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revmoo posted:I'd get up and walk out well before spending 12 hours in an interview. Does this apply to all code problems/tests as part of an interview process? We tend to do a technical skype round to see if the candidate has decent CS fundamentals and we wouldn't be wasting each others time, then we usually do a pretty abstract 'homework' problem. It should really only take an hour or two, and can be done in any language, and obviously isn't some practical work we are trying to scam for free, then if good we do a face to face. Some people on the team worry that the homework problem puts more senior people off, while others swear by it.
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May 23, 2014 01:07
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syntaxrigger posted:I have a phone call with him tomorrow to attempt to 'alleviate his concerns' about me. His main one seems to be that I haven't been at on job for more than a year and a half since I got out of college. I explained the reasons for each move but apparently I used words I shouldn't have like "work/life balance" and "being poorly managed". Critically examine this carefully.
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Dec 8, 2014 22:05
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Have any older/experienced programmers posting here moved from EU to USA after working for a long time in the EU? If so, how was the experience, what difficulties, how did you find a job, how was relocating (especially wrt significant others)? I am from and live in the UK and am in late 20's, have an undergrad in CS and a masters from a good UK university. Have close to ten years professional experience as software engineer and am considering a move abroad, either to USA or Australia. Am curious to find out how others did this and hear any good advice.
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Apr 26, 2015 15:35
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Mniot posted:What I mean is that I've been here a while, and I believe I am liked and trusted. And that management understands that if I were to rage-quit they'd be hosed (nothing special about me; we just have some hard deadlines and not enough spare developers). That's all some very tenuous clout, but I feel like I should practice being more assertive and that the risks to me aren't large. If this is true you should find another job and quit, if they'd be hosed they'd offer you a huge raise for sure. If not, hey, you get another job. Yay!
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Jul 22, 2015 22:55
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I live in the UK, and was recently hit up by an Amazon recruiter to attend a recruitment event they are hosting here. I never considered applying for them before, and am not really looking for a job right now, but since the role is based in Washington (Seattle?), I figured it would be cool to check it out. I had a technical phone screen that went okay, the interviewer told me the role is for the "Amazon Hardlines and Amazon Search & Discovery" team. It seems very retail/consumer focussed rather than back-end tech, is this the type of job that will be crazy hours and very high pressure? Also wondering what to expect at the recruitment event itself, apparently there will be four interviews of an hour or so each, if anyone has any experience with them?
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Feb 13, 2016 15:07
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return0 posted:I live in the UK, and was recently hit up by an Amazon recruiter to attend a recruitment event they are hosting here. I never considered applying for them before, and am not really looking for a job right now, but since the role is based in Washington (Seattle?), I figured it would be cool to check it out. So this happened a few days ago. I thought it went okay but not great, but the recruiter who initially contacted me called today and said it went well and Amazon intend to make an offer. Apparently I will hear from two teams I could work at over the next few days, then there is a process to arrive at an actual concrete offer. Is this a normal typical thing at big tech companies, and if so is it a euphemism for more interviewing with specific teams? As a dirty foreign (UK), should I expect a below market rate offer given I'll require visa sponsorship (probably H1B?).
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Feb 23, 2016 19:51
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mrmcd posted:If they are going to make an offer, then it sounds like you got the job and they just want to see which product team you'd fit best with. Nearly 10 years experience programming, education is up to an MSc in CS, was doing a PhD but dropped out because gently caress that. Currently my job title is senior software engineer but I am actually line managing some other engineers and doing other lead-like activities (scheduling, technical strategy, high level design). I mostly write code though (80% of the time). The recruiter and engineers throughout the process said they had roles at "all levels". Not sure what to expect for CoL/market rate in Seattle, will need to research it I guess.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:38
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Illegal or not, it's certainly true that H1B recipients must keep a job or else they get deported, which gives extensive power to their employers. I haven't personally heard of anyone being abused by the system, but it's very easy to imagine how it could happen. Can an H1B get another job elsewhere while employed in the US?
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Feb 23, 2016 22:13
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mrmcd posted:This is NYC, so I don't know about Seattle, but most senior/lead roles with that kind of background could get $130-160k base. I have 10 years with just a BS and got three offers over $150k in the last year. Cool. I'm quite excited to try out living in the USA so hopefully they make a decent offer. Right now I work a 40 hour week pretty much every week, and I understand that Amazon has a reputation for trying to pressure people into working a lot of hours, so I guess that's something to consider.
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Feb 23, 2016 23:01
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USA tech salaries are just ridiculous. I get paid a decent wage for where I live in the UK (up north far away from London) and converting my salary from GBP to USD shows I earn $65K. Is the US extremely expensive for housing or petrol something?
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Feb 23, 2016 23:15
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I was posting a while back about what kind of offer to expect moving from the UK to the US, as I'd been offered a job in Seattle. I got the offer, my current UK salary equates to around $65k, the offer is $140k base plus a pretty good signing bonus + shares  If anyone is thinking about moving from UK to US, probably do it.
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Mar 15, 2016 21:24
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return0 posted:So this happened a few days ago. I thought it went okay but not great, but the recruiter who initially contacted me called today and said it went well and Amazon intend to make an offer. Apparently I will hear from two teams I could work at over the next few days, then there is a process to arrive at an actual concrete offer. Is this a normal typical thing at big tech companies, and if so is it a euphemism for more interviewing with specific teams? As a dirty foreign (UK), should I expect a below market rate offer given I'll require visa sponsorship (probably H1B?). Turns out H1B is a randomly selected lottery, and you only have a <25% chance of being picked! America, sort your immigration and let us flood your job market already?
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May 25, 2016 19:57
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What's the deal with non-competes and restrictive covenants? I'm considering a new job, and the contract I have to sign has a strange condition that prevents me from working on anything similar for another company for 18 months after I leave this company (even if I am fired). Is this normal and do people just deal with it, or what? I know nobody here is a lawyer but just wondering if it's normal.
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Jun 20, 2016 22:31
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:They're illegal in California, for what it's worth. You might see if you can get that portion of the contract removed; it's something you can negotiate over. Whether you'll succeed depends in part on how invested the company is in hiring you. Yeah, I heard they are illegal in California. This job is in Canada, where apparently they are enforceable. It's an awkward one as I currently live in Europe so it's not easy to find an employment lawyer who knows much about Canadian employment law.
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Jun 20, 2016 22:48
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Serious question: what do I do when a recruiter requests my LaTeX resume in Word format lol I use LaTex to make my resume, and render it to PDF. When going for a role through a recruiter, they asked for it as a Word document and I refused. I was interviewing (video call) with a company through that recruiter, and the interviewers didn't understand something on it. I had no idea why, I had a copy on screen and the part they were talking about seemed totally clear. After some discussion we realised that the recruiter had manually transcribed the whole thing to word, messed a bunch of stuff up, and added their logo. I sent them the real one and it turned out mildly funny.
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Jul 6, 2016 20:58
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As a non-US person who recently went through the process of interviewing at Amazon for an SDE position in Seattle, I found them pretty cool and chill. One of their recruiters sent me a message on LinkedIn asking me to do a Skype interview. I did this, then a couple of days later they invited me to an Amazon recruiting event in a city near me in the UK. The interviewers were decent (all were really nice except one, who was merely cordial), and I got an offer a few days after the interview. They offered to sponsor H1B, for which I was not selected in the random lottery. They had a plan in place for this, and gave me a choice of other locations to work at (in London if I wanted to stay in UK, but also in other countries), and said I could still go to the US on an L1 if I wanted to after a year. They also gave a choice of teams, and I got to have a conversation with the team managers to pick a best fit. They were all cool, and were at pains to talk about their work-life balance reputation and say that it's not the case and people can and should work sane hours (like 40/week). The compensation they offered is good too, and I didn't get the impression after looking at the market that it was significantly below what they offer US citizens. I also interviewed around the same time with Google, they were also really nice, but moved much slower and were generally more opaque. Google also refused to consider H1B sponsorship (due to low selection rate), and were a bit more directive about possible locations to go before an L1. Of course, this is anecdote and I don't know how typical it is, but the experience was overall positive.
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Aug 3, 2016 20:16
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oliveoil posted:How much is "a lot of money"? I thought they paid like 70% of what other big tech companies pay but if you stay for more than two years then you start vesting properly and finally you're making the big bucks: maybe 90% of what LinkedIn/Facebook/Google/Uber would have paid you when they first hired you, but chances are you got a raise and/or more equity at some point, so those companies are still way ahead. Do people really consider linkedin and uber as tech companies on par with Amazon? I consider Amazon, FB, Google and maybe MS or Apple as the top big tech companies.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:23
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Well, I had my second Amazon interview, and I think that went to hell. Was this phone/skype, or face to face?
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Sep 1, 2016 18:23
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Noam Chomsky posted:As a 39-yo please share your strategies for staying on top of all of front-end and the other kinds of development you do AND also leading any kind of normal human life. This is an actual serious question. I'm not 39, but I am in my early thirties and have a family and a social life. I do some front-end dev at work, amongst other things. I've found it's pretty easy to stay on top of it. Follow HN or something on Twitter, read some articles on the train if you commute. Play about with stuff at work, they are paying you to be sharp. I'd rather move with tech as it gets better and work on a variety of stuff than be stuck on back-end on some service running an ancient Java version or whatever. Also I flat out will not work more that 40 hours a week. If someone wants more they have to promise me something good, else get hosed.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:50
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JawnV6 posted:How does the direction/vision/strategy of the org affect your day to day though? More than the person who functions as your interface to the whole system and has the largest say in your regular review? Maybe I'm just some dumb prole, but "existential thread 5+ years out" doesn't weigh on me quite as heavily as "vast majority of in-person interactions" I've definitely been in places where everyone is sensible, competent, and nice, but the organisation is dysfunctional and all the all the things you're being told to work on are absurd and clearly a futile waste. It can be fun for a while (because people are cool) but it becomes very frustrating eventually.
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Sep 13, 2016 22:13
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rt4 posted:I got HR to send me a vague description of the insurance, but no hard numbers besides "starts as low as $x per month." In response, I said In my opinion that's passive aggressive. Just counter with what you want, be friendly but assertive. This should be something you think is fair and reasonable that you'd be happy to work for. If they refuse, just decline. I would aim for: * excited about the company/role * need to see the full package before making a decision Then when they get back, if it's not to your liking say you were expecting $value base salary, but possibly willing to negotiate for more vacation/signing bonus/RSUs/remote work/whatever.
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Sep 14, 2016 19:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:NPM's famous failures Such as?
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Sep 28, 2016 23:33
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Thermopyle posted:npm left pad What would PyPI do? Does it retain old version of deleted packages? E: was curious about this and found a discussion https://m.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/4booff/what_if_the_npm_leftpad_fiasco_had_happened_on/. Looks like the same thing would have happened, and the pypi maintainers would have been forced to mitigate in the same way as npm by republishing. Not sure it's a great reason to avoid node. That sucks, it won't happen on Mac or Linux but yeah they should fix it return0 fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Sep 29, 2016 |
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Sep 29, 2016 07:30
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speng31b posted:Since this happened, I've created a weekly ritual of node dev shaming in our company slack that revolves around an elaborate set of gifs from this incident. It's one of my favorite things, I really look forward to it every week. You sound awful.
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Oct 2, 2016 09:16
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speng31b posted:It's all in good fun, we have slackbots set up for shaming everyone's pet languages / toolsets. Python: stuff about significant whitespace, Objective-C: really just about any method name, Java: all of Java. Not piling on the node hate train here - NPM left-pad was shameful, and also funny. Might as well acknowledge things like that and have some fun with them. ach fair enough, I think too much was made of left pad and the same would happen with pypi or gems, so npm gets a bad rap. It is probably fairly called out as being awful in other respects though.
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Oct 2, 2016 19:58
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Skandranon posted:I've been conflicted about this for awhile. On one hand, to get perfect reproducability and reliability, should just check in all node_modules into source control. But this causes huge repository bloat, especially if you want to keep current versions of things. The current solution for this is maintaining a private NPM repository that mirrors all packages from NPM that get downloaded through it. I still have my doubts though... Do what you do for python, ruby, etc.
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Oct 3, 2016 06:59
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Pollyanna posted:We've been pretty open since the start, and that hasn't really changed. It feels more stressful and "on edge" now. I was once in a startup environment where people could provide a robust constructive criticism and it would be taken in good faith and acted on. That team had an excellent engineering ethic and commitment to best practices, with support from management. Working there at that point was honestly great fun. Then came a period of 12 months where things weren't going so well for the business, resources became constrained and people became stressed and frustrated, and ceremonies that were previously positive and healthy became cathartic venting sessions. The atmosphere became worse, because people were ostensibly doing the same things as before, but not in good faith. The business eventually picked up again, but the mood on the team hadn't recovered - people were more guarded, non-trusting, and less open with each other. Maybe something similar is happening at your place. If the other engineer is really perceived as more senior, maybe they are under additional pressure to perform, and in turn they are taking our their frustration on you?
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Oct 19, 2016 23:39
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I don't get it. You mentioned it supports put, get, and some usage constraints. What are the desired semantics for conflict resolution. E.g., backend A is S3 in USA and local user puts value to item xyz, backend B is Dropbox with a datacentre in Asia and a local user puts different value for item xyz simultaneously with other put. Both systems internally have some form of eventual consistency. How does it work? Also, if meta data is a regular file, this would require the backend to support batch transactional put, or data races will occur (ignoring eventual consistency model issues). Did the spec talk about this?
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Nov 18, 2016 09:16
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FamDav posted:One idea might be that every key gets its own directory and you store the file ands it's metadata with a name that is the epoch concatenated with a hash of the contents. Retrievals take the newest file found, tie break on hash. This would have the nice properties that: This is a classic data race, and does not work in the presence of multiple users.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:53
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fantastic in plastic posted:Thanks for your input on US employment law. How are the First Nations doing? Just because other places are bad doesn't mean the US isn't bad. The employment law in the US is bad (for workers).
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Dec 24, 2016 07:03
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Switching teams How long have you been on the team? How long had your other colleagues been on before bailing? If you request a transfer, can they realistically decline?
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Dec 29, 2016 21:10
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geeves posted:Amazon has a horrific process, btw, in which they require you to install malware on your machine to basically spy on you like crazy while you do the interview. I read about this at Amazon, it sounds bad. I know my process was nothing like this. I got contacted on linkedin by an internal recruiter, had a phone interview with an SDE in Seattle, then a day of face to face interviews (four in total). The phone interview involved writing code in a shared text editor website (collabedit or similar). I used python in all interviews. YMMV, but my Amazon interview was a good experience.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:48
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Roadie posted:So, here's a warning for anybody else interested in SDE stuff at Amazon: regardless of your experience or references, they will make you take a programming test with someone watching you through your webcam the entire time. Not an interview or anything interactive, just a "proctor" from a third-party company operating on the basic assumption that you are a cheating liar and you and your computer need to be monitored the entire time. We certainly don't do this everywhere. I'm on an interview loop now that is standard phone and code-into-online-text-editor. It must depend on location/team.
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Feb 18, 2017 09:49
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Arachnamus posted:The story of gov.uk is one of mountains of tech debt accrued out of necessity and paid off over years of hard effort, I can tell you more about that if you're interested. I would find this interesting. Good Will Hrunting posted:I interviewed at all start-ups except Google and they all asked algo poo poo. How is google a startup!?
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Mar 27, 2017 22:48
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I did interview at a lot of startups, maybe people thought this was actually plausible? Yeah my bad I misunderstood, was tired reading it.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:52
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Pollyanna posted:let a newbie engineer have complete and unsupervised access to their server setup scripts This is standard and in no way uncommon in my experience. Year 1 to 2: AAA console games company. Chaotic, great fun, good learning, bad hours. Year 2 to 4: Same games company but on an MMO. Pretty fun and learned a lot more about backend. Early in project so better hours. Year 4 to 10: Small startup as early employee. Great fun, amazing team, some okay products, some crappy ones. Year 10 to 11 (now): A "Big4", again been pretty great. Zero bad years so far, but I think I'd consider the first 2 years bad if I had to do them again now.
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May 25, 2017 17:59
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Pollyanna posted:Doesn't make it a good idea. While of course I agree with the general principle of least privilege, it's not at all unreasonable for a team that rotates oncall to have full prod access, as long as it's sane and audited. Using customer payment detail for testing in production is highly non-sane.
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May 25, 2017 19:24
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Jaded Burnout posted:I once interviewed at a decent-sized post-startup in san francisco where one of their main hiring criteria was verbatim "If this person was working on a Sunday would I come into the office just to hang out with them". This is such a gigantic red flag, it's actually ridiculous.
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Jul 12, 2017 00:57
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Wait so is it Stripe or Square that sucks? I did a Stripe CTF a few years back and it was fun so hoping they are cool.
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Jul 12, 2017 17:36
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Where I work the lunch portion of the on site is not considered when deciding whether to extend an offer. The exception is if they show any alarming concerns, like racism/sexism.
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Jul 16, 2017 15:20
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