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Sab669 posted:Just sent off the ol' resume to Google for two separate jobs. I'm reading their "How We Hire" page, and they say "We’re less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how you think." Hopefully my 2.8 isn't too low regardless of where their priorities are I posted more details a couple pages ago, but just algorithms & data structures times a hundred. General fundamental knowledge about how operating systems / the internet / compilers work will also be very helpful (things like virtual memory, TCP/IP, call stacks being a few specific examples off the top of my head), but really if you can come up with decent algorithms / data structures to solve nontrivial problems on the fly (not necessarily things you've memorised as they will try to avoid problems you already know the answer to) then you're most of the way there. seiken fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Aug 20, 2012 |
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Aug 20, 2012 15:41
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Kim Jong III posted:I found my current job via a recruiter -- the company didn't publicly list the position, just relied on recruiting agencies. It was a 3 month contract to hire, and as soon as I was hired full time I ended up with around an 8% bump... I'm going to guess the recruiter got around an 8% commission A company is paying a contracting company $50 an hour for a co-worker and he is only seeing $30/hr of that.
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Aug 20, 2012 15:42
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hieronymus posted:A company is paying a contracting company $50 an hour for a co-worker and he is only seeing $30/hr of that. That's exactly why I wanted to 1099 and avoid contracting agencies. What the hell is that company doing that deserves a 66% commission?
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Aug 20, 2012 15:56
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Kim Jong III posted:That's exactly why I wanted to 1099 and avoid contracting agencies. What the hell is that company doing that deserves a 66% commission? The company is paying for the ability to fire without it being a pain in the rear end. You are actually better off though if you are an independent contractor - independent contractor means serious money as you can get paid for overtime doing software development.
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Aug 20, 2012 15:58
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hieronymus posted:A company is paying a contracting company $50 an hour for a co-worker and he is only seeing $30/hr of that. That sounds about right, assuming he's getting full benefits from the contracting company.
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Aug 20, 2012 16:33
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The chances of getting hired at google with a 2.8 gpa are pretty much zero based on the stories I've heard online. Unless you are a rockstar programmer in your free time and just didn't care about school, even then I would say it's a long shot. Obviously, you should still try since stranger things have happened.
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Aug 20, 2012 16:38
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Yea that's pretty much how I felt, but what's the worst that could happen? 
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Aug 20, 2012 16:57
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hieronymus posted:The company is paying for the ability to fire without it being a pain in the rear end. Ah, yeah - I keep forgetting that I work in a state that can be actively hostile towards worker's rights  As for independent contracting, I've got some friends that are doing it, loving it, and making crazy money. I just wouldn't know where to begin with the whole "find clients, build relationships" -- the business side. Any tips?
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Aug 20, 2012 17:06
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Kim Jong III posted:Ah, yeah - I keep forgetting that I work in a state that can be actively hostile towards worker's rights The best way to become an independent contractor is to work at a software company a bunch of years, be invaluable, get burned out, leave, have a major crisis occur because you left, get offered to come back, ask to be a contractor, and then get paid the big bucks.
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Aug 20, 2012 18:53
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If you are a rockstar programmer who didn't care about school, it'd be pretty hard to get significantly below a 3.5 even if you put in "no" effort. Absolutely impossible for CS in-major GPA.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:02
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shrughes posted:If you are a rockstar programmer who didn't care about school, it'd be pretty hard to get significantly below a 3.5 even if you put in "no" effort. Absolutely impossible for CS in-major GPA. In-major, yeah, but I knew plenty of people in college who were absolutely bombing their gen-ed stuff because they'd do their CS coursework, then hack on side projects, rather than doing the other work that needed being done.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:05
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That is definitely true. Probably the best way to get employed by google if your college grades were mediocre would be to work somewhere else for ~3-5 years and work on do lots of side projects in your free time.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:18
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Hello, thread. I'm a soon to be graduating (I'll be done with school in mid-December) Computer Science major and have a couple general questions about how I should go about my next couple of months. Thankfully I've had a decent amount of programming experience outside of classwork, so I hope that will help bolster my resume since my GPA hasn't been the best (roughly 2.7 GPA). This last semester is simply tying up some loose Upper-Division General Ed. classes so no CS classes or anything strenuous. As such, I have been looking into starting to get interviews and job offers so I can have something lined up for when I graduate. Thankfully I live very close to the Bay Area so I hope I don't have too much trouble finding a decent job. First, I'l like to maybe get a little feedback on my resume. I put it up on Dice.com and have had a lot of responses from both recruiters and companies, but I was just wondering if there was anything I could do to make it better. Also, as you can tell from my resume my most important work experience was doing mobile development for both Android and iOS. Since I've been split between both platforms I feel like a bit of a 'jack of all trades, master of none'. Most of the responses I've gotten from my resume have been mobile development jobs. I enjoy the work enough and had a lot of fun developing mobile games during college, but I'm worried that if I get hired or interviewed to make a mobile app I either 1) Won't know as much as I thought I knew or 2)Be pigeon-holed into only doing mobile work for the majority of my career, which I'm not sure I want to do. I get the feeling that if I want to get a job outside of mobile dev, I'm going to have to start applying directly to companies in the Bay Area instead of poring over job boards. Does anyone have a decent resource for tech companies that may be hiring other than on websites like Dice or Indeed, or should I just try to google around and see what companies I find? My final issue is actually getting interviews. I've talked to multiple companies over the phone and spoke to many recruiters but not being available until December seems to be a big hurdle getting past the initial stage. I understand that hoping a company holds a position for me for ~4 months may be a stretch, but I still would like to be interviewing right now to make sure I'm more comfortable with the process once November and December roll around and actually hiring me soon is a possibility. Is this too early to be looking so hard for a job opportunity?
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Aug 20, 2012 20:39
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In regards to the resume, the "Objective" thing seems to be a bit newer that I've been seeing lately. *Personally* (as a student in your position; soon to be grad) I think it's pointless. That's why you send a cover letter with your resume. So I would remove it and make it all fit on 1 page. I also wouldn't list your courses with your education, just your degree and GPA if it's > 3.0 (some might even say only if it's > 3.5). Also you have a small grammatical mistake on your projects, "Designed a autonomous..." should be an instead of a. I'd probably drop the green and just go monoblack. Other than that, content-wise you seem to have a really strong resume / background. I'm sure if you applied to any programming job (be it windows dev, web, or mobile) they'd consider you even if your real-world experience is primarily mobile. I graduate even sooner than you (Sept. 29) and even with it being only a month away I find it hard to have someone give me the time of day for a job, let alone waiting until Christmas. But then everyone here says you should be looking months in advance. Worst comes to worst maybe you'll get interview experience, or you won't until it's closer to graduation. Does your school's career services do mock interviews? Mine does and while they lack the technical questions a real interview will have it's better than nothing. Some recruiters are still keeping in touch with me, but they want me to accept jobs now and I can't do that very well. Sab669 fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Aug 20, 2012 |
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Aug 20, 2012 21:01
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Can you link to some of the things you've worked on from the resume? Seems a little weird to have all the projects/jobs and not be able to go peek at the code or at least see the finished product, maybe that's just me.
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Aug 21, 2012 01:13
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Sab669 posted:Resume advice Thanks for the tips - I feel like I've read over my resume 100 times the last week or two but some things still slipped through. I understand about the objective concerns, if I directly email a company I have another resume without that section since I write a CV but I figured for posting my resume publicly on a job board it's not too bad since I can't really write a cover letter for that. seiken posted:Can you link to some of the things you've worked on from the resume? Seems a little weird to have all the projects/jobs and not be able to go peek at the code or at least see the finished product, maybe that's just me. I have a GitHub account and have thought about making those repositories public but have some reservations, because in case of the mobile development stuff it's not all my code, and is part of a game that we are actively working on so I don't know how comfortable we would be with making it open source at the moment. I also don't know if my professor would feel comfortable with her scripts that I use in the research project being public as well, but I can talk to her about that during our next meeting. I do however understand that it's very beneficial for potential employers seeing actual code I have written, I guess I can post the Game-Jam code and some of my smaller projects online. However as far as final products go, I will put in a link to the Google Play store, and give the URL for the medical analysis CGI script I made. lmao zebong fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 01:58
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Gazpacho posted:OK, so they get a cut of the company's total compensation payout. Your hourly rate is much more than your yearly rate divided by 2000 - you get health insurance and a bunch of other stuff that makes you much more valuable. If you think the recruiter is risking your chances at a job to make 10% of the increase... poo poo man you must think he is really bad at math.
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Aug 21, 2012 03:37
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shrughes posted:If you are a rockstar programmer who didn't care about school, it'd be pretty hard to get significantly below a 3.5 even if you put in "no" effort. Absolutely impossible for CS in-major GPA.
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Aug 21, 2012 04:01
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edit: ah, forget it, my rate's not up for discussion here
Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 09:37
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Moos3d posted:I'm not sure this is really true. Two of the best programmers I know (both went to ICPC world finals and interned at Google and Facebook) both have probably the lowest GPAs out of all the people I know. IIRC a lot of Silicon Valley companies are no longer looking at GPAs after some studies came out showing that there was nearly no correlation between skill at programming and GPA. There's just too many confounding factors with cheating, professors being willing to adjust grades for students they know, professors not knowing how to teach and the fact that school is structured so differently than business. A high GPA says other things about you, but as far as programming skill goes you have to actually ask the person to solve some problems.
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Aug 22, 2012 18:04
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Woo! So a huge consulting firm's child company got in touch with me yesterday. I was really impressed with all they had to say and I had a technical interview today. Bombed that... Or so I thought. Just got a call back saying they want me up in Boston tomorrow for a sit down with the head of hiring for the north east division. The rep I spoke to on the phone said it'd mostly just be a culture interview to see if I'm a good fit, and the some consulting sort of questions to see how I'd react on my feet. I have no idea what to expect of this and I'm a little nervous. I think I interview pretty well because I generally know what to expect, but I kind of fumble with my words otherwise which isn't good for face-to-face with a customer. Any ideas what kind of questions I might expect?
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Aug 22, 2012 23:31
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It's possible (likely?) that they just want to make sure you're not a total grognard who can code but not interact with other hue-monns.
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Aug 23, 2012 07:13
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Cicero posted:It's possible (likely?) that they just want to make sure you're not a total grognard who can code but not interact with other hue-monns. Yeah, "culture interview" I think means "make sure this guy isn't a complete wacko." I had something similar; several rounds of phone interviews and then they had a project manager who was in town on business meet me at a Starbucks for an in-person. We just sat there shooting the poo poo for 30 minutes and he told me what his project team was working on. Real informal.
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Aug 23, 2012 15:37
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drat I feel good. Had that second interview and it went extremely well. Have a third one next week and then I think that might be the end of it. Super amped and actually look forward to it. Should it all go well, I just wanted to thank again all the awesome goons on SH/SC. You guys have provided so much help for me, and plenty others here too.
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Aug 23, 2012 22:23
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I also need to thank all the goons here. I managed to get a paid internship as a unit test writer at a biotech company early in the summer, with a cool boss dedicated to teaching me as much as he can, thanks to a lot of the advice I read in this thread. I'm going on to get to work from home as my next college semester starts. Going to start what is going to be my third semester in a CS program. Thanks a lot, guys.
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Aug 24, 2012 12:32
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Maybe this subforum can start a goon-run recruiting/training firm, what with all the jobs that have (to a degree) come out of it.
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Aug 24, 2012 13:09
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Sab669 posted:Should it all go well, I just wanted to thank again all the awesome goons on SH/SC. You guys have provided so much help for me, and plenty others here too. I'm pretty sure I've learned more about programming by osmosis from hanging around CoC than I ever did in university lectures.
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Aug 24, 2012 13:46
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tef posted:I'm pretty sure I've learned more about programming by osmosis from hanging around CoC than I ever did in university lectures. Although I haven't posted here myself very much until quite recently, for reasons of lurk more, this is certainly true for me as well.
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Aug 24, 2012 15:06
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tef posted:I'm pretty sure I've learned more about programming by osmosis from hanging around CoC than I ever did in university lectures. definitely applies to me (if you include yospos too).
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Aug 24, 2012 15:19
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Sang- posted:definitely applies to me (if you include yospos too). Third or fourth to say the same. This subforum has been such a great resource for me as I've transitioned from something pretty much unrelated to the beginnings of a decent web dev. One of my goals is to be half as helpful as some of the people that hang out around here answering questions. Thanks!
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Aug 24, 2012 15:59
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We were all forged in Avenging Dentist's flames 
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Aug 25, 2012 05:22
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tef posted:I'm pretty sure I've learned more about programming by osmosis from hanging around CoC than I ever did in university lectures.
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Aug 25, 2012 05:35
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Dijkstracula posted:We were all forged in Avenging Dentist's flames *pours out a 40oz for our fallen comrades, avenging dentist, flowenol and tts het posted:"Programming by Osmosis" would be a really amusing name for the next trend in software development Programming by Osmosis - Social design patterns of programming. We chastise others for copying without knowledge, labelling them as cargo cultists, but even autodidacts don't learn in a vacuum. Through leveraging the patterns, you can go beyond copying your peers to internalizing their knowledge.
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Aug 25, 2012 07:33
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tef posted:Programming by Osmosis - Social design patterns of programming. We chastise others for copying without knowledge, labelling them as cargo cultists, but even autodidacts don't learn in a vacuum. Through leveraging the patterns, you can go beyond copying your peers to internalizing their knowledge.
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Aug 25, 2012 07:36
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het posted:I'm contacting Addison-Wesley as we speak. Programming by osmosis is a collection of war stories and social interaction patterns to enable your team to work as a social unit rather than as a regiment. Aiming to build on the knowledge of the group as a whole, rather than being restricted by the weaknesses of the leader. In this book we talk about 'crowd sourcing', 'pull requests', and other techniques of large scale successful projects, and show how to apply them at a macro level. For too long we have relied on coding heroics, wizards, rockstars and geniuses to get us through the software crisis. We present an alternative, enabling even the most volatile of companies to stay afloat over the high turnover and competitive market for talent. By applying conways law, you can build reliable, safe and well designed software, but you must begin by having a reliable, safe and well designed team. Refactoring begins at the social level. If you encourage your coders to take risks, you end up with risky software. It is finally time once and for all to stop playground driven software development, abandon the nine-to-five crèche, and own up to the fact that software is immature, because no-one is treated like an adult. tef fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Aug 25, 2012 |
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Aug 25, 2012 09:24
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tef posted:*pours out a 40oz for our fallen comrades, avenging dentist, flowenol and tts* Yung turkistori still posts in the c++ thread pretty frequently 
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Aug 25, 2012 19:15
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I'm a Mathematics/Computer Science major and I graduate this December. I was wondering which of the two, Abstract Algebra or Numerical Analysis, is better to take, i.e. would be more useful in the future? Either would fulfill the same graduation requirement. (Edit: They're both intro courses to their respective fields.) (Yes, I know working on personal/open source projects is far more important in getting a job as a programmer than a trivial decision like this. I guess I'm vaguely looking at a Master's in CS in the future.) Devvo fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 27, 2012 |
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Aug 27, 2012 06:18
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Devvo posted:I'm a Mathematics/Computer Science major and I graduate this December. I was wondering which of the two, Abstract Algebra or Numerical Analysis, is better to take, i.e. would be more useful in the future? Either would fulfill the same graduation requirement. (Edit: They're both intro courses to their respective fields.) No no, this is a way more important decision, because the choice between abstract algebra and numerical analysis defines you as a person in a way that you can never take back. The answer to your question might depend on what other courses you've taken and other things that you've done in the course of your mathematics degree. An abstract algebra course will be like a linear algebra course that uses the book Linear Algebra Done Right, except it will be talking about groups, groups with extra features tacked on, and galois theory (or whatever your first semester curriculum has), instead of talking about vector spaces, linear transformations, and singular value decomposition. It'll be like other proof-based math classes like real analysis or "analysis" or linear algebra except about different subject matter. I didn't take numerical analysis which is good because I can't think of any way I'd use that knowledge Not really. That's one course I kept wanting to take (or maybe I'm thinking of a course "numerical computing," which might actually be a course for babies), but every semester I tried to schedule it, the course was full or there was a scheduling conflict, or I needed to take 5 CS classes because it was my last semester and I wanted to tack on a dual major. I've done a lot more heavy floating point number computations outside of college classes than anything taking advantage of abstract algebra (but haven't done any in 5 years), and don't feel like I'd be missing any domain knowledge by not having taken an abstract algebra course, while I do feel like numerical analysis and general introductory numerical computing know-how is the biggest hole in my computing education and something I'd find more interesting. Note that "numerical analysis" can potentially be a real beast of a course.
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Aug 27, 2012 06:53
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Both have their uses: Abstract Algebra pops up in a lot of CS related work and Numerical Analysis is essentially estimations of problems that are too difficult or impossible to work out exact solutions for. Personally, I think Abstract Algebra was a lot more fun of a course, and when its subject material appears its a lot more of a "oh hey, this is that thing" than you'll ever get from Numerical Analysis. Numerical Analysis for me was simply a lot of a "can you apply this formula in a MATLAB program" than any theory, but YMMV for school/professor.
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Aug 27, 2012 07:59
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shrughes posted:That's one course I kept wanting to take (or maybe I'm thinking of a course "numerical computing," which might actually be a course for babies), but every semester I tried to schedule it, the course was full or there was a scheduling conflict, or I needed to take 5 CS classes because it was my last semester and I wanted to tack on a dual major. I've done a lot more heavy floating point number computations outside of college classes than anything taking advantage of abstract algebra (but haven't done any in 5 years), and don't feel like I'd be missing any domain knowledge by not having taken an abstract algebra course, while I do feel like numerical analysis and general introductory numerical computing know-how is the biggest hole in my computing education and something I'd find more interesting. Note that "numerical analysis" can potentially be a real beast of a course. NumComp was a course that a lot of MechE's and similar were required to take and complained about because they didn't have any domain knowledge. If you understood at the time what a subnormal was or could mentally model how floating point error in a numeric integral approximation will eventually overtake approximation error as the dominant source of error as the number of steps in the approximation approaches infinity, you wouldn't have gotten anything out of the course. There may have been a grad course that covered the topic more usefully. Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Aug 27, 2012 |
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Aug 27, 2012 13:46
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