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I have several 2nd/3rd round interviews coming up and trying to think of some outside-of-the-box questions to ask, any ideas?
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Sep 25, 2015 19:21
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Tao Jones posted:I'm a developer in Portland. I don't know the graphic design world, but in terms of being a reasonably talented and reasonably experienced FE developer (especially one with effects/animation experience) I think $40 would be on the lower side. Consider that it's all the art, all (?) the code, and a lot of customer-facing responsibility. Thanks for the input. I actually wouldn't be doing all the code, I'm pretty sure there will be other people doing most of it. Also I'd say I'm reasonably talented but not very experienced in doing front end work professionally. It would be really nice if $40/hour is the lower end because that would be a life-changing amount of money for me.
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Sep 25, 2015 19:34
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Any advice on relocating or searching for jobs remotely? I'm in Portland but I feel like I'm ready to move on to Seattle. Fortunately it's close enough to where I could drive up and check it out on the weekends or something but I'm definitely not local. Also this is probably a dumb question but this relocation thing is awkward because I just started a new job here a month ago. I was on contract, it ended and I had a weird housing situation that didn't let me pick up and leave so I had to get a new job here instead. I like the new job and would feel bad about splitting right away though. I was thinking of just sticking it out until the new year so I can stay around 6 months or so? I mean a full year would be ideal but I don't know if I can stay here another year just for my job's sake. Does that sound like an OK plan or am I overthinking this and should just split whenever I get a job and place lined up in Seattle?
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Sep 25, 2015 21:29
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HondaCivet posted:Any advice on relocating or searching for jobs remotely? I'm in Portland but I feel like I'm ready to move on to Seattle. Fortunately it's close enough to where I could drive up and check it out on the weekends or something but I'm definitely not local. Serial job hopping is a big red flag. If you get a new job in Seattle, you'd better make drat sure you're going to stay there for several years and not get fired.
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Sep 25, 2015 21:43
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Ithaqua posted:Serial job hopping is a big red flag. If you get a new job in Seattle, you'd better make drat sure you're going to stay there for several years and not get fired. I will point out though that short term contracts don't factor into your job-hopping score (or they shouldn't if you're dealing with reasonable people), so just this once will not automatically make you unemployable.
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Sep 25, 2015 22:06
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Che Delilas posted:I will point out though that short term contracts don't factor into your job-hopping score (or they shouldn't if you're dealing with reasonable people), so just this once will not automatically make you unemployable. Good point. It's bad when it's more than once or twice in a row, though. It means either you keep getting fired, or you keep getting itchy feet and leaving in a hurry, or a combination. Neither is desirable. Doing a job hop after a few months one time isn't going to automatically red flag you... but if the job you hop into is terrible, you're going to start to have problems with people questioning you when you want to get out after a few months. Of course, I know a terrible developer who gets fired from every job after under a year and he somehow manages to keep finding work, so your mileage may vary.
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Sep 25, 2015 22:15
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Ithaqua posted:Doing a job hop after a few months one time isn't going to automatically red flag you... but if the job you hop into is terrible, you're going to start to have problems with people questioning you when you want to get out after a few months. It can also get you stuck at the terrible job you hopped into for longer than you'd like, if you decide that you don't want to look like a serial job hopper.
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Sep 25, 2015 22:39
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Mr. Crow posted:I have several 2nd/3rd round interviews coming up and trying to think of some outside-of-the-box questions to ask, any ideas? tef posted:here's some free questions to ask your next potential employers
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Sep 25, 2015 23:13
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Mr. Crow posted:I have several 2nd/3rd round interviews coming up and trying to think of some outside-of-the-box questions to ask, any ideas?
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Sep 26, 2015 00:00
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I've never been fired. I stayed at my first job for 2.5 years. My other job was contract and they liked me, they just ran out of money and work for me. I did leave one job after six months because it was a bad fit so that's a strike I guess. Are people really going to hold it against me for relocating for personal reasons? It's nothing to do with the job itself.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:16
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HondaCivet posted:I've never been fired. I stayed at my first job for 2.5 years. My other job was contract and they liked me, they just ran out of money and work for me. I did leave one job after six months because it was a bad fit so that's a strike I guess. Are people really going to hold it against me for relocating for personal reasons? It's nothing to do with the job itself.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:34
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Is there a good rule of thumb for counter-offers? Like, let's say I get a job offer and I would be totally happy with whatever they're offering. But there's no harm in asking them to bump it, right? What's reasonable/likely to work? Five percent? Ten percent? Ask and see how far they'll go?
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Sep 26, 2015 01:01
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Always ask for more just because. At my current job I gave a number first (like a moron). They offered a bit over that. I asked for a little more on top of that (lol) (I was interviewing at several places although I only ended up with the one offer), and I got it. You literally cannot lose if you ask nicely and have even the most basic justification like "I'm still interviewing with some other companies." Specifically in my case I said I'm interested in the current offer but I have interviews with X and Y and I'm willing to just cut off the process with them and accept if you bump your offer up and it worked, I didn't even have competing offers in hand. I don't know if there's a rule of thumb but I based my asks around glassdoor for the company and similar companies to stay in kindof an aggressive reality ballpark range, so any percentage would depend on what you'll think they'll pay, what you think you're worth, how far off their offer was, etc.
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Sep 26, 2015 01:27
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I'm down with all that, but I mean, let's say the offer is pretty generous or otherwise you don't have a really strong justification for more. How aggressive can you really get before you start encountering too much resistance? I was kind of desperate to get into the field with my first job so I kind of skipped this step.
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Sep 26, 2015 01:30
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Trapick posted:It's the standard thing; if you meet one rear end in a top hat during a day he was the rear end in a top hat, if you meet 25 assholes you're the rear end in a top hat. Same with jobs, if you're always quitting after 6 months for personal reasons it's you, if it was just one time it was probably them. People aren't going to hold that against you. Cool, thanks. I'm going to stick it out at least until the new year and then see how I feel. It'll give me some time to research and make sure the move is actually a good idea. ANYWAY, I still was wondering about people's experiences relocating for a new job? Any advice? Especially to get them to cover relocation costs.
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Sep 26, 2015 03:47
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The actual point of negotiation is to push until you get resistance.
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Sep 26, 2015 03:49
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Soylent Pudding posted:The actual point of negotiation is to push until you get resistance. Yeah, but there are limits. If you come out and say "OK, actually I want you to treble that" it's not going to go over well and might sink your negotiation altogether. I'm trying to get a sense of where a reasonable starting point is.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:13
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Yeah, but there are limits. If you come out and say "OK, actually I want you to treble that" it's not going to go over well and might sink your negotiation altogether. I'm trying to get a sense of where a reasonable starting point is. From what I've read, 15-25% is a reasonable baseline for everyday circumstances and won't make anybody think 'hm maybe this person we wanted to hire is actually a clueless moron.' That said don't listen to me, I just got firmly shot down after asking for essentially 10% in my negotiations. Check the 'How do I negotiate a job offer?' thread, or whatever it's called, in BFC for more negotiation discussion.
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Sep 26, 2015 10:14
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If you're going to negotiate basically anything you really need to do your homework. How much is somebody with your experience and education worth? Same goes for negotiating major purchases. How much is what you're buying or selling actually worth? If you already have a very good offer but then ask for more you look greedy. Yeah a lot of people will deliberately try to lowball you and get you to sign an unfair agreement but other people are going to make you a very good offer hoping you take it and don't walk. If your skills are worth $60,000 a year, somebody likes you enough to give you $80,000 anyway, and you then ask for more you look like a prick. Of course in that same situation if somebody offers you $30,000 and refuses to budge then you walk. If you don't even have the slightest inkling of what you should be getting paid then you look like somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about.
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Sep 26, 2015 18:45
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If you're going to negotiate basically anything you really need to do your homework. How much is somebody with your experience and education worth? Same goes for negotiating major purchases. How much is what you're buying or selling actually worth? If you already have a very good offer but then ask for more you look greedy. Yeah a lot of people will deliberately try to lowball you and get you to sign an unfair agreement but other people are going to make you a very good offer hoping you take it and don't walk. If your skills are worth $60,000 a year, somebody likes you enough to give you $80,000 anyway, and you then ask for more you look like a prick. Of course in that same situation if somebody offers you $30,000 and refuses to budge then you walk. This is true enough, but it's one thing to say that you should have precise knowledge of what your labour is actually worth and another thing to actually somehow know that. I think the best way to find out would probably be talking discreetly with your coworkers, so you could make a comparison that's at least somewhat valid; but are people actually willing to share their salary & compensation details like that? If you go for the easily available anonymous salary statistics, it's much harder to tell how applicable that stuff is to you and what you're doing.
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Sep 26, 2015 20:03
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Zephonith posted:If you've got time to research the company and you're being interviewed by developers, think of something that might be a problem in their industry, and ask how they solve that. For example, I interviewed at a company that does medical software, so I asked them about how they balanced the needs of developing software that uses data while also protecting patient privacy. jony neuemonic posted:It can also get you stuck at the terrible job you hopped into for longer than you'd like, if you decide that you don't want to look like a serial job hopper. Thanks Re: Salary chat, Look at the average salary on glassdoor for your area. If they're under it, use it as leverage, including counter offers (if you even have them or not), for several grand over the average (pick the top end of what glass door says, maybe a little over depending). You'll probably get somewhere in the middle. If they originally offered average or above average, you can try and squeeze a little more out using the same arguments, and/or try and negotiate less tangibles (time off etc.).
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Sep 26, 2015 21:28
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jaete posted:This is true enough, but it's one thing to say that you should have precise knowledge of what your labour is actually worth and another thing to actually somehow know that. Some Google searches and anonymous statistics, far as I can tell anyway, can give you at least enough ballpark information to make educated guesses. It's never certain and changes constantly obviously but if your response to "how much is my time worth?" is "I have no idea" it's probably time to do a bit of research.
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Sep 26, 2015 22:58
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Quick question for the thread: I'm a new-ish dev (Ruby, Rails). I started programming Ruby about a year ago, went through a boot camp, graduated, got a job in San Francisco. I've been in this role for 6 months and as of last friday was gainfully employed. I started as a Junior Software Engineer, shed my "Junior" after about 3 months. Then my employer went of out business and everyone got laid off. So suddenly I'm back on the job market. How would you approach job hunt round 2 if you were in my shoes? Any advice is appreciated.
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Sep 28, 2015 02:08
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negativeneil posted:Quick question for the thread: I'm a new-ish dev (Ruby, Rails). I started programming Ruby about a year ago, went through a boot camp, graduated, got a job in San Francisco. I've been in this role for 6 months and as of last friday was gainfully employed. I started as a Junior Software Engineer, shed my "Junior" after about 3 months. Then my employer went of out business and everyone got laid off. So suddenly I'm back on the job market. I'm in similar shoes but with more experience and in Austin. Just tell the truth. If your prior employer has anyone who can be a reference and verify that yes, it went pearshaped, yes you're a good dev - and no you didn't make the business fail - use them. "I wish I didn't have to let Neil/Whale go" is a really good reference. Are you in a hurry? Did they give any severance?
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Sep 28, 2015 03:29
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A couple questions about internships. My school's CS career and internship fair was kind of a wash. It was ten companies, all of them more or less local to where my school is and none particularly interesting. I'm planning to apply to some of them anyway, but I think I want to look for some more options for next summer. Any tips on finding and applying for internships online? The OP makes it sound very difficult. Realistically I think I'm going to have to leave my area to find any good internships, which is fine, but can I expect most internships to offer housing/relocation assistance? Also, I'm a junior CS major, but I only started the major in my sophomore year and am doing it alongside another major, so I don't have as much experience as one might think if they just heard junior CS major. In technical interviews, should I admit up front I'm probably less than they expect or just try to bone up on what I haven't learned as best I can? I'm leaning towards the latter, but if I blew it big time it probably wouldn't look so great.
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Sep 29, 2015 06:06
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Puella Magissima posted:In technical interviews, should I admit up front I'm probably less than they expect or just try to bone up on what I haven't learned as best I can? I'm leaning towards the latter, but if I blew it big time it probably wouldn't look so great.
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Sep 29, 2015 07:18
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Space Whale posted:I'm in similar shoes but with more experience and in Austin. That's a good point. I do indeed have a solid reference who has my back. My runway isn't super long: My rent is ridiculous and I don't have much in the way of savings (I'd just started to put money away when things went south), but I'm good for ~2 months. I'm dividing my days up into whiteboarding practice, putting together little projects on my GitHub to keep it active, and trying my best to do "personal" stuff that has nothing to do with job hunting to keep myself sane. Next steps are sending resumes to recruiters and searching for jobs by hand, I guess.
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Sep 29, 2015 08:11
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Finished my Google on site. I honestly have no idea how it went. There were some scheduling issues so some of them were cut short, but I got through at least one question with all of them. My biggest enemy was the sleepless night before, but I'm hoping my excitement and adrenaline came through more than sleepiness. It was surprisingly fun and collaborative though, and I'm less worried about interviewing now that I've done it. Onto the next one!
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Sep 29, 2015 16:12
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I had a phone interview today. Holy poo poo writing code on the fly over the phone is loving hard, worst of all when you're told to write a recursive function and you've used recursion maybe once or twice in projects. I got it mostly right but still, I struggled to clearly explain it properly and he had to explain the solution properly at the end (which was mostly mine but still, my struggle probably reflected poorly on me). Fingers crossed though. Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 19:31
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Just out of curiousity, can someone give me a quick overview of what a CompSci graduate in the US would know? Just trying to figure out how comparable the degree is to what we have over here. So far, I've done one year of a three year bachelors degree, and we've covered most basic stuff; Java programming, UML and general agile design, algorithms and data structures (recursion, different sorts, graph and tree algoritms, we implemented all of these ourselves), SQL and relational database design etc. The next 2 years are mostly going deeper into theoretical stuff like computation as well as developing larger software projects. Once I graduate, could I start searching the US job market with confidence?
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Sep 29, 2015 19:50
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Kuule hain nussivan posted:Just out of curiousity, can someone give me a quick overview of what a CompSci graduate in the US would know? Just trying to figure out how comparable the degree is to what we have over here. So far, I've done one year of a three year bachelors degree, and we've covered most basic stuff; Java programming, UML and general agile design, algorithms and data structures (recursion, different sorts, graph and tree algoritms, we implemented all of these ourselves), SQL and relational database design etc. The next 2 years are mostly going deeper into theoretical stuff like computation as well as developing larger software projects. Here are the core CS course topics from my university: Object-oriented languages (Visual Basic  )Technical Writing Ethics Programming Languages & Translation (parsers & compilers) Database Systems Algorithms Operating Systems Software Engineering Computer Architecture Computer Communications Artificial Intelligence (Sudoku Solving 400) Your program seems to cover the same broad strokes. I'd be more concerned about your university's name recognition than program quality, and I'm not very concerned about name recognition. So yes, apply with confidence. That said, remember that experience is key and lots of students get through school without absorbing what they were taught (let alone the concepts they weren't taught but which are necessary for success as a SWE). To have a fruitful job search, your best bet is to get experience prior to graduation via personal projects, open source contributions, or internships.
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Sep 29, 2015 20:38
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:I had a phone interview today. Not related to your job search, exactly, but if you've only used recursion once or twice you're probably avoiding recursion where it'd be the most natural solution due to a lack of familiarity with it.
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Sep 30, 2015 03:35
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:I had a phone interview today. What, narrating braces and parentheses? That's an absurd way to test coding ability.
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Sep 30, 2015 10:32
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qntm posted:What, narrating braces and parentheses? That's an absurd way to test coding ability. "Okay, I press 'space, open brace, enter, tab...' Huh? Yeah, tab. Well, no, I know the language's style guide says to use spaces, but I have my editor set up to make tabs spaces and... Look, I know, I just don't want to say 'space space space space' for every time I hit tab, this interview is taking long enough as it is, please can we just... Okay, yeah, uh, I understand. Thank you for your time."
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Sep 30, 2015 10:41
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qntm posted:What, narrating braces and parentheses? That's an absurd way to test coding ability.
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Sep 30, 2015 14:30
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Nah, just pseudocode. Which is still probably infinitely easier to do and understand for both of us written out. But regardless, in this case it was still a failing on my end. Oh well, it's the first interview and he was aware of my background so who knows what he's looking for/trying to hire for. Baby steps! Best advice I can give in a situation like that is to have a headset for the interview and keep a notebook or personal whiteboard in front of you. Write down your answers, read them from the board. You might have failed to prepare, but who can blame you? I would expect a phone interview that involves actual coding (or pseudocoding) to include collabedit or some other online collaboration tool. Because nobody in the real world works that way; if I'm discussing code of any substance with a colleague, I'm either at my machine, at their machine, or we go to a whiteboard, the last of which is convenient if you also have to diagram poo poo out.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:51
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Che Delilas posted:Best advice I can give in a situation like that is to have a headset for the interview and keep a notebook or personal whiteboard in front of you. Write down your answers, read them from the board. Speak for yourself. Personally, I dictate all my code to my secretary who types it all up on a manual typewriter, then faxes it to the lab boys who do the data entry.
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Sep 30, 2015 19:59
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Che Delilas posted:Best advice I can give in a situation like that is to have a headset for the interview and keep a notebook or personal whiteboard in front of you. Write down your answers, read them from the board. According to Yegge, at least, Amazon did the code dictation over the phone thing for years.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:48
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Jsor posted:Speak for yourself. Personally, I dictate all my code to my secretary who types it all up on a manual typewriter, then faxes it to the lab boys who do the data entry. code:
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Sep 30, 2015 21:00
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:According to Yegge, at least, Amazon did the code dictation over the phone thing for years.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:40
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