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csammis posted:It really depends on the employer. Some employers don't let sub-n GPAs past the initial recruitment threshold at all. Some employers look at GPA, ask questions about serious discrepancies, and evaluate the candidate based on a variety of attributes that may or may not take major GPA into account by itself. There's some new regulation that certain federal contractors can't hire anyone straight out of school with a cumulative GPA below 3.15, period end of story. Considering this, I advise everyone to transfer to a lovely school where they can get a 4.0 while learning nothing.
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Feb 18, 2011 05:31
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) and my major GPA was around 3.5. Recruiters for a certain Kansas-based GPS company came to a career fair at my university, saw my GPA, and literally crumpled up my resume in front of me and threw it into a trash can. Six years later I'm working for a different software company in Kansas and getting recruiting calls from the aforementioned GPS company on a regular basis v
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Necc0 posted:All I see is people talking about CS degrees and almost no mention of Software Engineering degrees, which is what I'm getting. My college offers CS as well but I shouldn't have any trouble landing a job with a sweng degree right? I feel like I'm pretty qualified. How does the Sw. Eng. degree at Penn State differ from the CS degree? There are folks out there wary of sweng degrees because at some places they take time away from necessary foundational coursework and rigor in general to focus on essentially religious issues like methodologies and OO dogma or whatever, but that might not be the case in the land of Joe Pa.
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Mar 17, 2011 01:35
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Does CompE vs CS matter much as far as initial job prospects and advancement? I realize computer engineers get to have the big fancy "ABET accredited" thing on their diploma and can take an FE or PE exam, but does it matter much? If not, would getting an EE Minor be worthwhile if one studied CS, or should you just stick to code and math? What sort of programming do you want to do? Having the deeper understanding of the hardware that a CE degree implies will be useful if you're doing something close to the metal, less so if you're writing webapps in a scripting language or accounting software in some enterprisey garbage collected language or whatever.
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Apr 7, 2011 19:07
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baquerd posted:This is only true statistically, as in when you look at a population as a whole. In practice you will have many real and potential opportunities to drastically improve your salary if only you have the proper skillsets and ability to apply them. And if you know how to ask for a promotion/raise (evidence, BATNA etc) and do so regularly
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Apr 26, 2011 19:31
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Ithaqua posted:This last guy had 12 years of coding experience on his resume, and he knew concepts and could discuss them intelligently. I just don't understand how you can know all about abstract classes and dependency injection and then not be able to bang out a for loop with a couple of ifs. The only explanation I can come up with his that there are a lot of people who go for rote memorization. Perhaps software engineering is to engineering what astrology is to astronomy
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May 12, 2011 01:18
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shrughes posted:I have a suit, the last time I wore it was at a funeral. Are you going to remind me of my relative's death just to get a job? Wear a tux and remind yourself of a wedding instead
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May 23, 2011 06:42
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Chasiubao posted:I'm sure a mech would be fine as a dev. Most MechE programs will require some matlab poo poo and that's pretty much it, like physicists there are very many that have to code in something 'real' to get poo poo done but the output is an abomination that cries out to heaven for judgment but the good apples tend to be pretty dang good
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May 23, 2011 07:17
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If you can, give condescending nicknames to whatever patterns are mentioned, eg. if they ask you about Strategy say "oh you mean passing a function pointer?" or if they ask about Visitor say "did you mean: map()?"
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Jun 9, 2011 14:43
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Orzo posted:That's pretty obnoxious and highly impractical, I know some good developers with certifications on their resume. Some companies really like them, some don't give a gently caress--but nobody should be penalized for having them. I think this would depend on what sort of cert you had - a CCNP or whatever is pretty much lagniappe on a dev's resume, whereas an MCSE if you're applying to a Unix shop or a Java cert anywhere nearly guarantees you're clueless
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Jun 15, 2011 04:45
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Orzo posted:I would not trust a company that is underpaying developers to be loyal if something goes bad. If they aren't paying competitively, leave. Yeah, if you're being paid significantly below market in circumstances other than "i'm an intern lol" (and even then, programmer intern pay anywhere respectable >> blue collar pay) you're probably best off not even asking for a raise under any guise. Interview elsewhere and hand in your two weeks notice when you have signed a contract elsewhere. Dismiss any talk of counter offers out of hand, it's never* in your interest to take one.
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Jul 14, 2011 22:46
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I left the footnote off intentionally, read the asterisk as 'barring something absurd'
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Jul 28, 2011 22:05
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I don't think that's a likely enough outcome to consider, your company either doesn't think you're worth the extra money (in which case they'll say toodles instead of giving a counter offer) or they think you're worth the money and aren't paying it to you anyways, in which case any raise they give you is really an advance against future raises - they're going to pull the same shenanigans again.
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Jul 29, 2011 00:38
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Orzo posted:Agreed, and I'd say this is basically the difference between software engineering and computer science respectively. I wouldn't. I'd say that computer science, while poorly named, is a term that means something while "software engineering" doesn't have any standard definition, and the most common usage thereof has little or nothing to do with engineering*. Few people who call themselves software engineers have any engineering background, schooling or experience, and for the most part any they do have is ad-hoc. The discipline itself lacks a solid theoretical foundation, which more or less gives the game away right there - consider some kissing cousin fields like electrical engineering and systems engineering. EE tools and techniques like node voltage analysis and mesh current analysis are outgrowths of scientific theories in which we are confident, namely Kirchoff's laws. In systems engineering, techniques to design and analyze control systems like root locus anaylsis are based on the control theory developed by Bode and Nyquist. In software engineering, our techniques are based mostly on shamanism and fads that resemble nothing so much as management; many of the problems which we consider software engineering problems are really organizational problems. To the extent what we do anything that resembles engineering practice, we still manage to turn it into superstition - consider how unit testing became Test Driven Development. The funny thing is, there has been a lot of engineering work done with relation to the design and analysis of software and hardware/software systems. Almost all of it has been done under the banner of CS or EE or one of EE's bastard children. I would go so far as to say that for software related systems, the likelihood of engineering being involved is inversely proportional to the frequency the term "software engineering" being used. * google "software engineering isn't engineering" and you'll get a million relevant things along these lines Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Aug 23, 2011 |
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Aug 23, 2011 19:19
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Otto Skorzeny posted:To the extent what we do anything that resembles engineering practice, we still manage to turn it into superstition - consider how unit testing became Test Driven Development. This bit is actually demonstrative of two different things, so I'll give it its own post to elaborate. On the engineering level, unit testing is more or less a port of the common engineering practice of breaking a system into its component parts, recursing on the components until we've got more or less atomic components, testing those to make sure they work, and then "bubbling up the stack" and combining subcomponents into components and testing them, until we're back at the top level and can test the system as a whole to ensure it works. In our software development culture with very complex systems that are never really finished we often use testing as a replacement for a formal spec such that we can diddle with or replace implementations or components and have assurance we haven't broken anything, but the concept remains applicable. Parts of our culture, however, having tasted the benefits of introducing this little bit of rigor and decided that it's a magic wand, a silver bullet which will solve all of our woes if only we add some hocus pocus. So we sort of ironically add process in search of rigor with no rigorous reason to add anything, to say the least of the particular things we are adding and end up removing real rigor if anything by doing so. On the computer science level, it probably jumps out to you that the recurse-down-then-build-back-up style to testing resembles the classic divide-and-conquer approach of many algorithms! The analogy isn't perfect, but you see it right away or at least go "ah-ha!" when it's pointed out if you have even a lick of algorithmic knowledge. This sort of recognition will allow you, when you encounter a problem, to think of what kind of algorithmic approach you might want to use if your naive approach isn't performant enough. While you may remove a level of rigor from your algorithms class and eg. code up a solution and see if it's faster enough rather than consulting the master theorem of recurrence relations to see if its asymptotic time constraints should be better, you're at least subconsciously doing this sort of CS stuff and devising algorithms even if you don't know you are whenever you do anything technically novel. For this reason I am skeptical that the Google folks have never used data structures and algos after their interviews - it's unavoidable unless you're pushing any technical boundaries. (This isn't to say a project that merely combines and applies known components isn't novel at all - it may well be breaking new ground in other areas. Many startups fit in this category).
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Aug 23, 2011 20:42
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tef posted:In some schools, computing came under the EE dept and so was named software engineering I don't think this is the case; if it were, then software engineering programs would likely fall under the school of engineering at these places and involve core engineering classes, which they generally don't, and likely involve some sort of rigor rather than teaching religion as science, and maybe even have some faculty cross over. This would also imply that SE people would know basic linear algebra, how a modern computer works, etc. On another note, i would love if software engineering were a real thing. I'm not saying that we would all have to get our PE*, but if we could have a relationship with computer science** similar to that which mechanical engineering has with newtonian mechanics, or electrical engineering with ohm's and kirchoff's laws, or systems engineering has with control theory, or aeronautical engineering has with navier-stokes equations and other fluid dynamics, or nuclear engineering has with all sorts of loving physics, I think it would be a positive development, and one of great magnitude. There are a ton of systems developed today which demand high reliability and performance in which software is an integral and even driving component. We have some theory built up under several academic disciplines and developed in several industries which we can build on! It's a shame that we instead want to wallow in the stone age of our discipline. *After consulting some friends who are Verified Old Farts, it seems that a PE is meaningful in more or less every field, but has different weight in each. For example, in civil engineering it is required to do practically anything (often legally mandated), in mechanical engineering it's good for a lot of things, etc. I would expect given the weight it carries in civil engineering that it would be more common on the electrical power systems side of EE than on the microelectronics/IC side, and that in chemical engineering more weighty and common for dudes designing cracking towers and poo poo than folks designing bioreactors for pharma. **I am greatly discouraged by the fact that many of the folks carrying the software engineering banner seem to think that basic, fundamental CS knowledge isn't just unnecessary but useless. Would you want to drive in a car designed by MechE's that held a similar view of calculus or statics? The mind, it boggles!
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Aug 24, 2011 03:42
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 kes posted:or maybe they haven't spent enough time programming in a terminal to care one way or another? you can write code for unix with visual studio (and even compile it within the ide!), so i don't see any reason why you'd demand familiarity with a unix editor. 
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Sep 9, 2011 21:35
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Innocent Bystander posted:This is such a subjective statement I really don't see how it adds to the conversation. Who cares which text editor you use? Yeah lets all have a good laugh at the noobs using nano, but seriously if they can kick out good code in nano, more power to them. I think he's referring to original Bill Joy vi, which is a pain in the rear end to use in 2011 for someone used to vim (or even elvis or whatever)
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Sep 12, 2011 02:41
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Sab669 posted:I applied for an internship today, just got an email back at 10:30 PM asking if I'd be down for a phone interview tomorrow at 9:30 in the morning. 'Stipend' implies a non-hourly non-wage payment and indicates they may be trying to get around minimum wage laws by not calling it a salary 'Equity' refers to stock of some sort, the fact that they offer the "potential" for it is sketchy, and in general sets off alarm bells All in all it sounds like an early stage startup with unscrupulous (and likely nontechnical) founders trying to get (technical) work (that they cannot do themselves) done for something close to free. I of course am speculating way in advance of the data, but the language used just reeks of sleaze imo
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Oct 3, 2011 05:03
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That's 18k GBP, ~28k USD, still terrible but not below the poverty line at least
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Oct 11, 2011 04:12
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gariig posted:You can get a Stafford loan without a co-signer. Before quitting college I would talk to your financial aid department about your options for paying tuition. Also, go talk to you Co-op department or CS department about an internship. If you are good at CS there is no reason to quit with 3-4 semesters left before graduation to go be a barrista. He's probably maxing out his unsubsidized and subsidized Stafford as well as Pell and his state's equivalent of TAP and only halfway at the total for the semester. poo poo might be real difficult for a while, but even if he determines he Can't Pay at his current school he's better off transferring to a cheaper state school than dropping entirely imo
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Nov 1, 2011 16:56
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Ranma posted:I read a blog post from someone who applied to Google after 20+ years in the industry. They asked him what his college GPA was. This is perfectly reasonable, what's not imo is the HR screen that prevents this from ever occurring at many places
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Nov 11, 2011 21:27
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There is actually some data on this in much broader terms. Cumulative GPA correlates poorly with job performance; GPA in major during the last two years is much better, but still not really good. cf. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/81/5/548/ (nb. the correlation coefficient for the naive case that's most often used was found to be .16)
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Nov 14, 2011 18:45
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A potential employer sent me a confidentiality agreement. From a first read-through it looks reasonable (excepting the misspelling of my address  ). Any common pitfalls I should check for before putting my John Hancock on it?
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Nov 28, 2011 22:49
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shrughes posted:As in, have they already given you an offer? Or just to interview them? Second "interview", I'm the only candidate left and they said they wanted to meet to discuss my availability in the short and long term and make an offer
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Nov 28, 2011 23:39
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Upon further communication, the potential employer clarified that he just wanted me to review the terms before we met and I wouldn't have to sign until after an offer had been tendered. 
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Nov 29, 2011 05:15
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tef posted:given your background in finance, if you are looking for HFT work, some functional language experience wouldn't go a miss. If you spend any time with C# or VB.Net, try learning a bit of F#. While a lot of algorithmic trading places do their secret sauce stuff in functional languages (esp. OCaml and Haskell), there's also a ton of C++ hanging around in the domain (mostly implementing platforms that the functional code interacts with). Unfortunately, it's somewhere between climbing everest and climbing to mars to learn a functional language and c++ at the same time (this is a long winded way of saying that I agree with you  )
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Dec 29, 2011 14:42
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Dijkstracula posted:CLRS is, to me, a better reference than a tutorial Agreed. DPV's Algorithms is not nearly as comprehensive as CLRS, but it's a great text and wonderfully short. Also, there's a version of it nigh-identical to the print version that's available for free.
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Jan 10, 2012 19:05
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Without considering whether an IQ test is a good filter, it's highly unlikely that whatever you're using is an accurate IQ test unless it takes four hours to administer
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Jan 20, 2012 09:28
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hieronymus posted:50k for fresh out of college is about what you would expect nowadays if you graduated with maybe an internship and an OK academic record and no real experience. No it isn't. It's about $10k below market for anything besides webapp and glorified accounting garbage, even for places with a low cost of living.
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Feb 11, 2012 20:12
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Coolreject posted:Recent college graduate here, just had my first real programming job interview at a small-ish, fast-growing tech start up type of company. After about 40 minutes or so of technical questions, which I think I did well on, despite drawing a blank on a simple SQL question out of sheer nervousness, they spent the next hour introducing me to the rest of the tech team and I got a chance to meet the rest of the programmers as well as their CEO. Everyone was way more laid back and casual than I had expected, and a large portion of the interview from that point on was them asking questions like "What do you do for fun?" "Play any good video games recently?" "What books do you like to read?" and asking me about college experiences, what my funniest story from a summer job was, etc. The programmers spent a good deal of time casually talking to me about different programming languages, what we liked and didn't like about certain ones and other geeky things regarding programming. I'll demur to someone who's spent some time in the valley, but generally start-ups are known to be super laid-back, product rather than process oriented, and concerned about cultural/team fit for early hires. Downsides are (sometimes) long hours, (sometimes) below-market comp until things take off (if they take off) (incidentally any equity offered to make up for this for an early hire will never equal the pay you're giving up in terms of expected value), and a small or nonexistent health insurance package. If you like the culture and the work and whatever their vision is, though, it can be amazing. Or so I'm told.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:51
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Sab669 posted:As a student who hasn't been in that position, I would think a few days would be sufficient? Unless it's a job requiring you to move large distances. Companies are generally pretty tolerant of asking for a few weeks. They typically understand that you need to do due diligence with other offers you may be considering. An 'exploding offer' is generally a suspicious thing. While I am often critical of him and I don't agree with everything he says here, I think Joel Spolsky gives a very good primer of this sort of thing here.
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Mar 28, 2012 17:55
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Safe and Secure! posted:Is the original Design Patterns book still the best source from which to learn about design patterns? The GoF design patterns book is seldom read (at least compared to how often it is claimed to have been read). Head First Design Patterns is much more readable for most folks. You should probably augment either with some reading critical of design patterns (esp. as done in C++ circa 1996 or Java) to keep you from becoming a kool-aid drinker; Norvig's "Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages" fits the bill well.
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Apr 1, 2012 05:33
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How should I account for cost of living vs. salary? I don't think a straight division of salary by cost of living index is accurate...
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Apr 2, 2012 19:25
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Low 60s, near Bridgeport. I'm waiting on another offer from a firm in Allentown and I want to know what the rough equivalent would be before I weigh other factors. e: they're both embedded/uC work if it makes a difference Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 2, 2012 |
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Apr 2, 2012 21:10
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How is $68k for about an hour east of NYC? Just got an offer.
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Apr 13, 2012 21:15
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Ithaqua posted:In PA or NJ? Answering a few posts at once: This was in CT. I'm a fresh grad as of May, it would be embedded work. Company culture is nice, people work 40 hour weeks more or less (!), my position would be about 80% software 20% hardware (most of their other engineers, of which there are about a dozen in this department are much older and are ~80% hardware).
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Apr 13, 2012 21:42
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Ranma posted:Was 68k their offer? No harm in asking for a bit more, but seems reasonable for a fresh grad. Yeah, it was their offer. I might err on the side of asking for relocation cash rather than a salary bump unless that's a crazy thing to do.
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Apr 13, 2012 22:41
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pigdog posted:But the idea of writing documentation first, i.e. specifying how the application is supposed to behave, sounds good. BDUF, aka 'waterfall', is a catastrophic failure outside of domains where requirements are well-known in advance (eg. some embedded projects where the code forms a part of a much larger system whose behavior is well-specified). Incidentally, any specification complete enough to answer questions of the form "how should X do Y?" is not actually a specification but rather a very verbose programming language with an unparseable grammar
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Apr 23, 2012 02:51
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Slack Motherfucker posted:I just wanted to say that thanks in no small part to all of the helpful advice in this thread, I managed to get a pretty nice job lined up for me when I graduate. Thanks guys, you do really good work in here Grats! Where and doing what, if I may ask? We're all growing up
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Apr 24, 2012 00:41
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MEAT TREAT posted:Agreed, but business as usual doesn't give a poo poo. There are many places for a mediocre programmer to get hired where that poo poo just doesn't matter. This varies so much from company to company that it's difficult or impossible to generalize like this. Companies that work in middleware may have the luxury to be able to take anyone who can coax eclipse into compiling their code, whereas companies working on eg. high-performance databases need people with solid CS fundamentals, I would furthermore posit that 'companies that make CRUD apps in java and python' are an especially bad place to extrapolate from to cover the entire set of companies hiring from CS and related disciplines (not that this is necessarily what you were doing). In summary, knowledge of CS fundamentals may be a necessary condition for employment depending on what sort of work you want to do. e: we have this 'discussion' about once a month, right? wonder if it's based on moon phases.
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May 6, 2012 20:01
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