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JawnV6 posted:I agree, it's pretty ridiculous to call it "unemployed people only" when there's this other obvious contingent of folks who make a really good fit. Contracting and contract to hire is much more common for ME's, EE's (layout is $80/hr, can even source it on craigslist), and EE technicians. Sorry if I denigrated super special snowflake CS folks by suggesting this as another totally reasonable option in common use in other fields though. Given that a major benefit of using contractors or doing contract to hire is the lessened risk on both sides if the other side turns out to be lovely, I don't think it's a particularly sensible idea to compare hiring procedures between them and regular full time hires.
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May 26, 2014 16:25
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JawnV6 posted:I agree, it's pretty ridiculous to call it "unemployed people only" when there's this other obvious contingent of folks who make a really good fit. Contracting and contract to hire is much more common for ME's, EE's (layout is $80/hr, can even source it on craigslist), and EE technicians. Sorry if I denigrated super special snowflake CS folks by suggesting this as another totally reasonable option in common use in other fields though. Grabbing a pickup truck and heading down to Home Depot is a totally reasonable option in other fields as well. But you don't see the programming thread recommending that after you finish brushing up on Oracle you head on down to get you next DBA position.
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May 26, 2014 19:14
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JawnV6 posted:I agree, it's pretty ridiculous to call it "unemployed people only" when there's this other obvious contingent of folks who make a really good fit. Contracting and contract to hire is much more common for ME's, EE's (layout is $80/hr, can even source it on craigslist), and EE technicians. Sorry if I denigrated super special snowflake CS folks by suggesting this as another totally reasonable option in common use in other fields though. Do you have a brain tumor? The fact that employers in other fields might do something doesn't mean that employers hiring programmers should do that thing. In case you haven't noticed, the job market for programmers, especially in certain places, is a lot different than that for ME's.
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May 26, 2014 21:03
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shrughes posted:Do you have a brain tumor? Serious question: Are you this much of a condescending prick in interviews, or is this an internet-only persona?
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May 27, 2014 00:10
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Ithaqua posted:Serious question: Are you this much of a condescending prick in interviews, or is this an internet-only persona? Put Shrughes On Ignore!
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May 27, 2014 00:15
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Skuto posted:Given that a major benefit of using contractors or doing contract to hire is the lessened risk on both sides if the other side turns out to be lovely, I don't think it's a particularly sensible idea to compare hiring procedures between them and regular full time hires. Data point: I was hired full-time at my current place of employment after a week tryout period. It works as a decent low-pass filter over a resume that looks good but might have a spot or two (i.e. circumstances outside of one's control). It also is good for determining whether you can get along with the person. The flip side of jumping from job to job is people quitting to recover from a job with full confidence that their job search afterwards won't be terribly prolonged. Definitely seen tons of people do it, so a 1 week trial isn't terribly outlandish, especially if the company is extremely hesitant to add an additional head at all, and is trying to keep head count down.
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May 27, 2014 03:28
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The flip side of jumping from job to job is people quitting to recover from a job with full confidence that their job search afterwards won't be terribly prolonged. Definitely seen tons of people do it, so a 1 week trial isn't terribly outlandish, especially if the company is extremely hesitant to add an additional head at all, and is trying to keep head count down. Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying that you were unemployed and are talking about people that are also unemployed in the above paragraph. So you're really reinforcing the point that was made about the problem with that hiring method.
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May 27, 2014 07:24
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Skuto posted:Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying that you were unemployed and are talking about people that are also unemployed in the above paragraph. Hughlander posted:That last is interesting because it could be rephrased as: We only hire unemployed people with no other options. I had a lot of options, but I wanted to try working at this particular company. After basically talking for a couple of hours they decided to try me out. It may not be the best for people who are working, but for someone taking their time, it's not so bad, and signal it offers is a lot more detailed - i.e. work habits / work ethic, deepness or breadth of knowledge, how they communicate. So saying "oh, it's for desperate people without jobs" is kind of a gently caress-you to the idea that some people aren't rushing to go from job to job.  I've actually never spent *less* than two months between quitting and getting an offer for full-time employment I actually want to accept. I usually take that time to work on hobby projects and do like 2 or 3 interviews a week, max. I usually don't even start looking for a job until a couple of weeks in.
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May 27, 2014 08:49
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:A lot of people I know have quit, done nothing for a while, then found something else after a while. Switching from one job directly to another job isn't the overwhelming common case within my circle of acquaintances (however common it might be more broadly) If you assume a moderate six figure salary you can see my reaction when I rephrase that as "I have never spent less than $20k between quitting and getting an offer of full-time employment." Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
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May 27, 2014 12:12
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Sometimes sleeping in and playing video games for a while is worth it.
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May 27, 2014 14:05
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Skuto posted:Given that a major benefit of using contractors or doing contract to hire is the lessened risk on both sides if the other side turns out to be lovely, I don't think it's a particularly sensible idea to compare hiring procedures between them and regular full time hires. Hughlander posted:Grabbing a pickup truck and heading down to Home Depot is a totally reasonable option in other fields as well. But you don't see the programming thread recommending that after you finish brushing up on Oracle you head on down to get you next DBA position. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The flip side of jumping from job to job is people quitting to recover from a job with full confidence that their job search afterwards won't be terribly prolonged. Definitely seen tons of people do it, so a 1 week trial isn't terribly outlandish, especially if the company is extremely hesitant to add an additional head at all, and is trying to keep head count down. Hughlander posted:If you assume a moderate six figure salary you can see my reaction when I rephrase that as "I have never spent less than $20k between quitting and getting an offer of full-time employment."
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May 27, 2014 14:31
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JawnV6 posted:Yeah, you pretty much always have to be sucking at the teat of capitalism. If you have talent and you're not monetizing that every loving day of the year, what a chump! Taking some time for personal interests, family, vacation, these are all dollars out of your pocket. Guess what? I'm at the terminal in southern CA leaving a 10 day vacation with my family. Next week I'll meet up with Dr 666 at WWDC. I did all of these while gainfully employed and not watching the mortgage come out of savings. But I guess I'm just a special snowflake.
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May 27, 2014 14:43
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JawnV6 posted:This aspect is also totally missing from most people's uninformed blasting of the idea. If you're going from employee #4 to #5, this person is going to be part of the core of the company's culture, like it or not. They're going to be a large part of any given day and can't be stuffed into another team or department if they're personally abhorrent. I'm sure you can afford a mere 4 hours on sussing someone's personality out if they'll immediately be marked programmer #4095 and thrown into a giant bin with limited ability to spoil the rest and never have to see them in person again. But certain situations call for a little more attention. In the anecdote which started this little kerfuffle I was employee #5, so this was an aspect for sure. In fact when it was bypassed later on for some cultish Software Craftsmanship hero worship the new employee managed to bring down the company in 6 months.
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May 28, 2014 01:08
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e: this was just mean
JawnV6 fucked around with this message at 17:42 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 17:38
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Hey oldies. Thanks for the advice. I have made past the first all-day interview to the point where I will be talking to various team leads. Any tips on what to ask aside from "what does your team do?" or "how do you run your project?"
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Jul 11, 2014 22:52
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Paolomania posted:Hey oldies. Thanks for the advice. I have made past the first all-day interview to the point where I will be talking to various team leads. Any tips on what to ask aside from "what does your team do?" or "how do you run your project?" if you'd like to be more specific: do you do code reviews do you do qa how long does it generally take a new feature to be added, and why how do you assign and divide work do you have production metrics for what do you use your productions metric do you have a system for catching bugs in production what is your turn around time on bug report to fix how often does your team miss target for deliverables who are the stakeholders in your project how much developer input is there throughout the planning process is there oncall rotations how important is eliminating technical debt to the team how often do you actually get to work on technical debt do you have a mechanism for testing new features in production safely are there any good food trucks nearby will it be a problem if i dont drink how often do people on your team take vacations does it ever feel like someone on your team is irreplaceable how early do most people come in how late do most people stay do you find the work atmosphere conducive to work are you expected to attend a lot of meetings are you expected to mostly output code does your team keep up with security fixes and incremental updates in your dependencies how do you manage your dependencies, anyways how do you perform deployments how often are you deploying changes how do you handle bad deployments how do you manage your fleet who owns deployment how much new work is there how much maintenance work is there and im sure a bunch of other questions.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:34
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Oh, and because it is so important i will make it a separate post instead of an edit what do you use for source control
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Jul 12, 2014 02:36
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That is an awesome list of questions! And I second the emphasis on asking about source control. "None" would be a total nightmare, but getting stuck with Perforce was not much better.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:43
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FamDav posted:if you'd like to be more specific: Those are awesome. I'd add a few: - Do you have automated tests? If yes: How often do you run them? Are there any "known failures" that are ignored? - Do you have nightly builds? CI builds? - Does the company pay for professional development? (books, conferences, training, etc) - What specs do developer workstations have? How many monitors? - What's the workspace like? (Open floor plan, individual offices, shared offices?). If open, is it relatively quiet?
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Jul 12, 2014 04:04
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Mniot posted:And I second the emphasis on asking about source control. "None" would be a total nightmare, but getting stuck with Perforce was not much better. The only correct answer is "we roll our own". Well-known solutions like Mercurial and Git, or heaven forbid, Subversion, lack significant customization to an organization's specific needs. A candidate recently asked me about our self-rolled solution and responded negatively. There was only one response: "They see me rollin', they hating'". The candidate did not get an offer as they were unprepared to ride dirty.
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Jul 12, 2014 04:18
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Mniot posted:"None" would be a total nightmare, but getting stuck with Perforce was not much better. Although I prefer git, I've had a consulting gig that involved working with Perforce doing big merges day in and out. I didn't find it too bad. Like, most stuff just worked, and the merge UI was good. We got into problems because Perforce doesn't scale. When I looked into what Google (who also use/used Perforce heavily at the time) did to make it scale, I found scripts that rebooted the server if certain conditions were true. (At least Mercurial isn't immune from those either. And I can make github die as well, so I guess git too)
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Jul 12, 2014 11:39
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Skuto posted:Although I prefer git, I've had a consulting gig that involved working with Perforce doing big merges day in and out. I didn't find it too bad. Like, most stuff just worked, and the merge UI was good. The problem I had with it was that it's so centralized that the Perforce admins are a single point-of-failure. Our server usuall went down once a week for several hours each time (that blocks you from starting edits and causes the GUI client to jump to the foreground with an alert that it can't connect). The CLI tools were a pain to automate, too. Anyway, I think consulting makes some difference, too. When I'm a FTE I feel like all the tools are my tools and it drives me up the wall when they (a) don't work my way and (b) I can't fix them to work my way. The one time I was a contractor, the client had lovely tools and made dumb decisions but it didn't bother me very much.
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Jul 13, 2014 02:18
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I have a relative who apparently wrote a bunch of systems in COBOL back when it was still considered a good idea. She's looking at changing careers, and has been out of the industry for literally a decade and a half. Everyone likes to joke that COBOL programmers are paid in gold ingots for keeping the financial sector alive, but is there any truth to that? Are there are resources I can connect her with to see if she's fit to be a once and future COBOL programmer?
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Jul 13, 2014 21:56
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Cheekio posted:I have a relative who apparently wrote a bunch of systems in COBOL back when it was still considered a good idea. She's looking at changing careers, and has been out of the industry for literally a decade and a half. Bank mainframes are still all written in COBOL, maintained by 50+ year old programmers making beaucoup dollars (I have friends who work at banks and they think it's hilarious) so I imagine there's still a demand for her skillset. Similarly, Nuclear plants are all still running software written in FORTRAN. Some systems are critical enough that their owners are too scared to update/modify them, hence all the unpatched XP systems running in manufacturing plants and critical infrastructure.
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Jul 15, 2014 01:05
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Kyth posted:Why I'm happy in management: As an alternative POV, I can explain why I didn't end up taking a management role when it was offered to me. I interviewed all our managers who'd all been promoted from engineering. - They never get to do any technical development anymore. This makes most of them sad. - Their product is now a good team, not good code. Fixing people is a lot harder than fixing code. They have to be enough of a people-person to understand what others want, to read between the lines when people ask them for stuff, come up with socially-workable solutions, and defuse meltdowns and tantrums. Budget constraints mean they can't just toss out low performers and hire better ones. With broken code, they know that they can fix the code given enough time. That's not always the case with people and it's an entirely new skillset to learn. - There's a power differential between the manager and their team, and this requires they keep the team at a certain emotional distance. Can't always go drinking with the team like the old days, because they're the one who controls the team's bonuses and promotions, and ultimately whether or not they get fired. Non-rockstar team members will always be on eggshells around the manager to present themselves in the best light. - Being a good manager requires discipline, imagination, foresight, empathy, diplomacy, good communication, good time-management, and ambition. And those things have to be fairly consistent; they can't just slack off for a week and crunch through the next like they could to some extent with development work. - They have to let go of micro-managing. If a team encounters a technical obstacle, the manager has to pave the way for them to get over that obstacle and avoid the temptation to dive in and work on the technical problem itself. This can be hard because Solving Problems Is Fun. - They lose the possibility of sitting down and focusing on a single problem for hours at a time. Being in management means frequent context-switching and hundreds of interactions per day. I think it takes a special kind of person to embrace this kind of role, and many of the devs I've worked with would not be up to the task. I certainly didn't think I would enjoy it, so I declined the role. That said, it may be inevitable - I can't imagine still being a software developer at 60 and having significant value over some 28-year old.
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Jul 19, 2014 20:52
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Yeah, my wife is in a completely different field (sales) but actually demoted herself from a management position because she enjoyed selling, not being the target of everyones bitching sessions. She also actually earned more as a salesperson thanks to commission/bonuses. I'm a freelance developer, and I love the variety of the job, but after 15 years of doing web development, I'm not basically not able to change careers or move into fulltime employment, because noone wants to employ someone who has zero recent experience of a structured office environment, and I'm possibly 'too old' to work for a lot of the companies that my skillset would work for (I do a lot of work for marketing/new media/branding companies).
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Jul 20, 2014 10:39
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bonds0097 posted:Bank mainframes are still all written in COBOL, maintained by 50+ year old programmers making beaucoup dollars (I have friends who work at banks and they think it's hilarious) so I imagine there's still a demand for her skillset. I've frequently heard that COBOL programmers are worth their weight in gold but I've been curious if that holds any water. As a non-programmer that has been toying around with programming as a hobby, I've thought about picking up a COBOL book and seeing what I could learn.
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Jul 21, 2014 19:13
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Hughmoris posted:I've frequently heard that COBOL programmers are worth their weight in gold but I've been curious if that holds any water. As a non-programmer that has been toying around with programming as a hobby, I've thought about picking up a COBOL book and seeing what I could learn. They're worth their weight in gold because they have years of knowledge on how to maintain horrible legacy applications. An inexperienced COBOL developer is of limited utility. Plus, you'd never get to work on anything even remotely resembling "cool" software.
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Jul 21, 2014 19:32
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cynic posted:after 15 years of doing web development, I'm not basically not able to change careers or move into fulltime employment, because noone wants to employ someone who has zero recent experience of a structured office environment After 15 years experience you would have no trouble as long as it isn't all in Wordpress or similar. We employ ex-freelance all the time. They understand the need to get the job done.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:16
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I'm not sure if this is the right place for this but I couldn't find any relevant threads in BFC and it's fairly technically focussed. I'm just looking for some outside perspective. Background: I'm in Australia and I work in .net consulting (C#, almost exclusively web stuff) at a senior developer level and also have experience running small agile teams. I have decent soft skills and am perfectly capable working at a non-technical client alone or with a team. Professionally: C#, MVC 3/4/5, WebAPI, AngularJS, Cordova/Phonegap. Some F#. Tools: git, Jira, TFS, TeamCity, Bamboo, github, BitBucket, Azure, Octopus Deploy, PowerShell, node. Non-professionally: Haskell, F#, a little OCaml and a few years ago Python, C, and Scheme. Plans: I've always wanted to live outside of Australia for a few years. I'm looking at moving to western Europe some time next year. Ideally I'd prefer something outside of Ireland/UK but I don't speak any other languages at a professional level. I've been looking on Stack Overflow careers and there are postings for C# positions that suggest there is English work available in the Netherlands, France and maybe Scandinavia. I'd be happy in any of those places or Germany/Spain/Portugal. Questions: Given my experience, what sort of jobs titles should I be looking for? I don't know if I would have the confidence to sell myself at a team lead position in a foreign country but I'm concerned I might not be challenged enough in an internal LOB developer position. The cost of living here is pretty high so Paris/equivalent probably won't shock me but what are salaries like for someone of my experience? I've looked on Glassdoor but it's almost unusable these days. The best jobs usually seem to go through word-of-mouth, but I don't have any professional contacts in Europe. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to proceed or should I contact recruiters? What sort of lead time would you expect on an international job application? If I'm aiming for April/May when should I be making contact? Any input or advice you have would be great.
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Jul 26, 2014 06:43
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Hiring internationally is a huge hassle, and at least in my experience, it gets harder the further from tech hubs you're aiming to go. France has especially dysfunctional laws for startups (though granted, you asked about positions without specifying that). IMO, getting hired as a team lead is basically not going to happen without credentials so good there really wouldn't be any question, or good contacts that can vouch for you strongly. Recruiters are probably not going to help.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:08
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Yeah I'd expect I'd probably be looking at bigger, more established companies both for their recruiting capacity and English language tolerance. I'm not set on a team lead position, that's just the level I'd probably look to step up into if I was looking for work locally.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:20
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An alternative might be to make a start in somewhere like London and explore from there. There's a big tech community (with lots of C# in the banks) and very quick access to the continent for weekend trips to see the cities, going to interviews etc. At least that way you wouldn't be dealing with both visas *and* language as barriers to hiring.
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Jul 26, 2014 10:09
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Paolomania posted:Hey oldies. Thanks for the advice. I have made past the first all-day interview to the point where I will be talking to various team leads. Any tips on what to ask aside from "what does your team do?" or "how do you run your project?" What's the staff rotation like, who has been promoted from or into your team ? What was the last big architectural change and how did you manage it ? How does a new feature get rolled out to production? What happens if it fails ? Is there any on-call or on-site work ? How much holiday has the team taken this year ?
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Jul 28, 2014 12:54
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tef posted:What's the staff rotation like, who has been promoted from or into your team ? These are great. Point for point would have flagged problems in one of my past teams.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:33
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Thanks for the advice all. Thanks to this thread I am making my transition out of academic research and into a position at Big G.
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Jul 29, 2014 17:19
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Paolomania posted:Thanks for the advice all. Thanks to this thread I am making my transition out of academic research and into a position at Big G. Congrats!
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Jul 29, 2014 18:15
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Speaking of transitions how can one transition technology stacks? Especially without a step involving "go be a junior dev somewhere for 2 years" . . .
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Jul 29, 2014 19:32
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My company is currently considering undergoing a major transformation to our engineering side and is looking into moving all us mobile engineers from the major platforms into a single 'multi platform' team. We would be using a product that allows you to build a shared C# codebase that can build out native apps for all platforms. For a variety of reasons, I am not really interested in moving to this new platform, as I feel I have a lot of skills in iOS and also a lot to learn. I feel at this point in my career that it's more important for me to continue learning development for a native platform than some cross platform solution. My question is, if my company does decide to go down this route, how open should I be that I am looking to leave with my new manager? I have made my reservations, both technical and business-wise very clear to those above me, but it seems very likely this decision is going to be ramrodded through by upper management. I am just curious where the line is - I have a casual relationship with my new manager so I wouldn't feel uncomfortable telling him I'm looking elsewhere, but I am unsure of the unofficial protocol of looking for a new job while being currently employed and how open I should be about it.
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Jul 29, 2014 22:27
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lmao zebong posted:My company is currently considering undergoing a major transformation to our engineering side and is looking into moving all us mobile engineers from the major platforms into a single 'multi platform' team. We would be using a product that allows you to build a shared C# codebase that can build out native apps for all platforms. For a variety of reasons, I am not really interested in moving to this new platform, as I feel I have a lot of skills in iOS and also a lot to learn. I feel at this point in my career that it's more important for me to continue learning development for a native platform than some cross platform solution. I've experienced a couple of different relationships with my bosses over the years:
So I'd say that if you a) don't trust your boss with your life or b) have a very open line of communication (i.e. friendship, very healthy professional relationship) -- keep your mouth shut. Your protocol should be your two weeks' notice.
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Jul 29, 2014 22:50
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