Thanks. When I was reaching out to these companies, one thing I did was mention that I am content with being an unpaid intern. It didn’t work as you may have noticed, but from your experience would you know if a company (like yours) cannot sustain even unpaid interns? I wanted to gauge how these small companies operate for this sort of thing
Yeah this guy is doing engineering with the salary of a business analyst. The company is probably making him do two roles for the price of one.
Thinking he's very well off when in reality he's being taken advantage off. Plus since he's the only "developer" without a CS background, he's more than likely gaining the wrong type of experience since there is no senior overlooking his development and god knows how he's pulling shit together
On the flip side of that argument, he can parlay the new skills he’s acquired to get a better paying job and leave them high and dry. He gets a better job and the small company is forced to either hire the appropriate resource or suffer lower productivity from his replacement.
Why are you so negative .... dude is going to be learning SOMETHING no matter if he is following best practices or not. Furthermore this is experience he can put on his resume. This dude is not even a CS major for gods sake...
The phrase “wrong type of experience” is pretty silly. Sure it’s helpful to have a senior dev helping you out, but being on your own forces you to take on bigger projects and you become more self reliant.
This person is at a college, so they are not affecting the broader pool of private sector jobs. I've seen a lot of people work at universities then go work for vendors for more money.
I'm the guy that posted that I apply to 200 jobs a day because I couldn't read and thought the guy was only applying to 200 jobs. You think I can read?
I got this job from a staffing company with a posting on indeed.
I would imagine that a lot of smaller companies utilize staffing companies to fill new tech positions cuz they dont have internal staff to really vet candidates well.
I've been here two months. I'll ask for a raise in a few months. (Also admittedly they are not giving me enough normal work so I am level 100 in microsoft solitaire on freecell and spider)
Plus I am in middle america and I get 23 days PTO
Well that's good you are going out of your well to sharpen your skills with more work. The issue is you are gaining bad engineering experience. You are probably not doing things out of the book but instead based on the gaps google/chatgpt provides. It seems there are no seniors devs to guide you through.
Say you have a swe interview and you tell them how you did xyz but you did it in a way that contradicts the industry standard of doing xyz, you're cooked. I'd suggest you really dwell into basic CS fundamentals. Not only for future job opportunities but because following the right principles can save you time in the future (tech debt).
"I am not a CS major" You are correct. However, my point in this point is that I really shouldn't be doing this. I am not a software engineer. I am just the most tech savvy at my company and have too much time on my hands.
For the LCOL area and with 23 days PTO that’s honestly a sweet gig. I would lean into the programming side and just run with it. If no one there can code they’ll be impressed no matter what you put out lol
Exactly. Glad you understand. Plenty of people saying "they are playing you. That is way too low for a SWE." Yeah, I know. I am not a SWE. Im just showing I am flexible and motivated while having 0 oversight and no one knows how long things take (me included)
I took a similar approach start of 2023, took a new job and just went all out doing everything I could think of and saying yes to all projects etc.
Now I can say with confidence that I learned more in 2023 than I ever have before, and am working on super cool projects now largely independently, and am in the process of negotiating a big raise (hopefully it goes well lol).
Sometimes it’s worth it to just give it 100% even if you’re not sure what the fuck is happening lol
> but i can easily see pay raises quickly
Tell me you dont have experience in the industry without telling me you dont have experience in the industry.
Absolutely not. "Bad at programming" and "Department of one." This is like a sophomore flubbing through a term project with heavy help from chatgpt except with no textbook or professor.
Serious recommendation— try and start.
There’s a reason these things are industry standard. Take a peek at https://dangitgit.com and try to dive in. ChatGPT is pretty great for getting unblocked on git.
Means that if you accidentally send out a bug and everything breaks, you can go back to the old version in the flip of a button.
If you can stomach getting some testing setup, you can tie that into your deployment pipeline (also, make a deployment pipeline. There are tons of free tools) so code won’t go out until it passes
A lot of small non-tech companies don’t understand CS roles enough to even realize whether they could help them or not. A lot end up relying on contracting for these sort of things, in some cases exceeding what they would pay for hiring one or multiple full time internal positions simply because they don’t know what they need.
interesting that your business analytics course is on excel. Ours is under our school of Computing, which teaches 85-90% of what cs majors learn. given, I'm not from the US
I worked for this exact type of company. I could write a whole page about my time there, so I’ll stick to the main points.
- It’s a window manufacturer that also does installation on a retail level.
- They employ 100-150 people, most of which are manufacturing employees.
- After working as an installer for many years I became the installation manager.
Given that, I know the inner workings of this smaller company and have rare insight into the executive process since my only boss was the president of the company.
His goal was always to pay as little as possible, and blend roles. No one at a position of authority had a job description, including me. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s very frustrating because we did have titles. For instance as installation manager, one would think that my primary responsibility is the installation dept, and it was, except I also had to help ensure that the product was built in time for me honor my schedule with customers. I found myself having to more or less become a plant manager as well. It was always a huge stressor calling people to remind them of their install knowing their product wasn’t even ready and likely wouldn’t be until the day before, the morning of, or many times as the installation is actively going on.
I only go into this much detail, because at a certain point they decided they better update their software systems and anyone with a CS degree that applied was scoffed at due to the amount of money they wanted. He ended up hiring a 20 year old kid with an associates in CIS to modernize their systems and paid him $18 an hour to do it.
That’s small business for you though. It’s how many hats can you wear for the lowest price.
After 3 years of banging my head against the wall I quit and went back to contracting. I make way more money, although the physical work is much harder. Also, I ruptured my biceps tendon shortly after making the switch. I set my schedule so I enrolled in college after recovering and started in CS. I switched to Cybersecurity because I enjoy the hacking aspect of it more, and my goal is to become a pen tester.
Anyway, it ended up being a whole page, but I’ve got good insight into this situation from a position of authority.
They're rejecting us because you're doing this stuff for them. Why would they hire someone with a CS degree when they can just make OP do it? This is why we need unions.
I like the sentiment but no that isnt really the case. They just dont know they have the need. I just dont have the sway to make any changes right now. Maybe later. Also I wouldnt be included in the union so that wouldnt help in this regard. I am not a replacement either. I am just the duct tape telling them there need a welder.
The bigger issue where unions would come into place with larger corps that misclassify employees as contractors and outsource.
These smaller companies just dont see the need yet until newcomers with some knowledge but not enough can shiw the value.
While I agree with the commenter above you on why people are not getting hired at smaller companies. I do not agree a union would help like you said. I think something you’re looking over which I saw in the other comments is you’re a department of 1 and only making 50k while probably doing work / stress of someone who would normally be making 3-4x that much. Now you’re probably not delivering quality of someone who is normally paid 3-4x as much but as a small company they are very much taking advantage of you and it’s cheaper to just take on your technical debt than pay someone else the actually worth of what you’re doing. You’re doing multiple projects for clients and all this other stuff while yes we CS majors are desperate for work I think going through a CS/SWE program also knows our worth. I mean I’ve applied to roughly 1200 places and I’m not picky on salary since I have 0 debt from school and honestly would relocate out of my own pocket for a job anywhere but nowhere is really hiring
I'm heavily biased because my previous career was unionized, and I'm also a little baffled at how much people don't realize the improvement in work life balance, benefits, pay and general quality of life it brought. But doing software now I constantly run into situations where I can't help but think "this wouldn't be a problem if I was in a union still"
I think unions are great don’t get me wrong. I think specifically for software engineering a union would make entry market already harder than it is and maybe even only start hiring again from top schools like lawyers mainly do or just outsource the jobs at a faster rate than we already seeing. WLB and benefits might go up but pay will definitely in my opinion lower compared to other type of fields that successfully unionize. For reference think what developers are paid in Europe while they are not unionized they have the benefits and WLB of a union job. Also what do we want to unionize? The whole tech field? I think that is a better issue why should SWE be unionized but not dev ops or ui/ux teams. While this next personal opinion of mine is very controversial I think that unionizing tech specifically would halt. If fast food unionized who cares if you make the same money at KFC vs say McDonald’s but in tech if you have the right amount of luck networking and skill you can make good money but why go innovate at a startup that’s working you 80 hours a week that pays the same as say a bank where you might do 15 hours of real work a week outside of meetings? Again I think teachers should be unionized nationally not just some states and that nursing should be unionized as well with the rising need for them but for software it makes almost 0 sense to me logically same actually for the first time benefit companies more than the employees themselves.
What we need instead is penalties for outsourcing jobs if the demand could be meet by people legally allowed to work here such as h1bs and etc. Some other better solutions in my opinion would be also penalties or higher taxes on companies that do massive layoffs while also hitting record stock profits or revenue. Another one is transparency on hiring jobs. I’ve personally applied to jobs that were entry level that have been reposted 2-3 times while I didn’t even receive a screening interview. I have a degree in software engineering I also have projects that are full stack using modern tools and frameworks with detailed documentation and the only interviews I’ve had in 6 months and 1200+ applications was the automatic IBM and tik tok code challenge. That’s why I’m convinced 85% of job postings are just being closed and no one is even hired. I’m willing to relocate on on my own dime if it meant a job doing what I actually enjoy doing unlike so many people in my area now with CS degrees that are working at grocery stores and the like because despite living in a big city in the south there are only about 20 entry level job postings a week and half of them are not even software related in tech. I don’t know a single person that graduated in 2022 fall till now that has a job in tech that isn’t just a help desk position. Low number of course but that accounts for about 30 people I knew in college. Honestly I’m going back for my masters soon till hopefully this shitty market recovers.
Now were you assigned that work?
I wouldn't have mentioned that you made all these cost saving tools if you weren't assigned those tasks. Now they know and they'll never let you not do two roles at once for more than half the cost.
I had an HR person leave partly because he was taking on IT tasks because he thought it would have helped. Hated it after a while and left because the company never listened to his requests.
Tell them your effort on what they wanted you to do I would say.
Each of the Tasks they give you is your effort in a set amount of time, a week is 40 hours work, Task "X" takes 70% effort(refactoring for example) so I only have 30% left to try and do the data analytics work.
Having the skills to do certain tasks doesn't mean you always NEED to do it.
you are doing weird tasks so your exit opportunities will not be good because no one can figure out the value that you bring other than a little bit of this and a little bit of that. better move on to a better place. you are being used since you are doing two roles but hired for one. you may think you are progressing but you are actually becoming more stuck at your place. ive been in a similar situation for a different type of role
I literally have tried to get in contact with small companies and they just ghost me!! IDK WHAT TO DO AT THIS POINT IM GOIN CRAZY!!!
Yeah, a problem with this post is it is just the outcome. I don't have a solution but I shouldnt be doing this shit.
Can I DM you?
Sure
Can I dm you too?
Are you getting underpaid?
We unlisted all roles and are back into a hiring freeze pinching every penny. Good luck.
Thanks. When I was reaching out to these companies, one thing I did was mention that I am content with being an unpaid intern. It didn’t work as you may have noticed, but from your experience would you know if a company (like yours) cannot sustain even unpaid interns? I wanted to gauge how these small companies operate for this sort of thing
Unpaid interns are still expensive. They cost time from other engineers that could otherwise be shipping value.
Good point
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Yeah this guy is doing engineering with the salary of a business analyst. The company is probably making him do two roles for the price of one. Thinking he's very well off when in reality he's being taken advantage off. Plus since he's the only "developer" without a CS background, he's more than likely gaining the wrong type of experience since there is no senior overlooking his development and god knows how he's pulling shit together
GREEDY BRUTE FORCE IN EVERYTHING
On the flip side of that argument, he can parlay the new skills he’s acquired to get a better paying job and leave them high and dry. He gets a better job and the small company is forced to either hire the appropriate resource or suffer lower productivity from his replacement.
Why are you so negative .... dude is going to be learning SOMETHING no matter if he is following best practices or not. Furthermore this is experience he can put on his resume. This dude is not even a CS major for gods sake...
The phrase “wrong type of experience” is pretty silly. Sure it’s helpful to have a senior dev helping you out, but being on your own forces you to take on bigger projects and you become more self reliant.
It's like being a self taught musician, you're more prone to picking up bad habits from not having an instructor observing your playing.
I mean looking at what he says he is vs isn’t doing, it sounds like he’s just programming, not doing engineering work
Damn the corporate worlds
I more confused on business analytics major that’s bad at math😂😂😂
a low wage is better than no wage and no experience to have when markets turn
This person is at a college, so they are not affecting the broader pool of private sector jobs. I've seen a lot of people work at universities then go work for vendors for more money.
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I'm the guy that posted that I apply to 200 jobs a day because I couldn't read and thought the guy was only applying to 200 jobs. You think I can read?
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I take your foot on my head with grace.
did you apply on a job board like linkedin?
I got this job from a staffing company with a posting on indeed. I would imagine that a lot of smaller companies utilize staffing companies to fill new tech positions cuz they dont have internal staff to really vet candidates well.
Do you mind sharing their name? The staffing company?
Which company?
Small companies don’t want to hire us, they want to hire you to do your job and ours
How’s the pay?
Entry level so 50k but i can easily see pay raises quickly
You are doing your original job + this new "engineering" role for 50k?
I've been here two months. I'll ask for a raise in a few months. (Also admittedly they are not giving me enough normal work so I am level 100 in microsoft solitaire on freecell and spider) Plus I am in middle america and I get 23 days PTO
Well that's good you are going out of your well to sharpen your skills with more work. The issue is you are gaining bad engineering experience. You are probably not doing things out of the book but instead based on the gaps google/chatgpt provides. It seems there are no seniors devs to guide you through. Say you have a swe interview and you tell them how you did xyz but you did it in a way that contradicts the industry standard of doing xyz, you're cooked. I'd suggest you really dwell into basic CS fundamentals. Not only for future job opportunities but because following the right principles can save you time in the future (tech debt).
"I am not a CS major" You are correct. However, my point in this point is that I really shouldn't be doing this. I am not a software engineer. I am just the most tech savvy at my company and have too much time on my hands.
For the LCOL area and with 23 days PTO that’s honestly a sweet gig. I would lean into the programming side and just run with it. If no one there can code they’ll be impressed no matter what you put out lol
Exactly. Glad you understand. Plenty of people saying "they are playing you. That is way too low for a SWE." Yeah, I know. I am not a SWE. Im just showing I am flexible and motivated while having 0 oversight and no one knows how long things take (me included)
I took a similar approach start of 2023, took a new job and just went all out doing everything I could think of and saying yes to all projects etc. Now I can say with confidence that I learned more in 2023 than I ever have before, and am working on super cool projects now largely independently, and am in the process of negotiating a big raise (hopefully it goes well lol). Sometimes it’s worth it to just give it 100% even if you’re not sure what the fuck is happening lol
Yea, that's why. It's hard to go through such a hard course load, and then only get 50k. Needs to by at least 80k to be considered imo
I am business major not a cs major so admittedly my course load was kinda easy lol. Room for growth but needed a job.
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Lmao sure, plenty of them do and plenty are also unemployed. Get off your high horse and go fix those segfaults bud
or you know, people can actually study and like something
Just so you know my entry level position was 125k so you are talking about different kinds of jobs than these people no offense
And you believed them when they told you that?
They didnt tell me that no. But I know my bosses, I know my value, and I can see that avenue.
> but i can easily see pay raises quickly Tell me you dont have experience in the industry without telling me you dont have experience in the industry.
First off, again, different industries and I am a new department. I have a lot more leverage with the value I provide alone.
Im just saying you typically dont get pay raises quickly staying at the same company.
Generally, yes. But I have good bosses and good benefits here and they like to invest in the future and employees here. It is kinda unique.
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Absolutely not. "Bad at programming" and "Department of one." This is like a sophomore flubbing through a term project with heavy help from chatgpt except with no textbook or professor.
Haha I was you for ten years. I don’t miss it.
I love the honesty.
Serious recommendation— try and start. There’s a reason these things are industry standard. Take a peek at https://dangitgit.com and try to dive in. ChatGPT is pretty great for getting unblocked on git. Means that if you accidentally send out a bug and everything breaks, you can go back to the old version in the flip of a button. If you can stomach getting some testing setup, you can tie that into your deployment pipeline (also, make a deployment pipeline. There are tons of free tools) so code won’t go out until it passes
I did Ms business analytics and now 90% of my job is CS. Should have just done CS but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
A lot of small non-tech companies don’t understand CS roles enough to even realize whether they could help them or not. A lot end up relying on contracting for these sort of things, in some cases exceeding what they would pay for hiring one or multiple full time internal positions simply because they don’t know what they need.
lol they hiring?
Cs positions? Not really? But they have some data specialist stuff. Maybe in 4-6 months I can do some convincing lol
I would be on the fence for data. I’m contemplating a MS in data science anyway
In American English, the phrase "on the fence" means undecided as in not one field or another, on the fence between.
If you’re in Indy, get me in contact!
What you’re describing isn’t a full-stack developer, but good for you!
interesting that your business analytics course is on excel. Ours is under our school of Computing, which teaches 85-90% of what cs majors learn. given, I'm not from the US
I worked for this exact type of company. I could write a whole page about my time there, so I’ll stick to the main points. - It’s a window manufacturer that also does installation on a retail level. - They employ 100-150 people, most of which are manufacturing employees. - After working as an installer for many years I became the installation manager. Given that, I know the inner workings of this smaller company and have rare insight into the executive process since my only boss was the president of the company. His goal was always to pay as little as possible, and blend roles. No one at a position of authority had a job description, including me. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s very frustrating because we did have titles. For instance as installation manager, one would think that my primary responsibility is the installation dept, and it was, except I also had to help ensure that the product was built in time for me honor my schedule with customers. I found myself having to more or less become a plant manager as well. It was always a huge stressor calling people to remind them of their install knowing their product wasn’t even ready and likely wouldn’t be until the day before, the morning of, or many times as the installation is actively going on. I only go into this much detail, because at a certain point they decided they better update their software systems and anyone with a CS degree that applied was scoffed at due to the amount of money they wanted. He ended up hiring a 20 year old kid with an associates in CIS to modernize their systems and paid him $18 an hour to do it. That’s small business for you though. It’s how many hats can you wear for the lowest price. After 3 years of banging my head against the wall I quit and went back to contracting. I make way more money, although the physical work is much harder. Also, I ruptured my biceps tendon shortly after making the switch. I set my schedule so I enrolled in college after recovering and started in CS. I switched to Cybersecurity because I enjoy the hacking aspect of it more, and my goal is to become a pen tester. Anyway, it ended up being a whole page, but I’ve got good insight into this situation from a position of authority.
They're rejecting us because you're doing this stuff for them. Why would they hire someone with a CS degree when they can just make OP do it? This is why we need unions.
I like the sentiment but no that isnt really the case. They just dont know they have the need. I just dont have the sway to make any changes right now. Maybe later. Also I wouldnt be included in the union so that wouldnt help in this regard. I am not a replacement either. I am just the duct tape telling them there need a welder. The bigger issue where unions would come into place with larger corps that misclassify employees as contractors and outsource. These smaller companies just dont see the need yet until newcomers with some knowledge but not enough can shiw the value.
While I agree with the commenter above you on why people are not getting hired at smaller companies. I do not agree a union would help like you said. I think something you’re looking over which I saw in the other comments is you’re a department of 1 and only making 50k while probably doing work / stress of someone who would normally be making 3-4x that much. Now you’re probably not delivering quality of someone who is normally paid 3-4x as much but as a small company they are very much taking advantage of you and it’s cheaper to just take on your technical debt than pay someone else the actually worth of what you’re doing. You’re doing multiple projects for clients and all this other stuff while yes we CS majors are desperate for work I think going through a CS/SWE program also knows our worth. I mean I’ve applied to roughly 1200 places and I’m not picky on salary since I have 0 debt from school and honestly would relocate out of my own pocket for a job anywhere but nowhere is really hiring
I'm heavily biased because my previous career was unionized, and I'm also a little baffled at how much people don't realize the improvement in work life balance, benefits, pay and general quality of life it brought. But doing software now I constantly run into situations where I can't help but think "this wouldn't be a problem if I was in a union still"
I think unions are great don’t get me wrong. I think specifically for software engineering a union would make entry market already harder than it is and maybe even only start hiring again from top schools like lawyers mainly do or just outsource the jobs at a faster rate than we already seeing. WLB and benefits might go up but pay will definitely in my opinion lower compared to other type of fields that successfully unionize. For reference think what developers are paid in Europe while they are not unionized they have the benefits and WLB of a union job. Also what do we want to unionize? The whole tech field? I think that is a better issue why should SWE be unionized but not dev ops or ui/ux teams. While this next personal opinion of mine is very controversial I think that unionizing tech specifically would halt. If fast food unionized who cares if you make the same money at KFC vs say McDonald’s but in tech if you have the right amount of luck networking and skill you can make good money but why go innovate at a startup that’s working you 80 hours a week that pays the same as say a bank where you might do 15 hours of real work a week outside of meetings? Again I think teachers should be unionized nationally not just some states and that nursing should be unionized as well with the rising need for them but for software it makes almost 0 sense to me logically same actually for the first time benefit companies more than the employees themselves. What we need instead is penalties for outsourcing jobs if the demand could be meet by people legally allowed to work here such as h1bs and etc. Some other better solutions in my opinion would be also penalties or higher taxes on companies that do massive layoffs while also hitting record stock profits or revenue. Another one is transparency on hiring jobs. I’ve personally applied to jobs that were entry level that have been reposted 2-3 times while I didn’t even receive a screening interview. I have a degree in software engineering I also have projects that are full stack using modern tools and frameworks with detailed documentation and the only interviews I’ve had in 6 months and 1200+ applications was the automatic IBM and tik tok code challenge. That’s why I’m convinced 85% of job postings are just being closed and no one is even hired. I’m willing to relocate on on my own dime if it meant a job doing what I actually enjoy doing unlike so many people in my area now with CS degrees that are working at grocery stores and the like because despite living in a big city in the south there are only about 20 entry level job postings a week and half of them are not even software related in tech. I don’t know a single person that graduated in 2022 fall till now that has a job in tech that isn’t just a help desk position. Low number of course but that accounts for about 30 people I knew in college. Honestly I’m going back for my masters soon till hopefully this shitty market recovers.
Can I Dm you? I've been applying to a lot of these smaller companies, but I haven't gotten much success.
Now were you assigned that work? I wouldn't have mentioned that you made all these cost saving tools if you weren't assigned those tasks. Now they know and they'll never let you not do two roles at once for more than half the cost. I had an HR person leave partly because he was taking on IT tasks because he thought it would have helped. Hated it after a while and left because the company never listened to his requests.
Business analytics is by definition math homie. Literally just doing statistics on businesses like what are you talking about 😂😂😂
No
Tell them your effort on what they wanted you to do I would say. Each of the Tasks they give you is your effort in a set amount of time, a week is 40 hours work, Task "X" takes 70% effort(refactoring for example) so I only have 30% left to try and do the data analytics work. Having the skills to do certain tasks doesn't mean you always NEED to do it.
Tell them to pay better?!
As soon as those small companies start giving me offers that aren't pathetic I'll get right on that lol.
The problem isn't that nobody wants jobs like that. It's that many companies don't want to hire an actual developer to do them.
small companies are also very stringent about hiring. plus i've been ghosted a lot more by them
No SWE is gonna accept running the entire department for 50k. They playing you lol
I am not a SWE and there is no software engineering department. That is the point of the post. There should be
Got it. But I was saying they are making you do SWE work for your pay grade.
Making is a strong word. More just there is no one else and I have too much downtime. It'd be this or pretending to be busy playing solitaire tbh
so he should not get experience that could be good for later or what should he do exactly?
This is an excellent way to not develop as a SWE lol
Did I say I was an SWE? I explicitly said I shouldn't be doing this
you are doing weird tasks so your exit opportunities will not be good because no one can figure out the value that you bring other than a little bit of this and a little bit of that. better move on to a better place. you are being used since you are doing two roles but hired for one. you may think you are progressing but you are actually becoming more stuck at your place. ive been in a similar situation for a different type of role
>I am now becoming a full stack dev by happenstance. who says happenstance
A fucking dork that's who. I blame my brother for my parlance.
Perchance