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Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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I don't know about crappy - someone who got a job at Microsoft right after graduation a year or two ago came back to give a short talk at my university, and he really seemed to like it.

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Jun 14, 2008

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Paolomania posted:

2b1s, from your posting pattern here and elsewhere I think your enthusiasm for finance and interest in a computing career for its financial rewards I really think you should be looking to be in some kind of quantitative analysis (or software support thereof) role. These opportunities are out there - I recently learned of such an opening doing software engineering and analysis for an Ivy endowment. Sweet gig with huge bonuses, but way above your experience level. If you want these types of roles you will need, in addition to engineering skills, a solid background in finance, statistical analysis, and rapid application development.

What kind of background in finance and statistical analysis? By "rapid application development", do you mean something similar to what are usually called agile development practices?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Everywhere I've asked, I've been told that ABET accreditation is pretty much meaningless for CS. I wouldn't worry about it. I was worried about this, too, when I found out my school isn't accredited, but apparently it's pretty common? Or at least, not uncommon.

Honestly, ABET accrediting CS programs makes just as much sense to me as ABET accrediting biology, math, or philosophy programs. I feel like they do it just because some schools treat CS like software engineering. Am I way off?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Milotic posted:

"Can I tough out a semi-crap job for (say) 2 years - long enough to get some more experience and long enough that moving on doesn't look suspicious?" (maybe others will disagree, but only spending short periods of time in a job can raise flags for those looking at your CV)

I've never really understood this advice. Sure, having a year or two of experience at one place is going to give you a higher probability of landing that second job, but surely that probability is still non-zero even if your resume says something like "3 months doing [job I hate]".

Can it really hurt to have three months at your first job followed by a year or two at your second job? Or even three months at one and three months at another? It seems like in the best case, you get a better job earlier, and in the worst case, you have to stick with your current job until you've been there long enough to seem like a good hire to someone else.

Basically, I don't see why you wouldn't take the job and just keep applying to new ones until you get the job you want.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Honestly, though, I think that sleepsort is really cool. Other sorting methods rely on the relationships between the items being sorted in order to compare them. Sleepsort considers each item by itself.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Rail Analyst.

fake edit:

real edit:

Never mind. Since it hasn't been used, my project is "make it work".

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Aug 30, 2011

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
A person from a local development company came into one of my classes two weeks ago to let everyone know his company was looking to hire a senior developer, but that they were really flexible on what "senior" meant and were basically interested in hiring someone competent and paying him/her according to their skill. He also said that they were also open to internships.

However, the position(s) is/are for immediate hire, and I'm taking 24 credit-hours this semester, so I don't think I could do it right now. Should I save the handout and send him my resume in a few months when I would be free, or should I put together a resume and a cover letter explaining that I'd be quite glad to work for them a few months from now if they are still looking to hire?

Or should I just forget since two weeks is a long time to wait and he's probably forgotten all about it?

I also feel that my application could be much stronger later on, as I'm currently working on a number of projects for several classes that should be kind of cool when they're finished, but right now would look kind of bad since they're incomplete, and I currently don't have anything other than homework assignments, so nothing to show that I have actually done productive, non-homework development. That's one reason I'm leaning toward applying later if that's not going to be a horrible idea.

He did say that the work was virtual, so entirely from home, and that we would be able to work at our leisure. He said like 20 hours a week would be fine, as they weren't stuck on having one person, but would be fine with hiring multiple people, as long as we can be available to meet (virtually) when everyone meets, as they are an agile team. So should I not even mention my course load and apply for work immediately? I'm guessing that having a job while in school would look better later on than getting a couple of Bs this semester.

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 26, 2011

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Understood. I'll update my resume and send it off after I have a few people look at it. Thank you, everyone!

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013

Hu Fa Ted posted:

That's retardedly low. Where I am, starting junior devs get around $60k if they can demonstrate basic compentency and aren't fuckwits.

Where are you, exactly?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Actually, since we're sort of on the topic, I'm kind of curious on how my school compares to others in general, as I've been under the impression that we're not covering as much as other schools. Here is our data structures syllabus from when I took it a year ago:

1 Arrays and References 10/12 Jan
2 Stacks 19 Jan
3 Stacks and Lab 1 24/26 Jan
4 Stacks and Recursion 31 Jan, 2 Feb
5 Lab 2, Queues and Lists 7/9 Feb
6 Queues and Lists and Lab 3 14/16 Feb
7 Queues and Lists, Midterm 21/23 Feb
8 Trees 28 Feb, 2 Mar
9 Spring Break 7 Mar – 11 Mar
10 Trees and Lab 4 14/16 Mar
11 Trees 21/23 Mar
12 Sorting 28/30 Mar
13 Sorting 4/6 Apr
14 Searching 11/13 Apr
15 Garbage Collection, Final Review 18/20 Apr
16 TBD 25 Apr

The material on trees extended from where it was first mentioned in the syllabus all the way through sorting and searching, until we got to garbage collection.

We had 11 assignments, of which 4 involved trees and 3 involved implementation. Half our assignments were actual homework while the other half were simple "lab" exercises that only took a few hours, with which we were given plenty of hints and allowed to ask question. The tree assignment that didn't involve implementation was one of those - we inserted stuff in a tree that was given to us and had to explain how that effected searching, etc.

Algorithms syllabus:
1 Balanced Binary Search Trees 9/11 Jan
2 Balanced Binary Search Trees 18 Jan
3 B-Trees 23/25 Jan
4 B-Trees 30 Jan, 1 Feb
5 Hashing 6/8 Feb
6 Hashing 13/15 Feb
7 Stable Matching, Midterm 20/22 Feb
8 Algorithm Analysis 27/29 Feb
9 Spring Break 5 Mar – 9 Mar
10 Algorithm Analysis 12/14 Mar
11 Graphs 19/21 Mar
12 Greedy Algorithm 26/28 Mar
13 Divide-n-Conquer 2/4 Apr
14 Dynamic Programming 9/11 Apr
15 Dynamic Programming 16/18 Apr
16 Review 23 Apr

Our first assignment was to implement AVL trees. I'm just finishing up an assignment now in which we have to implement B-Trees, and we were just given an assignment in which we have to implement extensible hashing. Sound normal?

And w.r.t. the tree question, going by the syllabi, it looks like we've spent about 10 weeks on trees, overall, and tree-implementation has taken a significant fraction of our programming assignments.

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Jun 14, 2008

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Alright, so I haven't had an internship yet as a senior and I don't have any chance of getting a decent internship this summer, but I know a place where I can get an internship locally, and I've had a part-time research assistant position since the beginning of this year. I've also started working on a ray tracer and an Android game. I know what I want to do with the ray tracer and it's kind of significant overall, though not original.

I'd like to implement a search engine at some point, but I don't really know anything about them right now. I've also been looking for open source projects to which to contribute, but haven't found anything that caught my interest. XFCE seems promising, though, so I'll look at that carefully and see what I can do/am interested in doing development-wise.

How am I doing? Does that sound like enough to get a phone interview at companies like, say, Google? I don't know if many places care about grades but I'll have a math/CS dual major with a GPA >= 3.75, if that helps, though I'll have taken five years to graduate.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Since we're on the topic of thinking you make useful comments when you don't, I've always thought that my comments were sufficient to make my code readable. Confirm/deny? A method from my last homework assignment:

http://pastebin.com/17SrhJbe

As for general programming style, I've been thinking that blank lines between sections of code separated by comments only made my code more spread out and difficult to read, so I've mostly started to eliminate those. I still keep my variable declarations separated from the rest of the code, though. Until recently I was skipping lines before all those places you see comments in the main section.

I've also taken to assigning my variables as late as possible because I've noticed that initializing them unnecessarily upon declaration can sometimes result in hard-to-find bugs, and the only downside to late initialization seems to be that the code is more difficult read, but I think poor comments are the real culprit there. Thoughts?

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Mar 9, 2012

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Jun 14, 2008

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I started out writing down a short list of steps to take to solve the problem (combining a bucket with its buddy). I then left each one in as a comment, because I figured that if it represents a separate "step" in my thinking, then it was probably worth explaining. So

quote:

check to see if we can combine
if so, first get the buddy
decrease depth of both buckets
store each buckets keys for later reinsertion
erase both buckets
save each bucket so that insertion can take place
reinsert the keys

in my notebook became what you see there. Is there a better "system" to follow or is it more of an experience/feedback thing? I haven't worked on much code with other people, so I don't really know how others are going to look it.

Also, I use "this" to make it obvious that I'm using a variable that belongs to the object, so that variables without "this" can be assumed to be local.

I know that prefacing instance variable names with m, or m_ would work, but I disliked how those required me to hold the shift key right afterward to capitalize the first letter of the rest of the variable name, or to type the underscore. Typing out "this." is just more comfortable to me than hitting shift.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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I see, so while I should stop putting comments before each chunk of low-level logic, separating them visually with a new line is also going to make it easier to read? As for the this/Hungarian/neither topic, I use Eclipse for Java and I didn't know it was an option to highlight instance variables differently from local variables.

Also, I had it return if the bucket couldn't be combined instead of throw an exception because the method calling it only wants it to combine if possible and do nothing otherwise:

code:
//now combine with buddy and collapse index as necessary
while(tryToCollapse){
	this.combine();
	this.loadData(this.index.getFilePointer());
	tryToCollapse = this.index.collapse();
}
I figured it would be better to check if we could combine before calling combine, but our assignment asked for a combine() method that did the checking internally.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
I think I've got the rest, but why would you use ArrayList<Integer> here instead of a fixed array? Also, the canCombine() method checks, along with something else, whether the two bucket's combined keys will overflow the bucket into which they are combined. Should I have explained that in the comment before the check?

Thank you all for taking the time to explain, by the way.

Also,

oRenj9 posted:

You should be looking into Lucene. That way, you kill two birds with one stone. You'll get to work with a search engine and contribute to an OSS project.

I have looked into Lucene but it seems way more complicated than anything I've worked with before and I wasn't sure how to begin to approach it. I guess going through the documentation and maybe writing a couple of programs that actually use it might be a good start? Thanks for the suggestion!

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Mar 9, 2012

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Googling "truncated multiplication" only gets me a bunch of complicated-sounding journal articles. Any suggestions on where to learn about it?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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That makes sense now. I did basically the same thing on homework in one of our introductory programming classes where we were supposed to implement objects that represented huge integers. We were never really taught that sort of thing, explicitly, though I guess it is kind of easy now that I remember it. Thanks for the explanation, Strong Sauce!

Tangentially, I'm pretty sure most people in the class just handled multiplication as repeated addition, which resulted in some ridiculous run times (as in, 45+ minutes) when my friends compared our implementations later.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Shrughes, what is your educational background? I never got any of this from my data structures class and I'm not seeing it so far in algorithms, though we haven't gotten to divide and conquer yet.

I feel like the only subject I've studied that would have helped me to solve that problem was abstract algebra.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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I would say that I can't answer the question, but I'll consult a goon who can.

E: But really, if I want to work a more "data structures and algorithms"-y place, and I feel like my school is more of a "more pre-professional Programming degree" place, would simply finishing my algorithms textbook bring me up to the level of ability expected for such a job?

I guess my school's approach isn't horrible, as everything in my area seems to be about gluing together GUI components in .Net. That just seems really boring to me, though.

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Mar 20, 2012

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Is the original Design Patterns book still the best source from which to learn about design patterns?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
How is my resume?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18fq1UaTbH2FOMdM3_iiuLxrqhO_BydgIL8evG8ZjF1k/edit

I think the section "academic achievements" should be moved down to just above "community involvement".

I also think that "Extensible hashing, AVL trees, B-Trees, Java", being simple homework, should be removed entirely, but several of my classmates think it should be left in "so they know youre not one of the morons who couldnt do that poo poo".

I left out a section on references because I don't have any. I could ask the professor who hired me as an RA, though. I also list my GPA before my graduation date because someone online told me that most recruiters don't care about when I'm graduating.

I'm also not sure if it would be handy to put in somewhere that I'm comfortable with regular expressions, and where/how I would put it in there.

I also worked on a kind of crappy project with two other people that used basic API calls to find, report and save information about a user's PC hardware in C#. Not sure if I should put that in since it was a couple of years ago and if asked, all I could really say about it is that we did it. It was really straight-forward.

As for team projects, the third and fourth projects I listed were also done as part of teams. Should I state that?

Edit: What I most want to know is whether I should feel comfortable sending this out after addressing the above things.

Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Apr 8, 2012

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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shrughes posted:

Your question is sort of wrong, in that you don't want what there is the "most of", you should want something that has the most supply/demand imbalance in favor of the developer. I.e. where you get paid a lot of money. (But let's not completely discount the benefit that being in a large field adds liquidity to the job search and also makes it more likely to be an efficient market.)

How do we go about identifying such areas?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Are there (m)any development jobs/areas where a master's degree would greatly benefit my employment prospects? I want to get an MS at some point, and whether I should be looking into a CS or statistics or maybe even math MS. I am interested in all these fields, so I figure that the one most likely to help me in the most in the long run would be the best choice.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013

Kim Jong III posted:

If the company equates "knowledge of OO practices" with "knowing some tricks created to hack around missing language features", then yeah, aBagorn most certainly dodged a bullet.

Can you give me some examples of design patterns that are used to hack around missing language features? I've never heard that before and it sounds kind of neat.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
"marks off" for not commenting or "marks on" for commenting? The example given was two candidates, one with some comments, one with none. I could see how making comments might give you a leg up.

It seems weird, though. You ask for code samples to make sure you want their code in your codebase. So if they don't write comments on the board, why not ask them to do so? It seems like you could miss out on a candidate who normally writes good comments if you just assume that "no comments on the whiteboard" implies "no comments ever" or "usually bad comments".

I'll definitely be writing comments if I ever have to write code in an interview, though. Seems like it might be helpful, both in writing the code and in standing out over those who don't.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Yeah, that would be insane if you weren't doing TDD. I would write the unit test afterward, to make sure I did it right.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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So, unit-testing. Should I end up having a lot more test code than application code?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Alrighty. I've been reusing chunks of very similar setup code in each test, with the actual testing being quite small, on the order of three or four lines. I guess that makes my tests lovely and non-maintainable in addition to being too long, so I'll refactor them somehow. Thanks, everyone.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
So what kind of companies do I want to work for if I want to maximize my hourly compensation? I understand that some (e.g., game industry) industries have particularly bad reputations for this, but I don't of any with good ones.

I started thinking about this when three of my friends graduated and immediately got jobs making $60k/yr, with what they described as excellent benefits, in an area with a low-ish cost of living, where they were told flat-out that working more than forty hours a week would be very rare. The work doesn't sound too interesting - apparently they make software that is used to manage data within the company - and they were all the youngest members of their teams, which is kind of significant since one of them was thirty-one years old.

I was just wondering, are there similar jobs in places I would actually want to live, where I won't be writing enterprise software in Java? If so, how do I find them? Is it a matter of just applying to every job I can find, then asking in the interview what kind of hours I would be expected to work?

I don't really have anything against working more hours, but I want to get paid as well for them as possible. I'd much rather work 40hr/wk for $60k than 50-60hr/wk for say, $70k*.

* - I pulled $70k out of my rear end. I'm just assuming that jobs that pay slightly more than average will probably expect much more work than average.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Suppose that when I graduate in the coming Spring, I'll have:

-A dual degree in math and CS with a GPA around 3.77.
-Held an internship position.
-Held a research assistance position.
-Made some mostly trivial open source software contributions.
-Solid undergraduate CS theory fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, operating systems, etc.).

How am I doing compared to other senior CS students? Is this very low for new graduates who get job offers from companies like Google, Amazon, etc.?

Also, a couple of companies in my area require their new hires to work for months doing tech support for their product before they're allowed to do any actual development. One of them requires six months of this, and a friend of mine has been doing it for four months at another. They still get paid like developers, but their responsibilities are different. I thought this was just some weird thing specific to one company, but when I heard from my friend that he is also doing it, I decided to ask here.

Honestly, it seems like a bad idea. Chances are I'll be leaving my first job after a year or two, so I should improve my skills and get as much experience as possible during that time, instead of wasting six months. Am I wrong? I guess it's okay if you want work for the same company for a long time, but I'm under the impression that that is a great way to keep your salary from growing.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Since it seems to be job interview and internship hour, I'll go ahead and mention that I got an internship recently in an agile shop where almost all the tests consist of directions for manual testing in Excel spreadsheets, plus maybe ~100 automated tests written in Javascript for a poorly-supported automated testing tool that likes to stop working on two of the three machines it's been setup on, with apparently nobody knowing why and just suggesting that I remote into a VM on which it actually works. Oh, and the scripted tests are months out of date. The last time they were updated was sometime in February, I think, and the last time they were run none of them passed. :toot:

My job is to figure out which test scripts can still be used, then start making new automated tests to replace the manual ones.

They seem to follow an actual agile process (scrum) rather than waterfall where the requirements change every day. I'm kind of excited. I'm kind of nervous, but at $10/hr I'm guessing that I'm super cheap compared to actual developers, as one of my friends who graduated a year ago got hired for >$60k/yr. So they're probably not expecting me to be a genius here.

I need to be a genius anyway, though, because I want to be working at Google/MS/Facebook/etc. this time next year.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Just thinking about it real quick, it seems like making a one-hour program and having someone else spend eight hours extending it later seems like a better idea than spending eight hours on it so that someone else will only have to spend two hours extending it later. I think it's even worse if that second person thinks like you and also spends eight hours on it so that a third programmer will only have to spend a couple hours when he or she gets to work on it, unless he or she also decides to spend much more time on it so the next person in line will spend less time, unless...

I'm just not convinced you're doing better in the long run.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Today I finally got to work with the testing scripts at my internship. Found a quadruple-level for-loop.

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Why aren't you applying to other places?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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How rare are jobs where you are not required to assign everything you create to your company?

I ask because I'm interning at a place where I don't do development, I just maintain automated test suites, and as part of my contract, everything I create belongs to my company. I've been there for roughly three months and the pay is poo poo even by internship standards.

I don't really need the money so I'm wondering if now would be an okay time to quit, put the "experience" on my resume, and start working on my own projects both as something to put forth later as evidence that I can program, and because I want to work on them and keep the rights to my work.

I don't really want to get a job later at a place where I have to avoid doing anything on my own time, have to get permission from my employer to work on particular things, etc. Is that unrealistic?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Currently doing a non-development internship for $10/hr at a place 60-80 minutes from my home at 20 hrs/wk. I estimate that I spend an extra $40/wk due to the extra driving. I do QA work here, though it's with a scrum team that seems to have its act together. In January I'll have a different class schedule and only be able to work here 16 hours per week.

My friend just told me that he's looking for a replacement for the position he has, since they only give him 5-20 hrs/wk, though it's usually much closer to 5. They pay $25/hr (though I'm like 99% sure it's contract work) and it's actually development work rather than QA. It's a work-from-home job, so no implication of teamwork or social skills for my resume.

Normally, I would just take it and work both jobs, but I naively signed a work-for-hire/assignment contract with my current employer.

Anyway, is there any tactful way I can ask my boss about the possibility of getting permission, from whomever is has that authority, to pursue work on the side here?

If not, then would it look bad on my resume to quit an internship after three months to go for another part-time job? Would it look better on my resume just because I could sell it as "real" work (meaning not an internship) and because it would be actual development work? I'm thinking, next semester I'll suddenly be getting $160/wk here and be spending ~$30/wk, so next semester I'll be getting $130/wk before taxes for 16 hours of work, plus I share a vehicle with someone else, so even if I only work 8 hours in a day, my entire day is consumed because I wake up around 6am to get ready and get home around 8-9pm.

If I can get this other job, then next semester I'd be getting $125/wk before taxes, without the crazy driving, and I could direct the extra time toward working on my own projects so that I can get a decent job at some point. Most importantly, it would be another bullet on my resume, which only says that I did some research assistant work for a professor for six months and this internship for three months.

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Jun 14, 2008

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A MIRACLE posted:

Don't worry about the length of the internship, just make sure you can get a letter of recommendation from one of your supervisors.

Do letters of recommendation actually mean anything to employers? I've never heard of them being used anywhere outside of school. What would I even do with one?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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I was told that if I wanted one, there would be a full-time position for me here after I graduate as a result of my current internship. I like the company and the people are awesome, but I turned it down because I hate this area and want to move. Mistake?

With over six months of work experience, a couple of my own side projects, and a couple small OSS contributions, and a decent GPA (3.8) by the time I graduate, I don't see how I'll have trouble finding at least some kind of job, any job, if I'm willing to live literally anywhere else that isn't near this area. Thoughts? Reassurance?

Safe and Secure!
Jun 14, 2008

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Since we're on the topic of QA, as an intern in the QA group at my current company, I:

- Fixed their suite of existing, broken and brittle UI-testing scripts that were based on a relatively out-dated tool.
- Examined several options for new tools that could be used to write new, more maintainable tests against a new product, taking into account factors such as ease-of-use, quality/availability of documentation, ease of integration with our existing tools, flexibility if we wish to change some of our tools later, etc., which directly influenced the decision of which to use and how to proceed with our testing / use of extremely limited QA resources.
- Am now using the above tools to write a suite of (hopefully) maintainable tests covering the main functionality of their new product.

Is any of that good experience? Is any of that worth talking about in an interview or on a resume?

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Jun 14, 2008

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SPRING 2013
Don't you mean "send them your product's source and give them three weeks to rewrite it into something more maintainable"?

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