Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer."
Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.
This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill.
I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.
Sadly this is rather common.
My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.
Except there was photoshop involved.
And a solitary 15" monitor.
And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).
After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
We'd kill for 'business desktop' machines. We have left-over HP tower servers, some of which were customer returns.
But we have TWO MONITORS!!! as the recruiter who got me in here pointed out.
Personally, I bring in my MacBook Pro and hook it up to one of my TWO MONITORS!!! because it's a much better environment than the rubbish tower server they gave me.
Well you could kill for the business desktop machines at my prior job, but it would be like killing someone for their socks.
1GB RAM powerhouses with 5400 RPM disks.
I lobbied hard for 6 months, doing research for them, laying out how little it would cost to buy new machines, and an additional monitor for all the developers, going so far as to do benchmarks of our software on my home machine (consumer-level $1200 Core i7) compared to the work cast-offs.
I quit when it was clear they did not care about the concerns of the developers at all, just cared for milking the sole golden goose.
But managers who did little more than PowerPoint, Outlook and surfing the net got budget to upgrade their laptops to specs that outclassed any machine the engineers had, it was pretty depressing.
Our hardware is sourced from a local supplier who specializes in gamer builds. The cooling is top notch so we thought we'd run a couple of machines at 3.5Ghz.
We're a medium-sized startup with a rocking VP of engineering, so there's no push to "standardize" on shitty HP or Dell machines, thank god.
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
I'd add "modulo the live site", but when I needed that, it was made available.
I think of this as the computer equivalent of the HP story of one of the founders using an axe to break into a storage closet so engineers had access to equipment over the weekend.
> Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
Good god, I don't even want root on every box. If I've got root on something, that means I'm responsible for it. I don't want to own that many resources, because then I have to worry about them.
is the standard outsourced and absolutely terrible job database search.
No offense intended but based on your career section alone I would never apply there. I might apply if I met people at a networking event and they convinced me but definitely not based on your site info.
I thought Tarsnap would be handing out S&W Model 500s as corporate swag for internship applicants.
At least seems like that kind of place from the outside: jail yard metal table, BSD boxen, a Colombian silver Peso, K&R and Plauger, bottle o' jack, dot-matrix printouts of kernel panics, cute unmentionables left by last night's mistaken young thang .. "This is Tarsnap, Asok. You can break hearts but you can't break servers."
Yeah, I wonder who cleans up after this. The guy who has root "just because we give it to all developers" and makes a mess and seriously breaks the production site is most likely not the person you want cleaning it up when time is of the essence.
If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though.
An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
Sadly, the whole dropbox site is blocked by the firewall at the client I am currently supporting (and they gave me a 15" monitor). Craziest though is they only allow Firefox 2.0- I keep sending them the vulnerabilities list. I run chromium instead...
Love the musical culture: Every night around 7, I turn up the music in the office. Then I have to explain to the beijing office why ICP, G&R, 2-Pac or any other thing I put on is a good choice. The Killer or Fleetwood Mac seems goes over better.
I find that music at night and on the weekends makes all the work even more fun.
Some people enjoy working like that, and enjoy their jobs enough that they don't care that they're actually working.
The extreme example is John Carmack, who according to the book "The Masters of Doom", would crank music all night, and drink diet pepsi (early days of id, grant you, I don't know how he works now) while programming. He rolled in the office at 4pm and stayed until early morning.
There's nothing wrong with working crazy late hours if you enjoy it.
The problem is when you start at 8am, work all day, waste time in meetings - then have to stay til 10pm every night to meet some deadline so that a sales guy gets a bonus.
There are lots of things that "makes life more fun". I find that not having to work nights and weekends, but loving so much what you do and the problems you work on and the people you work with; makes life even more fun.
i'm jon, the guy who made the drawing. though i did play wow once upon a time, the drawing actually wasn't inspired by this despite the crazy coincidence that both have a dino riding a shark.
...but i'm not gonna lie; i will say that wow's version really makes me heartbroken that i left out a laser beam D:
It would seem that it was subconscious inspiration. Things you see around you can easily get into your creative work without you realizing it (I know, [citation needed]). I did see a show where someone anticipated the nature a creative drawing, just by showing them similar imagery a while before. But that doesn't count as a citation.
I understand it's pretty normal for America, but 15 days paid holiday seems so small to me. 22.5 here in the UK + bank holidays, and I don't feel it's particularly generous. Hmm...
10-15 vacation days in the USA is typical, especially with less than a decade of experience [0][1]. I do wish I had more vacation (I get 15 days), but if I use it all each year and avoid working nights and weekends, I never feel symptoms of burnout. If I add my hobby projects, 60 hours a week feels sustainable, especially if I watch for feelings that might lead to burnout and take immediate corrective action.
Even worse: sometimes your responsibilities increase faster than your vacation days. My Dad was unable to take half of his vacation at his old job because of the amount of the company he managed.
Heh. My manager emailed me today, reminding me I have 10 days of holiday left in the year and that I should remember to take them. I'm planning walking along Offa's Dyke with my brother, and also taking off some days to work on side projects. And maybe a skiing trip...
(and my dad had the same problems - I think it was one of the factors in my parents breaking up. Now he's remarried and he takes far more time off, despite being in an yet-higher position. I think he's a fair bit happier, too.)
What's even more concerning for me is that it is "15 Days of Paid Time Off." Not sure about Dropbox, but at a previous employer of mine that meant "15 Days of Vacation/Sick Time."
Yeah that's the trend now, PTO is either a sick day or vacation day. It's best to clarify upfront what they mean. My last job had 15 PTO days (to be used for vacation or sick time), but my current job is 15 PTO days plus 6 paid sick days. Plus we get 13 holidays vs my last job's 8 (adding Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, Columbus Day, MLK Day, and the employee's birthday).
Ugh, I had heard that too. Sick days are completely separate over here. I don't understand doing it otherwise - do you want sick people to come in? Go home, recover, and don't infect the office.
I don't know the details, but when I worked for a company based in SF (like Dropbox), they claimed there was a law that compelled them to count sick time and vacation in one bucket.
CA has some really weird rules. In addition to that, there's also a cash-out rule that vacation can't be expired without compensation.
So, managers have to be persnickety about having you track the time you spend out of the office going to the dentist, etc. because otherwise the company can get shafted with a bill for the "untaken" paid time off at the end of the year / when the employee leaves.
Cash-out can be abused, but on the other hand, if you don't exert pressure on your employees to continually work overtime, or take as little sequential leave as possible, that's less of a problem.
Though I know it's somewhat common practice here in New Zealand to start not taking leave if you're about to quit, so you can get one or two extra paychecks when you quit, and time it so you have two weeks to a month before your new job starts.
Same benefit, plus a nice cash bonus.
Not saying it's the best thing to do for employers that treat you right, but if you're not being paid overtime, and being asked to work it and weekends a lot, it's not like you don't deserve getting that back if you leave.
The US standard (if you get paid holidays at all) is 10 days in most workplaces. 15 is relatively generous.
I did work at a University that gave some employees 24 days plus holidays, which was fantastic, and institutionally tolerable because the work load of the University was so much lower in the summer months. But while the benefits were good, the wages were about 60% of the market rate.
I think it's a common denominator around Europe. I Italy I was getting 23 days and here in the Netherlands I get 25 days per year. But I agree that I don't feel like they are being so generous.
Yep, I believe 20 working days is the european legal minimum, official holidays excluded. Countries can go above (Finland and France mandate a minimum of 5 weeks).
I have 29.5 days in total, with some of those being compulsory because the office is closed. Some are confusingly called 'compulsory discretionary' holidays due to the hilarious management I have.
My employer adds an extra half a day each year you stay with the company, plus another half a day if you meet sickness attendance targets.
Yeah, I think I get an extra half day a year. I forget, though, because I haven't been here a year, and we just got bought out and had all this stuff reshuffled.
There's no legal requirement for your holiday entitlement to increase each year - it just needs to be at least the minimum number of days.
In my experience, different companies handle it in different ways - one company I was with increased it by five days, but on your fifth anniversary with the company. I've also heard of companies giving one-off extra holidays for long service or other achievements.
If you're employed directly by a large company, your holiday situation is usually pretty good in the UK. If you're employed through an agency or you're a temporary worker, then it's usually pretty dire (compared to the UK norm - probably still quite good compared to the US).
Heh - love it. But playing devil's advocate here: won't this discourage applicants who aren't up on their latest internet memes? Is stuff like this on the recruiting page just a fast route to a homogenous company with a reduced ability to design for users not like them?
All corporate cultures select for "More people like us, please." (Especially the ones who mention how important a diverse workforce is to them. That line is not neutral with respect to the kind of people you want to hire.)
This might be true. I've done this myself. But is it ideal? I don't particularly care for 'people of all colors holding hands under a rainbow' as an ideology, but I do think it's easier for a homogenous team to make bad product mistakes.
During my enterprise time, I was a contractor at a BFE, and they did a pretty good job of diverse hiring by many measures. However, once people started, there was no room for diversity of thinking.
That is an _amazing_ "we're hiring" image! I didn't even need the rest of the page; why would I, with a graphic like that? Truly remarkable work, dropbox.
Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.