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Hmm I guess that's fair. What more information can I provide to narrow it down?
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Dec 3, 2014 23:45
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What kind of work you'll be doing, your past work history, anything you know about the work environment itself.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:48
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Cicero posted:What kind of work you'll be doing, your past work history, anything you know about the work environment itself. Ok great. I'm not looking to get a number out of this thread really, more gain some insight into how to think about pricing consulting work. I guess this highlights that pretty much every job needs to be priced differently! I would be working remotely. I have a good history with this company and specifically with the project they want help on, as I was its principal developer at one point. Aside from that I have limited (2 yrs) working experience as a software engineer. This particular brand of software engineering (ASP MVC development) is right in my wheelhouse experience-wise. I guess my personal history with the company and their project are the most important things, though! Very different from starting a freelance relationship fresh. What other things should I be thinking about/looking at before I give them a rate?
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Dec 4, 2014 00:59
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Cicero posted:I'm less familiar with the more senior-level pay (would just look at glassdoor), but for new grads looks like Amazon is paying ~95k base + 27k signing bonus. 122k for your first year out of college sounds like pretty good pay to me, although it's true that Amazon's benefits aren't as nice as the other companies and Seattle is expensive (although a lot less so than NYC or SF). you can definitely negotiate those numbers up, even if youre a new grad or have not a lot of experience. also it seems over the past 4 or so years amazon has gotten much better about being competitive wrt salary, which is oddly enough about when they started really ramping up growth? EDIT: and thats not including RSUs. amazon likes to compensate in stock. as for horror stories, i think somebody in yospos described amazon best as a thousand companies all using the same name. we're a serious SOA company and we're trending towards making decoupling even easier, with the platonic ideal being every team owning their own service on their own fleet and controlling that end to end. with this much autonomy a team can basically run itself however it sees fit so long as its commitments are met, which can end up being good or bad. FamDav fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 02:32
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Wardende posted:Hi guys. What's a good hourly rate for a .NET contractor in the Bay Area, or what resources would I use to find out? Do glass door etc. work for contractor gigs? I have a company offering me some part time work and the rate looks good to me but I have no experience with that so I want to make sure I couldn't get more! Is this by chance a startup that does stuff with real estate?
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Dec 4, 2014 07:09
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This is maybe a little out of left field, but is my position as board president at my Co-Op something that should go on my resume? It's not industry-relevant, it's part-time and I'm only president instead of a regular board member because I haven't been around long enough for a sizable minority of the members to hate me yet, but I'm still the legally liable president of what is technically a corporation with a net worth in the millions, so maybe that should count for something? If you saw that on the resume of someone applying for a software job, would you roll your eyes and get mad at me for wasting the seconds you spent reading it or think it's a positive thing?
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Dec 4, 2014 07:18
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Space Whale posted:Is this by chance a startup that does stuff with real estate? It is not! Why?
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Dec 4, 2014 12:59
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Today I accepted a job that I feel pretty certain that I wouldn't have secured without the advice in this thread, especially the OP. I'm pretty excited to have my plans to switch careers into programming finally come true. Thanks, thread!
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Dec 5, 2014 00:37
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Makeout Patrol posted:Today I accepted a job that I feel pretty certain that I wouldn't have secured without the advice in this thread, especially the OP. I'm pretty excited to have my plans to switch careers into programming finally come true. Thanks, thread! Congrats. How did you switch? I'm always curious, because I went a pretty different route myself and got into it pretty late.
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Dec 5, 2014 01:38
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Makeout Patrol posted:Today I accepted a job that I feel pretty certain that I wouldn't have secured without the advice in this thread, especially the OP. I'm pretty excited to have my plans to switch careers into programming finally come true. Thanks, thread! Grats! Edit: IF YOU WAIT UNTIL YOU GRADUATE TO LOOK FOR JOBS YOU'RE AN IDIOT! DO NOT DO THIS. If this means not getting an offer before I graduate, I'm dangerously close to this  .
Tezzeract fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 01:50
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Doghouse posted:Congrats. How did you switch? I'm always curious, because I went a pretty different route myself and got into it pretty late. I originally wanted to be a journalist because I got suckered in by the joys of student journalism and managed to wilfully ignore that there are no opportunities for anything but freelancers (which I don't want to rely on for my full paycheque). I eventually ended up as the business manager of my old student newspaper and started taking night programming courses. A lot of it was review of stuff I'd taught myself already. I worked on a lot of unity stuff and wrote an open-source application that organizes your TV episode files for you. I still have one course left before I have an "applied software development" certificate but I started going through the stuff in the Cracking the Coding Interview book listed in the OP and firing out applications in mid-November. The job I accepted was actually the second resume I sent out; I also interviewed elsewhere, but I'm super-impressed with this company, it's in my language of choice, and it's a great career builder as near as I can tell. My only regret is not asking for more money, because their offer exceeded what I'd asked for, but there are significantly worse problems to have.
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Dec 5, 2014 01:50
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Haha I also wanted to be a writer, got an English degree and then realized I could not possibly make money. Welp, software development is more fun anyway.
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Dec 5, 2014 02:24
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I have a bachelor's and a master's degree in music, and now I write CRUD web services and front-end stuff and get paid more than I ever could have possibly dreamed.
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Dec 5, 2014 02:26
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Wardende posted:It is not! Why? A shop that did what I was speaking about was talking to me about some remote work, but you're talking to someone else, welp.
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Dec 5, 2014 02:59
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I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned but there are plenty of emotional benefits of working for a startup: Power, authority, excitement, sense of purpose and responsibility. All of those trump being a cog. When the CEO consults with you personally before doing anything major. Personally, I've worked for small, medium, and fortune 100 companies. I prefer medium as the perfect balance.
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Dec 5, 2014 04:16
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Hey guys... I've gotten okay at doing coding interviews at this point - problem is that companies don't like my experience. I got most of my experience doing a 2 year full-stack development project with a tiny team. I just got rejected from one of the bigger/more selective companies and basically was told that my performance during the coding sections was passable if I'd worked somewhere good in the past, but because I hadn't worked for a really legit company before the bar was basically a little higher. (Obviously, I will continue studying coding interview stuff, because if I get an opportunity like this again I'd really like to make it difficult for them to not hire me.) At this point, I'm pretty adrift - I have no idea what sort of company to work for. I feel like for someone with a pretty non-specialized webdev background there's only startups (in which I have no interest at this point, and interviewers can tell even if I try to pretend otherwise) or really big prestigious companies. I've been working with some recruiters who are supposed to be really good, but most of the companies that use them are either early-stage startups and/or are looking for someone more senior. If you have any advice for what sort of places in NYC I should be looking at, let me know.
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Dec 5, 2014 05:02
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wide stance posted:I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned but there are plenty of emotional benefits of working for a startup: None of those trump going home at five and being paid real money.
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Dec 5, 2014 05:09
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Today's my last day before a week holiday and starting my new job! I'm excited, but mildly apprehensive, considering that apparently I impressed the head of development in the interview by doing a recursive fibonacci implementation, which maybe doesn't seem all that impressive to me. They have a really swanky office, though, and not wearing shirt and tie is a nice bonus. Unrelated: What are people's opinions on Computer Science conversion courses? I'm fairly sure I'll never actually *need* to do one, but it might be something I'd like to do at some unspecified point in the future. I have next to no theoretical CS knowledge so I can't really go on to do a standard CS course.
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Dec 5, 2014 08:35
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Surprise T Rex posted:Today's my last day before a week holiday and starting my new job! A naive recursive fibonacci implementation? Because that's one of the worst ways to do it. Or was there memoization involved?
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Dec 5, 2014 14:16
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Yeah, I kind of panicked since it's the first interview I've ever had to code in. I just threw out the first method of doing it that I could think of, and he moved on after that, then later said that I did really well in the practical coding bit of the interview. ...Now I feel like I really need to brush up on my CS fundamentals, things like memoization (I nearly had to google to remember what that meant) and recursion are things I'm super weak on, hence the question about CS degrees.
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Dec 5, 2014 14:45
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Blotto Skorzany posted:I imagine that most external recruiters would be scared of getting cheated out of part or all of their commission if they weren't the middleman in salary negotiations and thus privy to the final offer and acceptance thereof. Yep. If you have a good recruiter (they exist, but it's like finding a unicorn) then they will keep you in the loop on any salary details but it's like any agent: since they get a small percentage, increases in 5k a year is peanuts to them (maybe a few hundred $) compared to sealing the deal (tens of thousands) , so they will push for acceptance.
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Dec 5, 2014 14:57
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Surprise T Rex posted:Yeah, I kind of panicked since it's the first interview I've ever had to code in. I just threw out the first method of doing it that I could think of, and he moved on after that, then later said that I did really well in the practical coding bit of the interview. I wouldn't worry about memoization and dynamic programming too much. I've never been asked a question that required one of them to solve (maybe I've had a "How could you speed this up?" "Oh, maybe if I cached results to previous calculations." "Ok, good." but that's it). I think those kinds of problems end up taking up too long for a 45min/1hr. interview. I just want to say I'm super impressed with all of the people that were able to change their careers and get any kind of job. I can't even imagine how hard it would be for me to change careers. I don't know how to do anything else and I don't want to do anything else. Congrats to everybody.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:29
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How come all the talk in this thread is either like the Big 4 or unknown startups, and never companies like Intel or Sun? Seems like they have a lot of smart developers there. What's working there like?
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Dec 5, 2014 16:12
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Does Sun still exist? Thought they got folded into Oracle after the buyout. Yung istib prents used to work there [e: Oracle, not Sun], not sure whether he still posts in CoC though.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:14
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perfectfire posted:I wouldn't worry about memoization and dynamic programming too much. I've never been asked a question that required one of them to solve (maybe I've had a "How could you speed this up?" "Oh, maybe if I cached results to previous calculations." "Ok, good." but that's it). I think those kinds of problems end up taking up too long for a 45min/1hr. interview. I feel like adding memoization after the fact is pretty quick in a lot of sample interview problems I've seen, and that's assuming you went for the recursive solution instead of the iterative one. While we're on the topic of interview questions, how commonly can I expect to be asked to prove an algorithm's correctness? Basically never? Pie Colony posted:How come all the talk in this thread is either like the Big 4 or unknown startups, and never companies like Intel or Sun? Seems like they have a lot of smart developers there. What's working there like? I was under the impression that companies like Intel, Oracle, etc. have the same hiring standards as the Big 4, but worse compensation and working environments. Am I wrong?
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Dec 5, 2014 16:16
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Blotto Skorzany posted:Does Sun still exist? Thought they got folded into Oracle after the buyout. Yung istib prents used to work there [e: Oracle, not Sun], not sure whether he still posts in CoC though. Even if any organization within Oracle exists that might have resembled pre-buyout Sun, I'd have to think that anyone who was good bolted for the exits in 2009 when the deal closed.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:31
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Is taking a QA role @ my employer a bad idea if I would eventually like to move into doing actual software/web development at some point in my life? I can't really say with confidence that they will ever move me out of it, and I'm worried that having no experience might be better than having only QA experience (because recruiters/companies may want to pigeonhole me into doing QA for the rest of my life).
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Dec 5, 2014 16:36
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Blotto Skorzany posted:Does Sun still exist? Thought they got folded into Oracle after the buyout. Yung istib prents used to work there [e: Oracle, not Sun], not sure whether he still posts in CoC though. Yeah I guess you're right, shows how little I know about it.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:41
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The March Hare posted:Is taking a QA role @ my employer a bad idea if I would eventually like to move into doing actual software/web development at some point in my life? I can't really say with confidence that they will ever move me out of it, and I'm worried that having no experience might be better than having only QA experience (because recruiters/companies may want to pigeonhole me into doing QA for the rest of my life). This is a legitimate concern here, especially if the QA role is not as a Test Engineer/SDET, but rather as a QA grunt. On the other hand, if you tell your boss that the reason you want to do QA is so that you can eventually move to development, and they respond positively, you might have something. Why can't you just go apply for development positions right now though?
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Dec 5, 2014 16:55
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The March Hare posted:Is taking a QA role @ my employer a bad idea if I would eventually like to move into doing actual software/web development at some point in my life? I can't really say with confidence that they will ever move me out of it, and I'm worried that having no experience might be better than having only QA experience (because recruiters/companies may want to pigeonhole me into doing QA for the rest of my life). It's not worse than no experience, but it might be the same as no experience, depending on the QA. What, exactly, will you be doing? If you're clicking on buttons trying to crash the program and filing bugs you're not in good shape. QA is generally under-appreciated and you'll get treated like a lab monkey. If you're writing code to perform tests, you're in a better place. I think SDET is the role you'd want; you write all the automated tests as part of the dev team.
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Dec 5, 2014 17:02
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I'm really not sure what kind of QA I will be doing, I have a sit-down with the dept head next Thursday to discuss the role and my salary etc. I can, and am, applying for software roles right now, but my concern is that I basically have to either accept this QA role or quit my job, as the only reason this is even on the table is that my department effectively collapsed last week when my highly specialized boss quit without notice. I was really just wondering if it might have been my own unfounded fears creeping up on me, but it looks like it may not be.
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Dec 5, 2014 17:07
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Mniot posted:I think SDET is the role you'd want; you write all the automated tests as part of the dev team. This. At Microsoft SDET is also a software engineer it's just that the software they're engineering is used to test other software.
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Dec 5, 2014 18:02
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Ah, I had a phone call with a internal recruiter. They said I passed the interview round but I have to give up my current salary before it can move forward to the hiring committee. My current place is my first job out of university, and it's in the east bay so I'm not getting top dollar. I told the person that my salary is between me and my current employer but they said the hiring process will stop without my current salary. Do I stick to my guns and not give them the info? I've put out my resume to other companies but right now this is the only place I've interviewed at so I got nothing else to fall back on. I told them I'd call them again later today.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:19
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PlesantDilemma posted:I've put out my resume to other companies but right now this is the only place I've interviewed at so I got nothing else to fall back on. edit: best advice I can come up with is that if you think you'll struggle to get another offer from a different company and you are dissatisfied with your current job, then go ahead and give up the info. If you're ok with staying with your current job for a while longer and/or think you'll do ok interviewing with other companies, then don't give it up. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 20:32
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PlesantDilemma posted:...they said the hiring process will stop without my current salary. Do I stick to my guns and not give them the info? Honestly, there is no way to justify asking someone for their current salary. If they actually shut down the interview process over that, I would consider it a bullet dodged and move on. jkyuusai fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 20:33
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sailboat posted:Have at it.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:36
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Cicero posted:Don't you have your current job to fall back on? Personally I would probably not give them the info, but my current job pays well enough to where I'm willing to take that risk. I don't think there's really a One Correct Answer here. If they're not going to budge, you could also just try: 1) lying straight-up 2) telling them that the salary you'd expect falls within the range described in their job posting 3) telling them that your present salary is under a NDA and that you're not permitted to discuss it by the terms of your present position 4) just telling them that you're not going to provide them with your salary and to please contact you in the future if they would like to discuss employment again
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Dec 5, 2014 20:47
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Lying works very well, since they can't easily check on it. Just make sure to write down your fake salary history so nobody catches you lying. It's gotten me an above market wage pretty easily. Ymmv: sample size of one.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:02
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perfectfire posted:This. At Microsoft SDET is also a software engineer it's just that the software they're engineering is used to test other software. Wait, are we talking unit tests and batch testing scripts, or things like static program analysis and formal verification (e.g. as plugins for IDEs)? Because the latter is pretty hardcore work. Safe and Secure! posted:While we're on the topic of interview questions, how commonly can I expect to be asked to prove an algorithm's correctness? Basically never? Probably basically never. Proofs of correctness for algorithms tend to have two modes: fairly obvious if you understand the code, and ridiculously complex. You should be able to explain why your idea works, which is certainly a weaker idea of proving correctness, but I don't think you're going to need to break out your proofs by strong induction or use the words "assume we have an oracle that can solve..." any time soon. The only time I can think of that, if I were an interviewer, I'd expect a semi-formal proof is if the candidate used a greedy algorithm (that wasn't well known like the greedy scheduler or whatever), because greedy algorithms are almost always obvious, and also almost always wrong.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:14
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Safe and Secure! posted:I feel like adding memoization after the fact is pretty quick in a lot of sample interview problems I've seen, and that's assuming you went for the recursive solution instead of the iterative one. more likely you'd be asked to write unit tests, which is kind of like proving correctness i guess
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Dec 5, 2014 21:24
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