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Five months of traveling after graduating is not at all a long period of time and shouldn't be an issue at all, especially if you were actually doing things and not just sitting in your parents' basement playing video games.
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Mar 29, 2013 19:39
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Mr. Crow posted:So 2 months into this (predictably) suckfest corporate job on a 3 month contract; I ask and realize to myself as I hunt for new jobs, all corporate coding jobs are probably god awful from a programmer perspective? Are small (prosperous) companies developer paradise? How do you find these jobs though (what with them being small local companies)? (edit: moved the important stuff to the front and the more E/N stuff to the bottom) No. It really depends on the place. Bad management is bad management and happens everywhere, places big and small. TL;DR: A fast-moving small company will probably be more fun to work for, but it may be because they're skimping on important-but-unglamorous work that still must be done. Small companies will probably give you a bigger breadth of experience in a variety of roles. You'll probably have to do a little bit of everything, which is a good thing for a young dude taking his first steps into the real world. Small companies will probably (I say probably, because I'm too young myself to know) make a you a better, more well-rounded engineer. The big company I'm at now made me a better coder (though I think I lucked out and my experience isn't the typical). Big companies is order, small companies is chaos. Oh one other thing I picked up from my experience -- another plus for big companies is that if you generally like the people or place, but hate your team/manager/work you're doing, you can easily chat up someone 2 floors below and find another team to transfer over (of course, not all companies encourage or make transferring easy). Small companies, you either like your team and what you're doing, or you'll have to go look for another company. (And now, for the E/N rant.) My last company was a small-medium company. It was even very prosperous, widely known as the best product in our area, and we eventually got acquired by another big company. Inside the gates? All the focus was on getting stuff out the door, so lots of corners were shaved, shortcuts taken, and come next quarter, there was "no time" to repay technical debt because hey, new features to push (yes, I was specifically told not to repay this debt). Things became a horrible mess to work with, and I consider my time "not well spent" if over half my time and frustration is spent unravelling cesspools rather than doing interesting work. We were also highly dependent on this other team's product to do our work. Since there weren't any quality or testing standards in place or anything, they pushed out their features with minimal testing because we were usually the catching them. So, not only did we have our own work to do, we had to act as part-time QA for them -- except sometimes these bugs are blocking for us, and of course bugfixes themselves were often buggy. I'm now at a big company. Code reviews are required with a heavy emphasis on style and readability. And conversely to what everyone's saying about big company vs. small, I've learned much more about how to write clean, maintainable code than I ever did at my small company. I mean, this makes sense, right? Larger codebases have a much more dire need for maintainable code. The downside, of course, is that code submissions have to go through this entire review process, and then launches go through this launch process, both of which takes time. But to me, I'd rather spend extra time waiting for my reviewer to get back to me (during which I could work on something else), rather than spending the same extra time in spaghetti-induced frustration. Oh, I should also mention that the Big Company infrastructure is usually robust enough that if you miss a bug in your code somewhere, the whole thing won't come crashing down. On the contrary, this happened a lot at Small Company. So yes, depending on how well-run the company is, some small companies initially "move faster," but that's because they worry less about writing solid code and doing thorough QA and more about Making facepalmolive fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Mar 29, 2013 |
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Mar 29, 2013 20:34
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How strong do my programming skills have to be to get an internship?
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Mar 29, 2013 20:36
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how!! posted:It depends on what kind of programmer you are. If you don't really care about programming, then stick with big companies. If you really love programming, then you're best to stick with smaller companies. If you're self taught, or have lots of personal projects, you probably are a great programmer, and working at a big company will drive you crazy. If you just chose Computer Science as your major because you "heard they make lots of money", you probably suck as a developer (but are too stupid to admit it to yourself) and you'll have more fun working with other miserable bastards such as yourself. Most employees at big companies don't care at all if they do a good job or a crappy job so its very common to see the most hosed up ugly crap you have ever seen. how!!? how!! is this person still allowed to give advice to anyone about anything?
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Mar 29, 2013 21:22
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Doghouse posted:How strong do my programming skills have to be to get an internship? Depends on your grades and what classes you've taken I'd say. They don't expect you to be able to do the job of one of their actual programmers, you're there to learn. It's also important to point out the difference between "skill" and experience. If you put in the effort and have some good-looking code from class projects, that should show that you're capable of learning which is more important than if you know x language or y framework.
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Mar 29, 2013 21:28
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Brosnan posted:how!!? how!! is this person still allowed to give advice to anyone about anything?
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Mar 29, 2013 21:34
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facepalmolive posted:Oh, I should also mention that the Big Company infrastructure is usually robust enough that if you miss a bug in your code somewhere, the whole thing won't come crashing down. That, and if I do ship a bug to a customer, there are a bare minimum of three other people who signed off on it as OK; it's not all my fault and no one is going to blame it on me. Many companies are like that, and many aren't, whether they're big or small. That's why it's important during the interview process to find out how things work at that company; you can't just assume things will work in a way you're comfortable with.
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Mar 29, 2013 21:39
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kitten smoothie posted:Do you know this for a fact, having experienced big and small organizations, or are you just divining this insight from Slashdot comments and Dilbert comics? I have experience working at both types of companies. Big companies that sucked, big companies that sucked a little, small companies that rocked rear end, and small companies that sucked rear end. The company I work for now is a small company that sucks rear end. But its all relative. Some people would consider the job I have now as a pariside job. Basically I work from home, but I only work like 3 hours a week. The boss will give me an assignment for the week, and I have to write a "status report" every friday basically filling him in on the progress of my work. My assignment for this week is to "figure out how to use google calendar API". Later today I'm going to write up my status report and its going to be basically 200 words or so describing how to sign up with Google APIs. Last week my task was to "prep the codebase for building unit tests". These people are paying me 60K... One one had this job sucks because I know I could be having way more fun building something that will actually see the light of day. On the other hand, free money is kinda nice.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:17
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Unless you are working on projects in your own time, you are just screwing your self over. Yes, free money is nice and not having to do work is wonderful. Unfortunately, what are you going to talk about when interviewing for your next position? Nothing.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:20
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Don Mega posted:Unless you are working on projects in your own time, you are just screwing your self over. Yes, free money is nice and not having to do work is wonderful. Unfortunately, what are you going to talk about when interviewing for your next position? Nothing. Umm, haven't you seen his github? There are several 100+ line projects there.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:21
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how!! posted:I have experience working at both types of companies. Big companies that sucked, big companies that sucked a little, small companies that rocked rear end, and small companies that sucked rear end. The company I work for now is a small company that sucks rear end. But its all relative. Some people would consider the job I have now as a pariside job. Basically I work from home, but I only work like 3 hours a week. The boss will give me an assignment for the week, and I have to write a "status report" every friday basically filling him in on the progress of my work. My assignment for this week is to "figure out how to use google calendar API". Later today I'm going to write up my status report and its going to be basically 200 words or so describing how to sign up with Google APIs. Last week my task was to "prep the codebase for building unit tests". These people are paying me 60K... One one had this job sucks because I know I could be having way more fun building something that will actually see the light of day. On the other hand, free money is kinda nice.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:24
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Wow, he somehow found a company that is dumber than he is.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:28
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You should take the advice of people who are where you want to be. I never payed attention to howw!!'s advice, because I did not realize that he was where I wanted to be. I just need to take all of his advice and act on it.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:31
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OBAMA BIN LinkedIn posted:Wow, he somehow found a company that is dumber than he is.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:31
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Brosnan posted:how!!? how!! is this person still allowed to give advice to anyone about anything? Um, so personally, I've dropped in and out of CoC many times before, but nothing caught or kept my attention. Just recently, however, I read my first how!! post. He's probably the only reason I'm here. Speaking of which... how!! posted:Basically I work from home, but I only work like 3 hours a week... These people are paying me 60K Holy poo poo, what. If I were in that kind of position, I'd be working another real fulltime job on top of that. Or find 12 more of these gigs and I'd making 800K a year working 39 hours a week. e: OBAMA BIN LinkedIn posted:Wow, he somehow found a company that is dumber than he is. No. He's the one getting 60K a year for doing essentially no work. He's the one true genius here. facepalmolive fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Mar 29, 2013 |
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Mar 29, 2013 22:33
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I wonder if that 3 hours/week includes the amount of time he spent in the shower trying to solve a problem while totally not trying to solve a problem.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:37
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how!! posted:The company I work for now is a small company that sucks rear end... I work from home... I only work like 3 hours a week... These people are paying me 60K... this job sucks...
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Mar 29, 2013 22:37
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Cicero posted:This is actually kind of awesome. Like others have said, it's not good for career building but I could definitely see this kind of thing being appealing after I've worked real jobs for a while and am burned out (not to mention the potential income if you could somehow get multiples of this kind of job; 180k for 9 hours of work a week!). How did you get it? Did you just fall into it? I found the job on careers.stackoverflow.com. It may seem really awesome but its really not. Its very hard coming up with things to say for my status reports. I'd honestly rather build actual software, because thats what I'm good at, and its what I enjoy doing. Basically the other technical guy thats part of my 'team', is a complete retard and has never shipped a single product before. It takes him a entire week to get one tiny thing built, so thats the baseline that I have to perform against. In the past I would have taken it upon myself to get more meaningful work. But I've learned that doing those things will just result in getting fired. "B players hire C players", and all that jazz. If you want a job like this, learn how to act like a C player. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 29, 2013 22:49
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I'm almost certainly convinced how!! is a troll now, but:how!! posted:I found the job on careers.stackoverflow.com. It may seem really awesome but its really not. quote:Its very hard coming up with things to say for my status reports. quote:I'd honestly rather build actual software, because thats what I'm good at, and its what I enjoy doing. quote:In the past I would have taken it upon myself to get more meaningful work. But I've learned that doing those things will just result in getting fired. "B players hire C players", and all that jazz. If you want a job like this, learn how to act like a C player.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:53
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By "C" player, he means "Kanye" player. Read his groundbreaking thesis on human archetypes: http://www.slideshare.net/priestc/the-kanye-quotient
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Mar 29, 2013 22:57
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Suspicious Dish posted:By "C" player, he means "Kanye" player. Read his groundbreaking thesis on human archetypes: quote:A team should contain at least one woman
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Mar 29, 2013 23:00
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how!! posted:I found the job on careers.stackoverflow.com. It may seem really awesome but its really not. Its very hard coming up with things to say for my status reports. I'd honestly rather build actual software, because thats what I'm good at, and its what I enjoy doing. Basically the other technical guy thats part of my 'team', is a complete retard and has never shipped a single product before. It takes him a entire week to get one tiny thing built, so thats the baseline that I have to perform against. In the past I would have taken it upon myself to get more meaningful work. But I've learned that doing those things will just result in getting fired. "B players hire C players", and all that jazz. If you want a job like this, learn how to act like a C player.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:03
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OBAMA BIN LinkedIn posted:I'm almost certainly convinced how!! is a troll now, but: You do indeed get fired from good jobs for being incompetent, but my point is you get fired from bad jobs for being competent. The job I have now is a bad job. If I let slip that I'm not working my rear end off, I'l probably get fired, even though I'm doing everything they ask of me. 99% of jobs out there these days are bad jobs, in my experience.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:03
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OBAMA BIN LinkedIn posted:
I think he's saying if he takes too much initiative his boss will see him as a threat and fire him? Not sure.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:04
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how!! posted:You do indeed get fired from good jobs for being incompetent, but my point is you get fired from bad jobs for being competent. The job I have now is a bad job. If I let slip that I'm not working my rear end off, I'l probably get fired, even though I'm doing everything they ask of me. 99% of jobs out there these days are bad jobs, in my experience. Your solution: find a bad job and be incompetant. Great work! Sounds right up your alley.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:06
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Mr. Crow posted:Posting from my phone so I'll try to keep it short, but my biggest gripe is a "get it done" mentality and having to do hoola hoops around bureaucracy. There's no quality control; no peer review, we have one tester I know of, that basically verifies the feature works then we ship it off, no regression testing on and on... It's also a joy that designers, writers and any other job description related to developing a product have no direct interaction or "architecture". Designer gets done with a new page? Hands me a zip file with just a raw html f file and all the necessary folders /files structure in whatever dreamweaver decided that had nothing to do with the solution or actual website structure. Now I get to figure out what already exists, what's new, figure out where to put it, break the page apart into separate asp. Net components that are all over blah blah blah. Oh and the point of contact that assigns the ticket, "use all the existing tracking information". Wait what? Half of this doesn't make sense for this, go back and forth for a week trying to clarify the requirements with a guy that doesn't know anything about analytics or code. Finally go talk to one of the analytics guys directly. ."what? We've stopped using that entirely, ya just GA is fine for this page." Cool. Also good to know we stopped using that tracker cause its still everywhere in the code and website! I'm going to go back and address this to give us a little break from how!!! chat. Most of the complaints you have may seem like large corporate environment problems, but in reality a lot of these things (unclear requirements, people not communicating) happen everywhere, all the time (though their root cause may be slightly different, or they may manifest themselves slightly differently). If you really think a small company is where it's at for you, then go for it. Some people are just more happy with the idea of working for a small company. If you can find one of those jobs that suits you, all the better. Although I can't really give you advice on how to find these jobs, as most of the offers I have gotten for small-shop jobs have been through people that I have met at my big corporate jobs.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:15
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Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: how!! Do I linked list?
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Mar 30, 2013 00:50
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Jmcrofts posted:I think he's saying if he takes too much initiative his boss will see him as a threat and fire him? Not sure. He's just trying to justify the fact that he is repeated fired from all of these "bad" jobs that he's had.
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Mar 30, 2013 06:43
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how!! if your job literally only takes 3 hours a week I'll do it on the side, just get your partner fired and me hired on, I could use an extra 60k a year.
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Mar 30, 2013 07:13
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Cicero posted:how!! if your job literally only takes 3 hours a week I'll do it on the side, just get your partner fired and me hired on, I could use an extra 60k a year. I can't get the other person fired. The other guy is best friends with the CEO, who is being funded by "an inheritance". They apparently are pretty close friends, which means this guy , no matter how incompetent, will never leave. In my experience, the worst small companies are the ones where everyone are friends. The best kinds are when each employee is treated not as a friend, but as a professional. Anyways, there is nothing special about my job. This kind of crap is everywhere. Clueless kids with rich parents starting (failed) companies with their friends is a pretty common occurrence. You just have to learn how to play the game.
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Mar 30, 2013 16:37
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how!! posted:Anyways, there is nothing special about my job. OBAMA BIN LinkedIn posted:You're getting paid $384 an hour. Anyway I get the feeling you're working such hours a week because: 1) You're new, and the company doesn't expect you to hit the ground running so they're not giving you a huge workload to start with. 2) You're underestimating what the company is actually expecting of you. This seems to be a recurring theme for you. X-BUM-RAIDER-X fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 16:53
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3) The company is mismanaged and will fail soon, and how!! will be out of a job, and will be unable to present anything constructive that that he's done when he goes to look for a new job.
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Mar 30, 2013 17:05
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evensevenone posted:3) The company is mismanaged and will fail soon, and how!! will be out of a job, and will be unable to present anything constructive that that he's done when he goes to look for a new job. Which makes all the talk of how well he's being compensated completely negligible, really. I'd rather make $50k and go into work everyday eager to learn something I'm passionate about than $100k while sitting around doing nothing. I've been in the situation how!! is in with zero room to grow and it sucked even though I was making far more than any of my peers.
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Mar 30, 2013 18:22
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4) We live in a hustle economy these days and hustle skills are what pays the bills. Its a dirty greasy game, but if you want to get paid, you have to play the game. This guy doesn't want a great programmer, he wants another buddy to play "company" with. He doesn't want a product, he wants a company. I've played this game many times before. As long as I call the dude regularly and send him emails with buzzwords, he'll be able to convince his rich parents that his company needs to stay funded. As long as the company says funded, I continue to get my bread. edit: replace "rich parents" with "VC" and its still true for pretty much any small company in a lovely economy.
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Mar 30, 2013 18:27
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Which makes all the talk of how well he's being compensated completely negligible, really. I'd rather make $50k and go into work everyday eager to learn something I'm passionate about than $100k while sitting around doing nothing. I've been in the situation how!! is in with zero room to grow and it sucked even though I was making far more than any of my peers. Use your free time and the extra money to do cool poo poo on your own? I don't see how how!!'s situation isn't ideal if you actually want to do things.
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Mar 30, 2013 18:29
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Because it's fictional? He gets a new job every probation.
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Mar 30, 2013 18:33
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Well I used the money and free time to do schoolwork. Also, how!! and I were a bit different in that I was spending 8 hours in the office + a 1.5 hour commute each way. I left when we got a new manager who made the days longer and the work even more tedious/meaningless. Such is the audit department at a top 30 company I guess. E: I guess my post was pointless because I used money from that first job to get where I am now. Finishing school, interview process with a bunch of places I'm interested in, etc.
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Mar 30, 2013 18:35
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Safe and Secure! posted:Use your free time and the extra money to do cool poo poo on your own? I actually had a similar situation to how!!. Calculating an hourly wage for actual work done would be impossible, because you can not divide by zero. I was a field consultant for my employer and the economy was such that they had no contracts in the pipeline. They were very happy with the work I could do when I was staffed, though, and made this clear to me by keeping me around while laying off pretty much all the other benched employees they had. Out of the 18 months I worked for that firm, they did not need my services for 10. I was paid full salary and benefits in exchange for absolutely no work. I was a remote employee; one of my bosses was four states away and the other was in Canada. I'd check in with my boss every Monday morning; maybe one week out of that period she told me to get on a plane the following Monday. Otherwise she'd wish me a happy week and that was the end of my responsibilities. I spent the time learning the hell out of Rails and iOS and keeping my skills sharp and getting paid great money for it. The extra knowledge got me some freelance projects I was able to pick up. Eventually I quit that job and was able to hit the ground running at a place where I would have to actually do real work, because I had kept up on skills and had things to show for that time frame. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 18:47
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I was actually really surprised when I got my new job- my manager is a great guy and there's a bunch of things to do, but he's stuck in meetings all day and things tend to bottleneck until he can start assigning tasks. I came from a small firm where I had a huge list of things to do every day and I was getting paid so much less, so it pretty crazy that I was getting paid significantly more and had a lot more free time. I asked a couple of the other developers around, and they said that it was par for the course for contracting gigs- if they ask you to do an hours worth of work over the course of the day, you stretch it to 8. If they give you a huge task list, you do your best to knock it out. It's kind of weird, and it's my first 'big' job so I'm trying to find extra ways to be helpful and go above and beyond, but I'm not sure if at the end of the day it's going to result in my contract being extended or anything. On a good day I'm reading blogs and writing little experimental JS and portfolio stuff, on bad days I'm on imgur for waaaay too long. I'd love to find a way to do a bunch of cool stuff non stop, but we're high up on the Fortune list and there's a ton of bureaucracy weighing us down.
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Mar 30, 2013 20:31
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Well I applied for the position of E-commerce administrator for a local casino, and they called me like 6-7 times trying to get me in for an interview. I guess I'll be going down on Monday. It's not exactly the position I want, but casinos have renowned benefits in this community, so it's worth a shot I guess. I'd rather get a dev job but it would work while I'm in college. Thanks for the help, I'll be applying for more positions; hopefully a coding job or internship will bite.
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Mar 30, 2013 20:44
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