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Good Will Hrunting posted:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? Use the phrasing advice from upthread? If you need to practice something, practice saying some of those phrases until it doesn't sound like you're reciting internet strangers' advice.
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Apr 24, 2018 16:16
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? Being able to deliver diplomatic bullshit is an incredibly valuable skill on it's own. Remember employers only get to know about your job via what you tell them. They never have to know you were stagnant, only that you wanted more opportunities to grow as a developer.
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Apr 24, 2018 16:22
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Sure, but I'm not talking about this from a soft-skills approach. I'm talking about this from a "how can I make myself more likely to do well in the highest percentage of interviews and find a relatively stimulating job" wise. I'm great at bullshitting, I went to business school! 
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Apr 24, 2018 16:27
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? Don't even. "Mask lovely job experience" is a bad orientation to take for two reasons: you're focusing on how bad your current work is and you're trying to compensate for it by being at least opaque, if not deceptive. (Speaking as someone who has wanted to leave jobs that felt super lovely, yes, I have taken the orientation of "how do I mask this lovely job experience" and while I did succeed at that task, it did not help me find work that I really wanted more and messed up how I thought about my career.) Even if you think your current place is 90% poo poo, orient on the positive aspects of what you are doing and can do + good things that you want to have in your work. Find some other way of thinking / communicating about your situation that will make you feel happier about where you want to go and where you're coming from and (critically!!) will actually allow you and interviewers to relate on something positive or at least neutral. "I want to do more X" not "(cryptic words that translate to 'I want to run away from bad situation Y')"
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Apr 24, 2018 16:29
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Sure, but I'm not talking about this from a soft-skills approach. I'm talking about this from a "how can I make myself more likely to do well in the highest percentage of interviews and find a relatively stimulating job" wise. I'm great at bullshitting, I went to business school! Thats your problem though. Practice telling yourself the bullshit until you believe it because it sounds like your impostor syndrome is sabotaging you right now and preventing you from framing your lovely experiences as educational, or at least reasonable setbacks that you can politely convey. The feeling of insecurity that suffering from a bad job breeds can sometimes reflect in how you talk about it, and thinking positively about it can make it easier for you to project confidence in an interview.
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Apr 24, 2018 17:09
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? GWH, I totally sympathize with you, and I have similar but different issues how how to frame my situation positively to interviews (and exhaustion/burnout due to bad work situation), but someone posted this and it really helped me. Minor editing in quote. Space Gopher posted:And remember, even with your lovely boss and crazy working environment, you've learned a lot and have had the chance to implement what sound like some important pieces of an application at your current job. Find that framing, and hold on to it. Try to think of this as happening to a third party (sometimes writing it out and reviewing it helps me) and how you would try to give advice to them. Also! Try and find a way to make this more pleasurable for you. You are being ground down at work, and then grinding yourself down at home. You could totally do a pet project, try to think of an interesting way to incorporate algorithms, but the biggest thing is to practice self compassion. You've been taking positive steps with not doing as crazy of a study schedule, but try and take a further step back and see if you can't change the process or find a way to alter it so it's kinder to you. If you ever need positive encouragement or a way to frame things, feel free to PM me.
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Apr 24, 2018 17:34
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Forgive me if I'm not following well enough, but are you actually interviewing for jobs? I would take a step back from algos and focus on applying to job listings, tweaking your resume / CV, and actually interviewing. There's no better way to get better at something than by doing it a bunch, and if you have a broad pool of places to interview, a few gently caress-ups won't mean much. Even if you did very poorly on the whiteboarding portions, no company is going to blackball you over it - at worst they'll tell you to reapply when you have more experience. Remember that you don't need to do well in "the highest percentage of interviews", you only have to do well in one. Aim for jobs where you will have improvements in your quality of life and coding abilities, and move on when you've been there a few years to something better. There's no perfect job that you have to perform perfectly to get, but there are probably a lot of jobs that suck less than your current situation and will improve your quality of life.
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Apr 24, 2018 19:00
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Actually interviewing a lot helps me the most. I have pretty bad anxiety and fully expect to blow a few interviews, but the more I do the better I get. I'm ok with algorithms, no better than average, but I can show a few cool projects where I've implemented complicated algorithms and I'll straight up say if they want me to implement it on a whiteboard I'll probably blow it, but I can use them when it's the right tools for the job. I'm ok not working at Google or Facebook because I just don't have the time (or confidence) for their interview process and don't really need the money, and there are enough small companies that need devs.
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Apr 24, 2018 21:22
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if you're getting bounced from normie jobs for not being able to demonstrate sufficient whiteboardiness of a red-black tree then one of the following things is true: a) you don't want to work there anyway b) they actually bounced you for something else from my experience, the people we've hired that have done best on algo bullshit have been some of the worst employees we've had.
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Apr 24, 2018 22:49
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Munkeymon posted:I'm kind of weirded out how common Newtonsoft JSON is, but that's Microsoft's fault for lashing their first JSON support to some XML-transform bullshit. As in, "why the hell are there XML namespaces in my JSON property names?!", was the first thing I thought looking at the default serializer output, IIRC. Newtonsoft.Json is the reason I said Microsoft-sanctioned  It helps that it's good, but it helps more that it's been bundled into ASP.NET for a while.
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Apr 24, 2018 23:28
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Whoop. Got promo. Mostly on the strength of my soft skills, as my manager advised I focus on leadership track rather than technical track in the future.
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Apr 25, 2018 04:11
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condolences
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Apr 25, 2018 12:43
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Pollyanna posted:condolences Though seriously enjoy your new money pile.
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Apr 25, 2018 12:47
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Is there a nice list of algorithm bullshit problems online that doesn't require signing into something? I have the prospect of a few interviews coming up. Previously, I seem to not have impressed people with finding the super-duper-most-efficient way of detecting anagrams or whatever and I need to brush up.
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Apr 25, 2018 14:52
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Is there a nice list of algorithm bullshit problems online that doesn't require signing into something? I have the prospect of a few interviews coming up. Previously, I seem to not have impressed people with finding the super-duper-most-efficient way of detecting anagrams or whatever and I need to brush up. Maybe but the best one (leetcode) requires you to have an account
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Apr 25, 2018 15:50
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Is there a nice list of algorithm bullshit problems online that doesn't require signing into something? I have the prospect of a few interviews coming up. Previously, I seem to not have impressed people with finding the super-duper-most-efficient way of detecting anagrams or whatever and I need to brush up. For what its worth, in my last interview when I offered to provide a better algorithm after giving the brute force one they said the brute force was all they really wanted and we moved on to the next question. You might want to try talking through your thought process while practicing algorithm stuff. A lot of places (in the midwest at least) seem more concerned with hearing the solution process than getting an optimal final result.
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Apr 25, 2018 15:57
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LLSix posted:A lot of places (in the midwest at least) seem more concerned with hearing the solution process than getting an optimal final result. Oh my god yes absolutely. Things I want, in order of importance with most important first:
That's basically the checklist I work my way through when interviewing people. I've given high marks to people that turned in O(n^2 * m^2) solutions when considerably faster options existed, because they were able to do everything else. I mean, if you turn in a 2^n solution, then I'll have concerns, but gently caress it, does the solution work? That's way more important than runtime.
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Apr 25, 2018 16:58
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Well one's Amazon and a previous interview for a different position had them gaming for something. I honestly never figured out what they wanted. It might have been using a hash lookup or something else. I don't know. So I was planning to just go through a few, brute force them for reference, and then contrive some bizarro, overoptimized crap.
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Apr 25, 2018 17:05
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Some interviewers are looking for a specific solution to a contrived problem. Those interviewers are dumb. Unfortunately it's luck of the draw whether you get them. EDIT: vvv can't post interview questions we actually use or they get banned and we can't use them any more.  There's nothing particularly special about them though, there's tons of interview questions out there that are basically similar.
TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Apr 25, 2018 |
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Apr 25, 2018 17:10
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Hiring managers, post some of your questions for junior/mid-level engineers. Nobody knows where you work, unless you're at Google really.
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Apr 25, 2018 17:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:EDIT: vvv can't post interview questions we actually use or they get banned and we can't use them any more. Good idea, time to post your company's least useful interview questions and get them banned. Mine is Coins on a Clock.
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Apr 25, 2018 18:53
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Hiring managers, post some of your questions for junior/mid-level engineers. Nobody knows where you work, unless you're at Google really. A big one from my current position is "What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of (primary language used on project)".
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Apr 25, 2018 19:17
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Joined a new team yesterday and found out today I am actually the eldest at 40. Not the most senior, at least that is what I think and i hope they think the same.
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Apr 25, 2018 19:25
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lifg posted:Good idea, time to post your company's least useful interview questions and get them banned. Time works the same way.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:01
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What is your favorite/least favorite language to work with and why? You need to build X product, what technology would you choose to build it with and why? Basically looking to screen out the "X is better than Y because  " type thinkers.
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Apr 25, 2018 22:24
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Hiring managers, post some of your questions for junior/mid-level engineers. Nobody knows where you work, unless you're at Google really. I just shamelessly steal problems from codewars.com. Found a few good problems there. The one we've been asking our recent interviewees is http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MultiplicativePersistence.html quote:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? "While I've enjoyed my time at Fubared Company, I have not been given the opportunity to learn as I was promised and the company's inability to innovate could stagnate my skills and teach me the wrong lessons."
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Apr 26, 2018 01:47
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Portland Sucks posted:What is your favorite/least favorite language to work with and why? - For a product/problem that can be solved in any language, but which has a tight deadline and budget, I'd be wary of those people who would use the opportunity to learn a new language/platform. - For a product/problem that can be solved in any language, but which does not have big impact on the business and for which the deadline and/or budget is hand-waved, i'd be wary of those people who wouldn't use the opportunity to learn a new language/platform. Unless for future maintenance reasons (coworkers being left with the burden). - For a product that is best solved with technology X, it better be solved with technology X.
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Apr 26, 2018 04:20
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geeves posted:I just shamelessly steal problems from codewars.com. Found a few good problems there. The one we've been asking our recent interviewees is http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MultiplicativePersistence.html What exactly did you ask them? If they know the concept? To write a program that can find the multiplicative digital root or a number?
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Apr 26, 2018 04:25
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Hiring managers, post some of your questions for junior/mid-level engineers. Nobody knows where you work, unless you're at Google really. Tell me what happens when you run 'curl wikipedia.org'. (Can discuss how programs run, os interaction, dns, tcp, http, imagined architecture, load balancing, http servers) Coworker reports a service is broken, what do you do? (Plenty of discussion about behavioral stuff, troubleshooting, nuts and bolts of debugging various things) Both are good questions because you can explore things the person knows, and easily skip things they don't, without making it too pressured of a situation for them. You can basically fill an hour with just those two questions.
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Apr 26, 2018 04:45
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Volguus posted:What exactly did you ask them? If they know the concept? To write a program that can find the multiplicative digital root or a number? The latter. We went with the number of iterations util a single digit number was obtained. It gives them a couple of ways to get the answer through math or recursion. The Junior devs have done it via pure math, vs. the senior devs go the recursion and breaking up the number route.
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Apr 26, 2018 04:54
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The answer to most questions is going to be Kafka/redis/kubernetes. You're welcome.
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Apr 26, 2018 12:26
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Mao Zedong Thot posted:Tell me what happens when you run 'curl wikipedia.org'. (Can discuss how programs run, os interaction, dns, tcp, http, imagined architecture, load balancing, http servers) quote:Coworker reports a service is broken, what do you do? (Plenty of discussion about behavioral stuff, troubleshooting, nuts and bolts of debugging various things)
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Apr 26, 2018 12:46
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Jaded Burnout posted:Maven does, however, have some very fucky ways of declaring and resolving test dependencies. How do you mean?
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Apr 26, 2018 13:35
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Mao Zedong Thot posted:Tell me what happens when you run 'curl wikipedia.org'. (Can discuss how programs run, os interaction, dns, tcp, http, imagined architecture, load balancing, http servers)  Mao Zedong Thot posted:Coworker reports a service is broken, what do you do? (Plenty of discussion about behavioral stuff, troubleshooting, nuts and bolts of debugging various things) gathering information about reported problems, organizing it, and deciding what to do with it is a hugely important skill
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Apr 26, 2018 14:06
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Mao Zedong Thot posted:Coworker reports a service is broken, what do you do? (Plenty of discussion about behavioral stuff, troubleshooting, nuts and bolts of debugging various things) This is a good one. I have often turned it around (after answering) on the interviewer and ask them how their team/the company facilitates learning this information about the service, spreading it around, what solutions they have in place for debugging live services, how they do post-mortems, etc.
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Apr 26, 2018 14:52
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geeves posted:The latter. We went with the number of iterations util a single digit number was obtained. It gives them a couple of ways to get the answer through math or recursion. What's the ideal recursive solution you're looking for? I don't see it being any objectively "better" or much cleaner than an iterative approach, if anything likely worse in terms of performance due to the increasingly large overhead of the call stack? Maybe I'm missing something. A good problem though, I'd definitely feel fine if I was asked something like that.
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Apr 26, 2018 15:17
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pigdog posted:How do you mean? Well, I'm no expert, and my memory is now a little hazy, but there was a lot of trouble with specifying test-only dependencies, for starters they weren't recursively included, and it didn't seem to do the sensible thing. The "conclusion" as done by the kafka devs seemed to be to make a separate non-test lib and add that as a test dependency rather than do it with the maven structures.
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Apr 26, 2018 15:39
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Good Will Hrunting posted:, if anything likely worse in terms of performance due to the increasingly large overhead of the call stack? Dont do recursive implementations without tco
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Apr 27, 2018 18:21
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Phobeste posted:Dont do recursive implementations without tco Does Java even have proper tco? I literally haven't used recursion (besides working on these problems lol) in years, when I wrote a custom parser for auditing some huge JSON requests.
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Apr 27, 2018 18:49
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Does Java even have proper tco? I literally haven't used recursion (besides working on these problems lol) in years, when I wrote a custom parser for auditing some huge JSON requests. I very much doubt it. I've not seen many OO languages which do.
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Apr 27, 2018 21:08
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