[Gllug] VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[Balbir Thomas]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:47 AM, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Me, I wouldn't say that I had trouble getting employed. But I DID want
> to work in the field of medical imaging, and given that at the time
> there were two (2) places in the UK with Positron Emission Tomography
> scanners - those being Aberdeen and Guys and Tommies in London (*)
> when I was offered a post as a sysadmin at Tommies I took my PhD in
> high energy nuclear physics and leapt at the chance. I didn't start to
> grizzle that they weren't offering me the same money as someone
> working in an investment bank.


I can respect that attituted and I think it is a healthy one. I would
like to believe
I share it.

One of my past employers did just that with me giving me the assurance that
my salary would be reviewed in 3 months if I did prove to be worth my
credentials.
Six months later (no review yet) they hire a guy who I had to train and who was
being paid as much as me. He had a couple of years experience in a language
named like a snake. His training was in that very language.  There were others
in that training group along with one very bright girl just out of
college. We were
designing a simple Lending Library Management System as part of the
training. A search widget was necessary for a group of n possible fields. One of
the trainees suggested giving a drop down menu with all possible combinations
of the fields. I objected on the grounds that it was not a scalable solution and
asked the trainees to calculate how many such combinations would be in the
drop down list as a function of n. There was pin drop silence till the
college girl
began to count n choose 1 + n choose 2 .. . She did not manage to simplify that
 result (2^n) but that was good enough. She was being paid 1/5th of what the guy
with a couple of years experience was. Almost immediately after
training both left
 the company to get an even higher paying job (appropriate to theri
market value
in that country) with a large MNC. His was about 20% higher and hers was
about 300% higher.

While it would be inappropriate to generalize from a single instance, as a
human being I am left with a poor impression of the ability of small startup
companies like that one to evaluate employee worth. I have heard the
bigger and older ones tend to be more sophisticated in this regard.

Now I surely don't want to start another urban legend :-) but do take what I
experienced with a pinch of salt as it may not be the rule, but an exception.

regards
bt
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