> "Full-stack engineer" has also been stolen from us by recruiter to refer to frontend devs. WTF.
Pretty much yeah. I can relate to everything you write there. I always thought most of this is related to when I learned reverse engineering in high school. That's basically when I started understanding memory and why it mattered.
Unfortunately recruiters also don't understand the kind of profile, they just lump us in the group of "generalists" and say you need to specialize if you want to progress and yet in a lot of projects I often ended up understanding more about the details than the so called specialists.
I once had a client that I saved dozens of millions a year due to a fix that they had accepted as "just part of the system" only for the manager to fire me with a severance, because by fixing it I undermined his decision to scrap the project.
Amen to this. When I explain to full stack web devs that I do bare metal C, Python + Linux on edge nodes, server side processing, and native mobile apps they either say “you should AWS, we really like AWS” or “wow, so you’re like the real kind of full stack”.
Self deprecation and lauding aside, I’m curious what new titles others would propose? When I migrated into the field many moons ago, the two titles I saw mostly were “analysts” and “programmer”. The first had underpaid connotations, the second was rife with social awkwardness cues that Hollywood had run with for a while.
Classic principal-agent problem. Additionally I think you misunderstood who your employer was and what your job was!
But very very frustrating for the world to work in such an anti-productive and nonsensical way. I also wonder if you would have been fired anyways when the old system was scrapped.
> Additionally I think you misunderstood who your employer was and what your job was!
I've heard that one before, so I'm going to agree. It's also inline with what the guy told me.
The system wasn't being scrapped they were just going to pay for almost triple the infrastructure. But yes, this was the first time I was exposed to performance reviews, I was as you said hired for something else entirely and it's possible that I would have been fired anyways since my job was actually about writing firmware and migration tools to migrate away from the old system(which also saved them a couple of millions a year). The performance review itself was however about tasks completely unrelated to what I got hired for.
I have done mostly contract work since then, but I am wondering if it is common to put your actual job content into your hiring documents to make sure people don't do performance reviews about unrelated tasks?
> I have done mostly contract work since then, but I am wondering if it is common to put your actual job content into your hiring documents to make sure people don't do performance reviews about unrelated tasks?
Honestly for contract work (and usually also full-time employees), the best thing you can do is focus on all the people who are responsible for your performance review and make them happy, make their initiatives look good, and get along with them so that they like you. Sometimes this means doing completely different work than you thought you were hired to do. Or doing all that in addition to what you were hired for.
The absolute worst case for a contractor is that you're "hired to fail" where there's a project with a 90% chance of failing so they bring in a contractor/team who either miraculously save it, or you're blamed for the expected failure. However, even here, if you show competence and make friends with the people who will stab you in the back in the short term, you may also find that some of them call for your services again in the future -- because you did "the job you were hired to do" and made it easy for them, made them look good, and were enjoyable to be around.
The written "rules" of the performance review don't matter, at least in the USA (maybe different in other countries). Performance reviews basically boil down to "how much do I like working with this person?" which definitely includes competence (people mildly dislike working with incompetent people), but also includes things like "makes my day happier" or "great conversation over beers / at the sports game".
I'm mid 30's and have worked a few contracting gigs but never really made it work out (usually it coincided with life being a little too chaotic at the time for me to fully focus on my client). So hopefully some others with more experience will chime in. But there's a lot written on this topic on HN, you can find a lot of experienced views from all sides of the table with a bit of searching!
Pretty much yeah. I can relate to everything you write there. I always thought most of this is related to when I learned reverse engineering in high school. That's basically when I started understanding memory and why it mattered.
Unfortunately recruiters also don't understand the kind of profile, they just lump us in the group of "generalists" and say you need to specialize if you want to progress and yet in a lot of projects I often ended up understanding more about the details than the so called specialists.
I once had a client that I saved dozens of millions a year due to a fix that they had accepted as "just part of the system" only for the manager to fire me with a severance, because by fixing it I undermined his decision to scrap the project.