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One of the better pieces of advice I've gotten is to stand up, it helps make your voice project and be more clear. It's easy to mumble into a phone and it makes you hard to understand. If you can get access to a landline or good VOIP and a good headset, it's also a big improvement over a cellphone. My school had rooms in the career center you could check out for phone interviews, and that was really good because there were no distractions or interruptions. If you're going to do it at home, I would recommend cleaning off your desk, turning off your computer, and just having a notepad and whatever notes you need printed out and easily accessible without distraction.
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Apr 6, 2013 19:57
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Does anyone here happen to know if unpaid internships are illegal in Canada? Specifically in BC. I went through the efforts of interviewing at a local company here and they wanted to offer me an "unpaid internship." It felt pretty insulting.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:24
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Obviously, reject it whether it's illegal or not. I don't think it could be legal though, given it's illegal here (unless they have you doing literally no work) and Canadian labor laws are generally more stringent than they are in the US. You are correct that an unpaid internship in a technical discipline is an insult.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:47
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Apparently success feeds ambition. The job I've managed to secure is by all accounts easy, for now at least. I'm going to be spoon fed stuff which amounts to glorified (but admittedly critical) text parsing to facilitate business to business payments. Bla bla bla. Later on I'm going to be given more responsibility, so that I'll be messing with the back end of a website which will be setting up all this fun stuff. Securely letting clients process ACH/Wire/EFT/Virtual Card/Check/blablabla should be interesting. So, given what I'm going to be working with, I'm already thinking about how to leverage this in the future. It's all being done in .NET, and from what I hear working with money and being in a trusted position is good experience, too. Also, since the job is a 20 hour a week job, and the summer is coming up, I'm wondering how someone could find a reasonable 3 month contract to bang out over the summer, since my employer isn't as enthusiastic as I am about giving me more work. Hell, they might not have any yet. Also, how long does one have to stay at a current job before they should just stick it out until YOTJ? I might still have 3 more semesters in school, but holy poo poo, I'm ready to Just Work NOW. As easily as I found this job - the first call I got - I could probably make a full court press and get something full time with benefits. I'm rather tired of having no insurance, money problems, and the stress of school while being poor. When this job's paychecks start rolling in maybe I'll feel good enough to stick the rest of everything out, since 20 an hour makes 20 hours a week livable, but my god I'd literally kill or cross a desert on foot to get myself in a place I'd like to be at this point. I've spent enough time looking at NYC and SF through travel shows and street view. I really only care about the amount of experience I need to get an offer with relo at this point, and only if they expect a degree do I want to finish. So, what exactly should I do, so I can get that kind of offer?
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Apr 7, 2013 22:29
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If you're still in school, apply for internships. Shoot for the moon--Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. These guys all hire hundreds/thousands of interns each, and this is the time of year they do it. And of course they will work around you school schedule. Taking a semester off to do an internship is a pretty reasonable idea too. I really recommend finishing school, a degree combined with real-world experience will put you in a much higher class of work/pay, at least for the beginning years of your career. And if you want to live in the Bay Area long term, working at a tech giant is a pretty good way to get into the area--you get paid well, they'll often help with relocation, and they have insane perks like private coaches that pick you up in San Francisco and take you to work. evensevenone fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Apr 7, 2013 |
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Apr 7, 2013 22:55
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What does this stand for?
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Apr 7, 2013 23:00
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Ithaqua posted:What does this stand for? Year On The Job.
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Apr 7, 2013 23:28
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So I saw it mentioned in a post a few pages back, but could someone explain in a more low-level sense what the gently caress DevOps is, because basically every article on Google is complete poo poo and seems to be written for the technology-illiterate managerial buzz-word type. Maybe someone who works at an organization that considers themselves to be part of the "DevOps Movement".
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Apr 7, 2013 23:28
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evensevenone posted:If you're still in school, apply for internships. Shoot for the moon--Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. These guys all hire hundreds/thousands of interns each, and this is the time of year they do it. And of course they will work around you school schedule. Taking a semester off to do an internship is a pretty reasonable idea too. I have a job right now - I have already finished an internship already, anyway - but my GPA is pretty pathetic, and Jacksonville Florida doesn't really exist within the frame of where they care to pick people up, nor where they'd have campuses. Do they ever hire devs-as-devs instead of trying to play the poaching game with recent grads? The GPA issue is a non factor to me, except perhaps for impressing people who want to see me as a student and not a dev - not that I care anymore, though. It largely reflects that some semesters I had a 3.75, and semesters where I was evicted or threw newspapers at 2 am my grades slipped a whole point from how I did without all the poo poo on my plate. As far as the Bay Area, it's most likely either that or Manhattan, depending on which place has a vibe closer to my tastes. The odd sampling of the life I've never led until now has made it very clear that I'm really going to be bored out of my mind unless I'm in a cultural hotspot. As far as Jacksonville goes, staying here is just making do until I go where I'm not held back by the excuses and nonsense that pervade here. It's also not good for my career - I even got told point blank by a guy working for Robert Half that Jacksonville is a growth area for coding because it's not as far as india but still cheap, and I shouldn't expect more than 40K for my first full time job with a degree AND experience.  He tried to hard sell me 35K/yr to be a full time android dev!I should have just walked out then and there, but I figured I might as well have stuck around. His co-worker who does contract work was a lot more helpful and less pushy, at least. Nevertheless, the very first firm that interviewed me offered right off the bat 20/hr, even though I'm still in school. I just feel I might be quickly falling into a 20/hr a week job over the summer, and I feel like that's wasting time. As sick of being here as I am, I'm even more sick of being poor.
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Apr 7, 2013 23:40
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Good Will Hrunting posted:So I saw it mentioned in a post a few pages back, but could someone explain in a more low-level sense what the gently caress DevOps is, because basically every article on Google is complete poo poo and seems to be written for the technology-illiterate managerial buzz-word type. Maybe someone who works at an organization that considers themselves to be part of the "DevOps Movement". DevOps is everything related to software development that isn't actually writing code. Bug tracking / work item management, CI builds, deployments, application health monitoring, etc. Smaller teams will have the developers handling this stuff, but bigger teams might have someone hired specifically to handle that stuff.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:09
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Good Will Hrunting posted:So I saw it mentioned in a post a few pages back, but could someone explain in a more low-level sense what the gently caress DevOps is, because basically every article on Google is complete poo poo and seems to be written for the technology-illiterate managerial buzz-word type. Maybe someone who works at an organization that considers themselves to be part of the "DevOps Movement". It comes down to if you want to release software on a quick turn-around, you need to definitely need your infrastructure poo poo together so you're not doing a lot of manual and one-off builds that are basically unsupportable long term. For us it means that it's not ok to deploy something without proper packaging or configuration management support (e.g. Puppet manifests). I don't really know what the "DevOps Movement" is but if it's like "Agile" maybe the term has gotten over-applied. Edit: I don't disagree with the poster above me, so I guess mine is more bottom line for my work Lurchington fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Apr 8, 2013 |
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Apr 8, 2013 00:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:So I saw it mentioned in a post a few pages back, but could someone explain in a more low-level sense what the gently caress DevOps is, because basically every article on Google is complete poo poo and seems to be written for the technology-illiterate managerial buzz-word type. Maybe someone who works at an organization that considers themselves to be part of the "DevOps Movement". DevOps is a sort of formalized recognition that releasing and deploying software consistently and reliably is a non-trivial task. In a lot of corporate environments, software is built and then handed off to the infrastructure team to install. poo poo goes wrong, and the devs and infrastructure guys point fingers at each other as to whose fault it was. The whole "DevOps Movement" consists largely of practices and technologies aimed at scripting all of those steps so that they can be executed in a reliable way. In shops that have really embraced it, the development team often takes on more responsibility for deployments than they would have otherwise had, but they accomplish those deployments largely through scripting. There is a big focus on provisioning as well, which comes from the desire to rapidly bring up new instances on VMs (whether in house or "the cloud").
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Apr 8, 2013 00:22
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The name DevOps is pretty descriptive actually, since at a high level it's just having developers do operations work by writing software to do all the things that traditionally were done manually or with hacked together non-reusable scripts. The "Movement" part is just that there was a lot of resistance to the idea (both from sys admins that didn't want to get pushed out of a job and developers who didn't want to deal with ops poo poo), and it took some evangelizing to convince people it's actually a pretty good idea.
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Apr 8, 2013 03:42
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Also, how long does one have to stay at a current job before they should just stick it out until YOTJ? I might still have 3 more semesters in school, but holy poo poo, I'm ready to Just Work NOW. As easily as I found this job - the first call I got - I could probably make a full court press and get something full time with benefits. Do not quit school. Keep working PT, pick up contract work, whatever you need to. It will make finding a good FT position much harder (especially if you move somewhere with a larger market than Jacksonville). It will also limit your prospects for advancement. I'm not saying you can't get a programming job without a degree, many people do. It will just be much harder compared to having a degree.
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Apr 8, 2013 14:29
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Just to echo-box what's been said above from my own personal take. It's a hybrid of Development and Operations. Having deployment and verification steps embedded in the development team side of things. Often done at smaller to mid sized companies where it wouldn't be unheard of for developers to have access to production environments for debugging purposes. To me it's the typical wall between Operations and Development that exists at a Fortune 500 company is more of a fence with a gate in it. Our dev-ops guys handle daily deployments using scripts that they maintain but maybe were written by developers. They sit right with the server developers and are quickly able to react when something goes wrong. In turn the server developers will make sure that the dev-ops folks have any tools needed to fine-tune the process.
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Apr 8, 2013 14:36
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Year On The Job. Is it on? I always read it on here as "Year of the Job", like some sort of goon joke saying "this is the year we'll all get a good job!". 
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Apr 8, 2013 17:10
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Sab669 posted:Is it on? I always read it on here as "Year of the Job", like some sort of goon joke saying "this is the year we'll all get a good job!".
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Apr 8, 2013 17:16
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Yo, I'm a sophomore in college majoring in computer science. I couldn't find an internship and it's a bit late in the year for that anyways since all my friends already got theirs and I can't really find any places that are still hiring. My GPA is also below 3.0, which doesn't help. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do over the summer so that next year is better? I was thinking of learning Python and taking some Udacity course on algorithms. Still, I need something to put on a resume, so yeah. Thanks!
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Apr 8, 2013 17:36
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Take classes and get straight As.
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Apr 8, 2013 17:45
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flymonkey posted:Yo, I'm a sophomore in college majoring in computer science. I couldn't find an internship and it's a bit late in the year for that anyways since all my friends already got theirs and I can't really find any places that are still hiring. My GPA is also below 3.0, which doesn't help. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do over the summer so that next year is better? I was thinking of learning Python and taking some Udacity course on algorithms. Still, I need something to put on a resume, so yeah. Thanks!
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Apr 8, 2013 17:55
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Plorkyeran posted:The name DevOps is pretty descriptive actually, since at a high level it's just having developers do operations work by writing software to do all the things that traditionally were done manually or with hacked together non-reusable scripts. Part of the problem is that it's pretty much totally hopeless to deploy a software product with manual steps involved to an ops person - we attempt to fully automate the develop process so installing a server or the workstation client can be done by anyone with no special training. The problem is that pure operations people will find problems (real or imagined) and start making random changes to stuff like the IIS configuration, and then everything goes to hell. If your product has manual setup steps of any kind to install, it slows down test, it slows down development, and it slows down operations, so the ROI on fully automated deployment is really, really good. If you have two groups, development and operations, they'll just fight with each other because the developers want the general (and lazy) solution and the operations people just want to fix the problem now. With devops, the people installing the product are the people doing the development for the installation, so they have to eat their own dog food, and can incorporate their tribal knowledge fixes into the build script rather than trying to communicate findings to a different group and go through all sorts of red-tape.
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Apr 8, 2013 18:36
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Would you consider someone in devops more of a sysadmin or a developer? I ask because I think roles surrounding devops sounds interesting to me but I don't want to be locked out of dev jobs in the future because people think I'm actually more into sysadmin stuff.
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Apr 8, 2013 22:21
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DotFortune posted:Would you consider someone in devops more of a sysadmin or a developer? I ask because I think roles surrounding devops sounds interesting to me but I don't want to be locked out of dev jobs in the future because people think I'm actually more into sysadmin stuff. Developers usually do it. It's not a different job title (usually), but more of a complimentary skillset with some additional tools to be familiar with.
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Apr 8, 2013 22:31
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hieronymus posted:Part of the problem is that it's pretty much totally hopeless to deploy a software product with manual steps involved to an ops person - we attempt to fully automate the develop process so installing a server or the workstation client can be done by anyone with no special training. The problem is that pure operations people will find problems (real or imagined) and start making random changes to stuff like the IIS configuration, and then everything goes to hell. If your product has manual setup steps of any kind to install, it slows down test, it slows down development, and it slows down operations, so the ROI on fully automated deployment is really, really good. If you have two groups, development and operations, they'll just fight with each other because the developers want the general (and lazy) solution and the operations people just want to fix the problem now. With devops, the people installing the product are the people doing the development for the installation, so they have to eat their own dog food, and can incorporate their tribal knowledge fixes into the build script rather than trying to communicate findings to a different group and go through all sorts of red-tape. quote:"Our build process is manual. If you need one done, email us." *sets up an automated daily build request email* #solved
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Apr 8, 2013 22:38
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There is an important distinction between 'automated build' and 'automated deployment.' If you have a separate team that does the build and a separate ops team, the ops team will run into problems, change stuff to get things to work, and get the customer happy for a little while, but may or may not report the bug to the team doing the installer, and it may or may not get fixed appropriately. I have been on the wrong end of an ops/dev breakdown, and trust me, debugging in an operating room is about as painful as it possibly gets.
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Apr 8, 2013 23:10
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I'm finishing up a degree in CS, but I'm a bit old (28) for internships, or at least my understanding of them. I currently work 40 hours a week, but I want some experience in the CS field. Can I create a resume (or porfolio?) from programs I make at work? Would that even be a useful way to break into a CS related field?
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Apr 9, 2013 02:17
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Creating a portfolio of your work can be a really handy thing in some job applications so its never a bad idea to create one. Just make sure that its OK to share the work you've done if its for another employer. I don't think you're really ever 'too old' for an internship, but it really depends on the company. Some companies put up internships targeting graduate students.
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Apr 9, 2013 13:42
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2banks1swap.avi posted:I'm tired of being in school. Say in school. Also, you're complaining about still having 3 semesters to go AND nothing to fill up your summer with? I think we found out what you should do, do a summer semester so that you'll graduate this time next year, instead of next September (or December if you only take course during Spring and Fall semesters...). Hell, even going half-time would be enough to lighten your load for all the subsequent semesters. This is something you should do seeing as how you've already mentioned how "real world poo poo happens, semester goes to poo poo." A lightened semester might have you breathing easier if you're delivering papers again.
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Apr 9, 2013 15:19
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So I'm still in school, third year in Software Engineering major and I'm doing an internship right now. Nothing worrying except nobody wants to hire me for the summer (so I'll probably talk with these guys and see if I can get another block), but for post-school prospects: What sort of positions are Master's degree-holders employed for? I've heard that a lot of companies really only look for people with Bachelor's degrees, but I applied to (and was accepted for) our new BS/MS program so I'll have a 6th (!!!) year of school and a BS + MS at the end. So I guess my question is, what can I expect in the way of employment when I graduate come 2016?
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Apr 9, 2013 15:43
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This varies tremendously by company and sub-discipline; it's impossible to make a general statement. It also probably depends on what the curriculum for a Software Engineering degree consists of at your school, as there is a fair degree more variance in these compared to CS or CE programs. The closest thing to a general rule is that a master's will get you the same jobs that a bachelor's would, with starting pay a notch higher.
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Apr 9, 2013 15:50
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ARACHNOTRON posted:So I'm still in school, third year in Software Engineering major and I'm doing an internship right now. Nothing worrying except nobody wants to hire me for the summer (so I'll probably talk with these guys and see if I can get another block), but for post-school prospects: Pretty much the same positions that are available to a BS holder. Sometimes with higher starting pay, sometimes not. There may be some extra opportunities available if you do highly applicable research. Edit: Yes, obviously, this varies highly from company to company. There may be some different positions available, but in general holding a masters isn't going to unlock a whole new world of job listings that you couldn't see before. tk fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 9, 2013 |
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Apr 9, 2013 15:54
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Most places that I've worked will start you with pay comparable to someone with 2-3 years worth of work experience if you are starting with an MS. But yeah, it varies from company to company.
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Apr 9, 2013 15:55
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I love how people sign up for the MS and only then ask what the benefits are.
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Apr 9, 2013 15:57
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Okay, thanks for the info. I figured something like that but must have confused it in my mind with undergrad coops or something. because I'm dumb as heckevensevenone posted:I love how people sign up for the MS and only then ask what the benefits are. I just thought it would be cool and interesting, and especially good if I could get my MS while technically an undergrad and not have to pay more
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Apr 9, 2013 16:24
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ARACHNOTRON posted:Okay, thanks for the info. I figured something like that but must have confused it in my mind with undergrad coops or something. because I'm dumb as heck Are you in the US? In technical disciplines, normally schools actually pay you to get your graduate degree.
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Apr 9, 2013 18:23
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Edly posted:Are you in the US? In technical disciplines, normally schools actually pay you to get your graduate degree. This is true of Ph.Ds, not graduate degrees in general (at least not commonly). If someone gets a master's on the school's dime it's usually because they started out on the Ph.D track and decided it wasn't for them or failed their candidacy. (Even when this happens their advisor may stop funding them depending on his/her overall funding situation, whether he/she is opposed to their "dropping down" to a masters, what side of the bed he/she got out of that morning etc.). A by-design terminal masters program is not typically funded by the school.
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Apr 9, 2013 18:32
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Otto Skorzeny posted:This is true of Ph.Ds, not graduate degrees in general (at least not commonly). If someone gets a master's on the school's dime it's usually because they started out on the Ph.D track and decided it wasn't for them or failed their candidacy. (Even when this happens their advisor may stop funding them depending on his/her overall funding situation, whether he/she is opposed to their "dropping down" to a masters, what side of the bed he/she got out of that morning etc.). A by-design terminal masters program is not typically funded by the school. This makes sense. Where I went (UVA), they normally didn't accept terminal masters candidates, so everyone was funded. However, the vast majority of us simply left after getting a masters, so it worked out that way in the end. PS as someone with a graduate degree, I recommend avoiding grad school unless you are actually interested in a PhD followed by a career in academia or research. I don't feel like my masters is getting me more job opportunities or a higher salary as a software engineer - certainly not enough to compensate for missing out on 2 years of relevant experience and a real salary.
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Apr 9, 2013 18:58
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One of the really real (and good) reasons I'm doing this program, though, is that I can take graduate classes and have them double-count for BS requirements. How my schedule is looking so far, I only have to do one semester more than I would take normally and I'll have an MS.  well, one semester and another semester dedicated solely to my thesis
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Apr 9, 2013 19:10
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Yeah, consider the opportunity cost of 2 year's experience in addition to the cost of tuition for the MS degree. If an MS might get you a 10-20% bump in salary, it is a very real possibility that you could take an entry level job in industry straight out of undergrad, gain a couple years work experience, then go elsewhere and make as much or more than the starting salary for someone with an MS and zero experience except for school. And you'd get paid for working those two years, rather than paying for the privilege of working. It's different if you want to go into academia or research obviously as you need the letters after your name in order to play ball. And if your intent is academia you already have given up the idea of making any money anyway.
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Apr 9, 2013 19:36
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Otto Skorzeny posted:This is true of Ph.Ds, not graduate degrees in general (at least not commonly). If someone gets a master's on the school's dime it's usually because they started out on the Ph.D track and decided it wasn't for them or failed their candidacy. (Even when this happens their advisor may stop funding them depending on his/her overall funding situation, whether he/she is opposed to their "dropping down" to a masters, what side of the bed he/she got out of that morning etc.). A by-design terminal masters program is not typically funded by the school. This isn't true for CS/engineering, I was fully supported throughout my MS. I had to TA but that was normal for PhD track people in their first couple years. The only thing is that it's harder to get NSF GRF grants and other external funding, and professors are less likely to pay you out of their research budget. I think it depends on your university, better schools have more money. But I went to a mid-range UC, so it's not just Stanford or something. The one that rarely gets funded are the 5-year BS/MS people, since you get both your degrees contemporaneously. If you do a BS and then apply for MS, you can usually expect a funding offer.
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Apr 9, 2013 19:42
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