What Developers Should Know About Job Searching and Negotiation
Part I:<p>Let&#x27;s get real here:<p>Yes, in the OP, the good news is likely:<p>&gt; People who do consulting or freelancing
for a living might realize this is
isomorphic to getting consulting
engagements.  It really is.  It’s
fundamentally running a sales process for
yourself, which is a really weird skill<p>On salary negotiation, I&#x27;d suggest
bringing in some super important data:<p>Within easy commuting distance of the job,
go house hunting.  Want 3-4 bedroom, 2 1&#x2F;2
bath, with family room and two car garage.
Maybe also full, dry basement, nice yard,
nice landscaping, pool, nice neighborhood,
good schools.<p>So, get the figure per month for the house
-- principle, interest, taxes, insurance,
maintenance.<p>Add in your medical insurance, life
insurance, IRA, and college fund for the
kids.<p>Add in cost of cars for yourself and wife
and, later, kids.<p>Add in usual costs of living -- food,
clothing, education for the kids, home
furnishings, smart phones, Internet
access, desktop computers, professional
memberships, professional publications,
etc.<p>Add in some for recreation.<p>Add in some for contingencies, say, for
the kids, private schools, tutoring,
violin, swimming lessons, etc.<p>Then look at taxes -- city, state, and
Federal.<p>Then add it all up.<p>Then add, say, 30%.<p>That&#x27;s your figure.  Justify it with<p>&gt; I have a family, and I am the
breadwinner.  I have a wife and two kids,
and we want two more kids.  My wife is
busy with the kids, and with the home, she
is fully busy.  We need the usual, food,
clothing, shelter, transportation, medical
care, recreation, education for the kids,
retirement for my wife and I, insurance
against risk, plus smaller items.  In
addition, my wife&#x27;s mother needs to come
stay with us.  In this area, that&#x27;s what
it comes to.  To have less than that would
make us financially irresponsible.<p>Of course, if the employer wants to hire a
single person who wants to live in an
efficiency apartment and use busses and
taxis for transportation, then, okay, but
need to know that.<p>&gt; It is well worth your time to take
another developer out for a hamburger and
say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about the
company.&quot;<p>Maybe.  But this other person might tend
to see you as a competitor and want to
hurt your career instead of a colleague
who wants to help your career.<p>&gt; The nature of careers for us is just
working for 40 years for IBM and then
receiving a gold watch is something that
very few of us are going to be able to
successfully do, and that frankly, I’m not
even sure I want.  Actually, I much more
than not sure I want.  I’m sure I do not
want, do not want.<p>Right, don&#x27;t want it.  But, it&#x27;s been a
very long time since IBM offered such a
career.  The more common situation was, in
an IBM area, a house cost 5+ times what
the IBM annual salary was so that, really,
the employee had to pay for their house
out of other funds and was basically
subsidizing IBM.<p>So, who was living in those houses?  In
some cases, IBM employees who joined when
the house prices were much lower.  But in
most cases, people just not working at IBM
or in any such job.  Instead, likely they
were doing well in small business, e.g.,
as owners.<p>More generally, there is a biggie
fundamental problem with the whole career
and salary negotiation process in the
article:  The company will just NOT for
long be able to pay more than the work of
the job is worth.  So, really, the
employee needs to know what the heck the
work is worth and try to get as much of
that as possible, and for that, and quite
fundamentally, the employee needs in some
significant sense, in one word,
&#x27;ownership&#x27; of the business.  So, we&#x27;ve
got to be talking stock or the person just
owning their own business.<p>Biggie point:  If own the business and run
it, then are facing the &#x27;market&#x27; for the
product&#x2F;service the business provides.  If
that market is poor, gotta pick another
business.  If that market is good, then
the worker gets to keep what the work is
really worth.  That point is a huge
biggie.  As an employee, will have a tough
time getting for very long even half what
the work is really worth in the market.
This is a crude analysis, but it can be
the difference between (A) being single
and (B) providing for a good family and a
good life.<p>From the OP, here is another really
fundamental point:<p>&gt; “Look, I understand just if I start to
read through the resume, it doesn’t look
like the most promising candidate, but
when given a very complicated engineering
task, which involved both security
research, and then a complicated
open-ended data analysis task, they not
only successfully solved the task, but
produced a deliverable which could
literally be published in a research
journal,<p>Okay, if that is impressive, and it should
be, then there&#x27;s another approach:  Look
on the resume for candidates who actually
have PUBLISHED such work in a
peer-reviewed journal of original
research.  Or, at least they have a Ph.D.
degree from a good research university
where their dissertation was just such
work and is likely publishable.<p>Let&#x27;s have an example:  Recently at the
company, there have been some unexpected
problems -- outages, performance
degradations, security breaches, etc.  --
in the network and some in the server
farm.<p>So, the company wanted, in general terms,
better near real-time <i>monitoring</i> for
such unexpected problems.  That is, the
company wanted continual reports on
<i>health and wellness</i> of their network and
server farm.<p>They have been using various approaches,
but especially thresholds, and in total
the approaches have two biggie problems --
false alarm rate too high and detection
rate too low.<p>Joe looked at that situation and saw that
from Microsoft, Windows Server, SQL
Server, IIS, Oracle, Cisco, HP, etc.,
there is a river of data available for
monitoring.  So, he could get data on any
of some literally hundreds of relevant
variables at data rates of a value each
few seconds up to thousands of values a
second.<p>So, Joe thought about how to use that data
to get better monitoring.  Well rested in
a quiet room he put his feet up, popped
open a cold can of diet soda, reviewed the
problem and old approaches, reviewed some
of this educational background, and had
some ideas.<p>Eventually, he noticed:  If look at, say,
two variables jointly, should be able to
do better on false alarm rate and
detection rate than looking at the
variables separately, unless the variables
are independent, which in common cases the
definitely are not.  So, in some sense,
want to exploit several variables not
individually but jointly.<p>Next, Joe noticed that with false alarm
rate and detection rate, he was reminded
of his course in Statistics 101 and,
there, hypothesis testing with Type I
error, Type II error, and the &#x27;power&#x27; of a
test, that is, some tests are more
&#x27;powerful&#x27; than others.  Also he checked
in an intermediate text on statistics and
noticed that the classic Neyman-Pearson
result says how to get the most powerful
test possible.<p>Then Joe had some ideas, got some real
data, wrote some prototype code, and the
results looked good.  Joe was able to
adjust false alarm rate, and know the rate
in advance, for any detection say what was
the lowest false alarm rate at which the
data would still be a detection, and had
really good reason to believe in an
especially high detection rate.<p>He published his work in a high end
peer-reviewed journal of original research
and gave a seminar on that work at a world
famous, high end server farm where
reliability is taken very seriously.<p>He put this work on his resume, sent 1000
copies, and never heard back.<p>So, back to the last quote above from the
OP, here comes the biggie surprise:  Doing
such work won&#x27;t get you hired.  Hardly a
chance.  Now, we should all be screaming,
why, why, why, why, why?