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hendersa posted:Back in December, this happened: Bringing up ancient history, but I fell in a hole while reading this. You said you interviewed for an embedded role at Google, was that to work on Android or do they have other embedded stuff going on? I'm an old senior embedded guy myself, but I tend to be more bare metal or FreeRTOS, not Linux, and when I poke around for stuff at Google it looks like mainly FitBit work, and I just imagine myself falling asleep at a job like that.
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Jul 23, 2022 19:24
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StumblyWumbly posted:Bringing up ancient history, but I fell in a hole while reading this. You said you interviewed for an embedded role at Google, was that to work on Android or do they have other embedded stuff going on? From what I dug out of my Google interviewers, some of the projects to check out were Android-related (phones, automotive, kiosks, tablets), consumer products that Google has acquired (like FitBit), AR/VR, and "lots of cool internal R&D efforts that run for a quarter or two to see if they'll be worth it". I asked my recruiter for more specifics, and she couldn't tell me squat about specific projects other than "Android". She asked me to give her a debrief after all of my interviews so that I could give her some details on whatever projects my interviewers mentioned to me (since they were supposedly all embedded software engineers of some sort). It was an odd experience to me, since Google won't talk specifics on the opportunities available until you can prove that you fit their statistically-significant template of a good candidate via the interview gauntlet. Embedded is a big ball of niches, and someone who is writing Linux kernel drivers is going to interview way different than someone doing bare metal on micros. When Google interviews candidates, they do a generic "embedded" interview sequence. You don't interview for a specific job, per se... you interview for the embedded domain. If you pass these more generic interviews, you get to interview with specific teams that are interested in your background to find a good fit. You might have an idea of a specific area/product that you'd like to work on, but you have to go through the generic interview gauntlet first. You're really going in blind. StumblyWumbly posted:I'm an old senior embedded guy myself, but I tend to be more bare metal or FreeRTOS, not Linux, and when I poke around for stuff at Google it looks like mainly FitBit work, and I just imagine myself falling asleep at a job like that. I did some FreeRTOS work on Atmel SAM E70 MCUs at my last job. Bootloader work, application development, flash planning/layout, and tons of finding/eliminating performance hotspots with Percepio Tracealyzer.  Anyway, as far as interviewing with Google on embedded jobs... I don't recommend it and don't have plans to do so again in the future: hendersa posted:The call was... interesting. She wanted to know why I'd bail out of the interview process when I was so far along, and I told her that the offer I was accepting had a hiring process where I talked to the members of a team, was interviewed on knowledge related to the role, and had a quick (approximately one week) turnaround for a decision. The "embedded systems design" interview NVIDIA gave me was actually on, get this, embedded systems design. The one Google gave me was on OS trivia with a coding problem unrelated to embedded systems. I told her that I didn't feel like I was a number during the process with NVIDIA and that there weren't any puzzles or games. She assured me that Google treats their employees very well and not at all "like a number." I told her that I did not doubt that was true, but I wasn't an employee. I was an applicant. And, the hiring committee didn't feel that this particular applicant fit their statistically-significant template of a successful employee.
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Jul 23, 2022 21:37
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Thanks, that sounds really unfortunate. I can deal with a dumb hiring process if there's something good at the end, but it just doesn't sound like that's the case. And thanks for pointing me at Percepio. I'm getting more into the more advanced debug tools and that looks like an interesting one.
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Jul 24, 2022 00:53
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hendersa posted:Then, once I was accepted, I could find a team that really liked me who would argue on my behalf to get me bumped up to L5. I don't think I've ever heard of this happening. Ever. Afaik, you ain't getting hired at a level that the interviewers didn't assess you at. If they didn't have people around to assess you at L5 or higher, then I don't see how your manager could help with that after you've already passed the interview stage and started talking with teams. However, I think they switched to having teams interviewing for their own potential team members, so maybe it's possible nowadays that you could have done something after talking to a manager? Idk, whole process is even more confusing now. I bet it should be an easier process for juniors who lack specialization, as it seems designed to maximize number of commodities (junior/mid level devs) acquired for the lowest price, but idk about seniors who have domain expertise.
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Jul 24, 2022 17:09
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Anyone ever gone from Software Developer to Software Developer in Test? I have a choice between that and taking on ScrumMaster responsibilities in addition to bug and feature work. Wondering about those career paths.
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Jul 25, 2022 15:21
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I've seen this a bit in hardware and heard a bit of it in software. When you have a separate test role between development and testing, it creates a convenient wall to throw things over. Development can then max an excuse to produce garbage and just assume test will catch it. Meanwhile, they've organizationally severed themselves from test so the test people don't even get any information they could use to test effectively. This doesn't even get into any issues of prestige and mobility once you wind up in a test role.
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Jul 25, 2022 15:45
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Gahmah posted:Anyone ever gone from Software Developer to Software Developer in Test? I have a choice between that and taking on ScrumMaster responsibilities in addition to bug and feature work. Wondering about those career paths. You'll end up writing lovely selenium tests and being blamed for every bug. Don't do it. It's a demotion
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Jul 25, 2022 15:54
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:You'll end up writing lovely selenium tests and being blamed for every bug. Don't do it. It's a demotion This The only way you'd take that position is if you were in QA and looking at moving up into a developer position some day If they're offering that to you as a developer, might be a sign to start looking for the door
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Jul 25, 2022 16:14
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Hadlock posted:This "they want me to either do more non dev work or move to a SDT role" sounds a lot like "they think I suck, but not enough to fire, and want to limit the damage I can do"
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Jul 25, 2022 16:58
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:"they want me to either do more non dev work or move to a SDT role" sounds a lot like "they think I suck, but not enough to fire, and want to limit the damage I can do" It was also a career path for a lot of women programmers due to sexism. I can’t prove this, but I’ve known a lot of women QA over the years with high-end educational backgrounds who said they couldn’t find work as a developer.
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Jul 25, 2022 17:21
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I remember a meeting where I suggested that we developers needed to share more responsibility for writing test code and the QA Manager flipped out because it sounded like I was implying that the QA people were writing lovely code (they were). What I was really trying to point out was that we were doing Agilefall as the Creative person wrote some HTML, a developer wrote code that produced that HTML, and a tester wrote Selenium tests to validate it. We weren't collaborating on anything. Anyway, they fired me a couple weeks later.
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Jul 25, 2022 17:32
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There are organizations that take testing seriously and if you're with one of them it could be a good career move. If not, be very cautious.
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Jul 25, 2022 17:34
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nthing that SDT role is a huge demotion from a SDE role and is basically career suicide if you want to continue being a SDE. I can't really think of any good reason to do this unless it came with a very large increase of responsibility. If you are being moved into a lead role, whether people or technical, it might be OK. I'll echo CPColin in that the SDTs I knew from Microsoft were generally mediocre developers, they could write OK code but had terrible design skills. Usually bad or no abstractions in code so just spaghetti all over the place. It would work but would be very brittle and the SDTs couldn't refactor the code into something better. EDIT: This could be a PIP without calling it a PIP. MAYBE take the ScrumMaster but most places don't want to a SDE doing that kind of herding cats because SDEs are expensive. It usually falls onto the business side to do that work.
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Jul 25, 2022 18:00
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Gahmah posted:Anyone ever gone from Software Developer to Software Developer in Test? I have a choice between that and taking on ScrumMaster responsibilities in addition to bug and feature work. Wondering about those career paths. It's time to start interviewing for a new SDE job
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Jul 25, 2022 18:11
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ultrafilter posted:There are organizations that take testing seriously and if you're with one of them it could be a good career move. If not, be very cautious. gariig posted:nthing that SDT role is a huge demotion from a SDE role and is basically career suicide if you want to continue being a SDE. I can't really think of any good reason to do this unless it came with a very large increase of responsibility. If you are being moved into a lead role, whether people or technical, it might be OK. Yeah these are some of my concerns, I'd be the dev overseeing all the tests getting submitted into the project and designing the framework going forward as the previous guy moved to the arhitecture team. Largely I think I'm being recommended for it because I submitted the most tests to the project out of anyone on the team and corroborated with the previous SDT on on building utility classes in it. The Scrummaster stuff is up for grabs because management wants to pull the ScrumMasters from the dev teams, and most of the dev team are uh, reluctant communicators. I know the cat herding is necessary, and did some of this ans the last old dev at my previous job. Mainly wondering if these certs/training on the resume would be at all worthwhile, or just biceps crimes posted:start interviewing for a new SDE job edit: I mean really I should be anyways because webforms is poo poo Gahmah fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 25, 2022 18:59
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Be careful that they're not conflating ScrumMaster with Project Manager. The ScrumMaster is supposed to serve the Agile process; running meetings efficiently, cat herding team members to get them to collaborate together, etc. But if the backlog is not in good form, it can sometimes fall to the ScrumMaster to serve as Product Owner or Project Manager in order to get it clean, and that's an entirely different skillset and job description.
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Jul 25, 2022 19:15
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SDT and scrum master are roughly level, and equally easy to make the business decision later that they don't need those new positions Definitely update your LinkedIn and resume
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Jul 25, 2022 19:26
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Gahmah posted:Mainly wondering if these certs/training on the resume would be at all worthwhile, or just For a SDE? About useless to me if I was doing a resume screen at work. It's more useful if you are coming in as a people manager, Product Owner, or Project Manager. Like minato said I'd be careful you aren't actually getting moved into one of those roles unofficially. Unless you get a REAL fancy title out of this I'd say it's a poo poo job and it's time to find a different pasture. Being chosen because you submitted the most tests is very lovely reason. Should make you a janitor for cleaning up the one time you spilled coffee on the floor in the kitchen.
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Jul 25, 2022 21:38
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Doing the main scrum cert can be useful to know the “official” training to pull out sometimes when people are completely misunderstanding or misrepresenting it. I’ve found more and more non technical people in larger orgs are “doing agile” now and having the background in the “offical” terminology if you need to steer them is helpful.
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Jul 26, 2022 09:13
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I think the scrum master stuff at least has the potential to get you onto more of a lead track, as long as it's not just Jira busy work. I would definitely choose that one of the two.
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Jul 26, 2022 11:36
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The SDETs where I work end up leaving for amazing platform engineer jobs and the ones who started their career at the same time as me (went to school with a few people who interned / started at the same place ) are all making 50% more than I am in platform roles now. Could go either way I guess.
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Jul 26, 2022 13:26
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In places I worked that had Seats, they were also technically supposed to oversee test writing and framework implementation. In practice, only SDTs wrote tests. They were also supposed to have an equal level track to SDEs, but this definitely wasn't the case in practice. The SDT track topped out at Senior with no eligibility to move to a leadership role of any kind. They weren't eligible to jump to the management track even on paper.
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Jul 26, 2022 13:47
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rally posted:The SDETs where I work end up leaving for amazing platform engineer jobs and the ones who started their career at the same time as me (went to school with a few people who interned / started at the same place ) are all making 50% more than I am in platform roles now. Could go either way I guess. I have to point out here that they aren't pulling that in while remaining as SDETs.
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Jul 26, 2022 20:31
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I have to point out here that they aren't pulling that in while remaining as SDETs. True, it just exposed them to building automation and deployment systems and gave them marketable experience over “maintains an old lovely Apache module written in C” which is where I’m regrettably at.
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Jul 26, 2022 20:53
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Gahmah posted:edit: I mean really I should be anyways because webforms is poo poo This is a little old, but this alone should be reason to leave. Webforms is incredibly outdated garbage to the point I was surprised it's even supported at all anymore. I hope you're using C# at least and not vb.net or even worse one of the esoteric dead languages like J#. I was curious and I was in fact able to find jobs looking for J# in TYOOL 2022, which blows my mind.
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Jul 27, 2022 01:09
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wilderthanmild posted:This is a little old, but this alone should be reason to leave. Webforms is incredibly outdated garbage to the point I was surprised it's even supported at all anymore. I hope you're using C# at least and not vb.net or even worse one of the esoteric dead languages like J#. The code is old enough to have graduated college. Yes, thankfully it's in C#. The resume refresh really opened my eyes to the fact I've been here for 2 years and have gained nothing from it. Already got a call to follow up on.
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Jul 27, 2022 13:46
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Here's an intentionally (?) naive take, but uh https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/technology/meta-facebook-vr-ftc.html ( https://archive.ph/2022.07.27-175452/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/technology/meta-facebook-vr-ftc.html ) R.I.P. startup valuations that depend on acquisition as an exit target/goal This won't apply to every start up, but is definitely going to have some chilling effect on smaller startups hoping to be acquired by a FAANG, and probably shrink the VC funnel for a lot of startups that didn't want to/plan for becoming a sustainable profitable long term independent company Won't impact business models that have a clear road to IPO but seems like could be a watershed moment for tech industry particularly start ups nyt/slashdot commentary (yes I still read slashdot) posted:The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, limiting the company's push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. From a report: The antitrust lawsuit is the first to be filed under Lina Khan, the commission's chair and a leading progressive critic of corporate concentration, against one of the tech giants. Ms. Khan has argued that regulators must stop violations of competition and consumer protection laws when it comes to the bleeding edge of technology, including virtual and augmented reality, and not just in areas of business where companies have already become behemoths. "Meta could have chosen to try to compete," the F.T.C. said in its lawsuit. "Instead, it chose to buy" a top company in what the government called a 'vitally important' category.
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Jul 27, 2022 20:10
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I have a full stack systems design interview next week and I think I'm in way over my head. Anyone have some links to good resources for this?
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Jul 29, 2022 17:07
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Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems That's not specifically geared towards interview prep but it's the best serious overview of the relevant topics in a single volume.
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Jul 29, 2022 17:12
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DDIA is one of the books I consider a must-read, but could be a brutal book to try to cram in one week. OP might benefit from other options in the short term (I don't have any but am curious to see what others recommend).
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Jul 29, 2022 17:20
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luchadornado posted:DDIA is one of the books I consider a must-read, but could be a brutal book to try to cram in one week. OP might benefit from other options in the short term (I don't have any but am curious to see what others recommend). You can read the summary of each chapter to get an idea of key concepts. I found watching architecture interview videos on youtube useful to get an idea of how to practically approach them. Also do some practice ones in excalidraw and brainstorm any possible questions/concerns and how you'd address them. Like talk out loud and tackle some practice questions like design uber or google docs or whatever. Good luck!
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Jul 29, 2022 19:53
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If you have a few years of experience then a lot of DDIA will probably be familiar. Still gonna need some discipline to get through it in a week if you're working full time, and you might not finish if your work leaves you without much mental energy for other stuff, but that applies to any interview prep. Someone else can chime in on whether the 9th chapter on linearizability is likely to come up in a system design interview, that's the only chapter that would be really difficult to understand for someone whose work already exposed to them to most stuff in the book imo. If it's not likely to come up then I might be tempted to skim or even skip it during a 1-week interview prep. Is there anything else you think that time would be better spent on? If there's no higher priority interview prep then it's worth the time just from the standpoint of being valuable information presented in a really useful format. Does anyone know of any good writing on CSS principles? I suspect this isn't really possible but I want to stop doing trial and error when I update a stylesheet and guessing about whether this or that container might be doing something weird with some margin or position or whatever. I got stuck a day trying to figure out wtf the was wrong with some style this week and my TL said it was probably because some display property wasn't quite right. He wasn't exactly right but digging into that did lead quickly to a fix and I want to be able to look at a problem and immediately guess at what might be related, because if I continue to be completely clueless like this it's gonna be a big time suck whenever I have to update a style.
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Jul 29, 2022 19:57
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oliveoil posted:Does anyone know of any good writing on CSS principles? I suspect this isn't really possible but I want to stop doing trial and error when I update a stylesheet and guessing about whether this or that container might be doing something weird with some margin or position or whatever. I got stuck a day trying to figure out wtf the was wrong with some style this week and my TL said it was probably because some display property wasn't quite right. He wasn't exactly right but digging into that did lead quickly to a fix and I want to be able to look at a problem and immediately guess at what might be related, because if I continue to be completely clueless like this it's gonna be a big time suck whenever I have to update a style. There's no really agreed upon correct way to author CSS. I personally lean towards systems that basically eliminate the cascade as much as possible (Tailwind has been my preferred system for about 3 years, before that styled-components, and before that BEM). Other people think this is an affront to god and that the cascade is life. Adam Wathan had a good article about utility-first CSS a few years ago. Reading about BEM or OOCSS or SMACSS might give you some other perspectives on how people like to author their CSS in ways that keep things predictable.
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Jul 29, 2022 20:44
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I run a book club that just wrapped up DDIA and people thought it was too dense to cover in a month fwiw. From a system design perspective, skimming all the summaries wouldn't be a bad idea, and chapters 5-9 (Distributed Data) would probably be the ones I'd focus on (glossing over the parts when Kleppmann gets in the weeds). Chapter 9 (Consistency and Consensus) was probably the most challenging chapter to get through, but I would personally pull from this chapter a lot in an interview, especially if we did streaming with Kafka or similar. The other chapters are about how to distribute a system - this chapter is about how to build a distributed system well. Unrelated to DDIA, I really like Microsoft's section on architectural patterns. They keep it at a very high level and enumerate the tradeoffs well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/
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Jul 29, 2022 21:08
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My team's going through an exercise to identify the requirements for the various roles we have. How do y'all understand the difference between a backend engineer and a data engineer?
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Aug 1, 2022 15:44
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My gut reaction is that a data engineer is going to be primarily working with databases, data warehouses, and the languages used there. Basically primarily structuring data, moving it between places, etc. A backend engineer on the other hand would primarily still be working in a language like Java, Go, C#, etc with a fair amount of database work mixed in as well. Basically working on things like scheduled jobs, integrations with external systems, integrations with internal systems, serverless fun stuff, creating and maintaining services, etc.
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Aug 1, 2022 16:08
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Data engineer figures out how to structure and store your data, while the backend engineer figures out how to talk to those systems and package data for consumption by the front end.
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Aug 1, 2022 16:17
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data engineers figure out the schema and storage details. backend writes the business logic that queries the data. front end writes the business logic that queries the backend. a lot of places don't have data engineers and just have the backend folks (or occasionally sre/sysadmins) figure out the schema as they go
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Aug 1, 2022 16:24
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What's the difference between a senior DBA and data engineer then
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Aug 1, 2022 16:33
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Hadlock posted:What's the difference between a senior DBA and data engineer then DBA tunes and manages a database specifically, while data engineer will also work with the data itself.
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