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Starting my new job today. Impostor syndrome is setting in, but I'm trying to remain positive. It's a new place! And it's the holidays soon, so I won't immediately disappoint them. Now that this is my second job, I need to start thinking about developing myself professionally for the long-term. Are there good books to read in this vein?
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 13:21 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 11:35 |
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Pollyanna posted:Starting my new job today. Impostor syndrome is setting in, but I'm trying to remain positive. It's a new place! And it's the holidays soon, so I won't immediately disappoint them. I'm going to reiterate what folks have been saying to you since you started your career in software: slow down. You have a good 30-40 years left in your career. You'll have time for self-improvement and long term career planning. Just focus on your job now.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 14:50 |
Later today I have my first interview since I started looking for a new job. It has been 5 years or so since my last interview, so this is terrifying. Doesn't help that this is probably my top choice of the companies I've applied to and I am under the impression their interview may be difficult. I've been doing a decent amount of preparation, but am still more nervous than I've been in a long time. On the bright side, I have a few other companies interested, and another that already has an in person interview scheduled, so this isn't all or nothing at this point.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 16:16 |
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Blinkz0rz posted:I'm going to reiterate what folks have been saying to you since you started your career in software: slow down. Jesus, this. You're feeling the same thing that all the fresh grads who come into the newbie thread do, which is "oh my god there's so much I don't know." They generally react by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo before I start applying to jobs or I won't be able to compete with the other fresh grads," and you're reacting by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo as early as possible or I won't be able to compete with the other people who have 2-5 years (or whatever) of experience." It's the same poo poo. Listen. Your new job will have problems for you to solve. Some of them won't be easy. You will need to be creative and you will need to research things, and by doing so you will learn things and therefore develop yourself professionally. It won't feel like it from day to day because everything is incremental improvements, but there will be a significant difference between you now and you a year from now, in terms of your skills. This is what experience IS. Settle into your job and try not to worry so much about it in the context of your entire life.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 17:00 |
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Pollyanna posted:Now that this is my second job, I need to start thinking about developing myself professionally for the long-term. Are there good books to read in this vein? How To Win Friends And Influence People I read it and look what it got me.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 18:14 |
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Che Delilas posted:Jesus, this. You're feeling the same thing that all the fresh grads who come into the newbie thread do, which is "oh my god there's so much I don't know." They generally react by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo before I start applying to jobs or I won't be able to compete with the other fresh grads," and you're reacting by thinking, "I need to know all of this poo poo as early as possible or I won't be able to compete with the other people who have 2-5 years (or whatever) of experience." It's the same poo poo.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 19:26 |
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sarehu posted:How To Win Friends And Influence People
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 19:34 |
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Cicero posted:The ire of internet strangers? He said he read the book. I took it to mean he does the opposite of everything it says.
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# ? Dec 14, 2015 19:36 |
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A company near me contacted me a few weeks ago over StackOverflow Careers. They gave me a take home programming test consisting of some gimme questions on bit manipulation, analyzing some binary files to extract data from them, and a written specification for a compiler that translates some imaginary instruction set to x86. I spent like 8-10 hours total on the whole thing since I had to do a lot of research - I don't do much low-level stuff. Then there was a 1.5 hour in-person interview. Now, the company wants me to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a topic I know well to present to the company's CEO and CTO. I feel like this is excessive. I spent so much time on their exercises and in the process promised myself I'd never again spend that much time on a pre-interview programming test. The exercises were fun (except for the compiler design specification document, ugh), but I don't think it's healthy for me to spend so much time on something like that. I can't even put that code on GitHub or anything. However the time I spent was probably an outlier - if someone does low-level work analyzing binary files regularly maybe it would've only taken them 1-3 hours instead of 8-10. Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this? I'm not sure I even want this job anyway. It's mostly very low-level stuff. They analyze forensic evidence and reverse engineer malware. It's really, really cool stuff, but I haven't done these things at all and am not 100% confident I'd like to do that for 8 hours a day. If you asked me what my dream job is the first thing that comes to mind is writing Scala on some big data machine learning distributed this that and the other system. This feels like the opposite direction. Also I'd have to wear a tie and work on a government site. One of the interviewers openly complained that he has to work with idiots. But barring that, they do cool stuff. What should I do? What would you do?
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 17:37 |
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My company is looking to hire a Senior User Interface Developer with AngularJS experience, located in or willing to move to Austin, TX: https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/Senior-UI-Developer-Xtivia-Inc-Austin-TX-78759/10114120/UIDEVAus122015?icid=sr10-1p
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 17:39 |
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Cryolite posted:Now, the company wants me to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a topic I know well to present to the company's CEO and CTO. In your situation, I think it'd be reasonable to push back on this by telling them exactly that. If they won't budge, then get them to defer it until the very last stage of the process when you're actually sure you want the job. Otherwise it's just not a good investment of your time.
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 18:50 |
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minato posted:In my experience, a good presentation can take days to prepare, even if the author is an expert. And rehearsal time alone will take at least an hour or two. I think maybe a 5 minute presentation would be a reasonable ask to test someone's communication skills, but 30 is excessive. I'd expect the presentation aspect for a higher level position, not just an engineer. Is this a leadership/managerial role Cryolite?
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 18:55 |
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Cryolite posted:A company near me contacted me a few weeks ago over StackOverflow Careers. They gave me a take home programming test consisting of some gimme questions on bit manipulation, analyzing some binary files to extract data from them, and a written specification for a compiler that translates some imaginary instruction set to x86. I spent like 8-10 hours total on the whole thing since I had to do a lot of research - I don't do much low-level stuff. Then there was a 1.5 hour in-person interview. Now, the company wants me to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a topic I know well to present to the company's CEO and CTO. I'd really consider how much I want the position or not, and use that to determine how much I'd spend on the presentation. It sounds like you don't really want it much, and you know that, so I'd probably just wing it on something fun, like swords & metallurgy. Did they even specify what the presentation has to be about?
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 19:33 |
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Doh004 posted:I'd expect the presentation aspect for a higher level position, not just an engineer. Is this a leadership/managerial role Cryolite? Could be that a part of the job is explaining in detail how how clients' systems got owned and how to stop it happening again, etc.
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 19:35 |
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Skandranon posted:I'd really consider how much I want the position or not, and use that to determine how much I'd spend on the presentation. It sounds like you don't really want it much, and you know that, so I'd probably just wing it on something fun, like swords & metallurgy. Did they even specify what the presentation has to be about? Yes, they gave example topics, like comparing x86 to x64, compiler logic, using Hadoop, or analyzing malicious code. Some in-depth topic I research and develop on my own outside of work, so not swords, unless I wrote code to model the hardness of swords during forging or something. That would be cool. You're right. After thinking about it I'm not sure if this is something I even want. I got the book Grey Hat Python recently after attending a bunch of cybersecurity meetups recently - I feel like I need to work my way through that book before I know if this is something I want to get into. Also like minato said a good 30 minute presentation can take days to put together. Even if it's a topic you know a lot about and could babble for 30 minutes about, organizing it into a coherent half hour presentation takes a bit of time. Also I feel kind of ashamed/like an imposter for not having something I care or know enough about to be able to effortlessly pull a 30 minute presentation out of my rear end to present. I tried predicting the stock market using machine learning ensembles of neural networks, SVMs, and decision trees about 2 years ago, and could probably talk a while about how all that works - but 30 minutes? It would take a lot of effort to prepare that talk. I have so many side project ideas and feel like if I wasn't such a lazy piece of poo poo and did them all I wouldn't have a problem with coming up with a 30 minute presentation relatively quickly. Like, competing in Kaggle competitions, writing demoscene-like stuff using WebGL/three.js, doing crazy stuff in Spark... I don't know. Doh004 posted:I'd expect the presentation aspect for a higher level position, not just an engineer. Is this a leadership/managerial role Cryolite? No, it's definitely for an engineer role - for someone who might have their head buried in a hex editor for hours a day. There's no explicit leadership or managerial aspect about it. Munkeymon posted:Could be that a part of the job is explaining in detail how how clients' systems got owned and how to stop it happening again, etc. I think this is it. I do know the work of the reverse engineers (which are higher up than the position I'd be working) amounts to this. They get some files, executables, and other evidence, and then after analyzing it they write up a report about what it is, what it does, what files were lost, etc. They may need to write a bunch of code to answer those questions, but their output is basically a written report. Speed is a big factor too - they need answers quickly, so maybe being able to come up with a 30 minute presentation on short notice is a skill especially desired in this environment.
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# ? Dec 16, 2015 23:36 |
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minato posted:In my experience, a good presentation can take days to prepare, even if the author is an expert. And rehearsal time alone will take at least an hour or two. I think maybe a 5 minute presentation would be a reasonable ask to test someone's communication skills, but 30 is excessive. I routinely prepare and give presentations. A good one hour talk on a subject I know well takes roughly 1 8 hour work day to prepare and practice.
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# ? Dec 17, 2015 02:43 |
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Yeah, I've given 90-minute talks on things I didn't previously know about at all (comparative study of distributed filesystems) with about two days to prep You clearly are not a procrastinator
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# ? Dec 17, 2015 02:59 |
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Does that count if it's for a hobby and not for work?
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# ? Dec 17, 2015 04:44 |
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Sign posted:I recently did a phone screen with a well funded start up. I thought I did badly on the phone screen, and they want to fly me out for an in person interview. Following up on this went out there, thought I did better than I did on the phone screen. They seemed to ask lots of questions with the assumption you wouldn't get the right answer but to see how close you do get. They want me to progress to the next round of interviews which is with the two local employees. Which seems totally backwards to me. The feedback conversation after the interview was more about what I thought of their interview process than how I did. Is that normal to anybody else?
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 17:40 |
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E/N career chat: My yearly review is coming up in a few hours. I'm asking for a pretty sizable but justified raise (about 25%). I have all of my metrics laid out, I think I can swing it. A surprise Apple TV Christmas gift showed up at my house yesterday from my boss. My inner cynic says it's a harbinger of a really good review with a really bad raise.
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 18:21 |
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100% of the personal gifts from bosses I've received have been followed up with "you deserve a big raise, but..."
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 19:10 |
Plorkyeran posted:100% of the personal gifts from bosses I've received have been followed up with "you deserve a big raise, but..." My current boss has been acting extra nice and cool to me at work lately. I assume this is so he can act all chummy when he says "Well I really like you and you do great work, but it's just not in the budget". Luckily for him, I will probably voluntary remove myself from his budget in the next month.
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 22:24 |
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Plorkyeran posted:100% of the personal gifts from bosses I've received have been followed up with "you deserve a big raise, but..." Result: 17% raise. 5k bonus on top of that. It's not quite what I wanted, but it's in the right ballpark.
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 22:57 |
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Ithaqua posted:Result: 17% raise. 5k bonus on top of that. It's not quite what I wanted, but it's in the right ballpark. The biggest raise I've ever gotten was 5%. :| And I had to aggressively pursue/fight for it.
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 23:29 |
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Ithaqua posted:Result: 17% raise. 5k bonus on top of that. It's not quite what I wanted, but it's in the right ballpark. How extensive was the case you put together for this? Many people here may find it useful.
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# ? Dec 23, 2015 23:51 |
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Skandranon posted:How extensive was the case you put together for this? Many people here may find it useful. I actually didn't have to negotiate for it. I was looking for 25%, but 17% + 5k bonus put me within about 3-4% of what I was after, so I wasn't going to split hairs. I did try to push for it a little bit but I didn't push hard since it was a very generous increase. What I had in my notes if the need arose was: 1) My billability ratio (I'm a consultant) 2) The number of weeks I traveled for work the past year (I signed on with the expectation of 10% stated in the offer letter, I travel closer to 20-25%) 3) The salary of a former co-worker who was not as valuable as I am 4) A list of personal and professional accomplishments 5) An extensive list of the projects I worked on and the customer feedback 6) An extensive list of all of the times my co-workers gave me a shout out for helping them on their projects I could still do better by jumping ship to the tune of about 10-15%, but I also really like my job and my working environment, so it's a reasonable sacrifice IMO.
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# ? Dec 24, 2015 00:21 |
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Does anyone have any good primers for clueless people or resources on questions to ask regarding RSUs in an offer? I've done some research but don't really know what questions I should be asking. I interviewed someplace recently and received an offer that includes RSUs. This is at a privately held 40-something person company. The offer specifies an initial gift of X,XXX shares of RSUs after 90 days and that RSUs vest after a period of 3-5 years with immediate vesting after a change in control. There's no mention of how much individual shares are worth, or what the vesting schedule is like in those 3-5 years. The benefits mention that based on company/individual performance additional equity bonuses are possible, however this is not mentioned explicitly in the offer. What should I be asking? At the very least, how much the shares are worth, right? They could be worth fractions of a penny for all I know, and the equity could be pretty worthless. I asked the CEO during the interview if he plans to take the company public and he said no. He said once the equity vests you can sell it, however I don't understand who I'd be selling it to if it isn't public (unless it would just be selling it back to the company or other employees). The offer is good enough that I'd probably accept it without any equity at all, however for my own maximum benefit I'd like to know as much as possible about this and not appear like I just fell off a turnip truck by asking really naive questions. Can anyone recommend a good guide to RSUs for idiots?
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 19:03 |
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Cryolite posted:I interviewed someplace recently and received an offer that includes RSUs. This is at a privately held 40-something person company. The offer specifies an initial gift of X,XXX shares of RSUs after 90 days and that RSUs vest after a period of 3-5 years with immediate vesting after a change in control. There's no mention of how much individual shares are worth, or what the vesting schedule is like in those 3-5 years. The benefits mention that based on company/individual performance additional equity bonuses are possible, however this is not mentioned explicitly in the offer. An RSU is just a promise to transfer control of shares at a future date. Sometimes they also pay dividends like regular shares but that is pretty rare. What you need to know is the vesting schedule, whether there's any equity events anticipated that could result in dilution and what happens to your grants in that case and some idea of the companies present and future value. In your case I'd also want to ask whether an acquisition is anticipated. Unless the company goes public or is acquired by a public company it can be tough to sell stock and you may be limited to selling back to the company (generally on pretty unfavourable terms).
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 22:40 |
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Cryolite posted:He said once the equity vests you can sell it, however I don't understand who I'd be selling it to if it isn't public (unless it would just be selling it back to the company or other employees). There are private secuirity markets like Sharespost that let people buy/sell shares in private companies. If the company isn't famous or large, it's unlikely that you'll actually be able to sell them, though.
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 22:45 |
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Cryolite posted:I asked the CEO during the interview if he plans to take the company public and he said no. He said once the equity vests you can sell it, however I don't understand who I'd be selling it to if it isn't public (unless it would just be selling it back to the company or other employees). Given these circumstances I would value these RSUs (and the equity it converts into) at $0.00. If the salary is good, awesome, take the job. But if there are no plans to go public, I can't see a realistic way to get liquidity out of these unless the company gets sold and they have to cash you out under the change in control provision. Especially considering a vesting date of 3-5 years into the future, do you expect you'd be working there in 5 years anyway?
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# ? Jan 9, 2016 23:14 |
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You also need the total number of shares to calculate the value per share. I'd probably also ask if the company buys stocks, and how it does so, and if there are other avenues to sell shares.
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# ? Jan 10, 2016 00:42 |
Either I am really good at the whole resume, application, interview process or employers are really desperate for developers around here. I applied 4 places got 4 phone interviews, 3 in person interviews and, and 3 offers all of which were better than my current position and one of which was 30% more than my current salary and higher than my asking price. I guess it could be both? Either way, thank you to the posters who responded with tips and advice earlier. I will be accepting one of the offers this Monday and am quite happy about it. Now I gotta figure out how to convince my current boss that they should try to hire an actual IT guy to do the IT part of the job or they will just be going through the same thing a year from now when my replacement how bad that situation is. Is acting as a SysAdmin/Helpdesk/DBA/Developer/etc all in one position something you can realistically find a qualified person for? In my case I was hired to do the software, but had the other stuff dumped on me over time. What would the market rate even be for a position like that in a place like Ohio? Title? If my current employer isn't hostile or mean during my exit process, I plan to help them at least start hiring a replacement.(Unless they insist on doing the dumb thing and trying to dump it all on the remaining dev)
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# ? Jan 10, 2016 01:44 |
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wilderthanmild posted:Now I gotta figure out how to convince my current boss that they should try to hire an actual IT guy to do the IT part of the job or they will just be going through the same thing a year from now when my replacement how bad that situation is. "Hey boss, you should try to hire an actual IT guy to do the IT part of the job or you will just be going through the same thing a year from now. Well, so long!" Don't waste any more of your time than that worrying about it, it's not your problem anymore.
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# ? Jan 10, 2016 02:04 |
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New Job Status: 2016 Rejected from companies because 1. Didn't write semicolons in the javascript I did for the coding sample. Not the only reason, but just one of a sea of nitpicks about the code. 2. Even though I had a great onsite day-long interview which included the lead of the team, the VP Eng was not there. Went back to talk to VP, then couple days later got a call saying they didn't think I was suited for the job. The internal recruiter did say that if I saw any other positions I could directly contact him but I have a feeling if the VP didn't like me it's probably not a good idea to reapply there. thoughts? 3. Didn't get rejected necessarily but had a good onsite interview, but then the recruiter never emailed me again after I asked for a status and he asked me to wait a couple more days. 4. Wrote this huge webpack/react/es6 project for a big company (it's something they can't really use so it was more of a problem of wasting so much time). got rejected and only feedback was, "coding was incorrect" 5. Wrote a smaller project for a SV Unicorn Hype company. there was 4 bullet points that i needed to have in order for it to be considered complete. I made sure I did those and submitted. Got a rejection email a few hours later saying that they "have so many people applying and they have very specific needs that even talented people such as yourself may not be what we're looking for." 6. Talked to a recruiter on the phone, I refused to say a salary # when he asked, and again refused when he went with the, "we need to make sure we're on the same level" excuse. I countered by asking what was their salary range for the position, he said that he didn't have that number at the moment but would get back to me on the followup call. I got an email after the new year saying, "we decided to move forward with other candidates." there was no prior follow-up. I had said I would never do projects that require more than a week to complete but decided to try it since I wanted to work for that big company. But after this experience, I've decided doing projects is really a waste of your time, so the company better be worth it for you to possibly get some vague, "no" answer for all your effort. Strong Sauce fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jan 11, 2016 |
# ? Jan 11, 2016 04:28 |
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I feel you man. I'm interviewing myself, and it's been a slog, especially since I'm a bit rusty where it concerns answering questions with somewhat arbitrarily difficulty and somewhat arbitrary requirements. Also, interviewing while homeless suuuuuuuuuuucks. Been couchsurfing for about a month and a half and I'm just a couple of days away from being mostly tapped out of friends' places to stay. E: Oh, and as for interviews/screens: Two companies failed to call at their appointed time One unilaterally rescheduled an interview into a conflict, forcing me to cancel them One insisted that I reverse a unicode string using Objective-C without using docs (I mean, sorry the API for iterating over codepoints isn't on the tip of my tongue). I had the C/ASCII solution up in moments, and this was the /only/ whiteboard question in the entire four-hour span. The only period of time during which I was majorly sick in the past couple of months was for the three days in which I had two onsites (including the above) and two screens Stuff that was definitely my fault: Rusty on the rules of blackjack, getting it confused with poker Getting tripped up writing recursive algorithms dealing with trees (which as an iOS developer I'll very rarely write) "I know that library. Oh wait, no, I don't actually know that library." Really starting to be reminded how lot of interview processes aren't testing for success under normal conditions. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Jan 11, 2016 |
# ? Jan 11, 2016 05:26 |
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Really starting to be reminded how lot of interview processes aren't testing for success under normal conditions. I have never had an opportunity to do it, but I really want to like the idea of the weeklong pairing "interview." Give me an opportunity to see if the codebase is a dumpster fire, and get a patch through code review to see if my potential colleagues are jerks or not. But since I can't take a week of PTO for every company I want to interview at, I get to write fibonacci sequences on whiteboards instead.
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# ? Jan 11, 2016 16:46 |
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Have a half-day interview tomorrow at a Fortune 500 for a ~~~big data engineering~~~ job (they actually have petabytes worth of data to sift through so I guess they do count as big data). My current job is pretty alright, but I'm going to try not to gently caress this up and make 2016 the year of the job
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# ? Jan 14, 2016 05:44 |
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Monkey Fury posted:Have a half-day interview tomorrow at a Fortune 500 for a ~~~big data engineering~~~ job (they actually have petabytes worth of data to sift through so I guess they do count as big data). My current job is pretty alright, but I'm going to try not to gently caress this up and make 2016 the year of the job Hadoop or real-time? Kind of funny that I phrase the question that way, but are there any real contenders to Hadoop emerging for static analysis?
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# ? Jan 14, 2016 06:25 |
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baquerd posted:Hadoop or real-time? Kind of funny that I phrase the question that way, but are there any real contenders to Hadoop emerging for static analysis? Yes? Spark is a quickly maturing alternative to Hadoop that is easier and more flexible to write. Unless you mean "Hadoop the cluster manager, file system, and processing framework" in which case I'd say nobody is really building out a new file system. A couple of groups I know of are copying the basic idea of EMRFS and getting somewhere in the 1.2 - 1.5x of HDFS speed via S3. That does tie you to aws as your provider of choice without wanting to kill yourself over bandwidth charges.
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# ? Jan 14, 2016 10:54 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 11:35 |
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FamDav posted:Yes? Spark is a quickly maturing alternative to Hadoop that is easier and more flexible to write. Unless you mean "Hadoop the cluster manager, file system, and processing framework" in which case I'd say nobody is really building out a new file system. A couple of groups I know of are copying the basic idea of EMRFS and getting somewhere in the 1.2 - 1.5x of HDFS speed via S3. That does tie you to aws as your provider of choice without wanting to kill yourself over bandwidth charges. Oh duh, right. I always think of Spark as Spark Streaming, since that's what we use it for.
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# ? Jan 14, 2016 13:01 |