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Some of shrughes recent threads on big-problems/certs got me thinking that we've been lacking a general compliment to the "newbie programming" thread for old dogs. Even those who are far past undergrad and the first interview need to bounce ideas around to figure out where to go next. My suspicion is that as the forum ages, there will be more posters in this situation around, so let's discuss:
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Feb 7, 2014 16:42
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My admission: I feel like a change in direction is coming up for my programming career and I have no idea where to go next. I've been working as research staff in academia for a few years and although the high-level problems have been interesting, as a non-academic there is no upward mobility and I've been given mostly the uninteresting grunt-work and the tech has all been highly specialized nuts-and-bolts stuff that I really don't want to make a career out of. I'm feeling like I'm a mile wide and an inch deep and I need to train-up expertise in something with more commercial appeal so that I can move into a position with some prospect for growth. However, the choices seem daunting and I don't feel like I have a finger on the pulse of where the industry is headed. Is mobile going to continue to be big? Are there trends conspiring to waylay webdevs? Is high-performance computing a safe niche? I'd appreciate people's thoughts on what tech is a good bet for the near future.
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Feb 7, 2014 16:58
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:I was just looking for a thread like this, thanks! I'm being considered for a senior software engineering position, but I've got to ask: What does it mean to be a senior software engineer? I'm comfortable with my skills, but I know there's more to it than that. Any veterans care to chime in?
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Feb 7, 2014 23:14
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Thanks for the anecdote, smoothie. It provides alot of food for thought and reinforces the idea that it really is time to move on from academic research.
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Feb 8, 2014 17:31
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Having decided to eventually move on from academic research, it is time to dust off the old Resume. I'd appreciate any critiques - the biggest question in my mind currently being whether to trim to 1 page or expand to a more verbose 2 pages.
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May 10, 2014 01:09
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Hughlander posted:15 years of work experience should be two pages IMO. That is another question: do I include the early part of my career that I spent as an artist/animator or omit it? The really relevant stretch is the 8 years of gigs post-grad school.
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May 10, 2014 04:44
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Thanks all. I've decided to flesh it out to 2 pages - in large part to pre-answer questions about the gaping hole between undergrad and grad school. I'll add an intent and keep the clearance info and put the CG artist stuff under a separate "Other Professional Experience" section.
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May 15, 2014 00:05
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Thanks all, the resume work has paid off: I've got a tech screen lined up with big G in four weeks. I am fleshing out my study outline and signed up for one of their coaching sessions as well. Wish me luck.
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May 19, 2014 22:31
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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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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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I can't give specific advice as I did art, models and animation when I was in games; however I can definitely say: get out, make more, live more and never look back.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:18
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baquerd posted:I really appreciate the responses, though I don't want to make this an E/N thread, so it would be great if other people looking at organizational moves asked for advice too. I've gone from night shift help desk to where I'm at now and can talk a lot about the transitions if that's something that could help someone.
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Oct 24, 2014 04:49
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minato posted:There's a good 30 min talk here about a guy's experience with burnout in the Ops field, although it equally applies to development. Great talk. I saw the same worker/management relations back when I worked as a game artist as well, but I can't imagine it applying in that situation. His strategies apply well to engineering, but I think they depend on having the leverage of the non-commodity skills he acquired over the course of his career. That leverage was probably much less while he was scrambling to prove himself early on. I think the difficulty comes in recognizing when you have leverage (at least the leverage of "I can get a new gig before I go broke") and how much (i.e. how much benefit-increase/poo poo-reduction you could negotiate for.
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Dec 13, 2014 21:30
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Cryolite posted:Is it common to reach senior-level in salary and expertise in one stack and then switch to a completely different stack while maintaining the previous salary? Anyone else here do that? What was your experience?
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Mar 4, 2015 06:23
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There are dozens of us! Dozens!
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May 23, 2015 04:57
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Basically, I'm looking for stability and a decent manager, and have been for a long time, but at this point I think my heuristics for determining what to look for are somewhat broken. So to restate my question in a different way, what signs should I be looking out for / how do I identify people/situations/companies that give me a favorable chance of settling down and just working for a couple of years? If you don't want to play the leadership personality odds at a small shop, you're definitely going to want a company that is big enough to have processes by which people can get out of a bad situation - either by preventing them in the first place, disrupting them when they happen, or making transfer easy. In all likelyhood, a company big enough to establish such practices is probably big enough to have a reputation as being a decent place to work.
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Jun 6, 2015 21:26
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The Witness posted:For all the older programmers here, what would you consider to be the essential skills that helped you throughout your careers over the years? Is there a specific combination of skills or habits that proved more rewarding than focusing on other skills? The ability to eat poo poo and roll with the punches (while not loosing sight of my goals).
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Jun 16, 2015 03:18
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Cryolite posted:Does anyone here have any recent experience with how having a high clearance like Top Secret with polygraph affects software salaries relative to uncleared/private sector software work? I went from defense with TS to non-defense and got a big pay bump, so I'm not sure it has that much of a dollar premium. I do think it is a feather in the trustworthy-cap for the resume though.
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Jun 25, 2015 03:25
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Kallikrates posted:A couple google recruiters have been trying to get me to come in for what seems over a year and I recently took them up on an offer for coffee/lunch and an office tour. I've heard that interviews for specific teams/projects are a little different than off the street Engineer interviews at GOOG. If you are interviewing at GOOG they will hand you a link to a page describing everything they expect you to know - which is mostly just a list of fundamental undergrad CS concepts. You might be expected to know what a red black tree is and what some of its properties are but I doubt an interviewer would ask you to implement one. An actual technical task would more likely be a FizzBuzz that then mutates with more and more requirements like concurrency and scale. The interviewers are not trying to trick, or intimidate you - they are just trying to find answers to questions like: are you actually an engineer? do you know what you are talking about? do you have an understanding of the types of problems big G faces? how well do you collaborate and deal with changing requirements? Puzzles and memory-checks on obscure concepts answer none of these questions.
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Jul 3, 2015 17:11
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baquerd posted:That's the phone screen, the in-person interviews get significantly more involved for a senior engineer and will involve design questions as well as whiteboarding.
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Jul 4, 2015 04:15
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I've worked with "10x" people before who were really "make everyone else 1/10x" people. I think anyone who is good with logic and abstract thinking can be a "10x" when they are working in a familiar domain ... in idioms and patterns that they find natural ... with languages and tools they are familiar with ... on a codebase they are familiar with. However, anyone who is put in a situation where everything doesn't line up is going to naturally move more slowly - frequently stopping to look up information, cross-reference things, read background material, etc. for quiet some time until they come up to speed. Years ago I was on a project where the lead developer was fond of coming in on the weekend to geek out on the codebase. He would occasionally refactor everything (BOOM - everyone else is a 1/2x developer while figuring out the new codebase) to idioms that made sense to him (BOOM - everyone is a 1/4x developer because they had a different mental model for the solution) and using some hot new framework that he had learned and wanted to use (BOOM - everyone else is a 1/8x developer while figuring out the new framework). And lo, the sorry newbie on the team who was still learning the domain (me) was now a 1/16x developer. gently caress that guy. A good lead would put an end to it, but when that guy is the lead ... well I moved on pretty quick. The same situation can easily apply to greenfield development - the cowboy coder leading the charge can appear to be 10x because everything is lining up - domain, idioms, tools, code - but its just because they wrote it all! Everyone following along will look slow because they are wading in someone else's idea space. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 00:10
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ExcessBLarg! posted:folks
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Sep 27, 2015 03:09
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You need to push back really hard on the IT/help desk trend or leave. Parlay what you've done into more of the same - there or somewhere else. Don't play "great expectations" - time spent going away from the role you want will be time wasted.
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Oct 3, 2015 21:40
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AOP questions = "pssst, kid, don't work here we run Byzantine spaghetti systems."
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Feb 29, 2016 21:19
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A MIRACLE posted:What's cool and fun to code these days? C++14
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May 17, 2016 05:34
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My team did about a year of weekly "planning poker" (i.e. no daily scrum) with FIFO "dogpile" style task assignment and it was one of the few agile experiences that I've had where the benefits outstripped the pains. I have to say though that I was the oddball who actually liked it as the other developers on the team preferred to have individual ownership of components and voted to discontinue it. To me it seemed like a good way to organize a 4-5 person team, but with the advantage of having a stable task list other teams could view and try to negotiate priority with the team lead over.
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May 30, 2016 19:01
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Ouch. Looks like a good link for the D&D unicorns thread.
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Jul 22, 2016 04:27
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I think a more interesting thing might be something like a salary history. I've had to do some aggressive job hopping to get mine up to par: 60K + benefits +options - CG artist at ill fated dot-com 60K + benefits - CG artist at a medium size gamedev studio <grad school> 65K + benefits - Software company that was having its lunch eaten by Apple. 1st year out of MS with a resume that looked like an artist. 75K + benefits- Defense contractor as SWE 85K + benefits - Defense contractor 2nd year promotion to SWE2 95K contract - Research staff at a premier CS academic research institute 100K contract - Research staff at a premier CS academic research institute 120K + benefits + RSUs + bonus - 1st year SWE at premier tech co. 125K + benefits + RSUs + bonus - 2nd year SWE at premier tech co.
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Jul 30, 2016 14:38
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There is also the question of how much in general is getting listed (as opposed to promoted via other means such as direct recruiting) and of that how much is the share going to indeed. You could just be measuring trends in recruiting techniques. Is there BLS data of this granularity?
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Aug 3, 2016 06:14
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mrmcd posted:My team at Google NYC has like 3 open headcount now. Do well and maybe we can be goonglers together. Wow this place is just crawling with characters.
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Aug 16, 2016 03:13
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mrmcd posted:Google NYC had a practice interview / coaching talk for onsite candidates (which GWH you should def do if you get past phone screen and schedule works out) and the thing I thought was most insightful was the presenter said (paraphrasing) "We see and reject a lot of people who have spent 10+ years doing variations on 'write for loop, take data out of SQL cursor, put data on web page', and don't have the ability or inclination to really think about problems much deeper and more analytically than that." Gotta have high standards for your protobuf plumbers. If there is anything that gives me imposter syndrome its seeing my referrals that are way sharper than me never getting past recruiters / phone screens.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:19
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Analytic Engine posted:Is there any rational response other than devoting huge amounts of my free time to studying Cracking the Coding Interview and breaking into the anointed-programmer club?
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Aug 23, 2016 05:56
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God forbid people take a thread where career advice is asked for in earnest seriously.
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Aug 24, 2016 06:03
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google-earth-with-only-california.png
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Sep 1, 2016 04:07
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mrmcd posted:I am in the Cambridge/Boston office this week it's very nice. They are so proud of their toy subway system here it's adorable. Every area is styled like the train system or Boston history trivia.
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Sep 1, 2016 07:20
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We really need to start a googns mailing list.
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Oct 6, 2016 06:51
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Plorkyeran posted:The third-party vendor setup generally involves the employee being a normal W-2 employee of the vendor, so while they tend to get hosed on equity and such (where applicable) there isn't really anything legally iffy going on. I did some contracting for MIT that was structured exactly like this. Not really getting screwed out of equity on an academic coding gig, though.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:07
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mrmcd posted:The goongler mafia seems to grow larger by the day... I look forward to continuous meme improvement.
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Jan 7, 2017 17:36
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I went from senior SWE at a boring company to a regular SWE (L4) at Big G. I have no complaints. As everyone else has said, don't expect ranks on the outside to translate to those companies you listed.
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Feb 4, 2017 21:36
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Pollyanna posted:The amount you're paid depends less on your skill and more on what company you've joined up with. Majorly profitable companies pay more, as you've just seen. Also whether as an engineer you are seen as a profit or cost center (but just filtering for tech companies goes a long way to helping this).
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Feb 5, 2017 18:55
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