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Chasiubao posted:I'm gonna catch flak for this, but: Objectives suck. Also, your object is a weird mish-mash of an objective and a summary of yourself. Having read a ton of resumes, done hundreds of interviews over the last 6 years, and hired/offered over 100 people jobs over the same time period..... A person's objective has never "added" points, to me. A person's objective has sunk them. When they send in a resume to us, and their objective is to work at X other company, or work in finance (which we aren't), etc.
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Feb 6, 2013 12:11
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KNITS MY FEEDS posted:Ah, good to know. Thanks for the quick response. A lot of career fairs let companies book rooms the day after a career fair. So it's not just that it gets done on occasion, but it's a normal thing that the college's themselves book. Again it's not the interview that's going to get you the offer, though. And it's very possible that it'll be a short interview. (not saying it can't be long, but don't think you failed if it ends up only being 10-15 minutes).
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Feb 8, 2013 09:46
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Milotic posted:Courses taken is very handy for me as an interviewer as it gives me a chance to ask you about stuff you should know, rather than having to guess. Nothing worse than seeing a CV with no classes on for someone fresh out of or at uni. Agree. I like classes (as an interviewer). I also especially like the elective computer science classes. I don't particularly care that you took CS1. Everyone takes CS1. And CS2. But I do like seeing that you took a database class, or a human design interaction class - etc. At least for my school - those were the things that let you differentiate yourself somewhat.
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Feb 19, 2013 10:39
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Safe and Secure! posted:Say I got an internship automating tests because that's what they needed. Should I worry about having that on my resume or is that more of a worry for "real" jobs? I think this would be a positive. Having some background in testing (especially as an internship) is a great thing - especially if you can leverage it (in the interview) to explain how it help makes you a better developer. Seeing things from the testing side, etc.
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Feb 25, 2013 12:11
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Sarcophallus posted:Really? I never bothered listing it anywhere because it didn't seem important to the jobs I was applying to. Always list it. Especially with smaller/mid sized companies. It is not going the thing that gets you the job. But it might be an extra point that helps you get an interview. Or all other things being equal, gets you a job. On the smaller company perspective - one that is looking at expanding especially - having people that can help step in a scenario where you need another language, can be a huge help. Huge corporation? Matters less, they have a team of people for that. But smaller-mid sized, definite plus.
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Feb 26, 2013 12:34
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baquerd posted:What I see as the issue is when you have new programmers slavishly devote themselves to writing code that uses these paradigms. There's this school of thought that if something doesn't perfectly fit an existing pattern, it's somehow wrong, even if making it "right" would require ridiculous levels of abstraction that detract from the understanding and implementation of a solution. It's worthwhile to recognize code patterns as useful skeletons of design, but fetitishising them is amateurish. Hiring programmers out of college is a great thing in a lot of ways. But in others, yeah it sometimes takes a while to get them to realize things can't always be perfect. It reminds of the line in Pirates of the Caribbean.... (And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.). Everything isn't always going to be perfect.
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Mar 3, 2013 19:31
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Xik posted:This is perfect, thanks. I'm pretty confident in my knowledge of most of that at what I think is a junior level, indexes and performance issues being the exception. I'll have to go over relevant material for that and just refresh myself on the various joins to make sure I don't mix any up (memory gets lazy when you can just google at any time). I would add in simple database design as well. You might not be a designer, but they still may want to see basic understandings of database design. Also, depending on the company, they might want to see how up you are on the trends, companies out there, terminology, etc. Also - sometimes tests are not a simple - who gets the highest score gets the job. But they are more about relating to your experience. If you tell them you have a ton of database experience, lot's of SQL experience - etc, and then do 'blah' on the test... what does that tell them?
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Mar 4, 2013 14:42
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Ithaqua posted:I'd add these, too: Oh, good call on the denormalize piece. When interviewing guys coming out of college, I like to throw things in like that. When would it be appropriate to denormalize data? When would _____. Basically, are people stuck in the university mindset that things *always* have to be perfect.
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Mar 4, 2013 20:22
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JOHN SKELETON posted:I have an interview soon for an internship at a start-up in NYC. I already read some discussion earlier in the thread about salary in NYC, but my situation is somewhat funky so I'm not sure what kind of salary should I be able to negotiate. The fact that it's an internship.. that's a tough one. I'm not sure they'll pay you enough to live in NYC on your own. You'd likely need to look at bunking with roomates or something to cut down on that expense. It may be worth talking to the program that helps set students up; I'm sure they've placed people in NYC before, and might be able to offer some tips.
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Mar 5, 2013 09:21
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2banks1swap.avi posted:I didn't have time to read these posts until after the interview, go figure. He managed to be good at people skills and programming, believe it or not. how!!, you can too actually have both. Biggest question to me is where. Wages in NYC are going to differ greatly from somewhere in the Rust Belt.
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Mar 6, 2013 12:05
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pigdog posted:Computer doesn't pay your salary. Everything is a people issue. Good people skills are very important for a developer, ESPECIALLY if his work isn't CS and math heavy, but mostly about solving business problems. Well, I think you hit on the math heavy part right. There are going to be some CS jobs that are heavily theory, science, math, algorithm - etc based. For those, people skills might play in to it less. But... most things do involve collaboration. And collaboration revolves working and playing nice with others. At the end of the day, it's not always the best solution that wins. But the one that can be explained, and pitched the best. I'm not saying every programmer needs to be a sales guy. But he needs to be able to convince his boss, the product team, product manager, whatever - on the merits of his approach. I'm sure someone out there is going to say... well, they should stay out of it and let the programmer do their own thing. While I am not suggesting a heavy handed bureaucracy by any means, giving programmers too much free reign is most times a bad thing. You need to reign people in. I've worked with a lot of smart people. I consider myself, fairly smart. In the end, Me + you > me, or you, individually. And you aren't going to get me + you without good communication skills.
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Mar 6, 2013 12:09
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Plorkyeran posted:Giving honest feedback on a bad interview is a great way to walk into a lawsuit. This. I hate to say it, but America is just too crazy when it comes to litigation. You are pretty much taught to be afraid to say anything, lest something is said wrong, and comes back to haunt you. Not to mention the way the courts work, even if you are 100% right, it costs too much to prove you are right. You just need to settle. A scenario I heard of from a friend; several college students were hired. (entry level job). One of them did not work out. They were fired after about 4 months. Normal procedure - some people just don't work out / "get it". Note that the person who hired them - the person who had the real power/decision making ability, is also the power that fired the person. A week later the company was contacted that the person who was fired was considering legal action, that their firing was discriminatory. The company essentially paid off a small ransom (nothing crazy, a couple months extra pay). Why? Simply having to show up in court, to defend against it, was going to cost that much. And there was no upside to it. Blah.
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Mar 8, 2013 13:20
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Adahn the nameless posted:That's super low. I do .Net in Orlando. You should be getting at least $55k/year. yeah. Wow. I don't know what the cost of living is like there, but I'd expect entry level programmer, with some previous experience (not just course work), is going to command 50k+/start; Unless you are in like Idaho or something.
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Mar 11, 2013 11:18
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Good Will Hrunting posted:So I have two offers on the table right now: If i'm reading this right - and I may not be, i'm known to screw things up sometimes - it sounds like you are a fairly ambitious person. This is why B is interesting to you, you are thinking there is more room to grow there? If that's the case, I'd still say Company A sounds interesting. They .. give you a few assignemnts and see where you fit - seems like you'd have a chance to work hard, and get somewhere. It might be worth asking the questions (if you didn't)... along the lines of - For people that excel and do well, what type of things are they working on after X years?
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Apr 11, 2013 11:30
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Rurutia posted:Is it standard practice for a company to only 'negotiate' via a phone call with nothing written down about what the numbers might be? We asked for a rough overview and was turned down and told they only sent out official offers and only after the numbers were settled on. Depending on the situation, I think so. Where I work, negotiation is only after a job offer has been made. That said, a couple times I have talked with someone (we were hiring) face to face to finish negotiations. (over lunch or something). If we think there is going be a total mix (some guy coming in expects 100+, and we are looking to pay 50), ask about expectations. If they have much higher expectations, we say - that's not the range we were looking at. Do you still want to continue? This is a small-mid size company though. Larger companies, where pay is much more dictated by HR policies, likely different.
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Apr 17, 2013 12:25
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HipsLikeCinderella posted:I applied for a software engineering position and after 3 off-site and 1 on-site interviews the company tells me they think I would be a better fit as a systems test engineer. Honestly, I have no idea why they think that. I did screw up some linked list questions after 12+ hours of travel and no sleep, so maybe they think I'm a poor coder but still want me as an employee? Regardless, they set up another technical interview tomorrow for the systems test role. Can anyone tell me what I should be brushing up on other than white/black-box testing and software development life cycle? The only real experience I have with real testing is JUnit coverage tests. It may not just have been the test, but the actual interview. In our office where we have both QA/programming - if we find someone to be a good fit culturally, but not necessarily "up to par" to be a programmer, we will ask them if they want to interview for QA.
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Apr 17, 2013 12:27
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HipsLikeCinderella posted:So I guess it depends on the company whether it's easy to move to developer from a tester position. How easy is it in general? I would really like to work for this company but I had a really terrible day at the interview and know I have the skill set to be a developer there. Being a tester would bring me new perspective but I'm not interested in doing it for more than a year and I don't want my career path to narrow if I take this job. Unfortunately it's all going to depend on the company. But normally the most important thing you can do is excel in the current job (or in your case, the job offered).
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Apr 19, 2013 10:04
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Knyteguy posted:Well I just had a coding test with one of the largest marketing firms in the world, which I thought I completely bombed... but the code administrator just got back to me and said everything looks good! I'm very surprised, I had to leave a question out of 4 blank because my SQL statements (especially w/ unions/joins) are not very strong at all. One of the questions I couldn't figure out how to do in straight Javascript, so I just did it in Node.js (where it said only Javascript/jQuery were allowed), and I don't know anything about C# class inheritance which was another part of a question. I did get to use some C# class knowledge regarding private variable knowledge, which I just learned yesterday from everyone here though, so that was cool. I don't know how many companies do this, but sometimes the technical test is not just how much you get right, but how much it correlates to your resume. As in.. Failing the C# question is fine. Unless you claim to be an expert. Not knowing everything in SQL is fine. Unless you said you have 5 years of SQL experience.
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Apr 25, 2013 12:35
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shrughes posted:What kind of crazy deranged companies require an official transcript? evensevenone posted:People do that? That's even more ridiculous than asking for a transcript. I guess it depends on how far out of college you are. But for someone on their first/second job out of college, what's wrong with requesting the transcript? Not to mention, that tends to do things like - guarantee a person actually graduated college. My own experience: I've asked for transcripts when the person has a somewhat flawed academic past. Maybe they have a really low GPA, or it is taking them 6 years to graduate college. But - they have a story - that they explain well, and its something I can get past. Honestly, the fact you failed calculus and spanish doesn't matter so much to me. On the other hand, seeing that you failed databases twice (and then passed with a D) is a bit more of a problem.
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Apr 29, 2013 13:30
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tk posted:It's a good sign. They are interested in you. The "other teams" could mean a few different things. They could think you are a better fit on another team, or the people you are meeting with get input on all new hires, or any number of other things. Key word is reasonable here. And I agree fully. And it's not so much the number, but the way it was presented. My own experience on a backfire: There was one guy where after we made an offer, the way he came back and negotiated made us reconsider everything. To start with, we gave him what he originally asked for; then came back asking for 50% more. And the way he worded the request (it was an email) was so brimming with over confidence/arrogance, that we went - wow, what the heck happened here. It was also worded in such a way that you could take non negotiation (on our part) as him turning down the offer. We ended up asking to have another conversation with him, where he pretty much admitted he realized he screwed up in his request, and he wasn't familiar with negotiation. And we made nice, and it all worked out. But it could have went the other way.
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May 2, 2013 14:04
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:46 |
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The only time a cover letter has ever mattered/made a difference to me (as someone hiring), is when it was someone coming out of college with a resume that wasn't really a right fit. But the cover letter was able to frame a story of why their resume was relevant to the job position, and we should give it a further look.
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May 16, 2013 09:26
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