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Mniot posted:OK, so all the review comments on better code are good, but trying to think of what would trigger a rejection based on this code... I don't see it. I guess I could imagine a couple of the problems being annoying enough that they'd sum them up and reject. Or if you took a week on this, then that's disappointing but I'm assuming you did it in about an hour. It seems to run correctly and I can follow the code without shaking my head the whole time so I'd call it good. It really all comes down to the quality of the other candidates' code. If there were a lot of strong coders, then nitpicky stuff gets more weight. If there are a lot of candidates, you're going to screen as many out as quickly as you can so you can focus on the strongest. In those scenarios, your genius handling of some edge case won't matter if your code appears a little sketchy on first review.
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Jul 6, 2017 02:06
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Does anyone work with (or has anyone ever worked with) a lot of foreign language speakers? How do you deal with them speaking in a different language in the office?
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Jul 7, 2017 16:14
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The majority of any team I've been on has always been immigrants. You deal with it by doing nothing.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:21
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Ither posted:Does anyone work with (or has anyone ever worked with) a lot of foreign language speakers? Get good at explaining things in multiple ways using different vocabulary. Try to pick up on what their cultural norms are to avoid catastrophic misunderstandings. Have fun being in a meeting with a client/partner from their native country where they start out in English and then sidebar the whole meeting into their native language while you manage to pick up bits and pieces.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:25
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leper khan posted:Have fun being in a meeting with a client/partner from their native country where they start out in English and then sidebar the whole meeting into their native language while you manage to pick up bits and pieces. This is the real problem source, IMO. It's too easy to lock someone out of the team by speaking a language they don't understand. You may want to work with HR to gently encourage work to be done in whatever your lingua franca is.
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Jul 7, 2017 16:46
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I have a couple of Swedish coworkers and occasionally they lapse into Swedish when conversing online. My boss's response is to start copy-pasting random words from the IKEA catalogue into the conversation.
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Jul 7, 2017 17:24
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Ither posted:Does anyone work with (or has anyone ever worked with) a lot of foreign language speakers? There was a little bit of pushback from the foreign-language speakers who felt that they could communicate more efficiently in their own language. But ultimately everyone came to the consensus that it was more important to be inclusive than efficient.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:46
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I just put in headphones and ignore them like the conversations in English I'm not party to.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:00
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Ither posted:Does anyone work with (or has anyone ever worked with) a lot of foreign language speakers? What's there to deal with? Are they speaking English when conversing with English only speakers in the office? If so, that seems sufficient.
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Jul 7, 2017 21:53
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metztli posted:What's there to deal with? Are they speaking English when conversing with English only speakers in the office? If so, that seems sufficient. They are not. The team is about seven people. One other person and I only speak English. Sometimes I can tell it's personal conversation which is okay, I guess, but other times they are definitely taking about work.
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Jul 8, 2017 00:42
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Mention that when people discuss work in moonspeak, you feel less effective or excluded from the team or whatever it is you feel. You might not be able to change people's behavior, especially if they're more comfortable in their native language. Making it clear that it's having an impact on your work may help people be more mindful of it, however.
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Jul 8, 2017 02:25
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Sounds like a great opportunity for you to learn a new language.
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Jul 8, 2017 03:00
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fritz posted:Sounds like a great opportunity for you to learn a new language. From my team's IRC channel: quote:There is a word for the "fixes" I did in German: "Verschlimmbesserung" (worsening improvement)
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Jul 8, 2017 03:04
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Orkiec posted:The majority of any team I've been on has always been immigrants. You deal with it by doing nothing. This, really. I've worked in more than one international company. Assuming your co-workers aren't complete dicks, if it's stuff that involves you or you might have useful input into, they'll switch into English. Meanwhile if it's stuff between them they'll naturally get it done more efficiently than if they were speaking a second language to each other. (if the reason they're all speaking a different language to you is you've moved to their country, then consider learning the language, but hopefully that should be obvious  )
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Jul 8, 2017 09:52
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Rex-Goliath posted:Consulting is great if you're doing actual consulting. 90% of the time though what they actually mean is you'll be doing implementations for a vendor which sucks. They look kind of the same from the outside but there's a huge difference in both the work you'll be doing and your relationships with the customer. If long term you want to climb the leadership ladder then in a few years consulting will give you more exposure to different styles of management / company internals / client-vendor relations / ground-up chaotic implementations than many people get in their entire careers. Very good for sharpening your teeth in those aspects. If you're more interested in long-term development of products and being more focused on the technical aspects of things while others handle all the 'soft stuff' then you probably want to stick with engineering. Agreed. I was a "consultant" for a big ERP firm, which amounted to flying to client sites every week and doing implementations. The actual consultants were the people from Deloitte/Accenture/IBM whom the customer brought in to deal with us, so they didn't have to. That said, I still learned a lot about soft skills, navigating chaos, and how to prioritize 100 things when each one is all on fire. Also how to communicate bad news -- how do I tell a customer "yes, I know the salesperson promised you this HR software could do X with nearly zero additional effort, but your Byzantine union contracts make doing X harder without significant custom logic and he shouldn't have promised you that without discussing that with an engineer first. We can do it, but I'm 100% sure you will not like the price tag."
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Jul 8, 2017 20:03
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What's the consensus on suggesting changes as a new, but senior guy? I don't want to be *that guy*. Example: new job is re-architecting their codebase and doing some pretty test unfriendly things when testing is one of the primary goals of their refactoring. Also, lots of legacy stored procedures (understandable), but they're still creating new ones for the refactored code instead of using a library like Dapper or LLBLGen. New code becomes 90% unnecessary mappings.
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Jul 8, 2017 23:58
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Same as trying to convince anyone of anything really: lead them to the answer rather than tell it to them as a given fact. Use the Socratic method: Don't:"Your current approach will reduce testability, lol." Do: "What effect will the current approach have on testability, which I understand is an important goal?" (followed by gently pushing for a proper answer, taking into account the likelihood that this may be the first time they've actually had to justify their decision to someone else) Similarly, using the "I tried that too, but I found..." pattern is also a good gentle nudge in the right direction, because it couches your advice in the context of your experience, rather than just stating it as incontrovertible fact. Don't: "Don't use Singleton dude, it's an anti-pattern. Makes it hard to test the class." Do: "I saw you wanted to use the Singleton pattern for this class. I did that a few times too, but I found it made it hard to test because it became difficult to reset the state of the class between test runs."
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Jul 9, 2017 00:47
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My concern is that the three guys leading most of the dev have been here 10-15 years and seem pretty entrenched in how they do things. I was more or less hired to bring new ideas to the table, but my immediate boss is one of those three. If it's a wall I can't break through without alienating myself, then maybe it's  again. I have a history of sticking around way too long anyway.
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Jul 9, 2017 03:17
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Iverron posted:My concern is that the three guys leading most of the dev have been here 10-15 years and seem pretty entrenched in how they do things. I was more or less hired to bring new ideas to the table, but my immediate boss is one of those three. Produce an alternative that shows how testing can be better. Then you aren't just saying things. If they see your alternative, understand it, and still tell you to pound sand, then yeah, consider , but better find out early if they will stay stuck in their rut or not.
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Jul 9, 2017 04:02
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Iverron posted:What's the consensus on suggesting changes as a new, but senior guy? I don't want to be *that guy*. They hired you to use your brain and speak your mind, and bring "new brain" to their problems. Speak up without being a dick would be my advice. Maybe put things forth in the form of a question, like "that's an interesting approach - what advantages are you getting from doing foo, rather than bar or baz?" if you don't feel confident, but as a senior you should feel confident. If anyone get shirty with you, point out that you're the new guy and trying to understand and blah de blah, but really, if they're halfway reasonable they won't get pissy. If they get pissy, feel free to be direct and point out that by sticking to the old approaches they're just going to be recreating the same issues they have, just in a new and wasteful fashion.
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Jul 9, 2017 04:21
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raminasi posted:I have a couple of Swedish coworkers and occasionally they lapse into Swedish when conversing online. My boss's response is to start copy-pasting random words from the IKEA catalogue into the conversation. Heh, I'll have to suggest that one to my boss. We're two swedes on my team along with, I think, 8 other native languages. One person is even a native English speaker! I speak Swedish all the time with the other swede, even if it's a work discussion. It's nice to actually use my mother tongue for a bit since I don't get that many chances to do so in the US, it's nice to use a language where I can actually use idioms without a 50% risk of loving them up, and it's nice not have to do any mental translation just to carry a conversation, especially on the work-related topics where my Swedish vocabulary is just a lot better. I try not to be an rear end in a top hat about it and I avoid things like carrying on an encrypted side-conversation in a meeting (which has happened and is annoying), but I'd honestly be pretty upset if someone tried to mandate that I only ever use English in the office. There are conversations around me in Chinese, Spanish, Czech, Italian and French most days, some of which are probably about things I work on, and I don't see a problem with that either. If you coworkers are being exclusive assholes about it -- and it's certainly possible for them to be -- then take it up with your manager. Just be aware that in any international workplace there will always be conversations in a language that you don't understand, and try to avoid the outcome where half the team communication gets moved to a secret moonspeak chat channel instead and everyone loses.
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Jul 9, 2017 04:45
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Well, my latest couple interviews were a tad different, they were all interpersonal and my goals, what I do outside of work and the kind of person I am. Jesus, I don't want to marry all I want is a good paying job in a place where everything is overpriced, is it too much to ask for? Needless to say, it didn't go that well. Honest Thief fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 09:51
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I once interviewed at a decent-sized post-startup in san francisco where one of their main hiring criteria was verbatim "If this person was working on a Sunday would I come into the office just to hang out with them". So many things wrong with one sentence.
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Jul 11, 2017 10:01
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I'd send them a poop emoji.
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Jul 11, 2017 10:23
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When a recruiter asks what compensation I'm looking for, is something like this okay?quote:As for salary range, I'd rather discuss it once we know whether this is a good fit, but it's within the <area> market average.
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Jul 11, 2017 15:52
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Pollyanna posted:When a recruiter asks what compensation I'm looking for, is something like this okay? Either do that or shoot for 20-50% more than what you actually want.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:00
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leper khan posted:Either do that or shoot for 20-50% more than what you actually want. This does occasionally backfire. As a contractor I have some trouble succinctly explaining the idea of "Well, my day rate is £xxx, but this is a free market and I'm open to other offers, though bear in mind someone else might offer more", because I often have to break through the two walls of "whoa that's way to much" followed by "negotiable? I'm going to lowball you then".
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Jul 11, 2017 17:25
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MC Jaded Burnout posted:I once interviewed at a decent-sized post-startup in san francisco where one of their main hiring criteria was verbatim "If this person was working on a Sunday would I come into the office just to hang out with them". Stripe lol I'm sure they all truly believe they are at the peak of tech culture, too.
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Jul 11, 2017 17:50
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Pollyanna posted:When a recruiter asks what compensation I'm looking for, is something like this okay? It's not necessarily a bad idea to give external recruiters a "I will literally not call you back for anything under $X" number as long as you're very clear that it's your absolute lower bound.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:30
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raminasi posted:It's not necessarily a bad idea to give external recruiters a "I will literally not call you back for anything under $X" number as long as you're very clear that it's your absolute lower bound. This seems like a good way to get offered exactly $X
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Jul 11, 2017 18:32
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Jose Valasquez posted:This seems like a good way to get offered exactly $X Solution: $X = baseline + $10,000~$20,000
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Jul 11, 2017 21:55
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Infinotize posted:Stripe lol Yep. Are they still doing it? Regardless of the outcome of the interview I'd already seen enough of the real state of SF to never want to live there.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:03
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Jaded Burnout posted:Yep. Are they still doing it? The craziest thing about SF real estate (and there are many crazy things) is that people pay huge amounts of money to live in SF, only to commute south to the peninsula for work every day. I used to have a reverse commute simply because I headed into the city in the morning instead of away from it.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:10
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Jaded Burnout posted:I once interviewed at a decent-sized post-startup in san francisco where one of their main hiring criteria was verbatim "If this person was working on a Sunday would I come into the office just to hang out with them". This is such a gigantic red flag, it's actually ridiculous.
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Jul 12, 2017 00:57
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return0 posted:This is such a gigantic red flag, it's actually ridiculous. A red flag cannon that shoots red flags that explode into smaller red flags that have pictures of red flags on those flags.
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Jul 12, 2017 00:59
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"This person came in on a Sunday, probably to catch up on something they're desperately behind on. Better head to the office and distract them!"
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Jul 12, 2017 01:02
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The craziest thing about SF real estate (and there are many crazy things) is that people pay huge amounts of money to live in SF, only to commute south to the peninsula for work every day. How long ago? I lived in SF and worked in Redwood City from 2008-2010, and it was definitely a reverse commute then.
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Jul 12, 2017 01:46
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Infinotize posted:Stripe lol Funny you're mentioning Stripe. Been looking around for a while for a payment provider for our product and we talked with a fair number of people in our area. I heard Stripe being mentioned numerous times. Maybe their culture is poo poo, but is their product OK? I mean, between them, Paypal or some other payment provider Stripe was the most mentioned.
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Jul 12, 2017 01:56
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Steve French posted:How long ago? I lived in SF and worked in Redwood City from 2008-2010, and it was definitely a reverse commute then. My knowledge dates from 2008-2015 or so, with the caveat that I was using 280 instead of 101. But I've had cause a few times recently to commute from around Daly City down to Mountain View during rush hour, and it's very obvious that people are going south in the morning and north in the evening.
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Jul 12, 2017 02:32
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Honest Thief posted:Well, my latest couple interviews were a tad different, they were all interpersonal and my goals, what I do outside of work and the kind of person I am. Jesus, I don't want to marry all I want is a good paying job in a place where everything is overpriced, is it too much to ask for? We're asking those questions to make sure you're not a goon.
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Jul 12, 2017 03:10
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