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Zero The Hero posted:I feel like the actual job has to be something like data entry that they just need raw manpower for and are trying to hype it up, or something. I have no idea, but your scenario certainly has the advantage of simplicity compared to mine.
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Oct 20, 2013 01:24
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You might get ten times more work of value from one decent programmer, but you can't bill ten times more hours for it.
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Oct 20, 2013 03:47
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Here's a question I have... about a month ago, I scheduled a job interview for a company that requires me to fly out and spend a night in a hotel. A week or so ago they scheduled all the travel options for me. The interview is this coming Wednesday-Thursday. Since then, I've received a job offer from another company and I no longer am interested in this position. This whole interview would be a waste of everyone's time. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a dick move would it be to cancel the interview and force them to cancel the flight and hotel room? Is that considered poor form?
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Oct 20, 2013 12:01
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unsanitary posted:Here's a question I have... about a month ago, I scheduled a job interview for a company that requires me to fly out and spend a night in a hotel. A week or so ago they scheduled all the travel options for me. The interview is this coming Wednesday-Thursday. This is in no way poor form, but is actually good form to cancel rather than waste their money and time on you.
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Oct 20, 2013 12:04
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unsanitary posted:Here's a question I have... about a month ago, I scheduled a job interview for a company that requires me to fly out and spend a night in a hotel. A week or so ago they scheduled all the travel options for me. The interview is this coming Wednesday-Thursday. Unless you've signed the contract and have an official start date, go to the other interview. Never cancel one unless you're absolutely certain you don't want the job or have another one 110% secured.
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Oct 20, 2013 16:40
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If it is 100% certain that you will be starting at the company that gave you an offer, then yes, cancel. If there is any reason to doubt how the other offer has panned out, or if the deal isn't completely signed and sealed yet, then hedge your bets and go to the interview. If you're not sure where you stand on this, go to the interview anyway.
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Oct 20, 2013 19:03
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So I have an interview on Tuesday that has listed "Analytic math test (9-12 grade level analytic math problems)" as one of the two tests that they'll be throwing at me. Anyone have any recommendations for what I should be studying? Apologies if this has already been covered to death, I didn't see it on the first page at least (but the section on what to read over for programming skills is very awesome).
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Oct 24, 2013 18:03
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JollyGreen posted:So I have an interview on Tuesday that has listed "Analytic math test (9-12 grade level analytic math problems)" as one of the two tests that they'll be throwing at me. Anyone have any recommendations for what I should be studying? Apologies if this has already been covered to death, I didn't see it on the first page at least (but the section on what to read over for programming skills is very awesome). I don't know about the US, but the UK Y9-Y12 curriculum is (from memory):
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Oct 24, 2013 18:23
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Amateur (if even) programmer here, in desperate need of guidance. I have no formal education in programming, but it's always sort of had a presence in my life. My dad was a programmer, and my older brother took it up early. I was exposed to things like BASIC early on, but in my young age resisted learning it in depth. Over the years, I would get a taste of programming every now and then, creating macros or maps in computer games. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me to get a formal education in programming, and so I graduated (2011) with a degree I'm not even sure I care about anymore. Cut to the present, I'm nearing the end of my contract working in the data management department of a pharmaceutical company. I started about a year and a half ago, doing simple stuff like scanning documents and data entry. I got renewed under a higher paying contract when I impressed a manager with a macro that repeatedly filled out web forms with dummy test data. I continued to tinker around with ways to incorporate programming to do my job more efficiently. I'm very close to committing to a career in programming, but I'm discouraged by my lack of formal education and solid foundation. My knowledge is fractured, because when I learn languages, I tend to learn just enough to do the thing I wanted to do. I probably would not be able to answer very simple questions about fundamental concepts. Even though I've impressed some less programming-minded people at work, I feel like a sham. Anyway, I guess what I need to know is: what can I do to cultivate a career in programming, without previous formal training, and without going back to school full time? And how can I get a better foundation in programming/CS in general, as well as improve my approach when learning a new language?
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Oct 24, 2013 18:25
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gandlethorpe posted:Anyway, I guess what I need to know is: what can I do to cultivate a career in programming, without previous formal training, and without going back to school full time? And how can I get a better foundation in programming/CS in general, as well as improve my approach when learning a new language? Easiest way to become a programmer: Start programming. Put stuff on Github, contribute to OSS, and ask/answer questions on StackOverflow. Get a bunch of stuff that you can send to a potential employer that says "yes, I know how to program."
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Oct 24, 2013 18:46
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coffeetable posted:I don't know about the US, but the UK Y9-Y12 curriculum is (from memory): Excellent recommendations! Thanks for pointing out Khan Academy for me - that site looks pretty slick. Now that I think through my initial phone interview a bit more, I realized they were asking some (very basic) statistics questions for a reason; one of their six products heavily advertising its ability to do statistical work on medical stuff - I think that's where my focus needs to be (so I'll be focusing on Bayes', expectations, co variance, and standard distributions). JollyGreen fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 18:46
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gandlethorpe posted:Amateur (if even) programmer here, in desperate need of guidance. I have no formal education in programming, but it's always sort of had a presence in my life. My dad was a programmer, and my older brother took it up early. I was exposed to things like BASIC early on, but in my young age resisted learning it in depth. If you're interested in getting the formal CS education, would your company consider allowing you to take 6-8 credits per semester at some tech school and be flexible with your schedule so you can work on getting that foundation? My company allowed me to do that when I decided to switch careers to CS.
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Oct 24, 2013 23:53
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If you learn best in a lecture/tutorial environment, or if you particularly want/need the piece of paper saying you have a CS degree, or if you want the student experience, or if you want to study part/full-time and can't do it without a student loan, then to university with you! If you're generally an autodidact though, there is very little you can get out of a CS degree that you can't get out of the ol' Internet. In fact, a huge number of very good CS schools have all their materials online. Example: my alma mater lists the requirements for its CS degrees here, and all its course materials are here. I imagine Stanford and MIT and all will do similar. All that said, personally I've found the best way to learn CS hasn't been through courses, it's just been to read books and code and write notes and code. Pick a subject or a problem you're interested in, and Google up a good book about it. If you can't hack said book, see what they recommend as a foundation during the introduction, read that, and then return to the original book. coffeetable fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 00:07
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I'm doing the masters in applied CS program online at UWG - google it. It's pretty decent so far - comparatively cheap, flexible in terms of when you do your schoolwork, etc.
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Oct 25, 2013 13:25
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coffeetable posted:If you're generally an autodidact though, there is very little you can get out of a CS degree that you can't get out of the ol' Internet. In fact, a huge number of very good CS schools have all their materials online. Example: my alma mater lists the requirements for its CS degrees here, and all its course materials are here. I imagine Stanford and MIT and all will do similar. Biting the bullet and making an (admittedly crappy) bunch of data structures in good ole C did more to teach me how it all actually works than any amount of lecturing or doing class assignments in Java ever did. If you can make a toy program that utilizes various common data structures in C and just do some some basic sad rear end console input-output you're ahead of most grads, especially if you don't have memory leaks.
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Oct 25, 2013 14:35
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Biting the bullet and making an (admittedly crappy) bunch of data structures in good ole C did more to teach me how it all actually works than any amount of lecturing or doing class assignments in Java ever did. If your school never branched outside of Java it probably sucked. I'd like to see how your curriculum handled OS-related courses - a big part of which should include memory management.
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Oct 25, 2013 16:54
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Sarcophallus posted:If your school never branched outside of Java it probably sucked. I'd like to see how your curriculum handled OS-related courses - a big part of which should include memory management. Yeah, we wrote a device driver for a virtual disk array for our Systems programming class. A bit more than a toy program with console output.
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Oct 25, 2013 19:37
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Biting the bullet and making an (admittedly crappy) bunch of data structures in good ole C did more to teach me how it all actually works than any amount of lecturing or doing class assignments in Java ever did. I agree when the subject is pinned down, but gandlethorp was explicitly asking after how to work up a good coverage of CS topics. If you don't have a working knowledge of the subject, the only way to find out what you're missing is to go over a materials list someone else has made up.
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Oct 25, 2013 19:40
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How common are crunch days where you people work? I've had my job less than forty days and our third "everyone is staying till 3am and some people until 8am" is gonna be this Monday because there's another bug in something that makes some client money.
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Oct 26, 2013 01:30
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Safe and Secure! posted:How common are crunch days where you people work? I've had my job less than forty days and our third "everyone is staying till 3am and some people until 8am" is gonna be this Monday because there's another bug in something that makes some client money. Does it have to be everybody on Monday for a good reason? Why not get some of the work done over the weekend? Do you get overtime or some sort of compensation? Is there an on call rotation or is this expected to be a normal work hours only kind of job? To answer your question, being asked/told to pull an all nighter around once every two weeks sounds like a lot to me. Ignoring how irritating it is, it's not a terribly efficient way to work. Emergencies are emergencies, but if they keep happening then something is wrong.
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Oct 26, 2013 01:46
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Safe and Secure! posted:How common are crunch days where you people work? I've had my job less than forty days and our third "everyone is staying till 3am and some people until 8am" is gonna be this Monday because there's another bug in something that makes some client money. Where I'm at, we normally work 40-45 hours a week at most during ordinary time. We ship quarterly and we cut the final shipping build for this quarter's release probably end of next week, so this has not been ordinary time. I've put in a few 10-11 hour days this week and will probably be doing more next week. Nobody should be doing all nighters like that, ever. Go the hell home, you're just going to write bad code and make more bugs that require more all-nighters to try to clear. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 01:48
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kitten smoothie posted:Nobody should be doing all nighters like that, ever. Go the hell home, you're just going to write bad code and make more bugs that require more all-nighters to try to clear. The number of people in management who completely ignore that aspect of software development is absolutely mind-boggling. Usually it's people who haven't ever worked on anything complex for months to years (think the Codecademy crowd) and who think that coding past 10 hours a day really compounds to a lot of extra productivity over the long term. Anybody who's done this long enough viscerally knows that the very opposite is actually true, which is why things like the Agile Manifesto were born. That's however never on the radar of people who will instruct you to do 80 hour week deathmarches.
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Oct 26, 2013 04:11
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- What you've described is not routine in the industry. Emergency overtime might be to 10PM at the outside, not all freaking night. - It is not in anyone's interest for you to work past the point of exhaustion. - Anyone who asks this of you and does not follow through with tangible rewards is a sociopath. Start working on your exit scenario now. If you find that the demands of the job make that impossible as well, then you should resign. "They routinely ordered me to work until 3AM" is an acceptable complaint about your previous employer in interviews. Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 04:28
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I usually don't have more than 8 hours of good programming in me on a given day. An extra saturday or something is not out of the question, ON OCCASION, but sleep is 100% mandatory if you don't want me introducing more bugs into my code than I fix. Three pre-scheduled, all-hands all-nighters in a month is loving ludicrous. It's not even an emergency, they're loving scheduling it? How many times have the managers had their cars keyed and tires spiked, out of curiosity? More than one or two periods of crunch time in a YEAR points to serious management and staffing issues, if you ask me. And that's 10-hour days or a couple of saturdays, for a couple weeks. NEVER all-nighters. gently caress that. Get out of there. When the interviewers ask you why you're leaving a job after only a month and a half, tell them you just don't fit with the company culture. It's not going to be a big deal with most companies unless you make a regular habit of it.
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Oct 26, 2013 04:53
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I'd say I have around 4 "crunch" days a year. And really, the main benefit of those days is not the extra hours worked, but having the whole team together for a little while outside of business hours when no one else is interrupting. And they don't go anywhere near 3 AM.
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Oct 26, 2013 04:54
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I'd love to see the code getting poo poo out after working for 16 hours straight. You'd be lucky if it was even in the right language.
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Oct 26, 2013 11:17
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tk posted:Does it have to be everybody on Monday for a good reason? Why not get some of the work done over the weekend? Do you get overtime or some sort of compensation? Is there an on call rotation or is this expected to be a normal work hours only kind of job? I don't know what the reason is. Just that there's an emergency patch that has to go out. The third one since I've started. There isn't any special compensation except that you can come in later the next day and you don't have to stay as long - the hours you clock overnight after 12am count toward the minimum of 8 hours that you have to put in every day. There isn't an on call rotation, the standard hours are 8-5 with an hour lunch in between. I usually just work through lunch because I don't have anything else to do during that time, it only takes me like five minutes to eat, though I still hesitate to leave early because I think I'd get glared at. It does seem like half the people tend to stay till 6ish, but sometimes the office mostly empties by 5:30pm. It's just that everyone is expected to stay until the release is done, whether it's a scheduled release or an "emergency patch". The first release "party" I saw DID have everyone work over the weekend, as you asked. People still ended up staying till 3-5am the following Tuesday to get it out the door.
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Oct 26, 2013 15:16
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So they scheduled an emergency for Monday? It sounds ridiculous, get out of that place.
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Oct 26, 2013 15:26
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This has been echoed time and again, mostly in the pissoff thread in SHSC, but if you act like a doormat, you will be treated like one. Your hours AFTER MIDNIGHT count towards the next day? Well whoop-de-poo poo! How about if I work a significant amount of time after 5:00, I'm leaving early come Friday? If you think you are going to get in trouble for leaving early when you work through lunch, congratulations: you live in a corporate pit and will never be judged on the quality of your work. You will be judged only on the time spent in your office chair. I know, because this was exactly my situation. You will quickly become dissatisfied and demotivated. You will feel like a replaceable part in a machine, because that's exactly what you are in such an organization. Your company is full of spineless blobs and you're well on your way to joining them if you put up with this kind of schedule bullshit. I still can't get over the fact that they're loving scheduling an overnight deathmarch days in advance. Please don't put up with this. Not just for your sake, but for everyone else's; the fact that people in our profession often tolerate this kind of treatment is why it's so goddamn prevalent. This is not an emergency. They are using you as slave labor and LAUGHING ABOUT IT. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 15:34
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Do your colleagues have significant others or families? Are you hearing them call their loved ones and saying "put my dinner in the fridge again tonight ... well, yeah, I know, it's the third time this month... yeah, I know, but the Hudsucker account is an important one, and their accounts payable reports all have commas in the wrong places... yeah, I know." If you don't want that to be you in the future, quit this job right the hell now.
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Oct 26, 2013 15:44
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As others have said that is completely unacceptable. I work in the games industry and in response to a 1st party demanding last minute changes my team worked a weekend and some late nights (even then we're all on laptops and left work at the normal time just continued at home for a bit.) In response I've ordered people not to check their E-Mail over the weekend and have arranged for comp days for the extra hours they've put in, again where they won't be checking their E-Mail. Mandatory overtime is a failure to plan. In my case we didn't get a build out to the first party soon enough so didn't have time to take their lengthy feedback into account on the schedule. Sure won't be doing that next time!
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Oct 26, 2013 16:39
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Yeah, I think the latest I've worked here is 5:30 one day, and management apologized for that. We average about 30 hours of work a week. I can't imagine being forced to work past midnight and not being compensated for it.
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Oct 26, 2013 17:38
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We have a "just do your 40 hours however" policy. That means if I have to take off to run someone to the doctor, or just want to leave early some day, I can do it. I just have to come in earlier or leave later another day as long as it turns out. You can also use PTO for this or do it at your leisure at other weeks down the line, etc. This is flexible, since I have an extremely sick family member who can't move herself or drive herself anymore. It's also a great motivator to get up early and leave at 4:00 or 4:30 so you skip the rush hour traffic entirely. We have this one guy who shows up at 6am every day and leaves around 2pm. If I didn't have a night owl of a GF I'd do it myself.
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Oct 26, 2013 18:35
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Oh yeah I was supposed to do this Any glaring things I should change? This thursday I'm going to hire that resume writing service, but I still want to get it as good as I can in the meantime. I'm thinking I might want to ditch the tutoring and put in a skills section for the bots to register words while crawling, but wanted to ask here first.
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Oct 26, 2013 19:35
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Oh yeah I was supposed to do this Honestly, they'll walk you through it step by step. That's not at all the format I'd use though I haven't been a year out of school in many a year.
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Oct 26, 2013 19:52
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Hughlander posted:Honestly, they'll walk you through it step by step. That's not at all the format I'd use though I haven't been a year out of school in many a year. I just wanted to know if I had some idea of how to make a non-terrible resume and have some clue what people want to see.
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Oct 26, 2013 19:57
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Oh yeah I was supposed to do this Seems reasonable to me. A few suggestions on content:
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Oct 26, 2013 20:25
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Any glaring things I should change? This thursday I'm going to hire that resume writing service, but I still want to get it as good as I can in the meantime. Don't use tables for the section headings. Put the dates after the employer names instead. Put your job title before each employer name. What I'm not seeing in your experience section is any kind of description of what projects you were working on. You're focusing instead on what you did at particular moments. Move the low-level technologies to a "Skills" section, then lead each job section with high-level descriptions of projects you personally contributed to and how they benefited the company.
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Oct 26, 2013 20:37
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So I have an interview where they've asked me to do almost like a little 15-20 minute presentation of some kind... like of me and stuff I have worked on. I guess so the other interview team members don't have to read through my resume? Any advice on how to do something that isn't just a dull as hell powerpoint? Also looking forward to some wonderful behavioral interview stuff... 'Tell me about a time when...'
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Oct 26, 2013 21:39
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An interesting PowerPoint? Design diagrams, company logos, charts showing quantitative impact of stuff you did. Keep bullet lists to a minimum as they are mind poison.
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Oct 26, 2013 21:49
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