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Wordicuffs posted:Hey guys I have a problem and need some advice Next time, confirm the time zone when you set up interviews - never make assumptions. You might be SOL on this one and have to move on.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 18:34 |
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# ? May 22, 2024 05:52 |
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air- posted:Next time, confirm the time zone when you set up interviews - never make assumptions. You might be SOL on this one and have to move on. Well yeah I know that now, but I'm not just gonna give up on this opportunity because of that.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 18:44 |
Wordicuffs posted:Well yeah I know that now, but I'm not just gonna give up on this opportunity because of that. If you don't hear anything within a couple days, just move on. Typically you get one shot at these sorts of things, unfortunately.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 18:48 |
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Wordicuffs posted:Hey guys I have a problem and need some advice Do you have his phone number? I would just call him, maybe sometime during his afternoon just to make sure he's had time to deal with his emails. I have a certain threshold when it comes to screwing around trying to coordinate things with people over email past which I just pick up a phone. This would probably be past it for me.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 18:49 |
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Wordicuffs posted:Well yeah I know that now, but I'm not just gonna give up on this opportunity because of that. Hate to say it, but from missing not one, but two chances, I wouldn't shocked if at this point they've lost interest. You can try giving them a phone call, but I wouldn't invest any more time if I were you and use your energy towards something else.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 18:49 |
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gucci void main posted:Are you really that oblivious to the fact that many companies in the major tech hubs will provide relocation assistance? Wait, I thought "relocation assistance" was basically always a reimbursement after you've already paid to move yourself, get an apartment, etc. Based on that, my intent has been to find a low-paying local job (all the local jobs are relatively low-paying) and save my money until I could afford to move to better a market, since I can't afford to do right now. Am I wasting my time because many companies will provide relocation assistance up front?
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:28 |
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My company gave me 3k for general expenses, set me up with a "relocation assistant", scheduled & paid the movers for me, would pay off my lease break, paid for and sets up apt hunting trip and my final fly out, corporate housing if I needed it, and would set me up with corporate housing if I needed it until I find an actual apt. I'm sure scrub tier places do some of this. The smaller place at which I worked did most of this. x freakin d bro FamDav fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Aug 19, 2013 |
# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:32 |
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Wordicuffs posted:I applied for a job a few weeks ago (for my first job out of university), and was asked to take their online coding test, so I did that and they contacted me to set up a Skype interview a few days later. ... Do you only have 1 contact at the company, i.e. no HR or recruitment contact? The engineer or person doing the interviews might just be very busy (also suggested by the first email). Not sure what going to the local office might accomplish if they have a set procedure for recruitment. Timezones universally suck when setting up meetings, so I wouldn't quite give up yet. Just apologize, explain, and persist until you're told to GTFO. If you can get them on the phone, do so.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:35 |
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UnfurledSails posted:Right now I have a month of free time before the new quarter. I don't want to waste it, but I have no idea what to do or where to start when it comes to doing a personal project outside of class. I think I've learned enough to do something, but taking the first step into the real world is difficult. I don't really have a burning problem I want to solve right now, but I know enough that it's because I have no idea what's possible for me at the moment. I'm pretty much in the exact same boat. I have a month before school starts to code something but I just can't think of anything to work on. I'm mostly looking to do something in C++. I'm trying to look for some open source projects that I could do some bug fixing for, but I can't find any projects that I could work on. Anyone got some tips? Thanks,
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:40 |
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Isn't there any open source software that you use and feel could use some improvement/bugfixing? If diving into large codebases is daunting, writing add-ons or plugins can be quite fun too.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:50 |
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Skuto posted:If diving into large codebases is daunting If he has a problem with diving into large codebases, he might as well forget about getting a job as a software developer. I've never had a job where the first several weeks/months didn't involve diving into large legacy codebases and learning how it all fit together.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 19:59 |
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Safe and Secure! posted:Wait, I thought "relocation assistance" was basically always a reimbursement after you've already paid to move yourself, get an apartment, etc. Based on that, my intent has been to find a low-paying local job (all the local jobs are relatively low-paying) and save my money until I could afford to move to better a market, since I can't afford to do right now. Am I wasting my time because many companies will provide relocation assistance up front? For my relocation, my company took care of: the movers, shipping my car, flight out to new city, hotel & rental car for a few days in between the movers and the flight, rental car after getting there before my car was delivered, corporate housing while looking for a permanent place to live, an agent to help me find an apartment, reimbursement up to some amount for misc. expenses related to relocation, and breaking my existing apartment lease. Other than the misc. expenses, I didn't see a bill for anything. There was also a "do it yourself" option that gave you some flat amount in your first paycheck to cover relocation expenses, but gently caress that. So, I wouldn't let the amount of money currently in your bank account stop you from applying for jobs in a different market. Just make sure you're clear about your relocation situation so you don't waste your time with a place that doesn't have a package that will work for you.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 20:02 |
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Ithaqua posted:If he has a problem with diving into large codebases, he might as well forget about getting a job as a software developer. I've never had a job where the first several weeks/months didn't involve diving into large legacy codebases and learning how it all fit together. Good thing I don't have a problem diving into large codebases .
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 20:06 |
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Just to echo the "my company moved me" responses, the last time I moved for a job, my company did the following: flew me out for the interview, put me in a hotel, and paid for all meals for the weekend, gave me $3500 for relocation expenses, paid for a moving truck to move all my stuff, hooked me up with a real estate agent to find a place, and gave me time off to finalize rental agreements.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 20:14 |
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Safe and Secure! posted:Wait, I thought "relocation assistance" was basically always a reimbursement after you've already paid to move yourself, get an apartment, etc. Based on that, my intent has been to find a low-paying local job (all the local jobs are relatively low-paying) and save my money until I could afford to move to better a market, since I can't afford to do right now. Am I wasting my time because many companies will provide relocation assistance up front?
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 20:23 |
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Ithaqua posted:If he has a problem with diving into large codebases, he might as well forget about getting a job as a software developer. I've never had a job where the first several weeks/months didn't involve diving into large legacy codebases and learning how it all fit together. I'm just saying that if you're trying to get something tangible finished in less than a month, you can skip that part and do something which might offer faster fulfillment and hence be more entertaining. Nobodies doubting you'll get to revisit the part you skipped for the rest of your career.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 20:23 |
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Skuto posted:Do you only have 1 contact at the company, i.e. no HR or recruitment contact? The engineer or person doing the interviews might just be very busy (also suggested by the first email). Not sure what going to the local office might accomplish if they have a set procedure for recruitment. The guy I've been in contact with is a recruiter for the company and yeah, he's the only person I've been in contact with. Unfortunately I don't have his phone number or I would have called him after he missed the first appointment.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 21:17 |
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Will companies pay to relocate someone for an entry-level job though? I assumed they only do that for the tougher-to-fill senior spots.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 22:56 |
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hahaha, even entry level jobs are hard to fill for the big boys since so many of the recent grads are trash
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 22:58 |
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HondaCivet posted:Will companies pay to relocate someone for an entry-level job though? I assumed they only do that for the tougher-to-fill senior spots. We've done it.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 23:09 |
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HondaCivet posted:Will companies pay to relocate someone for an entry-level job though? I assumed they only do that for the tougher-to-fill senior spots.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 23:09 |
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HondaCivet posted:Will companies pay to relocate someone for an entry-level job though? I assumed they only do that for the tougher-to-fill senior spots. Yes. They need the best employees at all level of experience, and relocation cost is fairly minimal for somebody that you think is talented.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 23:11 |
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Relocation assistance is a signing bonus that's typically well under 10% of the person's salary that establishes no expectation of getting the same bonus the next year. From the hiring company's perspective it's a pretty trivial expense.
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# ? Aug 19, 2013 23:18 |
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When a company is looking to pay you $70k+ a year, handing you a check for $5k at the start isn't that crazy.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 02:20 |
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NovemberMike posted:When a company is looking to pay you $70k+ a year, handing you a check for $5k at the start isn't that crazy.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 02:38 |
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Looking for people to hire isn't cheap either. They're likely already paying well over $5k in up front costs to pick you out in the first place.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:09 |
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This thread has a lot of great content, and I haven't even read half of the 150+ pages. Thanks a lot to everyone who has contributed their experience and/or advice. You guys are awesome! It really helps to have a better understanding of the expectations in industry. Reading about people's interview experiences has been helpful as well. It may be because there's a surprising amount of experienced and talented people on SA, but reading threads on this forum has made me feel unprepared for the job market based on my education. I'm graduating after the upcoming semester with a dual Computer Science / Mathematics degree and a 4.0 GPA, but I get the impression the Computer Science program at this institution is inadequate. Without getting into too much detail, when the term "hashmap" was mentioned on this forum I had to look it up since it has not been mentioned in any course, and generally anything I know about languages outside of Java is practically self-taught. This is disconcerting because one of earliest points in this thread is not to oversell yourself (which I do agree with on general principle), but it seems self-defeating to take time in an interview to point out I'm not as qualified as it might look like I am. Given comments people in this thread have made I'd like to pursue personal projects I can add to my résumé. Other people have asked what kind of projects would be appropriate for this and I'll echo that question. I feel like doing something too simple and presenting it as a grand accomplishment would be foolish, but when I look into aforementioned projects like ray tracing I don't even know how to begin approaching them. For people who have done personal projects they've presented professionally or have looked at others personal projects in a professional capacity, what did you do or what are you looking for respectively?
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:17 |
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If you truly don't know what a hashmap is, projects should be put on hold and you should sign up for this course immediately - https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:22 |
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CatsPajamas posted:This thread has a lot of great content, and I haven't even read half of the 150+ pages. Thanks a lot to everyone who has contributed their experience and/or advice. You guys are awesome! It really helps to have a better understanding of the expectations in industry. Reading about people's interview experiences has been helpful as well. How to make a raytracer: 1. Figure out a way to represent an image in whatever language you're using (mostly just finding an imaging library like CImg for C++ or the python one for python) 2. Make a function called draw which uses this loop: code:
4. You've made a basic raytracer That's the great thing about it -- it's a very simple structure that it follows and it's very compartmentalized. It's mostly just representing a ray, representing a shape, and writing code to test intersection between a ray and the shape. To get the theory of it you should google lecture notes for computer graphics courses or pick up that book called Physically Based Rendering by those two smart dudes since it covers every single thing in excruciating detail.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:24 |
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CatsPajamas posted:Given comments people in this thread have made I'd like to pursue personal projects I can add to my résumé. Other people have asked what kind of projects would be appropriate for this and I'll echo that question. I feel like doing something too simple and presenting it as a grand accomplishment would be foolish, but when I look into aforementioned projects like ray tracing I don't even know how to begin approaching them. For people who have done personal projects they've presented professionally or have looked at others personal projects in a professional capacity, what did you do or what are you looking for respectively? The kinds of things that I've found helped me really feel more confident in my programming skills are things I've posted either here, or the general questions thread. They're all intended to be completed in a couple of hours to couple of days depending on complexity, so the volume and variety contributes to the confidence building. The ones I've been working on in the past couple of weeks are:
All of these except the schedule util I tried to find recursive solutions to. I used javascript for all of them, so that if it came up in an interview it would be very easy to show them off.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:28 |
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CatsPajamas posted:when the term "hashmap" was mentioned on this forum I had to look it up "Hashmap" is a language-specific term that you shouldn't expect to know. It's a synonym for "hash table", right? I'm pretty sure that any time you see "hashmap" used in place of "hash table", you're just hearing the mouthnoise of an uneducated scrub. Or maybe a quite well-educated highly skilled engineer or something. See: "hash map" redirects to "hash table": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table. So "hash table" wins. CatsPajamas posted:
What institution? Unless you wimped out and skipped the meaty analysis classes in the math major I think you'll be fine.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 03:51 |
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CatsPajamas posted:This thread has a lot of great content, and I haven't even read half of the 150+ pages. Thanks a lot to everyone who has contributed their experience and/or advice. You guys are awesome! It really helps to have a better understanding of the expectations in industry. Reading about people's interview experiences has been helpful as well. What ranking (or range I guess) is your college? A HashMap is pretty much a hash table / associative array. If you don't know any of these three terms then yes you may have gone to a CS program that is not good. If you just mean the term, "HashMap" then I'm not sure if that is as bad.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 04:00 |
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astr0man posted:Also, this is obviously anecdotal, but the last time I was looking for a job I was living in DC. I wanted to move to Chicago. So I just applied to a poo poo ton of jobs in Chicago. I got a job that was listed as "local candidates only", and they paid my relocation expenses anyways. Oook. Everyone misread the other guy's post, I guess, or just didn't read it. I was specifically responding to the guy who was telling me to get out of Nashville and move to the bay area and couch-surf or live out of my car until I got a job. I'm fully aware that many companies offer relocation and I apply to jobs out of state with that in mind. I'm just saying that I can't move blindly without a job or any assistance.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 05:43 |
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Beyond the excellent general advice in the thread, is there anyone here that can give me Australia-specific advice? I'm in Perth, graduating at the end of the year with a CS degree. From watching seek, it seems like there's no jobs here outside of experienced Java developers and .NET programmers. Am I going to have to move to Sydney/Melbourne?
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 06:12 |
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Do you have any specific areas you are interested in? In general you are probably better off in Sydney but it depends on what sort of stuff you see yourself doing. If you have the family tree for it, try get an EU passport and head to London, or try get to SF/NY.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 06:23 |
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Zero The Hero posted:Oook. Everyone misread the other guy's post, I guess, or just didn't read it. I was specifically responding to the guy who was telling me to get out of Nashville and move to the bay area and couch-surf or live out of my car until I got a job. I'm fully aware that many companies offer relocation and I apply to jobs out of state with that in mind. I'm just saying that I can't move blindly without a job or any assistance. Dude are you sure you know that? Barely less than a month ago you weren't sure if moving to LA was better for your career than staying in Tennessee living on $500/month delivering pizzas. If you are slacking at all in terms of your job search, you are failing yourself. Don't hope that it's going to just magically get easier to find a job if you aren't trying to do something about it each day. Honestly answer to yourself these things: How many jobs have you applied to since May when you started posting in this thread? Since you only work part time delivering pizzas are you actually taking the other 20hrs/week working towards your goal of getting a job that is _not_ in Tennessee? Have you cleaned up your resume or is it still exactly the same? Have you written up some projects to show prospective employers that you are competent? If you can't move out to a specific tech focused city, that doesn't mean you're suppose to dismiss the rest of the advice, which is that there isn't much poo poo out in Tennessee. Every single minute that you're not sleeping you should be thinking about how to find a job. If you're hanging out with friends on the weekends, you are failing at achieving your goal. And seriously you do not want to wait until November/December/January. A lot of companies just shut down and during the holidays and you'll have to wait to get a reply back. Look I feel you about your lack of funds, what you should be doing instead of worrying about how expensive a city is is trying to figuring out how you can make yourself more attractive to employers.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 06:23 |
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Flashing Twelve posted:Beyond the excellent general advice in the thread, is there anyone here that can give me Australia-specific advice? I'm in Perth, graduating at the end of the year with a CS degree. From watching seek, it seems like there's no jobs here outside of experienced Java developers and .NET programmers. Am I going to have to move to Sydney/Melbourne? I can't give you any advice about Perth, but don't rely on Seek to give you an accurate picture of the job market. A lot of great companies don't post ads on there (I assume because they get flooded with terrible applications). Think about what sort of work you want to do, find companies that do that work and send in applications. I appreciate that it can be difficult to find these things, but when I went through this process I think almost all of my interviews ended up being with companies I'd found through my own research. Since you're graduating at the end of the year, you may want to look specifically for new grad positions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of companies have already closed applications for these positions. I started applying in February for positions with 2014 start dates. One company I interviewed with closed applications for their 2014 grad program in April. If you find yourself unemployed or in an unsatisfactory position next year, keep these sort of new grad programs in mind.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 06:33 |
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shrughes posted:"Hashmap" is a language-specific term that you shouldn't expect to know. It's a synonym for "hash table", right? I'm pretty sure that any time you see "hashmap" used in place of "hash table", you're just hearing the mouthnoise of an uneducated scrub. Or maybe a quite well-educated highly skilled engineer or something.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 06:50 |
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HondaCivet posted:Will companies pay to relocate someone for an entry-level job though? I assumed they only do that for the tougher-to-fill senior spots. The first job I took out of school (in 2008, for a large company starting with a round letter) I was offered a relocation bonus of either $6k cash up front, or up to $10k in reimbursed expenses. I took the cash since I knew the costs of my move from Boston to SF would be less than $6k
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 08:15 |
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# ? May 22, 2024 05:52 |
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unixbeard posted:Do you have any specific areas you are interested in? In general you are probably better off in Sydney but it depends on what sort of stuff you see yourself doing. I'm not sure. Short term I'd love to work in python, because I enjoy coding in python more than any other language. Security really interests me but I've barely begun exploring it. 'Security' is a really broad classification anyway, I think I need experience before I can narrow it down. Real-world data analysis, the "big data" kind of stuff, is really interesting to me as well. The only thing I really want to avoid is getting stuck chugging out bland code for enterprise software. What I really enjoy about programming is being presented with a problem and having to figure out the most clever solution. But then again, who doesn't? I am actually eligible for an EU passport. I was going to pick it up for eurotravel but I haven't considered permanently moving to the EU, I'll do some research on that. American visa requirements are ridiculous and I definitely don't qualify for them. I do want to leave Perth though. keanu posted:I can't give you any advice about Perth, but don't rely on Seek to give you an accurate picture of the job market. A lot of great companies don't post ads on there (I assume because they get flooded with terrible applications). Think about what sort of work you want to do, find companies that do that work and send in applications. I appreciate that it can be difficult to find these things, but when I went through this process I think almost all of my interviews ended up being with companies I'd found through my own research. There's a handful of software companies in Perth, not many. Mostly I've found it's inhouse enterprise software stuff, maintaining and updating existing systems. There's a few ios development places that work in objective c which I'm looking at as a possibility. I also found a really cool startup that's applying customer tracking concepts to physical retailers but I'm not nearly smart enough to work there. It's kind of daunting really, it feels like everyone else is way smarter & better at programming than me.
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# ? Aug 20, 2013 08:39 |