So, by some miracle, a new video came out from the DOU “editorial team” of “journalists” without SoftServe’s involvement.

Since this is a very rare moment, I decided to review this podcast too :)

Below you can jump to the videos by timecode and read my comments.

This is purely entertainment content; any resemblance to real names and titles is coincidental.
In general, this podcast is the most fun and cool one ever released by the DOU team and editorial staff of journalists!

05:44-10:00 Why Recruiters

Everyone who asks “why do we even need recruiters” has either never hired anyone themselves, or hired very few. Once you start hiring a lot, it becomes your job and you turn into a recruiter yourself lol.

I’ve had the chance to work with excellent recruiters on both sides, and they were always very much to the point. If someone thinks he’s such a diamond that the CTO or VP of Eng should be headhunting him personally, you’re mistaken. Because there’s so much junk on the market that you’d just hang yourself sorting through it all.

The main whims of candidates:

• They check your English? Well, yes, there are characters who after 10 years in the outsourcing galleys can’t put two words together and then just hem and haw. By the way, among the new generation this almost never happens, their English is at a pretty high level! Which can’t help but make me happy :)

• They ask for clarification on some positions in your CV? If the team is interested in specific technologies or experience, they ask recruiters to narrow the search filters. If experience with a particular technology is really important on the project, then yes, the recruiter will grill you about it. Especially since technically they’re not testing you, but they can ask questions to add more information to your profile.

So why show off like that, let alone look down on recruiters - I don’t understand, just like the podcast hosts don’t. Forgot 2008, when people were crawling on their knees after whole offices of cattle farms got washed up on the shore? When 300-400 Java devs were landing on the beach every day. I know of cases when recruiters were even paid just to be considered. And now look at that, they asked about English… ew..

09:30-10:30 About Dad

Thanks for the reference :) Since DOU completely dominates our space, someone has to create a new center of gravity (without the crap from staff gestalt charlatans of SoftServed sitting on the front page for 4 days).

Other authors embarrass themselves by posting their technical articles somewhere on the 4th sub-tab from the main page, where nobody ever goes.

And having your article sit next to an ad by some Kvitka Tsysyk from SoftServed about the burnout of the plebs in the galleys (which of course passed review by the DOU “editorial team” of “journalists”) is not something I’m keen on.

15:19 GitLab hid its salary calculator / Companies keep salaries hush-hush

Why do companies forbid colleagues from sharing their salaries with each other? Because there’s always a sucker who gets paid 0.5x but does 3x the work for everyone. Always. So for the company, keeping such facts quiet is a very convenient option, so that this sucker doesn’t leave and keeps working. You can also throw him +0.2x a year later and the sucker will work even harder.

It’s also a manipulation technique used by management. For example, you tell one Full Time Equivalent that he got the biggest bonus (130%), so he’s the coolest in the company. Then the same manager tells another one: you got the biggest bonus on the team, a whole 115%!! I fought for it personally with the CFO, put my career on the line for your raise!! Then he tells the third one: you got… Well, you get the algorithm.

If you want to find out whether you’re a sucker or not, go to some interviews, you’ll learn everything there :)

18:00 About salary raises

Judging by Twitter, many companies in the EU are doing preventive salary raises to beat inflation and somehow keep their developers.

I recommend following @Gergely Orosz, he’s a former Sr Staff Engineer at Uber and constantly posts a ton of insider info and opinions. One of the best Twitter accounts. If you scroll through his tweets, he regularly posts anonymous data on new salaries across Europe. By the looks of it, if you don’t get a 20-30% raise by February, you’re getting screwed. So off to leetcode!

We are, of course, not the EU, but many of our people work for those companies. So Ukraine only becomes more attractive to them, because:

• Good level of English
• Time zone +1(2)
• Unlike the Germans, offices aren’t empty at 16:00 and nobody goes on a 6-month sabbatical to “find themselves” (getting fucked in the ass somewhere in Hong Kong for half a year).
• High level of specialists

So every wave of 20-30k salary raises there means yet another business has become interested in hiring a couple of Ukrainians here with the change :)

37:02 About stock

All this stock and its holders remind me of Soviet folks who had 20,000 - 40,000 rubles (that’s about 4-6 cars) in the state savings bank, dreaming about the future and how they’d use all that money someday. Except then the end came and it all vanished. Same with these pieces of paper: you have virtual money that you might somehow use someday, if this tech bubble doesn’t burst and leave you with nothing.

I read a tweet by a Googler who joined the company in 2011. He showed a screenshot: he has 1 million dollars in stock! Everyone went crazy, of course, well done, now that’s success! And I remembered my godfather, who started importing computers in the 90s and made insane margins on it. He kept about 40k bucks somewhere, which for the 90s was simply cosmic money. Except he never spent it, and what’s 40k now? A new car from the dealership. You can’t even buy a house. But he was smoldering over that money, just like this Googler with his 1 mil. Mind you, you’ll pay at least 50% tax on it, and in advance too. That is, to cash out 1 mil, you have to pay 500k up front :)

I personally have stock in my company, it’s granted for outstanding achievements, but I sell it as soon as I get the chance. You only live once, and it’s now!

59:02 About education

They brought up this topic again. I’ve already described it in great detail in my #metapersona profile:

On the Importance of Education

What’s interesting: yet another confirmation that those who say education is useless either work as form-slappers now, or studied at some crappy universities.

They also discuss another post on DOU, where a KPI guy from the Radio Engineering Faculty studied Television, then went to a galley as a frontend dev, and OH MY GOD. He doesn’t need Television there! Shocking!

Get a grip! Studied to be a programmer, went to work as a lawyer, education is useless! Wasted 5 years!

Actually, just read that imperishable masterpiece of mine. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

01:19:10 The sale of DepositPhotos

For some reason the DOU crowd (the dwellers of lower DOU) all shat themselves over how it was sold so cheaply, look, GitLab is already worth 19 billion, Grammarly 30. And here, ew, 80 million. You won’t even dream of 4 million in 40 years, but he pulled it off and can already rest. Or work on something else, without the pressure. One should only be happy about something like that. Any of us could have built a stock photo site in PHP in 2011 and had 20-30 million in our pockets by now.

That’s all

That wraps up the second DOU review. Looking forward to the New Year’s episode!