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How much of you spending all your time on this stuff is you taking a long time because you don't know it vs that is all the work to be done? Are the other people on your team and the wider org doing similar work breakdowns or are they doing the kind of work you want to be doing? If you are spending the time on the parts you are less experienced with it will get better. If you are getting the poo poo tasks nobody else wants you'll be stuck with that indefinitely. As a junior you don't get a lot of say on what sort of tasks you work on. Since you said Norway and I don't know what the labor law situation is there, if you have a probationary period keep your head mostly down through that and then agitate some for the kind of work you are interested in if it is around the org but not on your team. What about remote work?
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Jan 16, 2023 16:23
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Jan 16, 2023 17:33
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Doing stupid bug fixes and really minor stuff is exactly what the new guy gets handed. This is completely normal. Expect to do this for 18-24 months No offense but the job of senior developers is to take a project, design and see it to completion because they have the experience and track record to see it done. Junior's job is to keep the existing product running and sweep the runway so that the senior and principals can take off and fly on big project initiatives. Part of getting bug fixes and grunt work is that you need to learn the tooling, ci/cd, management/styles and just how the code is structured. It's always humbling to talk to a senior and they'll tell you how they'd do it, but then you go and do it a different (seemingly easier) way, only at the end to find out that their way leveraged a bunch of other existing code, and/or helped build on another project they wanted to work on in six months
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Jan 16, 2023 22:22
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Spending time doing maintenance and bug fixing will hone your instincts for good and bad code.
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Jan 17, 2023 00:36
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lifg posted:Spending time doing maintenance and bug fixing will hone your instincts for good and bad code. It's all bad
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Jan 17, 2023 01:05
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Yeah you'll learn very quickly how git blame works, both in the console and in GitHub. This will very rapidly teach you whose advice to listen to and more importantly not listen to We had one guy who was obsessed with layered templates. Nobody could (or would) work on his bonkers poo poo. He also didn't use linters or spell check  whenever I came across improbable or just bad code it was always his. He was super smart but his view of reality was about 15° offNew Yorp New Yorp posted:It's all bad This is not wrong Hadlock fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 01:14
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if it makes you feel any better i am a senior but just job hopped and am about 6 months in and so far i have just been doing minor fixes. i'm about to make my first big "this portion of the codebase is really loving bad and i want to fix it myself" talk next week. maybe try to find something you can take control of and make better. or just wait it out and keep fixing bugs. i'd say if you think you want to work on a project that will give you more responsibility, start applying for jobs in the 200 employee ballpark. maybe even less. from my experience, the dev teams tend to be small (depending on the industry).
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Jan 17, 2023 01:46
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Hadlock posted:He also didn't use linters or spell check 
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Jan 17, 2023 04:54
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Honestly, I like fixing bugs. Sometimes it takes a new set of eyes to look at something and be like "Why doesn't X work?" The only issue is that bugfixes don't always neatly fit into a story points / velocity mindset since sometimes they're simple and sometimes they are mindbendingly complicated.
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Jan 17, 2023 13:40
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Magnetic North posted:Honestly, I like fixing bugs. Sometimes it takes a new set of eyes to look at something and be like "Why doesn't X work?" The only issue is that bugfixes don't always neatly fit into a story points / velocity mindset since sometimes they're simple and sometimes they are mindbendingly complicated. this depends. I just left a project where to track issues in the ui, 4 separate microservices had to be running locally, with all their connectionstrings, injectable secrets etc configured just so. I was a junior tasked with understanding this and then adding feature work and it was a pretty great way to demonstrate my level of competency. Even tho I know the project very well, when it got transitioned to a lower velocity of feature work, I went with the senior to a new project. Seems like a normal way for a career to progress.
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Jan 19, 2023 01:56
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Thanks everyone for the feedback!Hadlock posted:Doing stupid bug fixes and really minor stuff is exactly what the new guy gets handed. This is completely normal. Expect to do this for 18-24 months The basic setup for the team is supporting a webapp with different modules for a bunch of different clients, and our 'job' is basically to add, modify and fix said modules as the client requests them. But most of the frontend is really simple proprietary tooling and using preexisting modules/scripts. Makes sense since having to write that stuff manually each time would be stupid of course, but it does mean not a lot of programming work on that side. Similarly a lot of the DB stuff is pregenerated through procedures and poo poo using their UI, and most of my actual SQL work so far has been small scripting work for my coworkers to find fields or what tables have been changed recently or stuff like that, as well as a few computed table columns. I've added tables and new frontend elements and the like to production-level code for clients already and it was mostly quite simple, although occasionally tedious and/or requiring some decent bug-hunting before getting the clear to production. I know of course that as the new guy there's a lot of stuff I'm not trusted to touch yet. But I also know a lot of what that work entails for my coworkers, and much of it is either A: client-facing work I definitely don't want to do (my main mentor so far spends so much time on Teams calls...) and B: directly deployment-related stuff WRT staging and project management/tracking issues and task completion, also hardly my favorite work. There's also some stuff with regards to DB management and new modules that is quite complicated and would be more my wheelhouse, but still not exactly what I was hoping for necessarily. There is one guy specifically who does some amount of backend programming in C#/.NET/C++ but the rest do very little or nothing, and that guy is fairly experienced so I dunno if I'll have a chance working with that stuff any time soon. That said I'm going to wait with deciding what to do going forward, as we're going to be pivoting somewhat to supporting an internal team in early Februrary apparently which hopefully might give me some more of that work to do. If not, I might take it up with the boss or my mentor and hear what they think my prospects are for that kind of work. Insurrectionist fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jan 19, 2023 |
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Jan 19, 2023 22:08
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You absolutely need to make it clear to your manager what you want out of the job. A good manager will work with you to help you achieve your career goals if it's possible in the current company at the current time, and if they're restructuring maybe this is your opportunity to grab some work in a domain closer to what you prefer.
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Jan 31, 2023 19:00
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hi i have a hopefully simple question. job-wise, is golang doing better than rust? i get a free learning stipend at work and i want to start investing in learning one, but i'm not sure which. i've read like a bunch of articles on pros/cons of both and it seems like there's not really a good answer on which one is better to pick up
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Feb 4, 2023 00:25
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teen phone cutie posted:hi i have a hopefully simple question. job-wise, is golang doing better than rust? i get a free learning stipend at work and i want to start investing in learning one, but i'm not sure which. i've read like a bunch of articles on pros/cons of both and it seems like there's not really a good answer on which one is better to pick up I'm not sure about the long term career prospects, but if I had time to learn 2 languages between those I would learn Rust twice. I think it depends a bit on what your current languages are and where you want your career to go though.
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Feb 4, 2023 00:36
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Rust is a stranger language, so I recommend that.
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Feb 4, 2023 00:53
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M. Night Skymall posted:I'm not sure about the long term career prospects, but if I had time to learn 2 languages between those I would learn Rust twice. I think it depends a bit on what your current languages are and where you want your career to go though. the only two that i'd say i have down really well are python and JavaScript, and i'd like my next language to be a static-typed general purpose language which is why i'm between those two. i'm not really looking to make any big career moves since i'm very happy coasting in my current front-end role, but i do want to have something else in my back pocket
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Feb 4, 2023 00:57
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Moving from Rust to Go will be a lot easier than going the other way.
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Feb 4, 2023 01:18
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Should you invest significant time into learning specific skills for a language sponsored by the reliable and long-term thinking company that brought you Reader, Picasa, Google Bookmarks, Stadia, Orkut, Google+, Play Music, and approximately nine thousand chat apps
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Feb 4, 2023 01:26
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teen phone cutie posted:hi i have a hopefully simple question. job-wise, is golang doing better than rust? i get a free learning stipend at work and i want to start investing in learning one, but i'm not sure which. i've read like a bunch of articles on pros/cons of both and it seems like there's not really a good answer on which one is better to pick up Confirm with your work before you spend the money to make sure they're fine reimbursing whatever. lovely workplaces (like where I work) will only approve poo poo they care about.
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Feb 4, 2023 09:20
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I just had to learn rust for a new project we’re starting at work. https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ should get you off the ground. I’d put money resources into something more useful for a resume or something.
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Feb 4, 2023 20:40
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rally posted:I’d put money resources into something more useful for a resume or something. Live your best enterprise life and learn java and spring boot
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Feb 5, 2023 17:57
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Smugworth posted:Live your best enterprise life and learn kotlin and spring boot Fixed
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Feb 6, 2023 15:50
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CPColin posted:Fixed You're not wrong, Kotlin is lovely
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Feb 6, 2023 17:55
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I've been debating on branching out and learning Java and Spring Boot myself. Seems not so bad overall, and my knowledge of C# seems to transfer over in a decent way. I've been in the world of developing API's and API consumers in React / whatever for the past few months and I'm so bored of it lol. What would be the logical "next step" for me if I wanted to advance my coding career? Start looking deeper into something like ASP.Net or the above mentioned Spring Boot? The few times i've actually got to develop something in nodeJS it's been a blast (well, besides JavaScript) so that's what got me thinking of looking at Kotlin and SB
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Feb 7, 2023 13:52
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If you want to learn backend, I guess you have two strategies. - If your company is using a technology on the backend, learn that. You’ll have lots of people to help. - If something that catches you eye and looks interesting, learn that. Your natural excitement will keep you going. (I don’t recommend learning a specific language just because you think it’ll help with a career: the best paying jobs tend to hire for programming ability and not “Java”. So may as well learn Kotlin or Rust.)
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Feb 7, 2023 16:39
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That makes sense, and I think I have most of those skills already. Guess I just wanted a excuse to learn something new, which I should just do!
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Feb 7, 2023 17:05
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I recall way back in either this thread or the general development thread, somebody had posted this amazing collection of all kinds of questions to ask during a developer interview from the perspective of a developer yourself. it contained some personal favourite questions like "what does a bad day at [company] look like?". does anyone know which site I mean?
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Feb 21, 2023 09:26
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Cynicus posted:I recall way back in either this thread or the general development thread, somebody had posted this amazing collection of all kinds of questions to ask during a developer interview from the perspective of a developer yourself. it contained some personal favourite questions like "what does a bad day at [company] look like?". does anyone know which site I mean? there's a green copy of them here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3845966
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Feb 21, 2023 19:18
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thanks so much!
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Feb 21, 2023 20:33
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I did my undergrad in biology and was planning to go into bioinformatics (for a period I thought this was much more of a hybrid field between biology and comp sci than it is in practice). I have since decided that academia is not where I want to be and have started doing the programming courses from my local university's computer engineering program to build more practical skills. I've really enjoyed the courses I'm doing and a few more computational projects I managed to do during my biology undergrad with Python and R and can tell abandoning academia is the way to go. Eventually I would like to leverage my bio degree and go into more of a data science field but I am enjoying learning the fundamentals and making my way there slowly. I'm 26 if that's in any way pertinent to any advice I might receive. My current job is fine, but not at all related to IT and I'd like to start building up a resume while I continue my education. I want to get an entry level job in IT as soon as possible in literally any area. It seems like webdev is an accessible field for people with little experience, but most of my classes have used C++ and I have no experience in Javascript, React, etc. I'm in LatAm so I'm not expecting very specific advice, generally I'd just like to know: what is the minimum level of knowledge to be able to competently execute the kind of tasks I could expect to encounter in a basic entry-level webdev job? What should I be doing alongside my basic university programming courses? Googling this kind of thing turns up advice like "do projects and build a portfolio" but I'm not even sure where to begin with that.
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Mar 7, 2023 22:35
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Can you talk a bit more about why you don't want to go into bioinformatics and what you're expecting from a career in data science? There may be some expectation management in order here.
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Mar 7, 2023 23:10
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I enjoy the data side of science, and working with and interpreting that data. Like I mentioned, my favorite parts of my biology degree were projects in Python and R, albeit that was just data analysis and some very basic machine learning linear regression stuff. I've just reached the conclusion that academia itself is a trap I have no interest in. I know that pure bioinformatics shouldn't imply wetlab but I'm under the impression that a lot of positions imply some amount of laboratory work and I don't think I would enjoy it on a day to day basis. Honestly, I just realized that I really enjoyed programming from my limited exposure to it and the work/life balance seems a lot better than it does in science for the most part, and I've been enjoying my coursework pretty enthusiastically. I haven't discarded the idea of pursuing an MSc in Bioinformatics though as opposed to, for example, completing the computer engineering degree I've done a little over a year of, but I would want to go into "industry" with it and I'm not sure what that would look like as opposed to data science.
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Mar 7, 2023 23:59
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Tosk posted:I'm in LatAm so I'm not expecting very specific advice, generally I'd just like to know: what is the minimum level of knowledge to be able to competently execute the kind of tasks I could expect to encounter in a basic entry-level webdev job? What should I be doing alongside my basic university programming courses? Googling this kind of thing turns up advice like "do projects and build a portfolio" but I'm not even sure where to begin with that. Do projects and build a portfolio. "What do I need to know to do a entry-level job" is a very difficult question to answer, and usually there's some kind of ramp up as part of a job. Whats important is some kind of familiarity with the frameworks a company uses and the best way to demonstrate that is having a portfolio using those tools and frameworks. It doesn't need to be anything ground breaking. A game, a web-based media player, a pointless "Ticket taking system" that will never be used, all these are fine. You just need something someone can look at and say "Yes, this person can write code and deploy a thing and it makes sense". No one is going to hire you intending to productize your portfolio, they just want to see proof you can do what your resume says you can do. There are entry-level C++ jobs though. Learning Java isn't a gigantic hill to climb usually if you know C++ and maybe have more jobs. Python is also used all over the place, you can definitely look at those as well and would probably fit a lot better with your long term goals. Front-end stuff is usually better/easier to grasp if your starting from nothing, but your not starting from nothing. Also for data in general going through some Mongo/Hadoop/etc certs can be very helpful, and depending where you are in LatAm they may be very low cost/free from the university. Getting some AWS/Azure/GCP training doesn't hurt either. Finally, if you're in Costa Rica hit me up, we're hiring there right now and while I don't think you're quite a fit today I can maybe give you some specific pointers if you want something to target (not neccessarily saying you should put work into trying to get hired by us, but I can show you specific jobs and what it would entail to give a more specific target for the kind of job that can lead to a data role).
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Mar 10, 2023 18:23
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I'm mid-30s and I've just started my bachelors of Computer Science. My goal is basically to be a wfh computer toucher earning 6 figs, my question is basically whether I should invest 3 years into a Computer Science degree with all the costs involved (loans in Australia are only paid back once you're earning over a certain amount) but the time is obviously very valuable, or should I do a bootcamp and start applying for jobs right away. Would a CS degree open doors for me that experience wouldn't at say, 5 years into the bootcamp pathway vs the 3+2 of the CS path? I don't have a degree already. Is there a cap on income without a CS degree? I've asked this in the careers thread, and it was suggested I ask in yospos but I couldn't find an appropriate thread.
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Mar 18, 2023 13:13
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Flea Bargain posted:I'm mid-30s and I've just started my bachelors of Computer Science. My goal is basically to be a wfh computer toucher earning 6 figs, my question is basically whether I should invest 3 years into a Computer Science degree with all the costs involved (loans in Australia are only paid back once you're earning over a certain amount) but the time is obviously very valuable, or should I do a bootcamp and start applying for jobs right away. Would a CS degree open doors for me that experience wouldn't at say, 5 years into the bootcamp pathway vs the 3+2 of the CS path? I don't have a degree already. Is there a cap on income without a CS degree? I've asked this in the careers thread, and it was suggested I ask in yospos but I couldn't find an appropriate thread. I did something similar to what you're planning, in that I returned to college in my early 30s and got a degree and a job. For what it's worth, I am in the US. I can't say if a bootcamp would be better or not, but I can say that there was a lot of "fluff" in a computer science degree that just doesn't matter for a regular computer toucher job. A few of the only things I learned that were important were:
Objectively it was a pretty big waste of time. It was also very hard to be around a bunch of board young people who didn't want to be there while I was desperately trying to learn Calculus while paying to be there and not being quite as spry anymore. It is the hardest I have ever worked in my entire life. Then again, for me the result was positive. I got the piece of paper that told someone else that I had value, and in turn they give me other smaller green pieces of paper that tell everyone else I have value. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Do you already have a degree in something else, or is this your first time? For me, I had a previous degree and went to the same institution which let me do it much faster than the normal full 3-4 years by having the GenEds like Foreign Languages already taken care of. (Not sure if there is a Roo equivalent.) Think of it like this: [your expected cost + the lost income from being a student] / your expected pay = your years before this becomes positive. For instance, if you make 25K/year, take 3 years and spend 40k, you will need to make 115K to get out of that hole. But if you start making 65K - 85K to start, that will still work out over the course of the years, particularly as it grows. (I don't know what the starting salary is in Upside-Downllars, just Freedom Bux sorry.) The one fact of the matter is it is hard to imagine that, so long as you succeed in getting a degree and a job, it will almost certainly pay off in the long run. The greater threat depends on your personal commitment and other things like living situation, savings etc as to whether you can make it work at all. This is what makes bootcamps seem like an appealing alternative but I have heard bad things about the quality of the candidates coming out of them. Sure, it's much less cash outlay to start, but that first job might be harder to find. Even if you find a good camp, some employers might have a stigma or just require a college degree anyway. From my experience hiring, I've had bad candidates with degrees and with bootcamps, so I can't really say more than that. If you do choose bootcamps, there is no denying it will be harder and you will need every advantage. You will certainly need a portfolio of projects on Github to show employers that you can actually code. Now, everyone should have one, but FWIW I managed to get by without it for my first jobs, and I coast on experience now. That was only possible because I have a degree and could answer standard CS interview questions well. Another thing to keep in mind: there were just a zillion layoffs, so the market is cooler than is has been in a while. Will this last? I dunno, but it does mean that the disadvantage of waiting 3 years may be less compared to the benefit of going for a few months, if things remain cool. Of course, the longer you wait the more disruptions like pandemics or AI might change things as well, so it's a toss up. Whatever you choose, remember: there is so much more quality help on YouTube than there was in even my time less than a decade ago. When I was doing it, it was one guy named Bucky who taught me how to Java. Nowadays, there are many many good channels that teach this stuff completely for free. Blessed by Tim Corey. You should certainly leverage that as well. Hell, if you have a question, even years from now, feel free to PM me and I will help if I can. Maybe someone else with more bootcamp experience can help put more color onto this question.
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Mar 18, 2023 14:13
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Flea Bargain posted:I'm mid-30s and I've just started my bachelors of Computer Science. My goal is basically to be a wfh computer toucher earning 6 figs, my question is basically whether I should invest 3 years into a Computer Science degree with all the costs involved (loans in Australia are only paid back once you're earning over a certain amount) but the time is obviously very valuable, or should I do a bootcamp and start applying for jobs right away. Would a CS degree open doors for me that experience wouldn't at say, 5 years into the bootcamp pathway vs the 3+2 of the CS path? I don't have a degree already. Is there a cap on income without a CS degree? I've asked this in the careers thread, and it was suggested I ask in yospos but I couldn't find an appropriate thread. Can you find anything in between? I have a friend who's going through a two year program right now, I think it awards a diploma or a certificate at that end. The program is at a college (here in Canada what Americans call college we call university and then colleges are where you go to learn more applied skills.) I've been tutoring my friend a fair bit to help him keep up with the material and overall it does seem like a good program. They're moving fast but they're covering lots of relevant technologies. They started with HTML and CSS, then programming basics in Javascript, then vanilla JS for DOM manipulation, then JS on the server with Node. Now they're getting into databases, front-end frameworks, object-oriented programming. I think next year they do some native app development with Swift and Java. There's been a couple of decisions I don't agree with, for example teaching MongoDB instead of a relational database system, but overall the curriculum seems really relevant and he'll be done after 2 years having laid out way less tuition than what a full degree would cost. I don't have a CS degree and I haven't yet found it limiting in terms of jobs but I also haven't tried to work at the kind of places that might require it. I also started working in the industry when I was 19 or 20 freelancing for $20/hr so I have a lot of experience. I also do have some gaps in my knowledge when it comes to lower level things like data structures and algorithms, but I think that's something I can make up for with self-study if I ever want to land the kind of job that involves that type of coding interview.
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Mar 18, 2023 15:19
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Flea Bargain posted:I'm mid-30s and I've just started my bachelors of Computer Science. My goal is basically to be a wfh computer toucher earning 6 figs, my question is basically whether I should invest 3 years into a Computer Science degree with all the costs involved (loans in Australia are only paid back once you're earning over a certain amount) but the time is obviously very valuable, or should I do a bootcamp and start applying for jobs right away. Would a CS degree open doors for me that experience wouldn't at say, 5 years into the bootcamp pathway vs the 3+2 of the CS path? I don't have a degree already. Is there a cap on income without a CS degree? I've asked this in the careers thread, and it was suggested I ask in yospos but I couldn't find an appropriate thread. I can’t speak to the CS university side, but my bootcamp was over in 6 months (which was the part time program) and the last month was focused specifically on showing us off to recruiters, hammering out applications, interview prep etc. imo that’s the real value of a bootcamp, and if they are just focused on skill building I’d pass on them. I do know my BA liberal arts degree didn’t force me into do anything like that and I was an idiot 20 something who probably blew off any career help the program did offer. I’m on job 2 and year 3 post-bootcamp, and just broke 6 figures in a not particularly tech savvy midwest America town. The recruiters from both jobs didn’t mention anything about my BA degree, and then the interviews were absolutely more technical/feeling out the personality vibes. Again my opinion, but it really feels like doing whatever it takes to trick a company into hiring you, and then performing above average for the first 6 months. After that all that really matters is how you can communicate what you know, at the level you know it. meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 16:04
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Right now might be an incredibly difficult time to land a job as a bootcamp grad. I graduated from a bootcamp in 2016 and it wasn’t easy to find a job then. At the moment, hiring is even slower and you’ll be competing with thousands of laid off folks with experience. At the end of the day though, I am a proponent of bootcamps and you’ll get out of it exactly what you put into it. Prepare to utilize all your tenacity.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:16
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I regularly use concepts I learned from calculus, probability, and stats. And had to use knowledge of grammars directly last week. I use knowledge gained in studying operating systems and CPU design daily. Not all jobs are CRUD webapps. And they don't require a PhD, and aren't all at FAANG. If you go through a bootcamp, you should spend the time to get the theoretical underpinnings of the field. University is the most straightforward way to do that, but it's also extremely expensive in time and money. Self study can get you there as well, and is a more efficient and expedient path which is important for people coming in later.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:29
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Having a degree matters. It's not as big a factor in the computer touching space as it is elsewhere, but it's a bigger factor than a lot of people here will tell you it is. If you can get a job partway through and finish up part time that's probably better than taking a few years off work, but you're probably going to be better off doing it than not.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:37
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