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SimpleCoax posted:Thank you. This is the type of advice I am hoping for. Just like when doing research, I'm trying not to wind up skipping over any resources that could help me out because I was unaware. I was also skeptical of sites like Monster having a bad signal to noise ratio like how Craig's List is so full of scams now. If you've got a PhD, I would not post your resume on a public forum. Surely you did some work with industry or government people who funded your degree, right? Just ask around in those circles. I would think you'd either want to be at a government facility like https://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil or at a contract research company like SRI or Lincoln labs. There are plenty of places, but they all recruit PhDs with specific degrees for projects they're working on, so they wouldn't bother sifting Monster for such a tiny set of people.
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Feb 20, 2012 07:01
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Ithaqua posted:Remember, their goal is to get you a job because they get a cut of your starting salary, not because they care about you, your happiness, or your success. Just to clarify this, they don't actually take any of your starting salary. If you get hired for $60k/year and the recruiter's contract is for 10%, then your new company pays you $60k for your first year and pays the recruiter $6k for finding you for a total payout of $66k.
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Aug 19, 2012 16:09
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Deus Rex posted:it wouldn't surprise me if, all else equal, employees hired through a recruiter earn less in salary because the company has to pay that commission. This is definitely the case. I actually had an interviewer say, "your starting salary's going to be a little lower, because I don't want to pay the recruiter"  . And, all else equal, companies will hire someone who doesn't come from a recruiter at all.The last time I was job-hunting, I was working inside of a secure area and it was a pain to duck out for a few minutes of job-hunting. Working with recruiters was amazingly convenient for me because they did all the time-consuming leg-work and only bothered me when my resume actually got a bite. They're also nice if you're looking to move or otherwise don't know where to apply (I applied to Google by myself, but a recruiter got me an interview with TripAdvisor, who were pretty cool).
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Aug 20, 2012 03:53
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Pie Colony posted:the company is lenient about when you can come in in the morning, i almost never have to stay late If you go interviewing, I suggest asking people to estimate how many hours their engineers work. A lot of places think that 60 hours/week is standard. A 60 hour week and a $10k pay-raise is more for you per-year, but a pretty significant cut in your effective hourly rate.
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Dec 28, 2012 03:02
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qntm posted:Would you really put "implemented <a specific algorithm>" on a CV? I've always found algorithm implementation fairly easy. A lot of them are even explained in terms of pseudocode. Some algorithms require more work to implement. For example, at my office we have our own implementation of the Lloyd-Topor transformation, which converts more complex logical formulas into a normalized form. The algorithm itself is dead-simple (it's just "see pattern X replace with pattern Y, repeat"), but there's no standard way of representing logic formulae internally in your system, so anyone who uses the algorithm is going to have to implement it themselves. Further, the algorithm deals purely with logic and so it's pretty abstract. In any given implementation, there are many potential optimization points (and the transform is definitely worth optimizing for us). I'd bet that if you looked at 5 implementations of Lloyd-Topor from 5 systems, they'd look nothing alike. If you had "Lloyd-Topor" on your resume then some small set of companies (like mine) would get really excited. But even at a company that didn't have anything to do with logic, you'd be able to explain how this is an example of specializing an algorithm to a specific implementation and you could talk about how you knew that optimizing this was a good idea and then how you went about it, and so on. For something like quick sort, I have a harder time imagining a case of being impressed by someone writing their own implementation. But if you were just out of college and had done a little personal project involving implementing various sort algorithms (maybe in different languages?) I could see that being a neat thing to talk about. Which is the main thing, outside of keyword-spamming. If you can talk about something you did for at least 5 minutes it can definitely go on a resume.
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Jan 4, 2013 14:58
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Bunny Cuddlin posted:Dude I am totally down to download this PDF from iaroslavski.narod.ru (which redirects to http://narod.yandex.ru/100.xhtml) It describes a quick sort varient that's a little better. But qntm was asking about putting something like "implemented the vanilla quick sort algorithm in C" on a resume, not "published a paper describing an improved quick sort algorithm with an average speed improvement of 2.3% (p=0.043)". I think the value of the latter is pretty obvious.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:55
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lmao zebong posted:Does anybody in this thread have any experiences working in a remote office? It depends enormously on who your coworkers are and on everyone's commitment to making it work. I had a job with a government contractor where everyone on my team (including boss) was at a different base than I was. They had made no plans beyond giving me the number for a weekly 4-hour phone meeting. I talked to various IT and security people to find a chat system that was acceptable, but nobody else in my group wanted to use it. They also didn't like talking on the phone more than once a week. It was really awful, and I could not leave that job fast enough. In my current job, we have only one office and everyone's fairly local, but we all work from home frequently. Everyone is on Jabber all the time (even if we're all in the office together) and the Jabber chat rooms have logging (so when you sign in, you can see the conversation that went on the day before after you left). If more than a couple of us can't make the short weekly meeting, we do it over video chat (Google Hangout). Everyone's got their phone number posted on our wiki, and I don't have any problem calling one of the other developers to chat about some complex code. It works well and if I ever wanted to move out of state, I'd strongly consider asking to be remote-only. It's a lot easier if you start out local and can bond with the rest of the group first, of course. Tell them you want to talk about the remote-office option and see what they've got to say. They should already have a plan for how you'll keep in communication with everyone else. If it sounds plausible, go talk about it more in person and try to make sure they're all serious about making an effort to keep the remote office intimately involved (because it's not an easy thing to do). You might also see how they (and you) feel about flying out to New York every so often to get in-person time with them. Or having them rent you a New York apartment for a couple months near the beginning so that you can try to make friends with everyone.
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Jan 22, 2013 05:23
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wide stance posted:Is there any good way of getting a feel for the job market in different cities? I don't have the experience/credentials for companies to fly me out for interviews. I'm making a bit of a career change. Are you trying to decide between a couple cities? Or trying to move to wherever you can get a job? What's your background that makes you sure that nobody would pay for your travel? I would just start applying. If you get to the point where they want to do an in-person interview, talk about it then.
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Jan 29, 2013 01:28
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First off, there's nothing at all shady about taking multiple personal days. Maybe your cat has cancer. Maybe you're visiting a lawyer to deal with your horrible divorce. Maybe your house is falling apart and you need to meet all kinds of contractors. All of this would be personal business that your company has no right to nose around in. Interviewing at other companies falls in exactly the same category of things you do on your own time. You just say "I need to take a personal day Thursday next week, Friday the week after, and Monday after that." There's no reason to make up lies about what you're doing. If anyone demands to know, just say "personal business." Depending on interview style, I would find multiple interviews in one day to be too much. But you could try to schedule them all in one week and just take the week off. That could make it easy to separate your focus on your current job from your focus in interviewing.
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Jan 31, 2013 07:55
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astr0man posted:Also, ZeroTheHero this is strictly anecdotal, but I know a lot of defense contractors list 3.0 minimum GPAs, but I graduated with a 2.9 and still had no problem getting hired by one out of college. I applied to Lockheed Martin and they said they wanted at 3.5 GPA (which I didn't have without doing things like "if I ignore the first semester where I did poorly and ended up re-taking all those credits..."). I just left it off my resume and ignored that part of their application. After I did some interviews and they were sure they wanted to hire me, HR said they absolutely needed my school transcript. I handed it over and got the job.
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Jun 30, 2013 16:28
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Pollyanna posted:What's the market like in Boston? Is it mostly web development, cause that's the majority of the job postings I see. Tons of stuff. I moved to Boston this year working on back-end code and had many companies to choose from. Most of them have at least some kind of web front-end, of course. Your resume doesn't look like you're a developer. Can you move the irrelevant work experience lower and move the programming projects higher? Linking to some code you've written would help a lot.
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Dec 13, 2013 16:30
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Hey how about that Penny Arcade job that was going around?Linkedin posted:Given our audience and the job at hand, this could potentially be the most competitive position we ever hire for. We're looking for a web developer / software developer / sys admin to join our small family. We’re a team of 15-20 people that essentially run Penny Arcade proper, the online store, our fulfillment center, the PAX shows, Child’s Play, PATV, and a bunch of other smaller things that no one ever hears about. We rely heavily on outside partners and vendors, but as far as managing and helping run/deploy the technical infrastructure to most of the things we do, we rely on one person. That person is you. And other highlights: quote:- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment. For people who've worried about relocation expenses, you should note that even in this job posting where they promise to over-work and under-pay you they also say they'll pay for relocation. That should give you an idea of how minor relocation expenses are from a corporate perspective.
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Dec 13, 2013 16:51
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Pollyanna posted:Er, thing is...I'm not. My Bachelors is in Engineering/Biology. I'm relatively new to programming/software development - like, "three/four months" relatively new. So I don't have much under my belt. I can share code I've written, but it's rarely much better or any more complicated than fizzbuzz or a static page served up by Flask. What I mean is, when I look at your resume I start at the top and see quote:Summer Intern, Imaging Core Technician Since you want a job as a developer, you should have something about development way up at the top. If you have work experience writing code, that goes at the top. If you're taking CS classes, that can go at the top. If you're trying to break in on your own, I think you should lead with a link to your GitHub or at least a list of hobby-projects you've done. If I see a link to some code on a resume I'll always click it, even if I'd otherwise ignore the resume.
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Dec 14, 2013 23:31
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Personal projects don't have to be giant or spectacular. One of mine that's been popular with interviewers is a MySQL->PostgreSQL converter. It doesn't come close to handling all the edge cases you'd need to be able to use it in production (I've used it twice so far and it took about an hour of adding features to get the second database to convert). What it does do, though, is demonstrate that my understanding of SQL is slightly deeper than having "what's the difference between INNER and OUTER JOIN?" memorized, that I use multiple tools (most of the conversion is done by a yacc-like grammar), and that I can design a more-than-one-step solution to a problem. That's not much more than Fizz-buzz, really. Just evidence that I can do something gets more attention than a list of programming jobs I've had. I'd guess that 20 hours of work on a project would be enough to make it worth putting on your resume. You'll want it to compile and otherwise not be total crap. A webpage that did Fizz-buzz with some dynamic flashiness would be cute and put you above half the resumes coming in. A more interesting and complex mash-up of technologies will get any good interviewer excited. If the project is something that you find fun, that will come across in the phone screen (where you should try to bring it up if they don't ask) and being excited about your own work will make you look really good.
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Dec 15, 2013 13:39
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Doghouse posted:I'm in Baltimore and most of the internship listings are government or security, which I am really not interested in, although I'll go ahead and apply anyway. What are you interested in?
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Dec 17, 2013 12:57
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Ithaqua posted:So I'm going to be up front with the first place: I just started the interview gauntlet at Google, they have a protracted hiring process, and I wouldn't be able to give an answer until mid-January at earliest, and that's assuming Google gets back to me and tells me to gently caress off after the phone interview. If they want to withdraw the offer, that's fine. If you haven't already, you should tell the Google recruiter that you've got an offer and ask them to hustle. When I interviewed with Google, it was a total of 4 weeks from first contact with their recruiter to phone screen to on-site to second on-site to them telling me "no". I was not in any hurry, but the recruiter kept telling me that if I had offers or other interviews they could speed the process up for me.
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Dec 22, 2013 01:19
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"Proficient in developing in a Linux environment" should be a pretty low bar, I think. You need to be not totally helpless in Linux and a living developer. I'd expect any developer to have basic understanding of the *nix command line. Basic means:
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Jan 2, 2014 00:15
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http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/30/questions-im-asking-in-interviews/ posted:How many women work for you? What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways? That's one I'd like to ask (specifically how many women engineers), but it feels a bit creeper-ish since I'm a man. It's been my experience that places that can't hire women also have trouble hiring men that I'd want to work with.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:13
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csammis posted:Since we're throwing out one-off data points that are totally meaningless in any broad sense, my most productive and happiest engineers are in open plan. They've repeatedly told me that they like being able to just swivel chairs and consult with each other. Different people work differently! Do you know what they were used to before an open plan? I could see an open plan being better than a cube farm (if the open plan was actually planned). But I find it hard to believe that anyone who was interested in writing code would prefer an open plan to individual offices. Or maybe they prefer talking to writing code, so open plan makes them happy (but not productive)? Personally, I found that not being able to just swivel chairs and consult was a major feature of offices, since it means you're more likely to get 30 minutes of serious thinking before someone interrupts you.
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Jan 4, 2014 00:59
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Pollyanna posted:Man, it really does seem like Boston had a lot of the good jobs. I found this which looks cool and I'm a great fit for, but I'm stuck in FL Three of my current coworkers left Florida because of the lack of jobs and moved up here to Boston.
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Jan 14, 2014 06:21
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Pollyanna posted:I ran out of money looking for jobs in Boston and moved back in with my parents in Florida. This makes it sound like you were in Boston looking for jobs. That would be silly. Just to make sure: you mean you were living in Florida, applying for jobs online, and ran out of money because you only had a few days of savings and were spending all your time job-hunting, right?
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Jan 14, 2014 12:34
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Pollyanna posted:Yep. What happened is that after graduation, I put in job applications to places and interviewed a few times, one of which was for a MUMPS-based position Wow, that's incredibly lovely of them! One lesson I've learned the hard way is that you always want deadlines: when do you expect to make a decision on hiring me? When will you know my start date? When do you expect a slot in the class to open up? What's our next step? When would you like to do the follow-up interview? If any of these times are too far out ("in a month", "I don't know, ask me again in a few weeks") then treat it as a soft rejection. Interview other places, take another job, and just notify the first company when you're no longer available. If they happen to get back to you with an offer letter before you've accepted anywhere else, then it's a pleasant surprise. (But a place that doesn't want you badly enough to figure out how to make room in a class or get around a hiring freeze doesn't really want you.) If they give you reasonable deadlines but then don't keep them, call back immediately. If they said they'd call you in a week, you call them 7 days later. If they blow you off or ask for more time, treat it as a soft rejection.
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Jan 15, 2014 21:05
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Apparently I did well on the interviews and had been told I could start once they found a slot for me in their classes, but by six months in they weren't even responding to my calls. Finally, they got back to me and said they were doing a hiring freeze and couldn't take me on after all 
By that point I had struck out with all other job applications and interviews and decided that it wasn't worth sticking around and paying rent if I wasn't employed. It was only after I moved back home that I decided to look into web dev as a potential career.
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Rello posted:Also, regarding GPAs on resumes a Microsoft recruiter told me if he doesn't see it on the resume he assumes its 1.00. I'm just putting my grades in my relevant courses instead on the advice of another Microsoft recruiter. I was going to write "he sounds like a complete idiot", but you're applying for an internship while in school, which is quite different. Personally, I wouldn't care about GPA even for an intern candidate, but if you're finishing your sophmore year you probably don't even have interesting coursework to show, so they want to have something to rank you with. For someone who's graduated (or about to), though, GPA is pretty meaningless. I guess I'd want to throw out anyone who got a 1.0, but I'd expect them to be pretty obvious in a phone screen (like, they don't call). Anything above that, and I think 4 years of school is just too big a space for GPA to be meaningful. Who cares if you flunked all your freshman classes? What if you got a zero on a big assignment because it was 2 days late, even though the code was great?
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Jan 17, 2014 22:48
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:If you're not willing to spend 5-10 minutes customizing your cover letter for the position, you probably shouldn't bother applying at all I think you're a very quick writer if it only takes you 10 minutes to write the letter. It's never taken me less than half an hour to apply for a single job, and it's usually more like an hour. I read the job description, read around on their web page, and ideally find (and maybe apply to) some competitors. That usually gives me a good idea of the real job (since the job descriptions are generally poor at that). Then I make some adjustments to my resume to make sure I've got a few keywords specific to the job and, ideally, add a sentence or two that's relevant to them. Then I re-read any "about our employees" sort of section and the job description and write a cover email from scratch that tries to match their tone. That said, I agree that it's better to spend the time and have a good application to one job rather than a crappy application to 10. Mostly because taking all that time lets me do a lot of filtering and so I'm not applying to jobs that really want something that I don't want to be.
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Jan 19, 2014 14:05
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Why would a place do this poo poo? Why ask the candidate during an interview and complain if they want more than the recruiter said, especially if it's within the market rate? Well, I feel like they were pretty justified. You said you were OK with $55k, and then you flipped around and said $60k. Why are you jerking them around? This is why you don't give a number to anyone. If you say "55 to 65" this will always be interpreted as "if you offer me 55, I will accept." Some places may offer you more because they're worried about competition or they think it will motivate you, but they're doing it with the understanding that they are paying more than you think you're worth. Some places may try to bargain you down, because they figure that if you're desperate/unaware enough to ask for 55, maybe you'll take 50.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:23
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Nippashish posted:I've emailed the recruiter already, but I'm still worried about the timeline. The Facebook deadline is about a week after the interviews are scheduled, so I don't have much time at all. I started the process with both companies at the same time (slightly earlier with Google actually), Facebook has just moved much more quickly. Did you specifically say, "I have an offer from Facebook and they asked for an answer by {Monday}"? Google loses plenty of employees to Facebook, so mentioning them by name might make them try a little harder. And giving the actual deadline (instead of "soon") is important. Of course, if you liked Facebook more, don't even bother. It's not like the salary or other benefits for an internship really matters; they should both be close enough and it doesn't have any bearing on your post-doctoral salary.
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Jan 25, 2014 20:23
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perfectfire posted:I guess the thing I was hung up on was thinking that e was itself a list instead of just a single node. So I kept thinking it appended stuff, but also truncated stuff and whatever it seems even stupider now. It's not that bad. 'e' is a single node, but it could be part of some other list. The function doesn't check if e->b is already assigned, so any following nodes are getting dropped (and maybe the memory leaked?). code:code:
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Jan 28, 2014 04:47
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No Safe Word posted:There are good ones? Or is that the joke? I've posted about it before, but I'll reiterate that I've worked with several superb recruiters. (I've dealt with lovely recruiters, too.) The first sign of excellence is that they have as much technical knowledge and interest as a good engineering manager. For example, if they look at your resume and see you've listed PHP and they ask "have you worked with the rest of the LAMP stack?" that's a good sign. If you did something cool and they are excited to hear all about it, that's a good sign. If you're explaining how you were instrumental in fixing a project that used both Java 1.4 and Java 1.7 together and it was sooo crazy and they cut you off because they don't give a gently caress, that's a bad sign. Second, they should pay attention to what you want. I asked for "a small company, located in the city, some amount of start-up attitude except I don't want to be paid in stock or expected to work 100 hours." That cuts out a ton of companies, but the recruiter never wasted my time by shopping me to big places, or other non-matches. A couple times, he found companies that were close fits but were in the suburbs, so he'd email me the company name and location and ask if I wanted to relax my criteria and go after it. Third is that they should be looking at developing relationships with engineers, not at making a quick buck. If you get a call from a recruiter, just ask for references (engineers they've placed). The recruiters I liked were able to give me all kinds of useful insider information on the companies they shopped me to, because they'd placed other people there and they would check up on all their former placements and see how they were doing. I dealt with one recruiter years ago when I had less experience, and so he found an engineer to do a mock phone screen and give me tips. I didn't get a job through him then, but when I was looking for my next job I called him right up (and did get my current one through him). Fourth is that they should know the companies they're recruiting for. Before a phone screen, I'd get tips on what kinds of questions and problems that company likes. After a phone screen, the recruiter would get a review of how it went from HR and pass it to me. Before an on-site, The recruiter got me LinkedIn profiles for everyone who I was scheduled to talk with and sometimes specific tips about what they were like. Even when they didn't have specific info, they could sometimes give tips like, "this guy's got an MBA from Harvard and they tend to like behavioral interviews, so have a couple stories prepared for him about quantitative improvements you've made." They also gave me hints like "they seem a little uncertain about your networking chops, so practice on that and if you've got something that would help there be sure to bring it up." Finally, I'd call the recruiter immediately after the interview to say how I thought it went, which let them pull a few more tricks out. For example, I had one interview that was fantastic except for the last guy who had a personality mismatch with me. The recruiter called the hiring manager immediately after the interview and asked leading questions to make them think about the earlier interviews more. If you've got some kind of inside connection or know the territory, then a recruiter is only going to hurt you. But if you're moving to a new geographic area or changing fields to the degree that you don't have a network to rely on, then a recruiter can be a huge help. Regarding salary negotiations and recruiters: it's true that they don't have as much incentive as you do to get you a good salary. If you work with a good recruiter, it's not as big a deal because they'll be interested in getting paid to land you your next 5 jobs rather than burning you for a quick buck. I would not try to go around the recruiter's back to negotiate unless you've cleared it with them already. Often, they have an agreement with the company that disallows this and the company will get pissed off that they're now negotiating with two people who aren't talking to each other. Instead, just treat the recruiter as the company and do your negotiating there. Make the recruiter give you a salary range (they will have way less resistance than HR and they ought to have a good idea of the salary ranges).
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Jan 31, 2014 16:04
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mobby_6kl posted:So, would it make sense to add these two under some sort of "Projects" category? Should some key features be listed and descried as above, or wold that look lame? I've never interviewed anyone for a dev position so don't really have a feeling for how this would look from the other end. Sounds like a cool idea to me. If you've never held a job as a developer, the thing that will scare companies away is the possibility that you know nothing about writing code. Giving them some evidence that you know something is great. Also, it gives them some easy interview questions: ask you to talk about your code. I'd much rather be asking someone to explain their ray-tracer than making them do yet another variation on FizzBuzz.
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Feb 4, 2014 06:14
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Pollyanna posted:Here's an example: I applied to Software Engineer, Bioinformatics with this cover letter: I don't think that a requirement of 3 years' experience should stop you from applying, but I think their "desired background" is pretty reasonable, and you only match "interest in bioinformatics" quote:Prior involvement or interest in bioinformatics or cancer genomics. When you apply for a job where your resume doesn't match up, you should explain in your cover letter how you actually do meet most of these. Like, "I've written some personal projects using MySQL and Java, here's a link." It's still a long-shot, but that can help. Also, your being in school is a red flag. Are you looking to drop out? Are you looking for a part-time position? Are you looking for a software engineering position in general, or only in bioinformatics? I know nothing about bioinformatics, but this job description reads to me like "be good at software and maybe a little bonus if you're interested in biology". Accordingly, if this is the kind of job you want, I'd look for any programming job you can get to have some experience under your belt.
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Feb 5, 2014 15:19
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Pollyanna posted:I realize that the job does not fit me very well. However, I've always been told to apply anyway, since I don't have a good understanding of what skills I do and do not have. Besides, pickings are slim for me. It's not that it's exactly bad to just spam your resume, but if you're applying for hundreds of jobs and getting no bites then it can be depressing. The rule I use when looking at job postings is that I can ignore half the requirements. So if they say "6 years of Java, experience with MySQL, JavaScript, and Linux" then I might say "well, I've got 3 years with Java, I've done stuff with PostgreSQL, I can bluff my way through JavaScript and I'm fine with Linux" and so that seems worth a shot. If they say ".NET, C#, Windows Phone, HTML" then I'm not going to try because the only one of those I've touched is web pages, and I've got nothing worth talking about there. I guess if I were in your place, and I wanted to do development work right now, I'd
Once you've got a resume that looks like you're a developer, it ought to be a lot easier to go after jobs like the one you linked. But I also think your school should be doing something here. What are your classmates doing with their degrees? Does your department mail out job listings or get requests for interns?
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Feb 6, 2014 00:23
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wolffenstein posted:If they normally wear khakis and a button-up, yes. If interviewing at Apple, hell no you will be laughed at behind your back. Apple's a sensible enough company about hiring. I interned there and my group hired a guy in a suit. The manager's reaction when he came in was to say, "awww you wore a suit, that's cute. I told you you didn't have to." Then an engineer came in in bare feet and cut-offs and they all grilled the interviewee in front of a whiteboard. He clearly knew his stuff, so they hired him and nobody mentioned the suit-wearing. When he started work, he dressed better than the rest of the team (khakis and button-ups) and nobody cared.
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Feb 11, 2014 13:24
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bonds0097 posted:Totally off-topic I suppose, but I don't think I'd want to work next to a programmer in bare feet (sounds smelly). "No shoes, no shirt, no coding" seems like a reasonable policy. Admittedly, I just wear slippers all day. Well, it's California. Plenty of the engineers were former or current surf bums, and dressing like one didn't seem at all out of place. If you never wear shoes then your feet shouldn't smell. The shoeless dude didn't smell bad, and definitely not like feet. I had a job where I walked to my office in Vibrams and went barefoot inside. It felt great and I kept my feet clean and dry to ensure they didn't bother anyone.
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Feb 11, 2014 21:09
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Pollyanna posted:I don't remember the call very well. I get this way, too. It's pretty useful to remember the interview, though. I usually try to scribble notes the second that I hang up, and then I describe the interview to my spouse (who's a good listener) or my mother (who's in software). Notes from the interview are good for finding things to improve on and noticing patterns (like "everyone asks about MVC, so I'll prepare some clever remarks for the next screen"). If the interview goes well, you can use your notes to try to guess what kind of person they're looking for and emphasize that in follow-up interviews. I'm also awful with names, so it's important that I write down who I interviewed with so I don't look like an rear end in a top hat later when I tell the HR rep, "I had such a great time talking to... uh... that engineer who I talked to." Pollyanna posted:Their questions were mostly things like "what got you interested in web dev", "why did you go with python", "how are you learning this", "why did you move onto this from a biomedical engineering degree". My answers were primarily about how I've been self-learning, wanting to get into it more since looking into bioinformatics, etc., but I have a feeling that what they ask will depend on the interviewee. It really wasn't anything heavy at all, just basic background information, but that was enough to get to a decision. This sounds to me like they wanted to hear that you were incredibly enthusiastic about software, and they didn't get it from the call. The other day, I was listening to a manager at my current job talking with one of his engineers about a candidate. The candidate had no formal training, no job history, and their code was of poor quality. But they were going to give the candidate an on-site because they demonstrated enthusiasm for coding (evidenced by a bunch of Android apps and a perky cover-letter).
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Feb 11, 2014 22:39
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It would be really interesting if someone recorded a phone screen to post here. Sadly, I doubt you'd ever get permission for a real one. Maybe the next time one of you does a mock-screen you'd consider it.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:38
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perfectfire posted:It didn't work for me. I still feel like the most interesting and cool and difficult stuff I did was as a research assistant and grad student. The stuff I worked on at my jobs has mostly been boring simple crap. I'm not sure what you think of as "interesting and cool and difficult" but for at least some definition I would expect those to be maximized as a grad student. Probably you were getting paid out of some DARPA grant that basically said, "make up some cool poo poo and impress us." Most jobs will be looking to solve a real-world problem within a very short time-frame, and pretty much the only way to do that is to take a bunch of existing libraries and glue them together. There is still plenty of room to enjoy your work. It's just that almost nothing you do will be novel, and the challenge is more about balance (we need to handle 1M simultaneous users, but it needs to be responsive, and please minimize server costs). In academia, you're trying to make all of your work novel, and the challenge is that the answers are unknown. "I wonder if we can transform natural speech into database queries?" does not attract VC funding. perfectfire posted:I got really good at coming into a completely new and foreign to me codebase and quickly getting up to speed to point where I can fix bugs/write features/take over the project, but it turns out nobody gives a crap about this skill in practice. People care way more about new products or exciting new features in existing products. I think any engineering department cares a lot about that skill. But we care about it in the sense that if you can't do it then you're not useful. How fast are you talking about? If you mean you walk in on your first day, read code for 10 minutes, and start fixing bugs then that's way cool and you should be a consultant. If you mean you can puzzle out an easy bug on your first day or two, get a good feel for the code-base in a week, and be a solid team member in a month, then that's just being a good developer. The next step beyond this base-line is to push things forward. Find and fix things before they become a problem, suggest new features, plan out new products based on your deep understanding of the current products.
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Feb 12, 2014 03:47
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Argue posted:Is there a solution to the histogram water-filling problem that's better than O(n) time and O(n) space? I've got two solutions, but both are O(n) time/space in the worst case. I'm feeling good about my solution but can't be sure there's a better one. For those unfamiliar with the problem, it's the one where rain falls on a histogram (integral heights, each bar is width 1), and falls off the sides--you're supposed to get the amount of water that remains. What's your solution? It seems to me like space should be constant, but I haven't written it out.
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Feb 13, 2014 18:21
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perfectfire posted:How many weeks should I wait to contact a recruiter so as not to give a bad impression? I think you should maybe have called sooner. At the end of the interview or screen, they should say, "we'll get back to you in X days." If they don't, then part of your follow-up thank-you email should be, "what would you like our next step to be?" If they said they'd get back to you in a week, then I think you were completely justified in waiting a week and then badgering a bit for some kind of response. It's lovely when a company strings you along because maybe you're their 15th-best choice. Definitely don't slow down or halt your job search unless you've got a clear, "we're working on the offer letter and will have it for you in 2 days" kind of thing.
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Feb 14, 2014 15:27
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N-queens seems like a lousy interview question. You either know how to solve it and it's rote, or you don't and you make a 2d array. Unless you're requiring that the candidate have an AI background, what does that get you? Anyway, I think backtracking is perfectly fine.
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Feb 15, 2014 02:20
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:12 |
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The problem I have with N-queens is that the most obvious representation of the problem is drawing the board as a matrix. Once you start down that path, you have to write a bunch of helper functions and it's no longer small enough for an interview. It brings to mind the Sudoku solvers of Norvig and Mohan (How to not solve a Sudoku). Norvig already has all the tools to solve his problem, so it's no big deal. Mohan doesn't, and he just flails around. Unless you're hiring an AI person, I wouldn't expect a candidate to have the tools in hand. You wouldn't want a candidate who stumbles around for 5 days and tons of LoC, but you're not going to weed them out with a whiteboard coding exercise.
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Feb 15, 2014 14:45
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