Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

I have an interview this afternoon for an Android dev role, it's exactly what I want but it sounds like they're looking for someone more senior than me. I'm six years out of uni with a BSc in CS (UK) and have been working at a software company ever since as the only technical person in a 4-7 man sales office, doing customer support, custom projects, product triage, prioritisation, some internal IT, and recently a bit of actual product dev. Our HQ is in Seattle so I work with them a lot to make sure the UK arm gets what it needs. I know our software and industry inside out, unfortunately it's kind of niche (mail sortation/data quality) and I really want to get into mobile dev.

I've written quite a lot of code during that time, mostly on bespoke projects for customers which I specced, designed, wrote and supported from scratch. Nothing huge, maybe 2-3 thousand lines at most. But it was 95% done in C# because we were a complete Windows shop.

Some concerns I have are that I haven't used Java much since university, I've only been messing around with Android for a couple of weeks, and most of my coding experience has been solo projects without very much code review. I feel like I make bad architectural decisions because nobody has ever been there to say "hey, do it this way instead".

Obviously I can try spin this in a positive way: I had to teach myself C#, I'm well practised at find solutions to problems by myself, and I'm good at working on ten different things at once if needed.

I got this interview through a friend who works there so I'm keen to impress. It's the first interview I've had in five and a half years and only my third interview ever (and the one for my current job contained almost zero technical questions because my boss is the sales manager), so I'm pretty sure the guy is going to ask me some question about trees or something that I've had no reason to use for the last five years. Welp.

Something I'm not really sure about is salary. I earn �35k right now but I have a lot saved up and I don't really care about money as much as I do getting a job that I enjoy. I would happily take a pay cut to get something in mobile dev but people tell me that I shouldn't ever take a pay cut. I hate that everything is so money focused. Admittedly those people are mostly non-technical so I'm hoping it's fine if I say "I earn this much, I'd be happy with the same, but also that isn't my motivation here so I wouldn't want that to be a sticking point."

Edit: here's my CV:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oqRJjLOvdQjEvfIbjfijNMx7zhOYHhc-SZ7EwcaRrl4/edit?usp=sharing
Yeah, this isn't exactly anonymised since it's on my Drive but whatever.

Tunga fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Aug 7, 2013

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 10:48

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:23

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Skuto posted:

Bah, that's more or less loudly signaling you're ok with them giving you a pay cut, though. Can probably just say you're happy with something similar - if they think it's too much they can still lower it. Or offer a bit more.

I guess I'm just concerned that my current salary is too high to represent what I can offer a different company. I am really valuable to my current employer but a lot of the knowledge doesn't transfer because it's industry specific. Royal Mail postal regulations do not help me write good Android apps, basically.

I don't want to lose this position because I way overshoot what they would reasonably pay me. But I also appreciate that inviting someone to pay you less doesn't look good either.

Urgh, I hate money.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 12:18

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

My interview went pretty well I think. Thanks for all the tips and replies in this thread!

They asked me to do Quick Sort on a whiteboard which I think I remembered correctly!

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 18:20

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Tres Burritos posted:

God I hope that I never get a question like that. I've never gotten one that's just "You need to have memorized this thing".

To be fair, I have no Android experience, limited recent Java experience, so they were mostly left asking me general CS questions. They didn't seem to be concerned with syntax and such, just the general principle.

I basically reeled off a quick in-place version of QuickSort, I had done some revision on it because I figured it might come up.

QuickSort is like fifteen lines of code so it's not exactly hard to memorise. I also understand and explained it, of course.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 22:40

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

JawnV6 posted:

Tres Burriots, you could nail this question even without knowing quicksort.

If you're in that situation, start talking. You ought to know enough to put "sort(int[] array) {" in your language up on the board. If you're completely lost on the algorithm, start asking for hints. Interviewers don't want to sit there just looking at you, it's a waste of everyone's times. And for a RCG/junior employee, I'm expecting to give them work that they'll need to ask about. So the interview is a little mock session where you don't know how to proceed and I'm going to gauge how easily you pick up on hints and start working vs. if I have to explain where every semicolon goes.

Explaining what's going on inside your head is crucial. It doesn't matter if you're mentally doing Rubik's cubes and eliminating world hunger, if no words are coming out of your mouth talking about it I have to assume you're daydreaming about hitting the It's-it factory on the way back to the airport. Which might make you a great culture fit, but I really need a coder.

This is really good advice.

Although the "burritos" comment is wasted on me (I guess it's a US thing).

One thing that came up in my interview today was using logical bitwise operators to perform a circular shift on a byte. I absolutely remember doing that at uni but it was six or seven years ago and I was drawing a blank so I just said "I remember doing this but it was years ago and I'm kind of lost on where to start." So we basically worked through it together.

You don't have to know all the answers and sometimes admitting that is just as valuable as if you had known it.

Tunga fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Aug 8, 2013

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 00:44

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Zero The Hero posted:

-I'm not sure how to fix my indentation. Someone suggested I find another template to copy, I'll probably do that. Looking at the example resumes that were linked in this thread, I don't actually know how to emulate them. I've just been using Google Docs.

Right, here's my CV:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oqRJjLOvdQjEvfIbjfijNMx7zhOYHhc-SZ7EwcaRrl4/edit?usp=sharing
Note that I'm in the UK so some things may vary a bit but a lot of the general advice that you'll see applies anywhere. Personally I aim for two pages, some people will tell you that it should be one but I think two is fine.

My CV is not the greatest ever but it seems to get pretty good results and it looks a lot better than yours for a few critical reasons.

What you need to do is make use of formatting instead of (or, as well as) indenting. See how I have my dates and companies in italic, for example. Use bold, italic and text size in consistent ways to highlight the types of information that you are presenting.

Secondly, bullet points are awesome. Include both prose and bullets so that someone can skim the key points and then read the detail. Prose not only provides important detail but it also shows that you are articulate, so a mixture is a good idea.

quote:

-I'm not sure how to give details for my Verizon Wireless internships. Here's what I have now:

Verizon Wireless - Summer Internships (June - September, 2006 and 2007)
Field testing and analysis with Baseline Engineering
System design and analysis for optimization and growth with RF Engineering

I don't understand any of these words but that's probably not an issue if you're applying for a similar job to this. But even then, what you need to do is include some detail about what you actually did, what you learned, why you were important to the company, and how the knowledge you gained will be useful for you in the future. Try to identify a few key achievements from your time there, maybe you learned a specific skill or you worked on a project that showed some quantifiable result for the business.

Don't bullshit, but be creative. The line on my CV about triage, for example, is true, I created that process. But what that actually entailed was me saying "hey can we have a meeting every week to talk about UK specific bugs?". And then we did. And suddenly they started getting fixed because it turns out if you talk about a thing, stuff happens.

quote:

Normally, interviewers ask me about this, and I go into detail, which is exactly what I want. I can actually explain the kinds of problems that required fixing and the types of solutions I applied to them. I can definitely agree that it needs more detail, but I just don't know how to give any relevant detail to people who aren't already familiar with the job positions within VZW. What I'm hoping with this description is that employers will get just enough of an idea to see that it's related to engineering through more than just the title and be more compelled to ask me questions; but when I look at it, it doesn't actually look any more descriptive to me.

Try to answer questions like "how did I save the company money", "how did I make things more efficient", "how did I save myself time". The specific details of what you did might not apply elsewhere but the fact that you identified a problem and applied a solution is really what people are looking for on your CV.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 10:42

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

So while I was typing that out, the post above it appeared!

This might be a double post but whatever, the one above is huge enough so I'll reply separately.

Strong Sauce posted:

You've already done the interview but you shouldn't assume that you're not qualified if they want to talk to you. You should let them figure out whether or not you're qualified.

Again, don't know how the interview went but you should probably brush up on data structures and algorithms.

I revised all of that stuff and it's exactly what came up, so it actually went really well. Not certain if I'll get an offer but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about going to similar interviews in future and being able to show that I know my poo poo.

When you've had two interviews in your whole life and they were both five plus years ago, it's kind of terrifying doing the first one. Honestly I feel so much better about the whole prospect of interviewing after doing that one.

quote:

Unfortunately a lot of companies are expecting this exact state of mind when they negotiate with software developers. I want to slap you because every developer that doesn't fight to get more money is devaluing everyone else in the field. Gain some courage and fight for your worth.

I keep reading this paragraph of yours and I want to just slap you over and over. I hope you did not actually say that last line. What in the loving gently caress, "happy with the same" are you loving kidding me?

You're killing me Smalls.

Edit: Just found your other posts about the interview. Please, I must know that you did not say "happy with the same"

Money didn't even come up, but I spoke to a couple of friends beforehand and everyone agreed that I can expect more money from this new role anyway.

The reason I feel like this is because I really want to get out of my current role. It's toxic and going nowhere. Long-term I want more money, sure, but right now I just need a foot on the dev ladder.

You're right though, I shouldn't downplay my value and the fact that I am super-valuable to my current employer should tell me that I can be a super-valuable employee for someone else as well.

quote:

Reduce your info at the top into two lines. First line is your address, Second line contains phone and email.
I didn't read that opening paragraph of your resume and no one else will either. Just get rid of it.
Same thing with that intro paragraph for your first/current job.

These parts definitely need a bit of work. Most likely going to dump the top part entirely and cut down the job description though I do feel that a bit of prose there is not really a bad thing.

quote:

All your action verbs for your current job are in the past tense. But your other "jobs" as a Java Workshop Demonstrator and Volunteer Award Leader are all in the present participle. Yet you haven't worked at those positions in 7 years and 3 years respectively.

I don't see this at all. Everything is in past tense. The Demonstrator position is maybe worded in a slightly odd way, it's almost lacking tense entirely, I might tweak that. Everything else is absolutely past tense.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 11:15

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

I don't even remember what linear algebra is. Just got my first proper developer role (Android) after doing tech support and professional services for five years and the most maths-like thing I was asked about was Big O notation.

It also pays �5k more than I was expecting which is nice.

I don't really post in this thread much but I read it a bunch so thanks for everyone who has posted tips and stuff over the last six months.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 15:59

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Skuto posted:

So I guess you didn't end up taking a pay cut after all

Congrats. (Or given that you'll be doing Android: condolences)

No, you were right, my attitude was stupid. Never undervalue yourself. This experience (interviewing) taught me a lot of things:

I am a much better programmer than I had convinced myself that I am because my current role doesn't stretch me at all.
I am, as a result, worth more to a company that wants a good developer than I am to my current company even though I have a tonne of industry and product-specific knowledge here. My current place offered me 3-4k less than this new role to stay here and be a developer and then spent nine months pissing around not making it happen (and refused to give me the rise until it did).
A company that values what you wear more than what you do is not worth working for.
As soon as you start wondering if it's the right time to move on, it's probably is. I sat here for six months pondering the idea of moving and waiting to see if this company would give me the role that I wanted and honestly I should have just left as soon as I felt that way.
Interviews are not really all that terrifying after all because even if they go badly you just move on and look elsewhere. And the more you convince yourself that it isn't a big thing, the better they actually go because you are relaxed and natural.
Self-confidence goes a long way. I nearly went to this interview thinking that I just wasn't good enough for it. Instead (with a bit of help from this thread) I went there thinking that they've seen my CV and they want to meet me so they must be genuinely interested.
Developer roles right now are an applicant's market, so don't be terrified by the recession or whatever. There are plenty of jobs around (at least in Europe) and not enough competent developers to fill them. There's also a lot of noise that you have to get your CV through to be noticed. Having someone who can refer you is a big benefit since you can skip over those first stages, I know I was really thankful to have been able to do that because without that referral I doubt I would have got the interview when I have zero experience with Android.

Regarding working in a role where you contribute to revenue, I can vouch for that too. My role has always been somewhere between the two and the response and interest that you get to each kind of project is night and day. Twice I built someone an internal tool to make their job easier and instead of actually using it they just went and sold it to the customer. Without asking me. That's when I stopped building nice things for people and just built them stuff to sell instead. That's all they cared about.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2013 15:16

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Chosen posted:

Well, I've been extended an offer for a Software Engineer job for a demanding company in Chicago. This will be my first full-time pure development job -- I've developed tons of small internal tools as a SysAdmin and Automation/QA Engineer, but nothing I've had to maintain for more than a few months, and certainly nothing I've ever collaborated on. I've basically been a one-man shop for almost everything I've ever worked on, so I've never had to go through a painful merge, for example.

I'm in almost the exact same situation as you, about to start my first developer job having spent five years writing internal tools and professional service projects for customers on my own.

I'm mostly spending my spare time trying to get my head around Android as much as I can so that when I start there I can focus more on integrating with the team and their processes rather than the language and framework. Though there's still going to be a lot of that too.

I know that the company I'm starting with has hired fresh graduates in the past so I don't really have any concerns about them helping me get up to speed. Most companies should know how to help you get to where you need to be.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 18:21

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Mr. Crow posted:

So people talk a lot about SF, Seattle etc. Being booming, but what about places outside of the u.s.? Surely the west coast isn't the only Shangri La for developers?

London and Berlin both have plenty of dev jobs going.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 00:45

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Also please make your bullets and text line up, it looks really messy at the moment. Don't use tables, use tab stops. The impression you're giving out before even reading any words is that you don't even know your way around MS Word properly.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 10:03

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

If someone offers you �5k more than you were expecting should you ask for even more anyway? I pretty much just said "yeah that it in line with my expectations" and that was that. Then after I wondered if I should have asked for another �2k or something just to see what they'd say.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 01:21

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

coffeetable posted:

Yes. Of course you do. How is this even a question? If you name something too high, they'll just go "Sorry, but that's a firm offer".

Applied for three jobs in my whole life, got two of them, which is cool but means I have very little experience of the hiring process and don't know what questions to expect. The thing about asking to think about it instead of answering stuff straight away is definitely right, I realise that now.

I'm happy with the salary and the role but it'd be interesting to know what I could of got since I was obviously grossly underestimating my market value in the first place.

Next time I will go hog wild with my demands :woop:

Tunga fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Aug 30, 2013

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 01:39

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

coffeetable posted:

It will have cost them thousands of dollars to get this far, they've decided you're their woman/man and they won't let go unless you force them.

I'm pretty sure it didn't cost them thousands of dollars, my friend put my CV on his manager's desk the day they posted the job, they gave me a 45min interview, and hired me. I don't think they even saw anyone else. But yeah, point taken in general

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 01:44

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Bongo Bill posted:

If they press you for a number, recite something pretty close to the fourth quintile salary among developers in that field in your area.

It's hard to actually figure out what that value is because most people don't go around advertising their salary, no?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 01:49

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Sarcophallus posted:

Is it so hard to use Glassdoor?

In the UK, yes. It'll list like two jobs and tell me that the average developer salary is �25k or something hilarious.

Edit: V V V "Junior developer" gives me two results in London, "Android developer" gives me none. Maybe I'm being too specific.

Edit edit: I also have an unquenchable hatred for any site that constantly tries to make me log in with Facebook for no good reason.

Tunga fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Aug 30, 2013

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 09:38

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

JimboMaloi posted:

Also if anyone wants to take a look at my resume and let me know how/if I can improve it, it's here. Thanks.

I don't know if this is a deliberate stylist choice but it seems like your bullet points are missing capital letters, they look kind of silly to me.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 20:58

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Most places shouldn't be super-obsessive about which language or frameworks your code uses. Good code is good code.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2013 20:53

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

rotor posted:

i've never heard of a group interview and i think that's the dumbest poo poo i've ever heard of

I don't know in this specific case but as someone already mentioned, you do get what are called Assessment Centres or Assessment Days where basically you get a bunch of people that you might like to interview and you throw them in a big room for a day and have them do things like work in groups to build bridges out of newspapers and stuff like that. There is often an individual test of some kind included like a IQ or lateral-thinking quiz, or similar. The idea is to spot people who work well with other people and who have the right attributes to fit into the environment.

I was under the impression that places like Google use these but I might be totally wrong. I've never actually done one myself but my brother helped run a couple of these days at one of his jobs.

I've never heard of anyone inviting multiple people into a traditional interview situation, that sounds absolutely ridiculous.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 09:37

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

You don't actually need an insertion sort, you just need one iteration of the process. The existing list will be perfectly sorted except for the new element, so it just needs to look for the correct place to add that element. You could also potentially use a linked list to make the insertion part more efficient but it's pretty negligible on a small array like this.

Personally I would actually write the insertion method, or use something from the standard libs if it exists. In C# I'd probably find the location with LINQ but I'm not sure about the neatest way in Java. Right now what've you've done is said "I take the item from the stream and then have this other function handle it, writing that function is left as an exercise for the reader" which seems a bit silly to me.

Another assumption you're making is that we don't care about the original (relative) order of the 100 largest elements. Which I'd say is reasonable, but you may want to mention it.

There's no way in your solution to actually retrieve the numbers. Wrap it up as an object and provide some kind of accessor, nothing too complicated.

Minor complaint: you have inconsistent capitalisation on the start of your assumptions :eng101:

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 10:01

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Sorry, I totally missed the text after your solution. I'm also terrible at C++, never mind C, but I do think the point stands about not writing most of the actual implementation yourself.

I don't remember the exact algorithm for an in-place insertion sort but surely it's still going to iterate over the entire list looking for out-of-order elements?

I considered a heap too but then you need to be able to make sure it doesn't go above 100 items, which means either iterating over the entire tree every time you add an item, or keeping the size as a separate variable. Although a linked list actually has the same issue. Unless I'm missing a neat trick here?

If I was given that question I'd most likely find the right place with a binary search.

Oh and I'm three weeks into my first pure dev role (used to do a mixture of support/testing/dev) so my advice may be terrible.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 10:44

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Suspicious Dish posted:

Let me tell you something: 90% of the other applicants that applied wouldn't be able to answer that question.

This is the absolute truth. Your solution was good. Not perfect, sure, but in an interview that's not what anyone expects. It was decent solution that probably needed to be fleshed out a bit, you clearly understood the problem and came up with a way to solve it. The fact that you call insertion sort "a trivial implementation" tells me that you are probably a decent programmer.

I had to interview CS graduates for a support/dev role and it was insufferable, about 80% of the applicants could not code for poo poo. Like, code not even write insertion sort and similar things.

Don't ever tell yourself that you are stupid because there are a lot of awful programmers around who cannot do the basic things that you clearly can do.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 16:33

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

I got fizzbuzz in my last interview and my solution wasn't that great but I sort of realised as I did it and said "oh you don't really need this part, and you could also do it this other way" and they were like "yeah, whatever, let's do something more interesting" (tree traversal, some logical bitwise stuff, and quick sort).

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 23:26

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

The cactus farm sounds ideal.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 20:47

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

2banks1swap.avi posted:

That said I do wonder when it will be in vogue to have a grinder and fresh roasted beans around.

My friend (and colleague) hand grinds his coffee at work, takes him like ten minutes to make a cup.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2013 20:03

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

In my last interview I was asked "Is there an algorithm which has better worst-case performance than quicksort and similar average-case performance?", or something along those lines.

"Heap sort", I declare. Not because I remember a thing about heap sort, but because I studied this thing the night before.

The two guys then sit there looking at each other for a minute trying to remember how the hell heap sort works and what its performance is. Meanwhile I'm sitting there hoping they aren't going to ask me how it works.

"Yeah, we think you're right. We were expecting you to say merge sort, but whatever."

# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 01:25

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

He has an interview with Poirot, obviously.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2013 19:25

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

bonds0097 posted:

If anyone here works or has worked as a PM at Microsoft, I would really appreciate it if you were willing to reach out to me via PM and answer some questions. Thanks!

What does the P stand for in this case? I am none of these things but the question has come up before, product/program/project.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 00:13

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

bonds0097 posted:

In Microsoft's case it stands for Program.

Oh, this poster used it for Project a while back. Anyway I'm not being very helpful. Good luck with your interview or whatever it is

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 02:01

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

So they scheduled an emergency for Monday? It sounds ridiculous, get out of that place.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 15:26

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Rescue Toaster posted:

It's for embedded development. So hardware knowledge is important too. Since I've done circuit design and PCB design as well, I'll probably bring in some of the boards I designed to pass around and talk about the software for them. I'm usually pretty comfortable talking about my own projects.

This sounds like a good approach. Be different. Interactive is always good.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 22:48

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Safe and Secure! posted:

Should I even bother listing this place on my resume? I graduated, didn't start looking for jobs until three months later, immediately got an offer but didn't have a starting date until a month after that, and now I've been here a little over a month. I figure, if "they want me to work ridiculous hours regularly" is a good reason to move on, then I won't look too unreliable by leaving so soon?

The alternative is omitting it and looking like I just sat around in my mom's house doing nothing for five or six months.

Keep it on there. Leaving your first job fairly quickly isn't that rare because often people finish uni and just really need to find a job. Be prepared to explain it, sure, but you don't need to pretend like it never happened.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2013 19:13

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Simpo posted:

With code, just make it clean, tested, readable etc. you can waste a lot of time trying to engineer the ultimate re-usable solution and it may never get used again. If the code is well written though, it shouldn't be too hard to refactor/extend to make it more flexible later down the line.

Also just make sure you do the simple things right. Formatting and poo poo. If you put in a Pull Request and someone thinks there's a better way to do a thing then that's a conversation you can have. Nobody expects perfect code, just keep it clean and simple.

Tunga fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Nov 2, 2013

# ¿ Nov 2, 2013 00:52

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

I know gently caress all about LaTeX because I have never had any need to use it.

What, exactly, can LaTeX do that GDocs or Word can't?

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 01:28

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Null Pointer posted:

Prettier typesetting. For example, Google Docs and Word use a greedy word wrapping algorithm that's optimized for speed so they can do a real-time preview. TeX uses an O(n^2) dynamic algorithm which minimizes the sum of squared space to the right of each line. The result looks more professional.

LaTeX sounds complicated but it's secretly a much lazier way to write. You can leave all of the styling minutiae up to document classes and packages, and you'll still end up with something that looks very good. But the advantages all sorta fall apart when you start talking about writing a custom document class for a one-off 1-2 page resume.

Given the lack of prose on a CV (mine, at least, is mostly single line bullets) this doesn't really seem like it would be very noticeable.

It would be interesting to see an example comparing the two, if anyone has one. Or someone post their LaTeX'd resume for me to reproduce in Word, that would also work.

I'm not saying that Word can produce as good results since I clearly have no idea what LaTeX can do, but one thing I will say is that most people have absolutely no clue how to properly format a document in Word. There is almost no reason to ever directly apply formatting to text. I write my documents in (effectively) plain text, create the four or five styles that I need, and then apply them as appropriate. From there you can adjust the styles and everything updates immediately.

It used to infuriate me no end when I would write a project spec or some other vaguely-technical document using styles in my old job and then the sales manager would poo poo all over it with terrible formatting in three or four places so that the whole thing looked awful.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 10:36

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Should have been clearer perhaps but what I mean is an example of the same document in both applications so that I can see the magical things that LaTeX does which Word absolutely cannot do. Basically I've never seen a document and thought "wow I don't know how that was made because I sure couldn't make it in Word".

All those documents prove, if anything, is that people are good/bad at using LaTeX and/or Word.

My suspicion is that most people are just really bad at using Word and that's actually the problem here. Using LaTeX to solve that problem is certainly valid, but so is using Word properly.

I could try recreating the first one in Word, I suppose, to answer my own question. Should be fairly simple.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 17:36

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

"Consistently herded cats ahead of schedule."

Actually that would be a stunningly accurate description of my previous job.

Now I herd cats behind schedule because they sleep 23 hours a day.

It is a cat analogy.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 19:38

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

One company asked me what my current salary was before they even gave me an offer, stating that they needed it "for tax purposes". I told them I'd be happy to let them know that if/when I was paying tax through them. Which they were fine with, but it wasn't exactly subtle that they were hoping to low-ball me.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2013 14:12

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:23

Tunga: May 7, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Amarkov posted:

Asking what things I want to be better is like asking what my greatest weakness is. I can either give a vague non-answer, or I can divine the precise set of responses where you and your company concur with my judgement. I definitely can't tell the truth; if the real answer is "my last job had poo poo testing", and your company also has poo poo testing, suddenly I appear not to be a good fit.

If you're leaving your job because of X, and you say "I don't like X" and they say "we like X so you're not a good fit", isn't that good for both parties? Why would you want to work there?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2013 17:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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