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you dont even need a high school diploma to break into figgieland, just a willingness to make an idiot of yourself in tech interviews over and over again and then, eventually, to relocate across the country. i've absolutely bombed over 70 tech inteviews. the relocation part is probably optional now
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Mar 29, 2021 17:22
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jesus WEP posted:literally all of this only matters for your first job or 2, and for every story like the one you quoted there’s a dozen places that only hires people with a cs degree, and a dozen more that take either degree or portfolio/other experience in my experience the difference is almost always size. large companies can afford to burn time training new grads on how to actually program, and in exchange they get to train them to do exactly what the company needs and they get to pay less for them. smaller companies dont have the time to spend on this so they have to hire someone who can do the work without a ton of additional training.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:26
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relo is prolly gonna turn non-optional again in like 10 months
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Mar 29, 2021 17:26
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i do wish i had better advice on getting past the initial filter w/o a degree. i lucked out as a 19-year old dropout: i went to a 3 month coding school at a time when that was still novel, and worked with extremely good recruiters to get me a job after. i only worked there 3 months before the company folded, but that was enough to get my foot in the door for later jobs i applied for. i'm also a dweeby cis white male so i also fit a profile at the time (lotta people loved to ask "so are you thinking about founding a startup yourself one day??" because lol 2013). nowadays, we do still interview a lot of people with nontraditional backgrounds (mostly college grads with non-cs majors), but i couldn't tell you offhand what makes them get past the filter besides work experience (which, as others have said, once you have like 6 months on a resume you're good there) once you get to the interview stage i think the biggest thing is just have some confidence talking about stuff you've built and express opinions on coding. this is the biggest thing i look for (i've done like almost entirely soft interviews since i hate training for and giving hard tech interviews, as someone who also hates being on the other side) and the thing i look for is just people who are able to talk about coding, what they like building, what they don't want to build, what tradeoffs they have made, etc. this is a surprisingly high bar for a lot of people, and it's not necessarily like a go/no-go thing (especially when it's like a new grad situation where, all fairness to them, they have not had space to do much learning beyond their curriculum), but when i see someone light up about coding - not in a faux "i love this poo poo" way but like "i have thoughts and opinions and feelings about this" - that's such a good positive sign i should note that, like, unless someone comes in for a senior backend role espousing their deep love for mongodb, it doesn't really matter too much what specific thoughts and opinions they have (even in that case i'd happily hear them out if they, like, had a wonderful experience with it at their previous employer or something, and could articulate why it actually helped them, etc). that's more the domain of a senior/staff/principal-y role where you really want to feel out that they made the right calls at the right time; i'll happily listen to someone go on about why they love an architecture i hate in a mid-level interview as long as they have clear justifications for their opinions beyond "well it's what we did in school" or something
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Mar 29, 2021 17:36
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The best way to get past the initial filter is nepotism. This goes for those with or without a degree.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:38
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Dont Touch ME posted:CS degrees are for flunkies who couldn't cut it in a math major. It also is not a euphemism for programming. Conflating it is a p. big red flag for code monkeys who will snarf snippets from stack overflow and think making jokes about it is cute. yeah i did major in CS and minor in applied math, shouldve been the reverse. a minor in CS is enough to cover all the actually useful courses
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Mar 29, 2021 17:40
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DoomTrainPhD posted:The best way to get past the initial filter is nepotism. This goes for those with or without a degree. oh yah. always use nepotism. always always always. both for hiring and for getting hired. it makes things infinitely easier
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Mar 29, 2021 17:40
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DoomTrainPhD posted:The best way to get past the initial filter is nepotism. This goes for those with or without a degree. goin to plutocrat school is basically distributed nepotism
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Mar 29, 2021 17:40
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Corla Plankun posted:pro tip: if you haven't focused on a niche, just make up a niche for interviews that sounds specific but actually broadly applies One day you're going to accidentally join a bitcoin exchange
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Mar 29, 2021 17:45
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i did a weird major that was a mix of EE and telecommunications and i feel like i didn't get much out of it but i enjoyed at least some of the classes so  i sometimes wish i'd gone with math instead, though.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:45
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Shaggar posted:oh yah. always use nepotism. always always always. both for hiring and for getting hired. it makes things infinitely easier Yep. It's how I got into my first job. Bing bong so simple.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:49
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Getting to the interview stage is definitely the hardest part. I think my resume looks pretty good in terms of relevant skills and personal projects, but I never got a callback from any position I applied to. I asked some acquaintances who used to work as recruiters if there's something obviously wrong with it, but I just keep getting told that it looks great, which honestly is not what I wanna hear when I get ghosted repeatedly. Might just be a volume thing, I definitely haven't been applying to as many positions as I should
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Mar 29, 2021 18:34
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what's your volume?
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Mar 29, 2021 18:38
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Chalks posted:most good programmers taught themselves before they turned 18. lol what
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Mar 29, 2021 18:57
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pokeyman posted:lol what yeah what the gently caress is a good programmer?
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Mar 29, 2021 19:06
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pokeyman posted:lol what lol, sorry, to be clear, most people who become good programmers taught themselves basic programming skills early on - not that they taught themselves to be a good programmer by age 18. have edited it to clarify Chalks fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 29, 2021 |
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Mar 29, 2021 19:12
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i spent 7 hours googling how to do one completely unnecessary thing that i wanted a discord bot i was making to be able to do and apparently that counts
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Mar 29, 2021 19:13
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the big transition from putertouching to a thing that was woman-dominated to putertouching bein man-dominated was during the rise of formal cs programs where peeps were starting to be expected to come in w some home computerin experience, which tended overwhelmingly to be men cuz expensive gizmos for children were sold nearly exclusively to boys so it's not sexist in intent but it's sexist in effect. but whatever gender peeps coming in nowadays often don't know poo poo about puters cuz you can work the phone knowing way less about puters than a commodore 64
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Mar 29, 2021 19:16
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Chalks posted:lol, sorry, to be clear, most people who become good programmers taught themselves basic programming skills early on - not that they taught themselves to be a good programmer by age 18. ah yep, it's probably pretty rare these days for someone to wrote their first line of code ever in cs 101. though I'm sure it happens, and should ideally work just fine
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Mar 29, 2021 19:17
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the filter for getting interviews is getting to 2+ years of experience in the industry. once you have that you are showered with interviews so just do whatever it takes to get that 2 years. nepotism is great for this
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Mar 29, 2021 19:18
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pokeyman posted:ah yep, it's probably pretty rare these days for someone to wrote their first line of code ever in cs 101. though I'm sure it happens, and should ideally work just fine This was me. It's been... okay.
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Mar 29, 2021 19:18
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pokeyman posted:ah yep, it's probably pretty rare these days for someone to wrote their first line of code ever in cs 101. though I'm sure it happens, and should ideally work just fine my roommate in college used to TA the "this is your literal first time touching a computer, really" class and it was a fuckin trip. they would have to basically do a purge of people who like, had been coding for 10 years but just had a psychological complex or some poo poo every year, "no, go to the normal CS class". and the other half would be like, african princes and random emiratis who had never encountered a non-tent city and poo poo like that
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Mar 29, 2021 19:19
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Zaxxon posted:yeah what the gently caress is a good programmer? one who writes no code
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Mar 29, 2021 19:22
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what counts as "experience" because the only thing that comes to mind is "having an actual job" which seems kinda like a catch-22 i will be genuinely shocked if me mashing a keyboard and churning out shitpost software is somehow experience
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Mar 29, 2021 19:24
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Soricidus posted:one who writes no code leave nothing behind for anyone to git blame
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Mar 29, 2021 19:28
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hbag posted:what counts as "experience" i interview lots of people who are right out of uni and if one of them told me about writing a discord bot in their spare time i'd think it was a really good sign. out of 10 people i interviewed earlier this year, maybe 3 of them could talk about a spare time project, it makes you stand out more than you'd think. when you're applying for a junior developer position you're not expected to have much real world experience, that's what a junior dev is. everyone starts out like that, don't let it bother you too much.
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Mar 29, 2021 19:50
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hbag posted:what counts as "experience" It's all in how you phrase it on your resume. For my first job, I wrote about how I made an ncurses-based rendering engine for a game on my resume, and even got asked about it in the interview. In reality, a friend of mine had made a roguelike as a free time project, and it drove me loving bonkers that he "drew" the screen by printing a bunch of newlines, so I took like a day on Christmas break to learn curses and actually make it draw properly. Making dumb tedious poo poo sound interesting and challenging is like 90% of resume drafting.
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Mar 29, 2021 19:52
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if your discord bot uses the websocket streaming interface thing for channel presence and you can speak intelligently about that in an interview you have already satisfied the prior experience requirement for a junior developer
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Mar 29, 2021 19:52
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The bonus point of the discord api is that you can say that you published your bot to 100 servers because the discord devs don't know what a server is
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Mar 29, 2021 19:58
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for my first job i talked about a custom client i made for some random multiplayer flash game. it was in visual basic and it was an absolute garbage fire, in the interview i just talked about all the stuff i learnt from the experience. it's really just a mechanism for showing that you're able to problem solve and have an interest in coding.
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Mar 29, 2021 19:59
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Pro-tip: Never accept a job from a non-faang company that does coding tests. gently caress that noise.
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Mar 29, 2021 20:00
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DoomTrainPhD posted:Pro-tip: Never accept a job from a non-faang company that does coding tests. gently caress that noise. try hiring a junior dev without any coding tests, you may as well pick them at random
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Mar 29, 2021 20:02
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DoomTrainPhD posted:Pro-tip: Never accept a job from a company paying less than 200k total comp that does coding tests. gently caress that noise.
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Mar 29, 2021 20:02
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yeah btw i'll say as someone who's been reviewing a lot of (post-initial-filter) resumes that feel very "candidate putting a bunch of vague descriptions of their previous jobs" on them, if you can put like one or two interesting aspects of your bot or any other project you worked on i'd be psyched to have something to talk about instead all i see is quote:Work Experience and it's like, what the gently caress is there to talk about? i'd much rather be able to see a set of items like quote:Projects or something. now that's a lot to chat about. you can tell me everything that's awful about your bot, and i'd be excited to hear it because knowing why your code sucks and showing interest in making it better is half the battle
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Mar 29, 2021 20:05
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DoomTrainPhD posted:Pro-tip: Never accept a job from a non-faang company that does coding tests. gently caress that noise. what do you define as a coding test?
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Mar 29, 2021 20:07
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if someone gives me a fizzbuzz test i am absolutely hosed though just saying
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Mar 29, 2021 20:25
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you are allowed to study for those lol
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Mar 29, 2021 20:26
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no i know i mean ive tried to do it before and i an incredibly poo poo at them i very much doubt i would be able to retain the knowledge on how to do it if i ever managed to my brain is a sieve
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Mar 29, 2021 20:38
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unless you have actual organic brain damage you're just not special in that regard, just do them over and over again
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Mar 29, 2021 20:39
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DoomTrainPhD posted:Pro-tip: Never accept a job from a non-faang company that does coding tests. gently caress that noise. My company is implementing these without the accompanying big paycheck. 
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Mar 29, 2021 20:40
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