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PIGEOTO posted:If you screwed up writing code but aced the theory then you are probably going to be dismissed as someone with not enough practical experience. Hope this helps.
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Sep 2, 2014 09:29
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The cscareerquestions subreddit can be pretty funny sometimes:quote:CS Graduate struggling to find job  And now he's interviewing for minimum wage retail. Cicero fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 07:46
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Cicero posted:The cscareerquestions subreddit can be pretty funny sometimes: LOL a month. Such effort.
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Sep 3, 2014 08:16
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Cicero posted:The cscareerquestions subreddit can be pretty funny sometimes: Your first job is always the hardest to get. But my god, why not just let a recruiter get you a job and take your licks? Retail?? My GPA is worse than that,I only have an AA to boot, and it's not holding me back at all.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:57
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gently caress them posted:Your first job is always the hardest to get. But my god, why not just let a recruiter get you a job and take your licks? Retail?? This person does not sound like they are very motivated. I imagine that comes across somehow in their resume if no one is biting.
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Sep 3, 2014 21:09
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gently caress them posted:Your first job is always the hardest to get. But my god, why not just let a recruiter get you a job and take your licks? Retail?? That's actually what I'm starting to do right now. I've run out places to apply to, but I still got something like 5 or 6 external recruiters wanting to hook me up with a job. Last job search I got tons of technical phone interviews and on-site interviews. This time I think I've gotten just 2 technical phone calls and no on-sites.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:43
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The Fizz Buzz from Outer Spacequote:Matteo recently interviewed a candidate that was employed elsewhere as an “architect”. His responses to the standard soft-skills questions sounded a bit rehearsed, which made Matteo suspicious, so he started asking some more technical questions, like: “What’s the difference between an interface and an abstract class?”
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Sep 4, 2014 00:13
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Cicero posted:The cscareerquestions subreddit can be pretty funny sometimes: I can feel where he's coming from, out of school I was pretty sure from everything I had heard about CS that I was going to get a job right out of school easily and it'd pay me a million dollars an hour. At some point later after a few months I realized that having a really bad GPA (from a great school at least) and no internships alongside from mediocre side projects wasn't really going to guarantee me a great job. Everything written about the industry is so positive and optimistic that it's so easy to think those jobs are open for everyone. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 02:00
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Careful Drums posted:Is four jobs in four years really really bad? I'm interviewing someone soon who has had his first two jobs ever in the last six months, and I guess he is now looking for his third. This is worrisome.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:38
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I am scared. I'm starting on the road of of CS -> software developer. But I want to travel and backpack. In New Zealand it is traditional to go on an Overseas Experience (OE) so there is some cultural understanding that people take time off work to see the world. This makes sense considering we live on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. But gaps in one's CV are universally bad. But I want to, at some point, take a year off to travel and see the world. A lot of friends and people I know have done this. Hell, my uncle did back in the 90s and now he's some corporate upper management type. So anecdotally, it seems like I can find a balance between being a good worker bee and also fulfilling my dreams. But there is a hell of a lot of talk in this thread over the pages about how gaps are very bad. I'm more confused than scared I guess.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:53
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If you have a reasonable/interesting explanation for them it is fine. I guess it could hurt your ability to get past the initial resume filtering, but assuming you can get an interview I don't think anyone would judge a gap negatively if it was for the reasons you gave.
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Sep 4, 2014 03:56
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Lampsacus posted:I am scared. I'm starting on the road of of CS -> software developer. But I want to travel and backpack. In New Zealand it is traditional to go on an Overseas Experience (OE) so there is some cultural understanding that people take time off work to see the world. This makes sense considering we live on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:00
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awesmoe posted:Put in your cv that during those years you were on an OE. Also america is crazy half the stuff they say in this thread doesn't apply to us. Yep, it's truly terrifying the thought of our hardcore Randian work culture spreading  I'm so, so sorry.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:20
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Hi guys. I was wondering what is involved generally in the orientation process for new hires into a tech workplace. Just trying to get an idea as to how it might be different than starting in a different sector. Do you guys discuss fire plans and security and stuff or is it pretty much like here's your desk, please start attending team meetings for direction? E: sorry if this isn't the thread for this question, I couldn't find a good fit.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:56
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VelociBacon posted:Hi guys. I was wondering what is involved generally in the orientation process for new hires into a tech workplace. Just trying to get an idea as to how it might be different than starting in a different sector. Do you guys discuss fire plans and security and stuff or is it pretty much like here's your desk, please start attending team meetings for direction? I don't think you can meaningfully generalize about how tech companies handle this stuff. It varies widely from company to company. If you ask someone during the recruiting process I'm sure they'd tell you, or if you're interested in a particular big company maybe someone in the thread has worked there and can let you know. I'd imagine things mostly lean towards less structure for the smaller and more hacker-ish the companies and more structure for the bigger and more enterprisey companies. I doubt anyone is going to spend a ton of time on the fire plan, though.
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Sep 4, 2014 06:41
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The small contracting company I work for handed me a few tax forms then pointed me to my computer and the list of bugs. The large company I worked for before that had 2 days of orientation and safety training, and another ~3 months of on the job training. That was a manufacturing company, though, so the safety training was quite in-depth and way more necessary than would be for a software company.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:33
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Bognar posted:The small contracting company I work for handed me a few tax forms then pointed me to my computer and the list of bugs. The large company I worked for before that had 2 days of orientation and safety training, and another ~3 months of on the job training. That was a manufacturing company, though, so the safety training was quite in-depth and way more necessary than would be for a software company. When I contract, I get "here's a computer, here's a list of what needs to be implemented". I have been at my current place for a few months and I still have no idea what a lot of the acronyms mean because nobody ever gave me a list or explained anything. When I do full-time employee stuff I get the usual orientation.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:38
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I got an orientation as an intern and had to go to some meetings my boss said I didn't need to go to. Nobody told me what any of the acronyms meant except for our teams.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:36
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Lampsacus posted:But gaps in one's CV are universally bad. This is not even true in the US. For new developers who want to make it clear that they didn't spend a year failing to get hired anywhere, just write "spent a year abroad" and come to the interview with one or two good photos and a fun story about what you did. If you have a bigger resume, you could just leave it out entirely.
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Sep 5, 2014 02:20
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Thanks for all the responses regarding orientation. I know it's a hard thing to generalize.
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Sep 5, 2014 02:22
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Sorry if this has been asked before...has anyone used http://www.ambesty.com/ before? I'm a web dev with no CS background, looking to make the next step, and I'm finding I can't get past tech screenings due to lack of algorithm / data structure / design pattern experience.
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Sep 5, 2014 17:09
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every posted:Sorry if this has been asked before...has anyone used http://www.ambesty.com/ before? That looks like a poo poo website that advertises a shady tool as soon as you navigate there. I'd recommend something like https://www.hackerrank.com/categories/algorithms/warmup, tons of cool challenges in a variety of languages and problem areas.
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Sep 5, 2014 17:25
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every posted:Sorry if this has been asked before...has anyone used http://www.ambesty.com/ before? http://aduni.org/courses/algorithms/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-046j-introduction-to-algorithms-sma-5503-fall-2005/index.htm https://www.udacity.com/course/cs215 http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-fall-2011/index.htm https://www.coursera.org/course/algo Also just added the Big O in Plain English link next to the Big O Cheat Sheet one.
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Sep 5, 2014 18:24
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every posted:Sorry if this has been asked before...has anyone used http://www.ambesty.com/ before? The recursion section has zero discussion about tail recursion and leaves any hint to it as "recursion is always a memory hog because every recursive step results in a stack frame" which...is...wrong They put Stack and Queue in front of linked list, and implement Stack and Queue with arrays. Their Linked List implementation will segfault if next() is called after we've reached the end of the list. I have other problems with their example implementation but that's just the most egregious part. Their Binary Tree implementation... OMG, I don't know where to start. Maybe the part where when you delete a node and it has both left and right children, it infinite loops  You can fix that by reversing two lines of code, but still there is a lot that is confusing and horrendous about their implementation.
Bhaal fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Sep 6, 2014 |
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Sep 6, 2014 01:49
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That site is poo poo and has virtually no content, but your complaints are poo poo. Tail recursion does not exist in real languages and is not very useful or worth talking about. Implementing stacks and queues with arrays is somewhat reasonable for a beginning introduction. There's nothing wrong with a linked list implementation segfaulting or in this case throwing an exception if you try to go past the end of the list. If you've got a logic bug it's not like you should check for a null pointer and fail manually.
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Sep 6, 2014 02:12
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Bhaal posted:They put Stack and Queue in front of linked list, and implement Stack and Queue with arrays. Warning, nitpicky bullshit ahead: Ehh... I haven't seen the code in question (my antivirus won't let me on that site), and it's probably terrible judging by the other stuff people have said, but while a straight array is out, I find that array-backed list types tend to work best for stacks and queues. Even in other situations where "Linked List" is the traditionally correct answer in theory, I find array-backed lists with array slicing support and sane growth rules for the backing array* tend to outperform linked lists in almost all real-world cases I've benchmarked. There are some caveats if you're really memory constrained (since you can't afford multiplicative array growth), but in general I find that even when linked lists "should" be the right way to do things, they often secretly aren't. * Grow the array multiplicatively. Meaning when the capacity is reached allocate somewhere around max(numElementsToAppend,2*currentSize) for small lists or max(numElementsToAppend,3*(currentSize/2)) for big lists.
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Sep 6, 2014 02:17
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Bhaal posted:The recursion section has zero discussion about tail recursion and leaves any hint to it as "recursion is always a memory hog because every recursive step results in a stack frame" which...is...wrong Not really. The only reason tail recursion is as good as looping is because of tail call optimization/elimination. If you don't do tail call optimization then you're left with the same problem of higher overhead due to stack frames that every other kind of recursion has.
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Sep 6, 2014 02:42
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Tail recursion is one of those things that is vanishingly unimportant as far as "things to know about programming" are concerned, but for some reason there is always someone who wants to give a lecture on it every time recursion comes up.
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Sep 6, 2014 02:50
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It's kind of like saying "function calls are expensive." Well, no, there's compiler inlining and leaf function optimization, but that's not for an intro course. Now, if the tutorial was written in, say, Haskell, then leaving out these details is a bit of a nightmare, but I probably wouldn't even mention it in a C, C++, Java, etc tutorial. (Do any of gcc's -O flags even try to do tail-call optimization? Maybe O3?) You usually don't want intro courses to get too in-depth into this stuff, because it really can get confusing. I mean, straight-up using a language without manual memory allocation brings up a whole host of issues about how the compiler avoids dangling pointers and the minutiae of variable escape analysis that would be foolish to actually try and address. Once I saw an Java intro course that actually tried to go into hardcore technical detail over how string interning works. It didn't really end well. Whenever I've had to teach an intro course, to a certain degree I've had to make clear that I'm going to introduce a very technical term called "magic" that means "this isn't entirely correct but we're sure as hell not going into it". Really what I'm saying is that clearly the best first programming language is a few switches and some logic gates. Just start with NAND2Tetris (disclaimer: don't actually start with NAND2Tetris)
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Sep 6, 2014 02:54
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Cicero posted:If you look in the comments of the Big O cheat sheet linked to in the OP appendix, you'll see some useful links to courses about learning algorithms: Just wanted to add these coursera courses also, though I suppose they're 1st and 2nd year courses as opposed to 3rd and 4th year: https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partII
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Sep 7, 2014 16:24
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Thanks for comments on my resume; got around to updating my resume based on comments here: revised wording slightly, made it chronological by end date (to keep my programming experience at the top while satisfying the chronological/reverse-chronological norm), and removed IDEs/Linux from the skills section (probably will tack on again if it specifically mentions Eclipse/Emacs/Linux experience in the job description [in case they screen by it], but otherwise stick with the cleaned version). I'll make a Github account tonight since it doesn't sound like it'll hurt (even if it doesn't help) and put up some of the samples I have (maybe something from my C course [lacked in projects, I'll have to see if anything seems up to snuff], a couple projects from my MATLAB course, and some Project Euler problems) for now and focus on personal interest things to fill it out further moving forward as recommended here. If there aren't any other suggestions/feedback, I'll probably start applying soon and turn to focusing on interview prep (CtCI and other practice problems, personal projects to fill out Github). On a different note: anyone have a link of (or feels like effortposting their own) good advice on writing a solid cover letter for if some place wants one? I feel like resume advice is available ad nauseam, but cover letters are far less discussed and I'd be more liable to trust something one with experience swears by than the oft-contradictory advice Googling turns up.
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Sep 8, 2014 02:49
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bUm posted:On a different note: anyone have a link of (or feels like effortposting their own) good advice on writing a solid cover letter for if some place wants one? I feel like resume advice is available ad nauseam, but cover letters are far less discussed and I'd be more liable to trust something one with experience swears by than the oft-contradictory advice Googling turns up. The best advice I've ever gotten for cover letters is in the OP for the Resume and Interviews Ultrathread over in Business, Finance, and Careers. To summarize: quote:"I'm applying for your position of CHOCOLATE TEAPOT MAKER. I would be a good fit for this position because of my experience with SKILL #1 FROM JOB DESCRIPTION and SKILL #2 FROM JOB DESCRIPTION I gained at PRIOR EMPLOYER. In fact, I RELEVANT STATISTIC ABOUT A SKILL IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION THAT SOUNDS IMPRESSIVE. I am excited about this position with COMPANY NAME HERE because of TIDBIT FROM WEBSITE. I look forward to speaking with you."
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Sep 8, 2014 12:27
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I'm an intern now and I've realized that my understanding of exception handling and how to do it properly is very weak. Does anyone have any recommended resources to read or watch?
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Sep 8, 2014 16:25
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Doghouse posted:I'm an intern now and I've realized that my understanding of exception handling and how to do it properly is very weak. Does anyone have any recommended resources to read or watch? if you care about how something failed, wrap it in an either. if you dont, wrap it in a maybe. this gets a little different if youre talking about IO tho
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Sep 8, 2014 16:35
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Doghouse posted:I'm an intern now and I've realized that my understanding of exception handling and how to do it properly is very weak. Does anyone have any recommended resources to read or watch? Here is a good post on the why/when/how of exceptions buried a number of pages back in the java thread. Keep in mind though that best practices will vary by language.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:46
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bUm posted:Thanks for comments on my resume; got around to updating my resume based on comments here: revised wording slightly, made it chronological by end date (to keep my programming experience at the top while satisfying the chronological/reverse-chronological norm), and removed IDEs/Linux from the skills section (probably will tack on again if it specifically mentions Eclipse/Emacs/Linux experience in the job description [in case they screen by it], but otherwise stick with the cleaned version). Befriend a graphic designer and have them format your resume for you. I'm not sure what passes for acceptable these days, but that is very hard to read.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:54
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Lumpy posted:Befriend a graphic designer and have them format your resume for you. I'm not sure what passes for acceptable these days, but that is very hard to read.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:52
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After posting in this other thread (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3656060) about making just ~31k (maybe 32k now, I work at a state university and get "inflation raises") with 4 years of programming/web development experience Cicero said to post about it here so I figured I would*. Part of the reason why I've never requested a raise is that I know I'm not a good programmer. This isn't just me being humble or something; I'm pretty clearly not talented at all and mostly stopped improving after my first year or so. I also worked with this really skilled consultant over Skype for a few months and he would frequently get very frustrated with me. It's honestly been pretty depressing for me, because I always learned new things fast (I seriously gained probably 80% of my current ability in just a couple months) and just sort of assumed while growing up and in college "if I spent years doing this I'd surely be totally awesome at it!" Working with that consultant made me feel like the dumbest fucker alive. This is a pretty good example of my code (that the consultant wasn't involved with) that isn't cherry picked at all: http://bit.ly/1rv9fmp (note how overly long the file is; even though I'm aware this is the case and that it's bad practice, I'm not competent enough to improve it in a timely fashion; my boss isn't a programmer and isn't as understanding about time spend doing things that aren't visually noticeable) The results from the mapping done in this python code is then displayed as either a manhattan plot or curve chart with some d3.js code. I'm currently using someone else's code that looks nicer than mine for the full genome view, but I had previously written my own. An example of the d3.js code that I wrote from scratch that I'm still using would be the single chromosome view: http://bit.ly/YqAXKm It might help to mention that my undergraduate degree was in finance and information systems, not computer science. The IS major was kind of a joke and didn't involve any programming, though, so I only had one part-time job writing scripts in perl as experience prior to my current job. My current plan is actually to apply to graduate school in bioinformatics in the hopes that I'll be better suited to that. While my programming for medium-large projects is really bad, I feel like my ability to write shorter scripts and what have you is at least on the level of most scientists I know (in case it wasn't clear from the link, I program for a web application used by biologists). Even if I get into graduate school (I'm applying for phd programs so it isn't clear whether I'll get in) I'll still be working as a programmer for at least another year, so my compensation is still relevant. One other reason I'm posting in this thread is that I'm aware that my perspective might be a little skewed. The only other programmers I know (other than my one coworker**) are these brilliant people who went to MIT or work at Google and all make 6 figures. Even though I know I'm a bad programmer, it might be the case that a bunch of other programmers are just as bad and I'm just not exposed to them. *And I can't do any work right now anyways because our servers were hacked and taken offline while the IT department investigates or something. Apparently some people in China and Korea were using our servers to transfer bitcoins (lol). **My coworker is probably the only person who makes me feel good about my code. He's better than me at the more "technical" aspects of coding (not really sure how to describe this, but things like sys admin stuff) but his code is even uglier and less elegant than mine (which is really saying something). I think he makes something like 50-60k. I know he's asked for and been granted several raises.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:35
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Ytlaya posted:After posting in this other thread (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3656060) about making just ~31k (maybe 32k now, I work at a state university and get "inflation raises") with 4 years of programming/web development experience Cicero said to post about it here so I figured I would*. Part of the reason why I've never requested a raise is that I know I'm not a good programmer. This isn't just me being humble or something; I'm pretty clearly not talented at all and mostly stopped improving after my first year or so. I also worked with this really skilled consultant over Skype for a few months and he would frequently get very frustrated with me. It's honestly been pretty depressing for me, because I always learned new things fast (I seriously gained probably 80% of my current ability in just a couple months) and just sort of assumed while growing up and in college "if I spent years doing this I'd surely be totally awesome at it!" Working with that consultant made me feel like the dumbest fucker alive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome Please don't waste money going back to school if you don't actually want to
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Sep 8, 2014 20:00
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Doghouse posted:I'm an intern now and I've realized that my understanding of exception handling and how to do it properly is very weak. Does anyone have any recommended resources to read or watch?
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