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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I would ask for more like $80k based on your previous experience and the market rates you posted. The worst they’ll do is say they can’t meet it, but it’s likely they’ll meet you in the middle. It’s always a good idea to ask for more than you think you’ll get!
I would try and avoid offering a salary expectation if you can. Do the song and dance where you them make a first offer and negotiate from there. I’m not sure if it’s the same in your area, but from what I can tell the job market is a bit nuts at the moment and tech employees have a fair bit of leverage.
I've been helping some volunteer groups after work with logistics-oriented stuff surrounding Ukrainian refugees in my area, helping people reunite after fleeing the war. It's been a blur.
On a less serious note, I interviewed with a company I like for a software dev job. They invited me back for another interview, and told me to prepare a 15-minute presentation on the Rust programming language for it (since I mentioned that I use it a lot and enjoy it). I'm trying to think of what to do for the presentation since 15 minutes isn't too much time, and I'm kind of nervous since I haven't done much "official" presenting and I have no idea what I'm doing.
My main advice for presentations is to practice at least a few times out loud. Preferably with somebody in the room. And slow down! I always end up talking too fast, haha.
Update to the latter part of my post, for those who care: I went through with the interview, did the presentation (which went pretty well, mostly because I had a huge paper taped behind my screen that said "SLOW DOWN" thanks to @autumn's advice), and I thought it went okay overall. It was planned to be an hour and a half, but booked for two just in case, which came in handy since we used all 2 hours of it.
I got a response today, or roughly 40 business minutes after the interview (nice). They extended a not-in-writing offer, but for roughly 10-15% less than initially given, due to certain weaknesses they felt I had (which is frustrating, since said weaknesses were in the job description's "nice to have" category) and could easily be made up on the job. Feeling pretty gutted at the moment.
The sad part is that even though this is a red flag, I'm going to try to negotiate back up to the original quote and see if I can get any extra benefits out of it.
On the plus side, I got actual feedback on my interview, which was a nice surprise.
Glad the advice helped! Definitely get the money you deserve. I really hate bullet point job descriptions, even though I get why they post them. Hopefully you can needle them into giving you the correct salary and benefits. :)
Update two: negotiations failed. Shame. We both wanted for it to happen, but the math just didn't work out.
I panicked about my graduation development project. I was under the impression that with Wix, a largely no-code environment, it was about the features we implemented and understanding the underlying systems at work, not about how we did it. Class comes around on Monday and we've got to have code to show that we did some actual development on our code, which feels like he should have clarified earlier instead of talking about how difficult it could be to use new languages and/or frameworks, and suggesting we just use Wix, which uses Javascript, which is not taught in the program at all. I spent six hours that night hacking out a way to notify mailing list subscribers that we've received their subscription, but got it to work, and have something ready for our product, which I guess is good enough. I feel much better, and am coming up with feature ideas for our next sprint, as our direction has been forced to change a bit.
I then did St. Patrick's day with my brothers and twin's wife, and again with my mom and other brother, which means a lot of corned beef, but I'll never say no to it.
I got back from a short cruise.
Actually it was a few days ago, but I spent the last few days lounging and recovering from the trip.
Had a ton of fun, but we were hoping to go on this trip partially because we wanted to see what it would be like compared to the more expensive cruise lines we've been to in the past, and me and the husband both agree that it's not really for us. We made it worse for ourselves by choosing a time that happened to coincide with Spring Break and had to deal with extremely loud teenagers. We were contemplating skipping the ports and enjoying the ship amenities instead since it was newly refurbished, but there were a bunch of small things stopping us from enjoying them.
Weirdly the entertainment on this trip was so bad that it often ventured into "offensive" territories at points. Every day on the lido deck they had a steel drum performance, but it was just one person playing aged pop songs accompanied by a MIDI playback device. If you've ever taken a midi file and changed the main instrument to steel drum, you'll know exactly what every performance was like. They did surprisingly have a trio of violinists playing occasionally, but they frequently played the same types of performances, which was disappointing to say the least. The two staged theatrical performances were all jukebox musicals with zero stories, and both exclusively featured music written roughly 60 years ago. While the performances and technical production were absolutely fantastic, there just wasn't any substance behind it.
I know those examples weren't particularly offensive, but the thing they don't tell you when you are choosing your cabin is that the atrium reaches up through every deck with cabins in them. So if you're anywhere near the elevators that go through them, you're going to get those cheap performances directly in your room until sometime between midnight and 1:00. And then there was the one time the band in the pub decided to play TLC's "Waterfalls" as if it were a party anthem. We experienced that while we were eating sushi, because that's where they decided to put the sushi restaurant for some reason.