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lifg posted:On the other hand, Rails. Which has keeps a lot of programmers employed and has entire ecosystems and specialities and such. The presence of ecosystems is fine, as is your job being almost entirely within a specific ecosystem. I'm just saying that an ecosystem or a framework should not define you as a developer.
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May 12, 2017 22:10
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Jose Valasquez posted:leetcode.com is the best in my opinion in terms of being similar to real interview questions I've gotten. Codewars.com is pretty decent too, but it's just a bit more random what you get instead of "I want to do X type of problem". A couple of test cases are always included and you get to see other answers after you complete it.
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May 12, 2017 22:23
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I make $75k with 3 years experience in St. Louis, which is average-ish I think. If I am asked how much I am looking to make during an interview, and I say 90, is that reaching too high? Too low? It seems like the market here is going bonkers (I turned on the "let recruiters know you're looking" feature in LinkedIn on, and I got like 8 messages in 2 days) but I don't really have a firm grasp on market salary figures.
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May 13, 2017 00:41
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VOTE YES ON 69 posted:like "HAHA it's actually leftTrim not trimLeft!" or what? No, more along the lines of "do you remember how to get a substring", and if they don't I tell them to just make up something close. Pollyanna posted:
What I like to do when I'm interviewing a candidate is grill them about stuff they have on their resume and ask them to explain things to me, and then for the coding portion I like giving easy questions. That's because I figure that if someone can't solve an easy question they wouldn't be able to solve a hard one anyway, but if they do manage to solve the easy question and don't do so in a horrible manner they're probably ok.
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May 13, 2017 01:09
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I always expect interview questions to bar me from using core library functions like String manipulation and what not, and that they'd make me do it old-style to prove I know how to index into an array and make a linked list or whatever. Sometimes it's hard to tell which interview questions are testing your domain knowledge and which ones are just CtCI cargo culting.
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Jose Valasquez posted:In terms of interview prep I agree, but they advertise themselves as more of a competition than focusing on interview prep, so I kinda get it I've definitely seen it popping up in a lot of application / interview scenarios lately.
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May 13, 2017 01:28
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Doghouse posted:I make $75k with 3 years experience in St. Louis, which is average-ish I think. If I am asked how much I am looking to make during an interview, and I say 90, is that reaching too high? Too low? 75k w/ 3 years is pretty good in a smaller-market city. (not NYC, Bay, LA, DC, Boston) Depends on how good you are at negotiating. A close friend of mine preached this to me: "You can command more money than you think you're worth if you just confidently ask." "What is your current salary or what are you looking to make?" I would never answer this during an interview or let them know my current salary. Always, always let them make the first offer. Never discuss salary in any way from recruiter to phone screen until they say they are making an offer. If you have to fill out a form, put $1 in the field. ~10 years ago, with 5 years of experience I was offered 70k and I countered with 85k. We agreed on 77k + an extra week PTO. My "number" going in was 70k - I was making 55k. but since 70 was their opening I went much higher. I had nothing to lose making a play for 15k more than offered. The worst thing they would say was "no". The only person I would ever talk salary with is my 3rd party recruiter. I tell her I want X amount. She does the initial filtering on my behalf.
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May 13, 2017 03:05
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Good Will Hrunting posted:
Demoing "V1" of the platform for the CTO and CEO - CTO asked why we weren't using PubSub and were basically reinventing Kafka and my boss's sphincter got so tight as he had to mention that I suggested that earlier as I just sat there laughing. E: Looks like we're using it lol
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May 15, 2017 17:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Demoing "V1" of the platform for the CTO and CEO - CTO asked why we weren't using PubSub and were basically reinventing Kafka and my boss's sphincter got so tight as he had to mention that I suggested that earlier as I just sat there laughing. :+1: for your CTO.
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May 15, 2017 19:28
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I have my doubts that people that couldn't be bothered to properly learn how to use a technology and wound up reinventing a a wheel as a pet rock would all of a sudden competently use what they should have been using in the first place. For example, I've seen people running Postgres struggling to beat 100 requests / second on $250k+ of bare metal, and I highly, highly doubt that switching to MongoDB like they wanted to would make it go away (hint: 0 caching objects used, over 100 SQL queries run per page hit, maybe 20% of which hit indexes, and autovacuum settings were such that nothing ever optimized - this is your bread and butter client as a consultant  ).
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May 15, 2017 23:30
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If you have been laid off, how would you indicate that to companies you are interviewing with? On Thursday my ex-boss had a wonderful epiphany and decided to lay off the entire staff... of the entire company. Rather suddenly, too. I am in the middle of interviewing now and I'm not sure how to spin my changed status in a way that doesn't reduce my attractiveness as a candidate. Unless it doesn't have much of an impact, but to me my gut feeling says it would anyway.
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May 16, 2017 02:57
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The fact that everyone got laid off is actually better for you. I would say pretty much what you said here. "The company closed down, about xx people were all laid off at the same time"
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May 16, 2017 04:02
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Getting laid off is not a big deal. Just say you got laid off. People only care if you're unemployed because you're a shitheel and got fired for being dumb or bad, or are somehow otherwise unemployable in a way they haven't yet discovered. Massive layoffs = the absolute best reason to be unemployed.
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May 16, 2017 04:06
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Flaming June posted:If you have been laid off, how would you indicate that to companies you are interviewing with? On Thursday my ex-boss had a wonderful epiphany and decided to lay off the entire staff... of the entire company. Rather suddenly, too. "My boss decided rather suddenly to wind down the company. It's an unfortunate situation, but he and my former colleagues can provide a reference on request." If he refuses: "My boss decided without warning to shut down the company, and laid off the entire staff of the company on Tuesday. My former colleagues can provide a reference on request." If it wasn't your fuckup then it's really just limited to the leverage they have from you not being employed. The less you need it or the better alternatives you have, the less usable that leverage. But maybe I'm emphasizing it too much even?
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May 16, 2017 04:07
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There's nothing embarrassing about being laid off unless you're in a really high prestige kind of position or something (which shows your lack of foresight / political awareness somewhat to have lost at corporate Game of Thrones). For a good candidate, being laid off in some respects can put pressure on the company because it means that the candidate is actively pursuing different places and if they're any decent they'll start getting multiple offers shortly.
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May 16, 2017 04:20
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:But maybe I'm emphasizing it too much even? It'll probably come up with someone on the hiring side, "why are you looking for a new job?" kind of question. Don't open an interview by badmouthing your previous employer no matter how heinous or incompetent, but there's no reason to be cagey or duplicitous about getting laid off. That's the businesses fault, explicitly not yours.
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May 16, 2017 04:21
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Haha, OK. It looks like it is less of a deal than I thought. I haven't been in this position before and wasn't sure what to think.
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May 16, 2017 04:38
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prisoner of waffles posted::+1: for your CTO. Bossman dweeb is being stubborn and it now looks like we aren't switching, lol. He's a huge problem stunting my team's growth and progress, not to mention my personal growth. At least it felt good to know I was totally on the right track with a good tech decision, especially since parts of the rest of the company are thinking about adopting it. necrobobsledder posted:I have my doubts that people that couldn't be bothered to properly learn how to use a technology and wound up reinventing a a wheel as a pet rock would all of a sudden competently use what they should have been using in the first place. For example, I've seen people running Postgres struggling to beat 100 requests / second on $250k+ of bare metal, and I highly, highly doubt that switching to MongoDB like they wanted to would make it go away (hint: 0 caching objects used, over 100 SQL queries run per page hit, maybe 20% of which hit indexes, and autovacuum settings were such that nothing ever optimized - this is your bread and butter client as a consultant It had 0 to do with people learning, we have 3 Kafka evangelists on our team, and everything to do with him being a complete loon. In other news: the only good manager on the team is now working from our remote office for 2+ months, so they're organized and doing a lot (better) and I'm on my own island as they're 7 hours ahead. They're making a ton of progress just doing their own thing while I have to pull teeth to get assigned stuff from my """boss"", write some code on my own, get stuck on requirements, ask him, find out there's a JIRA with details about things that he should have mentioned many work-hours ago (has happened multiple times now - and not just business requirements - benchmarks that had been done for tech I'm evaluating!!!!!) and get frustrated as heck. I think the other managers see the problem, they have brought it up, there just seems to be no way to circumvent the tyranny of King poo poo.
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May 16, 2017 15:31
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I'm lagging in this thread, but I remember a few pages back folks were talking about embedded systems. Embedded and machine level stuff isn't my cup of tea, but a formal verification position showed up on a Haskell mailing list, along with some other really cool operating systems positions at this company. Thought I would mention it here as an example of what's possible in the field: http://kernkonzept.com/jobs.html
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May 16, 2017 20:06
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Hell yes, thanks for posting this. This gives me a better idea of where I should aim myself to get further into embedded software.
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May 16, 2017 20:40
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On that note: if I'm interested in moving my career towards FP and away from OO, is there less of a stigma around years of professional experience in a given Functional language considering that the majority of shops aren't using FP and most devs therefore can't necessarily use FP in their day to day work? "My day to day is primarily centered around X and Y, but I have tinkered / freelanced / whatever in Z available <here>, <here> and <github>." doesn't get me very far in my previous experiences.
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May 16, 2017 21:45
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There's a huge FP presence in data science with Scala on Spark.
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May 16, 2017 21:49
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Most folks in the corporate functional world recognize that it's rare to see 8 years of OCaml/Haskell/ML experience, so they're happy if you've got an open mind, tolerance for screaming arguments with a compiler and maybe read a couple of chapters of SICP or Learn You a Haskell. In addition to Spark / Scala, that's the way Java is going anyway slowly. Java8 added Optional with flatMap, lambdas, etc. I've even seen people writing code that goes into services built with that horrible Dropwizard framework which uses Eithers instead of exceptions for error conditions.
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May 16, 2017 22:58
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Iverron posted:On that note: if I'm interested in moving my career towards FP and away from OO, is there less of a stigma around years of professional experience in a given Functional language considering that the majority of shops aren't using FP and most devs therefore can't necessarily use FP in their day to day work? I think a lot of HR departments and recruiters have trouble with this. We were trying to hire devs and I'd tell the recruiters "we want someone with a bunch of general server experience who thinks functional programming sounds fun" and they'd be like "here's someone who knows Java and wants to learn C#". I'd expect most dev teams to feel like I did, though. I like FP because I think it's easier to write good code. It takes some different thinking so you want someone who at least remembers doing CS 101 in Scheme so they know that they like it. Other than that, most of what makes a good developer is the same.
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May 17, 2017 03:05
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Mniot posted:I think a lot of HR departments and recruiters have trouble with this. We were trying to hire devs and I'd tell the recruiters "we want someone with a bunch of general server experience who thinks functional programming sounds fun" and they'd be like "here's someone who knows Java and wants to learn C#". FP is great, but the last time I was trying to get a job in it firms were pretty strongly against people who only had hobby experience in their language for some reason.
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May 17, 2017 12:30
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Bleh. Just got benefits info from a company I applied to and was very interested in. 10 days pto total, doesn't go up much. That's less than half of what I have now and it's just not enough for someone with a family. Companies really never let you negotiate this either, in my experience. So disappointing. If I get a good salary, is there any way to negotiate a way to be able to take unpaid days?
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May 17, 2017 21:28
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10 days PTO?! Brutal. I thought it was pretty standard for companies to offer something like 15-18 bare minimum. If it were a remote job, 10 days PTO wouldn't seem quite as bad but if you're locked into a specific location that would get old pretty fast unless you were a shut-in who doesn't travel and has no family. Ask directly about unpaid days, probably. I'm sure that differs between companies too. Amish Ninja fucked around with this message at 21:49 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 21:45
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Plenty of places will negotiate on PTO. They should, too, it's an easy perk that doesn't reflect negatively on anyone's balance sheet. 10 days would be a deal breaker. That's pathetic.
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May 17, 2017 21:59
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good jovi posted:Plenty of places will negotiate on PTO. They should, too, it's an easy perk that doesn't reflect negatively on anyone's balance sheet. Actually from what I understand, unused PTO counts as a debt on the company's balance sheet. Though I'm pretty sure when it comes to things like "a particular department's hiring budget," it's not generally factored in. But yes, 10 days is laughable. That's the first thing I'd point to in negotiation, and I would use language like "shockingly low." I wonder if they expect people to negotiate PTO and are just preemptively anchoring so that you settle on 15 or something (which is still extremely low for this industry if you aren't completely desperate). Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 22:42 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 22:38
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Jesus christ, 10 days? I know a couple of people that have negotiated PTO before without much hassle. Surely this won't be the first time this company has been approached about negotiating that.
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May 17, 2017 23:24
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Everyone says you can negotiate PTO, but I've never been able. Admittedly my sample size is a grand total of four companies, but all of them were very specific that it wasn't on the table and was entirely dependent on tenure at the company.
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May 18, 2017 00:11
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While we're sharing our anecdotal evidence, I've negotiated PTO at my current position with success. It doesn't hurt to try.
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May 18, 2017 00:49
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asur posted:Everyone says you can negotiate PTO, but I've never been able. Admittedly my sample size is a grand total of four companies, but all of them were very specific that it wasn't on the table and was entirely dependent on tenure at the company. The only success I've ever seen with regard to negotiating PTO was basically having prior industry experience applied as "tenure" for the sake of PTO calculation.
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May 18, 2017 01:09
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Why are companies so reluctant to give out PTO?
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May 18, 2017 02:36
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Pollyanna posted:Why are companies so reluctant to give out PTO? Never mind that people are way more productive when they're not rationing out their PTO for special trips or holidays. Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 02:43
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It probably depends on the companies/country/culture. In USA and Canada they'd love to squish the last drop of blood out of you before they throw you out on the street like a used TV. In high-demand fields (such as software engineers) they're a bit better, but not by much. Europe has it much better by comparison, as a lot of the legwork for worker's rights was done quite some time ago. Companies also have realized that having happy, rested and not overly-stressed employees is good for business. But they do make a shitton of more money in the US. And less taxes So ... YMMV.
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May 18, 2017 03:07
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Pollyanna posted:Why are companies so reluctant to give out PTO? Idleness is a sin. You don't want your employees to go to hell, do you?
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May 18, 2017 05:46
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Even in the U.S., which has on average significantly less vacation than in the EU, 10 days is hot garbage for this industry. It's low enough to be downright insulting, and if I see that before I go into the interview, I would decline and I'd tell them that's why - that the vacation package is so bad that it raises serious concerns about work/life balance at the company. If they brought it up during the offer stage, I would have a hard time not laughing. Even as a first job I would have to be pretty desperate to settle for that.
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May 18, 2017 05:54
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10 - 12 days is pretty common for a lot of lower tier tech employers that have bad margins with less staff for redundancy of duties and have a cultural emphasis on working harder, not smarter, especially if it's a professional services / consulting firm. When you're struggling to bring in cashflow the company will start pulling accounting tricks to keep things afloat. Start-ups got rid of accrued PTO and rebranded them as "unlimited" vacation days partly for this reason.
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May 18, 2017 13:40
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I've negotiated for more PTO but it was in lieu of more money and as part of a raise  Pollyanna posted:Why are companies so reluctant to give out PTO? Because, unlike salary, it's a very visible form of compensation that people aren't conditioned against talking about, so anyone who's not totally checked out might notice someone else's superior comp and start asking for the same.
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May 18, 2017 14:00
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It's a new-ish, small company. They do custom software development and have contacts with some really big companies, and seem to be doing very well. The rest of their benefits are actually ok to good; they even have this thing where they let you work on whatever you want (your own software projects, etc) for 4 hours a week. I'm just trying to decide if it's even worth just going through the interview process or if I should just walk away now.
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May 18, 2017 14:45
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