angarg12

Sadly I see people struggling with overwork, afraid to push back way too often. What I learnt from my personal experience is this: when you push back, people respect you more, not less.

I started my career in a small shop reporting to a toxic and abusive manager. Due to a combination of factors (my own upbringing, being a naive new grad, a bad economy) I didn't know how to handle the situation so I just took it silently. Those were some of the lowest points in my life. When I finally left, I decided I wouldn't allow myself to fall in the same situation again.

Then I realized something amazing. Contrary to my fears, when I pushed back against unreasonable requests, for the most part people respected me more rather than less. Of course there is always people who retaliate, and the secret is you want to be far away from those people.

This is my hypothesis of what is happening: most abusive managers are low confidence cowards which use their formal authority to bully others. Because they are cowards, if you stand up to them, most often they will be afraid of losing face, and will choose to bully someone weaker instead.

Of course it isn't easy to start doing this out of the blue. Once you trained your manager to assume that you'll work 12 hour days and always say yes, it's very hard to make them change their mind, and you'll face retaliation. If you are in such a situation, I don't have great advice, other than you should look for another place to work, and start asserting yourself, even if in small ways at first.

Unfortunately I know many people will ignore my advice. They'll say I'm being idealistic, or that it worked only for me, or that they can't afford to lose their job. But I hope that at least some people will follow this advice and we'll give less food to the toxic managers of the world.

Oh yes this happens all the time!

Last year an engineer in my org got promoted to Senior Staff. In order to get there he alienated and burnt out many other engineers, including me.

But guess what? he got the promotion, which is what he was gunning for, and he only alienated his peers. Leadership still support him and think he is a genius (BTW for doing things like taking credit from others). Also he seems to have chilled down a lot since the promo, so if you only interacted with him afterwards you would have a very different opinion of him.

There is this idea that tech is a small world, your fame will precede you and such, but in practice I have seen the opposite. It seems way too easy to outrun your mistakes, either by changing teams or companies. I guess that is why it is relatively common to switch companies right after a promo. I have seen not so brilliant people greatly exaggerate their accomplishments and jump to greater highs.

They say that you can't fool all the people all the time, but that framing is wrong. You only need to fool the right people long enough. And in tech, long enough seems to be 2-3 years, after which you can jump ship and rinse and repeat.

I don't know about your company, but in mine executives never get fired. They always "leave for new and exciting opportunities" or "to spend more time with their families". I remember reading an article from an entrepreneur saying that a high % of executive hires are duds, but this is often kept under wraps to save face for both the company and the executive.

Bottom line, min-maxing your career progress *can* backfire, but statistically you'll be ahead by doing it than not. And you can minimize the downside by outrunning your mistakes, moving to other teams or companies (this applies less with the current job market).

This advice is not wrong, but honestly it could be way more cynical.

The first step to get promoted is to understand the promotion process of your current company, if they have a formal one. It took me one year to learn how promos work in my current company, and that was one whole year of progress lost.

Then if you really want to get promoted fast, you need to optimize to meet the promo criteria. Often that is in line with OP advice, sometimes it is against it. And above all, learn about scope, impact and visibility. Also learn about optics and politics. Sadly often promotions are not so much about your accomplishments, but how you present them and how people perceive them. The old advice of "work really hard and you will be rewarded" is moot if the right people don't know about it. Some people get promoted faster by doing less but promoting themselves harder and louder.

Even if you don't want to exactly game the system, it is still useful to know how it is played. For example, if you accomplish some extraordinary, spend a bit of effort letting higher ups know about it.

> Interviewing is a terrible way to screen candidates

so.... how do you suggest companies hire candidates? purely through referrals, without any further screening?

One big point I'm missing from this post is "work on your communication skills".

People shit on STAR method or variants, but the fact is that unless you are a great communicator (and most engineers I interview aren't), you will do better by adding some structure to your answers.

And then there is people who just ignore your questions and ramble on and on. Listen to your interviewer and directly answer their questions.

I remember reading analysis showing that there is a high correlation between the order that comments are posted and how many votes they get, i.e. early comments tend to get most voted. I guess people are gaming the system by commenting quickly. Who has time to read a 10 min article and comment when you can not read it and post a platitude?

One honest question for all people who miss the "good old days" of on-prem: have you ever worked in a shop that ran their own private datacenter? because I did and it wasn't lovely.

My first job ran their own datacenter. We started with a rack of about 50 nodes and some odd computers here and there. By the time I left we had a rack of 250 nodes and we had thrown away all individual servers (oh Solaris I won't miss you).

> Truly, why not try to run your own private cloud? How many old laptops, desktops, PIs, etc must we all have lying around?

Although VMs and Containers have done a world of difference on running your own datacenter, there are still reasons why just use the hardware that you have lying around for a business is a bad idea.

First, random laptops and desktops don't have a good ratio of price, performance, and energy consumption. Second, despite virtualization, all this heterogeneity in hardware and software is bound to cause an ongoing maintenance headache. Third, I hope your business doesn't have a sudden spike of demand, or you'll be struggling to find hardware to support it. Fourth, say good bye to quick iteration and experimentation when you have huge lead times and tons of capex.

Bottom line, cool for a hobbyist project, not cool for starting a business (and a maybe for a well establish and mature business).

People have been doing that for 10+ years solid, even more with rudimentary middleware such as grid computing.

> someone wanted a garage put above their kitchen because they wanted to park their ferrari next to their bedroom on the second floor.

You mean this guy?

https://youtu.be/Us8mDKUaX2M?si=qnrckuGLyWzoFNAe&t=1515

That's a lot of questions so I'll try to answer one by one.

> Whats your recommendation for backend engineers that want to transition to ml engineers?

I get this a lot, and my first question would be, why do you want to work in ML? Is it because it's "cool"? because it's in high demand? because it pays a lot? for the second two points, see my comment. For the first point, I'm pretty cynical about it. At the end of the day it's a dev job not very different from other domains. Depending on where you end up, your day to day might look the same, but with focus in ML systems.

Nevertheless, if you really want to transition, I still think the easiest way is to do an internal transfer to a team that does ML. That's how I got this job. If you are a good engineer, most ML teams will be happy to have you and teach you the skills on the job.

Of course maybe there is no ML team in your current company. If you are in a small company you might try to influence leadership to start ML initiatives and get some experience. I've seen many candidates do this: they start an ML project in their current company, and after 6-12 months they look for a job elsewhere. This is a variant of CV driven development, and sadly often these initiatives are hamfisted and don't really solve business problems.

Otherwise you might try to get a job in ML in another company. Lucky for you I found some companies that hire engineers in ML or ML adjacent jobs using a standard software dev loop, i.e. no special ML round, although these difficult to find. The other option is to try to learn enough ML to pass an interview.

I won't lie, this is doable, but the deck is stacked against you. The job market is pretty insane right now, and you'll be competing with people with masters and PhD's in ML, plus engineers with years of experience in the field.

I believe it's fair to say that pure theoretical knowledge won't get a job, much less unless you have prestigious credentials. Instead I would focus on a blend of applied theory and personal projects. Probably it would be best to choose one ML framework and double down on it to increase your chance of finding a job that requires that particular framework.

For theory there are tons of courses and resources online, although I tend to like more walkthroughs and tutorials that guide you on building a system rather than pure theory. For practical experience, the sky is the limit. As I said there are tutorials online that guide you on a project, but that will almost certainly not be enough. You can try your hand at Kaggle competitions, and at some point you can just choose some personal project that interests you and try to build on it.

I hope any of this helps and best of luck to you. Feel free to DM me if you want to know more.

I wish OP all the best, but there is one bit I can't get out of my head

> I feel very strongly that everyone should try, to the extent that it makes some kind of sense if you squint hard enough, to do what they want in work and life.

This is much much easier to say after an entire career in tech. However I wouldn't give this advice lightly to people just starting over.

Here is a counterexample. I started my career following my passion and "doing what I love", so I became an academic and joined a university.

After 7 years I was burnt out, broke and hated what used to be my passion. And I had to essentially start over my professional career in the private sector.

These days I don't necessarily always love my day to day job, but I do enjoy more the lifestyle it afford me as a whole.

My takeaway is that earning money and growing your career capital early on has compounding effect over time, and more importantly, it increases your optionality in the future. Going into comedy writing is less scary when you don't need to worry about sustaining your family.

It seems OPs opinion is heavily influenced by their personal experience, and it doesn't generalize well. In fact I have the complete opposite opinion on several points

> Your words have weight. If you, an IC, say "guys, we really should write tests", everybody goes "oh, crazy old Vladimir, all grumpy again, haha, where do you see tests fit here?". If you, an EM, casually say "guys, we really should write tests", you might be surprised to find the tests unexpectedly growing in different places.

I can't generalize, but in my company engineers trust Staff engineers way more than managers. Everyone has informal authority, and from my experience engineers tend to respect other engineers more. As a manager you can ask people to do things, but there is no guarantee they'll do it. And if you need to resort to your formal authority to resolve something, things probably went wrong somewhere.

> Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough.

If this is the case, then you are certainly not pushing yourself hard enough. Maybe it's company specific, but right now in my team there is a neverending list of ever increasingly bigger and more complex problems. The idea that you can master everything in 5 years sounds extremely naive to me.

> Life of an engineer is relatively relaxed. If you don't have anything urgent, you can go lay on the grass for half a day

Please OP tell me where you work. I'd like to lay in the grass half a day, rather than being constantly pulled into 10 different directions and having to push back on new requests.

We are just getting started with the age of LLM mishaps, and it's just going to get more ridiculous.

I was talking with an ML engineer that told me they had a lot of success fine tuning a LLM on their internal docs. A chatbot could solve about 70-80% of questions without the need of human intervention.

However their next big idea was to fine tune the LLM with the company financial data so that the finance department could get the information they need without custom queries or tech skills. We are just a few steps away from LLMs feeding hallucinations to decision makers and then those acting on bogus data.

I never heard of people aiming at Staff+ positions with 6 yoe, but surely sounds like a stretch. I'd say that 5 years from new grad to senior at big tech is a fast-ish progression; a bit quick, but doable with skills, hard work and some luck.

I personally have +15 yoe total and I'm currently Staff in my company.

This. Going from one act of vandalism to an escalating revolt against big tech sounds like quite a stretch.

I'm not sure what part of my comment made you think that my current employer is an obstacle in job hunting. Actually it's quite the opposite, as I mention I get a lot of attention from recruiters even though I'm not actively looking. The issue I'm observing is that this attention doesn't clearly translate to more job opportunities.

If my current employer was the problem, wouldn't recruiters and hiring managers not bother reaching out, or reject my applications (I haven't applied to any job directly recently so I can't say).

Thank your for sharing, it's great to hear different perspectives on the topic.

Non-transferable skills is actually one of my biggest concerns about working at the same company long term. These tools are often so far from the industry standard that it can hurt your employability long term as you mention.

It's no secret that devs often interview with companies they don't intend to join just as a warm up exercise. I confess I've been guilty of this.

The boomerang is quite interesting. Up until very recently this was a very well known career move. People would leave the company for one year just to come back at a higher level and higher salary. As a "loyal" employee I find this furious, but alas I guess it's my fault for working for such a lousy company and not pulling the same move. If it is any consolation, at least our company change the rules so that it's harder to pull this off, so you should see this much less often these days.

Regarding your last comment I'm not particular about leaving FAANG, as I aren't about working for FAANG. Considering my priorities it's very likely I'd only take a competing offer from another top tech company. For now I'm comfortable enough staying in my current company and passively looking for a better opportunity. At the same time I want to avoid becoming too complacent, and I'm aware the rug might get pulled from under my feet at any moment (hello layoffs?).

Fully remote would be a pretty nice perk, ever since our companies forced us back to the office. I believe this alone might be one of the easiest ways for smaller companies to poach talent these days.

Other than that, I enjoy working in hard and impactful problems. I'm privileged that I was able to do that in FAANG, but it's unclear how long this will last. I know that is very trite to say that your company has changed, but I truly feel it. Our company missed the LLM train and we are scrambling to play catch up now. Also we mostly pivoted from bold and inspiring initiatives to efficiency and cost cutting. Most of the initiatives in our pipeline for this year are pretty dull "let's save some dollars here and there". Nothing wrong with that, but given the choice, the chance of working on a moonshot vs helping a trillion $ company save pennies might convince one to change jobs.

There is also the very trite but very true aspect of "small cog in a huge machine". I might engineer a new system that brings in tens of millions of dollars to the company, and I'd be lucky if 3 layers of management above me knows about it. Those kind of initiatives might influence the entire company in a smaller organization.

All in I recognize I'm quite privileged and doing pretty well in my current job, and that's why I'm passively looking. TBH one of the aspects is that I got FOMO from all the talk about ML engineers being in high demand. However my experience so far has been very underwhelming.

I'm a ML Engineer at FAANG and I have been passively looking for the last half year. Common wisdom might make you think that I should be having companies throwing wads of cash at me, but my experience has been very different.

* It's true that my profile attracts many messages from recruiters. However ghosting is the name of the game. More than half of recruiters have ghosted me at different stages of the process. Overall I'd say that attention from recruiters is a great vanity metric for your ego, but it means shit unless you can convert that into job offers.

* Although there is a lot of demand, the bar for hiring is also very high. Specifically companies are looking for someone with experience in their exact tech stack. Given there are a few major ML frameworks and I'm only familiar with one of them, that rules out a lot of jobs. In one case a company screened me out because I only had 6 years of experience in a particular tech instead of their required minimum of 8.

* So far my only outcomes have been 1 rejection and 2 downlevels to senior (I'm targeting Staff+ positions). Although I haven't been dedicated to job hunting, I haven't been successful either at receiving an offer.

* In terms of salaries, most companies tend to top out around half of my current comp. I have only spoken with less than a handful of companies that could offer more. I guess that has always been the case with FAANG, but seems more pronounced now.

Overall I think that currently the job market for ML Engineers is still better than for Software Engineers, but it's nothing like the fever dream market of 2020-2022.

I've worked in 5 different countries in my life, and one lesson you learn quickly is that it's impossible to compare salaries between locations at face value.

For example, now I live in the US and although my salary is about twice what it was in England, my lifestyle remains about the same, worse in some aspects, and better in others. I'm almost certain OP lifestyle would have taken a hit living in Bay Area, even with a higher comp.

And this is simply comparing income, not accounting for many other variables (social benefits, taxes, culture...). In fact I'll probably take a big hit in comp to move back to Europe so that I can live a more comfortable lifestyle.

Your first point hits it exactly.

Let's say that it's year X and you have two choices: either you bet that the future will be bleak, and cut cost and hunker down, or you bet that the future will be bright and make big investments.

If X is 2022, the first bet will be right, while the second will lead to bloat and excess. But if X is 2014, the second bet will be right and the company will gain market share, while the first bet might make you go out of business.

So big tech companies weren't so irrational to make those big bets to begin with, and they simply overcorrected the other way around afterwards.

Now, as an employee in one of these I still think this is shortsighted and will damage them long term. But the stock market keeps rewarding these companies handsomely, so what do I know?

It's not uncommon in Europe to restore old and historical buildings and turn them into modern homes. I think it's a middle ground between preserving an old build as-is, and serving the current needs of a city.

Here [1] is an example of an old brewery turned vanguardist home in Barcelona. IMO one of the coolest homes I've seen.

[1] https://www.idealista.com/inmueble/101990029/

There is something oddly humbling and inspiring about this story. The scientist thanklessly slaved away for a year and half before even producing the first breakthrough. It must require an immense amount of perseverance to do so. It also reminds me to the craft mentality and patience of Jiro dreams of sushi.

Very refreshing when contrasted with western mentality, where people can't wait to get promoted fast enough.

This. Focusing your hiring on open source contributions biases the process and misses huge slices of the software engineering population.

I made the best work of my life (by a long long shot) to private companies closed source.

Be careful what you wish for, as this kind of rules can quickly have unintended consequences.

I used to live in an English town that set up maximum number of parking spaces for new homes. On paper looks good, as they were trying to incentivize public transport as you mention.

However the outcome was that single family homes were virtual unaffected, as they usually have a double garage plus driveway, while people on apartment blocks had severe parking limitations. In other words, if you were well off enough to buy a house you were gold, and the less well off people had to bear most of the burden.

> May 2022 - Left my SWE job at Wave and incorporated my own startup called Path (a Delaware C corp) I was permitted to remain in the USA, since I was not employed by Path yet. My understanding is that it is permissible to do exploratory work on a new startup as long as you are not employed by that startup, and your previous visa has not expired. It was during this time that my cofounder and I raised money for Path. Note: If I had left the USA during this time, I would not have been permitted to re-enter on my old L1-B visa.

This sounds iffy. I'm in the US on a L1-B visa as well, and my company went through rounds of layoffs, which concerned me. All information I've read, including the immigration team from my company (Big Tech), points out that if I lost my job, I would have had a short time to leave the country with no chance to find other jobs.

Unless I'm reading too much into it, it sounds like OP spent some time in the US in an illegal status, until that gap was bridged with the new visa.

I'm very happy using Typescript to templatize JSON. You can define a template as a class, compose them if needed, and when you are done, just write an object to a file.

Is this a cultural difference? Do we have any data on this?

Where I'm from (southern Europe) my experience is this is far from true. Most people work as a means to an end, and often look for ways to skimp on it.

Sure, people might say "I like my job", with the implicit concession that they indeed need a job to live. If they could keep the same lifestyle without a job, I doubt most of them would keep doing what they do.

A tweet with screenshots of a LinkedIn post. Not HN finest moment.

Actually I moved to the US last year so this experience is currently in the Seattle area :/