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The enterprise accounts are $12.50 / user / mo and meets the authz and authn requirements of some of the stupidest places I know besides defense. So for 200 people, you're looking at $30k / yr. I think the last place I worked explicitly forbid any chat system to be deployed enterprise-wide that allowed chat history to be preserved reliably. I think they wanted plausible deniability of preserving any communications and erred on handicapping 300k+ employees instead of inconveniencing their legal team's investigations or forcing auditability compliance on chat tools.
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Oct 6, 2016 15:34
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Volguus posted:The IT department having one less thing to worry about I can buy (and while I don't know how much slack costs, its probably cheaper than maintaining an IRC server). About the rest of the company adopting the tool, couldn't care less about. If I need to speak with the administrative assistant, I can just send her an email. So your workplace is entirely engineers and administrative assistants? Obviously that's a somewhat facetious comment; your workplace is likely different than mine. In my day to day, we regularly have groups of engineers, designers, product managers, analysts, support folks, etc working together, and while I personally love email, Slack or IRC works much better for those conversations, and Slack is much easier for many of them.
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Oct 6, 2016 15:53
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One client. Drag and drop. Easy APIs. Bouncing that doesn't suck and works predictably. Pluggable content attachments. Simple account configuration. Standardized notification settings. Everything works like you'd expect across desktop, mobile, and web. Basically all of the kinds of user experience things that having a bunch of servers and a bunch of clients makes impossible.
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Oct 6, 2016 16:02
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At my last job we ran our entire company out of a hipchat room for a week after Sandy when our office was without power and our primary data center barely survived the storm surge. One of the key things that worked so well is we were able to text people a short link to a web client for a hipchat room so when people had internet and power they could check in and sync up. I can't imagine the hassle it would've been to convey how to setup an IRC client to an internal sever for several dozen non-technical people with asynchronous and possibly spotty communication methods. Plus, given that we had stupidly hosted our email server and internal documentation wiki (including emergency contact info!) in a server closet at the office without power, there's a good chance we wouldn't have had IRC either. Everytime I see someone crying about how slack or hipchat "is just expensive IRC for idiots!  " I'm reminded of why skilled product designers and UX people exist.
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Oct 6, 2016 16:07
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Yea, I guess my biggest beef is that I cannot be the special snowflake that can use my lovely terminal IRC client that I love so much. These JS based clients (web or desktop) are ... ughh. The web based clients that "just work" are definitely extremely valuable in the case of a disaster like Sandy.
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Oct 6, 2016 16:27
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You people going on about your free Google food and so on are starting to piss me off, in no small part because this is the second year in a row Google turns me down after flying me in to gently caress up on-site interviews. Although this time they brought me back in for follow-up interviews after the first round of on-sites, so I guess I'm improving and loving up marginally less. Anyhow, I was wondering if anyone has experience with online courses, specifically how useful they are in getting a related job. I've had an interest in machine learning for a long time, but for various reasons didn't take ML classes back when I was in college. On top of that, I only have a B.Sc, and most ML positions seem to be pretty insistent on having people with master's, so that doesn't help. On the flipside, a good chunk of my professional experience is related to distributed systems and databases, which are a pretty useful for at-scale ML application, and I've got a decent enough background in physics and numerical computing, so I'm good if I have to do vector calculus or singular value decompositions or whatever. Hell, I've read ML textbooks and understand the theory just fine. It's really the actual machine learning experience I'm lacking. Taking some online course on Coursera or Udacity seems like it could be a way to fix that, but I'm not sure how much weight they carry on a resume. For what it's worth, I've got about 4 years of professional experience, with a whole lot more non-professional experience. Quit my last job so I could change industry and take some time off, which has admittedly lasted a fair bit longer than expected at this point.
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Oct 6, 2016 18:19
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I don't think that a Coursera or similar course is all that valuable in and of itself, but if you take a few and build something that you can show off on GitHub, that might count for more.
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Oct 7, 2016 00:58
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:You people going on about your free Google food and so on are starting to piss me off, in no small part because this is the second year in a row Google turns me down after flying me in to gently caress up on-site interviews. Although this time they brought me back in for follow-up interviews after the first round of on-sites, so I guess I'm improving and loving up marginally less. You sound pretty qualified, and most "requirements" in job descriptions are fuzzy and open to substitution. How many places other than Google have you tried?
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Oct 7, 2016 01:34
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The last two places I've interviewed with have done both a shared doc coding session of 40-45 minutes and a take home assignment. Is this the new norm?
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Oct 7, 2016 14:08
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Yes, or at least that's what it looks like based on my friend's experience.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:00
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I like that I can think straight while working on it. I don't like that it leaves a ton of room for autistic nitpicking.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:38
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In my latest job search only one place had an assignment and I told them to gently caress off because that's a gigantic waste of my time. I sure hope that isn't the new normal:
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Oct 7, 2016 16:03
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I ran into a take home as well and I told them they'd have to disclose the title & salary band I was working towards before I did it. They ended the discussion instead. Probably dodged a bullet
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Oct 7, 2016 16:20
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If I wasn't super interested in this place I'd probably say gently caress off. If they nitpick me like crazy, I'll be pretty frustrated but I dug my own grave and will probably avoid further.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:25
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Just a touch under ten years ago, a recruiter contacted me about a position at a company that makes giant displays and timers for sporting events. Think of their product as these huge "blocks" of LED arrays that could be combined together to make arbitrarily large displays. The company was looking for a development manager/lead developer, and I had the right background, so they asked me to come in for a one-hour interview. I did the interview, everything went well, and then an engineer came in and told me it was time for the developer code test. He wanted me to sit down at a PC without an internet connection and code some C++ based upon a class definition in a header file, and he told me that it should only take me "a few hours". The recruiter said it was going to be a one-hour interview. The company's HR also said it was going to be a one-hour interview. I told this engineer that I was going back to work and that I had already gone well over the hour I had allocated for the interview, and he said, "but... everyone does this test when they come in!" I apologized, said that I wasn't going to do it there, but that I would be happy to take an hour or two and look at it later that evening after work. He rocked back and forth on his feet for a few seconds before he said "ok, but I need to give you my cell phone number in case you have questions." He was insistent on giving me his number and he kept telling me to be sure to call him if I ran into trouble. Maybe 8:00 that evening, I finally had time to look at this header file they gave me. It was designed all wrong, and it clearly wasn't going to work the way the interfaces were set up. We're talking about passing pointers to buffers of variable size into methods, but without any sort of buffer length parameter, known terminator in the buffer, etc. to know how big the buffer is. I spent maybe 30 minutes looking at it thinking about how it was all wrong before I gave the engineer a call. I told him that I had looked at his test and that I could not write code for it as-is without reworking the header file first. He asked me what was wrong with it, and I gave him five or six things that needed to be fixed before it could be implemented. Then he said "congratulations! You passed the test! I'll let HR know tomorrow." I was offered the job position. I did not accept it. If you want to test people's ability, that's fine, but don't turn it into the movie Saw or something.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:44
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I like that I can think straight while working on it. I don't like that it leaves a ton of room for autistic nitpicking. At least it is usually only a competition between applicants, rather than a competition versus some autistic ideal. I like the idea of a practical exam of some sort, after hiring in a different field I saw how many incompetent people lie about their skills. People would swear up and down that they had years of experience and then fail the most basic skill test spectacularly. Adding a test made it easy to throw out the fakers.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:53
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Their test script doesn't work and I was wondering if that's some sort of test, ha. taqueso posted:At least it is usually only a competition between applicants, rather than a competition versus some autistic ideal. I'm only doing it because it was the best interview I've had yet. Great flow, great question, and just an overall very good experience. Helps that the company is very interesting to me.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:58
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taqueso posted:At least it is usually only a competition between applicants, rather than a competition versus some autistic ideal. How is the interview not a practical exam? Presumably you're writing code on a whiteboard or computer and since you're there in person it eliminates the possibility to cheat by having someone else do it. I will say that if the assignment is short, 1-2 hours, and cuts down on the interview time then it's ok. Amazon had this where you took an assignment online that had a time limit, an hour and a half I believe, and then you didn't have any phone interviews and there were only 2-3 in person interviews. The other place I told to gently caress off had an assignment that was easily 4+ hours and then you had to go through the entire process still.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:03
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Every round of hiring I've ever done has involved (compensated) 1-3 hour take home projects. It's unbelievable how much more accurate sense of a candidate you get when you can 1) see somewhat realistic work they've done and then 2) actually discuss that work, and talk about how they would add functionality, improve quality, whatever. Who gives a poo poo if someone can answer big-O questions, I want to know how they'd approach adding a feature to a codebase they're familiar with, etc. Don't worry, the flipside holds true: I've done quite a few take home projects, and think they're good as a candidate as well. I did a ~30 hour (no poo poo) project to get my current job. I built a cool little project (toy cluster scheduler) that was fun and interesting, albeit not quite production ready. PS I really wanted the job, even reneged on another accepted offer for it  If you're taking the spray and pray approach to job hunting, yeah of course doing a take home project for every job is lovely (though even then, I'd argue that a ~1 hour take home is pretty reasonable, and a lot loving better than doing useless algorithms on a whiteboard). If you're doing a more targeted job search, and do enough due diligence up front to bail on bad fits earlier in the process it's rather workable. I am absolutely willing to invest time in a job search, and I'd like to be evaluated on something that sort of approximates my actual job performance. TLDR: sorry, take home projects are good and useful. Of course there are lovely jobs with lovely take home projects, don't hesitate to bail on them.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:06
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Outsource some quarterly work to interview candidates.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:07
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I'm pretty cool with personal projects, I'm just wondering if I make like one OOP decision they don't like will they bounce me? I mean it's pedantic as gently caress but look at this industry.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:19
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm pretty cool with personal projects, I'm just wondering if I make like one OOP decision they don't like will they bounce me? I mean it's pedantic as gently caress but look at this industry. Then you don't want to work there.
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Oct 7, 2016 18:30
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metztli posted:Then you don't want to work there. Yeah, other than wasting your time it's a self-fixing problem: dummies reject you for dumb reason? Oh well, bullet dodged, they were dummies. Mao Zedong Thot fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jun 13, 2020 |
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Oct 7, 2016 18:32
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The interview process is still an insane and it's going to be that way for a while. But I'd have to agree having some sort of take home assignment for a job you want in the first place is pretty dang reasonable and probably the best way to show you know your stuff short of working for the company in question. I'd rather do that, even a bigger project, than get grilled on a bunch of topics unrelated to the position because the team you're interviewing with is on a cracking the code interview high. And I guess I'll offer a story about how a guy on our team spent 3 months disqualifying candidates on phone interviews because they were getting a question he asked wrong. Turns out they were all getting it right. I wouldn't have known if I wasn't sitting next to him while he was doing the interview. I then showed him in code how to do it. So you never know what's going to happen or why. It's all insanity.
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Oct 7, 2016 18:40
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moctopus posted:And I guess I'll offer a story about how a guy on our team spent 3 months disqualifying candidates on phone interviews because they were getting a question he asked wrong. Turns out they were all getting it right. I wouldn't have known if I wasn't sitting next to him while he was doing the interview. I then showed him in code how to do it. What was the question?
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Oct 7, 2016 18:43
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moctopus posted:The interview process is still an insane and it's going to be that way for a while. I don't mind coding projects as long as they're reasonably sized and have basically no chance of being something that the company is going to take and use in production. The "build us a full website with membership and a content management system" from the other day (in the Working In Development thread, I guess) is hilariously inappropriate.
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Oct 7, 2016 18:49
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taqueso posted:What was the question? It's been about 4 years so I'm hazy on the details but it had to do with our guy not knowing about custom model binding and decimals/phone numbers in asp .net mvc c# world. And we had solved the problem in our solution.
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Oct 7, 2016 18:59
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Che Delilas posted:I don't mind coding projects as long as they're reasonably sized and have basically no chance of being something that the company is going to take and use in production. The "build us a full website with membership and a content management system" from the other day (in the Working In Development thread, I guess) is hilariously inappropriate. I think this is true too. My interviewing fantasy probably involves them picking something from my github and then us just chatting about it.
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Oct 7, 2016 19:01
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moctopus posted:It's been about 4 years so I'm hazy on the details but it had to do with our guy not knowing about custom model binding and decimals/phone numbers in asp .net mvc c# world. I'd be annoyed at my coworker just for disqualifying candidates based on one tech question, especially on a phone screen. And it sounds like this Q was fairly esoteric.
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Oct 7, 2016 19:07
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taqueso posted:I'd be annoyed at my coworker just for disqualifying candidates based on one tech question, especially on a phone screen. And it sounds like this Q was fairly esoteric. Yeah that's how it felt. Another couple. We interviewed a guy that said the position didn't sound interesting, but he wanted to work in the same field as his wife. Another guy told us all our questions were easy, so we start asking him about using Func to write LINQ like extension methods (not particularly advanced) and proceeded to not know how to do that at all and got all huffy. I think if you can make it in the top 10 interview candidates, out of 100, just by not being an rear end in a top hat and having a slight idea how to do the job you're applying for.
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Oct 7, 2016 19:13
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ultrafilter posted:I don't think that a Coursera or similar course is all that valuable in and of itself, but if you take a few and build something that you can show off on GitHub, that might count for more. That's more or less what I thought. Problem is, I tend to have trouble coming up with personal projects that are interesting to me, are reasonably small, and actually show I can do more than follow the tutorial for a machine learning framework. I guess there's no getting around that though, so I'll figure something out. Thanks. Ralith posted:You sound pretty qualified, and most "requirements" in job descriptions are fuzzy and open to substitution. How many places other than Google have you tried? The Google interviews weren't for anything directly related to machine learning (it was SRE Software Engineering). And I wasn't even the one who started the process; one of their recruiters contacted me and I figured I'd see if it lead to anything interesting. The problem with applying for machine learning positions with my current resume is that there just isn't anything in there that would let me easily get through the initial HR quick glance. No past experience in the field, no university classes, or anything that would save my resume from the shredder, so I haven't actually applied for any positions. I'm also not sure how well what I've learned on my own would serve me in an actual interview. I'd figured taking an online course might help with both of those. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, though.
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Oct 7, 2016 20:07
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Che Delilas posted:I don't mind coding projects as long as they're reasonably sized and have basically no chance of being something that the company is going to take and use in production. The "build us a full website with membership and a content management system" from the other day (in the Working In Development thread, I guess) is hilariously inappropriate. Maybe it's a test. Give them a phpBb install and call it a day
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Oct 8, 2016 02:00
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:That's more or less what I thought. Problem is, I tend to have trouble coming up with personal projects that are interesting to me, are reasonably small, and actually show I can do more than follow the tutorial for a machine learning framework. I guess there's no getting around that though, so I'll figure something out. Thanks. I feel like people overplay the power of the resume screening. It's the interviews that really count at Google.
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Oct 8, 2016 02:25
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General wisdom seems to be that searching for jobs by sending out resumes should be your last resort, also. Make friends with people in the industry and get a foot in the door.
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Oct 8, 2016 02:28
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asur posted:In my latest job search only one place had an assignment and I told them to gently caress off because that's a gigantic waste of my time. I sure hope that isn't the new normal: For my last job search pretty much everyone I talked to wanted one. Annoying, but it was worth it in the end.
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Oct 9, 2016 13:59
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My last two job searches most places wanted to have a conversation about what I had done and they would know from how I spoke about the work if I was any good, rather than do an intense pop quiz style thing. There were maybe 3 places that wanted to do a little white boarding and had a couple of red/green questions about fundamentals. One place asked me to troubleshoot a web page that wouldn't load correctly and instantly said 'that's enough' when I pulled up the dev tools in chrome, saying literally no one they brought in had done that so I clearly knew my poo poo, which I found hilarious. Two places wanted some homework - one was for a senior python dev job (my background is 99% .net) so that made sense - they needed to know I could write python without a ton of ramp-up time. The other said the only time the homework would matter was if they were on the fence about me, so I didn't do it and still got an offer. Maybe it's my location (Chicago), but I haven't run into a lot of game playing bullshit when looking for a job.
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Oct 9, 2016 15:40
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hendersa posted:The recruiter said it was going to be a one-hour interview. The company's HR also said it was going to be a one-hour interview. I told this engineer that I was going back to work and that I had already gone well over the hour I had allocated for the interview, and he said, "but... everyone does this test when they come in!" I apologized, said that I wasn't going to do it there, but that I would be happy to take an hour or two and look at it later that evening after work. He rocked back and forth on his feet for a few seconds before he said "ok, but I need to give you my cell phone number in case you have questions." He was insistent on giving me his number and he kept telling me to be sure to call him if I ran into trouble. This sounds like a great test of both your ability to read code and recognize problems and have a constructive conversation with someone about the issues. If anything I'd say more interviews need to test things like this compared to yet another tree serialization question.
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Oct 9, 2016 21:53
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pr0zac posted:This sounds like a great test of both your ability to read code and recognize problems and have a constructive conversation with someone about the issues. If anything I'd say more interviews need to test things like this compared to yet another tree serialization question. It made hendersa reject the position though, and that seems bad. 
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Oct 9, 2016 22:01
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leper khan posted:It made hendersa reject the position though, and that seems bad. My concern was more along the lines of their HR department reassuring me that it would be a one-hour interview (they were aware I had a job and was coming in on my lunch hour) and then springing a coding interview on me well past the end of that hour as I was just about to walk out of the door to leave. I didn't have an issue with their particular coding test, for much the same reasons as pr0zac pointed out. It felt pretty awkward to have to call someone at home outside of business hours to tell him that the test was "broken", though. During part of the interview, one of my interviewers told me that the company had already interviewed about ten people for the position. That means that HR had already been through this interview process ten times, so they should have been familiar with the scheduling requirements when interviewing a candidate. If they wanted to keep the code test a surprise until the interview, that's fine. Just ask the candidate to come in for a two-hour interview and then do the code test for the second half of the interview period. I wouldn't reject a job solely because of something like this, though. There were other aspects of the position that I wasn't too keen on. This was just one more concern added onto the pile. Then again, maybe I was just the first candidate that made it through the hour of interviews and wasn't tossed out prior to the coding test! 
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Oct 9, 2016 22:36
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If the take-home isn't a total trainwreck I don't mind it. A past job of mine gave iOS/Android candidates a take-home that would probably take an hour if you were at all qualified to do the job. We're talking "here's a well documented REST API endpoint and a super simple design comp, call that API and display the returned output in a list view per the comp." That's it. If I can spend an hour doing that to prove I can do the job and get out of two or three additional hours of doing whiteboard crap I'll pick that every time.
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