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Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know

Chomposaur posted:

Then Google invited me to their coding challenge. I passed it, and I'm currently scheduling an on-site interview for Software Engineering in between furiously practicing code on a whiteboard. It'd be an amazing job, but obviously I can't rely on getting an offer, so about applying to other jobs:

1. Would passing the Google coding challenge and getting an interview be worth working into my resume as a credential, considering my lack of experience? Or would that be counterproductive/tacky? Something like "solved a series of increasingly complex graph theory, combinatorics, algorithm, and optimization problems to earn an on-site interview at Google."

It would look goofy on your resume, but often there's a stage in the interview process where the HR rep asks "are you interviewing anywhere else right now?" At that point, you should say that you're scheduled for an on-site with Google (or that you've just done one, etc).

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The Laplace Demon
Jul 23, 2009

"Oh dear! Oh dear! Heisenberg is a douche!"

Mniot posted:

It would look goofy on your resume, but often there's a stage in the interview process where the HR rep asks "are you interviewing anywhere else right now?" At that point, you should say that you're scheduled for an on-site with Google (or that you've just done one, etc).

Hopefully that point is as early as possible. Actually passing that gauntlet is legitimately impressive and a better indicator than whatever hokey screening process the average startup has.

Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

The Laplace Demon posted:

Hopefully that point is as early as possible. Actually passing that gauntlet is legitimately impressive and a better indicator than whatever hokey screening process the average startup has.

While that may in fact be true, companies have egos that can be bruised. Saying "I did well enough at google to warrant consideration, but if they don't like me, I'll settle for you" doesn't come off well. Companies also want to be reassured they are wonderful places to work and they are attracting the best talent, even when that can't possibly be true.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS
Dec 21, 2010

fatelvis posted:

I have question for those who do web development jobs. Do you guys generally have to design the look/feel of the website, out any assets, or does someone else do that?

I think I could learn the technical implementation, but making stuff look good is not something I've ever been good at.

I'm in a very small shop doing Web dev and most of the design work is installing Bootstrap and using the built-in styles. Some places will have dedicated designers. I think this varies greatly from company to company.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Skandranon posted:

While that may in fact be true, companies have egos that can be bruised. Saying "I did well enough at google to warrant consideration, but if they don't like me, I'll settle for you" doesn't come off well. Companies also want to be reassured they are wonderful places to work and they are attracting the best talent, even when that can't possibly be true.

Yeah, if you phrase it like that someone might get their panties in a twist, but come on. No reasonable decision-maker is going to hold against you the fact that you have more than one interview lined up at the same time . If they're so fragile that this fact offends them, and they don't hire you because of it, I would call that dodging a bullet - egomaniacs are a nightmare to work for.

Just be matter-of-fact about it. "Yes, I've got interviews with a couple other local companies, and an on-site with Google next week" or something to that effect.

Steve French
Sep 8, 2003

Skandranon posted:

While that may in fact be true, companies have egos that can be bruised. Saying "I did well enough at google to warrant consideration, but if they don't like me, I'll settle for you" doesn't come off well. Companies also want to be reassured they are wonderful places to work and they are attracting the best talent, even when that can't possibly be true.

All they would know is that he is interviewing with both them and Google. If they want to take that to mean that they are the backup option, then that poo poo is on them.

lurkdawg
Jan 1, 2005

"WHEN YOU GET TO HELL, TELL 'EM BONER SENT YA!"... Hehe, "boner!"
Hey I was thinking about taking a programming boot camp. I read an article were a college student couldn't get a job in the english field so they took one of these 13 week boot camps and got a job right out of the course. I was wondering if these programming boot camps are worth it and also if anyone knows which one to take as I noticed there is a bunch of them. I also know nothing about coding or programming so I wondering if I needed to know anything before I started getting into the field. I was also thinking about going back to college for programming.

This is the one I was thinking about taking

http://www.fullstackacademy.com/lea...fbccaAvf_8P8HAQ

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Opinions on programming bootcamps here are mixed. They're unregulated and a relatively new, hyped-up phenomenon though, so even if you decide to go through with one be very careful about which one you pick.

I would definitely try your hand at programming before deciding to attend one, it's possible you may not just 'get' programming, or maybe you hate it or whatever. There are lots of websites where you can learn to code, like Coursera or Udacity or Codecademy, or just run through a random internet tutorial in a major language* and then try your hand at Project Euler.

* Having a hard time deciding? Java, C#, or Python. Really don't want to decide yourself? Python.

pepito sanchez
Apr 3, 2004
I'm not mexican

fatelvis posted:

I have question for those who do web development jobs. Do you guys generally have to design the look/feel of the website, out any assets, or does someone else do that?

I think I could learn the technical implementation, but making stuff look good is not something I've ever been good at.

like others have already said it absolutely depends. the company i work for started with pure design, now it's seven people including me, with four on design and three on programming. i work in a team with three others, two designers and one programmer. i'm front-end programming and leave the design up to the dudes next to me, while the other programmer focuses on backend. they're all websites on a RESTful API.

but i think (can't compare since it's my first IT job) other, bigger companies are a bit more organized than this.

i will say that if you're bad at design - like i am - i see nothing wrong with building upon premade themes or snippets of code. two good websites for this are https://bootswatch.com/ and http://bootsnipp.com/ since bootstrap is pretty simple, easy, and responsive. i used to have a pretty good grasp of bootstrap, and it only took about three weeks. lack of practice makes that bad.

question: what are these bootcamps? i can't see a 13 week programming course netting much, but i guess it depends on how focused it is. if i had to start learning JS from ground-zero-no-idea-what-a-variable-is i suppose in an intensive course i'd have that and jQuery down. it'll mostly depend on the individual.

oh i see...

quote:

. We offer a 26-week part-time, flex program and a 13-week full-time program. Both cover the same advanced curriculum.

AngularJS
Node.js
MongoDB
MySQL
Object Oriented Programming

Authentication
Express
HTML & CSS
APIs
Computer Science Fundamentals

Daaaaaamn that's a lot to learn in 39 weeks, but it's sure do-able, and hopefully it doesn't just give a basic introductory course into each touchpoint. once you get the fundamentals of programming down it's pretty easy to catch onto new things. pretty much like any CS course it'll still depend on the individual, and i see a lot of people dropping out of this from lack of interest or frustration in the first month or two. but yeah that's a lot to cover. just for databases i had to take a year and we only learned relational dbs.

edit: above poster is right. it really seems to me that if a course like this covers anything past introductory-level then it's best to have some general grasp on programming. the biggest problem i had *getting into* programming was finding an implementation of any language. and there are websites for that too. little projects and stuff. codeprojects is a pretty cool site and they give intros to languages too, but first learn fundamental concepts like types and OOP.

pepito sanchez fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Aug 31, 2015

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

pepito sanchez posted:

Daaaaaamn that's a lot to learn in 39 weeks, but it's sure do-able, and hopefully it doesn't just give a basic introductory course into each touchpoint.

There's a 26 week program, and a 13 week program, there is no 39 week program. And someone expounding the differences in UI/UX shouldn't use the word "touchpoint" like that.

pepito sanchez
Apr 3, 2004
I'm not mexican
after having long and pointless debates about the meaning of touchpoint with people, i humbly submit to your definition of touchpoint

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

I didn't realize so many of you guys were in Boston. I live in Weymouth.

I am 90% sure at least one or two of my coworkers are goons, just by sheer statistics. So I've probably blabbed too much already. :v:

I live in the middle of Fenway. Rent is like $1550 for a studio here. :gonk: I'm moving elsewhere as soon as I get a chance.

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Cicero posted:

Opinions on programming bootcamps here are mixed. They're unregulated and a relatively new, hyped-up phenomenon though, so even if you decide to go through with one be very careful about which one you pick.

I would definitely try your hand at programming before deciding to attend one, it's possible you may not just 'get' programming, or maybe you hate it or whatever. There are lots of websites where you can learn to code, like Coursera or Udacity or Codecademy, or just run through a random internet tutorial in a major language* and then try your hand at Project Euler.

* Having a hard time deciding? Java, C#, or Python. Really don't want to decide yourself? Python.

lol a mean stack. mongodb is a toy, node.js is a toy, angularJS is like the devil incarnate, and mysql, well, at least it isn't oracle. good loving luck to the people who learn on that platform.

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

pepito sanchez posted:

after having long and pointless debates about the meaning of touchpoint with people, i humbly submit to your definition of touchpoint

Odd. I didn't give one.

pepito sanchez
Apr 3, 2004
I'm not mexican
you implied i used the word wrong? i'm happy to be corrected.

e: no really, i assumed you'd post how i used it wrong.

Tres Burritos
Sep 3, 2009

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

lol a mean stack. mongodb is a toy

I have it on good authority that mongo 3 is significantly less broken. At least that's what all our backend guys say.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

lurkdawg posted:

Hey I was thinking about taking a programming boot camp. I read an article were a college student couldn't get a job in the english field so they took one of these 13 week boot camps and got a job right out of the course. I was wondering if these programming boot camps are worth it and also if anyone knows which one to take as I noticed there is a bunch of them. I also know nothing about coding or programming so I wondering if I needed to know anything before I started getting into the field. I was also thinking about going back to college for programming.

This is the one I was thinking about taking

http://www.fullstackacademy.com/lea...fbccaAvf_8P8HAQ

Anecdotally, I did a bootcamp and got a job, as did basically everyone else in my cohort who didn't run screaming from the thought of programming for living. I knew slightly more than nothing going in, in that I'd messed around with some Ruby tutorials and knew enough about myself to know that I am the kind of person who enjoys sitting in anonymous air-conditioned buildings typing poo poo into machines all day, ideally in as close to silence as possible. I also knew that I'm the kind of person who values compressing learning the basics of a skill that I want to learn into as short a timeframe as practical and I can deal with picking up the finer details later. So it worked out for me.

A bootcamp will give you some practical skills that maybe some people from CS departments don't have, while college classes will give you a lot more theory that most likely you won't learn much about in a bootcamp. I think that with either approach, if you're flexible with regard to location and have reasonable salary expectations, you'll be able to find some desperate firm that will throw a salary at you in exchange for not loving things up too bad as a newbie.

I would strongly urge to find out whether or not you like programming before you drop thousands of dollars on a bootcamp - pick some practical tutorial and do the exercises. By "practical tutorial" I mean a book that assumes you don't know anything about programming and gives you a bunch of simple-sounding exercises. I used https://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ which is Ruby language. I also know of http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ which is similar and Python language. The author of the latter book is a very in-your-face kind of dude and so a fair number of people think he's a jerk because he wrote a lot of blog posts beefing with hacker-culture figures once upon a time, but I've heard nothing but praise for the book.

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

pepito sanchez posted:

you implied i used the word wrong? i'm happy to be corrected.

e: no really, i assumed you'd post how i used it wrong.

I assumed someone pretending to educate the rest of us on UX would have a working definition to share. I assumed someone pretending to educate the rest of us on UX would actually, you know, do UX and not just be guessing at how it's done properly based on a single job where it's done wrong.

Assumptions fail. Regardless, I don't see how something normally used in context where Brands are interacting with consumers is at all helpful when being used as "the entire pedagogical effort, including lesson plans, lectures, and office hours instructions, behind this outline heading on a curriculum." Even assuming you're stretching it to mean something like that a touchpoint would be a single instance of one of those pedagogic interfaces, not used to indicate classes of information that travel over various interfaces to get to the student.

But I'm not a UX expert.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

lol a mean stack. mongodb is a toy, node.js is a toy, angularJS is like the devil incarnate, and mysql, well, at least it isn't oracle. good loving luck to the people who learn on that platform.

What's wrong with Angular and mySQL? My company uses Angular and mySQL seems to be really common.

Series DD Funding
Nov 25, 2014

by exmarx

Pollyanna posted:

I live in the middle of Fenway. Rent is like $1550 for a studio here. :gonk: I'm moving elsewhere as soon as I get a chance.

$1625 in Brighton here :getin:

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

22 Eargesplitten posted:

What's wrong with Angular and mySQL? My company uses Angular and mySQL seems to be really common.

People have been using MYSQL for decades. It's like, OK. It works. Literally everything else you can pick to use as a database will perform better and not have MYSQL's idiosyncrasies.

Angular is so hosed up that Angular 2 is not going to be compatible with Angular 1. I cannot believe so many people used that project without looking at the goddamn source code.

ullerrm
Dec 31, 2012

Oh, the network slogan is true -- "watch FOX and be damned for all eternity!"

22 Eargesplitten posted:

What's wrong with Angular and mySQL? My company uses Angular and mySQL seems to be really common.

I'm not qualified to comment on Angular, but MySQL has a lot of oddities. It's popular mainly because of historical precedent -- it was originally a drop-in open source replacement for an old commercial RDBMS called mSQL. It grew from there to being a huge thing, especially once stock installs of PHP gained support for it.

Today, MySQL has a massive software ecosystem built around it, and it's a well-understood system. However, many of its questionable early design calls has caught up with it. In particular, because there's this huge corpus of very old software built around it, MySQL operates by default in a "quirks" mode where it's extremely tolerant to poorly-designed queries, but somewhat unpredictable and not very stable. There's also a number of SQL features that MySQL does not support.

If you are maintaining code that already works against MySQL, it's probably not worth fixing anything that's not currently broken. However, in this day and age, Postgres is probably a better default.

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Angular is so hosed up that Angular 2 is not going to be compatible with Angular 1. I cannot believe so many people used that project without looking at the goddamn source code.

What do you prefer to use instead of Angular? (Genuine question, I'm a backend dev and know little of the frontend world.)

Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Angular is so hosed up that Angular 2 is not going to be compatible with Angular 1. I cannot believe so many people used that project without looking at the goddamn source code.

Why do you think this is such a huge problem? Would you rather they drag poor decisions they made at the beginning out until the end of time just so you never have to update your code? I'd much rather they bite the bullet now and fix the problems they've identified with the 1.x branch. They've also stated that there will be a clear upgrade path if one wants to port from 1.x to 2.0, and it's not hard to see what that path will look like if you've watched some of the more recent demos of Angular 2.0.

Series DD Funding
Nov 25, 2014

by exmarx
I checked and mysql still silently drops check constraints. Why

Odette
Mar 19, 2011

Is the MEAN stack just a fad? It seems like web-dev/etc moves really quickly with respect to the technology used.

I'm not in the industry, so I apologise if this sounds like a stupid question.

piratepilates
Mar 28, 2004

So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.



Odette posted:

Is the MEAN stack just a fad? It seems like web-dev/etc moves really quickly with respect to the technology used.

I'm not in the industry, so I apologise if this sounds like a stupid question.

Probably.

MongoDB is kinda poo poo and Mongoose is a bad ORM.

Express.js is a pretty decent web framework if you want to use JavaScript for an HTTP server for some reason.

AngularJS will still be a front-end framework that people use at least, and Angular 2 with TypeScript will probably actually be pretty decent.

Node.js kinda sucks and why would you use it but yeah.

On the other hand who really cares, learn them if you want to learn them, don't if you don't. You'll get a job with or without them and in a few years there will be some other thing you'll have to learn anyway.

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Skandranon posted:

Why do you think this is such a huge problem? Would you rather they drag poor decisions they made at the beginning out until the end of time just so you never have to update your code? I'd much rather they bite the bullet now and fix the problems they've identified with the 1.x branch. They've also stated that there will be a clear upgrade path if one wants to port from 1.x to 2.0, and it's not hard to see what that path will look like if you've watched some of the more recent demos of Angular 2.0.

No, it's just really, really loving scary that so many people latched on it and used it in their projects without critically evaluating it. Like I think Angular 2.0 is a good thing, and I don't disagree with the design goals of the angular project, but that so many people just plopped angular 1.0 into their projects it without questioning it or really understanding how it works is really an indictment of the state of engineering of web development in general.

Skandranon
Sep 6, 2008
fucking stupid, dont listen to me

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

No, it's just really, really loving scary that so many people latched on it and used it in their projects without critically evaluating it. Like I think Angular 2.0 is a good thing, and I don't disagree with the design goals of the angular project, but that so many people just plopped angular 1.0 into their projects it without questioning it or really understanding how it works is really an indictment of the state of engineering of web development in general.

Angular 1.0 was pretty bad, in hindsight. Now that I'm using 1.4 with Typescript, it's a lot better. I still wince when I see all the 1.1 & 1.2 projects we still have, which just vomit functions & variables all over $scope.

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake
Salary thread seems to be dead so I'll post it over here: http://www.datamation.com/careers/it-salary-2015-developers-to-help-desk-to-project-managers-1.html

Wondering what you guys think about this. Accurate for you? Asking for a raise tomorrow?

I'm in the 'asking for a raise asap' camp :(

b0lt
Apr 29, 2005

Necc0 posted:

Salary thread seems to be dead so I'll post it over here: http://www.datamation.com/careers/it-salary-2015-developers-to-help-desk-to-project-managers-1.html

Wondering what you guys think about this. Accurate for you? Asking for a raise tomorrow?

I'm in the 'asking for a raise asap' camp :(

comically low

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Necc0 posted:

Salary thread seems to be dead so I'll post it over here: http://www.datamation.com/careers/it-salary-2015-developers-to-help-desk-to-project-managers-1.html

Wondering what you guys think about this. Accurate for you? Asking for a raise tomorrow?

I'm in the 'asking for a raise asap' camp :(

It's about right once you take into account the "add X% if you have skill Y" and "add X% if you live in this major city". Also, if you don't take into account stock or bonuses if you work for one of the big boys.

Cryolite
Oct 2, 2006
sodium aluminum fluoride
I was trying to come up with an answer to a potential interview question along the lines of "what's an example of something you'd prefer to use a tree for over a hashtable" and realized I'd say "something that can't be hashed but is comparable". However, I can't think of a good example of something that you absolutely can't hash but you could compare (or would just be better to compare). Are there good examples of this? I realize it's a vague terrible question and answer, but if you get the gist of the idea do you know of any examples of things you would prefer to throw into a tree over a hashtable when needing to do quick lookups?

Necc0
Jun 30, 2005

by exmarx
Broken Cake

Cryolite posted:

I was trying to come up with an answer to a potential interview question along the lines of "what's an example of something you'd prefer to use a tree for over a hashtable" and realized I'd say "something that can't be hashed but is comparable". However, I can't think of a good example of something that you absolutely can't hash but you could compare (or would just be better to compare). Are there good examples of this? I realize it's a vague terrible question and answer, but if you get the gist of the idea do you know of any examples of things you would prefer to throw into a tree over a hashtable when needing to do quick lookups?

Anything that naturally has a lot of parent-child dependencies is better suited for a tree structure while things that are largely independent are better with hash tables. So say you have a page layout that has lots of sub-components recursively going down and want to be able to easily toggle settings on them. You could have a tree that stores read-only vs. read-write and could do things like set the root as read-only while one of the leafs is set to read-write. So effectively on the page only that child has read-write privileges. I'm only using this as an example because I ran into this exact scenario at work today but they implemented it exactly backwards :mad:

Necc0 fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Sep 2, 2015

Analytic Engine
May 18, 2009

not the analytical engine
Just learn D3

sarehu
Apr 20, 2007

(call/cc call/cc)

Cryolite posted:

I was trying to come up with an answer to a potential interview question along the lines of "what's an example of something you'd prefer to use a tree for over a hashtable" and realized I'd say "something that can't be hashed but is comparable". However, I can't think of a good example of something that you absolutely can't hash but you could compare (or would just be better to compare). Are there good examples of this? I realize it's a vague terrible question and answer, but if you get the gist of the idea do you know of any examples of things you would prefer to throw into a tree over a hashtable when needing to do quick lookups?

Presumably we're talking about using these for the same purpose, i.e. for a container for things. This is a very relevant question for SQL usage.

A BST or other kinds of tree can be iterated in order, you can lookup subranges, it has better worst-case amortized performance, better non-amortized performance, far worse average performance, the ability to find the minimum and maximum quickly, the ability to efficiently track cumulative information that can be combined associatively but not commutatively, to query the tree based on such statistics, for when there aren't "keys" but you want to efficiently look up elements based on some cumulative statistic, etc.

(edit:)

For example, suppose you're implementing the Something Awful Forums. You have a table of posts. You want to be able to efficiently look up a user's post history. So you make an index over (user, datetime). You want an SQL index that's implemented as a tree, ordered by user then date, not as a hash table, so that you can efficiently lookup the first N posts after the first M posts in reverse order by date (for whatever page of the user's post history you're rendering). The table would be useless as a hash table, but as a tree, you can efficiently access ranges of dates for a specific user, and with the right meta information on each node (the number of rows in a subtree), you can efficiently access the [n, n+k)th posts within a given date range.

sarehu fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Sep 2, 2015

dangling pointer
Feb 12, 2010

I'm graduating in a few months so I've been focusing on working on some personal projects to put on my resume/GitHub so people know I learned something in college. I've been spending the majority of my time writing a simple IRC client. I'd like to make a program that uses the goodreads API to watch a specified bookshelf so when you add a book to that shelf it will automatically use the IRC client to download the epub and put it in a directory, eventually add functionality to add it to your Calibre library.

My question is, is a program that is obviously used for pirating books ok to showcase on a resume or talk about in an interview, do interviewers care about that? I guess if I did talk about it I could use Project Gutenburg books as an use case. Or does something like that only work when talking about downloading linux iso's on an internet comedy forum.


Also is not having an internship going to hurt me? I worked full time through college and every internship around here would have been a taking pay cut that I couldn't afford at the time.

Last question. Does anyone have any advice for getting a job on the west coast while living on the east coast? The unversity I went to is not big at all and has no name recognition.

dangling pointer fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Sep 2, 2015

Steely Glint
Oct 29, 2011

Dinosaur Gum

fence hopper posted:

My question is, is a program that is obviously used for pirating books ok to showcase on a resume or talk about in an interview, do interviewers care about that? I guess if I did talk about it I could use Project Gutenburg books as an use case. Or does something like that only work when talking about downloading linux iso's on an internet comedy forum.
It's unlikely that a resume screener is going to understand the implications of your program, and interviewers are unlikely to care enough to factor it in to their decision. If they do, your legal use case should be sufficient to mollify them. In my experience, nearly all developers have pirated stuff at some point in their lives (but few do now, because spending $$$ is easier).

fence hopper posted:

Also is not having an internship going to hurt me? I worked full time through college and every internship around here would have been a taking pay cut that I couldn't afford at the time.
Yes. Experience is king, and internships are the most relevant sort of work experience that you can get (aside from actually working as a SWE, natch).
That said, any work experience is good. If it's entirely irrelevant, like retail or food service, it demonstrates that you are not a complete fuckup by virtue of being able to hold down a job for 4+ years. If it's at all relevant - any sort of technical work - then that's even better, as you can talk about your domain expertise and whatnot. Since your work paid more than CS internships, which generally compensate very well, it's probably at least slightly relevant.

fence hopper posted:

Last question. Does anyone have any advice for getting a job on the west coast while living on the east coast? The unversity I went to is not big at all and has no name recognition.
Apply to jobs on the west coast. You don't have to list your location if you don't want to (mind I'm not up on resume etiquette, so I may be contradicted on this point). Focus on big corporations. Reputable companies will generally want in-person interviews, and the big names can fly you out on their dime.

ExcessBLarg!
Sep 1, 2001

fence hopper posted:

My question is, is a program that is obviously used for pirating books ok to showcase on a resume or talk about in an interview, do interviewers care about that?
I don't really care about the purpose of your program as much as its technical qualities. Napster and BitTorrent are examples of programs that had impressive technical ideas as well as wide adoption, even though they were pretty clearly intended to facilitate copyright infringement.

I probably wouldn't be flippant about it though. My main concern here would be hiring someone who has so little concern for the law that it would result in the company being embroiled in a license or infringement issue down the line. So discussing it in terms of Project Gutenberg *wink wink* is fine.

That said, one of my concerns as an interviewer for someone without an internship experience is if you can work on a team. If your GitHub currently consists exclusively of personal projects, you might want to contribute to a larger community project. Seeing bug fixes, new features, or really any successfully-merged pull request is a huge thing as it indicates you can navigate through the process of contributing code to a project bigger than yourself and do it in a way where folks are reasonably happy about your contributions.

dangling pointer
Feb 12, 2010

I'll definitely find an open source project to contribute to. I have some experience working in large groups. One class we took the entire semester we worked with a company to update their webpage using bootstrap and also make a search engine to search through their inventory they sell. It was a cool class even though I'm not very interested in web design.

Steely Glint posted:

It's unlikely that a resume screener is going to understand the implications of your program, and interviewers are unlikely to care enough to factor it in to their decision. If they do, your legal use case should be sufficient to mollify them. In my experience, nearly all developers have pirated stuff at some point in their lives (but few do now, because spending $$$ is easier).

Yes. Experience is king, and internships are the most relevant sort of work experience that you can get (aside from actually working as a SWE, natch).
That said, any work experience is good. If it's entirely irrelevant, like retail or food service, it demonstrates that you are not a complete fuckup by virtue of being able to hold down a job for 4+ years. If it's at all relevant - any sort of technical work - then that's even better, as you can talk about your domain expertise and whatnot. Since your work paid more than CS internships, which generally compensate very well, it's probably at least slightly relevant.

Apply to jobs on the west coast. You don't have to list your location if you don't want to (mind I'm not up on resume etiquette, so I may be contradicted on this point). Focus on big corporations. Reputable companies will generally want in-person interviews, and the big names can fly you out on their dime.

It is technical, this makes me feel slightly better about no internship. It is a combination of me being an overpaid computer janitor and living in a city with one of the lowest costs of living in the country that made it difficult to find a decent paying internship. The few locale companies that hire interns around here average about $10-15/ hour because plenty of students will take that since there are few other options in the area.

I'm going to update my resume by the end of the week and post it here. The advice is helpful, thanks.

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Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

ExcessBLarg! posted:

That said, one of my concerns as an interviewer for someone without an internship experience is if you can work on a team. If your GitHub currently consists exclusively of personal projects, you might want to contribute to a larger community project. Seeing bug fixes, new features, or really any successfully-merged pull request is a huge thing as it indicates you can navigate through the process of contributing code to a project bigger than yourself and do it in a way where folks are reasonably happy about your contributions.

This is common advice but don't let the fact that you haven't done this prevent you from applying to jobs. It's pretty difficult to jump into any kind of non-trivial project and contribute in a meaningful way, and fresh grads often have a problem with paralysis, getting stuck on this thought pattern of "I'm not quite good enough yet" because they haven't accomplished this or that or want to learn one more language or framework before they start job hunting. It's silly and counterproductive.

If you had a group project as part of your education, and didn't utterly bomb it, that's proof enough that you can work in a group as far as I'm concerned. I'd argue that expecting personal projects AND open source contributions AND a 4-year degree is a little much for most positions labeled "entry level" or "for recent graduates."

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