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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

    First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

    That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

    Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

    Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.



  • In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

    Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

    The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

    I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”


  • Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

    You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.


  • You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

    I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

    I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

    I would have thought that was abundantly clear.





  • First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

    Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

    Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.




  • That’s not a dumb question at all.

    There are MDs who do substantive research in medicine and surgery. However, basic science questions and a lot of the applied research are done by MD/PhDs. The dual degrees are a signal that the person holding them is not giving MMR vaccinations to kids or fixing broken arms, but who are committed to doing active research. It’s not an absolute requirement - I’ve worked with brilliant MDs at the VA and UC facilities who are gifted researchers. I’m painting with a very broad brush there.


  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mltoRisa@startrek.websiteI'm a *doctor*, not a PhD!
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    5 months ago

    Here’s a fun fact: “Doctor” was an academic degree. It was originally meant for theology, but expanded as the scope of academia expanded and natural philosophy became the sciences. We still call the degree “Doctor of Philosophy” as a result of that. Being a doctor of something meant that you were qualified to conduct research and teach at the university level. It eventually meant that you have made a contribution to your field - your dissertation - and the expectation was that you had and would continue to publish research papers in scientific journals.

    The idea of a “medical doctor” was a new addition. MDs don’t do research, didn’t do a dissertation, and in general are not equipped to teach and advance the academic understanding of their field.

    So I agree. Scientists should get the blue shirts, physicians and surgeons should just wear scrubs.


  • I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

    My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

    In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

    It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.