Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

necrobobsledder posted:

This is all part of why I had to laugh at Y Combinator's Big Ideas suggestion on improving enterprise software - the solution to improving the technical quality of enterprise software is no more of a technical issue than world hunger is about producing enough food for the planet. We should remember, after all, that most software did come from the enterprise so long ago.

On the other hand, I've certainly met some drat smart guys still in enterprise software. The other hypothesis I have is that the resulting software from these cultures is due to the chilling implications of the Milgram experiment.

You're onto something here. For a year and a half I worked at an ERP vendor as part of a few client project teams, and it drove me nuts.

Enterprise software is not made to have a beautiful user experience that saves time, or "just do one thing and do it right" design or any of that stuff that makes YC portfolio companies shine. It's designed such that a company with deep pockets can send out an RFP that describes all the ridiculous corner cases that they might encounter in their business once in a blue moon and a vendor can respond with "Oh yeah it'll hit that out of the park" no matter what the question might be.

Then the client buys a license to a product that does none of that stuff out of the box, and signs off on a contract to have the vendor's consultants develop some custom bolt-on to address all the stuff the salesman promised. The vendor loves this because this means not only is it extra hours for their professional services organization to develop the custom stuff, everybody knows it's going to be an ugly mess that could well break spectacularly the next time the vendor puts out a maintenance release. That leaves a perpetual need for additional development/testing hours, which helps that sales guy's bonus later on.

And maybe some line item in the functional spec that takes 40 consulting hours at god knows what bill rate to code a solution for is something that may only crop up once a year and can be addressed in 30 minutes by a $20/hour clerical employee. Time to payoff is centuries away, but that's all muddied up in the fact it's a "requirement" and they were promised it could be done.

Finally after what probably has been (at minimum) months of schedule slippage, the system goes live. Then the users, who are not the people buying the software, actually get their hands on it. The custom bolt-on stuff doesn't "quite" follow the same UX flow as the rest of the system, making it harder for them to do their work.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2011 07:09

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:05

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Super Dude posted:

I'm going to be graduating in December with a CS degree. I went to the career fair today, spoke with the rep from a company, and he called me a few hours ago to set up an interview for tomorrow morning. This is my first interview for a true technical position, so I'm sort of freaking out. He said the technical questions will focus mainly on object oriented design and some basic database stuff. The interview is supposed to last about 30 minutes (so the technical stuff is probably 20-25 minutes. Any idea what kind of questions I can expect?

Stuff I might ask if I were in their shoes, and stuff I have asked in interviews in the past:

OO stuff:
- What's a class? What's an object? What's the difference between the two? (Seriously this sounds like baby CS101 stuff that you can explain in one sentence, but you'd have no idea how many times candidates totally blow it)
- What's the difference between static and instance variables/methods? When would you want to use static fields or methods?
- Explain inheritance and polymorphism to me. What does it mean to override something? What's the difference between overriding and overloading?

DB stuff:
- What does a join clause do? What's the difference between an inner join and an outer join? What about left outer join vs right outer join?
- Design a database to model this problem. I run a department store. My customers buy things in orders. Sometimes they buy more than one item in an order. Help me track my customers, my products for sale, the orders (what customers bought when), and what method of payment they used on the order.
(At a high level what I'd expect someone to have here is a table for customers, and a table for products. You'd also have a table for orders that has a foreign key to customers and a field for method of payment, and then also a bridge table between orders and products)
- Show me what the primary keys are in each of these tables in your database.
- Write me a SQL query against your database to find all the customers who bought Product X.
- Write me a query to find all customers who have paid with a credit card more than 3 times. use GROUP BY

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Sep 22, 2011

# ¿ Sep 22, 2011 06:37

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Hu Fa Ted posted:

2.) Not sperg out when I ask what a pointer is (or sperg out in general)

I once worked with someone who once told me "I know C, but I just plain do not get pointers." Bozo bit: flipped.

quote:

3.) I usually ask, on a scale of 1 - 10, where 1 is "have heard of it" and 10 is "wrote the book on it", to rate themselves in a few topics, C#, etc. If they go over 5 I usually test to destruction.

Thank you. I had someone do something similar to me on a Microsoft interview when I was about to graduate college. I way overestimated my abilities with C++ and the interviewer did me a great favor by tearing me a new rear end in a top hat with questions that she totally knew I would have no clue about. It taught me a very necessary degree of humility.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2011 04:27

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

TasteMyHouse posted:

I wanna know what kind of questions were asked :3 I wanna see how I measure up

Unfortunately it was nearly a decade ago and the only real detail of the interview I remember was how awkward it was that I was wearing a suit, while the interviewer was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt that had to have come from the Salvation Army.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2011 05:04

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Piss Man 94 posted:

Had an interview the other week. I asked the guy to program A Thing so he made a new class and started writing code his code outside the class

edit: Java position

like this?

code:

public class Monkeybutt extends Thingymabob {

   private static Snuffleupagus myFriend;

}

System.out.println("I KNOW JAVA");

# ¿ Oct 12, 2011 21:08

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

csammis posted:

The internship field is astonishingly full of seekers. I had no idea how crazy it is until I went to a career fair at my alma mater last month reppin' R&D at my company. We had first-year freshmen - people who had started college six weeks ago - handing us resumes. A few colleagues of mine have had similar experiences at other schools.

I really don't remember that kind of pressure when I was in school. Are academic advisors saying "get an internship or die trying" instead of "hello welcome to State Tech home of the Fighting Animals" these days?

This has been my experience too when recruiting out of career fairs. For every one person looking for full time work there were probably 7 or 8 intern applicants, and a lot were not exactly anywhere close to qualified (even got a few humanities majors handing in resumes with no documented CS course work or experience).

I graduated from undergrad in 2003, and even then my CS department was drilling the idea into people's heads that they were utter worthless human beings unless they had lined up internships or were working as some professor's research lackey in addition to their coursework.

In the years after I went to college there have been plenty more of the "do 100 extracurriculars, apply to 27 universities, etc" kids coming to universities, so I can certainly imagine there are people just shotgunning the internship applications all over the place.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Oct 25, 2011

# ¿ Oct 25, 2011 21:45

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

Heh, I don't graduate for another year and I've been on the hunt like a madman.

What's the worst thing that will happen if you start now? There's a few possible outcomes

-You get an interview, they feel you're competent and offer you a job right now
-You get an interview, they don't like you and you're back at square one (and have interview experience!)
-You get an interview, they don't hire you for a full-time development position but offer you an internship or liked your personality and want you to come back when you graduate
-You don't get any interviews, and you're back at square one again

There is no harm in trying to look for a job now. ~~Wasn't there just a discussion about this earlier about lining up summer internships and when to start?~~ Read any of the past like, 15 posts.

Seriously, this isn't a bad idea anyway. If you land an internship the summer before you graduate, and you manage not to gently caress it up while working that summer, your odds are pretty good in terms of getting fast-tracked for a full time position after graduation.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2011 06:04

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Ithaqua posted:

Yeah, I've always answered that question by saying that I want to be a technical lead / architect, just not a manager. Never a manager.

Yeah I think "management" (in the sense of telling people what to do, but not doing) for me is a distraction from making stuff. I don't like not making stuff, it makes me feel like I'm not contributing or living up to my potential. Being a project lead, handling requirements, etc are things that are still related to pushing the ball forward in some technical sense.

I would not hold it against someone if they expressed a similar opinion.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2011 23:52

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Pweller posted:

Read this today

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/tech-careers/noncompete-agreements-carry-high-cost-for-engineers

Talks about new hires getting blindsided by non-compete agreements.

I've signed these before, since I didn't feel I really had a choice...
What are your guys' thoughts/strategies here?
IP is such a shitstorm it makes me worry about getting sued if I ever were to start my own company (without basing it on any other company's work).

I signed a noncompete/nonsolicit for a former job that was, in my mind, pretty overreaching. It stipulated that for a year after I were to quit, I could not work for anyone that dealt in the same product/services that the company offered while I worked there. It was not limited specifically to whatever product line I worked on.

The trouble is that company had bought dozens of software companies over the years and had their hands in all sorts of businesses - HR software (which is what I worked on), ERP, CRM, library card catalog systems, banking, and even fast food restaurant cash registers, and that's probably not even scratching the surface.

If that's not enough, it established the geographical scope as being anywhere in North America. So basically it pretty much meant I couldn't work in any company that sold software to businesses, period.

My wife is an attorney, and she basically told me that courts look at noncompetes in terms of whether the scope is reasonably defined. After talking it over we pretty much agreed that I could make the case that this is not in the least reasonably defined, and there was still the question of whether the company would ever bother to come after me for it anyway if I were to go to a competitor.

I lasted at that company for a year and a half and then quit to go work in biotech, so all my consternation over the whole thing wound up moot anyway.

DISCLAIMER: the above is not legal advice and you should not rely upon it. Go ask your own attorney to review any legal document you are unsure about.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Nov 4, 2011

# ¿ Nov 4, 2011 04:39

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Boy Wunder posted:

Finally, what is the most effective way to search for jobs? I've mainly been going directly to company web sites and browsing the careers sections, but most of the jobs there have requirements of 2+ years of professional experience. Lots of the sites state that if you don't see an offering that suits your experience or skills, you can still submit a resume and they may contact you later. Anyone had luck with these or is it a waste of time?

Stupid question, do you live in a major metro area, or a college town or something? If so, what sort of technical interests do you have? I don't live in a terribly huge city but here we have local meetups for web dev, two different mobile groups (one iOS, one Android), a .NET group, a JavaScript group, and even a functional programming group. These are things you'd either find in a big city or a college town where there are students and recent grads sticking around in town.

There's one thing in common with all these groups and that is that they are crawling with people who are trying to hire. Every one of these meetings I've gone to, I've had at least one, usually more, person ask me if I wanted a new job. At most all these, the free food/beer was usually also sponsored by independent recruiters or tech staffing companies who a person there at the meeting to talk to.

I would say consider searching around for any of these technical groups because they are great networking opportunities and you'll probably learn something out of it to help boost your skills too. While you might expect these meetings are full of awkward sperglords the majority of people I've met at these sorts of things are pretty cool folks.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2011 06:41

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

FamDav posted:

Maybe you should've gone to a better school?

Edit: Though I do agree that a lot of programs provide very easy classes because they have to cater to who they're teaching. If you go to a top 10 uni or lac you're going to get a much better again. If you can't get in well whelp hope you can teach yourself.

The better CS programs buy into the "computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes" school of thought. So you graduate knowing a heap of theory but not a lot of practical stuff unless you tried exploring it yourself.

Which is for the better, because I have seen plenty of people with "CS" degrees where the core coursework was making stuff in MS Access and so it's all irrelevant right off the bat.

One such person told me they knew C, "but I totally do not get pointers, I don't use them at all." :ughh:

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jan 4, 2012

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 04:56

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

So just for grins I tried the String#to_i thing out myself. This would fail spectacularly if this was signed or had decimals but I wonder how far off I am here for a 2:30 am attempt

code:

class String
    def fake_to_i(base=10)
        k = 0;
        (0...self.length).each do |i|
           k *= base
           k += (self[i].ord - '0'.ord)
        end

        return k
    end
end

a = "31337"
puts a.fake_to_i 

b= "101"
puts b.fake_to_i(2)   # should give 5

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 09:44

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

ancient lobster posted:

Intro to Algorithms by who?

Is there any other?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2012 06:08

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

code:

(1..100).each do |i|
  out = ""
  out << "foo" if i % 3 == 0
  out << "bar" if i % 5 == 0
  out << "baz" if i % 7 == 0
  out << "#{i}" unless out != ""
  puts out
end

Probably could've done it like this and ignored the extra mod 3/5/7, but either way I don't think you really messed it up.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2012 07:41

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Otto Skorzeny posted:

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

Four hours to administer, and done so in a controlled environment by a professional whose hourly billing rate would make it unfeasible to use them to decide who gets a phone interview.

Wikipedia cites studies saying average IQ test for a college graduate comes out to 115, so around +1 sigma or 84th percentile.

So if you have an "inexplicable" number of people who graduated from rigorous CS programs and have an impressive work history, yet score below 100 altogether on your IQ test, maybe your test can explicate things.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2012 17:40

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

e; Any input on jobs that say "Send your cover letter / resume / salary requirements to <email>"? I've heard somewhere that can be a kind of "test" to see the candidates confidence levels? Make sure they don't think they're worth more / less than they really are.

I thought it was to accomplish one of two things, depending upon your response

1) Find out if you're asking for more than they're willing to pay, and if so pitch your resume in the trash before they waste any more time talking to you
2) Get you on the record as saying you're cool with a specific amount, which could in fact be less than they would have otherwise offered you.

They might hypothetically be perfectly fine paying $90K for a given position, and that's what everyone else on the team gets paid -- but because you said in your cover letter you wanted $75K, well, you've cheated yourself. Even if they offer you $85K and say "woah now, we don't pay that low, let's pay you what you're worth!" you have lost any ability to negotiate higher than their opening offer since you said up front you're cool with $75K and that's ten grand more.

#2 burned a friend of mine once. We both applied for and got jobs at the same company. My friend told them a number up front, which turned out to be way below the pay band for the position. I told them no numbers at all.

We both got the same opening offer. I was able to get another $5K out of them, while my friend pretty much was stuck with what they offered.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jan 21, 2012

# ¿ Jan 21, 2012 05:19

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sarcasmatron posted:

It's a great strategy for young programmers who work in startups and have been prematurely advanced into a lead/architect position and waste hundreds of hours a year writing mediocre code that isn't refactorable because they couldn't be bothered to read API documentation.

They are generally the same people looking for ninjas in a work hard, play hard culture.

They also say stupid things like "my favorite IDE is vi*."

I'll just leave this here (the original was pulled from HN but thankfully there was a cache)

# ¿ Jan 27, 2012 06:20

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

And even if I did, I dunno... what would I contribute? I guess I lack confidence in my abilities even though I'd say I'm ahead of most of my fellow students.

Most projects on Github that are actively maintained probably have a long list of bugs or to-do items in the "Issues" list.

Find an open source project you like or use a lot and see if there's anything in the issues list that looks like it could be a low-hanging fruit. Or even just fix or cleanup some documentation if you see it.

To make the change, what's customary is that you "fork" the repository in Github, which is an exact clone of the repository as maintained by the project owner, except you own the fork. You check that out and push your changes back into your own fork.

Then, you create a "pull request," which basically is a message to the project maintainer to tell them "hey I've got a fix for issue #1234," and they can pull your changes from your fork into the master branch of the project. And at that point your name is enshrined in the commit history for that project forever and you can be all proud that you've contributed to a project.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2012 07:13

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

Alright, career fair at school next Thursday! I went out and blew my tax returns on 2 suits, 4 shirts, 4 ties, and 2 pairs of shoes.

Tips, pointers, recommendations? I've never been to a career fair before so I don't know what to expect from an engagement with a company. Is it just a quick, "hi nice to meet you here's my resume" thing or do you actually spend time with them, generally? I did a little bit of research on the companies that will be attending and I have a list of the ones I definitely want to see / talk to, and then I'll visit everyone else after that.

I'll reinforce a couple things csammis said, especially about getting there earlier. You have no idea how six hours on your feet constantly talking to people will tax you.

And, as he said, be memorable - have some kind of hook so they can remember you later. Some project you're proud of, a hobby you've got, anything to help distinguish yourself from the flood of undergrads they will see who are all just like you.

When my team does career fair trips we generally always end up grabbing beers immediately afterward. Part to take the edge off the aforementioned taxing six hours, and part to review resumes while everything's still fresh in our mind. We would refer to people at that point as "that guy with the election data visualization project up on github" or "the girl who wrote an iPhone app for her college radio station" or even just "the kid who's a drummer in a Genesis tribute band."

Most college career fairs I've been to on the recruiting side would list on their website ahead of time who was recruiting. Use this to come up with an attack plan. Over the next week you should get a look at it to see who's coming, and spend some time to research the companies. If there's some project you've worked on that would maybe make you look good to one company versus another, make a custom copy of your resume to hand to the guys at that particular company and highlight that stuff.

If after you've done the research and you don't want to work for a particular place, just don't go to their booth. We don't take it personally. Don't feel obligated to burn everyone's time by standing there in front of my table while I talk to you and try to discern whether you're just shy or you're really just killing time until the line at the next table over dies down.

And most of all try to have some fun. You should be proud to get out there and brag about yourself.

edit:

Chasiubao posted:

Call out your non-school stuff. Everyone's done the same projects and taken the same classes. You need to stand out if you have that ability. Don't come off as desperate. Research the companies there and have an idea of what they do, and what you want to do. Enthusiasm is one thing, telling someone that you'll do anything just sounds a bit sad

Seconding this. I saw a lot of people really enthusiastically tell me "oh I wrote a system for tracking bank accounts" (or put it on their resume) as if they had interned at a bank or something big. No, that was just a standard project at in the database theory course at that school, because EVERYONE told me the same thing.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Feb 22, 2012

# ¿ Feb 22, 2012 19:56

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

how!! posted:

Is this the right place to get a cover letter critiqued? I never know what to write on these things... http://pastebin.com/0Qn9UjcP

It's for a senior developer position, so they kind of expect someone at that level to know how to write cover letters, I suppose... Does mine read like something that sounds like it was written by a senior developer?

There's a lot of pontificating in there about software development but it doesn't tell me why I should hire you. Tell the reader about yourself and why your experiences matter to the position.

Do something like:

quote:

Dear Sir/Madam:

I am extremely interested in your Backend Developer position at Consolidated Huge Company, Inc. I have over five years' experience with the Django framework and am ready to take on some new challenges.

My favorite project was <xyz>, where I implemented <blahblahblah>. My experience makes me a great candidate for the position, because <yadayadyada>.

I am currently based in Miami but I am willing to relocate to New York City if offered this position.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Best Regards,
how!!

# ¿ May 21, 2012 04:47

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

hieronymus posted:

Are you on drugs? I used to spent eight hours a week in meetings with senior software engineers, and I've cut that down to four. I get way more out of emailing a single dev with a specific question.

Yeah, I forgot to address the meeting part because that also jumped out at me. The "we need to have regular meetings" part of that cover letter would make me want to not hire you outright.

Meetings suck and usually deliver no value to most people in the room. Furthermore it takes everyone another hour to get back into the zone after the meeting is over.

I work on a team of 20 people. So a one hour team meeting means you've soaked 40 hours of productivity. If everyone in the room is a software developer making $75K then that means that one hour meeting cost you almost $1500. I bet it wasn't worth it.

# ¿ May 21, 2012 05:24

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

how!! posted:

So thats why I think it's best to handle hard problems first.

The lesson to take home from this isn't "do what is hard first." It's "do what is critical to the business/getting a viable product out the door, and be prepared to admit when you're wrong."

The team knew there was a blocker, and chose to ignore it because they were afraid of admitting a bad decision was made. You may feel like you look like a fool pointing this out before you launch, but you'll look like a way bigger fool after you go live and stuff goes bad.

There could well be problems that are easy and critical to getting the project off the ground, and if you look past them because they are not hard, you could just as easily take your eye off that ball.

You could end up hypothetically focusing on getting some highly available, auto-scaled on EC2, Varnish-cached frontend with a sharded Redis object store to provide lightning fast response time, because it seemed hard and thus getting the app to run at "Web Scale" was the appropriate problem to choose to solve. Meanwhile while doing that you ignore the fact that the front page is full of typos and nobody wants to use it because it looks like a Russian phishing site.

# ¿ May 22, 2012 04:02

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

how!! posted:

Do you all think it is reasonable to expect someone to get all of that done in two hours, or did I just gently caress it up? I basically worked on this the entire two hours. The first half hour I spent getting postgres running on my machine (I was expecting a fizzbuzz via etherpad, or a codility or something like that, so I wasn't really prepared)

Did they have any requirements as to what you wrote it in? Two hours would be quite generous of them if this were a Rails app.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 05:41

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

aBagorn posted:

Edit: As far as comma breakability, you could split the string only at the decimal point, and then when you are parsing the [0] substring, you can check for any commas and throw them out and then check string.length and work it that way, yeah?

Even easier is to just lose the commas and then chew up the string iteratively using the mod operator.

Perl code:

sub parse_dollars {
    my $number = shift;
    my @magnitudes = ('', 'thousand', 'million', 'billion');

    # lose the commas (and anything else that isn't a decimal point or a digit)
    $number =~ s/[^0-9\.]//g;

    my ($integer_part, $decimal_part) = split /\./, $number;

    my $magnitude = 0;
    my @output_wavs;
    while ($integer_part > 0) {
        my $next_thousand = $integer_part % 1000;
        
        $integer_part  = ($integer_part-$next_thousand)/1000;

        my @thousands_wavs = parse_thousands($next_thousand);
        if ($magnitude >0) {
            push @thousands_wavs, $magnitudes[$magnitude];
        }
        unshift (@output_wavs, @thousands_wavs);
  
        $magnitude++;
    }     

    push @output_wavs, "dollars";
    if ($decimal_part > 0) {
        push @output_wavs, ("and", parse_tens($decimal_part), "cents");
    }

    return join " + ", map { sprintf("%s.wav", $_) } @output_wavs;
}


sub parse_thousands {
    my $number = shift; 

    my $tens= $number % 100;
    my @out = ();
    if ($number > 99) {
       my $hundreds_place = ($number-$tens)/100;
    
       push @out, ($hundreds_place, 'hundred');
    }

    push @out, parse_tens($number % 100);

    return @out;
}

sub parse_tens {
    my $number = shift;
    if ($number <= 20) {
        return ($number);
    } else {
        my $ones_place = $number % 10;
        my $tens_place = $number-$ones_place; 

        my @out = ($tens_place);           
        push @out, $ones_place if ($ones_place > 0);
        return @out;
    }
}

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Jun 13, 2012

# ¿ Jun 13, 2012 02:10

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

And I just don't see the point to an Objective section. Isn't that what the cover letter is for?

I thought it was implied that if the employer has your resume in hand that your objective was clearly to work for them.

I have never once seen an objective block that wasn't full of fluffy vague statements made just so the box was filled in.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 21:20

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Paolomania posted:

By this do you mean that the company doesn't have an equivalent of Google's 20% projects or that you have signed a document that basically gives the company rights to every line of code you write both on and off the clock? If it is neither of these cases - who cares what they tell you, the company has no say over what you do with your time outside the office.

I worked for a firm who had an employment contract that specified:

- I am to devote all effort to the company. No freelancing, side projects, part time job at a record store, whatever.
- anything I write, on and off the clock, is theirs.

I stupidly accepted these terms, because the salary/bonus bump was so great that I thought "who needs to freelance." Then the economy went into the toilet, the bonus evaporated, and I realized I wasn't freelancing for the money, I was doing side projects because I thought they were fun.

I worked for that company for 18 months, and the last 9 were spent applying other places in an effort to get out.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 23:14

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Gee Wizard posted:

Just had an interview for an internship today, and it went pretty well. He said he'd get back to me later in the week with an answer. Is there anything I should do in the meantime, like a follow-up email thanking him for the interview?

I think it'd be courteous, but it might come across as needy. What's the move here?

anecdote incoming :siren:

At my last job I was a remote field employee, and it wasn't until almost a year after I got to meet the manager who interviewed me. She handled my phone interviews, but she was not the person who'd be my boss if I got an offer.

She and my team were crossing paths on business trips one week and so she hosted a team dinner. One of my friends who hired on with me at the same time was sitting there with me, and it was their first time meeting her too. The lady took a moment to tell my friend that she enjoyed talking to them on the phone, and said they were the only candidate she had interviewed who followed up afterward with a thank you.

Everyone at the table was someone she hired, email or no. So an email isn't going to move the needle if you weren't going to get hired anyway. But it did make my friend look good after the fact, which didn't hurt.

If you actually enjoyed talking to the boss, then I see no harm in shooting over a quick email along the lines of "I enjoyed talking to you today, thanks very much for taking some time out."

# ¿ Jul 24, 2012 02:31

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

shrughes posted:

If you are a rockstar programmer who didn't care about school, it'd be pretty hard to get significantly below a 3.5 even if you put in "no" effort. Absolutely impossible for CS in-major GPA.

In-major, yeah, but I knew plenty of people in college who were absolutely bombing their gen-ed stuff because they'd do their CS coursework, then hack on side projects, rather than doing the other work that needed being done.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2012 19:05

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Cicero posted:

It's possible (likely?) that they just want to make sure you're not a total grognard who can code but not interact with other hue-monns.

Yeah, "culture interview" I think means "make sure this guy isn't a complete wacko."

I had something similar; several rounds of phone interviews and then they had a project manager who was in town on business meet me at a Starbucks for an in-person.

We just sat there shooting the poo poo for 30 minutes and he told me what his project team was working on. Real informal.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2012 15:37

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Sab669 posted:

God drat it. Got a call the other day saying this awesome job I'm super excited to be interviewing for might not exist anymore. Finished interview 2 and said they'd (they being both the guy I interviewed with, and the hr rep whose been working with me in regards to scheduling stuff) pass me on to the next step. Then a few days later I got a call saying it could be a week+ til I hear from them while they do some sort of internal review on the availability of the job. Is that them secretly saying piss off, or am I just being an insecure ninny and they're legitimately doing some internal working

Honestly it sounds to me like they want to hire you, there may be some internal funding issues related to actually being able to fill the position, and they're being proactive by telling you now while they go plead up the chain to be able to extend you an offer. I wouldn't sweat it just yet.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 00:52

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

astr0man posted:

So I got an unsolicited email from a guy claiming to be a Google recruiter. My first reaction was that it was fake/phishing, but he has a valid linkedin profile and none of the links in his email point to anywhere unexpected.

I thought that it was fake because he said he got my information from github, and thought I might be a good fit based on that info. While I do have a github account and my name and such is available, I'm not an active contributor to any projects of note. The only commits I have are just small personal scripts and a tiny python apps that I work on with a friend.

Has this happened to anyone else?

edited for grammar

The same happened to me, except the guy didn't at all where he found me.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2012 01:13

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

You should have zero problem finding work, especially in this environment. There is no reason to put up with living in a place you do not like.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 04:47

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

edit: n/m

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Oct 26, 2012

# ¿ Oct 26, 2012 05:28

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Milotic posted:

Being blunt, if I saw a ranking on a CV, I'd raise an eyebrow and would do some more digging to find out if the candidate is a good culture fit for our place. Again, that's just my opinion - others might not bat an eyelid.

Naw, I think you're not the only one. I'd think the same thing if I saw someone put "mensa member" on a resume, honestly.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2012 23:07

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

unsanitary posted:

It sounds like first-job salaries for outgoing CS grads varies greatly by region you're living in. Does anyone have an idea what an average salary range for midwestern cities like Minneapolis/Chicago/St. Louis/Milwaukee for a CS grad without much experience?

I'd say even within those cities you name there's probably a lot of wobble due to cost of living.

At least here in St. Louis, it's my impression that $50-$60K probably wouldn't be out of the question for a fresh grad with minimal experience. I also know experienced folks who are probably doing closer to $90-$100K.

That said, it's really cheap to live in STL and I think that's reflected in the salaries here. $600-$700 in rent could get you a 2-bedroom apartment (to put into perspective, I own a townhouse with a yard and garage, and my tenant pays $850 for it). You wouldn't need a roommate, and even at $50K/year that'd still leave you with nearly $2K/month left over.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 05:11

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Rurutia posted:

I would honestly not even bother countering with an offer like that unless I really had no other (better) options.

Yeah. Even if it was a cold day in hell and they actually went along with your counter of $90K, you would still end up working for a company run by a bunch of cheapskates. Also, your coworkers would probably be idiots, because you'd have to be one in order to accept an offer like that.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2012 03:27

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Pweller posted:

Since this is probably a better place to ask than the Business subforum, what level of annual benefits are you guys getting right now in terms of pension, retirement funds, company shares, stock. I'm trying to gauge what's normal for software these days (please temper your cali/ny anecdotes with reason). Pretty much exited new-grad status, and am looking for creative ways to consider bumping up compensation soon (have other strong offers recently but my company is awesome and I want to make it work).

At my current employer, so long as I pitch 5% (or more) of my pretax salary into the retirement plan, they kick in 7% of my salary. You are eligible to deposit from your hire date, and on your 2 year anniversary you start getting the match. It's vested immediately. Also, on your 10th hire date anniversary, they start throwing in 10% of your salary. It's all invested through Vanguard and so they're some good low-expense funds.

The job before this would match 25% of your contribution, with their match capped at 1% of your annual salary. Their contribution vested over five years. About 10 months into my tenure there they suspended the match due to the economy, saying "we are a profitable company but our investors require a certain return." When I quit and rolled over the 401k, the amount of vested employer contribution I got out of the match would have been barely enough to buy a nice dinner for two.

I work in academia so my base salary is lower but I get a heap of other benefits, like free classes (I took a bunch of glassblowing classes for free and got a graduate degree for 50% off), the retirement match, and some great health insurance. There's also free college for my kid if I stick around long enough for that. I also signed no intellectual property assignment agreements, so they're not going to get in the way of whatever side projects or freelancing I do.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2012 20:36

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

gucci void main posted:

I subsequently received a text message from the tech head (I emailed another person declining) saying "Pretty disappointed that you didn't accept after I got you what you said you wanted".

It's bad enough that they carry out business negotiations & hiring stuff via SMS at all, let alone send you passive agressive SMS messages when you call them out on the lovely offer they made.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2012 23:26

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

You answered the questions right, so there's that. Most reasonable and intelligent people can also realize that a speech condition is not something that is going to preclude you from doing good work.

If they are going to judge you for it and they don't move things forward because you stuttered in the interview, consider that you just dodged working for an rear end in a top hat.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2013 23:19

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:05

kitten smoothie: Dec 29, 2001

Cicero posted:

What's coworking?

When I have heard this term used it refers to a shared space with desks or small offices you can rent for a couple hundred bucks a month. Your rent often covers internet access, conference rooms you can reserve, and sometimes a receptionist who can greet visitors and sign for your FedEx.

That's a nice perk if a company will pony up for that. One of the toughest parts of remote work is separating having fun at home from work. Not just to ensure you don't just sit at home and watch TV on company time, but also to make sure that you don't keep on doing work when you should be having fun with friends and family.

Renting a share of a coworking space can help keep you in the right frame of mind if you are the type who needs to put real clothes on in the morning and act like you are going to work. At the same time you still get to have a workspace that is what you want to make of it.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2013 23:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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