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Thanks for that post. I love messing around with this stuff
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Aug 18, 2020 21:56
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hendersa posted:These are the two sources that I recommend any starting "maker" check out to get a feel for what's out there in the embedded space: Adafruit is a really excellent source, I strongly recommend buying their products even if they are more expensive than similar eBay stuff simply to support their tutorials etc. If there are library updates/changes, they're usually addressed in the forums Price premium for adafruit is minimal, maybe 5-10% but they design and build most of their own stuff, real American DIY dream poo poo, plus did I mention the thoughtful tutorials?
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Aug 19, 2020 01:12
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Every embedded job ad I see wants to pay max £30k for 10+ years experience. I've always assumed embedded devs suffer from the same kind of Stockholm syndrome as game devs.
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Aug 19, 2020 09:27
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:Every embedded job ad I see wants to pay max £30k for 10+ years experience. I've always assumed embedded devs suffer from the same kind of Stockholm syndrome as game devs. Where are you looking? Even keeping in mind we're in the middle of a massive crisis and programming outside of London pays like crap in Britain, most embedded jobs I see are around the £40k-£45k mark with >4 years of experience. Maybe look in an urban area, like Bristol or Glasgow or whatever (I know those cities in particular have outstanding embedded positions right now, or at least did last week). It does pay less than high-end web development, finance or similar, but that's just how things are. e: outstanding as in unfilled, not necessarily amazing Private Speech fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 09:58
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I had three main reasons for picking web dev over other kinds. One, I was promised handholding all the way from learning what a variable was to doubling my then-current salary. Two, you could write code and then save your change and hit F5 to see if it worked. No compiling or anything. And three, if I got into games dev which is what I was actually interested in, and then had to work on the officially licensed video game adaptation of the Barbie Horse Adventure Direct to VHS Christmas Special instead of a game I actually cared about I would have killed myself. Embedded/maker tech always seemed really cool, but my big worries at the time were "I barely scrape by as it is, I can't put $100 into hardware only to brick it and have to put another $100 into it", which was perhaps not a real problem and just my anxiety making poo poo up, but here we are.
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Aug 19, 2020 10:45
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Vincent Valentine posted:, you could write code and then save your change and hit F5 to see if it worked. You don’t even need to hit F5 - I have auto reload in JavaScript save and hot reloading for CSS changes. It’s pretty nice!
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Aug 19, 2020 14:45
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In addition to work in web development and embedded systems, there are plenty of jobs building CRUD apps for various businesses. It's not glamorous at all, but it's steady work that'll generally give you plenty of time to pursue your hobbies, and there are always a lot of companies hiring in that space. That's also something where there's no real premium for a computer science degree, so if you're frustrated by your options in hotter areas, it might be worth looking at. (There's also quant development/scientific programming, but that tends to require a very specific educational background, and is probably not worth talking about at length in the general newbie thread.)
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Aug 19, 2020 14:55
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There’s also native mobile engineering. Big money, big scarcity, big demand, big fun.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:58
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dantheman650 posted:Do you have any data on this? It does not match my experience. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-salary-by-developer-type-united-states ultrafilter posted:Front-end and back-end devs make the same amount of money at similar education and experience levels, but front-end has more junior and self taught people, so that skews the overall comparison. Is probably part of why it looks that way in aggregate, yeah, but even on job listings where they're up-front about salary ranges I've seen Front-End < Full-Stack < Back-End < "Specialized" (DB, Ops, Data Science, etc) but it's not like I'm keeping track of that stuff scientifically or anything. As a full-stack generalist I'm offended that I'm less valued than back-end weenies all afraid of looking at a JS file 
Munkeymon fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 15:03
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ultrafilter posted:Front-end and back-end devs make the same amount of money at similar education and experience levels, but front-end has more junior and self taught people, so that skews the overall comparison. This hasn't been the case in my experience, though maybe that we're not a web-dev shop. Senior Back-Engineers P50 salary is 15% higher than a front-end for my current location though the expectations for them are also much higher than other orgs I've been at. IE: Backend is expected to be working on the tech around the horizontal scalability of the application and getting into dev-ops thought in how it operates in a cloud agnostic fashion. Much more Systems Engineering type work. Last two places were similar that the teams that provided the back-end platforms were a higher paygrade than the front-engineers that would use it.
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Aug 19, 2020 15:27
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:Every embedded job ad I see wants to pay max £30k for 10+ years experience. I've always assumed embedded devs suffer from the same kind of Stockholm syndrome as game devs. I've seen embedded jobs generally fall into one of three categories. The first category is for embedded jobs that develop large, complex systems that sell small numbers of units for a large amount of money. Say, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per unit (making things like airplanes, airport radar systems, and military vehicles). The second is for inexpensive retail units that will sells millions of units for low cost (making things like cash registers, cell phones, Alexa/Echo/Google Assistant, etc.). The third is for the jobs that fall between the two (making things like scientific equipment and assembly robots). In my opinion, the sweet spot is with the jobs in the third category. Jobs making inexpensive retail goods are in a race to the bottom and are more stingy on benefits. Jobs making big ticket items make you a slave to one or two big customers that drive cost and schedule. The spot in the middle tends to be at a not-huge company with only a few competitors, so it is more focused on employees and making good products in a reasonable fashion. ultrafilter posted:In addition to work in web development and embedded systems, there are plenty of jobs building CRUD apps for various businesses. It's not glamorous at all, but it's steady work that'll generally give you plenty of time to pursue your hobbies, and there are always a lot of companies hiring in that space. That's also something where there's no real premium for a computer science degree, so if you're frustrated by your options in hotter areas, it might be worth looking at.
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Aug 19, 2020 15:32
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:Every embedded job ad I see wants to pay max £30k for 10+ years experience. I've always assumed embedded devs suffer from the same kind of Stockholm syndrome as game devs. For many positions the competition is Taiwan and due to cost of living it is simply not a option. Most E&EE grads I know took another degree to get a job. However if you can move towards micro-electronic engineering a bit more there are careers available.
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Aug 19, 2020 16:02
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hendersa posted:Ah, the good old CRUD. It's the oatmeal of software development. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and you'll be able to find a store selling it pretty much anywhere. But, how many meals of oatmeal can you eat it in a row? Some people are into oatmeal (and enjoy debugging oatmeal with Visual Studio), so who am I to judge? ultrafilter is right that it'll always be there as an option, though. The thing that all the newbies reading should keep in mind is that those of us who post in the thread are not representative of developers in general. Most people in the profession do work that I would consider boring, and they're not going online to talk about it outside of work hours. But they lead comfortable lives, and that's good enough for them. I don't have numbers to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that a supermajority of software developers fall in that category. If you don't identify with what you see in this thread, that doesn't mean that there's no place for you in this career. It's just an issue of finding a place where you fit. Hughlander posted:This hasn't been the case in my experience, though maybe that we're not a web-dev shop. Senior Back-Engineers P50 salary is 15% higher than a front-end for my current location though the expectations for them are also much higher than other orgs I've been at. IE: Backend is expected to be working on the tech around the horizontal scalability of the application and getting into dev-ops thought in how it operates in a cloud agnostic fashion. Much more Systems Engineering type work. Last two places were similar that the teams that provided the back-end platforms were a higher paygrade than the front-engineers that would use it. Yeah, systems engineering is a different beast entirely. Most places that have backend engineers distinguish between them and the systems programmers if they even employ the latter at all.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:24
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Something just came to mind to me, with all of the applying I've been doing lately. Last year, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained a lot about my past performance in grade school and college and how my mind worked in general. I can concentrate without Ritalin, but it's far less blurry when I'm on it. What I'm wondering is, would that be the sort of thing you'd disclose to a potential employer? If so, what's the appropriate way to do it? Like, as long as I'm on Ritalin the ADHD shouldn't impact my work.
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Aug 20, 2020 02:27
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I would not say anything about it.
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Aug 20, 2020 02:30
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Ploft-shell crab posted:I would not say anything about it. This. Had a direct reveal it to me and I'd like to say that I didn't treat him differently after but I'm afraid I may have. It's between you and your PCP.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:21
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It's a private medical condition, don't say anything.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:28
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The only reason to disclose your disability before you're hired is if you'd like to request an accommodation during the interview process. Most employers won't ask if you require one, and many will ghost you if you ask for one. After you're hired, if you're in the U.S. at least, you can disclose your disability to your employer if there's a reasonable accommodation you'd like to put in place. Whether you actually disclose is something you have to feel out for yourself, because many managers and employers are assholes, and taking legal action to assert your rights under the A.D.A. is burdensome. Where I work, managers tend to take such requests seriously, and there's a large network of people with disabilities to lean on for advice.
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Aug 20, 2020 06:10
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hulk hooligan posted:Something just came to mind to me, with all of the applying I've been doing lately. Last year, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained a lot about my past performance in grade school and college and how my mind worked in general. I can concentrate without Ritalin, but it's far less blurry when I'm on it. Most people don't know anything legit about ADHD but think they know an awful lot. It's worse in tech because devs tend to think their dumb opinions are infallible (search HN for ADHD). Don't tell workplace. There are ways of requesting reasonable adjustments without telling them about your condition. Make a point to your manager that you greatly prefer tasks given in written format, etc. SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 08:01
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:Most people don't know anything legit about ADHD but think they know an awful lot. It's worse in tech because devs tend to think their dumb opinions are infallible (search HN for ADHD). Don't tell workplace. Or indeed workplace.stackexchange.com. The bootlicking libertarian developer attitudes are on full display there. Bit of a tangent but whenever I read something on there (when I see it suggested on the SO sidebar) it's along the lines of "my boss is sexually harassing me, what should I do" with the answer being "keep quiet and roll along with it, whatever you do don't tell HR it's unprofessional" and it's very 
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Aug 20, 2020 08:13
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Yeah, generally agree. Don't say anything to potential employer unless you need an accommodation. Whether you say anything after getting hired will totally depend on the situation, but don't feel compelled. I've had employees tell me about their ADHD as a "Hey, sometimes I won't work on projects right at a moment but I will always make sure to hit deadlines. Also, if I'm getting a little scattered in a meeting just give me a little nudge.", both of which are totally easy to do as a manager and makes life a little less stressful for the employee if they know their manager can help in those situations. However, I can see the opposite where someone might not want to say anything and that's fine too. In general I have a more "Players-coach" approach to management and not every manager does that. ADHD (with a real diagnosis) is a protected class, which is nice, so if you ever feel like you might be getting pushed out because of it you should keep receipts if you disclose it. It's not all that big of a shield in the US though.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:18
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ADHD / autism / etc. are pretty hard things to hide. You probably don't have to share your diagnosis of high-functioning autism or ADHD - the people who would understand and respond well to the diagnosis are also people who will be able to tell just by talking to you.
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Aug 20, 2020 17:57
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Thanks, everyone! I'll keep it to myself. One other question came to mind to me today, I came across this course that looked interesting: https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-it-automation It's $49/month, which isn't bad at all, and the skills that it teaches are things that I feel would round me out more, so it's something I'm interested in just on that merit. However, with regards to the certificate part, is that worth anything at all? Like, is that certificate going to give me a leg up in the hiring process or is it largely going to be ignored?
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Aug 22, 2020 04:37
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Once you get to the interview, the certificate won't matter at all, but it might help with an HR screen, and you're not getting an interview if you don't pass that. Coursera's very new and nobody's figured out exactly what value its certificates have yet, so I'd say to go for it if you can comfortably afford the cost.
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Aug 22, 2020 14:46
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I'm a little confused by Triplebyte. I went to sign up and noticed they only list 6 cities to choose from. If they listed ~10 cities, my city would definitely be on the list. When I go to filter job postings, there are literally listings for one company in my city. Am I missing something? Is Triplebyte just bad for those not in the cities they list?
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Aug 26, 2020 22:10
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huhu posted:Is Triplebyte just bad yes
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Aug 26, 2020 23:38
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Are the mock interviews on interviewing.io any good? Just wondering if the questions asked there reflect the difficulty level of a typical question in an actual interview.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:15
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drainpipe posted:Are the mock interviews on interviewing.io any good? Just wondering if the questions asked there reflect the difficulty level of a typical question in an actual interview. Got any representative samples?
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Aug 27, 2020 00:35
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They have a Youtube account with some selected mock interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg. You can read the names of the problems they used from the video titles. I don't think they have any database of questions used, however.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:46
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A bit late, but some personal experience: I have autism spectrum disorder level 1 and ended up telling my line manager (mostly to request that I stop being pulled into unimportant meetings that had already started and other such scheduling issues) and he said he had always thought of me as someone with asperger’s, so yeah people can tell  I also ended up telling the rest of my team since I took over some tasks from our program manager while she’s on maternity leave, but I wouldn’t have done that without knowing that my manager had my back (and curiously then I did get a lot of “I never would have guessed!”). I’d already been here for three years though and been promoted once, I do suspect that it would’ve gone badly had I come in with that (which I couldn’t have done anyway since I only got diagnosed a year and a half ago but I digress)
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Aug 27, 2020 01:10
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drainpipe posted:Are the mock interviews on interviewing.io any good? Just wondering if the questions asked there reflect the difficulty level of a typical question in an actual interview. The videos you linked seem pretty normal for companies that like to do the data structure and algorithm questions as the main part of a technical interview. In my career, very few of my interviewers have taken an approach so theoretical. It's sort of a facade of rigor where the questions are challenging but don't have that much to do with making real software. In other words, these are typical of a certain type of company.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:42
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How are you supposed to deal with impostor syndrome? I never encountered it before until I had to start up the job hunting process again and it's a serious motivation killer.
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Sep 1, 2020 17:41
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Nothing but to power through it.
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Sep 1, 2020 17:47
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I went to a WWDC in 2013 and met up with a goon for a beer. At one point, I had casually mentioned that I "wasn't a real programmer" one too many times, so he just stopped me dead flat and said (something along the lines of): you write code, you make apps, you're here... you're allowed to have opinions as a "real programmer." That really stuck with me.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:10
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hulk hooligan posted:How are you supposed to deal with impostor syndrome? I never encountered it before until I had to start up the job hunting process again and it's a serious motivation killer. How long have you been a developer? I think for me I always had this vision in my head of what a "developer" was. And I put that in quotes because it wasn't that real. I also had unrealistic expectations of what employers wanted or even knew, and over-estimated the quality of competition. Sure, there are some whiz devs that have been doing this from earlier ages and/or are more naturally adapt at it, but that's not the majority. Combined with personally realizing that engineer was a much more apt description, impostor syndrome sort of melted away. I find my value isn't only derived from writing code and my experience, so much as knowing what I do know or experienced and knowing where to look to find answers to that which I don't know. Maybe analogous to hiring a specialist for home repairs because even a small amount of experience in the field means they can do it so much faster and of higher quality.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:14
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I have five years of experience with R in an academic research setting, and over the pandemic I've managed to teach myself Python and SQL while working from home. My recurring fear is, what if I join a different academic research group, or what if I end up in a non-research programming environment, and they discover that I'm actually a total fraud and I'm actually the worst programmer in existence and I'm not a real programmer? Something that feeds into it is that none of my bosses have programming experience themselves, and I'm entirely self-trained. I've never had another programmer sit down with me and go over my code and say yeah, do that, or don't do that. Whatever industry standards there are for R, I'm completely ignorant of them, but I do my best to keep my code clean and organized and documented and with comprehensible variable names, I try to keep on top of new packages and learn how to use new things, I constantly profile and try to improve performance, and I've never had an assignment given to me that I wasn't able to finish. I don't have any awareness of whether something can or cannot be done in R, I've been able to make very complex and wild Shiny apps entirely on my own. The faculty members just tell me "hey I need this thing" and I just do it. I've done some real weird things with R, things it probably wasn't even intended for. Again: what if I'm totally incompetent in a "real" setting, whatever that is? What if when I leave my current position, I discover I'm totally out of my depth because I'm actually a phony? How do I even gauge my own competence when there isn't some standardized exam, like there was way back in the day in my college years?
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Sep 1, 2020 18:58
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hulk hooligan posted:I have five years of experience with R in an academic research setting, and over the pandemic I've managed to teach myself Python and SQL while working from home. If you do decent work, learn quickly, are easy to work with, and are dependable you will thrive outside of academia. I am telling you this as someone who went into industry, became a manager, returned to school for a PhD, became a PI, and then went back into industry. Trust me, do not judge what industry life is like based upon your observations of academia. People far less talented than you are doing just fine in industry. Be confident in your ability to solve interesting problems, and don't sweat the details.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:19
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hulk hooligan posted:I have five years of experience with R in an academic research setting, and over the pandemic I've managed to teach myself Python and SQL while working from home. The bolded section tells me you'll be fine. Nobody knows everything, but you put forth the effort to improve which is more than can be said for a ton of people in the industry. If you were actually bad you wouldn't care, you'd just be coasting by collecting paychecks. You certainly have holes in your knowledge, but everyone who starts a new job has holes in their knowledge. You don't know the industry standards for R, but if you join a place that does you'll quickly learn them as you do code reviews (I assume anywhere that cares about industry standards also reviews code). Imposter syndrome may or may not go away, it'll probably come and go as you are put into uncomfortable situations. However, it is far more likely that you are at least a pretty good developer than that you are a master imposter on the level that it would take to fool people for years at a time.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:48
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hulk hooligan posted:I have five years of experience with R in an academic research setting, and over the pandemic I've managed to teach myself Python and SQL while working from home. I guarantee you’ll see code on the first week of a job which will make you say, “how does this possibly function? How was this person possibly hired?” Moments like those will chip away at your imposter syndrome. (Edit: and if it’s my code, I’d like to preemptively apologize. I don’t know how I was hired either.)
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Sep 1, 2020 20:27
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lifg posted:I guarantee you’ll see code on the first week of a job which will make you say, “how does this possibly function? How was this person possibly hired?” And then by the next week you'll realize this statement applies to the entire code base.
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Sep 1, 2020 23:30
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