|
Pollyanna posted:May I introduce you all to a little thing I like to call democratic socialism? I'm sorry, (system that will definitely produce hellworld for my children and everyone else's children too) worked for our forebears [the ones that were the right color and lived in the right places] and simply should not be fiddled about with! much <3
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 16:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:13 |
|
|
Pollyanna posted:May I introduce you all to a little thing I like to call democratic socialism? Are you sure that Amazon is the only cult here?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 16:51
|
|
|
the most socialist thing that seems wholly germane to the thread would be worker co-ops. anyone want to start a worker co-op?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 16:55
|
|
|
Isn't there a goon here who runs a CA based tech workers union? I would swear I heard about it herePollyanna posted:May I introduce you all to a little thing I like to call democratic socialism? 
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 16:57
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:the most socialist thing that seems wholly germane to the thread would be worker co-ops. Are you looking for a Junior Dumbass Scala Engineer?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 16:57
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:Are you looking for a Junior Dumbass Scala Engineer? dunno but I think it would be cool to have a Good Will Hrunting on my team
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 17:00
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:Yeah I did the on-site. It was pretty brutal. Like I said, the behavioral on site is serious. They will fail you even if your code / design is perfect if you don't have a story about single handedly saving your company 10 million or something, bah! so coming from it on the other side, of the people i've worked with who were "alright" on the tech section but amazing on soft skills vs. "alright" on the soft skills section but amazing on tech I would 100% always pick the first person. once you go beyond the first year or two of your career being able to function autonomously, work with various teams and positions, and drive consensus is just as important as your technical skills, and in some ways becomes more important as you continue in your career. If you really got dinged because you didn't have a story about "single handedly saving your company 10 million" then that sucks because I agree most people aren't in that situation. that doesnt mean you don't already have examples, though. FamDav fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Jun 29, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 17:51
|
|
|
FamDav posted:If you really got dinged because you didn't have a story about "single handedly saving your company 10 million" because I agree most people aren't in that situation. that doesnt mean you don't already have examples.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 17:53
|
|
|
FamDav posted:once you go beyond the first year or two of your career being able to function autonomously, work with various teams and positions, and drive consensus is just as important as your technical skills, and in some ways becomes more important as you continue in your career. My closest ex-manager/mentor always preaches this to me when i start to worry about algo/design interviews but of every single place I've met with so far, this seems like such a trivial part of the interview process thus far. Is it such a cursory thing to be evaluated because I'm just an individual contributor still? JawnV6 posted:I've got a story where I cost a company multiple millions.  I understand if you can't share but it would be cool to hear because it's something I'm terrified of doing. We blew through about $120k in a Flash bug serving ads and not being able to bill for them at my last job but that was our biggest hiccup and I wasn't on the team that caused it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 17:55
|
|
|
JawnV6 posted:I've got a story where I cost a company multiple millions. Does the phrase "tape out" appear in this story
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 18:26
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:the most socialist thing that seems wholly germane to the thread would be worker co-ops. Several already exist https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/25940
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 18:33
|
|
|
Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:i've known people who work at both amazon and bridgewater, and tbh it's kind of like comparing the mormons to the heaven's gate cult - amazon may dress you up in weird underwear and push you to succeed, but bridgewater will cut your balls off and make you drink poison. Scientology has Dianetics, Bridgewater has The Principles.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 18:46
|
|
|
Munkeymon posted:Several already exist https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/25940 anyone ever worked with or worked for a co-op?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:02
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:anyone ever worked with or worked for a co-op? I'm kinda working in one. Most of the employees are shareholders and vice versa. I don't see it being that huge of a deal to be honest. The CEO (who also owns a larger number of share than anyone else) does his thing, it's not like we could or would elect some random nerd to do his job instead.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:10
|
|
|
pigdog posted:I'm kinda working in one. Most of the employees are shareholders and vice versa. I don't see it being that huge of a deal to be honest. The CEO (who also owns a larger number of share than anyone else) does his thing, it's not like we could or would elect some random nerd to do his job instead. I worked in a company with an employee stock ownership program and it sure didn't seem that different from a normal company in terms of organization / management-- and having your only retirement plan be the company stock is a ridiculously sharp two-edged sword. I guess I'm more curious about "constituted / organized as a co-op" work.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:15
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:I worked in a company with an employee stock ownership program and it sure didn't seem that different from a normal company in terms of organization / management-- and having your only retirement plan be the company stock is a ridiculously sharp two-edged sword. ESOP shares are generally nonvoting whereas I would expect a CoOp share to grant the right to vote on at least some governance issues. I'm not familiar with workers CoOps, though, just the housing kind.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:26
|
|
|
Munkeymon posted:ESOP shares are generally nonvoting whereas I would expect a CoOp share to grant the right to vote on at least some governance issues. I'm not familiar with workers CoOps, though, just the housing kind. I worked at a wholly-employee-owned company and we could vote our shares at the (once annual) meeting if we really wanted to, e.g., symbolically move that we appoint someone other than our boss' boss to his position and then lose the vote to the founders and management team who certainly owned the vast majority of the company. Not sure how management would have treated you after that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:30
|
|
|
Doh004 posted:I think that's a really important thing to consider (not letting your biases force you into tunnel vision) - but I expect an experienced engineer to use their previous experiences to inform their thought processes moving forward. Of course but I'm saying using a mental mapping of "500 -> likely root cause" from a previous service on a new service at a new company is bad heuristic to carry over, unless you know they are built extremely similarly. If anything it's indicative that you have a lack of broad experience because you have worked on a single system so long you don't know which patterns within it are broadly applicable to other software. I would feel way better about an engineer who said, "My experience is that 500 is a catch all for many types of errors so I would first try to get more information. Does the alerting also show an error code or message in the response headers or body? Is there telemetry that I can use to quickly grok the scope of the errors, like is restricted to a specific region or tenant?"
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 19:51
|
|
|
To reiterate my point: As an interviewer, I want to know if you have a process, vs throwing poo poo against the wall and seeing what sticks. The CTCI book briefly discusses how to approach a novel algorithm problem; e.g. redefining the problem with simpler parameters then working your way back. The Google SRE book also discusses effective troubleshooting which describes a systematic way to approach diagnosis when there could be literally hundreds of reasons for service failure, and possibly many $$$ are being lost in real-time as you try to fix it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 20:31
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:My closest ex-manager/mentor always preaches this to me when i start to worry about algo/design interviews but of every single place I've met with so far, this seems like such a trivial part of the interview process thus far. Is it such a cursory thing to be evaluated because I'm just an individual contributor still? There are devs for which soft skills come easily (and it sounds like you're one of them, or at least self-assess as such). There are also devs for which soft skills absolutely do not come easily. To the extent that an interviewer's assessment depends on how well they like the interviewee, more personable people will tend to do better in interviews. Though there are limits. It's also worth bearing in mind, you're also not going to be told "you weren't hired because our interviewers thought you were an rear end in a top hat." Judgements based on personality can easily be re-interpreted as judgements based on protected categories (did the interviewer not like you because you don't emote, or was it really because they saw your backpack had a rainbow badge on it and the interviewer is a bigot?), so I doubt any sane company would give feedback other than "go practice this specific skill", assuming they give feedback at all.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 20:42
|
|
|
That makes sense. Holy poo poo am I actually an rear end in a top hat??? It feels like using my insanely dank ad-tech domain knowledge to see if I can go to one of the competitors of my old company isn't a terrible idea. DSPs and bidding are pretty unique and interesting problem areas, align pretty well with trading-type systems which will always be around because the stock market isn't going anywhere, and some of the most challenging fun I've had at work in my short career. I wanted to avoid ad-tech but the domain experience is drawing a lot of companies towards m including two I've really enjoyed my preliminary talks with.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 20:50
|
|
|
prisoner of waffles posted:I worked at a wholly-employee-owned company and we could vote our shares at the (once annual) meeting if we really wanted to, e.g., symbolically move that we appoint someone other than our boss' boss to his position and then lose the vote to the founders and management team who certainly owned the vast majority of the company. Not sure how management would have treated you after that. When people say worker co-op, they usually mean an organization where workers vote for their representatives or directly participate in decision-making democratically. The ideal is 1 worker 1 vote. There is no board of directors unaccountable to the workers who make decisions undemocratically. Worker co-op does not mean employees owning token amounts of stock that give them negligible power. That's just a regular capitalist hierarchically undemocratic company.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 21:54
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:That makes sense. Holy poo poo am I actually an rear end in a top hat??? Assholes don't get people telling them what a pleasure it was to work with them, don't have people smiling when they see them, etc. From what you've said previously, you're probably not an rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 22:53
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Assholes don't get people telling them what a pleasure it was to work with them, don't have people smiling when they see them, etc. From what you've said previously, you're probably not an rear end in a top hat. Also assholes don't worry about being assholes
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 22:55
|
|
|
Is terrible communication from clients (in this case, a former employer which is a medium size digital agency) pretty much par for the course? Serious lack of requirements, lack of proper comps / wireframes, etc. I'm fairly sure the only reason I am able to get stuff done for them is because I used to work there and know what generally flies. I guess the question becomes at what point does it become not worth it and time to fire a client
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2018 23:38
|
|
|
BlackMK4 posted:Is terrible communication from clients (in this case, a former employer which is a medium size digital agency) pretty much par for the course? Yes. This can be somewhat alleviated by doing the following: 1) not signing a contract and starting work until there's a well-defined statement of work, and the understanding that work outside the SoW will require the SoW to be expanded and possibly (definitely) cost them extra 2) before the project kicks off, building out a backlog with well-defined acceptance criteria. this is reviewed and approved by the client. 3) having periodic review sessions to make sure everything is on track and the client's requirements haven't magically transformed
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 00:05
|
|
|
Shirec posted:Also assholes don't worry about being assholes Can confirm. Am an rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 00:43
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:So basically I am expected to come up with a flawless solution with zero bugs that I have the time to go through and test in the constraints of 30 minutes? I mean sure, it's not a particularly hard problem, but that still seems unrealistic to me and once again beyond the whole "we want to see how you solve a problem" that people said these interviews were about. If I had time, I would have stepped through and seen most of the mistakes I made pretty quickly. But I didn't have time. So am I supposed to code... faster? It doesn't have to be perfect perfect, but in your example you forgot the variable name of your map 2 lines after you defined it, and if your key is only one character, a hash map isn't really necessary. I would just initialize an array of length 26 with 0s and subtract a constant from the ord of the character to get its index, explaining I can look up and define the constant in a few seconds afterward if it were real code, and then after counting, make a word-length array for the counts and count the counts the same way you counted the characters, and then check if it's a solid line of 1s followed by all 0s. A final optimization there would be to note if the indices of the streak of 1s adds up to the word length and stop there, but that would be just to kill time and push you above the other strong candidates. Checking the final array could be ported out to a function for readability, and the counting thing could be a function too since it's done twice. If you make a mistake on like, the name of a library function like writing BorkStringUp but it's really BorkStrUp, that's fine, but if your code wouldn't build for more fundamental reasons and you don't notice, that's a big problem in my book. At interviews, you're implicitly expected to be bringing your A-game, and successful companies can't really invest in the assumption that the candidate was just having a bad day and they're secretly razor-sharp most of the time. Considering you're great with people and have a technical background but get annoyed with algos, have you considered going into product management? Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jun 30, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 01:36
|
|
|
Stinky_Pete posted:Considering you're great with people and have a technical background but get annoyed with algos, have you considered going into product management? sick burn bro lol
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 01:38
|
|
|
I'm serious though. When I was interviewing I always made a big deal out of it and prepared and made sure I would be well rested and feeling energetic because I genuinely enjoy programming puzzles, but it sounds like you are really sick of it and don't get into it like that, so why torture yourself? Product managers can still write code but it's usually for analysis to guide the team's priorities.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 01:44
|
|
|
Stinky_Pete posted:It doesn't have to be perfect perfect, but in your example you forgot the variable name of your map 2 lines after you defined it What, where? (Also you must have missed the part where I said it was an approximation. And, seriously? This is pretty nit-picky to me. I'm frantically typing this poo poo in a text editor under serious time constraints where copy and paste is a hassle, how is this really important?) Stinky_Pete posted:if your key is only one character, a hash map isn't really necessary. I would just initialize an array of length 26 with 0s and subtract a constant from the ord of the character to get its index, explaining I can look up and define the constant in a few seconds afterward if it were real code, and then after counting, make a word-length array for the counts and count the counts the same way you counted the characters, and then check if it's a solid line of 1s followed by all 0s. A final optimization there would be to note if the indices of the streak of 1s adds up to the word length and stop there, but that would be just to kill time and push you above the other strong candidates. Checking the final array could be ported out to a function for readability, and the counting thing could be a function too since it's done twice. You literally say "It doesn't have to be perfect perfect" and then describe what you would write as (I'm assuming) perfect perfect code. I'm trying to write code in these interviews that is correct and also fairly readable in case my interviewer isn't paying attention and will have to refer back to it. Defining a mapping of Character stood out as way clearer than using an array and subtracting a constant, which to me seems like a very Cracking the Coding Interview Solution type answer.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 01:51
|
|
|
Stinky_Pete posted:It doesn't have to be perfect perfect, but in your example you forgot the variable name of your map 2 lines after you defined it, and if your key is only one character, a hash map isn't really necessary. I would just initialize an array of length 26 with 0s and subtract a constant from the ord of the character to get its index,
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 01:52
|
|
|
Stinky_Pete posted:genuinely enjoy programming puzzles, but it sounds like you are really sick of it and don't get into it like that I guess you weren't here for the complete pounding I took when I talked about how much prep I was doing 
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:04
|
|
|
Hot take: when people try to use an array as a lookup table based on index, they're doing it wrong. Especially if their concern is to be more performant than a dictionary would be. Code should be clear about what it does, and making an index double as a lookup key is confusing. If your interview has somehow managed to progress to the point where you need to worry about the performance characteristics of dictionaries vs. arrays, then either your interviewer is dumb, or you've already covered every less-trivial topic in your fifty-hour-long interview.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:06
|
|
|
New Yorp New Yorp posted:Yes. Hmm, yes, I have not been doing any of that. I am also billing time and materials, and they don't seem to actually care how many hours I am billing as long as the work gets done by their (absurd) timelines.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:23
|
|
|
apseudonym posted:I would absolutely ding you for A) assuming the alphabet is just a-z, Java strings are utf8, and B) trying to be too clever too fast. java strings aren't utf8
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:33
|
|
|
b0lt posted:java strings aren't utf8 Assuming the alphabet is 26 character and assuming Java strings are utf-8 is what poster meant I'm assuming
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:42
|
|
|
BlackMK4 posted:Hmm, yes, I have not been doing any of that. I am also billing time and materials, and they don't seem to actually care how many hours I am billing as long as the work gets done by their (absurd) timelines. That's a recipe for making a lot of money and then burning out, so...I guess keep it up as long as you can?  Also, what materials?
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 02:48
|
|
|
Good Will Hrunting posted:Assuming the alphabet is 26 character and assuming Java strings are utf-8 is what poster meant I'm assuming Nah I was just wrong, it's utf-16 internal and ??? Encoding by default (don't know outside out of Linux). The point stands though, assuming your alphabet is 26 characters is just wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 03:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:13 |
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:That's a recipe for making a lot of money and then burning out, so...I guess keep it up as long as you can? That's kind of what I was thinking, my day job is pretty easy-going. The place I am contracting for is a pressure cooker and the reason I left in the first place... it reminds me every day, which is bittersweet. There are no materials right now, that is just what they call this kind of billing. I'd imagine it would be reimbursement for licenses or something. edit: In retrospect, I should have taken bothering to make a post about this as a signal that this poo poo is like being pushed under water by a wave and being caught by the undertow. I've already been caught without realizing it, jesus christ. BlackMK4 fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jun 30, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2018 03:29
|
|