In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. A few years ago, my current company did a big no-no which turned into a scandal that made national headlines. When I was considering joining, I said it was important for me to feel ethically aligned with my work, and asked about how things had changed since The Incident. They told me they stopped doing bad things, and I accepted the offer. Well, during my time at the company, it has slowly been dawning on me that my team is THE TEAM in question. I finally gathered the courage to ask a coworker, and he confirmed that this was true, and that there’s more designs coming down the pipeline that he and other devs are uncomfortable building. He brought it up with our manager and he was basically told “business is business”. As devs, we don’t make the decisions. And our golden handcuffs are really shiny. Should I leave, stay and try to influence change from the inside, or stay and maybe be a whistleblower one day if need be?

2. I think I made a horrible mistake. I gave up an undesirable job for a fairly large tech company, and joined a Drupal agency. These two weeks have been the longest year of my life. I haven’t written one line of code, and the Drupal admin is incomprehensible. Since it’s only been a (relatively) short time here, how do I get back in the job market without looking like a chump? Do I remove it from my resume? Do I own it like a hideous tattoo? What do I tell hiring managers; whether its a gap in my resume, or that I want to leave after only 2 weeks? Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. I am REALLY into music. I mostly get paid to listen to Spotify. With this in mind I decided to apply for a new job at a “globally leading audio technology company”.

   The job would be paying a lot more. About 30% more minimum based on the advertised salary range.

   However, I hate the stack being used! I have been given a homework assignment to complete, but it has not been an enjoyable experience.

   I enjoy my current job, however the company doesn’t seem as stable, and their are complications with tax/benefits which i won’t get into.

   So to summarize, should I take the classic SoftSkills engineering advice and quit my job for a sweet pay check and an interesting industry, to suffer the stack?

   Maybe I will learn to love it?

   Any advice?

2. I’m at my first developer job at an ad agency, and on a regular basis I and my co-workers are working well in excess of the 40-50 hours a week (closer to 60+). On many occasions we work the weekends as well. I’ve worked on websites, a couple of apps within a proprietary system, banner ads, and html emails. I’ve learned as much as I’m going to at this job. There are no code reviews, no training, and no on-boarding. I no longer want to work at the agency, but I can’t afford to just quit my job. Given the perceivable lack of transferable skills(recruiters have said this to me, ie no product experience), what are some of my options? Mind you, I also don’t have a fancy CS or CS-related degree that I can leverage.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation http://boston.conman.org/2003/12/02.3

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. Can you talk about making mistakes at work? How do you handle it, how do you frame it when you talk about it, do you try to minimize or be honest about it, how soon is it to pretend nothing went wrong and you’re doing great, etc. Thanks!

2. Hello there, Huge fan of the show here, I often laugh hysterically listening to it on long commutes and people think I am on drugs.

   I just finished grad school in a foreign country and i am in the middle of negotiating a job offer with a company whose field of expertise is my passion. All seem to be going well and i have a feeling that the company is hugely interested in me. HOWEVER when we arrived at the salary subject i found that WAN… WAN… they want to pay me a fresh graduate salary even though i have 3 years of part-time and 1 year of full-time development experience abroad; i know their decision is not based on my skills as i did not even have to do a technical test (we mainly talked about the tools i used in the past and the work i did related to that field and it was convincing enough).

   As i see the situation, I have 2 options of either take their offer and use it as a learning experience before switching to a well paying company or say No and go on Vettery?

   Let me know what you would do in my case. Merci

Show Notes

Patrick McKenzie’s article on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/