IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Khane

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TJT said:
Thinking about this a little today. I realized that the interview process today for Mid-Senior+ is the same as it was for entry level now. Entry level tech jobs had grueling interviews. The one I did for GM as an entry level developer was 4 interviews, 2 of which were white boarding. While it is difficult to get the job it is quite easy to keep the job. Especially in larger organizations.

When I got my current role as a "mid level" after 6 years at GM it was a 3 interview process and the questions about technical stuff were relatively deep but they required no whiteboard coding. More like, "walk us through how you would approach this common issue for the role and tell us why you would do X or Y." Every interview I had from 2019-2024 or so was like this. This past year or so its full on 5-7 stage process with whiteboarding, leetcode, take home assignments, aggressive filtering, everything. If anything it makes me not want to get a different job that badly because that shit straight sucks to do.

The old format was enjoyable.
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Supply and demand, if a company is willing to actually hire an American they have so many candidates vying for the position they can basically require anything they want and people will jump through all the hoops.

Essentially the opposite of how it was for those of us established in the field circa 2015.
 
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TomServo

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TJT said:
Thinking about this a little today. I realized that the interview process today for Mid-Senior+ is the same as it was for entry level now. Entry level tech jobs had grueling interviews. The one I did for GM as an entry level developer was 4 interviews, 2 of which were white boarding. While it is difficult to get the job it is quite easy to keep the job. Especially in larger organizations.

When I got my current role as a "mid level" after 6 years at GM it was a 3 interview process and the questions about technical stuff were relatively deep but they required no whiteboard coding. More like, "walk us through how you would approach this common issue for the role and tell us why you would do X or Y." Every interview I had from 2019-2024 or so was like this. This past year or so its full on 5-7 stage process with whiteboarding, leetcode, take home assignments, aggressive filtering, everything. If anything it makes me not want to get a different job that badly because that shit straight sucks to do.

The old format was enjoyable.
Click to expand...
It fucking sucks. I am working two seperate outside business things with wife to get the fuck out in the next 5 years
 
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TJT

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And to really rub it in the Indian hires only have 2 interviews. The ones that require me to do the first stage anyway.
 
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Neranja

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Kirun said:
That's the pattern: Blue collar jobs get automated > "adapt or die." White collar spreadsheet work gets automated > "well, those weren't the important ones." Next up: "Sure, AI writes code, but that's not TRUE TECH! Real engineers think."
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I'd like to point out something here: The "adapt or die" mentality has always been the case for IT jobs. Every new year comes a new technology, a new framework, a new operating system, a new language, a new way of doing things. We went from big central computers with stupid remote access terminals to personal computers, and then back to cloud computing an centralized computing, in like 25 years.

"Adapt or die" you say, like it's a bad thing. "Adapt or die" has been in the DNA of IT jobs since forever. And this is the reason you get no sympathy here, and why no one understands your argument.
 
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Noodleface

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TJT said:
Thinking about this a little today. I realized that the interview process today for Mid-Senior+ is the same as it was for entry level now. Entry level tech jobs had grueling interviews. The one I did for GM as an entry level developer was 4 interviews, 2 of which were white boarding. While it is difficult to get the job it is quite easy to keep the job. Especially in larger organizations.

When I got my current role as a "mid level" after 6 years at GM it was a 3 interview process and the questions about technical stuff were relatively deep but they required no whiteboard coding. More like, "walk us through how you would approach this common issue for the role and tell us why you would do X or Y." Every interview I had from 2019-2024 or so was like this. This past year or so its full on 5-7 stage process with whiteboarding, leetcode, take home assignments, aggressive filtering, everything. If anything it makes me not want to get a different job that badly because that shit straight sucks to do.

The old format was enjoyable.
Click to expand...
This is 100% true and the reason I stayed where I am. Fuck all that shit. I've been in the field for 15 years, if you want me to code a queue data structure from scratch you're hiring the wrong people for this level.
 
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Kirun

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Khane said:
I'm not sure why he thinks its acceptable and appropriate to come into a thread where none of what he is describing happened and people are commiserating about how this current state of things is effecting them in negative ways and act like that.

But sure Kirun, I guess all of us who just went into a field we enjoyed that also happened to be lucrative are now getting our "just desserts". Sure.

It was 1998 and I was 16 years old when I decided to apply to colleges for a CS degree. What a dumbass right?!
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Oh, come on. This whole "why is he being mean in our commiseration thread" routine is just an attempt to reframe criticism as cruelty so it can be safely ignored.

No one is barging in to dance on graves. What's I'm pointing out is a pattern and hypocrisy (which happens a LOT on this forum and people get really titty twisted when called out on it). It's uncomfortable precisely because it hits close to home. When factory workers lost jobs to automation, they were told it was inevitable and they "should've planned better". When retail collapsed, people sneered about "unskilled labor." When journalists got hollowed out by blogs and algorithms, they were told the market had spoken. Truck drivers? Call center workers? Same story. Sympathy was scarce, and smugness was plentiful.

Now the wheel has turned slightly, and suddenly the expectation is emotional insulation from criticism because this time the affected group "just picked something they enjoyed that paid well." So did plenty of the people who got wiped out before. That didn't stop anyone from mocking them, moralizing at them, or telling them they should have "seen it coming", they should "learn2code", or need to get "skilled".

And the 1998 anecdote is doing a lot of emotional work it doesn't actually support. No, choosing CS in 1998 didn't make someone a dumbass. What does deserve scrutiny is the decades-long posture that followed. Where tech positioned itself as "uniquely" future-proof, uniquely rational, and uniquely entitled to stability, while openly sneering at other professions for not being "adaptive" enough.

That's the part people are reacting to. Not the personal hardship, not the stress, not the fear. It's the insistence that this disruption is tragic and unfair, while all the previous ones were just the market doing its thing. So no, this isn't about "just desserts" in some cartoonish moral sense. It's about accountability for attitudes. You don't get to spend years telling other workers that pain is the cost of progress and then demand a safe space when progress shows up at your door.

History doesn't repeat because people are cruel. It repeats because every profession is convinced (right up until the moment it isn't) that their work is different.
 
TJT

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Okay but you're just being disingenuous. The tech industry isn't gone, it is totally robust and massive. American citizens are just being barred out of it in favor of foreigners. That is what is really happening. Not the automobile replacing the horse or anything like that. Big tech has laid off in recent times sure.

AI going to take our jobs and all but you are truly under threat of that if your job is an actual email do nothing job. I have not seen a single developer laid off to have AI replace them. I have seen Indians hired instead both in the USA and offshored. I have seen jobs to to the Philippines and more recently Mexico.
 
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Control

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Kirun said:
Oh, come on. This whole "why is he being mean in our commiseration thread" routine is just an attempt to reframe criticism as cruelty so it can be safely ignored.

No one is barging in to dance on graves. What's I'm pointing out is a pattern and hypocrisy (which happens a LOT on this forum and people get really titty twisted when called out on it). It's uncomfortable precisely because it hits close to home. When factory workers lost jobs to automation, they were told it was inevitable and they "should've planned better". When retail collapsed, people sneered about "unskilled labor." When journalists got hollowed out by blogs and algorithms, they were told the market had spoken. Truck drivers? Call center workers? Same story. Sympathy was scarce, and smugness was plentiful.

Now the wheel has turned slightly, and suddenly the expectation is emotional insulation from criticism because this time the affected group "just picked something they enjoyed that paid well." So did plenty of the people who got wiped out before. That didn't stop anyone from mocking them, moralizing at them, or telling them they should have "seen it coming", they should "learn2code", or need to get "skilled".

And the 1998 anecdote is doing a lot of emotional work it doesn't actually support. No, choosing CS in 1998 didn't make someone a dumbass. What does deserve scrutiny is the decades-long posture that followed. Where tech positioned itself as "uniquely" future-proof, uniquely rational, and uniquely entitled to stability, while openly sneering at other professions for not being "adaptive" enough.

That's the part people are reacting to. Not the personal hardship, not the stress, not the fear. It's the insistence that this disruption is tragic and unfair, while all the previous ones were just the market doing its thing. So no, this isn't about "just desserts" in some cartoonish moral sense. It's about accountability for attitudes. You don't get to spend years telling other workers that pain is the cost of progress and then demand a safe space when progress shows up at your door.

History doesn't repeat because people are cruel. It repeats because every profession is convinced (right up until the moment it isn't) that their work is different.
Click to expand...
Are you sure you're on the right forum? I don't think anyone here generally makes fun of any profession except for journalism and maybe teaching, and even that's only because they're full of people doing activism instead of their actual profession. A good journalist doing good journalism can be incredibly valuable, and I don't think anyone here would disagree. They're just vanishingly rare these days.
 
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Neranja

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I really like that he has built this world view in his head that we had luxurious, stable, six figure jobs without stress or overtime. The ones he saw in those Tiktok videos with "a day in the life of a ${TECH_STARTUP}" with the fruit bars and ping pong tables. If that is your world view of how jobs in IT are, then I can totally get that he's angry now that he perceives those people complaining about being replaced by AI.

Only that was a fucking fantasy, and those girls were the first to be fired once the startup money dried up.
 
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Khane

Khane

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Kirun said:
Oh, come on. This whole "why is he being mean in our commiseration thread" routine is just an attempt to reframe criticism as cruelty so it can be safely ignored.

No one is barging in to dance on graves. What's I'm pointing out is a pattern and hypocrisy (which happens a LOT on this forum and people get really titty twisted when called out on it). It's uncomfortable precisely because it hits close to home. When factory workers lost jobs to automation, they were told it was inevitable and they "should've planned better". When retail collapsed, people sneered about "unskilled labor." When journalists got hollowed out by blogs and algorithms, they were told the market had spoken. Truck drivers? Call center workers? Same story. Sympathy was scarce, and smugness was plentiful.

Now the wheel has turned slightly, and suddenly the expectation is emotional insulation from criticism because this time the affected group "just picked something they enjoyed that paid well." So did plenty of the people who got wiped out before. That didn't stop anyone from mocking them, moralizing at them, or telling them they should have "seen it coming", they should "learn2code", or need to get "skilled".

And the 1998 anecdote is doing a lot of emotional work it doesn't actually support. No, choosing CS in 1998 didn't make someone a dumbass. What does deserve scrutiny is the decades-long posture that followed. Where tech positioned itself as "uniquely" future-proof, uniquely rational, and uniquely entitled to stability, while openly sneering at other professions for not being "adaptive" enough.

That's the part people are reacting to. Not the personal hardship, not the stress, not the fear. It's the insistence that this disruption is tragic and unfair, while all the previous ones were just the market doing its thing. So no, this isn't about "just desserts" in some cartoonish moral sense. It's about accountability for attitudes. You don't get to spend years telling other workers that pain is the cost of progress and then demand a safe space when progress shows up at your door.

History doesn't repeat because people are cruel. It repeats because every profession is convinced (right up until the moment it isn't) that their work is different.
Click to expand...

Amod Amod we need a Billy Madison gif specifically for this dipshit.

 
TJT

TJT

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Neranja said:
I really like that he has built this world view in his head that we had luxurious, stable, six figure jobs without stress or overtime. The ones he saw in those Tiktok videos with "a day in the life of a ${TECH_STARTUP}" with the fruit bars and ping pong tables. If that is your world view of how jobs in IT are, then I can totally get that he's angry now that he perceives those people complaining about being replaced by AI.

Only that was a fucking fantasy, and those girls were the first to be fired once the startup money dried up.
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Adding to that working at a startup is truly sink or swim compared to working at a big corp like General Motors. I was the 175th person hired at a company that has 3500 employees today and a billion in revenue. When I started we had just hit $30M in annual revenue. They sure did have a pingpong table and some snacks though. Not a fruit bar however!

If you weren't performing as in finding and deploying solutions with a swiftness you were out the door. This required you to wear a dozen hats and learn just as many completely different systems on the fly. As opposed to GM where I only worked in one small slice of the pie and had a very specific lane.
 
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Neranja

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TJT said:
They sure did have a pingpong table and some snacks though. Not a fruit bar however!
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I could do without the fruit bar if I'd get daily blowjobs, too, like the Chinese tech workers:



But then again, their work culture is 996, which is from 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week. No amount of blowjobs can compensate for that.
 
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Control

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Neranja said:
No amount of blowjobs can compensate for that.
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What Wtf GIF by Bouygues Telecom
 
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TJT

TJT

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You know what they say. A blowjob a day from the office cutie on staff keeps me working 12 hours a day 7 days a week!
 
Neranja

Neranja

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TJT said:
You know what they say. A blowjob a day from the office cutie on staff keeps me working 12 hours a day 7 days a week!
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The office cutie doesn't come in on weekends, she's going to her side hustle at the strip club.

You'll get the fat diversity hire with the problem glasses.

EDIT: Also, she'll complain to HR about "toxic workplace culture" if you can't get it up for her.
 
yabbayabba

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moonarchia said:
Yeah, but the Office Orifice is communal.
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The office that gets herpes together stays together.

I miss working for the startups. While I don't think I have ADD I do get easily bored with tasks and like to jump around. With my old job I was lead engineer, while being part time DBA and dev ops. Meant that everyday was something different to do. Today it's a mid size company and I'm just a cog in the wheel. While I do like my job as I'm still 100% remote living in the midwest with my California salary, I'd be happy to find something else but I have zero interest in the interview process anymore and would probably get a pay cut.
 
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Kuro

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Two of the Owners teamed up and issued an ultimatum to the third owner today: Me, My Boss, or the MSP have to go, so that they can afford to pay sales commissions on jobs that netted negative last year
 
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moonarchia

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Kuro said:
Two of the Owners teamed up and issued an ultimatum to the third owner today: Me, My Boss, or the MSP have to go, so that they can afford to pay sales commissions on jobs that netted negative last year
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Good.... luck? Seems like the sort of place to be running away from even if you make it through this.
 
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Kuro

Kuro

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moonarchia said:
Good.... luck? Seems like the sort of place to be running away from even if you make it through this.
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Yeah, looking for a new job regardless, stress is through the roof with the random freakouts they have. I like all the employees and have really enjoyed updating their whole network, but I'm done with the owners.

Still feels lIke I got lucky with a decent first IT job experience, learned a lot, managed to pack away a couple years of experience for the next job.
 
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