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Just landed a new position and I wanted to do a quick write-up of my search. I started applying three weeks ago, after getting turned down for a promotion for the second time in a row. Here are the stats: 26 applications 7 rejections (5 at resume stage, 2 at phone screen stage) 4 on-sites scheduled (3 attended, one canceled after taking another offer) 10 no-responses 3 offers I cut off the rest in the middle because I got a good offer The questions I ran into were pretty much all between a leetcode easy and medium level. Almost all of it was via coderpad or a similar site. I never got a substantial take-home; the one take-home I did get was "here's an hour, timed. answer this leetcode-style question" via hackerrank. uninverted fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Aug 10, 2019 02:39
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Lockback posted:This will vary by employer, but when I hire I strongly favor having a candidate walk me through a project in the code, and usually it's nice to be able to look at it ahead of time to come up with some questions as why they did XYZ or what kind of problems did they need to solve, etc. I do that in lieu of a coding exam as I've personally found coding exams to not be very useful. Thanks for your thoughts  I like the idea of making a small but non-trivial open source project to discuss in interviews. I'm going to think more about what this might look like. Cheers!
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Aug 10, 2019 12:03
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RC Cola posted:This is all good advice. If this job interview doesn't pan out, I think I will keep working on learning D3. I think that could be a good little project - you could include the units of production improving over time, and also show units of production per machinist (perhaps do some number crunching with d3 collections). You could also draw out some stats on year over year improvement. Google analytics is a good place to look for inspiration on this sort of thing as it does the year over year comparisons quite well. Also wouldn’t hurt to add a tooltip and a nice little hover effect - helps it look polished. I’d be happy to look it over if you’d like. —- As for me, over the last few days, I told my boss that I’d be resigning, had an exit interview with the CEO, and announced it to the rest of the team. Have yet to do an exit interview with my boss. My boss seemed pretty blindsided when I told him. I didn’t get into the reasoning much beyond saying I took a new job and that there was misalignment between my goals and interests and the company’s goals for my role, and of course didn’t say anything of the sort in the actual resignation letter. Once the cat was out of the bag I started feeling a lot less angry about everything and just relieved that I only had a few more days to put up with all this poo poo. The exit interview with the CEO went well, I think. I was very frank with him, and when I brought up some of the issues he looked pretty sad and upset - he definitely wasn’t aware of a lot of this stuff because he’d been working in a different office than the dev team, and I told him I previously hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about my dissatisfaction because I was worried about jeopardizing my job security, which he was dismayed to hear. Anyhow, he’s a great guy and understands and wants to meet up for lunch sometime down the road to catch up. I’m hoping he’ll be able to make some improvements to hiring and the dev office environment. I’m more nervous about the exit interview with my boss. It might be a bit contentious because he’s ultimately at fault for all the reasons I’m leaving (hosed over my position, determined the pay, chose to hire the dick, etc). We’ll see. At least I’ll have more time to continue to calm down before it happens.
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Aug 11, 2019 00:09
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uninverted posted:I had 2 years of experience with a technical B. S. (tangentially related to CS). The questions I ran into were pretty much all between a leetcode easy and medium level. Almost all of it was via coderpad or a similar site. I never got a substantial take-home; the one take-home I did get was "here's an hour, timed. answer this leetcode-style question" via hackerrank. The offer I ended up taking was at a 100-ish person startup, for a 30% raise and some Just curious, what was the average time you had to answer each question?
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Aug 11, 2019 14:10
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drainpipe posted:Just curious, what was the average time you had to answer each question? Anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Getting one or two softballs and a harder question in an hour block was a common setup. The most common "genre" of question was dynamic programming. I got asked one of those questions three times across the four companies I wrote code for (one used a DP question for both the phone screen and the on-site. I have no doubt that I would have seen another if I went to the last on-site). Luckily they're really not as scary as their reputation would imply.
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Aug 11, 2019 16:00
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Cool, thanks! I was worried it would be 15 as that'd be tight for some of the leetcode problems, but 30+ seems manageable.
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Aug 11, 2019 16:30
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Would it be a terrible idea to quit a dev job you like where you're making 50k, grind whiteboarding and algos and poo poo for a year making no money, and then either land a high paying faang-type job or give up and go back to the same 50k-ish range job? Seems like a "bad idea" from a "traditional point of view" and a "good rear end idea" from a "making money" point of view (lose a year of income for a huge raise for rest of career). Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. Also the worst case (back to same job after a year) seems fine? You'd own at interviews at least cause you practiced for a year right?
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Aug 14, 2019 03:09
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awesomeolion posted:Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. You're competing against people who don't have this constraint. Do you feel good about that?
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Aug 14, 2019 03:12
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You should gain experience lol what
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Aug 14, 2019 04:34
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awesomeolion posted:Would it be a terrible idea to quit a dev job you like where you're making 50k, grind whiteboarding and algos and poo poo for a year making no money, and then either land a high paying faang-type job or give up and go back to the same 50k-ish range job? Seems like a "bad idea" from a "traditional point of view" and a "good rear end idea" from a "making money" point of view (lose a year of income for a huge raise for rest of career). Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. Also the worst case (back to same job after a year) seems fine? You'd own at interviews at least cause you practiced for a year right? Grind experience on their time.
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Aug 14, 2019 04:59
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awesomeolion posted:Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. Let's not.
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Aug 14, 2019 05:13
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E: thanks for the help
Phraggah fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 07:25
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MickeyFinn posted:Anyway, all recruiting is a dumpster fire I wish I could avoid. Skipping a few pages, but I really have to stress that this is absolutely not universally accurate. I got my last job through a random recruiter on LinkedIn and it was incredibly helpful to my career and the recruiter himself was an absolute legend. They will also fight for a good salary for you because they usually get bonuses as a percentage of the salary awarded. That said this is in Melbourne Australia and I'm absolutely willing to believe that this experience differs greatly from city to city, and even recruiter to recruiter. I guess I'm just saying if a cool sounding job pops up in your LinkedIn from a recruiter, don't outright dismiss it.
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Aug 14, 2019 09:41
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Phraggah posted:Please feel free to ask questions, it would help to understand exactly how lovely or not lovely my current job is. This is my first real performance review at A Tech Company. There is no way you're going to be able to provide unbiased context from just the stuff surrounding this review alone to make a comment about how lovely your job is. Do you have (or can you ask for) a meeting to ask your questions of the person who wrote the review directly and how you should respond? Maybe they just forgot all the relevant context and are bad at writing first drafts of performance reviews; I have no way of knowing.
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Aug 14, 2019 10:21
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Phraggah posted:I think i have A lovely Boss but it's hard to tell what part of the lovely is from me and what part is from not me. It's Kinda sounds like your boss doesn't like you and how you're a bummer at company parties. Shoot more finger guns maybe? Wink and finger gun is a great combo. For the visibility thing maybe cc more people when you're helping or doing good work so they have visibility into your contributions? Edit: are there coworkers of yours who seem to be doing well or who you admire? How is their approach different than yours? Anything you could learn there? Even if your boss sucks you can still analyze and emulate positive attributes of your strongest coworkers. Edit 2: If he's separate from your day-to-day work, is he just judging you based on any info he does have? Let's say hypothetically you shower and brush your teeth once a week and wear old dirty clothes. Your boss who doesn't see your day-to-day work contributions might just look at you and say "lacking passion" when they mean "smells bad and i don't like them". I feel like devs sometimes ignore that everyone is judged on their appearance, their smell, how well groomed they are, etc. so I thought I'd throw this out there as something you could maybe improve on. awesomeolion fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 10:49
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but I'd appreciate perspective.
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awesomeolion posted:Would it be a terrible idea to quit a dev job you like where you're making 50k, grind whiteboarding and algos and poo poo for a year making no money, and then either land a high paying faang-type job or give up and go back to the same 50k-ish range job? Seems like a "bad idea" from a "traditional point of view" and a "good rear end idea" from a "making money" point of view (lose a year of income for a huge raise for rest of career). Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. Also the worst case (back to same job after a year) seems fine? You'd own at interviews at least cause you practiced for a year right? There are intermediates between 50k and FAANG, and frankly it's not like it's going to a take a year of grinding algos to get into FAANG either. I dated a biology major who was working at a crappy web design company part time for like fifteen bucks an hour or so as their first job out of college - I remember showing them how to put break points in a web browser and actually debug javascript. This was enough to score an internship at some company that did fantasy football stats, that turned into a junior development job making significantly more than 50k. They worked there for about a year and switched to a job at real estate ads company that was making north of 100k. After working at real estate ads company for a year, they started seriously studying the algorithms stuff, and made it into a FAANG company with about a month of studying.
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Aug 14, 2019 11:18
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ultrafilter posted:You're competing against people who don't have this constraint. Do you feel good about that? I think what you're saying is "if you're not passionate about it now while working full time, you sure you're going to be passionate about it if you did it full time"? Fair point. barkbell posted:You should gain experience lol what Practical experience shipping projects is not what FAANGs test for AFAIK. I never use algos or anything like that at my job. downout posted:Grind experience on their time. I mean I'm getting experience at work but it's not going to help with an algo question... If you mean "do leetcode at work", I'm not going to do unrelated activities on work's dime. Unless they take place in the bathroom (I poop & post on work's time is the joke thank you) Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:There are intermediates between 50k and FAANG, and frankly it's not like it's going to a take a year of grinding algos to get into FAANG either. I dated a biology major who was working at a crappy web design company part time for like fifteen bucks an hour or so as their first job out of college - I remember showing them how to put break points in a web browser and actually debug javascript. This was enough to score an internship at some company that did fantasy football stats, that turned into a junior development job making significantly more than 50k. They worked there for about a year and switched to a job at real estate ads company that was making north of 100k. After working at real estate ads company for a year, they started seriously studying the algorithms stuff, and made it into a FAANG company with about a month of studying. Interesting. I guess I'll continue slowly studying in my free time and applying to a bunch of places. Thanks for your anecdote and feedback. My thinking was along the lines of "if the average approach is work a dev job + study a bit of algos here and there before interviews", then an approach of "a long, full time dedication to deliberately practicing interview/algo/whiteboarding" would win out. Sounds like the general sentiment from the thread is "don't quit your day job", so fair enough 
awesomeolion fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 11:39
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I'm an accomplished developer, happy with my career and I have no problem admitting that I couldn't pass an algo based interview and I don't really care to. Algo based interviews are missing the point big time.
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Aug 14, 2019 12:20
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:I'm an accomplished developer, happy with my career and I have no problem admitting that I couldn't pass an algo based interview and I don't really care to. Algo based interviews are missing the point big time. I agree with you, but I've been practicing algorithm interviews for about a month now, because it seems like devs who are good at solving algorithm problems are worth way more money than devs who are good at shipping products and creating value  If getting really good at solving algorithm problems means that I can build a nice house for my family in my 30s, then I don't mind spending my free time on it, even if I personally believe that algorithm interviews aren't a great way to judge developers.
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Aug 14, 2019 12:37
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sunaurus posted:I agree with you, but I've been practicing algorithm interviews for about a month now, because it seems like devs who are good at solving algorithm problems are worth way more money than devs who are good at shipping products and creating value Where are the numbers on this? What are you basing this on?
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Aug 14, 2019 13:29
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:Where are the numbers on this? What are you basing this on? I would love to have some good numbers on this myself. All I know is that my current salary is already pretty good as far as most European employment opportunities go (according to colleagues, online discussions, recruiters I've spoken to), and the only companies which consistently seem to pay significantly higher salaries are also known for doing algorithm puzzle interviews. sunaurus fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 13:51
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sunaurus posted:I would love to have some good numbers on this myself. All I know is that my current salary is already pretty good as far as most European companies go (according to colleagues, online discussions, recruiters I've spoken to), and the only companies which consistently seem to pay significantly higher salaries are also known for doing algorithm puzzle interviews. You keep saying "seem".
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Aug 14, 2019 13:53
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a hot gujju bhabhi posted:You keep saying "seem". Yeah, to emphasize that I'm talking about personal experiences here. Does it bother you that I'm talking about the way I see things based on the incomplete data that is available to me, instead of claiming I know some absolute truth about all developer salaries?
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Aug 14, 2019 14:01
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awesomeolion posted:Would it be a terrible idea to quit a dev job you like where you're making 50k, grind whiteboarding and algos and poo poo for a year making no money, and then either land a high paying faang-type job or give up and go back to the same 50k-ish range job? Seems like a "bad idea" from a "traditional point of view" and a "good rear end idea" from a "making money" point of view (lose a year of income for a huge raise for rest of career). Let's assume the algo/whiteboarding grind is never going to get anywhere without a full time focus. Also the worst case (back to same job after a year) seems fine? You'd own at interviews at least cause you practiced for a year right? Taking time off work _just_ to study is a bad idea, in more than just a financial sense. If it's not a job you care about, definitely study on the job. That being said, I took 9 months off to travel, studied for an hour a day for a couple of those, and now have a FAANG job making those sweet sweet figgies. So it's definitely possible. My advice for you is that it's going to be more than just whiteboarding/algos, so do more than just Leetcode (e.g. do design problems, take practice interviews), and also have a good answer ready for when they ask you what you did in that timeframe ("studying to pass this interview" won't suffice).
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Aug 14, 2019 14:41
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awesomeolion posted:Edit: are there coworkers of yours who seem to be doing well or who you admire? How is their approach different than yours? Anything you could learn there? Even if your boss sucks you can still analyze and emulate positive attributes of your strongest coworkers. Well interesting you bring that up, apparently even the co-workers that I view as most competent seemed to have some less than exciting reviews too. Phraggah fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Aug 16, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 09:00
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My current job is not a developer job yet, but the people favored at my work are the suck ups, the yes men, and the good ole boys who spend their Fridays getting blackout drunk with the owners and poo poo talking millennials. Try one of those.
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Aug 15, 2019 13:19
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Also try talking about - The state of your lawn - The state of your lawnmower - The last time you mowed your lawn - The next time you plan on mowing your lawn This conversation should happen 3-5 times a week
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Aug 15, 2019 13:28
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RC Cola posted:My current job is not a developer job yet, but the people favored at my work are the suck ups, the yes men, and the good ole boys who spend their Fridays getting blackout drunk with the owners and poo poo talking millennials. Try one of those. Sounds like it's time to 
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Aug 15, 2019 13:46
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rt4 posted:Sounds like it's time to I am looking for a new job. Unfortunately Denver is very saturated. Yesterday I asked for non slip, cut resistant, water resistant gloves and got a talking to from the GM about my attitude.
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Aug 15, 2019 15:03
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Pie Colony posted:Taking time off work _just_ to study is a bad idea, in more than just a financial sense. If it's not a job you care about, definitely study on the job. That being said, I took 9 months off to travel, studied for an hour a day for a couple of those, and now have a FAANG job making those sweet sweet figgies. So it's definitely possible. My advice for you is that it's going to be more than just whiteboarding/algos, so do more than just Leetcode (e.g. do design problems, take practice interviews), and also have a good answer ready for when they ask you what you did in that timeframe ("studying to pass this interview" won't suffice). Thank you for your thoughts! #sweetfiggies
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Aug 15, 2019 16:06
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RC Cola posted:I am looking for a new job. Unfortunately Denver is very saturated. Guillotines.txt thread is thataway
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Aug 15, 2019 16:55
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Is it stupid to consider retraining at 40? I've been working as a mechanical engineer for more than 10 years, despite not actually having a masters or anything. It pays really well and I enjoy it, but only because I've managed to work on products I've found interesting or felt good about. So like medical devices, recycling technology, high end telepresence equipment. And there aren't many of those jobs that get advertised and the competition to get them is incredible. I kind of made the mistake in the past of not pushing myself past my role so a lot of the senior specialised positions are not really things I have the experience to get in the door on. There are lots of jobs in oil but I've always avoided those and still want to avoid those. But there are a lot of software development jobs, and I have tons of high end project experience. But I don't really know what I want to do, I don't really know what is possible. And in order to do this fast I feel like I need to be razor sharp in my focus. So I guess I'm looking for suggestions for what I might like to do so I can research, I have an industrial design background as well and it's come in handy in mechanical engineering so I guess something that draws from that too would be smart.
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Aug 21, 2019 12:39
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It would not be a mistake. You may face a bit of age discrimination but it’s totally possible. I’ve got a buddy older than you who went to the same boot camp as me and is now an extremely successful software engineer. You will be valuable because you have a ton of skills many junior devs lack - project management, communications skills, etc.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:46
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lookslikerain posted:Is it stupid to consider retraining at 40? I just finished making the transition from a mechanical engineering background to software from 25 to 29 and I'd say I'm just settling. It sucks being a junior developer at 28. If I were you, I'd start learning programming as a way to compliment your mechanical experience. Perhaps start looking at electromechanical stuff, robotics, etc.. Product/project management could also be a good match for your skill set.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:47
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huhu posted:It sucks being a junior developer at 28. Can you elaborate on this? I'm 31 and degreeless in digital marketing, and I'm thinking about going back to school for a CS degree and then retraining as well. If it sucks, I'd like to know why.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:50
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34-year-old starting an internship in three months, reporting in.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:54
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This is encouraging. For some reason I never even thought of mechatronics/robotics, not having a specific qualification hasn't stopped me so far so that's a good idea and I'll look into it. Maybe because of the developer friends I have the thoughts I have are like UX Design and web stuff, it's good to get feedback which is not that. If I get back into another mechanical development role I'll definitely be pushing for more project management stuff.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:09
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Perhaps age had nothing to do with it - I decided to transition to software and started teaching myself. I applied to no exaggeration several hundred jobs. Moved through 3 poo poo jobs in about two years. Got laid off from one, feared layoff from another so I left, and ended up at a toxic company where I (luckily) got let go. Getting my foot in the foot initially was extremely hard. However after I got let go, I finally had enough experience to be competitive. At one point I had to stop applying for jobs because I was getting too many interview requests. I've been at my current company for over a year now. For shits and giggles I saw a posting for a Google position, applied and actually got as far as the second round. Transitioning can be a long lovely ride. But drat, my pay, perks, and rewards are all amazing and I'm probably in a much better position than if I'd stuck it out in mechanical engineering.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:11
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Rude Mechanical posted:34-year-old starting an internship in three months, reporting in. 38 and finishing a CS degree to pivot into a new field after my military retirement.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:24
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I want to mention that all your years of experience in other fields will still count. They speak to your professionalism, your trustworthiness, and your ability to get stuff done. It all still belongs on the resume.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:34
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