cloud just for Mathematica?
Monsanto doesn't own farms, but almost all farmland in America is farmed by large corporations. Dig into US agricultural subsidies some day - it's the dirtiest, most corrupt area of government.
Completely ignoring the fact that monied interests are more than happy to use their power to exploit you for profit
So you're saying Hitler wasn't so evil, since he attacked Stalin? Look, centralized power is bad, because power attracts assholes. Obviously the trade-off is sometimes worth it, but one should be very skeptical in every case, demand proof that every new power really is a net positive.
The worst bureaucrat at the worst Soviet agency did not have a personal, vested interest in screwing you over for financial gain.
Yeah, you don't understand how that worked, do you? They very much screwed people over for their personal financial gain (at least, at the top). Under capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under communism, the powerful become rich.
Whats the only institution that can stand up to car companies that don't care if you die in a fire?
What's "regulatory capture"?
You make as much sense as al the people saying "government is too corrupt, and the only way to fix it is to give the government more power".
Wow, all the ad hominems. No actual arguments or science, as expected, just "reeeeeeeeee - out-tribe, out-tribe".
You might consider that humans were on the scene for many millennia, but didn't flourish, didn't start the climb to civilization, until 10k years ago when this unusually warm period began, unlike the narrow peaks of previous inter-glacial eras.
Can humans evolve to have elephant's ears to cool down
My opposable thumbs work quite well for that, thanks.
Never seen that at the 8 companies (10 with acquisitions) I've worked at. Never seen "Lead" as a title, except at Microsoft where "Lead" is just what they call first-line managers. Leading a team is a project-by-project thing, though as a senior engineer you should always be leading a project. And I've never seen "junior engineer" as an actual title. It's just numbered SDE titles until mid-career.
The title structure I'm talking about is what is common at non-software engineering companies, and some of the bigger software companies that push back against title inflation. You have several numbered grades of SDE or MTS, and some people will finish their career there. You have managers and senior engineers. You have directors and principle engineers. And you have VPs and Fellows.
I've certainly also worked at places where "senior" was a mid-career title, not equivalent to a manager (or only to a very junior manager). That's certainly common.
Are you working at places where most of the workforce is in their 20s? Where no consideration has been given to what your career looks like in your second twenty years as an engineer? If the kind of company you work for sees heavy drop-off in the early years (as opposed to exponential expansion of the field), then, wow, sounds like an unpleasant place to work.
Yeah, title inflation is normal. It's cheaper to give a title than a raise, But it's different at the Big 5, and at "real" engineering companies, where senior generally happens at 8-10 years experience for the smarter engineers, and you're expected to start leading projects by 3-5 years experience if you're sharp.
My job history shows a continuous deflation in job title, though my pay always went up. From "senior principal" to "senior" 5 jobs later.
Principal is quite rare at big software companies, typically less than 1%, where it should be around 3% (as at "real" engineering companies). But that's a pay grade equivalent to directors, and is generally for people with 20+ years experience and top-notch skills and leadership ability.
In addition to salary history, Employers in the United States often ask for tax forms or permission to obtain tax transcripts. Sometimes this is to prove who you worked for without contacting them. But other times this is used to see your salary history, and/or prove it is what you said it was.
I've been in the business through a quarter-century and 8 employers (and many more interviews). I've never heard of such a thing, and would tell any such company to fuck right off.
"Senior" is a victim of title inflation. At a company that takes title seriously (only a few large companies), you are a lead for years before you're a senior dev. Senior dev should mean that you're in a manager-equivalent paygrade (and not a newbie manager), and you generally have to do work at the next level for a while before getting the matching promotion. If it's easier t become a senior dev than a dev manager, the title isn't honest.
OK, but those countries are not the US. Here, no employer will say anything about you other than dates of employment for fear of lawsuits. I think there are better tactics than lying, myself, but salary history doesn't come into it.
This isn't true for software developers. Hiring managers know devs suck at salary negotiation, but they also know they're competing with other hiring managers. Heck, I had one job make one offer then raise it by $10k and throw in a $40k hiring bonus after I had already accepted just to make sure. Of course, that was as a senior dev. Some companies are really quite desperate for senior talent.
Nonsense. You don't know how large companies work. The cost to the hiring manager is exactly "1 req". Salary doesn't come into it. Large companies can afford you, as long as you're not way out of line with the market. The hiring manage is usually desperate to find anyone qualified, and will delight in the cases where market rate is a large boost over the candidate's current salary. We as a left-coast company love to interview people from elsewhere just for this reason - the "shock and awe" of the salary disparity between the left coast and most other places is enough to overcome any trepidations about relocation.
I'm paid well, so I always provide my salary in the first call with the recruiter. No point in wasting my time in they're not in the ballpark.
When young and underpaid, I would respond with "my salary is a joke, and the punchline is $X". Any large employer is going to pay you at least market rate if you're a software developer, and that certainly worked well for me, getting a 40% raise when I left my first and third jobs.
So, in my experience, if you're below market, you might as well say so and make it clear that's not going to be OK. If you're at market, there's no point in hiding it, since that's what they'll assume anyway. If you're well paid, then you really want to tell them upfront. All the cases point to telling the recruiter your current comp package.
History before that is none of their business, though.
UX is an made-up buzzword by UI guys trying to pretend they're no graphic designers, when good graphic designers are the main thing needed (but everyone and their dog was claiming to be one, at the time). I'd say power steering is actually a different UI than old-school, as the controls just work differently. That's certainly the case for power brakes, power windows, and so on. You might argue that the smooth ride and quiet cabin of the Mercedes S class is part of the user experience that's not part of the UI, but it's hard to find a software analog.
SRB warpage was a dangerous issue though. The SRBs were made in sections and set sideways on train cars for shipping long distances, just so they could be made in the right senator's state. That's a problem with leadership above the NASA level, though.
Smellovision!
I didn't see a link to a patent, but from the description it could also be for a humidifier, which can also be used to scent a room, or dispense some inhaled medicines. TFA might be making some assumptions as to the scale of the device.
But who knows, Apple might be making bluetooth eCigs next, color-coordinated with Beats headphones.
Well played, sir!
but they are UX, I don't know what you have against calling it that, because UI is how it looks (and in UI the look is functional yes). Behaviour such as popups auto opening as soon as you open a page are clearly UX because it is nothing to do with the design of how it looks and everything about how it behaves.
Nonsense. It's all UI. A command line is a UI. My car's steering wheels and pedals are a UI. A remote control is a UI. A UI where things slide around and hide themselves and whatnot is all UI. I'm the user. It's the interface.
climate change (which is already happening, perhaps irreversibly).
Climate change is always happening. "Irreversibly" is scare tactics. There's nothing mankind can do to keep the climate stable long-term, because climate is not a stable thing. But the Earth has been 90% covered with glaciers, and the Earth has seen CO2 concentrations 10x today (first the one, then the other). It's self-correcting, on geological time scales. A snowball Earth threatens mankind's existence as a species - one most of the oceans are covered with glaciers, there's just no ecosystem left. A warm Earth doesn't. Oh, there may be transition costs, even war (another thing that will always be with us), but it hardly threatens the species.