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Analytic Engine posted:What is the ultimate career goal of Scrum masters? It seems like PMs are shooting for middle/upper management, and the only good Scrum Master I've known was laid off and then hired elsewhere as a senior PM. Not trying to judge, this is totally outside my experience.
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Nov 5, 2016 17:58
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Less Fat Luke posted:It's a minimum of three weeks vacation so if you take all three you don't have any more paid time off if you're let go. I also clarified a bit; I'm not making a call in regards to allowing or disallowing it. I haven't seen anyone abuse it yet to the point where we've had to make strict policies around it either (maybe there's a hidden 6 week max I haven't seen written down but so far nobody has pushed it). I will admit that you've found probably the single company in the entire US that proves my previous statement wrong. It's somewhat confusing to me why a company would have a mixed policy like this as they still have to track vacation days and carry liability so why not just give your employees more than three weeks instead of three weeks and then unlimited.
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Nov 6, 2016 01:13
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asur posted:It doesn't come from a good place in any circumstance and claiming so is blatantly naive. It's the policy so that the company doesn't have to carry vacation as a liability on their balance sheet. If the company was coming from a good place as you claim they'd just give everyone the max allowed under the unlimited policy so that the policy is consistent across the company instead of being nebulous and manager dependent. Hanlon's razor dude. Most companies are dumb, not competently evil and scheming over screwing you out of like a whole $1000!!!
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Nov 6, 2016 02:30
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asur posted:I will admit that you've found probably the single company in the entire US that proves my previous statement wrong. It's somewhat confusing to me why a company would have a mixed policy like this as they still have to track vacation days and carry liability so why not just give your employees more than three weeks instead of three weeks and then unlimited.
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Nov 6, 2016 03:54
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4 of the last 5 places I've interviewed wanted me to do take-home assignments. 2 of them we're 4+ hours, one took about 3, and my estimate for the last is that it will take me 8+. This is really becoming the in thing now. I wouldn't mind it if I could do it and then post it on my github as a personal project for exploring another language or something but otherwise, yikes.
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Nov 7, 2016 20:30
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If you don't have a public portfolio I can understand the logic behind a web project as there are a lot of moving parts and every company is lazy and wants a "full stack" developer. The question is do you still get a 4-5 hour onsite trivia quiz interview afterwards? I don't think I've seen this at all in Java "core developer" or C++ developer land.
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Nov 7, 2016 21:12
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MrMoo posted:I don't think I've seen this at all in Java "core developer" or C++ developer land. This is exactly what I am. I have zero interest in "full-stack" and have done exclusively back-end stuff in my 2 years of work. My two challenges I received today are "build a chat app server" and "build a service for uploading files", obviously each has a handful of constraints.
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Nov 7, 2016 21:16
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The thing about a lot of these samples is that they still don't necessarily tell you that much about a candidate's problem solving or sometimes even coding skills because you can grab some random dude's implementation out there, tweak it so it's not horrendous, and that's your mini-project. In my experience, the differences among people that matter isn't so much about "can you whip up a random service from scratch?" but "can you avoid making decisions that have horrible consequences in terms of maintainability?" Writing an O(n3) algorithm that can be optimized down to O(1) isn't as bad as designing the function in a way that nobody can refactor it without taking three other developers days or weeks of effort. Maybe I'm in my own bubble where we don't write blog and todo list examples all day as microservices, but writing code that's maintainable and reasonably performant while communicating it well with others is a "rockstar" in my book. In other news of recruiting horrors, I haven't ever heard of a recruiter contacting me about a FTE W-2 yada yada job... and asking me to pay because the client won't pay a recruiting fee. I can understand with 1099 gigs, but I've never seen anyone get that ghetto to cold call a random engineer that happened to have Java on his resume and ask for a cut of his earnings. This is supposed to be opaque to the candidate and all the ugliness behind the scenes for a reason. necrobobsledder fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Nov 7, 2016 |
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Nov 7, 2016 22:03
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That sounds like a plain ol' ripoff
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Nov 7, 2016 22:14
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Companies who are serious about hiring don't do that.
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Nov 8, 2016 01:34
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Good Will Hrunting posted:4 of the last 5 places I've interviewed wanted me to do take-home assignments. 2 of them we're 4+ hours, one took about 3, and my estimate for the last is that it will take me 8+. This is really becoming the in thing now. I wouldn't mind it if I could do it and then post it on my github as a personal project for exploring another language or something but otherwise, yikes. This is pretty normal for games jobs, at least in mid level when I was last interviewing. Very unusual for everything else.
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Nov 8, 2016 05:38
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necrobobsledder posted:and asking me to pay because the client won't pay a recruiting fee. I hope you laughed at him loudly enough to hurt his ears.
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Nov 8, 2016 08:37
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I've now had 11 (!!!!!!!) interviews at one place split between 2 teams and the head of engineering. I do not think I could have come out of 7 or 8 of the 11 feeling any less comfortable, confident that I'd succeed, or that they were interrogating me vs. interviewing me. Yet it seems like I'm going to get an offer.
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Nov 8, 2016 19:46
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I've got a Google phone interview for the Pittsburgh office coming up after being randomly contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn... Guess it's time to relearn my entire CS degree as fast as possible 
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Nov 8, 2016 19:56
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Jose Valasquez posted:I've got a Google phone interview for the Pittsburgh office coming up after being randomly contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn... Guess it's time to relearn my entire CS degree as fast as possible Pittsburgh is a cool and chill office. Not as cool as NYC but probably more chill. Also you get Google salary and benefits while living in Pittsburgh.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:08
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Good Will Hrunting posted:4 of the last 5 places I've interviewed wanted me to do take-home assignments. 2 of them we're 4+ hours, one took about 3, and my estimate for the last is that it will take me 8+. This is really becoming the in thing now. I wouldn't mind it if I could do it and then post it on my github as a personal project for exploring another language or something but otherwise, yikes. My current team uses one of these pretty liberally and I've been in an ongoing conversation with the other hiring managers about it for a while since while I do think take-homes could theoretically be useful, I don't think our current one is that great. My general issues are with it being rather open ended meaning performance is pretty strongly tied to available free-time and the metrics we're using to judge it not being that clearly documented (I work in security so theres a development part and a security auditing part). Generally how bad do people think take-homes are as far as quality of signal goes? Does it seem like something that could be made valuable? Esp interested in the experience of people from the hiring/interviewer side at places that use these things.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:08
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I've now had 11 (!!!!!!!) interviews at one place split between 2 teams and the head of engineering. I do not think I could have come out of 7 or 8 of the 11 feeling any less comfortable, confident that I'd succeed, or that they were interrogating me vs. interviewing me. Yet it seems like I'm going to get an offer. 11 people or individual events? Because the former doesn't seem too unusual, but the latter sounds like a nightmare.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:10
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leper khan posted:11 people or individual events? Because the former doesn't seem too unusual, but the latter sounds like a nightmare. 11 people over 2 phone screens and 2 in-office. Just feels like a waste of time to me kinda. My current situation is a nightmare but Christ the process at this place did not give off a vibe of good culture.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:15
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11 people spread across how many days, too? It's an interview process, not a continuous deployment pipeline, geez.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:29
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necrobobsledder posted:11 people spread across how many days, too? It's an interview process, not a continuous deployment pipeline, geez. Day 1: Phone screen Day 2: 3 ints team A/3 ints team B Day 3: 2 ints team B/1 lead of dev Day 4: 30 minute phone screen with team A They keep asking me weird questions and I'm just incredibly turned off from the whole process.
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Nov 8, 2016 20:30
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necrobobsledder posted:11 people spread across how many days, too? It's an interview process, not a continuous deployment pipeline, geez. In my experience, an 8 hour on site isn't unusual split into 7 meetings and lunch, talking with 7-10 people. Add a phone screen or two and it's not hard to get to 10-12 people. 
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Nov 8, 2016 20:31
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pr0zac posted:My current team uses one of these pretty liberally and I've been in an ongoing conversation with the other hiring managers about it for a while since while I do think take-homes could theoretically be useful, I don't think our current one is that great. My general issues are with it being rather open ended meaning performance is pretty strongly tied to available free-time and the metrics we're using to judge it not being that clearly documented (I work in security so theres a development part and a security auditing part). I've already mentioned it ITT, but take homes are about the best setup for a discussion as you can get. You and the candidate both have an understanding of some problem, a code base that one of you wrote and both of you have read -- you can talk through how they approached it, what they did or didn't evaluate, or what they thought was the most important part. And you can segue into actual design discussions about adding features, addressing constraints -- again, that are grounded in some actual real code the person wrote and groks. To make that discussion work well, it's good for you to have an idea of where you want to take the 'further design' discussion, but make sure that the assignment is specific and scoped to implementing something concrete that is the first step of that bigger design you have in mind. Also treat the assignment less as an actual filtering step, and more as prep work to get on common ground for an interview. Of course if someone flaming fails it, give them the boot. But you're probably not gonna be blown away with anyone's boringly competent solution to a kind of artificial task, so don't hold your breath waiting for that. Instead use it to find those people when discussing the implementation or further design.
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Nov 8, 2016 21:18
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The team I wasn't interested in is making me an offer. Easy decision to decline it, which feels pretty good given the bad vibe I got. Sucks that I burnt 2 vacation days though. Time to blow 20 hours on take-home assignments! 
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Nov 8, 2016 21:50
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pr0zac posted:My general issues are with it being rather open ended meaning performance is pretty strongly tied to available free-time and the metrics we're using to judge it not being that clearly documented (I work in security so theres a development part and a security auditing part). VOTE YES ON 69 posted:To make that discussion work well, it's good for you to have an idea of where you want to take the 'further design' discussion, but make sure that the assignment is specific and scoped to implementing something concrete that is the first step of that bigger design you have in mind. Also treat the assignment less as an actual filtering step, and more as prep work to get on common ground for an interview. Of course if someone flaming fails it, give them the boot. But you're probably not gonna be blown away with anyone's boringly competent solution to a kind of artificial task, so don't hold your breath waiting for that. Instead use it to find those people when discussing the implementation or further design.
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Nov 8, 2016 22:25
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Jose Valasquez posted:I've got a Google phone interview for the Pittsburgh office coming up after being randomly contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn... Guess it's time to relearn my entire CS degree as fast as possible Scratch that, they want me to skip the phone interview and go straight to onsite. Don't they realize I'm a ridiculous fraud? 
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Nov 8, 2016 22:36
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JawnV6 posted:Really like this take on it. Definitely have someone on your team write up a solution guide, pointing out the specific challenges and a few possible solutions, questions to lead the discussion. My main question for stuff like this is how much can I Google? I'm not going to copy code obviously, but the last 2 I got (basically a chat app + file uploading service) were a lot different from OOP card game/OOP checkout service and I feel like I need to approach them how I usually approach a problem I've never seen so far: Google, evaluate solutions, put something together.
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Nov 8, 2016 23:49
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Good Will Hrunting posted:My main question for stuff like this is how much can I Google? I'm not going to copy code obviously, but the last 2 I got (basically a chat app + file uploading service) were a lot different from OOP card game/OOP checkout service and I feel like I need to approach them how I usually approach a problem I've never seen so far: Google, evaluate solutions, put something together. The way I view any kind of "real" work (i.e. not just standing in front of a whiteboard) is, if you aren't searching for previous solutions to examine different peoples' approaches to the problem, then you're doing it wrong. The more perspectives you can bring to bear on a problem, the more likely you are to notice issues that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of.
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Nov 9, 2016 00:27
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Good Will Hrunting posted:They keep asking me weird questions and I'm just incredibly turned off from the whole process. What sort of weird? We need details.
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Nov 9, 2016 00:31
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Sign posted:What sort of weird? We need details. Just strange questions about my current company's scrum process, super in depth hypothetical scenarios about interactions with management and product teams, typical behavioral questions but almost fishing to see if I'm some sort of aggressive and hostile authority-hating dickhead that just wants to sit in a corner and code. Maybe this is an issue because I got that vibe from most of the other engineers...
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Nov 9, 2016 00:38
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Good Will Hrunting posted:My main question for stuff like this is how much can I Google? Part of ours was designing a networked gambling machine with tickets so one of the questions was about threat models. You have an antagonistic user who's going to unplug the machine. What possible failure modes are there, and which do you think are acceptable? e.g. You could have the ticket count as "spent" without giving out a reward OR you could have the ticket pay out but unplug before "spent" is communicated to the server depending on the implementation. The problem statement isn't complete enough to know which of those is more desirable (are rewards meaningful or 1/20th of a penny coupons and the machine was just to get someone in the building?) so most candidates pick one and can defend it with their conception of the problem.
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Nov 9, 2016 00:42
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Sorry I quoted the wrong thing I think - phone posting all day. That's a cool problem though, I'd like something along those lines.
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Nov 9, 2016 00:47
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I've been doing IT work for 2 years now, and I'm trying to figure out where to go from here. This job was initially to figure out what I enjoyed working on and move from there and I've been fortunate to get experience with a lot of different projects (new HW deployment, company-wide OS upgrade, learning Active Directory, etc.) The thing I've probably enjoyed most though is writing Powershell scripts to automate useful tasks, so I feel like programming is where I'm leaning towards. In the past I've done some coding in C# in my spare time ( this for example ) and have been trying out a few courses over at CodeSchool to give other languages / frameworks a try (Ruby, Python / Django, Bootstrap, etc.) Without a CS degree what is my best path forward? Should I just pick one and work on getting a portfolio of a couple examples of what I can do setup and then look for an entry-level position?
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Nov 9, 2016 19:10
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Just go ahead and start applying. You've got code on Github. This separates you very nicely from nearly all other entry-level candidates.
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Nov 9, 2016 19:18
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Cross-posting from the Newbie Thread, since I'm not sure what side of that divide I fall on after being at my current job for about a year - What's a good job board to look at for international or canadian jobs? The boards I frequented before getting my current position are all pretty US-focused.
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Nov 9, 2016 21:00
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I scored an interview with a company that I thought would be perfect for me. I know how to do the things they need done, they build things I enjoy as a hobby, and they are located in an area I would be happy with (not quite my ideal location, but pretty close). Now I am dealing with HR stuff that is rubbing me the wrong way. Should I judge the company based on HR? I was worried they might be too large and corporate for me, and now I think I am starting to see some of that. Additionally, the internal recruiter told me the top end of their salary range yesterday and it isn't what I expected. Possibly close enough to what I want that I could negotiate up, but disappointing to see that their stated max is below the median salary for the area (which is below the median for the country). Feels good to write that out, I'm thinking maybe I should pass on this one and keep looking.
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Nov 9, 2016 21:04
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Not sure if I'm stating something you already know but just in case : Writing something as a hobby is very different then writing it for a living in a medium to large corporation. You will usually have very little say in the product direction, feature, quality control, style of code. Most likely you will be another cog in the machine and execute what someone else want. It's not always like that, in smallish company you will have a much bigger role in decisions. As for salary, well, if you start disappointed about that then you always have the growth opportunity for career advancement but yeah it doesn't start too well. Sometime you can fall into another bracket if your job title change.
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Nov 9, 2016 23:10
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taqueso posted:I scored an interview with a company that I thought would be perfect for me. I know how to do the things they need done, they build things I enjoy as a hobby, and they are located in an area I would be happy with (not quite my ideal location, but pretty close). Now I am dealing with HR stuff that is rubbing me the wrong way. Should I judge the company based on HR? I was worried they might be too large and corporate for me, and now I think I am starting to see some of that. Additionally, the internal recruiter told me the top end of their salary range yesterday and it isn't what I expected. Possibly close enough to what I want that I could negotiate up, but disappointing to see that their stated max is below the median salary for the area (which is below the median for the country). In situations like this, I suggest following your instincts and walking away. The heart knows things that the mind never will, and it would be terrible to wind up working in a poor work culture for poor pay because you don't want to pass judgment on a company.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:48
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taqueso posted:Now I am dealing with HR stuff that is rubbing me the wrong way. Should I judge the company based on HR? Depends on the stuff.
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Nov 11, 2016 05:34
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The gut feeling that my potential new managers might not provide the best mentorship because they were terrible communicators in my interviews is enough reason to turn down an otherwise decent offer, right?
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Nov 11, 2016 17:30
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Good Will Hrunting posted:The gut feeling that my potential new managers might not provide the best mentorship because they were terrible communicators in my interviews is enough reason to turn down an otherwise decent offer, right? I wouldn't necessarily be looking to managers for mentorship at the stage you're in, career-wise. I mean, of course they should be trying to foster an environment in which you can advance your career, but you'll be learning a lot more from the people on your team that have more experience than you do. Hopefully you interviewed with some of them. On the other hand, if you have a bad gut feeling, that can be a good reason to bail.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:37
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