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Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

Volguus posted:

What does git have to do with it? SVN may be what they use in some teams in Google (according to that testimony it is in that team), so checking out the entire repo for work is not that crazy (not advisable normally though).

I think that's part of the joke? Obviously he didn't have a choice if he was going for the self driving car code.

I'm surprised Google is using SVN, but maybe that is one of their espionage countermeasures. "Downloaded the whole repo? Another Uber spy, dispatch the Black Ice!"

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AskYourself
May 23, 2005
Donut is for Homer as Asking yourself is to ...
Git wouldn't have changed a thing.

He demonstrated intent to acquire company secret that he was not supposed to access in his normal work assignment and he took step to try to hide his illegitimate access.

Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11991479

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Skandranon posted:

I think that's part of the joke? Obviously he didn't have a choice if he was going for the self driving car code.

I'm surprised Google is using SVN, but maybe that is one of their espionage countermeasures. "Downloaded the whole repo? Another Uber spy, dispatch the Black Ice!"

It's usually nothing more exotic than bets and acquisitions end up with their own weird tech stacks that take time to migrate and integrate.

And yes, that was part of the joke.

in a well actually
Jan 26, 2011

dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

mrmcd posted:

Like dude if you're gonna download a whole repo, make sure it's on git. Full backups and commit history are in every client by design, so it'll just look like your normal work. Amateur hour!

Edit: also lol@ him and like three other people clicking "download" on sensitive Google docs and not realizing that poo poo is logged.

Also, lol at not bothering to check those logs until a supplier accidentally sent a "lidar by Google otto" blueprint to the Google LIDAR team.

Volguus
Mar 3, 2009

PCjr sidecar posted:

Also, lol at not bothering to check those logs until a supplier accidentally sent a "lidar by Google otto" blueprint to the Google LIDAR team.

With 100k+ employees, is kinda hard to check all the logs all the time. I mean, the guy was part of that team after all.

in a well actually
Jan 26, 2011

dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

Volguus posted:

With 100k+ employees, is kinda hard to check all the logs all the time. I mean, the guy was part of that team after all.

If you are the size of Google and your Infosec team doesn't have a rule on your internal Splunk knockoff to automatically check when any high level employee quits for anomalous behavior within the last month (oh, like downloading thousands of files and gigabytes of data from a sensitive repo), your Infosec is incompetent.

Maybe if they had had Adwords on that data they would've seen it?

RandomBlue
Dec 30, 2012

hay guys!


Biscuit Hider

mrmcd posted:

Like dude if you're gonna download a whole repo, make sure it's on git. Full backups and commit history are in every client by design, so it'll just look like your normal work. Amateur hour!

Edit: also lol@ him and like three other people clicking "download" on sensitive Google docs and not realizing that poo poo is logged.

Reminds me of a guy I worked with at a previous company who quit when I told him his fantasies of becoming some kind of IT management weren't going to happen and we were poo poo-canning his pet project. He yanked a hard drive out of his computer as he was leaving because: "I bought it myself, see, here's the receipt!". Yeah, OK, that's totally legit and not suspicious at all. Maybe you should've deleted this repo export you left on the root of the system drive with all the work you and your friends did on your personal side project on the company dime. That whole "cooler facebook for cool people" project is really gonna go places buddy, especially with amazing talent like yours heading it up. Can't recall for the life of me why were so stupid as to let go talent of that scale...

He also took some other company property with him but HR decided it was worth the loss if we never had to deal with him again. One of his genius henchmen that left with him REALLY GOT ME by setting their desktop background to an image of the login screen and unplugging their keyboard and mouse.

Their total value add to the company after a year or two was a website that managed to have a different piece of functionality that was broken in every browser, but the ring leader really had all the latest hot poo poo buzz of the week lingo down along with his cultivated 'l33t hax0r' attitude of barely concealed contempt and the whole "I'm doing you a favor even being here" thing so non-techy people thought he was amazing. I mean why would you act like that if you weren't amazing?

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Pollyanna posted:

There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

People that work at Google are, usually, a) not jerks, b) reasonably intelligent, and c) willing to apply themselves. That's it; there's no secret sauce there. Sure the company makes big noise about hiring the best and the brightest, but that's just PR. There's far too many employees for them all to be MIT valedictorians.

And besides, one of the best ways to improve yourself is to push yourself to achieve goals that you aren't certain are reachable. Do some studying, refresh yourself on interview questions, and apply for a few big-name companies that have offices near you.

Also they aren't all doing really low-level, highly-optimized coding. Who do you think builds and maintains the reams of websites that Google runs?

csammis
Aug 26, 2003

Mental Institution

Pollyanna posted:

There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

Pollyanna, this how you don't make the sort of jumps in your career that you seem to want right now. Just Apply. Let the company tell you no, don't do their work for them.

Personal Anecdote: I've been working on making a shift in my career from enterprise-scale backend stuff and management to embedded development. I got a TI Launchpad, made a couple Github projects and a gift for my wife to prove I wasn't totally incapable of learning, and then started applying. One company said "we like you but you can't be an embedded developer, how about a project manager?" Oh well I tried. One company said "Okay you can be a developer, hired" and in the thirteen months I worked there I got a lot of experience...not exactly in what I wanted to do, but I got a lot of exposure to the ideas and mentality and Hardware World in general. It can be done, but you can't do anything by not sending a resume. Google or Facebook or whoever is your personal Big Name I'm Not Good Enough For won't even know who you are if you don't tell them!

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
Also there's no real penalty for applying and failing -- companies don't blacklist people that don't make the cut, unless you're a complete jerk at the interview. In fact I got my position after failing to pass the interviews twice before.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

I agree with what everyone else said, make companies reject you, don't automatically disqualify yourself. Plenty of people who work at Google were surprised when they were hired.

Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know

Pollyanna posted:

There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

Google's interview process is a bit long, and now that I'm older and crankier I'm not fond of how they treat every interview like you're a junior developer. But I've done 3 interviews with them and I felt like I learned a lot every time. It's definitely worth your while to apply.

Here's one of the interview questions (from several years ago) that I remember clearly:

quote:

Imagine that you've got an alphabetic keyboard being displayed on a TV screen:

code:
A B C D E
F G H I J 
K L M N O 
P Q R S T 
U V W X Y 
Z
You have a remote control that can move the cursor up/down/left/right and select a letter. We've got some word, "HELLO" which has been translated into coordinates for you: [(1, 2), (0, 4), (2, 1), (2, 1), (2, 4)] and the cursor starts at (0,0), which is "A". You're trying to produce a sequence of button presses (U/D/L/R for movement and X to select) to type out the given word. In this case, you could start with "DRRXRRUX" to spell "HE". Write a function that takes the coordinate list and turns it into the button-press sequence.

I think if you try it you'll find that it's not that hard. There were some harder questions, and I didn't get an offer on any of my tries, but you should try to get an on-site and feel good if you succeed there. Once you do OK-ish at a Google interview their recruiters will hound you for the rest of your life, so that's a fun ego-boost!

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


That's...not as bad as I expected. It seems to boil down to figuring out how to represent a movement delta from point A to point B plus a button press, then reduce over the list of points to get a full list of actions.

The last time I got a question like that, it was at Twitter where they had me try and write some kind of A* algorithm for a 2D matrix encoded in strings, and I totally ate poo poo over it. I expected something like that.

I kinda got it into my head that applying to companies was based on company need (i.e. what postings they've put out) instead of a "pull" where the applicant goes directly to the company. That might not be the case. Maybe I'll try my chances...

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I thought my first Google phone screen interview was a pretty good and practical but challenging question while the second one was an embarrassing nightmare done by someone who should never interview a candidate again. That said, you should never get single company tunnel vision. I also really dislike the whole "go through all these rounds" poo poo before hearing anything about what you might be working on because I know a handful of people there who are doing stuff they really hate or who keep getting shifted to different projects and departments and that's been frustrating for them.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Pollyanna posted:

The last time I got a question like that, it was at Twitter where they had me try and write some kind of A* algorithm for a 2D matrix encoded in strings, and I totally ate poo poo over it. I expected something like that.

Graph theory questions are very common in interviews in general, so it's worth knowing how to do breadth-first and depth-first searches (and what the differences are between them), and to have some basic understanding of what's different about A*.

For example, in the problem Mniot posed, how would you solve the problem if the cursor is allowed to "wrap around" (e.g. from A to Z or from A to E in a single step)? Your approach of using deltas could still be made to work if you added a bunch of special casing, but there's another, graph-based approach that remains simple. Then you can think about expanding that problem to, say, picking out letters from a grid that has 1000 elements in it, or 1000000 elements...how do the different approaches scale?

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


Yyyeah that makes sense actually. This is the kinda stuff I need to learn :saddowns: Graph theory is my weakest subject, and I still don't run into situations where I need to dive deep into it. I guess if I wanna pass these interviews I need to practice these problems. I have a copy of Cracking the Code Interview cause I saw the problems in it and got discouraged, thinking I'd need a CS degree to do them. I'll take another look at it.

Friggin everything becomes a graph problem somehow, bleh.

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


oliveoil posted:

Why not both? I think no matter what my niche is, I'm going to aim to become more effective at it, so then the question is: what niche? Do I have one already? If not, do I just pick one and see if I can hack it?

My point is you don't need a niche. You can take that route, but it isn't necessary if you're good at what you do.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
There's no secret sauce in a CS degree either. It's just some focused learning. I'm confident you can find a CS Algorithms online course you can take, which will cover most of what you need. Really it's just getting some experience with using a variety of algorithms, even on toy problems. That experience will then be available in the future, so when you need to solve problems that look similar, you can say "Oh, I should apply X to this."

I'd say that a good CS degree consists of a few courses of "learn to write code that has decent formatting/structure/comments", some "here's a bunch of algorithms and how long they take to run", some "here's a bunch of data structures and what they're good/bad at", some "here's the math underpinning a bunch of this stuff", and some "here's some specific domains (like web programming, databases, embedded systems, compilers, etc. -- any given student probably wouldn't do more than 2 or 3 of these) that you can do a deep dive on." A lot of those can be replaced by real-world experience, especially if you make a conscious effort to try to improve and learn from your experiences.

Really the problem with graph theory is that it doesn't usually show up in real-world situations, but is very popular for interview questions. That's not to say that it's useless, just that even a skilled developer rarely has cause to make use of it while performing their job responsibilities.

Rudest Buddhist
May 26, 2005

You only lose what you cling to, bitch.
Fun Shoe
FWIW, I've had good luck using InterviewCake.com for my latest batch of interviews. It'll run you through the vast majority of white boarding / coding stuff you'll be seeing. Much like cracking the coding interview but for some reason this seems more concise to me.

I got my rear end kicked a bit last night by an iOS pre-interview coding challenge, diving back into it again tonight. We all go through this, it makes you better in the long run! Gotta apply for jobs you're interested in and go for the moon shot. Worst case you get some good feedback.

lifg
Dec 4, 2000
<this tag left blank>
Muldoon
Well now I'm becoming convinced to apply for Google. And speaking as someone with a CS degree, it spooks me too. Gotta get reacquainted with B-trees.

Doctor w-rw-rw-
Jun 24, 2008

Pollyanna posted:

There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

csammis posted:

Pollyanna, this how you don't make the sort of jumps in your career that you seem to want right now. Just Apply. Let the company tell you no, don't do their work for them.

hello impostor syndrome my old friend
+1 to csammis.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

People that work at Google are, usually, a) not jerks, b) reasonably intelligent, and c) willing to apply themselves. That's it; there's no secret sauce there. Sure the company makes big noise about hiring the best and the brightest, but that's just PR. There's far too many employees for them all to be MIT valedictorians.

Same wrt/ Facebook. Any company that tells you they hire the top 1% is REALLY just telling you that they don't pick 99% of resumes they get. Granted, they probably hire pretty well, but there is no metric for "best", just a bunch of guesswork and apparent success after the fact.

And especially with the big ones, they get a TON of resumes that are extremely and very obviously unqualified. You having decent grammar and ability to think about programming abstractly already makes you more qualified than many, many people. Now you just gotta roll the dice and see if you fall somewhere around or above the threshold these companies are working for. There's a big amount of personal effort involved in getting to that point, but luck is also a part of it.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Also there's no real penalty for applying and failing -- companies don't blacklist people that don't make the cut, unless you're a complete jerk at the interview. In fact I got my position after failing to pass the interviews twice before.
I had several opportunities to get hired by Facebook: 2009, 2011, 2013 (twice), and 2015. Three of those were internships; two were phone calls. I succeeded on the last one, obviously, but that just goes to show you - trying and failing doesn't count against you.

Pollyanna posted:

I kinda got it into my head that applying to companies was based on company need (i.e. what postings they've put out) instead of a "pull" where the applicant goes directly to the company. That might not be the case. Maybe I'll try my chances...
Things might be different at small shops where they can't afford to float some additional employees for a time, where any individual engineer can have an outsized negative impact (or even just a neutral one and not be worth their salary).

I think salaries are so high in tech in part because companies are desperate to hire. If they wait until they have a concrete need, risk would grow out of control, and if they thought in those terms then they might stop hiring or fire when the need is gone. The need for someone smart to build something knows virtually no bounds, especially at successful/growing companies, so many application processes worry about what specifically they're hiring you for until they've decided you're worth betting on and investing in (training, benefits, salary, $$$).

tl;dr: If you think you have room to challenge yourself and grow, study up (drilling myself on Cracking the Code Interview repeatedly really helped, good choice), send that resume in, and let the companies turn you down before you turn yourself down.


---

Personally, I'm not so much a fan of Google because my interviews with them have always been dysfunctional, like their recruiter wasn't paying attention or the interviewers didn't actually care about me or following the process the recruiters claim Google follows. But YMMV. My interview experience with Facebook was extremely smooth.

Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Mar 22, 2017

muon
Sep 13, 2008

by Reene
Google is extremely cool and good and I highly recommend anyone interested apply. Failing my first interview with them prepped me to pass my second, so don't get discouraged if that happens!

Flaming June
Oct 21, 2004

The last several posts have been cool and good and now I'll shoot for the stars and try for the big companies in NYC/Seattle.

asur
Dec 28, 2012

Mniot posted:

Google's interview process is a bit long, and now that I'm older and crankier I'm not fond of how they treat every interview like you're a junior developer. But I've done 3 interviews with them and I felt like I learned a lot every time. It's definitely worth your while to apply.

Here's one of the interview questions (from several years ago) that I remember clearly:


I think if you try it you'll find that it's not that hard. There were some harder questions, and I didn't get an offer on any of my tries, but you should try to get an on-site and feel good if you succeed there. Once you do OK-ish at a Google interview their recruiters will hound you for the rest of your life, so that's a fun ego-boost!

Not trying to discourage anyone, but this question is on the simple side of what I would expect and prepare for. If someone asks this in a non-phone interview I'd expect the follow up with wrapping, I.e using a graph. If you want to do well at interviews at Google, etc you should have a good understanding of trees, maps, graphs, and dynamic programming. Maps probably being the most common since they are used everywhere. Asking questions about specific algorithms or obscure data structures is loving dumb though.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
About all I can remember about dynamic programming is that it's like recursion except you cache results, so it trades runtime for memory use in situations where you make repeated calls. I've been lucky enough that I haven't been required to explain things further than that in a long time.

Paolomania
Apr 26, 2006

Pollyanna posted:

There's no way in hell I'm good enough for Google. My impression is that people who work at Google do hardcore CS algo work or are really good at server maintenance or C optimizations. That's something I don't have the education or experience for. I'm talking out of my rear end, yeah, but they're a whole 'nother level.

All most of us really do is take data in one format and copy it into data in another format ... and then get that code through productionization and security review which really is just like some form of CS hazing.

apseudonym
Feb 25, 2011

Paolomania posted:

All most of us really do is take data in one format and copy it into data in another format ... and then get that code through productionization and security review which really is just like some form of CS hazing.

Some of us do rad things and have never touched a protobuf. :shrug:



I've given a lot of interviews at Google, personally I love graph questions since they let me see how you think through a problem from being given the description to writing code the code for it to spotting issues in your code/algorithm.


The advice I always give people is to take an algorithms textbook and pick some random word problems out of them and solve them completely (come up with a solution and then code it up).

But applying doesn't hurt, worst thing you get is a no.

Zamujasa
Oct 27, 2010



Bread Liar
One of the two lead developers at my place put in his resignation; he's finally had it here and I don't blame him, I've been thinking of doing the same for years but effort. We work in software dev, doing webapp stuff.

Three days later, we all now have huge scary forms to sign. It's a non-compete. I don't even know if I should sign this poo poo or just :getout:

quote:

3. Conflicting Employment. I agree that, during the term of my employment with the Company, I will devote my full time and efforts to the Company and I will not engage in any other employment, occupation or consulting activity, nor will I engage in any other activities that conflict with my obligations to the Company.
So any sort of consulting or gig work is dead. Friend wants a website? Nope. This is "justified" by the owner saying "well, you work for me, not anybody else, and I pay for your health insurance, and I pay for your unemployment/worker's comp insurance, so if you get hurt elsewhere I don't want to be paying you to work for someone else."

quote:

5. Notification of New Employer. In the event that I leave the employ of the Company, I hereby grant consent to notification by the Company to my new employer about my rights and obligations under this Agreement.
This is probably standard, but given the circumstances it's all suspect.

quote:

8. Covenant Not to Compete.
(a) I agree that during the course of my employment and for a period of eighteen (18) months immediately following the termination of my relationship with the Company for any reason, whether with or without good cause or for any or no cause, at the option either of the Company or myself, with or without notice, I will not, without the prior written consent of the Company, (i) serve as a partner, employee, consultant, officer, director, manager, agent, associate, investor, or otherwise for, (ii) directly or indirectly, own, purchase, organize or take preparatory steps for the organization of, or (iii) build, design, finance, acquire, lease, operate, manage, invest in, work or consult for or otherwise affiliate myself with, any business in competition with or otherwise similar to the Company's business. The foregoing covenant shall cover my activities in every part of the Territory in which I may conduct business during the term of such covenant as set forth above. "Territory" shall mean (i) all counties in the State of Nevada, (ii) all other states of the United States of America and (iii) all other countries of the world; provided that, with respect to clauses (ii) and (iii), the Company derives at least five percent (5%) of its gross revenues from such geographic area prior to the date of the termination of my relationship with the Company.

This sounds way over-reaching for what we do.

quote:

10. Arbitration and Equitable Relief.
(a) Arbitration. Except as provided in subsection (b) below, I agree that any dispute, claim or controversy concerning my employment or the termination of my employment or any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to any interpretation, construction, performance or breach of this Agreement, shall be settled by arbitration to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada in accordance with the rules then in effect of the American Arbitration Association. The arbitrator may grant injunctions or other relief in such dispute or controversy. The decision of the arbitrator shall be final, conclusive and binding on the parties to the arbitration. Judgment may be entered on the arbitrator's decision in any court having jurisdiction. The Company and I shall each pay one-half of the costs and expenses of such arbitration, and each of us shall separately pay our counsel fees and expenses.

And this feels like we're signing our rights away to contest any of this bullshit, should it come up when seeking new work.

This whole thing feels like retaliation for our lead quitting, and the owner is trying to get him to sign too, despite already being on the way out the door. Keep in mind that we aren't new employees signing this -- I've been here for over 5 years, and everyone else has been here for at least 3 months. This is just now landing on our desks, and required to be returned by Friday. Supposedly the owner will (at his discretion, of course) strike some terms if you bring them up, but only on a case-by-case basis.

This whole thing just feels like poo poo. I wish I had a lawyer I could ask. Are agreements this harsh the standard? It feels like this is way, way worse than what I've seen elsewhere.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Zamujasa posted:

One of the two lead developers at my place put in his resignation; he's finally had it here and I don't blame him, I've been thinking of doing the same for years but effort. We work in software dev, doing webapp stuff.

Three days later, we all now have huge scary forms to sign. It's a non-compete. I don't even know if I should sign this poo poo or just :getout:

:sever:

Either that, or strike out all the terms you find objectionable, and dare the owner to fire you over it.

stealth edit: also, non-competes are illegal in California and possibly other states; worth checking if your state is one of 'em.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Zamujasa posted:


This whole thing just feels like poo poo. I wish I had a lawyer I could ask. Are agreements this harsh the standard? It feels like this is way, way worse than what I've seen elsewhere.

Generally with non-competes, or restrictive contracts in general, there has to be something you're receiving in return (aka, consideration.) This could be considered a new job, but you already have an existing job. What makes this discussion interesting, is that you can play hard ball and not sign, which would be a strong bluff. If your employer fires you over it, they may be in some poo poo if the NC doesn't pass legal muster.

Unfortunately, you need a lawyer familiar with Nevada law to give you advice. Maybe you could pool some funds with the other employees and pay for one to look it over.

Zamujasa
Oct 27, 2010



Bread Liar
The advice to :sever: is basically exactly what I'm taking. I was waffling on it because I like the stability even though the job sucks, but this flaming turd really pushed me past that point.

quote:

The conventional wisdom passed from Nevada lawyers to their business clients has always been to draft reasonably broad non-compete provisions. If a court found that the provision was too broad, the court had the power to lighten the restriction, but still enforce the agreement. Thousands of non-compete agreements in Nevada are drafted in this way. All of them need to be revisited.

Now, if a judge finds an agreement “unreasonable,” the entire agreement is void. Nevada joins a tiny minority of states that follow this rule. Employers cannot expect their non-compete agreement will be enforced at any level. They must weigh the risk that the agreement could be thrown out entirely. Uncertainty now clouds employment agreements in Nevada, potentially opening the flood gates to expensive litigation.



B-Nasty posted:

Generally with non-competes, or restrictive contracts in general, there has to be something you're receiving in return (aka, consideration.) This could be considered a new job, but you already have an existing job. What makes this discussion interesting, is that you can play hard ball and not sign, which would be a strong bluff. If your employer fires you over it, they may be in some poo poo if the NC doesn't pass legal muster.

Unfortunately, you need a lawyer familiar with Nevada law to give you advice. Maybe you could pool some funds with the other employees and pay for one to look it over.

One of the other developers is talking with a lawyer, but I'm told they won't be able to review it until Monday, and the boss wants this signed by Friday.


TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Either that, or strike out all the terms you find objectionable, and dare the owner to fire you over it.

This is the nuclear option I'm considering. I really, really don't like this agreement, and I'm in a position where if I'm let go there's literally nobody else here who knows how to maintain poo poo.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Zamujasa posted:

One of the other developers is talking with a lawyer, but I'm told they won't be able to review it until Monday, and the boss wants this signed by Friday.

Somebody pressuring you to sign this RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD THIS IS SO DAMNED IMPORTANT PEOPLE ARE DYYYYIIIIINNNNGGGGG SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT SIGN IT OH GOD JUST SIGN IT is one of the biggest red flags in existence. Your boss just outed himself as a tremendous rear end in a top hat. Seriously, :sever:

It's a knee jerk reaction to him losing somebody important. Instead of thinking "hmm, if they're looking for greener pastures maybe I should give them reason to stay" he's thinking "wow, gently caress I have to slap handcuffs on right now!"

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Zamujasa posted:

One of the other developers is talking with a lawyer, but I'm told they won't be able to review it until Monday, and the boss wants this signed by Friday.

Tell your boss that you won't sign it until your lawyer finishes reviewing it and advising you, and just let that hang out there. If he flips his lid over a reasonable request, then you have your answer as to what to do.

In any case, I'd probably refuse to sign and see what happens. Then immediately start using company time to look for another job.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

There's no secret sauce in a CS degree either. It's just some focused learning. I'm confident you can find a CS Algorithms online course you can take, which will cover most of what you need. Really it's just getting some experience with using a variety of algorithms, even on toy problems. That experience will then be available in the future, so when you need to solve problems that look similar, you can say "Oh, I should apply X to this."

I'd say that a good CS degree consists of a few courses of "learn to write code that has decent formatting/structure/comments", some "here's a bunch of algorithms and how long they take to run", some "here's a bunch of data structures and what they're good/bad at", some "here's the math underpinning a bunch of this stuff", and some "here's some specific domains (like web programming, databases, embedded systems, compilers, etc. -- any given student probably wouldn't do more than 2 or 3 of these) that you can do a deep dive on." A lot of those can be replaced by real-world experience, especially if you make a conscious effort to try to improve and learn from your experiences.

Really the problem with graph theory is that it doesn't usually show up in real-world situations, but is very popular for interview questions. That's not to say that it's useless, just that even a skilled developer rarely has cause to make use of it while performing their job responsibilities.

I recommend the Coursera course and the book associated with it. I read the Algorithm Design Manual which is also good but IMO Sedgewick is clearer/easier to read.

edit: But on the other hand if the object is an interview probably just get Cracking the Coding Interview instead.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

B-Nasty posted:

Tell your boss that you won't sign it until your lawyer finishes reviewing it and advising you, and just let that hang out there. If he flips his lid over a reasonable request, then you have your answer as to what to do.

In any case, I'd probably refuse to sign and see what happens. Then immediately start using company time to look for another job.

I'd strike every word and then sign, that's what I think of crap like this dropped on my desk after 5 loving years holy poo poo. After that amount of time at one company, in this industry, they'd have no call to insult me like that.

quote:

10. Arbitration and Equitable Relief.
(a) Arbitration. ..... The Company and I shall each pay one-half of the costs and expenses of such arbitration, and each of us shall separately pay our counsel fees and expenses.

:lol: :roflolmao: :lol:

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
If someone tried to make me sign that contract, I'd resign my position at their company on the spot.

Rudest Buddhist
May 26, 2005

You only lose what you cling to, bitch.
Fun Shoe
Yep, time to get out there.

Use it as an opportunity to work on something you're really excited about. You can have stability and a cool project to work on.

Cuntpunch
Oct 3, 2003

A monkey in a long line of kings
I once had an employer offer a 'revised contract' after a year or two of working for them. The ownership threw a bit of a fit when I insisted a revision("but everyone else signed it!") because of a clause defining something like 'output' in terms so broad that a daydream or meeting-doodling would qualify, and then later attempted to also define the applicable period of company ownership of my output as being that of my employment, retroactive, and not as "time where I'm on-the-clock". I told them to change it if they wanted me to sign it and at the 11th hour they did, but were very upset they had to pay their contract lawyer for an hour to get on the phone with me and discuss what sort of language I would actually accept. I really should have seen it for the red flag it was and not waited another year for them to do even crazier stuff before I left.

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sausage king of Chicago
Jun 13, 2001
Is it bad form to reach out to a company directly if you've been going through a recruiter for the whole process?

I had an interview on Tuesday with a company and I thought it went really well. It was set up by a recruiter I've been talking with. After the interview, I spoke with the HR lady from the company and she asked about salary, and I told her to speak to the recruiter regarding that since that's what my recruiter asked me to do. She said they should have an answer in a day or so.

I followed up with my recruiter yesterday and she said she hadn't heard anything. I wrote a "thank you" letter to my interviewers and passed it on to her and she said she'd forward it to the HR lady who would forward it to the people I spoke with.

So I called up the recruiter today and didn't get to speak with her, but spoke with a guy she works with who has me set up for another interview at a different company today. He told me my recruiter hasn't reached out to the company yet to find out what's going on. I really want this process to be over and don't want to have to go on this other interview today if I get an offer from this other place, so I'm wondering if I can just reach out to the HR lady directly and ask if they've made a decision? I don't want to wait around for my recruiter to reach out and also don't want to be annoying by calling her 3x a day to find out what's going on. This whole thing just makes me anxious as poo poo and I would really appreciate a 'yes/no' as soon as possible.

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