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Anyone have advice on working with (non-internal) recruiters? I'm in the DC area and it seems like the fraction of recruiters, internal and otherwise, contacting me who actually read my Linkedin profile is... low. If "Linkedin is a blasted hellscape, not worth your time" is already your opinion, I'm listening for that, too.
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Feb 22, 2017 22:29
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:09 |
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Had an in-person interview at a nice place, but one of the interviewers wasn't there because the interview day had been rescheduled once, due to weather. I interviewed with this last interviewer the day after via videoconference and in my opinion, it did not go nearly as well as any of the in-person interviews. Kicker: this last person is the director over the job function that I am interviewing for a role in. I already think it is plausibly reasonable but just wanted to take the temperature of the wise oldies: would it make sense to send a nice email to the hiring manager (different person, with whom I had a very nice interview among other interactions) talking mostly about how much I enjoyed the interviews etc. (which I genuinely did) and tack on a bit that (at least lightly) addresses how I think I screwed up the interview with the most important person I spoke with / how I did myself a disservice by talking about X instead of Y? (Hint: I think I want this job.)
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Mar 20, 2017 16:56
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Rudest Buddhist posted:Should I just start telling people? He keeps using this "let's keep this between us" thing every time we discuss my departure. What would be wrong with being straightforward with your CTO? Tell him why you want to let people know you're going and ask why he wants it to be delayed. If you leaving will be a morale event, telling people at the last second probably won't make it any better.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:53
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Skandranon posted:Can't really hurt to demonstrate enthusiasm, and if you are sure enough of your error, you can try addressing it. Shows you care, that you can improve on your own, etc. Just don't go admitting to a bunch of stuff that they might not have noticed. Thanks... aaand I got the "we're putting together an offer" email prior to having time to write the "here's what I think I got wrong" email. Seems it would be silly to write it now, right? Rudest Buddhist posted:Pulled him aside. He wanted to push back the date because someone popular was let go on a different team (small company). I persuaded him to go through with announcing it to our team. It's happening in 20 min. Feels like this place went south quickly. Is your decision to move on feeling even smarter now? Because it should. One offer in hand and one in "we're putting it together" status: feels good man
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Mar 21, 2017 16:28
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Pollyanna posted:I've been thinking about what I want to be doing a few years down the line, and I'm genuinely kind of lost. I know I wanna work on cool and interesting things, but is it okay to just follow that line of thinking, bouncing from place to place? I kind of want stability (e.g. able to stay in a single place for a few years) but I don't wanna give up opportunity, either. I'm tempted to reply "e/n is thataway" but I've been in places where my thought process has been basically identical so... Give us some more detail. What have you been doing? What, out of that, would you want to keep doing? What do you want to give up or not give up? What are good ideas, personal characteristics, or techniques that you haven't been able to use so far in your professional life? What have you been building your career out of so far? What are the things you want to do but don't see any feasible way of working towards? edit: somebody please chime in with some who / why / when / where / how questions
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Mar 21, 2017 16:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Somewhere in the 6-12 year range is more appropriate to start wondering "okay, what am I really going to do with my life?"; at this point you just don't have enough experience to make a good decision. Seconded. At 3 years working experience, I still had not made most of my major career blunders. I thank the good lord that "maybe I'll do something with programming and math/physics/statistics" was in fact a good enough career plan to make up for not being very smart about where/how I work. I've suspected that I've been lagging behind with salary and now I'm looking to play catch-up? Anyone want to give a ballpark figure for the following: ~~~actually I deleted this because I am kind of paranoid~~~ also, lol if anyone from the company reads this, just lol. I guess I've got a touch of the ol' capitalism anxiety. prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 18:33
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Maybe this is too e/n, but does anyone have a good, unambiguous definition of technical debt? Under the rough description of "engineering is identifying, refining, and solving problems", tech debt to me always implies "this solution will noticeably do poorly under some circumstance X" where X might be something that can happen presently or something that isn't even possible at the time. Under that line of thinking, tech debt is "risk that the way we solve stuff with code/systems now ceases to be a good solution at some point in time."
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Mar 27, 2017 21:15
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fantastic in plastic posted:Achievement unlocked: received call from drunken recruiter But now you gotta tell us about this conversation.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:46
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Demoing "V1" of the platform for the CTO and CEO - CTO asked why we weren't using PubSub and were basically reinventing Kafka and my boss's sphincter got so tight as he had to mention that I suggested that earlier as I just sat there laughing. :+1: for your CTO.
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May 15, 2017 19:28
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fantastic in plastic posted:What's being an SRE like compared to being a web engineer? I've seen a few companies advertising SRE roles in my city and I'm a little tempted, but I don't know what to expect. disclaimer: I've only read a few chapters of the SRE book and that's what I base the following on. I think it's gonna depend a whole ton on what that company's interpretation of "SRE" is. My attempt at a capsule description of the Google SRE role: "administrative responsibilities for systems at scale achieved using SWE/CS skills to make/use/improve automation; responsible for being able to triage failures and at least partially localize non-{systems, hardware} failure back into the running applications; shares responsibility for uptime with developers of applications running on those systems." My expectation seeing an "SRE" role from another big company would be that it may have some elements of the google SRE role. My expectation seeing an "SRE" role from a small to medium company would be "nah, you guys don't actually need SREs, what is this role actually" prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 16, 2017 |
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Sep 16, 2017 14:39
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vonnegutt posted:Fair warning: this is something I feel very strongly about. Had to resist the urge to just quote-in-full your post, but that's less appropriate here / more of a YOSPOS thing? I'm currently working somewhere that is trying to hire rapidly to scale up to the number of incoming projects we have and... being labor-limited on both the dev/SWE and business analyst/project manager job functions means we presently do almost zero non-code, non-test activities. Just have to make sure that the least-maintainable code only gets used by the least important customers, I guess.
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Nov 15, 2017 04:02
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minato posted:This is paying off your Visa with your Mastercard. It will eventually catch up with you, really hard. I agree strongly. I'm hoping we either staff up to a level where we can and do start paying attention to everything else or (worst case) we lose some of our somewhat overwhelming portfolio when the lovely code hits the fan. Working mostly on pilot projects I feel as though I'm not likely to get stuck with too much technical debt that I have to support in production, but I'm probably making the bad assumption "that's a prototype, they'd never put it right into production." Having everyone heads-down on their own small projects is a terrible waste; in our problem domain, it seems like a few clever engineers looking across the many project-specific sets of requirements could quickly come up with some powerful generalizations.
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Nov 15, 2017 05:29
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Pollyanna posted:Anyone ever contract through a recruiter before? Never done it, but my understanding is that in situations like this the "recruiter" (for whom you are working as a W-2 employee while actually doing poo poo for X other company) will often offer health insurance and possibly other bennies... unless the role or the recruiter are garbo edit: beaten
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Jan 10, 2018 18:19
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Don't know much about co-ops, but these look like worth a read. https://www.techworker.coop an example: https://feeltrain.com/hello-feel-train/#a-hard-limit-on-scale
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Feb 1, 2018 19:40
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I did the same at my last job, which was my second job. 2/3 ain't bad! My next goal is group sex with coworkers, maybe even be able to say "yeah I slept with that team" instead of that person when my friends ask about my work degeneracy. somebody's gunning to get renamed "bad will horndog"
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Feb 16, 2018 19:50
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Part of being a good coder is writing something that solves the right problem Identifying and understanding what constitutes "the right problem" frequently requires communicating with other people Having critical insight into the business context of some code or system is often only possible through communicating with people who are not total codelordzz. If a design or problem is not already very nailed down, one might have to interact with multiple people over multiple meetings to come up with what constitutes "the right problem" It's a mistake to think that having fewer/weaker social skills makes one better at the "purely technical" aspects of programming work. Even if some sort of anti-correlation exists, correlation ain't causation. (e: in life we all only get 24 hours a day to use, but this is not like assigning stat points in an RPG) This is somewhat muddied by the fact that there is so much useful technical poo poo that one can/could learn and educational materials are generally so weak that many programmers are self-taught in many or most of their skills. But being a good self teacher doesn't imply a lack of social skills. tumufor tagnus prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Mar 10, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2018 04:28
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:I think the point was that Java has a better overall ecosystem than .NET, but C# is a better language. I don't have enough insight into the Java ecosystem to make an argument one way or the other. Me and my coworker wistfully wishing we were using Maven and not NuGet while enjoying many C# language features agree with this.
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Apr 22, 2018 15:14
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:I'm not trying to talk about something I don't understand, I'll freely admit I have no idea what Java has to offer in this regard. But can you explain what .NET is lacking, specifically? I've not really had an issue in the last couple years or so. NuGet is sometimes flawed but ecosystem wise I feel like there's always been a library out there for whatever I've needed. Again though, it's just my experience, people working on different types of software probably have different experiences. I think most of our worst issues are due to the particular history of things at the company (i.e. self-inflicted) and not NuGet per se, but here goes: Maven plugins allow additional tasks to be brought into the system, NuGet is meant to be a closed-set-of-functionality tool (unless you open up the powershell escape hatch, I guess). In our case, this means we have Python and Gulp scripts of dubious quality running our NuGet instead of community-tested plugins doing special purpose tasks within Maven. Is it accurate to say that Maven actually defined a declarative model for Java project building, including dependencies? Whereas NuGet inherits its project model from visual studio and bolted on two different formats for dependencies before putting them in the visual studio project itself... and putting dependencies there is a preview, or something. So Maven wanted to do every build activity you can do from a single machine and is open both as source and to extension by plugins. NuGet is, in contrast, just for packaging and dependency management, has no ambitions about being able to fulfill every task you might want to throw at it (that's what powershell and Team Foundation BuildLord or something else with a terrible name is for, right?) and suffers a little from being a small fish in a churning pond of Microsoft Dev tools. C# vs Java library ecosystem fights are not for me.
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Apr 23, 2018 14:58
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For me, NuGet vs. Maven is even more like "an apple in a bowl of fruit that I don't particularly like vs. a different bowl of fruit"* *The other point was that C# is (IMO) ahead of Java and some weird async, Task<T>, and reflection stuff I had to work with about 5 minutes ago was actually quite well explained in docs and on SnackOverflow as well as being Nice and Slick.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:39
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No judgment on you, GWH, and kudos on finding an understanding of your anxiety, but man "CS algorithms as shibboleth showing your worthiness to join a big tech company" seems like such a waste. That said, why not find some online collection of problems with a judge and do some of them (or keep doing them if that's what you started)? Deep dives into certain CS concepts will pay off best if you literally get asked about the concept, a good set of problems with a grader will stretch your skills and build your confidence with feedback.
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Apr 24, 2018 15:40
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I guess the real takeaway is: how do you mask lovely job experience where you're not given much of an opportunity to progress? Don't even. "Mask lovely job experience" is a bad orientation to take for two reasons: you're focusing on how bad your current work is and you're trying to compensate for it by being at least opaque, if not deceptive. (Speaking as someone who has wanted to leave jobs that felt super lovely, yes, I have taken the orientation of "how do I mask this lovely job experience" and while I did succeed at that task, it did not help me find work that I really wanted more and messed up how I thought about my career.) Even if you think your current place is 90% poo poo, orient on the positive aspects of what you are doing and can do + good things that you want to have in your work. Find some other way of thinking / communicating about your situation that will make you feel happier about where you want to go and where you're coming from and (critically!!) will actually allow you and interviewers to relate on something positive or at least neutral. "I want to do more X" not "(cryptic words that translate to 'I want to run away from bad situation Y')"
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Apr 24, 2018 16:29
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Mao Zedong Thot posted:Tell me what happens when you run 'curl wikipedia.org'. (Can discuss how programs run, os interaction, dns, tcp, http, imagined architecture, load balancing, http servers)  Mao Zedong Thot posted:Coworker reports a service is broken, what do you do? (Plenty of discussion about behavioral stuff, troubleshooting, nuts and bolts of debugging various things) gathering information about reported problems, organizing it, and deciding what to do with it is a hugely important skill
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Apr 26, 2018 14:06
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Skandranon posted:And if you are really bitter, just change your tune about Mongo. this is spectacular advice if one really wants to be spiteful. the best way to be the worst person in this situation is to line up some poor schmuck (not you) to take the full responsibility for the switch to Mongo. Skandranon is always a good poster ITT so I'm going to go see their post history to try to guess why someone hosed with their av.
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May 16, 2018 15:26
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I'm just talking poo poo about it from a place of no real experience. That said, a couple of years ago it provided no way to perform a single-record read-and-write transaction that didn't involve locking the entire collection? (think of removing the first element in the array document.butt and adding it as the last element of document.fart)
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May 16, 2018 20:59
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JawnV6 posted:so what this is a pretty good point. unless they want deep .NET expertise, your ability to sling Java means you'll probably be just fine slinging C#. whether or not you want to work in a windows shop is a different question for sure.
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May 22, 2018 20:21
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Munkeymon posted:SLASHES GO WRONG VAY! *smashes keyboard* Either NO platform-specific button on my keyboard or it better be NEXT TO THE SPACEBAR!
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May 22, 2018 21:18
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My joke was formulated around the intent of "oh man, can I come up with the least significant difference between working professionally in a Windows vs *n*x environment?" and not "I'mma make fun of GWH." Using Windows, in my industry experience, correlates with as well as causes some undesirable situations, moreso (again, just in my experience) than *n*x. A decent shell on Windows is obtainable and this is something I always desire so that I can pipe find to xargs or open every file that's conflicted in gvim or do a bazillion other dumb little tricks.
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May 22, 2018 22:47
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Jose Valasquez posted:All languages and operating systems are garbage. Computers were a mistake "Paging Jose Valasquez, paging Jose Valasquez. Please report to YOSPOS, you belong here."
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May 23, 2018 15:34
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When asking people to implement "Fib(n), no performance requirements", then following up with "Fib(n), linear time", I sometimes compliment candidates for writing implementations that look very much like the mathematical definition of Fib(n) that we give them-- IMO, when your math code looks like the math it's implementing, that's a good thing for correctness and clarity. This seems to throw a lot of candidates off, as does any offer of assistance. 
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May 29, 2018 16:58
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comedyblissoption posted:Software workers make a lot more than a lot of other types of workers, but the employer is still really making out in the arrangement above and beyond other industries. This arrangement suggests higher degrees of exploitation unless you believe that software employers are unique titanic ubermensch compared to other employers and more deserving of this extra margin. I think one thing that can be tricky to parse about an argument like this is that "exploitation" has a literal sense and a connotation. "Higher degrees of exploitation" literally means "owner achieves more profit per wage $ paid" but the connotation of the word suggests that the owner is doing bad things to the worker (and is treating the software worker worse than owners of other businesses treat their workers). I think cbo is on with the literal meaning.
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May 30, 2018 14:59
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ultrafilter posted:You have to do stuff outside of work that helps you to manage the stress. Yep! I also try to find things I can do to briefly play hooky and get something for myself, like a 10 minute detour to the office gym. Getting my body moving and my blood oxygenated is probably a net positive when it comes to productivity too, the way I zomb out if my butt remains in the chair for too long
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Jun 7, 2018 03:48
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I have had a job with problems and I made those problems worse for myself by how I related to them.
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Jun 7, 2018 04:41
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fantastic in plastic posted:The models for this I inherited from my parents were "literally sleep all the time" or "come home in an insane rage and shout at spouse/children/pets/inanimate objects for two hours, then completely shut down and watch TV, reverting to screaming rage if disturbed at all". the implicit message that I take away from this is "not dealing with work related stress will literally make you (and possibly your family if you've got one) miserable at times"
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Jun 7, 2018 14:45
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Pollyanna posted:I mean I dunno about you but work itself costs me energy and recovery time, I gotta convalesce. Is that wholly incompatible with what I wrote? Your phrasing seems like, super super significant. If work feels or is like an illness or surgery to you, I really hope that you can find a way to lessen that feeling or experience.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:07
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I'm thinking about leveling up the old "algorithms problem" e-peen (i.e. I have no specific goal in mind) and I want thread opinions: what would motivate you to choose one of the auto-judged platforms (leetcode, hackerrank, topcoder, etc.) vs. practicing from a review-oriented book (CtCI) vs. just breaking out a textbook that has neat problems? (I got a foobar invite a while ago and then never completed one of the problems because baby. long, long time afterwards I came up with what seemed like a reasonable solution but alas, my invitation is no longer active)
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Jun 10, 2018 21:16
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Being conversant with SQL can be really powerful. An analyst who does know SQL is way way more dangerous than one who doesn't. Maybe practice a little bit?
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Jun 11, 2018 21:27
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Portland Sucks posted:Specifically if you think not knowing what a trie is is a negative signal.
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Jun 14, 2018 18:41
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Dumb question: why is it called an inverted index? Over in database land there isn't such a concept, right? And if it's a metaphorical index, an index from terms to pages is... an index. An index from page numbers to terms would also be, imo, an index.
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Jun 15, 2018 14:56
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minato posted:An inverted index is like an index you find at the end of a book... what most people traditionally think of as an index. Same thing is also used in databases, to map rows to locations on disc. Thank you.
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Jun 15, 2018 16:15
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:09 |
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FamDav posted:were you doing unbounded recursion in a language that doesn't have tail call optimization? yeah, as far as toy problems go that's a pretty good one for seeing if somebody knows that (call) stacks can overflow... while that's an important bit of CS fundamentals it's mostly irrelevant most of the time
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Jun 27, 2018 04:43
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