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perfectfire posted:I think we've been over this before. UK salaries look like crap to North Americans because they get hella benefits from their government. They're hard to compare. I work in the UK. 22k is peanuts even for the UK. Surprise T Rex posted:If you're in London that doesn't surprise me. I'm in the East Midlands, not the biggest tech hub in the world. Yup. Are you prevented from moving? 4 months is kind of short unfortunately. Maybe stick it out for a while to build up the CV and then go jobhunting.
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Nov 11, 2014 23:13
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Gaffe posted:The average cost for 12 week programs seems to be around $14k and rising.  Dang. That's a lot of money. My two year masters program is about that much. Maybe I should start one of those in a few years.
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Nov 11, 2014 23:32
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PlesantDilemma posted:Did the place give any help in looking for a job? Was there a resume workshop or interview practice sessions or anything? They have a dedicated career services staff that works with students individually throughout the program and well after graduation. The last week of class was almost entirely dedicated to portfolio/resume prepping, practice interviews and one-on-one help nailing down the types of jobs each person should be applying for. Since I had a job lined up when the program started I didn't participate in any of it but I have heard nothing but positives about the career services team. One commitment they make that I really appreciated was long term help for alumni. Some of the early classes had students ready to move on to new positions after 6-9 months, and they still got one-on-one help as needed from the career services team. Doghouse posted:
Yep. Even accounting for lost wages during the 3 month program I think most of my classmates will have broken even within a 12-18 months. If you don't get a job or find out you hate writing code though, things could go pretty badly for you. One of the downsides of the newness and lack of accreditation is that funding these programs can be really difficult. Gaffe fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 00:21
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Discovering you hate the job after going through a three month program is pretty trivial compared to things like discovering it after paying for law school.
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Nov 12, 2014 04:31
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Malcolm XML posted:I work in the UK. Yeah, I've not got much dev experience at all, professional or otherwise. I'm almost entirely self taught. Are you saying that 22k is awful for a graduate/junior developer job? It seems like that's in the mid-high range for around here.
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Nov 12, 2014 09:32
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Gaffe posted:I am curious where you're at/which program this is that is producing 4-5 job offers before finishing the program. That sounds unrealistic, or they're pushing students into the job market before they've even finished instruction. http://www.swcguild.com/ This is the one that I was referring to. Supposedly the guy that runs it has a lot of direct contacts with companies around the country.
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Nov 12, 2014 18:51
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Surprise T Rex posted:Yeah, I've not got much dev experience at all, professional or otherwise. I'm almost entirely self taught. 22k is what I got started on as a graduate in a Scottish *games company* like 8 years ago, it is garbage. And by Scottish I don't even mean Edinburgh or Glasgow.
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Nov 12, 2014 20:48
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A few pages ago I posted about quitting my job and finding a new one that paid nearly twice as much. Well, I've been at the place for some while now, seen the codebase, worked with the team and I start to realize why. drat. I'm kicking myself ... for not quitting the old place sooner because the people here are cool, the management is good, code looks fine, coffee is free, even the lunches are great, and everything is awesome :iamafag: If you're unhappy at your job and think you can do better, go for it.
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Nov 12, 2014 22:57
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Any chance any of y'all have a hot lead/tips on where to look for jr spots in NYC/Brooklyn? I've been putting myself out there on angel and SO careers, and have been getting plenty of love from recruiters but everyone seems to be hiring senior Python positions out here. Went all the way through a tech interview with one place and the dude said he would love to hire me, but he needed someone more senior. Gave me a fat reading stack and told me to check in later. So, I'm doing that, but I'd really like to get going on this as my current job is sort of not great.
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Nov 13, 2014 00:53
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The March Hare posted:Any chance any of y'all have a hot lead/tips on where to look for jr spots in NYC/Brooklyn? I've been putting myself out there on angel and SO careers, and have been getting plenty of love from recruiters but everyone seems to be hiring senior Python positions out here. I got my current job here via a recruitment agency. I worked with several, if you're interested pm me and I can give you some advice. What is your general background/skill set?
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Nov 13, 2014 01:20
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pigdog posted:A few pages ago I posted about quitting my job and finding a new one that paid nearly twice as much. Well, I've been at the place for some while now, seen the codebase, worked with the team and I start to realize why. drat. I'm kicking myself ... for not quitting the old place sooner because the people here are cool, the management is good, code looks fine, coffee is free, even the lunches are great, and everything is awesome :iamafag: Congrats! Enjoy. Especially the free coffee. I still really, really enjoy that where I work.
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Nov 13, 2014 01:30
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DimpledChad posted:I got my current job here via a recruitment agency. I worked with several, if you're interested pm me and I can give you some advice. What is your general background/skill set? General background is that I dropped out of architecture school in my 5th year of college, moved to Brooklyn and started working at my current company in R&D. My dept. is in charge of bringing new materials to market, so I've done everything from clean molten plastic made from algae off of a terrifyingly hot 8' long screw to writing the scripts that my teammates use to test different material performance on printers. I started playing with Django a little over a year ago, and brought one site to "completion" but have since been working to actually complete it. I'm writing a shitload of unit tests and working on some functional tests in Selenium right now because I did that thing where you just go 'writing tests sounds boring, I'll do it when it matters' and, welp. Buzzword soup for the project includes: Python/Django/elasticsearch/celery/DRF/pyqt/javascript/compass-sass/nginx/gunicorn/git and probably some stuff I forgot about. I've also got one itsy bitsy commit making its way into Django 1.8, which people seem to really like to see. Current employer has been promising me a move into software for almost a year now with no actual move, and I feel like I'm really not progressing because I have no oversight so everything I do just goes from my hands directly into 'production'. I've been teaching myself all of this stuff in isolation for a while now, and I'd really like to find a place that can afford to take on a smart baby dev so I can finally blossom.
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Nov 13, 2014 04:01
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Onsite with Amazon in a few weeks, any company-specific tips? I hear they're a bit of a meatgrinder, especially for entry-levels, so I'm going to talk to a few more companies as well.
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Nov 13, 2014 18:14
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I PMed you, but I'll repost some of what I said (minus personal stuff) in the thread in case it's helpful to anyone else. As I mentioned, I found my current job through a staffing agency. There are a bunch of IT recruiters in the city, some better than others. The advantage of working with an agency is that they will know what the market is looking for in terms of experience, and it's in their interest not to put you up for jobs that you're under/overqualified for, as they only get paid if you're hired. They can also help you negotiate salary, and the good ones will have good advice and really work to get you out there interviewing. The bad ones will treat you like just another box to tick off, waste your time, and get you nowhere, so use your common sense as to whether the person you're talking to is competent and trustworthy. The downside is that top-level companies don't use external recruiters; you're not going to get a job at Google or Facebook this way, and most other corporate jobs also all go through internal HR. You have to be on the lookout for sketchy/lovely companies. That being said, my current company is great and since it sounds like you're looking for a foot in the door it may be a good way to go. I feel like with a year of experience with python/Django, you should be able to get something; there's a ton of demand out there. I had only about 8 months of real on-the-job experience before this. When I was applying, a ton of places asked for code samples and/or example sites that I'd worked on. I didn't have much to show, except for an HTML5/JS game that I made specifically as a demo to show people and some websites that I'd worked on in the previous 8 months. It would be a really good idea to put some toy projects on GitHub just so that people can see you actually can program. In addition, my current job actually gave me a small take-home programming project the complete between the phone screen and the in-person. I really liked that, because it gave me an opportunity to prove myself. I pulled an all-nighter and knocked the project out of the park: I met and exceeded the spec, all my code was meticulously commented, the presentation was very polished, etc., and my manager says that's a big part of what got me the job. One tactic I think you can use is to offer to do a programming assignment yourself if people are skeptical about your experience level/available portfolio. Just beware though, it's fine to do a small assignment as a demo of your skills, but I've heard several stories of sketchy companies doing unpaid "tryouts" where you write code they'll actually use or fix bugs in their software. It's not cool to do actual work without getting paid for it, and any reputable company would compensate you as a contractor for any time you spent working on their product. Also keep in mind that legally, if you're not an employee on the clock, you own the copyright to any code you write unless you explicitly sign it away. Hope this helps! You can totally make the transition; I was an opera singer before this.
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Nov 13, 2014 19:29
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What's the consensus on blogs? I've seen a number of job postings request a link to your blog where you presumably write about programming. I've been meaning to write down some thoughts or project walkthroughs anyway, but I'm not sure what's the best way to go about doing it. Tumblr? Hosted wordpress? Completely built from the ground up page? Does the URL have to be mega-professional, or can it be kinda goofy?
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Nov 13, 2014 20:55
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Literally Elvis posted:What's the consensus on blogs? I've seen a number of job postings request a link to your blog where you presumably write about programming. I've been meaning to write down some thoughts or project walkthroughs anyway, but I'm not sure what's the best way to go about doing it. Tumblr? Hosted wordpress? Completely built from the ground up page? Does the URL have to be mega-professional, or can it be kinda goofy? I don't think having a blog is necessary and it's fine not to have one. Actually, people that write about programming generally creep me out, especially (and you can tell) when they write for the purpose of being one of those people that write about programming. If somebody has a personal website that's, well, cool, but it's the same as having a github account that's cool or some other cool thing -- not that interesting once I'm actually talking to them, unless it really is really fuckin' interesting. Like, the way it would be if your blog had some poo poo that shows you're a bad motherfucker, not some opinion haver with a lovely walkthrough that obviously nobody cares about or some neurotic generalities about how you write code.
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Nov 13, 2014 22:52
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sarehu posted:I don't think having a blog is necessary and it's fine not to have one. Actually, people that write about programming generally creep me out, especially (and you can tell) when they write for the purpose of being one of those people that write about programming. If somebody has a personal website that's, well, cool, but it's the same as having a github account that's cool or some other cool thing -- not that interesting once I'm actually talking to them, unless it really is really fuckin' interesting. Like, the way it would be if your blog had some poo poo that shows you're a bad motherfucker, not some opinion haver with a lovely walkthrough that obviously nobody cares about or some neurotic generalities about how you write code. To show examples: http://www.alex-ionescu.com/ Bad rear end motherfucker http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks Neurotic generalities
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Nov 14, 2014 01:21
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:To show examples: Oh wow that second one is horrible :/
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Nov 14, 2014 02:12
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americong posted:Onsite with Amazon in a few weeks, any company-specific tips? I hear they're a bit of a meatgrinder, especially for entry-levels, so I'm going to talk to a few more companies as well. - How often does the team get high-severity support issues? - Describe the last one you worked on. Question for the hiring manager: - How does the team's software get approved for release? (An answer that amounts to "We look at the calendar" is a bad sign. "We run tests" without further details is also a bad sign.) Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 07:30
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After working at my current job, I'm going to grill every future company I interview with questions about testing.
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Nov 14, 2014 17:03
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Something I've learned/decided, is that I won't work anywhere that won't let me open-source most of the tools I write in the course of my work. I'm doing some Android work right now and it's incredibly annoying that I don't have access to any of the tools I wrote while working at another company; having to solve the same problem more than once is frustrating. Plus, in my industry (security), it's pretty common to open-source internal tools so it's particularly galling. So that would be something I ask when/if interviewing in the future.
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Nov 14, 2014 17:28
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americong posted:Onsite with Amazon in a few weeks, any company-specific tips? Don't bring this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716 I'm bringing it up because it matches very well with what the ex-Amazon guys I work with told me.
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Nov 14, 2014 17:31
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bonds0097 posted:Plus, in my industry (security), it's pretty common to open-source internal tools so it's particularly galling. Out of curiosity, is that the case even for the commercial companies involved in it? i.e. not just the academics or open-source divisions of the big players? It sounds like a competitive disadvantage to do it, your post explains why. It could be worse. You could have patented several big improvements at your first employer and then be hired at the second one and have to work around your own patents. *cough*
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Nov 14, 2014 17:38
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Skuto posted:Out of curiosity, is that the case even for the commercial companies involved in it? i.e. not just the academics or open-source divisions of the big players? Yes, absolutely. I've never worked outside of the commercial sector. Big players like iSec Partners, IOactive or Tenable open-source a lot of the tools they use and publish them on Github. These aren't things they'd be selling anyway, it builds their brand and it helps the security community as a whole. The mobile space, in particular, thrives on freely available tools/frameworks like Substrate, CyCript, etc. That said, not everyone releases tools. And I wouldn't work for one of those companies again.
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Nov 14, 2014 17:54
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So, last day at this poo poo job comes and goes without any fuss, hooray. I start Monday at the $newplace which is by all accounts awesome. And yet I'm here and it hasn't been a long while! Well, that's because something interesting happened! The SF place listened when I said "I might do some side work, sure" and shot me a contract: They're offering 11,500 to be paid in half upon getting my environment setup and then two one week stories done, then the the other half when I do two more stories. While this is clearly not chump change, the question of making sure I get paid remains - how do I protect myself? What should I be looking out for? They took their sweet rear end time, but this doesn't seem too awful. On the other hand, I've never done remote work across state lines, let alone the continent. Worst case I waste some time. Best case this turns into my ticket out of Florida, and some sweet cash for a few weeks of work. What's the right move to make?
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Nov 15, 2014 01:09
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I have a phone interview with Yahoo next week. CTCI says they often ask System Design questions, so I am reading chapter 10. Anyone have experience interviewing with Yahoo, or other things to prepare for System Design questions?
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Nov 16, 2014 01:51
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PlesantDilemma posted:I have a phone interview with Yahoo next week. CTCI says they often ask System Design questions, so I am reading chapter 10. Anyone have experience interviewing with Yahoo, or other things to prepare for System Design questions? http://www.quora.com/How-should-I-prepare-system-design-questions-for-Google-Facebook-Interview Makes me think about caches a whole lot.
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Nov 16, 2014 03:01
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Actually, I saw Gayle Laakmann's (author of Cracking the Coding Interview) answer to this question: http://www.quora.com/What-graph-top...akmann-McDowell Gayle posted:You should know breadth-first search and depth-first search. Is that accurate? I've definitely heard of people being asked to implement sudoku solvers and find shortest paths in interview questions. The book she wrote also seemed to have easier questions than the ones I've been practicing in Elements of Programming Interviews, so I'm wondering if her knowledge of interviewing standards at top companies is simply out of date, or if I'm over-preparing in my effort to feel comfortable in an interview with Facebook, Google, etc.
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Nov 16, 2014 04:03
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The reality is that it varies. Generally, interviewers are just regular engineers who can pretty much use whatever question they want. She's right though that as a general rule, they don't ask about complex algorithms, there just isn't enough time in the interview (especially when the interviewee is under pressure).
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Nov 16, 2014 04:59
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System design questions are a specific type of question - often about the design of larger scalable systems. They're totally separate from the algorithmic questions. Facebook even has different names for the two types of interviews ("ninja" and "pirate"... yeah, yeah....) I've been asked "How would you design Twitter?" and "How would you design a URL shortening service?" I failed both miserably at the time, but with a little upfront time studying systems design they would have been pretty easy. I think they're kinda crappy questions to get by surprise because spending even half an hour prepping for large-scale system design stuff (read: caching) puts you way ahead of anyone who doesn't, but if you're like Facebook and tell your candidates what to prep for it's pretty fair.
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Nov 16, 2014 07:16
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I just looked at my recruiter's twitter and it looks like he's leaving Microsoft. I'm still waiting for them to schedule my Seattle interviews... What should I do in this situation?
Acer Pilot fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 00:32
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 Why it gotta be this way
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Nov 17, 2014 04:29
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Tech bubble? What tech bubble?
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Nov 17, 2014 05:03
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Cicero posted:
Because all the local municipalities look down on each other, and none would even consider merging with the neighboring town because of all those lower class people running around, so there's lots and lots of little itty bitty towns of 30k people each.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:59
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Does anybody have a feel for how strictly companies generally evaluate candidates on over the phone coding exercises? I had one this week where I got down the path to a correct O(N) solution pretty fast, after a short detour which I self-corrected. However, I did spend about ten minutes debugging my code so that it correctly implemented a secondary requirement, even though the output at this point was primarily correct. The program was producing fully correct results in O(N) time after this point. I feel like the fumbling hurt me - is a correct, fast solution usually good enough for this sort of interview, or is it typical to face rejection for being a little frazzled over the phone? I would hope that companies care more about results, but false negatives don't really harm the hiring company, and I understand that they may err on the side of rejecting candidates.
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Nov 17, 2014 15:11
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YanniRotten posted:I feel like the fumbling hurt me - is a correct, fast solution usually good enough for this sort of interview, or is it typical to face rejection for being a little frazzled over the phone? I would hope that companies care more about results, but false negatives don't really harm the hiring company, and I understand that they may err on the side of rejecting candidates. I'd say you're probably worried for nothing; what you did is called programming. You described literally every single day at a programming job, except you were interviewing which is an order of magnitude more stressful and you still came up with a working solution. Some companies do look for unicorns, but I'd go so far as to say they usually have real trouble finding what they think they want for what they are willing to pay for it. Just, don't pin all your hopes on this one company. There are a million reasons why they might reject you, most of them utterly out of your control, so do your level best to not second-guess yourself. Our kind tends to over-analyze and dwell on hypotheticals, so the best thing you can do right now is just keep plugging away at the job search, and if this one company wants to hire you, great!
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Nov 17, 2014 15:52
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YanniRotten posted:Does anybody have a feel for how strictly companies generally evaluate candidates on over the phone coding exercises? I had one this week where I got down the path to a correct O(N) solution pretty fast, after a short detour which I self-corrected. However, I did spend about ten minutes debugging my code so that it correctly implemented a secondary requirement, even though the output at this point was primarily correct. The program was producing fully correct results in O(N) time after this point. Anyone who doesn't at least fumble a bit on a phone call interview is probably reading the answer off the internet, so I personally wouldn't hold it against you.
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Nov 17, 2014 15:52
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Safe and Secure! posted:Actually, I saw Gayle Laakmann's (author of Cracking the Coding Interview) answer to this question: The sudoku solvers will probably appear for people who listed AI as part of their coursework (I'm not sure why that would be asked outside of this context.) I've gotten asked mathy questions because of my math background. In that context, it's a test for CSP/Backtracking or brute force. I think that you're usually going to get questions related to the interest of the engineers. Google's culture was built out of implementing CS PHD research and that's probably a reasonable context to understand the questions being asked. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon had stuff on collaborative filtering, etc. Don't get me wrong, these interviews are pretty stressful (still in the process of job search and all that.) But I have a feeling they're also looking for the type of people who get engaged in hard problems/puzzles. And CS has a lot of pretty interesting and incredibly hard problems that people spend ages crafting tools to solve.
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Nov 17, 2014 16:28
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sometimes people have pet questions that are arguably harder than they should be; bad interviewers will say the only good interviewee is the one who solves it, good interviewers will look at the results less black and white. i think cicero still has the fisher-yates question in the OP? if you don't know probabilities you're going to get super stuck or not necessarily understand why a solution like "sort but with a randomized comparator" is a bad idea.
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Nov 17, 2014 18:19
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Hey guys, I've recently started a Masters program in Computational Linguistics. I did a little Comp Sci in college (my degree was Linguistics), but never above the intro level. I looked at what my courseload looks like, and there's no Data Structures and Algorithms. Is this something I should be learning on my own? I have a fairly weak courseload right now, so I could do it. There's no chance of me taking it through my university, I'm in Europe and they have a hosed up system. Is this something I could conceivably learn on my own? Or some MOOC? Or picking up on my own? I could also do it online with some university or something. I reckon that this would help me out a little once I graduated. I could also be pursueded not to do this. But I figured since I was pretty strong on the Linguistics side, I should bolster the Comp Sci part. I have a month gap in between semesters in February, and I could just do that a couple hours a day then.
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Nov 17, 2014 21:55
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