This brings joy

https://reddit.com/r/technology/...

Bypass paywall:

A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.

The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.

"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."

Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.

How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.

A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.

For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.

During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.

Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.

Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.

Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.

"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.

https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...

My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.

Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.

Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...

We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.

We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.

Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.

The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.

Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.

Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.

Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.

Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.

My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.

He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.

Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.

So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.

I can be manipulated. Yes, I’m now more resilient to manipulation than ever because I’m autistically good at recognising patterns, yet I’m not perfect.

For a manipulator, there is just one problem — now and then, my disorder obliterates my entire worldview, together with the foreign manipulative framework, so I can start with a blank slate. It protects me. Yes, this protection is akin to our body’s “we’ll boil all the germs in our own blood” tactic that instead of defining winners and losers only leave survivors, yet the force is unstoppable. You cannot secure the land that is hit by a tornado every three months.

That inner Nemesis is so strong that it even defeated a complex, almost fractal-like manipulation of my own mother that I lived in since birth, leaving her with a wound that will never heal. Wannabe manipulator exes didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t care if that force destroys me or not, as during that time, there is no “me”.

About my mom, long story short, she told me “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming-out. Full story is here:
- part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4923052/...
- part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4924040/...

Every problem I ever had with a game development engine, only made me hope for something better.

After all, we’re independent developers, not activision! What the hell is an “indie” anyway? I’d even grown a sort of disgust at the term, as if saying it, without having published anything, was being fake. The word felt vapid. Like calling yourself an e-celebrity, or apple putting an i in front of everything.

(Don’t you know its year 20xx, we attach coin to brands now! Dogecoin, ecoin, walmartcoin, hospitalCoin for when you really really just want an appendectomy).

This is my newsletter, Y Intercept, and the story of my many embarrassing failures, and what I have learned from them.

Indie Game Development Tools
https://yintercept.substack.com/p/...

Stay tuned for more, like "how I once redesigned the same interface over two thousand times."
and gems like
"I wish it was more like Minecraft, But With Guns - and the awful ads that FLOODED the internet from that one little, terrible, god awful suggestion."