interviewing: The Land of the Rising Fig

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing: The Land of the Rising Fig

«‹›2 »

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Started a job last year with a 2h commute each way so I've been getting up at 5:45 every morning, pretty envious of all you who've managed to retain night owl status

:smith:

# ¿ Jan 5, 2019 19:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:23

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

partially a two-body problem constricted by bay area geography (partner does not commute south like I do and, there's nowhere we can move that would improve my commute without drastically worsening it for her) and also south bay rents are astronomical vis a vis what I pay for a 300sqft studio in Oakland

# ¿ Jan 5, 2019 21:02

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Chalks posted:

You've got to be pretty careful you don't burn out if you're putting yourself through that every day

Yep this is what I've discovered. I'm renting a spare bedroom for a few nights a week down there, which has helped, but it's still, like, holy christ what am I doing with myself

# ¿ Jan 6, 2019 01:03

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

PokeJoe posted:

lifehack: move to the spare bedroom and ditch your other place

I'd get a dedicated parking spot since it's in the deepest darkest suburbs too so don't think this hasn't crossed my mind

# ¿ Jan 6, 2019 07:05

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

interviewing status: blocking on my application flowing through teams at BayAreaBigCo; meanwhile NYC startup is gonna fly me out after MLK weekend

so I guess this means I have to remember how to reverse a linked list again :negative:

# ¿ Jan 8, 2019 06:12

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

JawnV6 posted:

a yosposter literally dosed me post-lunch with this stuff

lmao oops sorry jawn, I multiplex two espresso shots into one virtual single-shot americano

# ¿ Jan 17, 2019 01:02

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

<edit: probably not the right thread>

# ¿ Jan 21, 2019 15:19

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Flat Daddy posted:

would apple actually care / look at it if I made a side project macOS app in swift?

YMMV but in my experience at Apple nobody really paid any attention to my side projects or other out-of-preordained-interview-band stuff, nor did that stuff ever come up when I interviewed candidates.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2019 18:46

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

I used to work at a Scala shop that was unconventional in the sense that nobody thought very highly of the actor model, which I guess is what the rest of the Scala community is all about these days

and then would get super salty at candidates who submitted take-home tests using Akka instead of threads and locks and atomics as god intended and would not listen to me begging them to either be more open-minded or change the take-home wording :mad:

# ¿ Jan 23, 2019 01:59

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

I have to say, it feels pretty nice to not have a job to go to

interviewing, recruiting, and also jobs are for suckers

# ¿ Jan 29, 2019 16:37

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

MononcQc posted:

also renting if you want pets is an exercise in continuous frustration.

This is the big one for me. I don't particularly care about ~owning land~[1] but drat do I miss not having a dog at home

_{[1]: if the government can take your land away from you for not paying your taxes, is it really your land}

# ¿ Jan 30, 2019 17:29

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

uncurable mlady posted:

what's the most decent place on the west coast to live

seattle circa 1999 hth

# ¿ Feb 3, 2019 19:29

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

just applied to a job at mozilla and felt bad about submitting without a cover letter, so ty for validating my choice

when they reject me I'll be sure to secretly blame you all

# ¿ Feb 5, 2019 00:33

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

this is a super-common occurrence, OP, at least among big places/FAANGs, so don't worry about it

# ¿ Feb 9, 2019 21:43

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

be careful of the one pitfall of that scenario, where both companies livelock themselves waiting for the other to give you an offer for them to counter

# ¿ Feb 11, 2019 02:21

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

DONT THREAD ON ME posted:

just seems like wishful thinking, like you can just buy this security product instead of investing in security engineers. i guess that's enterprise for you

by any measure of reality that's true

but if you rub a WAF over your network then you get to tick off boxes for your ISO 27001 certification, which some big prospective customer is making you pass before they consder giving you $$$

# ¿ Feb 12, 2019 20:19

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

iospace posted:

Question: if a company requires you to submit an expected salary, what should you submit then?

The last time someone tried this and wouldn't take my polite dodging as a hint, I told them $500k total comp to get 'em off my back and they countered with $150k total comp, so, this suggests aiming high isn't necessarily the best plan

# ¿ Feb 23, 2019 03:59

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Rex-Goliath posted:

yeah this is what i�ve heard as well. if you�re looking for a long term and steady gig to support a family you could do a hell of a lot worse than IBM. if you�re single and looking to go places with your career than ehhhh you could do a lot better than IBM

it�s basically in job form

One of my closest friends is at IBM and I've met a bunch of their colleagues, this is the impression I get.

Like, as of 2013-2014 their team was building cgi-bin scripts in Perl 4, and if I'm reading between the lines correctly my friend didn't get any stock grants, so it isn't clear that you'll have anything to add to your resume or be able to stack those figgies, but eh it's a job I guess?

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 16:28

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

I agree with all the others, if the interviewer didn't offer help or a reformulation to help you get unstuck, that says more about them imo.

Got an onsite scheduled for tomorrow (and two more for next week), hopefully these will go better than the previous one I did, where I had to implement LZW compression, got it done by the end of the interview, and then got bounced anyway :confused:

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 00:32

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Ciaphas posted:

i got there at least part of the way on my own recognizance, just took a couple of prompts to get the solultion out in 40 of the 45 minutes we were scheduled for. we were talking the whole time, I was just stumbling from what I guess is panic

so really, yeah, i don't know what they expected or even if that was good or bad or what, interviewing fuckin sucks, etc

I legitimately don't know why "had to think about it and tried some things that didn't work, but got it in the end" is less desirable an interview outcome than "whipped out a solution cause they studied it on the bus ride to the interview"

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 02:12

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Sapozhnik posted:

What the gently caress

lmao yeah and they started the interview by saying "so I'm sure you remember this encoding strategy from college, ..."

like my dude I went to a b-tier state school equivalent in canada, somehow I think we had different university experiences

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 02:14

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

so on the topic of "what would make a programming interview worthwhile", I had an onsite yesterday that was pretty interesting and different. I had to bring my own laptop in with a certain set of dependencies preinstalled, and there were questions where they'd give me a repo with a bug in it and had me track it down.

This seems way more in line with day-to-day software work, and I'd have been on board with this except that what language I'd like to use and, because it's easy to whiteboard, I say "oh I usually interview in python", so I had to figure out how to use a python debugger right on the spot in front of the interviewer

Still, though, seems less artificial and would be cool if that became the default.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 20:09

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

raminasi posted:

the big downside there is that you're requiring each candidate to have a laptop and time to janitor it to prepare for the interview

which, like, tradeoffs. everything has tradeoffs. so many of them seem to suck.

true but setup was literally "create a virtualenv, check this repo out, and pip install the repo's dependencies", so it wasn't that onerous in practice

(the bigger problem was that my "ancient" mac doesn't have modern video-out so I couldn't connect it to the conference room's monitor, so I needed an extra 30 seconds to dial into a zoom meeting, but even if I couldn't have done that they would have provided me a laptop anyway :shrug:

)

# ¿ Mar 9, 2019 21:03

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

I've always wanted to believe that binexp interviews would be super rad, glad to hear that's actually the case :shobon:

# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 02:24

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

mekkanare posted:

I wasn't sure if there was a thread to put it in mainly, but here's what I have: https://i.imgur.com/mgMFCJn.png

I'm not really sure what kind of computer touching I want to do so I just kind of apply to whatever sounds interesting. Also

A suggestion I'd make is that you have enough room on your resume to describe a bit more about what you did at $STATEJOB in terms of tech. As a hiring manager, I want to know both how you made things better at the company but also how you did it. Usually people have the opposite problem, where they give me word salad of hip tech buzzwords that makes me wonder if they were just navel-gazing in Haskell or whatever, but here I think you have the opportunity to say something like "eliminated the need to send documents by mail by building X and Y and extending Z to support Q" or whatever.

But yeah in general I agree, no red flags

# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 19:15

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

qhat posted:

Until your RSUs are fully vested you basically have nothing.

As someone who once held a lot of $TWTR stock and watched in horror as the value tanked:

count no figgies stacked until you've actually sold your stock

# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 22:26

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Does anyone have good questions or advice for intuition-building around comparing offers from startups vs more established companies?

In past interview cycles I've only interviewed either exclusively at small places or exclusively at big places. Obviously if you're going to a public company then you have a rough idea of how high your figgies will stack just by checking the stock price and praying for not too much variability. And, I guess given my past experience I'm content with going to small places, taking whatever offer they throw at me, and hope for mega stock splits down the road or something. This time, though, I kind of have to do an apples-to-apples comparison against:

- X (~1500 employees, series E, 785M raised, ~20B valuation)
- Y (~80 employees, series C, 70M raised, ??? valuation)
- Z (~80 employees, series C, 170M raised ~1.1B valuation)

The problem here is that this set's spread is pretty wide here so I don't know how to tackle comparing these just from a "how much cheddar is going to come out the other end" perspective.

What sorts of things would you ask here? Is it simple enough to ask about "valuation multiplied by percentage of ownership", or is that an easily-massagable metric?

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 01:44

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

bob dobbs is dead posted:

Value company at 1 p/e. Sucks if you dont have earnings data

Is earnings data something that one can reasonably ask to see?

p/e makes sense (though I guess this biases towards the more established company that is less dependent on VC funding...which is maybe the sensible point after all); at that point I presumably can equate two companies by this over the number of shares (e.g. twice as many shares at a places with half the p/e balances out)?

edit: also ty for the response :shobon:

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 18:06

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

JawnV6 posted:

idk the last 5 on crunchbase seem legit, redis & databricks?

ive worked for startups but nothing close to those options

right, like SOMA startup darling slack dot com is up to a series h, so for better or worse an E isn't super out of the question these days

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 23:09

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Chill Callahan posted:

ask them what their liquidation preferences look like

ty, I had thought this only mattered with preferred stock (which as nbsd points out I'm not getting), so I'll explore this

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 15:59

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

My first-choice company just bounced me...after checking my references :confused:

# ¿ Mar 30, 2019 19:15

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Three, per their request (one former manager and two peers)

I asked the manager reference if they had any idea of what went awry, since backchannel from the peers seemed to be that the company were positive on me, and I was told "I wasn't super prepared for that reference check" which is :confused:

# ¿ Mar 30, 2019 19:27

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Tetramin posted:

lol how does that happen? what kind of person agrees to be a reference then trash talks you

maybe they were on the fence and deliberating while checking references, so it wasn't actually related?

IDK IT IS EXTREMELY WEIRD and I'm grouchy because I liked this company

# ¿ Mar 30, 2019 19:30

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

qhat posted:

Unless of course the referencer threw a bunch of curve balls that the reference found difficult to answer, so I guess it might not even be their fault.

Yeah this is the thing that I'm thinking maybe happened

OH WELL

# ¿ Mar 30, 2019 22:27

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Captain Foo posted:

This is worth a call to your reference

yeah so when I did they were all "yeah so I wasn't really prepared for the call, they asked about your projects and I didn't have much to say" which is messed up but they had two other people to talk to (they called at least one of the other two, who said the talk went well), so I don't know

# ¿ Mar 31, 2019 02:07

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

thanks pals :shobon:

# ¿ Mar 31, 2019 19:20

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

Pulcinella posted:

Uhg I�m being ghosted.

I feel you, OP, I've been waiting for almost a month for a company to get back to me after my onsite, and even after pinging the recruiters (who never responded) I haven't heard anything :sigh:

# ¿ Apr 2, 2019 21:36

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

yotj update: turns out finding a remote gig after leaving two jobs in as many years is tougher than just walking into the open-office and saying "hire me, binch" :smith:

Talking to a place founded by some German microkernel folks who are working on theorem-proved hypervisors tho, so fingers crossed I get to dereference a pointer again soon

# ¿ Apr 20, 2019 16:37

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

thread title: Can-We-Buy-Figgies.pdf

# ¿ Apr 21, 2019 23:53

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:23

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

granted 2019 feels like 20 years ago but not sure the 737 max debacle counts as a deep cut, OP

I will not make the "unless the 'deep cut' means the hole it scraped into the ground on impact" joke

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 03:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing: The Land of the Rising Fig

«‹›2 »