My data structures professor graded assignments based on how they performed against teaching assistant developed test suites.

Unfortunately, too many people failing were bad for department revenue so she was replaced. Our reject rate hiring graduates for inability to program went from negligible to perhaps half.

With IBM's Santa Teresa study showing 40% more productivity from employees with quiet private spaces, those open offices are costing share holders a lot of money,

In a big, growing company
40% of a young engineer's $200K annual package is $120K
40% of a mature staff engineer's $600K annual package is $240K

Walls cost much less.

Most HR departments where software is a big part of their products (including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to use a few household names) ignore that written requirement when hiring experienced software engineers.

60-80 hours a week allows plenty of personal time. 168 hours in a week leave 112-119 waking hours with 7-8 hours of sleep each night. Subtracting just 60-80 hours leaves 32-59 hours for other things. That's a lot when you don't waste it on low-value activities like watching TV or commuting far because you chose to spend your housing budget on a larger home farther from work.

Working 60-80 hours a week for my second startup I learned to fly, made 168 skydives and 30 BASE jumps the year I counted, snowboarded some, and built a pair of stereo speakers.

OTOH, 105 hours a week for a few months at my fourth one I didn't even have time to dine with my wife. That's too much.

AP meant 27 hours of college credit I didn't have to pay for.

It meant learning calculus 1 and 2 in a small classroom with under 30 people not a lecture hall with 300+.

Both things were entirely worthwhile.

Moving somewhere outside fly-over country where software is core to businesses not a cost center does more for salaries than studying COBOL.

New grads at the big Silicon Valley tech companies are getting $170-$190K packages - like $115K salary, $100K signing bonus, and $200K restricted stock package vested over 4 years.

$2500 apartment rents and a 9.3% state marginal tax rate take a big cut out of that although it's still a net win.

>Honestly, the best thing to do in IT once you hit a certain level is ask yourself "Do I want to be a manager". If the answer is no, you essentially have to quit and go be a consultant.

Hardly, you just have to work someplace you're appreciated. Such organizations have engineering roles up to the VP level.

Principal Engineer is usually equivalent to a director, Distinguished Engineer VP, and Fellow somewhat higher.

Consider Microsoft - Principal Engineer is level 65-67 position like a director. Distinguished Engineer is a level 70 position like VP. Technical Fellow is level 80.

Such positions involve leadership but not people management and handle bigger technical problems than the ones companies delegate to consultants.

The problems are noise and interrupts. For simple problems less communication is better because minutes lost by an engineer using Google instead of his friend make a smaller impact than the fifteen minutes of context switch overhead which can result for the person interrupted. When more communication is needed people can always grab a conference room.

IIRC IBM's Santa Tersa Laboratory - Architectural design for program development lists a 40% throughput delta for engineers in quiet spaces provided by enclosed offices or with partitions at least six feet high.

With fully burdened per-engineer costs that can break $200K per annum open offices can waste at least $58K (I don't recall if the comparison was stated as 140% for the good performers implying you get $142.9K of work for $200K from slow ones or slow movers loose 40% of their throughput and don't do $80K worth of work) per engineer per year and cost more than closed offices.

_Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams_ by Demarco and Lister provides some anecdotes and hard numbers in chapters 8 "You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5" and 9 "Saving money on space."

Comparing coding wargames participants who performed in the first and fourth quartiles

57% versus 29% have "acceptably quiet" space
62% versus 19% have "acceptably private" space
38% versus 76% do not have "people often interrupt them needlessly"

Median time to complete the programming tasks was 2.1 times the best and bottom half as a whole 1.9 times the top half.

Participants with acceptably quiet spaces were also one third more likely
to produce zero defect work.

Sales is often half commission. IOW, a sales person with a $60K base salary is expected to make $120K On Target Earnings.

UPSes do nothing about emergency thermal shutdown which isn't uncommon in laptops when you use them for real work.

They do nothing about the hard power cycle needed to clear certain software failures. As shipped my laptop running Windows 7 often hung with a spinning cursor and wouldn't bring up a task manager. Occasionally it hangs solid under Linux, usually when resuming from sleep.

Sure there is.

Smart attribute ID 202 Percent Lifetime Remaining

This value is defined as:
VR = 100(MAX(EAVG)) / BL

Where:
EAVG = The average erase count for a super block (stripe of blocks)
BL = The erase count for which the part is rated (block life)

1. You may care to work for and/or recruit people from that company and not want to make their lives worse.
2. The company may be wrong.

A year after a big company acquired a startup I worked for they decided to schedule the product's end-of-life, send it over seas for maintenance, and close the office.

1. I recruited a project manager and two engineers from that group to work for my next startup and joined the PM and one engineer at the one which followed that.
2. The company wasn't happy with the quality of the outsourced engineering and had to hire people back as high-paid consultants
3. While the competing group didn't care for the product the customers did, kept buying, and got the end-of-life pushed farther into the future (a few times IIRC)

With leadership aptitude you can multiply contributions from people around you.

Without leadership skills your contribution to the bottom line is limited to what you can do personally.

When hiring an expensive senior engineer I want one with leadership skills. If I can't get that I'd rather have a less senior engineer likely to do as well or better as an individual contributor (because the work is more novel to them and likely to have them operating at a more optimal psychological arousal level) who I'm more likely to mentor into a leader than some one in industry long enough without signs of showing aptitude or motivation to lead.

As others have noted, leadership and people management are different things. I don't expect engineers to be managers or vise-versa.

>Despite many accomplishments, published papers, and more, I cannot seem to get past the canned hiring process and actually get before a hiring manager.

With a history like that you shouldn't be going through a canned hiring process.

You're doing something wrong.

Talking to former co-workers and moving into positions at companies they've vetted as decent places to work is often a great deal for all parties involved - you get a good job, work with the same excellent people again, and their company gets a known well-performing quantity. That doesn't work as well when you've progressed to leadership roles too far beyond your peers or have other career goals that are too different like making enough to cease working for money at which point you start your own companies. I suspect new peers you'd like to work with again make that a temporary situation but have yet to verify.

Where that's not reasonable as a senior person you should be having casual encounters with technical directors (in big companies only; at small companies you want to go up the food chain to some one more able and willing to speak about the business), VPs of engineering, or CTOs in person (coffee is popular) or on the phone in which both parties get a feel for each other and determine whether a long term relationship is worth pursuing at this time or in the future. A decent linkedin presence should be enough to net this with inbound contacts directly from executives in young companies and from recruiters for larger organizations.

Those recruiters fall into two broad categories - keyword matchers taking a shotgun approach, and more targeted ones that have a better understanding of how things work and what your CV implies. The former usually don't have anything interesting to offer and I don't have much experience dealing with them. The later will make introductions. Some will try to funnel you directly into a hiring process which begins with a technical phone screen, but any place you want to work (executives recognize engineers' importance to the bottom line and consider you worth their time) you can get away with not doing technical interviews on the first date and push for a personal introduction.

When the hunger comes I can stick around for dinner after which it's more convenient to keep working at my desk until I'm at a convenient stopping point (however long it takes) or I can head home, make something or wait for my wife to do that, and by the time I've eaten switching back into work mode would be too inconvenient so it waits until necessary the next day..