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Gazpacho posted:But my last job was at a company that made all their own service tech IT WAS AMAZON, DON'T WORK FOR AMAZON and I swear at least half the screens go like this: Now what's wrong with working for them? Someone I know got a job there as a recentish grad in Toronto and apparently makes like 70-90k there doing software development, which to me makes my head hurt and my heart weep since I don't really want to work for one of the big firms, what in particular is so bad about working for them though?
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Apr 21, 2013 04:39
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I'm a recent grad of CS that's looking for a job, a recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn asking for a time to be able to talk over the phone. What are some questions I could ask to make sure that doing anything with this recruiter won't lead to one of the horror stories I read in this thread? edit: To make sure the recruiter is any good, not really the companies that would be hiring me. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 07:11 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 27, 2013 22:35
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Zero The Hero posted:I have heard before that I should list hobbies on my resume, but it justfeels wrong. I feel like I shouldn't just say "programming", I'm going to sound like a tryhard. I don't think I should list video games or posting on internet forums, either. That leaves stuff like gardening, but do companies really like to hear about my cactus farm? You can't just come up with something like sports or reading or cooking or something? Anything to at least make people think you have hobbies that make you not seem like a neckbeard (not meaning to say you are)?
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Jul 22, 2013 09:13
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Che Delilas posted:If the job they offered you was in the mail room, would you take it because you like the company? Hey that segues nicely into a dilemma I have! A company I interviewed at (which went quite well) is asking me for references and I'm pretty sure there's a good chance they'll be sending me a job offer eventually. The problem is that the job seems like it will be doing some documentation and providing some support for this internally developed app they have, at least for the next few months when the one other guy doing this project (from what I gathered) finishes implementing the next version of this app. The app itself is a web app and it doesn't seem to be some horrible beast made out of Fortran or anything, it's using recent technologies and a decent framework, and the company itself seems like a really nice place to work. I'm getting kinda nervous over my job prospects, this would be my first real full time job out of school (I'm in Toronto and not looking to relocate or at the big big firms like Amazon yet) but it doesn't seem like I would learn much from it nor does it seem like it would help me get a development job in the future. Does it just seem like a bad idea to everyone? piratepilates fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 20:34
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For 3D graphics I'd say 13, it really depends.
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Aug 12, 2013 21:51
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I feel like I'm in a twilight zone episode, am I the only person with a terrible GPA and bad at school who otherwise enjoyed Linear Algebra and didn't have that hard a time taking it?
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Aug 13, 2013 04:19
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Bolton Hairy-Bore posted:What are web dev interviews like? Is it a good move to skip the Big O's and start memorizing the JQuery API? How 2012, if you don't already have a blog where you write all about how much you love AngularJS then you're not a real web developer. Yeah I may be bitter from troubleshooting AngularJS by finding blog articles from Google, why do you ask. You should probably just do both, but less so on memorizing an API -- any API. Just make a site or two using some web development fancy stuff and that should do you well enough to answer any questions from the web side in an interview. Or at least I hope so, since that's what I'm doing.
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Aug 13, 2013 08:38
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Pseudo-God posted:Does anyone else think that this interview question is bullshit (this is C++): That depends on if they expect everyone to get it right, I understand what they're going for and you can see how a person thinks about the statement but if this is for a junior developer position it's also possible that someone just might not be exposed to how post and pre increment operators differ. What I don't understand is why it's 21, if it's evaluated right to left wouldn't it be (a++ + (++a + ++a)) which is ((7) + ((7) + (6)) ) =20, and if it's evaluated left to right it's (((a++) + ++a) + ++a) which is (((5) + (7) ) + (8)) = 20. Unless I'm missing something or I'm really dumb which I probably am. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 21:44
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UnfurledSails posted:Just received the results of my algorithms final. I aced it. I dreaded taking this class in the beginning of the summer, but now I have a newfound appreciation of the elegant and intricate ways people have solved seemingly intractable problems (and sometimes getting around the issue of the problem being actually intractable!). I made a raytracer, it's nice because it's simple but has lots of direction to build on and in the end you get a pretty picture! And don't be excited about C, what the hell man, be excited about C++11 at least.
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Aug 19, 2013 05:24
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CatsPajamas posted:This thread has a lot of great content, and I haven't even read half of the 150+ pages. Thanks a lot to everyone who has contributed their experience and/or advice. You guys are awesome! It really helps to have a better understanding of the expectations in industry. Reading about people's interview experiences has been helpful as well. How to make a raytracer: 1. Figure out a way to represent an image in whatever language you're using (mostly just finding an imaging library like CImg for C++ or the python one for python) 2. Make a function called draw which uses this loop: code:4. You've made a basic raytracer That's the great thing about it -- it's a very simple structure that it follows and it's very compartmentalized. It's mostly just representing a ray, representing a shape, and writing code to test intersection between a ray and the shape. To get the theory of it you should google lecture notes for computer graphics courses or pick up that book called Physically Based Rendering by those two smart dudes since it covers every single thing in excruciating detail.
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Aug 20, 2013 03:24
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HondaCivet posted:
Recruiters get paid a percentage commission on the first year of salary for every employee they get signed. Employers give recruiters the potential to be paid to get people who would fit into their team well into interviews with them, not to get the lowest possible bidder. If the choice for an employer is between paying salary out to the tune of 70k for a great employee versus 60k or 50k for one that's worse then hopefully they're smart enough to realize that the lowest cost option is probably not the best one -- employee salary is a small part of the cost of an employee to a company and offering more to get the good talent who will be satisfied with their job and contribute more value to a project than someone they can pay less but does a worse job is just a smart thing to do.
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Aug 28, 2013 09:07
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Tres Burritos posted:Man, just did my first ever codility online programming session / interview question thing and it was stressful as gently caress. Being put on a clock is really nerve wracking. I actually find the codility tests a lot more fun than the other sites. Codility gives you two hours and gives you questions that are simple, varied, and test things like thinking about extreme edge cases. I had one company that gave me a test with only ten minutes to do it and handle edge cases, I flubbed that one and they didn't call me back which is sad since I knew the solution right away and almost gave a working solution but something went wrong in my code and the site didn't give helpful feedback at all. Ten minutes is not enough time to give you working code as a test, people, it's too much pressure, just give more tests but much more time!
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Sep 4, 2013 21:08
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Tres Burritos posted:I had 1 hour to do 2 problems, finished the first with 10 minutes to spare and the second with 4 minutes. Man I didn't even have time for stuff like edge cases, however it seemed like from the problem question I didn't really have to worry about it too much. (famous last words) There are some questions where you have to worry about overflow/underflow and such but there are others where their bound on the input is good enough so you don't have to worry too much about things. Maybe you should just practice writing more of these things outside of tests so you can get better at writing them? Probably haven't been taking any courses that follow these questions for a couple of years (I know I haven't) so maybe you should get the ol' juices flowing. edit: and the best thing to do with Codility is to probably just relax! You'll probably think better and do it in the same or less amount of time if you don't feel so pressured to write it as fast as possible. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 21:56
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Whenever I see those things I just make up some big lie about myself like saying I can balance a hundred plates on my head or that I'm the Gerber baby. Coincidentally I don't have a job yet, so maybe my way doesn't work too well.
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Oct 3, 2013 21:32
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Today I got a message from a small startup on StackOverflow Careers asking if I'm interested in this job posting they have for a lead front end developer, with emphasis on "expert web engineer". I've had no previous development jobs, no internship, and I'm not an expert in anything at this point.
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Oct 4, 2013 04:18
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FamDav posted:why are you eating cheetos The crunchy ones are pretty good. Not those big puffy ones though, those are garbage.
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Oct 4, 2013 18:27
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Might want to throw in something about big theta and big omega just to show that big o notation isn't just something to show how fast an algorithm is run, it's part of a set of descriptions of bounds on how fast an algorithm can run. It'll never come up in an interview but it'll be good to know.
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Oct 9, 2013 22:16
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Person emails me yesterday to set up a phone interview today (a second phone interview with someone different) and asks me to email back confirming this, shortly after I email back saying I'm fine with it and asking for some details on the interview. No reply. Person calls me today 20 minutes early from the time they scheduled and the call basically takes five minutes and just tells me they're going to send me a coding test that I have a day to complete. It's in perl and for a position that I still don't really know anything about except that apparently I'm up for a junior QA position. It's not the worst situation in the world but would it have been so hard to just give a bit more information about what's going on? edit: Does anyone have any good guides to quickly learning perl? I already have a degree and experience in a bunch of languages so I basically just need something to let me translate from python to perl.
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Oct 10, 2013 18:51
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Alright this has been bugging me all day now. I got an offer today for a job doing debugging and fixing of code for a medium sized company near me, I graduated in the summer from a good CS school with a terrible GPA and no internships. I've been searching for jobs for the past 4 or so months and came close to a few junior level developer jobs but didn't get any offers. This company that sent me the offer seems like a nice place to work and all the people were very friendly. The position itself is basically a full time support/QA/fixing bugs thing, it's not a call center and it's not just messing around in the program trying to find bugs, from what I can tell it involves actual debugging and writing fixes to code and the likes that are close enough to making software to be cool. They said that after 6 months or a year or so that I could be moved over to the full-on development department and the first two guys who interviewed me said that they had started with my job and moved over. Something about the whole offer just makes me nervous for some reason though, for one the salary they offered me was lower than what I expected (but since it's in the far suburbs of a big city it's more than enough to live comfortable on, especially since I'll be living with my parents and don't have any big expenses) but I haven't tried negotiating to get it higher yet. I'm kind of scared that I'm settling for a job lower than what I could get but I can also see it providing me some experience to actually get me the other jobs that I'd want more. Am I just being an idiot for not wanting to take it? I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'm just wasting my time sending out applications to places that are looking for better candidates than me. I don't really have anything else lined up except another new grad job that I applied to at a job fair, I went in for one short interview and the guy seemed very impressed with me (telling me so directly even) but I'm not sure I could get another interview and offer in without making the company that already sent me an offer wait too long to just move on to the next person.
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Oct 11, 2013 04:46
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Cicero posted:Piratepilates, with a bad gpa and no internships yeah, you kind of have to take what you can get. Especially if you've already been trying unsuccessfully for 4 months. I'd guess I'd stay there 6-12 months, try to move to a regular dev position like they mentioned and negotiate a raise, stay there for a bit and then get a job somewhere else. ManoliIsFat posted:I say maybe negotiate another 5%-10%, but there's nothing wrong with grinding it out. That kinda position really lends itself to knocking it out of the park, and if you impress you can definitely get the bump in pay. And that a pretty spectacular way to get in to get started with a codebase. Especially if it's your first job, you've gotta learn how to work in a team, how to get along in an office. I went from not even having a CS degree (2 years of classes but finished philosophy), entry level, underpaid to running the whole team. tk posted:lots of stuff Alright thanks. I'm definitely going to negotiate to see if I can get a bit more that will bump it into nicer territory for me. I think that I just keep thinking there's going to be my dream opportunity right around the corner and it makes me nervous to not get it. On the other hand what the hell is wrong with me, this offer that doesn't wow me is more than a lot of people make and its my first job out of school for a guy who slacked off for most of his life and it'll still be pretty interesting, I'm basically a garbage human for not liking it so much  !
piratepilates fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 05:55
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No one actually uses big o (or big theta or big omega, they still exist dammit) for anything in any regularity unless you're in academia, but they're useful conventions for thinking about what an algorithm is doing and how it might run and scale. No one actually sits down and makes a runtime complexity analysis for a function they make but by learning big o then you can understand from writing and reading the function you're making roughly how efficient the algorithm can be. It's like all that math you learn in school that you say to yourself you'll never use and for the most part you're right but it also teaches your brain to think in a certain way that will help you solve problems everywhere.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:13
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Also you really shouldn't be introduced to big o in a crash course because there is a lot to it and you should really just read it from a textbook and get a grasp on the whole concepts to understand it or you won't really understand things like what the notation really means or how it's affected by different inputs or what you classify as an input.
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Oct 11, 2013 21:40
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Cicero posted:This is like saying it's pointless to memorize times tables because hey you can just re-derive them by adding a bunch. That's how I remember how to do like half the multiplications on the times tables.
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Oct 12, 2013 01:41
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I thought he got an offer from NBC, personally.
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Oct 13, 2013 19:12
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DreadCthulhu posted:I'm fascinated that I've yet to hear companies like Dropbox, Evernote, Twitter, Square, AirBnB mentioned even once in this thread as far as job options go. Are companies under 1k people not on a new graduate's radar at all? I remember being in college interviewing with Xanga back in the Paleolithic and they had something like two dozen employees at the time (it was a Fibonacci-flavored interview, for the curious). Do "small" companies recruit in colleges any longer? I went to a job fair a few weeks ago for STEM majors and there were a bunch of smallish companies and such like AeroFS or some local small companies you haven't heard of. Also the Canadian NSA who was hiring a ton of positions for their own version of NSA datacenter stuff.
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Oct 13, 2013 20:35
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After sending in the email accepting an offer from one company, like an hour later the other company that I was interested in emailed me back for a second round of interviews/tests. The test they sent me to do is basically just to make an HTML form, like straight up just use Bootstrap and CSS3/HTML5 to make a form, that's it. I don't even get how that qualifies as a test.
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Oct 16, 2013 17:20
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Don Mega posted:The best results I had while job searching was through stackoverflow careers. Craigslist seems to be filled with postings created by someone in HR who has no clue what the position actually entails. I think companies have to pay to list jobs on Stack Overflow Careers (an employer told me this once) which is why you tend to get higher quality postings there, because it filters out companies that don't want to pay the money to list their jobs there.
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Oct 17, 2013 17:27
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It took me about half a week to go from interview to asking for references to a week to getting an offer, 3 days is nothing. Hell I've had companies call me asking for a phone interview months after I've applied there, just the other day a company I gave my resume to at a job fair about a month back called me asking to set up a phone interview and I've already had a job for two weeks.
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Nov 3, 2013 22:17
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unsanitary posted:Real pros make their resumes in InDesign. I unironically do this though, gotta get some good looking layouts and typesetting to really get the recruiters on you.
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Nov 11, 2013 02:04
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One of the big things I learned when I was trying to find a job was that for every person who gives you advice on your resume or how to interview there's always someone else who will tell you the exact opposite.
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Nov 19, 2013 02:20
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pr0zac posted:I don't even look at titles when reviewing a resume because they are almost always completely worthless for providing relevant information. Companies all have completely different definitions of what's a software engineer vs senior software engineer vs SWE level 3 vs technology lead vs whatever. Worry about the stuff under that that describes what you did on the job. At the company I work for you have developers working on two things -- the big central pieces of software that a bunch of small things interact with, and the small programs that interact with the big ones. The people who work on the big central ones (maybe 10 people) are all just "Developers", the people who work on the small things (20-30) are "Programmer/Analyst". There's people who have been working for 10 years developing software who have titles like this here, titles don't mean much. Hell there's people who have been working at the company developing software for years and years who have the same title as me, a guy starting out at the bottom.
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Nov 24, 2013 01:11
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bonds0097 posted:Aren't you in Tennessee or something? You probably don't have a job because you don't live in a good area for tech jobs and don't have a whole lot on your resume. When I was looking for an entry level job here in Toronto I had to write about 10-20 string reversal functions for interviews, was never the most complex functions they had me write but it was almost always the first programming question they gave me. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 6, 2014 |
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Jan 5, 2014 22:48
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Steve French posted:Uhhhhh.... I once solved an interview question in Prolog. No I didn't get that job.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:13
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If it ain't a bug in production should it even count? There's no one to even get mad at you or any money being lost over it!
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Feb 27, 2014 04:03
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah, that's actually something I've been wondering about. My mom is of the opinion that if you don't have a CS degree, you're literally useless, while I'm on the side that says as long as you have the skills the degree doesn't really matter. I've told her that over and over, but she keeps pushing the "degree --> job and nothing else" angle and I've never figured out the rationale behind it. It's a hell of a lot easier to prove to someone that you know how to develop software by saying "here is my degree proving I spent 4 (at least) years doing this at a professional institution" than not, unless you've actually spent that same time grinding it out at lower level jobs or building something very impressive to make up for it.
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Mar 2, 2014 01:26
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hedgecore posted:I applied one place that used it. I found the timed online test submitted to a website rather anxiety-inducing, and would have been much happier talking through it as I solved it in front of their developers. I actually quite like Codility versus the other online tests since it actually gives you a decent amount of time and judges you off of a bunch of criteria. You want to talk anxiety inducing, I once was given 15 minutes to code a problem, it was an easy problem too but not when you're given 15 minutes and have to code an actual working solution. I chose C++ for some stupid reason and it ran in to some odd error (didn't seem to be a compile error or exception, or it made it really hard to tell, who knows) even though I knew how to solve the problem. I ended up just going welp and kissing that job goodbye.
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Mar 4, 2014 05:14
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I've been at my current job almost 5 months and I'm not enjoying myself, the more time I spend working here the more I feel it is a terrible fit. - The technology stack is ancient and awful, ASP.NET with Web Forms, plenty of legacy Asp, a ton of VB6, a thankfully much rarer VB3, along with some random VB.NET thrown in and now new stuff being made in either C# or VB.NET, I don't know because I haven't been able to touch any of it yet. We're also still using Sourcesafe in the year of 2014 if you can believe that. - The organization is very corporate and waterfall-y. It's a business that is contracted by a bunch of corporate clients to handle billing. Everything is wrapped up in procedure. A lot of the things I have worked on I have spent more time on just writing change requests for these changes than actually changing something. - I'm starting to feel scared about every change I make because of how much time I know I will spend writing a change request, having the reviewer probably reject the request because it is not in the style they will like (there's no set style, everyone has different opinions), and then having the case sit in QA's queue for a day or so until they can just reject it for any host of issues that may or may not have anything to do with anything I have touched in the change. - I'm mostly working on investigating issues and making tiny fixes (one line or so) or making small changes. The team I'm in handles the small work while the team I have to get promoted in to does all the larger form work (anything over 20 hours of work, including review and QA time). - Getting promoted in to this team doesn't seem very exciting anymore, after having seen all the code they write and the problems they have to solve. It seems like uninteresting work and the quality of development work is as bad as the technology stack. - It can be very stressful, especially since everything is done for corporate clients that are directly paying our bills and have their own ideas on when things should be done. - It feels very constraining, I have to log all the time on everything I've worked on every day and since it might be billable work and you can be running around all day taking care of smaller things it can be hard to find where to put all your time each day. The last 10 or 20 minutes of each work day I reserve to just think about how I can account for all the time I spent working that day, and the same goes for most of the team. I feel like accounting for my time actually makes me do a worse job since it makes me want to rush through things and hesitant to do thorough testing. We're also accounted for on a whole bunch of other metrics at the same time (same goes for the QA department, which I'm pretty sure gets bonuses for rejecting changes more often). - I'm pretty underpaid, it's my first job so I'm not that concerned with it but every other mark of salary I've seen is higher than this. The problem is I have just so little experience, I didn't have any internships in university, and aside from this currently going on 5 month long job the only other work I have in development is tiny (month long or so) contract work that wasn't purely development. I'm pretty confident in how I stack up as a developer (at least for a junior developer) but I'm not sure if I can do much better than this place. I think I'm looking for a place that's less rigidly structured and more startup-like. With my lack of experience are there any jobs out there that are "better" who would hire me at this point? Am I just not used what is required for jobs in terms of what I don't like about this job? How long should I even stick it out here until I can get a better gig? (I'm in Toronto, don't really want to relocate outside the city, went to a good university [with bad grades], have some personal projects I work on)
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Mar 12, 2014 04:37
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Che Delilas posted:This is the right answer. You're thinking about all the negatives like you having no experience or only working so far for 5 months. But you didn't have any experience when you got THIS job. Companies hire inexperienced people all the time, that's what entry level is for. I'm not sure this job is not really a junior level software development job, a lot of the other members of the team are either non-CS people (mostly EE) or have diplomas instead of degrees. I'm not sure if I qualify for the same entry level that a junior software dev job would be. quote:There are tons and tons of 3 and 6 month contract positions so working 5 months does not exactly ring a big alarm bell. And you've got a university education, which, while it may be the subject of endless debates in threads like this one, is still a big plus when it comes to getting hired. Also personal projects, which also is a big plus. I spent a few months looking for work before finding this job. I got the feeling (and sometimes was just downright told) that I wasn't being hired because of a lack of experience (again, no internships, no real prior jobs). Will a 6 month stint really make the difference? I'm still going to start making the rounds and seeing what I can get but I'm a bit anxious that I'll just find more opportunities like this.
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Mar 13, 2014 01:32
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I'm wondering how much of a leg up 6 months of experience gives me, I didn't take any internships while at school (because I'm stupid ok) and I have a full time job doing development work. How much more desirable am I to companies now?
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Mar 29, 2014 02:09
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JawnV6 posted:Why are you leaving? The second one when people ask, the first one in reality.
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Mar 29, 2014 02:58
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