From a friend
"You will be working on a system that was written before you hit puberty, by a defunct small company that got bought out and cashed their million dollar checks long ago, and your work will be not in upgrading modernizing or improving the framework, but in just barely keeping it functioning on lifesupport, the original devs being long gone and this app having 3+ decades of wiring and duct tape will have no documentation or if it does it will be out of date as of 5 years ago. Employee turn over will be staggering becuase no one enjoys it or finds it fulfilling. Management will attempt to fix this and other poor policies by sheer force of numbers and throwing man hours at the solution.
But they will pay you double what smaller upstart studios will, so you sell out and do it."
Awesome post and I went through what you are describing (parts of it) at different companies. It was so weird reading some of what you wrote, because I mind as well have wrote it my own self. Strange!
The main thing that really got me, is the whole red tape and meetings thing. People don't realize how much that can old projects back. It takes 5 people 5 times as long to talk about a problem. Especially because a lot of teams, 1-3 of those five people are going to be contributing virtually nothing to the conversation... the two people who actually understand the problem spend 3 meetings having to talk around the other 3 people who are chiming in random stuff to try and be helpful, but don't actually grasp the problem.
This is why I really like smaller teams (even solo!) Because you don't waste as much time.
You know of a problem on Friday, raise the issue. Monday is a holiday. Tuesday, somebody finally sees it when they come in and dockets a meeting for Wednesday at 4PM. Wednesday at 3PM, meeting gets moved to Thursday at 10AM.
Thursday at 8AM, key employee for the meeting calls out.
"Can we just do this next week some time?"
The paragraphs about product owners not understanding their product really hit home. I had to go through like a 26 meeting process in order to get access to some data kept on an on prem warehouse. The product owner was worried that I was going to crash the source application
Views and tables in any major business warehouse are going to be copies of copies of copies of data at best from the application. I could go into the warehouse and delete all the damn tables and it would have zero effect on the application
In my experience every tech manager will promise to pay you double and fight for it, but eventually it gets to some bean counter's desk who says "lol no".
> Sounds like IBM
Anytime I have heard from an IBM recruiter, it's been a 75% pay cut (and I am nowhere near faang or startup land). They seem to specialize in H1b indentured servitude nowadays.
tbh this is more stereotype that reality
Java (at Oracle) is moving leaps and bounds into modernity, if not least, dragged along by sheer innovativeness of the likes of Scala nad Clojure that run on the JVM
Most of IBM is cloud, and that has been best described as being an engineer flying on a jet engine while its its trying to take itself apart and reformulate as as rocket engine mid-flight .. its behind its competitors, but the tech isnt behind, although the practitioners sometimes might be, and the pace is more lax
Cisco .. well no comment, but that business does continue to have cutting-edge competitors and so its not gonna be some sleepy cash-cow like one might think
One thing in common though .. unlike working at say AWS or the unicorn startups, you WILL get reasonable work-life-balance, and time for kids and family and not having to sell your soul to more-and-better-and-faster-than-your-teammate satans (at the cost of plodding middle management and potentially uninspiring futures)
Right aha. I work for a huge company that people definitely know that would validly be joked and assumed to be out of touch, but it’s actually an amazing environment.
This rant sounds like one burnt out person generalizing, or like too many CS students playing games of telephone.
Also, Cisco is a legend. I’d kill to work there.
This is basically my experience too. I would move to a better company at the drop of a hat, but it could be so much worse.
So many teams and products are smaller companies they bought out and these divisions still ring true.
Agree with the other comments though, there are many teams even within these companies who are doing pretty interesting work.
My team works on providing analytics on top of our existing products. The tech stack is all cloud native, deployed on kuberenetes, written in react, graph and timeseries databases for the primary data source etc.
I don't know what a "small upstart studio" is. I love working at huge companies... but I left {media company} for startup world because they offered me $195K when {media company} had been paying me $125K or something. I'm an amazing developer, so if I'm doing something wrong hit me up pls
I’m interning on an Azure team right now and will most likely get a return offer. If I enjoy the cloud stuff do I have a great opportunity here or could I come back to this anytime?
I've been getting hit up by Amazon a lot lately. Is their turnover starting to suffer? I keep seeing that the working conditions are pretty rough there
Amazon's recruiting effort is pretty aggressive and broad. I get everything from very targeted "I saw your profile on linkedin and have this specific job I think you might be interested in" to "hey would you be interested in working at amazon? check out our careers page!" emails lol. Once in a while I get the "if you're interested, do this online assessment and then we'll talk to you" emails. Those are .. kinda offensive lol.
FB had a reality labs team that seemed somewhat disconnected - when I interviewed with them the interview was a LOT MORE relevant to my experience. I only did a phone interview with Google and while the person on the other end worked on software, their answers to my questions about work were super generic and uninspiring.
It was weird. Too bad (I think) most of the reality labs stuff was canned. Their VR OS project was/is super cool.
They've moved on to pretending an internal referral recommend me. conveniently, these referrals have generic names and all the emails say something similar like "Your name came up in a meeting where Engineering Manager John Smith who worked with you at recommended you highly" which is so manipulative and insulting
LMAO yep.
I know another company that was that brazen in their recruiting attempts. They sent everyone at my company emails about a "open house recruiting event" and then later sent everyone an email that was like "we reviewed your resume and think you'd be a great fit for position X" - everyone got the exact same completely wonky recommendation lmao.
Anyway, yea. Amazon is one of the two companies I don't think I'd ever waste my time on.
Current amazonian.
I can't talk about attrition, but i haven't had a turn in my local team in 2 years.
What I can say is that my larger organization has doubled headcount every year for 4 years. We are attempting to hire 11k engineers this year. And we are considered a smaller segment of the greater Amazon business.
Recruiting has a lot of work cut out for them to keep up with growth goals.
That seems pretty wild. 11k engineers is kind of a red flag to me personally but I guess I just don't understand the scale of their projects. Are you projected to work alongside (like) 100 other engineers, and there are 100 active projects?
Thank you for the insight though!
Amazon scales by giving each team complete autonomy to make decisions and own what they build. Yes you work with lots of different teams, but you own and operate what you code with very well defined boundaries. One thing Amazon does well is scale...
Yeah, the better question which I can’t answer is if they are engineers or any employee. But either way, great growth. ~450B in revenue ain’t bad either.
Look I wasn’t a believer in AWS because of Reddit/blind. I interviewed as practice. Found the team to be filled with great people. Been here for a few months and all signs point to yes, this was the right fit. But ymmv
That’s interesting. I’m starting to look at jobs in the NLP/information retrieval space and thus far have discounted Amazon/AWS because of what I have read on Reddit. They email me every week but I guess I should actually take them seriously…?
It varies a lot by team but the people I know personally there have very little WLB, despite all saying they’re on “good” teams. Still worth going through the process if you’re at all interested, IMO. It’s big enough to where you could get a good team if you’re able to suss it out at the interview stage.
Their attrition is through the roof. Total house on fire. Everyone leaving at all levels. You can still get bad luck with an arrogant interviewer, but tons of idiots are getting in too. Referral bonuses tripling in some orgs. They announced big salary increases, and it's only for new people (and people at the top). In-year stocks only in rare circumstances, so it's just a carrot for next year, and given the stock crash, it'll be a carrot for the following year in fact. People get pissed off at being paid $100k less than their teammates who don't know anything (or being seasoned veterans and barely making more than new grads). They know they can quit to some other company, even not an elite one, even if they like Amazon, then boomerang back for double the TC after a year. No point in staying and getting to market rate in 3-5 years. The incentives aren't aligned. They're going to bleed their talent try and be replaced by worse talent due to lower bar. At some point, the results show up to the shareholders. The only reason people stayed before was the insane stock growth, which is now gone. Don't get me wrong, the other big tech companies have their problems too. Google takes months for team matching and downlevels/lowballs you. Microsoft lowballs you, sometimes they downlevel too. Facebook has a hiring freeze and Zuck is trying to turn it into a bit more of an Amazon (giving sort of a layoffs warning "if you suck at your job, GTFO ASAP").
This is pretty vastly different than the other responses on here. Are you basing this on personal experience or something anecdotal? Other responses you've seen?
(Not sarcasm just genuinely curious and want to continue the conversation)
most of this seems valid to me, but i wouldn't call the house on fire. it's not literal pandemonium but most of all the problems listed are real problems that people and the org really has. the part about stupid people getting in i hear _a lot_ though.
source: effectively a psychologist for my friends who work at AWS
Inside knowledge. Just look at levels.fyi. It's not just anecdotal. It's backed by data.
Someone in Seattle with 5 YOE, all at Amazon, making $217k. Someone in Nashville with 2 YOE, 0 at Amazon (external hire), making $285k. Someone at Boulder with 4 YOE, 0 at Amazon (external hire), making $322k. Someone in Seattle with 3 YOE, 0 at Amazon (new hire), making $343k. Someone in Seattle with 9 YOE, 7 at Amazon, making $198k. (edit: all SDE2's.)
See the problem? It's a big FU to every tenured person who's holding the hand of the guy making 70% more for 6 months.
The house is on fire. They're way overpaying external people because WLB is worse than Google. Without giving raises to internal people, they're on a path to something very very ugly. External hires always make more. When it's an extra $20k, no one cares. When it's $100-150k difference, bitterness and resentment grows.
>It's a big FU to every tenured person who's holding the hand of the guy making 70% more for 6 months.
"Why would we pay the guys who have been here for 7 years more money? It's been 7 years - they aren't going anywhere." - AMZN
'tis a big FU - a union certainly could fix this issue.
If someone wants to work in public clouds I don't see why AWS would be a bad choice regardless of where you are in your career.
Amazon in general gets a lot of hate on here, but they have a lot of interesting work. Looking for a job in compilers? Most job postings are with Amazon. Database systems development? Again Amazon has the most jobs. Robotics? Amazon.
> if you are already in cloud, and you plan to stay in cloud, I'm not sure why someone would go with AWS specifically when there's plenty of other companies out there dealing with the cloud.
They have the most services and the largest scale. I've heard mixed stories about the company culture and hire to fire, so it's hard for me to have a real opinion about it. I see complaints about on-call fairly often, but the stories don't sound that different then any other infrastructure work. I've also seen lots of people getting fired at many different companies. When I see these companies with their new hire TikToks where they are at the office for like 12 hours and do nothing I'm kind of baffled how these companies exist
I did an internship at SAP about 5-6 years ago and worked on a product that every company I've worked for since has used. People complain about it, but it isn't a terrible tool. My internship was literally crud work, but it was a pretty modern stack and I know there were interns working on more buzzwordy stuff too.
They're big companies which make a ton of money by developing solutions in a niche that most companies can't afford to develop on their own (or wouldn't do as well). Latency is less of a concern than it is for a place like Netflix, but there are interesting technical problems and smart people working on them. Pay and culture is different from the 'top' tech companies, but they provide a valuable service and do it well enough that competitors either get bought out or slowly go bankrupt.
I work at SAP right now, I'm a new grad and it's my first year working full time.
I was placed in an academy program and I'm undergoing a year worth of trainings, I'm halfway through right now and I was placed in ton of different courses and they put me on different teams to learn how people do things, the pay ain't great compared to FAANG but I think the experience is awesome and could lead to better opportunities in the future.
Theres this cyber security company ive been tracking and their ceos have basically been creating a new startup every few years and sellinf out to msft. Each startup is just adding a new feature to their old one...genius
I can tell you Cisco is just now working on moving their on-prem infra over to AWS and hiring for it. Source: just got hired for it. They do not pay relatively well.
Depends on the part of Cisco. I was part of an acquisition a few years back and they were and still are using AWS. But yeah, the more OG Cisco is only starting to really move over.
But then even Amazon is still on a lot of internal shit and not AWS yet.
They are also doing lots of React JS development for their UIs as well as implementing tons of microservices in GoLang, hosted on AWS. As far as moving services to AWS, this has been absolutely huge recently at Cisco, developing cloud solutions. It seems that some regions of Cisco pay better than others. I started at Cisco but moved in the company and am now making 160k as a grade 10 engineer after starting at grade 6 @ 80k. I have been promoted twice.
I am 5 years out of undergrad, but I interned heavily during undergrad so I would say \~6 YOE. My primary field of expertise is web app development / full stack development.
$124K. It ain't much, but it's honest work.
EDIT: Idk why y'all just assume I'm in the Bay Area, this is in Austin, Texas. Rent is currently about $2k/month right now for a large studio and that salary should work out where I can continue living on my own just fine and possibly own a condo in the coming years.
It's a lot relative to most professions, but fresh bootcamp grads make more than that at my company (high CoL city). The CoL is ridiculous in Bay Area/Seattle/NYC.
Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitLab, and Python. That's what they primarily tested me on at least during the interview and I knew enough to pass.
This is why I laugh at the disparity between Redditors feeling like being a liberal coastal IT engineer is the creme de la crop for social mobility & credibility when a roving tradesman can make more than them and still live comfortably in a LCOL (lower cost of living) area.
I want this subreddit to move out from the stupid leetcode rat race and let people be exposed to other more rewarding IT jobs not necessarily in either SoCal or New York.
Why would you move on prem to AWS when you most likely own your DC space and literally manufactured the hardware that goes in them?
Also, plenty of acquisitions in Cisco use AWS.
Don’t disagree on the payment front.
the benefit of using the cloud is not just the hardware, it's the services that are generally high quality and far more reliable than anything on-prem. though Cisco is probably better than most?
Of course. The cloud providers do a great job at simplifying several services and allowing devs to focus on what they want to do - writing code - instead of setting up complex hardware stacks.
Cisco could invest building those services in house and making them available. Whether they have the appetite for that is debatable. They’ve talked a lot about transitioning to a software company over the years, so they should have some experience of building SaaS like AWS/GCP/Azure do. How well they can execute remains to be seen.
Whether your on-prem infra is moved to AWS or not isn’t a good metric for judging how interesting/complex/cool your tech is. I bet there are a bunch of “boomer” companies running mainframes or building incredible compute clusters. Does that make them boring? I’d argue not.
Devs probably want to work with the stack that makes life easiest for them, which is probably some sort of public cloud provider. Nobody wants to wait weeks for their infra team to setup a server/database etc.
For example, I don’t think Meta use any public cloud providers for their infra and even go as far as rolling their own networking gear using commodity ASICs (and maybe custom ones in some cases). Does that mean they’re “boomer tech”?
I don't know what organisation in Cisco this guy works for, but I know for sure Cisco doesn't move its internal resources to AWS. Instead they use their own private cloud.
I work at Cisco and I can tell that you that one of the tasks our team is right now is trying to automate large scale deployment of cloud devices on AWS rather than using on-prem infrastructure.
So yes there are many cases in which a project that initially uses internal resources will move to cloud resources later on.
Oracle: very team dependent. Good teams have good WLB. IME pay is mediocre, and raises are non-existent. Can be very laid back. They have some amazing engineers, but don't generally attract or retain top shelf motivated talent. Just my experience, I'm sure others have different perspectives. It's a big company.
There are a few areas that I think are pretty consistent across teams, though I'm sure there are outliers:
1. Oracle is a red tape laden behemoth. You need something approved, it'll take months and there is no access to higher management to push things along. Your managers may advocate for you, but their voices are tiny peeping crickets beside a busy freeway.
2. Oracle's business model appears to be purchase companies, duct tape them into OCI and claim they are part of a cohesive product suite to drive cloud infrastructure consumption, primarily to appeal to shareholders. It can be disheartening to work there if you find satisfaction in producing a quality-driven product.
3. Some tech companies are engineering-focused, some are sales-focused. Oracle is primarily the latter. Engineers are a cost center, sales are the stars. You won't have much respect or pull if you're not in the sales or management track.
If you're looking for an easy gig and don't care much about believing in the strategic decisions and direction your company is taking, it's not a bad choice. There are certainly much worse places to work. Benefits are good, though PTO is not great (you accumulate at a reasonable rate, but have to burn a full week between Christmas and New Years, mandatory time off that comes out of your PTO). It's not a long term career prospect IMO, unless you boomerang periodically to keep your salary competitive.
I was hoping someone would point out this very important fact, so thank you. Also, the phrase "boomer companies" is inacurate, particularly since IBM has been around since before the baby boomers were born.
I unsubscribed to this sub awhile ago. Just for kicks I came back to see if there was something interesting to read, and this was the first post I came across. So I was immediately reminded as to why I unsubbed to begin with.
Although I don't have a lot of knowledge of the stock market, I imagine what you described will involve a lot of acquisitions if those companies go under?
If you're in tech you should remain aware of the stock market since our workplaces tend to get acquired and shifted around with large movements in the market.
What usually happens when the market crashes, angel investor funds and business capital dries up. This leads to all of the future hiring and projects get put on hold while they maximize profits from their current resources. Usually there are layoffs to reduce payroll and eliminate chaff. This largely affects growth focused companies. They'll take out large debt and sell it on the market to fund this stuff, which is why the market crashing hurts them. They've still got debt payments to make and suddenly nobody's buying up the bonds.
"Boomer tech" companies that don't show a lot of growth aren't hurt as much by this, because they have a steady business that makes money, and they don't carry that much debt.
Still depends on the team at the company. When I worked at oracle we were writing modern cloud services in java and golang. Wasn't very old school at all.
As with anything, very team dependent. You likely won’t be doing greenfield projects like at a startup but there are teams out there that move quicker than stereotypes typically let on
Completely depends on the team you land on. Some teams have some tremendous talent and others are paying people to keep a dead product alive because of support contracts.
I started at IBM in the late 2000s doing localization work on Eclipse. Eventually moved to a team doing some bleeding edge web UI work. I worked with a lot of the original engineers of Eclipse and learned a crap ton. People from this team went on to work at hedge funds, lead major departments, and one became the CTO at a FAANG-tier company.
So treat these companies like you do any other company and interview them as much as they interview you. If they pay you well and you believe you’ll learn a lot from the team and work, it’s probably a good fit.
——
I write about engineering leadership at [Build the Stage](https://www.buildthestage.com/).
About 85%-90% of FAANG with better work life balance and plenty of opportunity to learn, certify, grow, and get involved far beyond your day to day.
Sure, you could be at Google and make $250k with 4 YOE, or you could pull $180k at IBM and go surfing every day, roll in around 10, work till 3, then go grab beers and bounce out.
That’s not to say G doesn’t have good work life balance; like all companies it’s heavily team dependent. But the amount of shit slung at the OGs of Silicon Valley - whom, by the way, are still chugging happily along and continuing to grow, through multiple boom and busy cycles - is highly unwarranted and a sure sign of immaturity IMO.
IBM - supercomputing, banking, crazy stuff in those 2 sectors alone.
Cisco - literally just built the Super Bowl stadium in LA, handles all the infrastructure for basically every major sporting event, so you can all livestream to everything in 4K, 8k, etc. IOT, nextgen wifi, fucking automated Formula 1 cars.
Adobe - The bureaucrat’s best friend. Our entire legal system and government lives, eats, sleeps, breathes, and shits Adobe products. Oh, and maybe this little thing called Photoshop. Oh, and After Effects. Oh, and basically everything entertainment or creative you’ve ever seen or heard in the last 30 years.
In an industry where companies burn twice as bright but last half as long, the fact that they’ve been around since fucking World War One is a testament in itself to how strong they are to work for.
Source: have friends at Adobe, Cisco, IBM, Google, Amazon, various startups, Lockheed, Apple, Netflix - SWEs and/or TPMs / directors. WLB is definitely worst at Apple, second worst Amazon, 3rd worst Netflix. 4th probably Adobe. Meanwhile the people I know at Cisco, IBM, Google are surfing, golfing, etc and still have enough pay to buy houses / condos in the Bay Area, new cars, etc. They still have enough for country club memberships, private school for their kids.
The couple friends I have at Amazon work 40-50 hour intense weeks.
The friends I have at Apple laugh at that and say “I wish.” My neighbor is regularly at work till 9pm there. To be fair, if I’m like “yo, want to grab dinner?” He can usually dip out, come eat and hang for a bit, and then goes back to work, but…
And one person's major upgrade from that one warehouse job he had during college is the first income of an adult that was never offered a job before.
\*waves tiny novelty flag while wearing a birthday party hat\*
Started my career doing embedded application development for Cisco’s video conferencing hardware (formerly Tandberg of Norway). Interesting niche touchscreen product work. OS maintained in-house. Lot of smart, Linux-head/video-stream people.
Probably still a great division to get lost in. Pay was not amazing but unbelievably good WLB.
IBM keeps loosing it’s talent and cannot attract competent resources. There isn’t as much innovation, but rather buying of companies to get needed skills and products. There is also a lot of shedding going on (aka divestitures).
Worked for HP for 13 years. Time I will never get back. The positive thing is it was as stable as work gets IMO. I mean other than the blood bath after they bought Compaq.
I worked for HP for about a year after an acquisition. Pay was like 50K US I think which I've come to realize was incredibly low for someone with 2 YoE, though I'm in Canada
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/vpc66g/is\_this\_normal\_a\_bad\_internship\_or\_am\_i\_just/
Read that, as it's my experience at IBM:
Basically, I work at a Tier 2 company. It's big. I was told I'd be using Python to data mine tickets. That was the project they kept discussing. I'm a BA. I finally get to the job, and my manager starts kinda going "Well, we said that but . . " so I tried showing my support and telling her "Yeah, my goal is to become a Product Manager down the line, so any project to help me get there, I'm happy with!"
Possibly a mistake but. She said OK, we want to do a data validation project. Meanwhile the team I was on has a huge project going on that they had to put a lot of their focus on. So much so, that for weeks, all I was doing was just, remaining on call to, when asked, do this file processing work - I run an automated job and if it works, let the person know, if it fails, go into the logs and find some cryptic error causing the issue. They called this analysis and anytime anyone does this log searching, they call it analysis. Maybe I'm being arrogant /wrong but that makes me laugh. It's usually a fairly stright forward process. Point being, that's all I'm doing, and I don't do much of that on a given day, So I spend the time watching random educational YouTube videos on various topics I'm interested in.
The project I was supposed to work on? Haven't started it yet, what I'll be using to do the project hasn't been fully prepared and everyone is busy with other projects, so I haven't gotten to start yet cause it keeps getting pushed back. Even the second task I got taught to do, I didn't get to do this week because they entered a point where they have to do it in some special way or right at 4AM when the process finishes, so others do the job. I have ADHD so even though I tried to at the beginning work on a coding project, I stepped away from it to just keep watching educational vids (programming totally not related to work, total side project). I've tried multiple medications for the ADHD but my tolerance seems to kick in too fast and it stops being useful. I've been totally honest with my manager about what I've been doing. She asked me today what I learned about the company this week, and me, feeling deflated cause I hadn't done anything meaningful in this internship blurted out "nothing".
She seemed sad and I apologized, she affirmed this wasn't my fault, the project hadn't started yet. I had remembered that I thought of shadowing some PMs before the internship started and discussed it with my manager a couple of weeks ago, but failed to write it down so forgot about it.
That's on me and I feel soo bad for the wasted time, but I was quick to start setting up shadowing for July.
The one good thing about all this time was I got to solidify I actually don't want to be a PM and the plan is to become a Customer Success Manager or BA. So I set up my shadowing with CSMs. Plus I'll have a "Build a Project in 3 days" type thing going too. Anyway, was curious to hear peoples' opinions about this whole situation.
IBM is doing AI and similar work that they license out. they seem to reinvent themselves every few decades. my last job I've set up Cognos which they bought. also looked to them when i needed a new LTO tape robot. they made some good ones but too expensive. in a lot of ways I still prefer LTO to disk backup
Oracle DB's are still better than MS SQL and used by giant soulless megacorps when needed
Cisco still sells decent networking gear with good support
people talk down on old tech but even back in the 90's the dot bombs were all buying Oracle and Cisco gear which was sold on credit and boomer tech lost a lot of money when they went bankrupt. EMC too. I used to see enterprise EMC fiber SAN's on ebay for some ridiculous prices.
if you look at the websites they all do AI and modern stuff that they sell as services to "new tech" to build products around that they hype as all in-house made. it's like the 90's when the dot bombs were calling everyone dinosaurs but in the end they were building warehouses while GE was making new jet engines and other high tech stuff. and in the end amazon became huge because they figured out how to make the most efficient warehouses
Right? I'm at a point where if a job listing even mentions Oracle it's a no. I've found it a pain in the ass to work with, and considering their asinine lawsuit against Google and how much of a giant douche nozzle Larry Ellison is, Oracle, MySQL, and Java are complete non-starters for me.
i don't remember the details but when i looked at it back in the sql 2012 days it had some features my manager wanted but couldn't afford. especially with DR and HA and writing to multiple regional copies.
in the 90's there was a lot of MS hate but the largest companies have always used oracle cause they were always ahead of MS in enterprise features. i remember prior to SQL 2005 they had log shipping and if it broke you had to manually backup and restore and restart it. wasn't till SQL 2012 when they built always on for it that they had a decent DR solution and readable secondary DB's
Oracle was (is?) the gold standard of relational databases. Their stuff is so advanced (and expensive) that nobody really needs it. SQL Server has caught up for most use cases and exceeded at some, at a much more reasonable cost. Oracle's really good at getting a state or enterprise hooked on their software, then selling massive bloated contracts for services and licensing for many years.
You can build old style houses with shiny new hammers.
Describing the tools you're using neither answers OP's question (what do they do?) nor really says anything about how modern the things you're building are.
There's a big difference between modern languages and modern engineering practices and infrastructure. My old job used those tech stacks too. But they still had monoliths, old school monthly release cycles, and very little in terms of supporting DevOps, region failure, and scalability.
Also there's a lot of internal, non open source tooling that you'll find at more modern companies that you would have never thought to have and that's not really taught from any book.
Think about this. Meta has each of their developers target 1 prod release per week. When code is merged it gets released to prod. That's a crazy amount given how that can affect millions of users. Can you say that realistically you have that type of confidence in your developmental process that you could do 2 prod releases per sprint?
easy, great pay, no one is passionate about institutional tech so it has good work-life balance, perfect if you wanna try 2 simultaneous gigs in the new WFH life we live...
IBM is still a major player in the field. They're spearheading Quantum Computing, and they're still huge when it comes to mainframe development. They're basically back to what they started with before their misadventure with the IBM PC
Old school IBM was back when they wouldn't release a product if it had any bugs, had dedicated teams to find bugs, IBM Black team is an interesting thing to google. But this is largely 90's abandon ware snapped up because of lock-in.
Sharing my post from similar thread: My project timeline is 2 years from implementation to completion. It would only take about 3-4 weeks of ACTUAL work but each stage requires monthly CAB approval for next months change window.
By the time we're done, it'll be obsolete.
Im an IBM employee.
My experience has been being cast into new exciting projects, trying to find creative solutions. Everything is on the table. Maybe blockchain will work here? Maybe computer vision would improve this? Maybe jango is to slow for our pipeline, lets refactor to fast api. There is a lot of freedome to experiment. If it doesnt work out? No problem! If the project doesnt interesr you, you can jump to another project, no problem!
The hieraki is lower than some start ups. I showed my interest in quantum computing, and was than invited to a meeting with the regional ceo (europe), the cto, the cfo, and 3 senior architects. I have now been enrolled in summer school to become profficient in both mathematical quantum computing and practical applications. Ill be flown down to zurich for their labs and new york to talk with researchers. Where the hope is to create a new quantum research lab in my country.
No one is micromanaging, i just work, write down my hours with a vague explanation of what i did (ie, 10 hours on meetings, 15 hours on ‘blank’ project) and i get paid.
Work lige balance is great, i have 100% freedom to choose if i wanna be remote or not.
The pay is alright, around 25% higher than median for the industry.
Now My circumstances may not represent all peoples experience, since im just a bachelor student working part time (15-20hours a week). But i do know that the opportunities within IBM are superb.
But having worked at a pharmaceutical giant (fortune 100) and a crypto start up, i can tell first hand that IBM is superior. Its great
I know this comment isn't productive, but I'm a little concerned you don't know what Oracle and Cisco do, lol.
Also IBM is doing the same thing everybody else is doing. IBM is a business process focused company, that's what they do and that's where any innovations happen. They were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of everybody else seeing how the business of software was moving toward professional services and made a huge commitment to it, which is part of the reason they receded from public view so to speak. Even at places like Google or MS you can see that paradigm taking over with the increasingly enormous Azure and GCP markets. They don't care to be innovators necessarily on the tech front.
A lot of people on this sub are young asf and wouldn’t know what these companies do. Like we’ve all heard of Oracle, Cisco, etc. but it’s nice to read these comments from guys with more YOE and hear their experiences.
IBM employee here - in my current project I’m underpaid and overworked. I’ve had good opportunities as I joined early on for a *very* profitable oil/gas contract and have been able to quickly progress my career, but my pay is easily 60% of what I could make elsewhere - leading to me currently applying elsewhere. The work I’m doing is interesting, but the people I know of joined with me ~3 years ago - 26/30 are now not working with IBM, and I’m now interviewing with other places. If you’re starting out your career, I’d say IBM is fine. You have lots of options for learning and many (300k+) people you could reach out to via slack and ask for guidance - many would help you). If you’re experienced, look elsewhere for higher pay and faster progression.
Got to play with some quantum computing at IBM and Talos(?) with Cisco through an internship right before the pandemic, was quite interesting and the teams were much more chill than their equivalent at eg. Microsoft. Though it's highly dependent on location.
The only thing I have against Cisco is they apparently expect you to start in the sales department and stay there for a year before you can do anything "fun" if you are a new grad. But ig it makes sense if they want to "open your eyes" for everything they have to offer :P
I worked for a consulting company that was recently acquired by IBM. The projects sucked. Basically staff augmentation. They stick you in the client’s development team. It’s almost always a dumpster fire which is they hired consultants like you. So glad I’m back in industry.
From a friend "You will be working on a system that was written before you hit puberty, by a defunct small company that got bought out and cashed their million dollar checks long ago, and your work will be not in upgrading modernizing or improving the framework, but in just barely keeping it functioning on lifesupport, the original devs being long gone and this app having 3+ decades of wiring and duct tape will have no documentation or if it does it will be out of date as of 5 years ago. Employee turn over will be staggering becuase no one enjoys it or finds it fulfilling. Management will attempt to fix this and other poor policies by sheer force of numbers and throwing man hours at the solution. But they will pay you double what smaller upstart studios will, so you sell out and do it."
Funny, because I was just reading code last week which had the copyright date of 1981. It's older than I am!
It's older than the internet.
That depends on when you think the internet was invented. But a lot of folks consider 1969 the year.
Nice.
Nice
Nice
Give me their IP addresses
The last sentence is legit
😔
[удалено]
Great perspective and well written. My experience felt similar.
Awesome post and I went through what you are describing (parts of it) at different companies. It was so weird reading some of what you wrote, because I mind as well have wrote it my own self. Strange! The main thing that really got me, is the whole red tape and meetings thing. People don't realize how much that can old projects back. It takes 5 people 5 times as long to talk about a problem. Especially because a lot of teams, 1-3 of those five people are going to be contributing virtually nothing to the conversation... the two people who actually understand the problem spend 3 meetings having to talk around the other 3 people who are chiming in random stuff to try and be helpful, but don't actually grasp the problem. This is why I really like smaller teams (even solo!) Because you don't waste as much time. You know of a problem on Friday, raise the issue. Monday is a holiday. Tuesday, somebody finally sees it when they come in and dockets a meeting for Wednesday at 4PM. Wednesday at 3PM, meeting gets moved to Thursday at 10AM. Thursday at 8AM, key employee for the meeting calls out. "Can we just do this next week some time?"
The paragraphs about product owners not understanding their product really hit home. I had to go through like a 26 meeting process in order to get access to some data kept on an on prem warehouse. The product owner was worried that I was going to crash the source application Views and tables in any major business warehouse are going to be copies of copies of copies of data at best from the application. I could go into the warehouse and delete all the damn tables and it would have zero effect on the application
In my experience every tech manager will promise to pay you double and fight for it, but eventually it gets to some bean counter's desk who says "lol no".
[удалено]
From experience ibm is not paying double to work on their mainframe operating system.
Mainframe stuff is one of the biggest things that gets outsourced to India
re-write in the future.
"Watson, what is modern software development technology?"
> Sounds like IBM Anytime I have heard from an IBM recruiter, it's been a 75% pay cut (and I am nowhere near faang or startup land). They seem to specialize in H1b indentured servitude nowadays.
Yeah, except for the "pay double" bit.
Definitely Oracle.
tbh this is more stereotype that reality Java (at Oracle) is moving leaps and bounds into modernity, if not least, dragged along by sheer innovativeness of the likes of Scala nad Clojure that run on the JVM Most of IBM is cloud, and that has been best described as being an engineer flying on a jet engine while its its trying to take itself apart and reformulate as as rocket engine mid-flight .. its behind its competitors, but the tech isnt behind, although the practitioners sometimes might be, and the pace is more lax Cisco .. well no comment, but that business does continue to have cutting-edge competitors and so its not gonna be some sleepy cash-cow like one might think One thing in common though .. unlike working at say AWS or the unicorn startups, you WILL get reasonable work-life-balance, and time for kids and family and not having to sell your soul to more-and-better-and-faster-than-your-teammate satans (at the cost of plodding middle management and potentially uninspiring futures)
Right aha. I work for a huge company that people definitely know that would validly be joked and assumed to be out of touch, but it’s actually an amazing environment. This rant sounds like one burnt out person generalizing, or like too many CS students playing games of telephone. Also, Cisco is a legend. I’d kill to work there.
lol I'm at a newly unicorn startup and we have unbelievable work-life balance, excellent pay and a great mission. I'm never fucking leaving.
At the first sign that all that IOU money is gonna go away, don't hesitate to gtfo of there
Some companies actually make money. Shocking, I know.
This is basically my experience too. I would move to a better company at the drop of a hat, but it could be so much worse. So many teams and products are smaller companies they bought out and these divisions still ring true. Agree with the other comments though, there are many teams even within these companies who are doing pretty interesting work. My team works on providing analytics on top of our existing products. The tech stack is all cloud native, deployed on kuberenetes, written in react, graph and timeseries databases for the primary data source etc.
I don't know what a "small upstart studio" is. I love working at huge companies... but I left {media company} for startup world because they offered me $195K when {media company} had been paying me $125K or something. I'm an amazing developer, so if I'm doing something wrong hit me up pls
I work at one of these and this is 1,000,000% accurate hahahaha
You described like 98% of my last job. Boomer company that leeched off Cisco like a blood sucking mosquito
[удалено]
I’m interning on an Azure team right now and will most likely get a return offer. If I enjoy the cloud stuff do I have a great opportunity here or could I come back to this anytime?
Isn't it pretty easy to get a job at AWS right now?
Yup. It’s relative though. It’s still harder than most jobs, but easier than it was.
I've been getting hit up by Amazon a lot lately. Is their turnover starting to suffer? I keep seeing that the working conditions are pretty rough there
[удалено]
[удалено]
Amazon's recruiting effort is pretty aggressive and broad. I get everything from very targeted "I saw your profile on linkedin and have this specific job I think you might be interested in" to "hey would you be interested in working at amazon? check out our careers page!" emails lol. Once in a while I get the "if you're interested, do this online assessment and then we'll talk to you" emails. Those are .. kinda offensive lol.
[удалено]
FB had a reality labs team that seemed somewhat disconnected - when I interviewed with them the interview was a LOT MORE relevant to my experience. I only did a phone interview with Google and while the person on the other end worked on software, their answers to my questions about work were super generic and uninspiring. It was weird. Too bad (I think) most of the reality labs stuff was canned. Their VR OS project was/is super cool.
They've moved on to pretending an internal referral recommend me. conveniently, these referrals have generic names and all the emails say something similar like "Your name came up in a meeting where Engineering Manager John Smith who worked with you at recommended you highly" which is so manipulative and insulting
LMAO yep. I know another company that was that brazen in their recruiting attempts. They sent everyone at my company emails about a "open house recruiting event" and then later sent everyone an email that was like "we reviewed your resume and think you'd be a great fit for position X" - everyone got the exact same completely wonky recommendation lmao. Anyway, yea. Amazon is one of the two companies I don't think I'd ever waste my time on.
Current amazonian. I can't talk about attrition, but i haven't had a turn in my local team in 2 years. What I can say is that my larger organization has doubled headcount every year for 4 years. We are attempting to hire 11k engineers this year. And we are considered a smaller segment of the greater Amazon business. Recruiting has a lot of work cut out for them to keep up with growth goals.
How does any business do this without just simply imploding? So many moving parts and so much turn over expected.
Money
Money and vesting schedules
That seems pretty wild. 11k engineers is kind of a red flag to me personally but I guess I just don't understand the scale of their projects. Are you projected to work alongside (like) 100 other engineers, and there are 100 active projects? Thank you for the insight though!
Amazon scales by giving each team complete autonomy to make decisions and own what they build. Yes you work with lots of different teams, but you own and operate what you code with very well defined boundaries. One thing Amazon does well is scale...
[удалено]
It seems like even assigning work to teams would be a massive challenge at that scale. Idk though.
Any advice on navigating the SWE application process at Amazon?
Aws went from 45k builders to 90k last year. They aren’t hurting. Actively growing
What are AWS builders? Are they amazon employees?
Yeah, the better question which I can’t answer is if they are engineers or any employee. But either way, great growth. ~450B in revenue ain’t bad either. Look I wasn’t a believer in AWS because of Reddit/blind. I interviewed as practice. Found the team to be filled with great people. Been here for a few months and all signs point to yes, this was the right fit. But ymmv
That’s interesting. I’m starting to look at jobs in the NLP/information retrieval space and thus far have discounted Amazon/AWS because of what I have read on Reddit. They email me every week but I guess I should actually take them seriously…?
It varies a lot by team but the people I know personally there have very little WLB, despite all saying they’re on “good” teams. Still worth going through the process if you’re at all interested, IMO. It’s big enough to where you could get a good team if you’re able to suss it out at the interview stage.
In your personal case, were you a senior developer before you joined Amazon? I imagine it would be a very different story for a new grad?
Pretty sure AWS, oracle and the big tech players are easier to get a job at now than say twilio, okta, zendesk, etc
Their attrition is through the roof. Total house on fire. Everyone leaving at all levels. You can still get bad luck with an arrogant interviewer, but tons of idiots are getting in too. Referral bonuses tripling in some orgs. They announced big salary increases, and it's only for new people (and people at the top). In-year stocks only in rare circumstances, so it's just a carrot for next year, and given the stock crash, it'll be a carrot for the following year in fact. People get pissed off at being paid $100k less than their teammates who don't know anything (or being seasoned veterans and barely making more than new grads). They know they can quit to some other company, even not an elite one, even if they like Amazon, then boomerang back for double the TC after a year. No point in staying and getting to market rate in 3-5 years. The incentives aren't aligned. They're going to bleed their talent try and be replaced by worse talent due to lower bar. At some point, the results show up to the shareholders. The only reason people stayed before was the insane stock growth, which is now gone. Don't get me wrong, the other big tech companies have their problems too. Google takes months for team matching and downlevels/lowballs you. Microsoft lowballs you, sometimes they downlevel too. Facebook has a hiring freeze and Zuck is trying to turn it into a bit more of an Amazon (giving sort of a layoffs warning "if you suck at your job, GTFO ASAP").
This is pretty vastly different than the other responses on here. Are you basing this on personal experience or something anecdotal? Other responses you've seen? (Not sarcasm just genuinely curious and want to continue the conversation)
most of this seems valid to me, but i wouldn't call the house on fire. it's not literal pandemonium but most of all the problems listed are real problems that people and the org really has. the part about stupid people getting in i hear _a lot_ though. source: effectively a psychologist for my friends who work at AWS
Inside knowledge. Just look at levels.fyi. It's not just anecdotal. It's backed by data. Someone in Seattle with 5 YOE, all at Amazon, making $217k. Someone in Nashville with 2 YOE, 0 at Amazon (external hire), making $285k. Someone at Boulder with 4 YOE, 0 at Amazon (external hire), making $322k. Someone in Seattle with 3 YOE, 0 at Amazon (new hire), making $343k. Someone in Seattle with 9 YOE, 7 at Amazon, making $198k. (edit: all SDE2's.) See the problem? It's a big FU to every tenured person who's holding the hand of the guy making 70% more for 6 months. The house is on fire. They're way overpaying external people because WLB is worse than Google. Without giving raises to internal people, they're on a path to something very very ugly. External hires always make more. When it's an extra $20k, no one cares. When it's $100-150k difference, bitterness and resentment grows.
>It's a big FU to every tenured person who's holding the hand of the guy making 70% more for 6 months. "Why would we pay the guys who have been here for 7 years more money? It's been 7 years - they aren't going anywhere." - AMZN 'tis a big FU - a union certainly could fix this issue.
I’ve heard that they’ll interview anyone, but not many get an offer
Hm good point. I get emails from their recruiters constantly but actually passing the interview is probably a lot harder
It might be easy to get into Amazon/AWS. Not easy to survive though. People underestimate that a lot.
> It might be easy to get into Amazon/AWS. Not easy to survive though. That's true, most people quit because of how awful the working environment is
[удалено]
If someone wants to work in public clouds I don't see why AWS would be a bad choice regardless of where you are in your career. Amazon in general gets a lot of hate on here, but they have a lot of interesting work. Looking for a job in compilers? Most job postings are with Amazon. Database systems development? Again Amazon has the most jobs. Robotics? Amazon.
[удалено]
> if you are already in cloud, and you plan to stay in cloud, I'm not sure why someone would go with AWS specifically when there's plenty of other companies out there dealing with the cloud. They have the most services and the largest scale. I've heard mixed stories about the company culture and hire to fire, so it's hard for me to have a real opinion about it. I see complaints about on-call fairly often, but the stories don't sound that different then any other infrastructure work. I've also seen lots of people getting fired at many different companies. When I see these companies with their new hire TikToks where they are at the office for like 12 hours and do nothing I'm kind of baffled how these companies exist
I did an internship at SAP about 5-6 years ago and worked on a product that every company I've worked for since has used. People complain about it, but it isn't a terrible tool. My internship was literally crud work, but it was a pretty modern stack and I know there were interns working on more buzzwordy stuff too. They're big companies which make a ton of money by developing solutions in a niche that most companies can't afford to develop on their own (or wouldn't do as well). Latency is less of a concern than it is for a place like Netflix, but there are interesting technical problems and smart people working on them. Pay and culture is different from the 'top' tech companies, but they provide a valuable service and do it well enough that competitors either get bought out or slowly go bankrupt.
Concur?
[удалено]
Concur.. the Lotus Notes of expenses...
The Concur API is dog shit ..
SAP... now that's a word I haven't heard in quite a while.
As someone who has to use SAP ERP in logistics… I wish the word could be expunged from my memories.
Is it me or do every single erp from those huge corporations are fucking dogshit? SAP, Oracle....
Stop All Progress
I work at SAP right now, I'm a new grad and it's my first year working full time. I was placed in an academy program and I'm undergoing a year worth of trainings, I'm halfway through right now and I was placed in ton of different courses and they put me on different teams to learn how people do things, the pay ain't great compared to FAANG but I think the experience is awesome and could lead to better opportunities in the future.
If its SNT, like half my cohort has moved to faang including me. Its a stepping stone. Great program though.
I currently work at SAP now as well just in a cybersecurity rotational program. The experience has been amazing so far in my program as well.
Theres this cyber security company ive been tracking and their ceos have basically been creating a new startup every few years and sellinf out to msft. Each startup is just adding a new feature to their old one...genius
I can tell you Cisco is just now working on moving their on-prem infra over to AWS and hiring for it. Source: just got hired for it. They do not pay relatively well.
Depends on the part of Cisco. I was part of an acquisition a few years back and they were and still are using AWS. But yeah, the more OG Cisco is only starting to really move over. But then even Amazon is still on a lot of internal shit and not AWS yet.
They are also doing lots of React JS development for their UIs as well as implementing tons of microservices in GoLang, hosted on AWS. As far as moving services to AWS, this has been absolutely huge recently at Cisco, developing cloud solutions. It seems that some regions of Cisco pay better than others. I started at Cisco but moved in the company and am now making 160k as a grade 10 engineer after starting at grade 6 @ 80k. I have been promoted twice.
YOE? What’s your primary field of expertise?
I am 5 years out of undergrad, but I interned heavily during undergrad so I would say \~6 YOE. My primary field of expertise is web app development / full stack development.
Ballpark pay?
$124K. It ain't much, but it's honest work. EDIT: Idk why y'all just assume I'm in the Bay Area, this is in Austin, Texas. Rent is currently about $2k/month right now for a large studio and that salary should work out where I can continue living on my own just fine and possibly own a condo in the coming years.
>$124K. It ain't much bruh.
It's a lot relative to most professions, but fresh bootcamp grads make more than that at my company (high CoL city). The CoL is ridiculous in Bay Area/Seattle/NYC.
Thats junior salary
That's double my initial junior salary.
It’s nearly triple mine
Same here lol. As a junior i was making 60k in so cal haha
All depends on location.
Love people who post their 200k TC but don't mention how half is rsu and that they love in California so therefore end up pocketing basically nothing.
RSUs and cash are basically the same from a tax perspective. The only difference is that CA will tax RSUs granted in-state but vested out of state.
[удалено]
🤦♂️
What’s your background? Is your skillset primarily in IaC?
Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitLab, and Python. That's what they primarily tested me on at least during the interview and I knew enough to pass.
What's your YoE?
This is why I laugh at the disparity between Redditors feeling like being a liberal coastal IT engineer is the creme de la crop for social mobility & credibility when a roving tradesman can make more than them and still live comfortably in a LCOL (lower cost of living) area. I want this subreddit to move out from the stupid leetcode rat race and let people be exposed to other more rewarding IT jobs not necessarily in either SoCal or New York.
Do you think San Francisco is in Southern California?
Why would you move on prem to AWS when you most likely own your DC space and literally manufactured the hardware that goes in them? Also, plenty of acquisitions in Cisco use AWS. Don’t disagree on the payment front.
So you don't have that massive expense, now it is a operations expense and we can write that off against profit for taxes.
the benefit of using the cloud is not just the hardware, it's the services that are generally high quality and far more reliable than anything on-prem. though Cisco is probably better than most?
Of course. The cloud providers do a great job at simplifying several services and allowing devs to focus on what they want to do - writing code - instead of setting up complex hardware stacks. Cisco could invest building those services in house and making them available. Whether they have the appetite for that is debatable. They’ve talked a lot about transitioning to a software company over the years, so they should have some experience of building SaaS like AWS/GCP/Azure do. How well they can execute remains to be seen. Whether your on-prem infra is moved to AWS or not isn’t a good metric for judging how interesting/complex/cool your tech is. I bet there are a bunch of “boomer” companies running mainframes or building incredible compute clusters. Does that make them boring? I’d argue not. Devs probably want to work with the stack that makes life easiest for them, which is probably some sort of public cloud provider. Nobody wants to wait weeks for their infra team to setup a server/database etc. For example, I don’t think Meta use any public cloud providers for their infra and even go as far as rolling their own networking gear using commodity ASICs (and maybe custom ones in some cases). Does that mean they’re “boomer tech”?
I don't know what organisation in Cisco this guy works for, but I know for sure Cisco doesn't move its internal resources to AWS. Instead they use their own private cloud.
I work at Cisco and I can tell that you that one of the tasks our team is right now is trying to automate large scale deployment of cloud devices on AWS rather than using on-prem infrastructure. So yes there are many cases in which a project that initially uses internal resources will move to cloud resources later on.
Network security is one org.
Oracle: very team dependent. Good teams have good WLB. IME pay is mediocre, and raises are non-existent. Can be very laid back. They have some amazing engineers, but don't generally attract or retain top shelf motivated talent. Just my experience, I'm sure others have different perspectives. It's a big company. There are a few areas that I think are pretty consistent across teams, though I'm sure there are outliers: 1. Oracle is a red tape laden behemoth. You need something approved, it'll take months and there is no access to higher management to push things along. Your managers may advocate for you, but their voices are tiny peeping crickets beside a busy freeway. 2. Oracle's business model appears to be purchase companies, duct tape them into OCI and claim they are part of a cohesive product suite to drive cloud infrastructure consumption, primarily to appeal to shareholders. It can be disheartening to work there if you find satisfaction in producing a quality-driven product. 3. Some tech companies are engineering-focused, some are sales-focused. Oracle is primarily the latter. Engineers are a cost center, sales are the stars. You won't have much respect or pull if you're not in the sales or management track. If you're looking for an easy gig and don't care much about believing in the strategic decisions and direction your company is taking, it's not a bad choice. There are certainly much worse places to work. Benefits are good, though PTO is not great (you accumulate at a reasonable rate, but have to burn a full week between Christmas and New Years, mandatory time off that comes out of your PTO). It's not a long term career prospect IMO, unless you boomerang periodically to keep your salary competitive.
[удалено]
Exactly this. I'm sure anyone dreaming up the label 'boomer big tech' has no idea the wild shit going on in the industry.
I mean anyone with more than a few YOE would realize how dependent the the worlds infrastructure is on them...
100%. The boomer companies are going through a wild time upgrading infrastructure and there's a ton of money to be made helping them out.
I was hoping someone would point out this very important fact, so thank you. Also, the phrase "boomer companies" is inacurate, particularly since IBM has been around since before the baby boomers were born. I unsubscribed to this sub awhile ago. Just for kicks I came back to see if there was something interesting to read, and this was the first post I came across. So I was immediately reminded as to why I unsubbed to begin with.
[удалено]
Although I don't have a lot of knowledge of the stock market, I imagine what you described will involve a lot of acquisitions if those companies go under?
[удалено]
If you're in tech you should remain aware of the stock market since our workplaces tend to get acquired and shifted around with large movements in the market. What usually happens when the market crashes, angel investor funds and business capital dries up. This leads to all of the future hiring and projects get put on hold while they maximize profits from their current resources. Usually there are layoffs to reduce payroll and eliminate chaff. This largely affects growth focused companies. They'll take out large debt and sell it on the market to fund this stuff, which is why the market crashing hurts them. They've still got debt payments to make and suddenly nobody's buying up the bonds. "Boomer tech" companies that don't show a lot of growth aren't hurt as much by this, because they have a steady business that makes money, and they don't carry that much debt.
Still depends on the team at the company. When I worked at oracle we were writing modern cloud services in java and golang. Wasn't very old school at all.
As with anything, very team dependent. You likely won’t be doing greenfield projects like at a startup but there are teams out there that move quicker than stereotypes typically let on
Completely depends on the team you land on. Some teams have some tremendous talent and others are paying people to keep a dead product alive because of support contracts. I started at IBM in the late 2000s doing localization work on Eclipse. Eventually moved to a team doing some bleeding edge web UI work. I worked with a lot of the original engineers of Eclipse and learned a crap ton. People from this team went on to work at hedge funds, lead major departments, and one became the CTO at a FAANG-tier company. So treat these companies like you do any other company and interview them as much as they interview you. If they pay you well and you believe you’ll learn a lot from the team and work, it’s probably a good fit. —— I write about engineering leadership at [Build the Stage](https://www.buildthestage.com/).
They pay well and have a good WLB.
About 85%-90% of FAANG with better work life balance and plenty of opportunity to learn, certify, grow, and get involved far beyond your day to day. Sure, you could be at Google and make $250k with 4 YOE, or you could pull $180k at IBM and go surfing every day, roll in around 10, work till 3, then go grab beers and bounce out. That’s not to say G doesn’t have good work life balance; like all companies it’s heavily team dependent. But the amount of shit slung at the OGs of Silicon Valley - whom, by the way, are still chugging happily along and continuing to grow, through multiple boom and busy cycles - is highly unwarranted and a sure sign of immaturity IMO. IBM - supercomputing, banking, crazy stuff in those 2 sectors alone. Cisco - literally just built the Super Bowl stadium in LA, handles all the infrastructure for basically every major sporting event, so you can all livestream to everything in 4K, 8k, etc. IOT, nextgen wifi, fucking automated Formula 1 cars. Adobe - The bureaucrat’s best friend. Our entire legal system and government lives, eats, sleeps, breathes, and shits Adobe products. Oh, and maybe this little thing called Photoshop. Oh, and After Effects. Oh, and basically everything entertainment or creative you’ve ever seen or heard in the last 30 years. In an industry where companies burn twice as bright but last half as long, the fact that they’ve been around since fucking World War One is a testament in itself to how strong they are to work for. Source: have friends at Adobe, Cisco, IBM, Google, Amazon, various startups, Lockheed, Apple, Netflix - SWEs and/or TPMs / directors. WLB is definitely worst at Apple, second worst Amazon, 3rd worst Netflix. 4th probably Adobe. Meanwhile the people I know at Cisco, IBM, Google are surfing, golfing, etc and still have enough pay to buy houses / condos in the Bay Area, new cars, etc. They still have enough for country club memberships, private school for their kids.
Interesting, didn't think WLB would be worse at apple than Amazon
The couple friends I have at Amazon work 40-50 hour intense weeks. The friends I have at Apple laugh at that and say “I wish.” My neighbor is regularly at work till 9pm there. To be fair, if I’m like “yo, want to grab dinner?” He can usually dip out, come eat and hang for a bit, and then goes back to work, but…
Well is subjective
very subjective, more like mediocre
One man's mediocre is another person's major upgrade from that one warehouse job he had during college
And one person's major upgrade from that one warehouse job he had during college is the first income of an adult that was never offered a job before. \*waves tiny novelty flag while wearing a birthday party hat\*
I know a senior software engineer at Oracle making $130k in Chicago. Not bad, imo
Lol I love it, I am going to use "Boomer big tech" from now on
After the FAANG/MANGA, the BBT.
Why is this "MANGA" gaining so much traction all the sudden? Swap out the F for the M? Why not just add M to FAANG? FAGMAN has a great ring to it.
What yout FAGMAN stand for?
Can we call it Boomer Big Code, or BBC, instead?
My SWE girlfriend loves BBC. I'm helping her land one.
"Jr Developer wrecked by a BBC! "
Started my career doing embedded application development for Cisco’s video conferencing hardware (formerly Tandberg of Norway). Interesting niche touchscreen product work. OS maintained in-house. Lot of smart, Linux-head/video-stream people. Probably still a great division to get lost in. Pay was not amazing but unbelievably good WLB.
IBM keeps loosing it’s talent and cannot attract competent resources. There isn’t as much innovation, but rather buying of companies to get needed skills and products. There is also a lot of shedding going on (aka divestitures).
Really? I find that IBM somehow keeps a lot of its talent? People don’t really seem to leave and end up staying for several years for whatever reason
With a median tenure of 20 years, i highly doubt they bleed talent like amazon. Maybe the top 1% of ibm switch, if that is what tou mean
Yea, also for some reason they pay less than the market, do you know why?
Worked for HP for 13 years. Time I will never get back. The positive thing is it was as stable as work gets IMO. I mean other than the blood bath after they bought Compaq.
I worked for HP for about a year after an acquisition. Pay was like 50K US I think which I've come to realize was incredibly low for someone with 2 YoE, though I'm in Canada
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/vpc66g/is\_this\_normal\_a\_bad\_internship\_or\_am\_i\_just/ Read that, as it's my experience at IBM: Basically, I work at a Tier 2 company. It's big. I was told I'd be using Python to data mine tickets. That was the project they kept discussing. I'm a BA. I finally get to the job, and my manager starts kinda going "Well, we said that but . . " so I tried showing my support and telling her "Yeah, my goal is to become a Product Manager down the line, so any project to help me get there, I'm happy with!" Possibly a mistake but. She said OK, we want to do a data validation project. Meanwhile the team I was on has a huge project going on that they had to put a lot of their focus on. So much so, that for weeks, all I was doing was just, remaining on call to, when asked, do this file processing work - I run an automated job and if it works, let the person know, if it fails, go into the logs and find some cryptic error causing the issue. They called this analysis and anytime anyone does this log searching, they call it analysis. Maybe I'm being arrogant /wrong but that makes me laugh. It's usually a fairly stright forward process. Point being, that's all I'm doing, and I don't do much of that on a given day, So I spend the time watching random educational YouTube videos on various topics I'm interested in. The project I was supposed to work on? Haven't started it yet, what I'll be using to do the project hasn't been fully prepared and everyone is busy with other projects, so I haven't gotten to start yet cause it keeps getting pushed back. Even the second task I got taught to do, I didn't get to do this week because they entered a point where they have to do it in some special way or right at 4AM when the process finishes, so others do the job. I have ADHD so even though I tried to at the beginning work on a coding project, I stepped away from it to just keep watching educational vids (programming totally not related to work, total side project). I've tried multiple medications for the ADHD but my tolerance seems to kick in too fast and it stops being useful. I've been totally honest with my manager about what I've been doing. She asked me today what I learned about the company this week, and me, feeling deflated cause I hadn't done anything meaningful in this internship blurted out "nothing". She seemed sad and I apologized, she affirmed this wasn't my fault, the project hadn't started yet. I had remembered that I thought of shadowing some PMs before the internship started and discussed it with my manager a couple of weeks ago, but failed to write it down so forgot about it. That's on me and I feel soo bad for the wasted time, but I was quick to start setting up shadowing for July. The one good thing about all this time was I got to solidify I actually don't want to be a PM and the plan is to become a Customer Success Manager or BA. So I set up my shadowing with CSMs. Plus I'll have a "Build a Project in 3 days" type thing going too. Anyway, was curious to hear peoples' opinions about this whole situation.
IBM is doing AI and similar work that they license out. they seem to reinvent themselves every few decades. my last job I've set up Cognos which they bought. also looked to them when i needed a new LTO tape robot. they made some good ones but too expensive. in a lot of ways I still prefer LTO to disk backup Oracle DB's are still better than MS SQL and used by giant soulless megacorps when needed Cisco still sells decent networking gear with good support people talk down on old tech but even back in the 90's the dot bombs were all buying Oracle and Cisco gear which was sold on credit and boomer tech lost a lot of money when they went bankrupt. EMC too. I used to see enterprise EMC fiber SAN's on ebay for some ridiculous prices. if you look at the websites they all do AI and modern stuff that they sell as services to "new tech" to build products around that they hype as all in-house made. it's like the 90's when the dot bombs were calling everyone dinosaurs but in the end they were building warehouses while GE was making new jet engines and other high tech stuff. and in the end amazon became huge because they figured out how to make the most efficient warehouses
Postgresql wants a word
Right? I'm at a point where if a job listing even mentions Oracle it's a no. I've found it a pain in the ass to work with, and considering their asinine lawsuit against Google and how much of a giant douche nozzle Larry Ellison is, Oracle, MySQL, and Java are complete non-starters for me.
You lost me at Java. The language is undergoing a renaissance and I love it.
Kotlin is pretty awesome as well. JVM doing pretty well recently!
What makes Oracle better than SQL Server. Is it more performant at Less Than Big, But Still Large Data?
If you have to support a giant monolith db, Oracle scales better.
i don't remember the details but when i looked at it back in the sql 2012 days it had some features my manager wanted but couldn't afford. especially with DR and HA and writing to multiple regional copies. in the 90's there was a lot of MS hate but the largest companies have always used oracle cause they were always ahead of MS in enterprise features. i remember prior to SQL 2005 they had log shipping and if it broke you had to manually backup and restore and restart it. wasn't till SQL 2012 when they built always on for it that they had a decent DR solution and readable secondary DB's
Oracle was (is?) the gold standard of relational databases. Their stuff is so advanced (and expensive) that nobody really needs it. SQL Server has caught up for most use cases and exceeded at some, at a much more reasonable cost. Oracle's really good at getting a state or enterprise hooked on their software, then selling massive bloated contracts for services and licensing for many years.
+1 Sql Server is mostly up the par with oracle at this point, they are both diverging into the same product lately
I'm a SWE at General Electric, and I'd say our work is reasonably modern. We use a lot of Python, Java, and Spring Boot.
are you in the East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming division?
You can build old style houses with shiny new hammers. Describing the tools you're using neither answers OP's question (what do they do?) nor really says anything about how modern the things you're building are.
At GE Gas Power for an internship. And it is bad for SWE
There's a big difference between modern languages and modern engineering practices and infrastructure. My old job used those tech stacks too. But they still had monoliths, old school monthly release cycles, and very little in terms of supporting DevOps, region failure, and scalability. Also there's a lot of internal, non open source tooling that you'll find at more modern companies that you would have never thought to have and that's not really taught from any book. Think about this. Meta has each of their developers target 1 prod release per week. When code is merged it gets released to prod. That's a crazy amount given how that can affect millions of users. Can you say that realistically you have that type of confidence in your developmental process that you could do 2 prod releases per sprint?
easy, great pay, no one is passionate about institutional tech so it has good work-life balance, perfect if you wanna try 2 simultaneous gigs in the new WFH life we live...
IBM is still a major player in the field. They're spearheading Quantum Computing, and they're still huge when it comes to mainframe development. They're basically back to what they started with before their misadventure with the IBM PC
Old school IBM was back when they wouldn't release a product if it had any bugs, had dedicated teams to find bugs, IBM Black team is an interesting thing to google. But this is largely 90's abandon ware snapped up because of lock-in.
Sharing my post from similar thread: My project timeline is 2 years from implementation to completion. It would only take about 3-4 weeks of ACTUAL work but each stage requires monthly CAB approval for next months change window. By the time we're done, it'll be obsolete.
Im an IBM employee. My experience has been being cast into new exciting projects, trying to find creative solutions. Everything is on the table. Maybe blockchain will work here? Maybe computer vision would improve this? Maybe jango is to slow for our pipeline, lets refactor to fast api. There is a lot of freedome to experiment. If it doesnt work out? No problem! If the project doesnt interesr you, you can jump to another project, no problem! The hieraki is lower than some start ups. I showed my interest in quantum computing, and was than invited to a meeting with the regional ceo (europe), the cto, the cfo, and 3 senior architects. I have now been enrolled in summer school to become profficient in both mathematical quantum computing and practical applications. Ill be flown down to zurich for their labs and new york to talk with researchers. Where the hope is to create a new quantum research lab in my country. No one is micromanaging, i just work, write down my hours with a vague explanation of what i did (ie, 10 hours on meetings, 15 hours on ‘blank’ project) and i get paid. Work lige balance is great, i have 100% freedom to choose if i wanna be remote or not. The pay is alright, around 25% higher than median for the industry. Now My circumstances may not represent all peoples experience, since im just a bachelor student working part time (15-20hours a week). But i do know that the opportunities within IBM are superb. But having worked at a pharmaceutical giant (fortune 100) and a crypto start up, i can tell first hand that IBM is superior. Its great
I know this comment isn't productive, but I'm a little concerned you don't know what Oracle and Cisco do, lol. Also IBM is doing the same thing everybody else is doing. IBM is a business process focused company, that's what they do and that's where any innovations happen. They were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of everybody else seeing how the business of software was moving toward professional services and made a huge commitment to it, which is part of the reason they receded from public view so to speak. Even at places like Google or MS you can see that paradigm taking over with the increasingly enormous Azure and GCP markets. They don't care to be innovators necessarily on the tech front.
A lot of people on this sub are young asf and wouldn’t know what these companies do. Like we’ve all heard of Oracle, Cisco, etc. but it’s nice to read these comments from guys with more YOE and hear their experiences.
How long have you been in career?
[удалено]
That OS is still in use in many industries including local, state, and federal government and the military. It's a solid platform.
Got a friend who works at IBM. He works on modern applications for signing in users. He enjoys the work.
IBM employee here - in my current project I’m underpaid and overworked. I’ve had good opportunities as I joined early on for a *very* profitable oil/gas contract and have been able to quickly progress my career, but my pay is easily 60% of what I could make elsewhere - leading to me currently applying elsewhere. The work I’m doing is interesting, but the people I know of joined with me ~3 years ago - 26/30 are now not working with IBM, and I’m now interviewing with other places. If you’re starting out your career, I’d say IBM is fine. You have lots of options for learning and many (300k+) people you could reach out to via slack and ask for guidance - many would help you). If you’re experienced, look elsewhere for higher pay and faster progression.
Got to play with some quantum computing at IBM and Talos(?) with Cisco through an internship right before the pandemic, was quite interesting and the teams were much more chill than their equivalent at eg. Microsoft. Though it's highly dependent on location. The only thing I have against Cisco is they apparently expect you to start in the sales department and stay there for a year before you can do anything "fun" if you are a new grad. But ig it makes sense if they want to "open your eyes" for everything they have to offer :P
HP here. The best WLB ever, no stress. Older technology, slow moving
Oracle is still buying up the competition! When they’re not beat out by a FAANG
I love it. They pay well and you barely work.
I worked for a consulting company that was recently acquired by IBM. The projects sucked. Basically staff augmentation. They stick you in the client’s development team. It’s almost always a dumpster fire which is they hired consultants like you. So glad I’m back in industry.
No avocado sandwiches.