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That's a pretty short list of languages. You'd probably get a better picture if you had JavaScript and PHP in there.
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Aug 3, 2016 02:32
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Necc0 posted:DC goon who's actively hunting here: they're mostly sub-sub-contracted bottom of the barrel seat warmer positions. Which isn't to say there's a lot of good stuff here but we're always going to have that aspect to the job market. The most surprising thing I saw in that city listing is that freakin' Columbia, MD is on there - that's contractor-ville for NSA, not a "major city" in my opinion. This shows how strongly skewed the Indeed data is for certain metro regions (namely, larger corporate recruiters) rather than that it represents the job market as a whole. There's some fantastic tech jobs in the DMV, but just like almost every other tech job market the best jobs are probably not advertised on a job board and will be personal referrals. I can point to several companies I personally like in the DC area that aren't defense that I'd be looking at if I wasn't trying to start my own thing and/or burned out. Due to the intense focus upon enterprise and government in the region it's a pretty serious region for security professionals. I was interviewing with Salesforce for a security position and they were having a really, really hard time finding people in the Bay Area that would be technically qualified and would be clearable. Ultimately, that didn't work because I didn't want to relocate, but it was a little chilling to see that even such a reputable company had tapped out the security folks in the Bay Area resorting to my sorry rear end for an engineer across the country.
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Aug 3, 2016 04:24
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There is also the question of how much in general is getting listed (as opposed to promoted via other means such as direct recruiting) and of that how much is the share going to indeed. You could just be measuring trends in recruiting techniques. Is there BLS data of this granularity?
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Aug 3, 2016 06:14
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ultrafilter posted:That's a pretty short list of languages. You'd probably get a better picture if you had JavaScript and PHP in there. Maybe even specify Node.js. Javascript just seems to be booming unfortunately and might account for the reduction as it slowly eats mindshare.
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Aug 3, 2016 06:18
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For lack of a better venue, I figured I'd bitch here about a bad Amazon interview experience. There was a systems engineering role I applied for and subsequently discussed with a recruiter. I had done similar integration kind of stuff with software automation before, so it seemed like a close fit. The recruiter said the manager wanted to see some code. I don't really have any major public code, so I doodled up a little project and threw it up on GitHub. It took me three weeks to scrape together the time to develop something on a topic I was interested in. It had to do with synchronizing independent agents on different systems using RabbitMQ. I thought it appropriate. After I sent the code, they quickly set me up with a phone interview. I assumed they saw the code and were keen to talk to me. As it turned out, they never looked at the code, and didn't have any intention of looking at the code. They just poked me about general OS administration questions like what Linux shell commands to use to determine disk throughput is getting maximized, migrating virtualization nodes, SQL commands, some details about the top command. There wasn't a drat programming question in the whole lot. Okay, I was asked what "use strict" meant in Perl. I had been working mostly in Windows recently; my job at best really only does Android, which is a real bastardization, and I only toy with it at home mostly these days. I managed to fix an Ubuntu rig at work that botched its upgrade, but it's not stuff I do every day, and I usually have the documentation right there. I said I had developed in a Linux environment before, but I wasn't an administrator by any means. So they ultimately rejected me after that. I wouldn't really care about that if it weren't for the fact that they never had any interest in the actual code. I actually am finding it really offensive. I'd say it's a good save: If they're willing to throw away projects for people before they've even hired them, I think I'd start the job already downhill. That's not cool. So I'd just just double-triple check with people asking for code what their intentions are with it and the process they are following. It might even be worth getting a link from them to something they consider "sufficient." I suspect these people would have been fine with a self-contained Perl script. I guess at the least that I can point to the GitHub permanently on my resume.
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Aug 3, 2016 07:24
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I mean they typically are looking for stupid poo poo, not advanced stuff. I've seen sample Java code where the candidate explained reusing the same variable name for a bunch of objects in a very long function as a memory-saving technique. Because fewer variables meant that much less memory. Really if your code looks like code then it's done its job in screening much of the horde of people at the bottom of the bell curve applying to companies at the top of the bell curve. Still though, Amazon sucks anyways.
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Aug 3, 2016 07:32
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I like to look through open source libraries and such that I use and check their unit test coverage. It's usually pretty easy to find something untested, write some tests for it, and get a pull request accepted. Project maintainers seems appreciative and it allow me to legitimately say "I have contributed to this, that, and the other open source projects" which (I think) automatically sets me apart from 90% of interviewees. But yeah gently caress Amazon. That place is a factory for horror stories.
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Aug 3, 2016 12:12
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I screen a lot of resumes and do the occasional technical interview when someone seems like a good candidate. Because I do a lot of research projects with DARPA/Army/NASA/Air Force/etc., I'm restricted to only candidates that are green card holders or US citizens and who want to do all of the secret squirrel stuff, so I tend to get a lot of lazy scrubs that think they should be handed a job because they already have a security clearance. Github projects score major points for me if they hit the right check boxes (for Linux system programming): 1. Clean code. That means comments, proper indenting, consistent variable and function naming, good API, etc. 2. Code that shows some measure of experience. That means error checking, use of const, simple-but-functional, etc.. For example, I am a bit wary when I see someone roll their own linked list instead of using an STL container of some sort. If it is a resource-starved project for embedded, then this could be OK and a good starting point for a discussion on the pros and cons of doing so. But for a daemon for a Linux server somewhere, I wonder why they reinvented the wheel. If I bring something like this up and I hear "yeah, I wasn't as experienced as I am now when I wrote that, but I did it the right way over here and just haven't rewritten the old stuff", then that is definitely points in the candidate's favor. 3. Documentation. Is there a web page, usage document, or even a generated Doxygen listing of the API? At least a Readme file? It could be a huge project, or it could just be a convenience wrapper around another library. I've looked at a lot of SDL wrappers around audio and network libraries, for example. I've also looked at libraries for LLVM optimization passes and other non-trivial projects that are tightly coupled with another massive project. Another filter that I use when I do a verbal interview is the "repeat, but not related" filter. If I ask you a question and you repeat the same deflection answer that you gave me before for a different question, I'll raise an eyebrow. For example, if I ask if you've had experience with some aspect of systems programming and you tell me "well, I've done a project with X, which is kind of similar", that is OK. However, if I keep getting back that same response with multiple things that I bring up, I get the impression that you are coasting on some previous project that you worked on and that you are hoping to leverage the reputation of that project to coast on a new project. If, instead of telling me "no, I'm not familiar with that" you repeat something else that you did that is completely unrelated, that is worse than telling me that you are unfamiliar with it. I tell candidates flat-out at the start that I don't expect them to know the answer to every question and to be honest with me. They lie anyway. Go figure. Also, if you come across as an arrogant tool, I don't care if you are an absolute genius. The rest of us have to work with you each day. If you can't at least smile and say a quick hello and nod to your officemates that you pass before sitting down and coding for hours, you need to work on that. Being an introvert is totally OK with me, and I'm not going to penalize people for not feeling comfortable doing the typical office smalltalk. But, there is a big difference between being shy and being an arrogant jerk, and it is very easy to spot the difference. Face to face interviews are my chance to see what kind of person you are. You aren't just a sack of meat that takes in coffee and spits out code. You are a member of the team and I'd like to keep you around for a few years (if for no other reason than to avoid doing the interview process again). I have seen quite a few applicants that were pretty good, but who just seemed like they would be awful to put up with. I think they were that way because they actually were really good, and were probably the best developer at a previous job. The habit of talking down to colleagues and management became ingrained, and then we have to live with the "you should be happy to have me" type of attitude. I see this more in the developers with around 3-5 years of experience or less. The more experienced guys that have been through a few product development cycles have a better perspective and attitude (from what I have observed). You'll sometimes get a dev that worked at the same defense contractor for 15 years that has this "you should be happy to have me" attitude. Yes, we are happy to have you. No, we aren't happy that you are an arrogant jerk. Lighten up. If you have a previous job position on your resume/CV that involves the words "rockstar" or "ninja" without you being a literal rockstar or ninja, you may very well fit into the category of person that I mentioned. That being said, I would jump at the chance to have an actual ninja working at the office. You'd turn to him in a meeting to assign him work and there would be a puff of smoke and a log sitting in the seat where he just was a moment ago. As an experienced guy, I always hope that I get interviewed by someone with a similar level of experience. This rarely happens. Edit: If you do a lot of hand waving during your interview and beat around the bush, I'll do whiteboard questions to see what your thought process is for solving various small problems with multiple solutions. If you can explain solutions to me clearly at a high level, I skip whiteboard stuff because it is clear that you understand the problem and can form a high-level solution. The whiteboard is more of a filter for lower-end candidates. hendersa fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 14:10
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Good points, but that assumes the interviewer will ever even look at the code. It was ultimately a pointless exercise. They had no intention to do it, even though they asked for it.rt4 posted:But yeah gently caress Amazon. That place is a factory for horror stories. Yeah, I'm staying away now. We do a lot of shopping on there, but now I'm terrified some technical debt is going to avalanche on top of everything.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:12
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I interviewed with Amazon years ago and I submitted a code sample and got a phone interview, and pretty much got a rejection afterward that was really vague leading me to think "oh, it's a recession, they could find someone that's a Hadoop master instead of me for the same salary I guess." I managed to get a hold of the interviewer and he said that the sample project looked good and that he had liked and approved me after the phone interview but that there wasn't anything else he could tell me. So if they wanted someone with more experience, well why bother interviewing me given I'm only so far into my career anyway? This kind of opacity is something I've heard that Google doesn't even do and they're not exactly the best company in terms of process clarity and consistency.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:14
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MeruFM posted:Maybe even specify Node.js. Also Objective C. Everyone has to have a dang app.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:37
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Cryolite posted:Has anyone noticed the tech job market is not growing that much, and seems to be shrinking? Or at least in some/most areas and for some types of jobs? Contrary to what any "get [demographic] to code because there's lots of jobs" initiatives are, the positions are either a) simply not there, or b) some combination of companies not being eager to hire mediocre talent because they all think they can hire the top 1%, or just keeping up appearances. It's anecdotal to some extent but go look at any HN who's hiring thread and compare them month to month -- I'd venture to guess that many of those listings if not an outright majority of them are the same. Often each month there's anywhere from 700-1000 posts these days so there's likely some kind of trend there. The way I see it is that the market is only going to shrink unless there's a major shift in expectations of talent, and even then that might not really matter.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:17
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Munkeymon posted:Also Objective C. Everyone has to have a dang app. You mean Swift? 
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Aug 3, 2016 16:18
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Yeah, I don't know where the "there are so many developer jobs out there the market is hot!!!" thing is coming from. It doesn't seem particularly different from other industries, and I suspect that it's bullshit.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:36
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah, I don't know where the "there are so many developer jobs out there the market is hot!!!" thing is coming from. It doesn't seem particularly different from other industries, and I suspect that it's bullshit. The cynical response is that this is perception manipulation to make it easier to get more H1-B visas / other favorable legislation. Anything tech companies can do to reduce their manpower costs is a good thing, right?
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Aug 3, 2016 17:10
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The cynical response is that this is perception manipulation to make it easier to get more H1-B visas / other favorable legislation. Anything tech companies can do to reduce their manpower costs is a good thing, right? 75% of my dev team of 25 people are H1B, I never knew it was favorable to the company but this makes sense.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:16
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Good Will Hrunting posted:75% of my dev team of 25 people are H1B, I never knew it was favorable to the company but this makes sense. Technically they're supposed to be paid above-average salaries so they can't depress the labor market, but I've no idea what metrics are used to determine what "above-average" means. The big issue though is that someone here on an H1-B visa gets deported if they lose their job, so they have a lot less freedom to jobhop, and the employer has correspondingly more power over them.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:26
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I've always heard from corporate HR that it is one thousand kinds of pain in the rear end to sponsor H1B, so much so that no company I've worked for was willing to do it. You'd think the ability to retain due to fear would be outweighed by the paperwork necessary to get them in the first place.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:35
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Doh004 posted:You mean Swift? Ah yes, I stand corrected  TooMuchAbstraction posted:Technically they're supposed to be paid above-average salaries so they can't depress the labor market, but I've no idea what metrics are used to determine what "above-average" means. The big issue though is that someone here on an H1-B visa gets deported if they lose their job, so they have a lot less freedom to jobhop, and the employer has correspondingly more power over them. I was trolling some comment thread on Engadget a few years ago and someone pointed out they knew a developer in Boston making 80k as a counter to my claim that H1-Bs are underpaid 
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Aug 3, 2016 17:36
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csammis posted:I've always heard from corporate HR that it is one thousand kinds of pain in the rear end to sponsor H1B, so much so that no company I've worked for was willing to do it. You'd think the ability to retain due to fear would be outweighed by the paperwork necessary to get them in the first place. This is one of those things that companies mostly either go whole-hog on or avoid entirely, I suspect. Bigger companies can afford to bring in the "paperwork expertise" needed to hire lots of imported workers, smaller ones can't.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:06
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Munkeymon posted:I was trolling some comment thread on Engadget a few years ago and someone pointed out they knew a developer in Boston making 80k as a counter to my claim that H1-Bs are underpaid I should ask for a raise then.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:18
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As a non-US person who recently went through the process of interviewing at Amazon for an SDE position in Seattle, I found them pretty cool and chill. One of their recruiters sent me a message on LinkedIn asking me to do a Skype interview. I did this, then a couple of days later they invited me to an Amazon recruiting event in a city near me in the UK. The interviewers were decent (all were really nice except one, who was merely cordial), and I got an offer a few days after the interview. They offered to sponsor H1B, for which I was not selected in the random lottery. They had a plan in place for this, and gave me a choice of other locations to work at (in London if I wanted to stay in UK, but also in other countries), and said I could still go to the US on an L1 if I wanted to after a year. They also gave a choice of teams, and I got to have a conversation with the team managers to pick a best fit. They were all cool, and were at pains to talk about their work-life balance reputation and say that it's not the case and people can and should work sane hours (like 40/week). The compensation they offered is good too, and I didn't get the impression after looking at the market that it was significantly below what they offer US citizens. I also interviewed around the same time with Google, they were also really nice, but moved much slower and were generally more opaque. Google also refused to consider H1B sponsorship (due to low selection rate), and were a bit more directive about possible locations to go before an L1. Of course, this is anecdote and I don't know how typical it is, but the experience was overall positive.
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Aug 3, 2016 20:16
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I was looking at job postings and found out that the company I work for are looking for COBOL experts. maybe I should apply
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Aug 3, 2016 21:01
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I work in ad-tech in NYC and I have a "non-compete" that sounds like total horse poo poo to me. A few ad-tech companies have been trying to recruit me and seem to be willing to throw a lot of money my way (I'm talking 1.5x my current salary) but I'm a bit worried about dealing with the bullshit of a lawsuit. Can anyone shed some light on this?
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Aug 8, 2016 15:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I work in ad-tech in NYC and I have a "non-compete" that sounds like total horse poo poo to me. A few ad-tech companies have been trying to recruit me and seem to be willing to throw a lot of money my way (I'm talking 1.5x my current salary) but I'm a bit worried about dealing with the bullshit of a lawsuit. Can anyone shed some light on this? Bring it up with the competitors and let them navigate the legality nuances. If you can get them to accept all risk as part of hiring you you're golden.
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Aug 8, 2016 15:29
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I work in ad-tech in NYC and I have a "non-compete" that sounds like total horse poo poo to me. A few ad-tech companies have been trying to recruit me and seem to be willing to throw a lot of money my way (I'm talking 1.5x my current salary) but I'm a bit worried about dealing with the bullshit of a lawsuit. Can anyone shed some light on this? Non-competes can be hard to quantify. Different states have different laws on the legal enforceability of non-compete clauses and some companies / industries will pursue the matter more than others. If you do something specialized in ad-tech that would give a company a competitive edge then it's more likely to be brought up than not. It might even come down to whether your head of HR feels particularly cussed on the day you put in your notice. Bottom line: if (a) you signed a non-compete as part of your employment agreement and (b) you're looking at leaving for a company that your current employer would label a "Direct Competitor," then you probably should have a lawyer who knows employment law in your state look it over before pulling the trigger on anything. e: Necc0's post was far more succinct and good
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Aug 8, 2016 15:33
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Thanks for the info. I'm using underdog.io. My profile went live at 9am, I've gotten 4 emails already for calls to set up and 3 I'm interested in. One of the people who wants to set up a call (the best place so far) is actually a company we use regularly and not a competitor really.
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Aug 8, 2016 15:49
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I had a contracting company employer based in Ohio that tried to recruit an employee that worked at another Ohio company that had the same, massive Fortune 10 client. Turns out they had a non-compete in their employment contract. My company's legal team immediately said no go without even looking up specifics and that kid was basically locked into working at that same crappy contracting company as long as he lived in the state and for the same client (there's not a whole lot of tech jobs in Ohio that will pay more than $80k / yr unless you work for this company from what I've observed). So I'd disclose to anyone I'm being recruited by the terms of my current employment contract before they try to move seriously forward because some companies are babies about non-competes.
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Aug 8, 2016 16:03
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Random musings: I cannot believe the boost to my career, visibility, and general developer community involvement now that I work for a place that actively supports and sponsors me on speaking at/attending conferences. It sounds stupid and obvious in retrospect, but there are so many employers that give zero fucks about this.
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Aug 10, 2016 05:07
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How common is it for a company to do a 90 day review? I just passed mine, and another slightly-less-recent hire congratulated me. He said he only passed his after a 30 day extension. Is it typical to offer extensions? How often do people fail a 90 day review? When they do, are they typically allowed a chance to shape up? For what it's worth, this other guy is easily my least favorite co-worker. I believe he is a compulsive liar, but I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed yet and I hesitate to make that sort of accusation.
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Aug 10, 2016 13:44
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I don't know about 90 but I've worked at a place that do a 180 day probationary period for new hires. I can think of several instances where people completely failed to account for any meaningful contribution and were let go at their six month review. We're talking not even checking in a simple bug fix here. 90 days in software seems a little too short to be able to fully get your head into a decent sized code base. I feel like in my history that 75-90 days was where I really started to get a handle on everything I was working with.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:07
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Yeah, I don't think guy knows any programming besides trivial tutorial experiments. I don't think he's contributed anything to our C# codebase and hasn't bothered to learn enough PHP to get anything serious done on the project we've been working on together for these 3 months. He also makes all kinds of impossible claims. Surely I am not the only one who has cringed when he has said things like:
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Aug 10, 2016 14:23
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rt4 posted:Yeah, I don't think guy knows any programming besides trivial tutorial experiments. I don't think he's contributed anything to our C# codebase and hasn't bothered to learn enough PHP to get anything serious done on the project we've been working on together for these 3 months. He also makes all kinds of impossible claims. Surely I am not the only one who has cringed when he has said things like: Oh yeah he definitely seems like a dud.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:28
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Yeah... nobody cares much about a software engineer's unique quirks or anything as long as there's decent code being produced and communication & attitude are professional. Being a software engineer is not exactly a soft skills-first job. After that, who cares if your father is literally Bill Gates and your mom is Octomom?
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Aug 10, 2016 14:36
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rt4 posted:
This one's easy to verify. Ask him for the bibliographic details.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:42
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kitten smoothie posted:I don't know about 90 but I've worked at a place that do a 180 day probationary period for new hires. This seems like more of an indictment of the code base than anything else. Imo a new employee should make commits on their first day and be able to track down a reasonably complex bug within two weeks or so.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:46
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necrobobsledder posted:Yeah... nobody cares much about a software engineer's unique quirks or anything as long as there's decent code being produced and communication & attitude are professional. Being a software engineer is not exactly a soft skills-first job. After that, who cares if your father is literally Bill Gates and your mom is Octomom? Yeah, but the guy comes off as a pathological liar, which is a bit much ever for a software engineer.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:47
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baquerd posted:Yeah, but the guy comes off as a pathological liar, which is a bit much ever for a software engineer. Yeah. You literally cannot trust what he gives for status and basically need a whole CI flow just to know what is really happening with him alone. Then you probably need somebody else writing all the tests--basically constantly auditing him. Sure, you can argue something close is ideal or whatever, but forming it on a foundation of distrust is not.
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Aug 10, 2016 15:10
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First day at work for me is usually setting up a machine to make sure I can get to communications and get git installed, then I ask for a repository of some sort. After that to test that I'm able to push code and to watch what happens in CI / CD (if that doesn't exist, I already know what I'm going to be busy doing for 3 months) I fix something like a typo or after reading over a code style guide I'll almost always find a violation and just push it up. This tells me day one how productive the developers generally are and how much bureaucracy and code review scrutiny I'll face. I usually can get this done before lunchtime with a fresh Macbook Pro now depending upon if my accounts are screwed up or not.Blinkz0rz posted:This seems like more of an indictment of the code base than anything else. Imo a new employee should make commits on their first day and be able to track down a reasonably complex bug within two weeks or so.
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Aug 10, 2016 15:11
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necrobobsledder posted:Being a software engineer is not exactly a soft skills-first job. You say that, and yet inability to not be a total rear end in a top hat is kind of my #1 priority when vetting potential teammates. You might be God's gift to the discipline of software development; if you can't get along with the rest of the team you'll still be a net drain on our ability to get poo poo done. Also, you absolutely need soft skills when getting project specs, pushing for needed changes, or justifying why you made the decisions you did.
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Aug 10, 2016 15:33
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