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HondaCivet posted:I have a couple more questions: It's impossible to answer either of those questions. It varies a lot from company to company. In general, you should expect to be asked technical questions about CS fundamentals and the technologies you'll be working with at the job. Hiring can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, depending on lots of factors. I've been offered jobs day-of-interview, and I've been offered jobs months later.
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Aug 23, 2013 18:59
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Months? Did you know they were still considering you, or did you just randomly get a call a while later with an offer? From my experience, it's usually a phone interview 1 week, in person the next week, then I'd assume a job offer within a few days after that most of the time. Take a few days to accept or decline the offer, then actually start 2 weeks after acceptance date. I don't remember how it went with my one and only current job, I think it was one on-site interview, they interviewed other candidates then I got an email saying come on down. That was for an internship with a tiny rear end company though.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:07
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Sab669 posted:Months? Did you know they were still considering you, or did you just randomly get a call a while later with an offer? Yeah it can happen and usually it's due to some extreme circumstance beyond your control. Some cases it might because of a very rigorous background check or things just get in the way- I've had a HR contact be on maternity leave (without mentioning a thing in the interview process) and I never heard back for months on one offer.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:10
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My team gave an offer once that was open for a number of years. The candidate was finishing grad school, since the req was approved we weren't going to cancel it. Weird mix of circumstances, but this person's name was on our slides for years without ever coming to work for us.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:16
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Ithaqua posted:It's impossible to answer either of those questions. It varies a lot from company to company. In general, you should expect to be asked technical questions about CS fundamentals and the technologies you'll be working with at the job. The phone interview doesn't typically have coding questions at least, right? It's usually stuff you just answer with an explanation like what's a hashmap, etc.?
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Aug 23, 2013 19:17
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Post a job description with the qualifications and duties list? That'll get you better answers.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:21
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Is it just me or does everyone seem to have a 4.0 GPA. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone graduating with a 4.0 from my school.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:22
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HondaCivet posted:The phone interview doesn't typically have coding questions at least, right? It's usually stuff you just answer with an explanation like what's a hashmap, etc.? It might. I've been asked to write code via Skype before. It typically doesn't, though.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:27
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There's some selection bias. Anyone still listing their GPA after a few years is probably 4.0. HondaCivet posted:The phone interview doesn't typically have coding questions at least, right? It's usually stuff you just answer with an explanation like what's a hashmap, etc.?
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Aug 23, 2013 19:28
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Rello posted:Is it just me or does everyone seem to have a 4.0 GPA. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone graduating with a 4.0 from my school. Because you either have a 4.0 GPA or you're going to leave it off your resume. If you did terribly in school (*ahem*) you're probably going to downplay it on your resume.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:29
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Rello posted:Is it just me or does everyone seem to have a 4.0 GPA. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone graduating with a 4.0 from my school. What JawnV6 and rrrrrrrrrrrt said. In addition, it really depends on the quality of the curriculum. Richie Rich and Tiny Tim might do the exact same work, but Richie Rich goes to an expensive private academy and gets a 3.0 while Tiny Tim goes to a state college and gets a 4.0. I wouldn't put too much weight on a GPA. I think the reason a GPA is important is to show that you can be responsible, follow directions, meet deadlines and yadda yadda yadda before you have the work experience to show you can do that. Once you get the experience to prove you're not incompetent it seems unnecessary.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:45
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Well it's not even the selection bias part of it. I have never actually seen a 4.0 GPA on a resume from my school. The highest I have seen was a 3.91 and that guy was at the top of his graduating class.
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Aug 23, 2013 19:54
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GPA depends on where you go too. I kind of flubbed through school and community college trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life so I'll probably be leaving it off but I could understand wanting to slap that 4.0 on when you're fresh on the market. It at least gets HR's attention.
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Aug 23, 2013 20:38
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GPA isn't a standard measurement from school to school either. Some schools measure A+ as 4.5, so it's much easier to get a 4.0 from them.
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Aug 23, 2013 21:23
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air- posted:Post a job description with the qualifications and duties list? That'll get you better answers. Good idea! There are actually a few open positions at this place that interest me but here's the descriptions for two of them. I'd list the qualifications lists but it's a young company so they're all flowery and vague. quote:In this role, you’ll collaborate with other team members to develop all aspects of the application, from the backend services that collect and transform data to the Javascript components that power the user interface. You’ll help design and implement the architecture of a complex cross-host application, and work with our QA department to ensure the product is fast and reliable. In addition to writing code, you’ll be sharing your knowledge with others through code reviews and group learning sessions. quote:You can help out a growing company and team tackle the thorny problems of managing heterogeneous clusters of systems using elegant and reliable code. As part of a larger team, you’ll help review and merge pull requests, mentor contributors, cultivate new developers within the community, and interact regularly with our user community. This role involves digging into the depths of various operating systems and packaging systems. We often deal with Solaris, various flavors of Linux, Windows, and just about anything under the sun that runs software. Much of what we do is in Ruby, but we also interact with Clojure, Python, Bash, and will sometimes find ourselves in C. The recruiter made it sound like they typically just find good people first and let the engineers decide the best place for them second so I figure the phone screen will be somewhat general? Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself since they haven't scheduled the second interview yet but the recruiter has been encouraging me to keep checking in while she waits for the managers to all get back from events/vacation so I feel optimistic. 
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Aug 23, 2013 21:30
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My GPA was 6.9 and I'm not joking.
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Aug 23, 2013 22:13
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9.0/12.0 scale?
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Aug 23, 2013 22:21
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Rello posted:9.0/12.0 scale? Out of 9, yeah. 
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Aug 23, 2013 22:24
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CatsPajamas posted:What JawnV6 and rrrrrrrrrrrt said. In addition, it really depends on the quality of the curriculum. Richie Rich and Tiny Tim might do the exact same work, but Richie Rich goes to an expensive private academy and gets a 3.0 while Tiny Tim goes to a state college and gets a 4.0. I don't know about CS at top schools but in other disciplines a 3.0 is a pretty lovely average.
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Aug 23, 2013 22:38
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I graduated from a Materials Science program and most people hovered in the 3.2-3.3 range. The highest in our class was a 3.87.
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Aug 23, 2013 22:42
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That dude that asked about a phone interview should get used to something like collabedit because he'll probably/maybe/never use it during a phone interview
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Aug 23, 2013 23:48
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fritz posted:I don't know about CS at top schools but in other disciplines a 3.0 is a pretty lovely average. I go to a top 10 CS school and they make a conscious effort to bell curve to a C average (2.0 GPA). So most my courses have a D+ (57%, 1.7 GPA) to a C+ (69%, 2.7 GPA) class average. Since the kids with the lowest GPAs will probably drop out I guess that bumps the GPA average up a bit. So a 3.0 GPA is pretty good, but you would obviously want a 3.3+ to get into graduate school.
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Aug 24, 2013 02:02
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Rello posted:I go to a top 10 CS school and they make a conscious effort to bell curve to a C average (2.0 GPA). So most my courses have a D+ (57%, 1.7 GPA) to a C+ (69%, 2.7 GPA) class average. Since the kids with the lowest GPAs will probably drop out I guess that bumps the GPA average up a bit. This was the case where I went too, and it was a lovely state school.
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Aug 24, 2013 02:55
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Rello posted:I go to a top 10 CS school and they make a conscious effort to bell curve to a C average (2.0 GPA). So most my courses have a D+ (57%, 1.7 GPA) to a C+ (69%, 2.7 GPA) class average. Since the kids with the lowest GPAs will probably drop out I guess that bumps the GPA average up a bit. This always sounded so poo poo to me. What's the point of ordering students? If I demonstrate an understanding of 95% what I was expected to learn, then my grade better reflect that, you assholes!  An instructor should aspire to have every one of their students get 100% on everything. Bell-curving everyone to a C is just as much of a cop-out as assigning everyone an undeserved A.
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Aug 24, 2013 04:07
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Safe and Secure! posted:This always sounded so poo poo to me. What's the point of ordering students? If I demonstrate an understanding of 95% what I was expected to learn, then my grade better reflect that, you assholes! Well to be honest I've never actually had a course where the bell curve lowered anyones marks. Usually the class average was lower than a C and everyone gets bumped up. If the course average is higher than a C+ I think the professor has to explain to the department why the average was so high. I've had one course with a B average, that was the highest I've seen. I believe that if the course has less than 30 students or is a four year/graduate level course then it is exempt from the C average rule. I do feel for students trying to get into medical school and what not where they need a 3.90+ GPA and they're competing with students from other schools who get graded a bit more easily.
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Aug 24, 2013 04:28
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Safe and Secure! posted:An instructor should aspire to have every one of their students get 100% on everything. Bell-curving everyone to a C is just as much of a cop-out as assigning everyone an undeserved A. I disagree with the first part of your statement. At my university, a passing grade was given to indicate that you had fulfilled the requirements of the course. Anything above a pass was seen as the student going above and beyond the given requirements. The courses were designed to reflect this grading system. There would be some base amount of knowledge you'd have to accumulate and work you'd have to do in order to pass, and anything beyond that would get you bonus marks. Redesigning the courses to allow everyone to be able to get 100% would have removed the opportunity for certain students to truly excel. If everyone started getting As and Bs it would devalue those grades, and eventually a degree from that university would be seen as useless unless you had straight As (sound familiar?). The course assessment should be designed such that student results naturally form a bell curve. A forced bell curve may seem unfair, but it's there to ensure that the A and B grades retain their value. It acts as a fail safe in case a particular course has poorly designed assessment. Of course, this discussion really demonstrates how silly the GPA is. Since there are so many different grading systems floating around it makes no sense to try to have a standard number to indicate how well someone did.
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Aug 24, 2013 05:04
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If a student goes "above and beyond", then good for them. They benefit from learning more. Why do we need to rank students again? Redesigning the course so that everyone who satisfied 100% of the requirements got an A wouldn't prevent anyone from excelling - they'd still be able to study extra if they wanted. If you take ten students who individually would go "above and beyond" in a silly bell-curved course, and put them into one bell-curved course, suddenly they're all average according to the bell-curve system. If the people designing the courses were competent, they'd just make those "above and beyond" actions bee part of the requirements to get 100%, and then silly things like top students all being average would be impossible to think about. Grade inflation vs curving everything to a C is just "we're too lazy to figure this out, so let's not gently caress most of our students" vs "we're too lazy to figure this out, so gently caress most of our students".
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Aug 24, 2013 07:34
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Yeah, it sounds absurd if you consider taking the best of the last ten sessions of the class (who got A+), hypothetically put them in the class, suddenly one is a C. What is the value of an artificial mechanism designed to prevent grade inflation, which actually causes grade inflation for sub-par sessions?
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Aug 24, 2013 10:25
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Safe and Secure! posted:If a student goes "above and beyond", then good for them. They benefit from learning more. Why do we need to rank students again? Redesigning the course so that everyone who satisfied 100% of the requirements got an A wouldn't prevent anyone from excelling - they'd still be able to study extra if they wanted. We don't necessarily need to have grades. Some universities still have a simple pass/fail system. If you are going to have grades, though, they should mean something beyond "I learned X% of the course content." Safe and Secure! posted:If the people designing the courses were competent, they'd just make those "above and beyond" actions bee part of the requirements to get 100%, and then silly things like top students all being average would be impossible to think about. I don't agree with enforcing a certain number of failures - if students demonstrate sufficient knowledge they should pass the course - but limiting high grades to the students who were smartest, worked hardest, etc. seems fair to me.
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Aug 24, 2013 13:26
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Or you could just do it the way a lot of stats departments do it, look at the natural distribution and then look for clear cutpoints for delineation.
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Aug 24, 2013 13:29
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Safe and Secure! posted:This always sounded so poo poo to me. What's the point of ordering students? If I demonstrate an understanding of 95% what I was expected to learn, then my grade better reflect that, you assholes! It's really hard to write exams or assignments to exactly the same level of difficulty every year, especially if you don't want to repeat questions and you don't cover exactly the same things every time around. Also, guess what, nobody actually cares about your GPA and if a prospective employers hiring process is so lovely that they do care you probably don't want to work for them.
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Aug 25, 2013 04:49
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Employers would prefer to distinguish who were the brightest lights in this years clutch of graduates. Bell-curved grades are awesome for that. If everyone gets an A, then businesses would end up having to start more rigorous interviews/tests... Quick question: As a UK-ian, I really don't get the GPA thing... I guess as it is used to get into college (University?) that it is the average of your High School grades, but how many subjects? In the UK we have the A-Levels, and it is usual to do 3, tho some swots (ahem) did more. But if I get a B in the extra subject, wouldn;t this push the GPA down? or do you only count the best '3' as that is the normal number to do?
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Aug 25, 2013 22:43
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OzyMandrill posted:Quick question: As a UK-ian, I really don't get the GPA thing... It's generally the average of all of your grades in all of your courses, and in the States it's used in both high school and college (university for you). The "normal" (actually there is no real "normal") system is you get 4.0 for an A, 3.0 for a B, 2.0 for a C, 1.0 for a D and 0.0 for a failing grade. But every school does it differently. Some schools grade on a 5 point scale, some schools give points for in-between grades. The college I went to did 4.0 for an A, 3.66 for an A-, 3.33 for a B+, 3.0 for a B, 2.66 for a B- and so on. The inconsistency between schools is why employers in the US generally don't care beyond "did this student fail a somewhat important class like CS 101?" Colleges use high school GPA's for undergraduate admissions in combination with other criteria
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Aug 25, 2013 23:19
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The other difference is that it's based on coursework throughout your entire high school career rather than a nationwide standardized test at the end. So it's pretty useless as an objective measure since it depends on your school, how hard the classes were, whether your teacher was a giant hippie that gave everyone A's, etc. We have standardized test but they are much less exhaustive than A levels and don't really cover anything that you shouldn't have learned by 10th grade or so.
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Aug 25, 2013 23:27
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It seems like the general consensus is that a GPA (or presumably similar school ratings in other countries) isn't as important important as work experience or skillsets. Having experience might be the most beneficial thing to note on a resume or CV, but it seems like you need to have experience to get experience. In that case: which skills are most valuable, or at least most marketable? Language-wise it's my impression that C and C++ are likely the most widely used programming languages, but the current three for higher level application development are C#, Java and Python. For web development of course there's Javascript, and it seems like PHP is widespread (even if people think it's terrible), but Ruby on Rails and ASP.net are the other two I frequently hear mentioned. I think functional programming is still used more in academia than industry, but the most common names I hear about that are Haskell and Scala. Finally, it apparently can't hurt to know Perl. Though it definitely varies between companies and positions, in general is there a notion of what's good to have experience with?
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Aug 26, 2013 00:21
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CatsPajamas posted:it apparently can't hurt to know Perl. Emotional pain is pain too.
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Aug 26, 2013 00:44
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So I'm looking for my next internship for next summer and was wondering how I should ask my current company for references. They seem to like me and may ask me to return but there are a few places that I'd really like to intern at if I get a chance. Should I ask my managers or maybe my co-workers instead?
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Aug 26, 2013 01:08
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Ask your managers and tell them exactly what you said in your post.
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Aug 26, 2013 02:29
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CatsPajamas posted:Language-wise it's my impression that C and C++ are likely the most widely used programming languages, but the current three for higher level application development are C#, Java and Python. For web development of course there's Javascript, and it seems like PHP is widespread (even if people think it's terrible), but Ruby on Rails and ASP.net are the other two I frequently hear mentioned. I think functional programming is still used more in academia than industry, but the most common names I hear about that are Haskell and Scala. Finally, it apparently can't hurt to know Perl What language you know isn't as putting in the effort to understand/know a language. You should be able to talk about control structures, type systems, polymorphism, memory management, and optimization. (un)Surprisingly, a lot of the knowledge you gain will generalize to other languages.
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Aug 26, 2013 06:40
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Is there a standard way to politely ask for a reference? Do I just email my supervisor from my internship (ended eight months ago, he told me I could use him as a reference) and say "hey, I'm using you as a reference, just fyi!" or do I ask for permission first? Do I bother him with information about the place/role I'm applying for or just ask if I can use him as a reference?
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Aug 27, 2013 18:57
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