Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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MickeyFinn: May 8, 2007; Biggie Smalls and Junior Mafia some mark ass bitches

Acer Pilot posted:

i just took some online assessment from amazon and ran out of time doing the 2nd coding question. was pretty close but i probably made a mistake somewhere in there that made the test cases fail. it was followed by some sort of personality quiz afterwards.

i asked for a manual review of my answer to q2 but i don't know what'll come out of that, i was pretty confident i was close. hopefully can still make it through to the onsite but ugh. did a whole bunch of leetcode but these seemed to be "new" questions, thankfully they followed the same type of pattern that leetcode/hackerrank had though.

Don't these normally have a hard pass/fail line and either you get above it (and maybe the detail matter after that) or you don't? I would be surprised if they care about any of the details below a certain "score."

# ? Jan 15, 2019 07:20

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 15:31

Uhh Nope: May 20, 2016

Acer Pilot posted:

i just took some online assessment from amazon and ran out of time doing the 2nd coding question. was pretty close but i probably made a mistake somewhere in there that made the test cases fail. it was followed by some sort of personality quiz afterwards.

i asked for a manual review of my answer to q2 but i don't know what'll come out of that, i was pretty confident i was close. hopefully can still make it through to the onsite but ugh. did a whole bunch of leetcode but these seemed to be "new" questions, thankfully they followed the same type of pattern that leetcode/hackerrank had though.

I did the same exact thing back in November and mentioned it to my recruiter and he said it looks like I was "good to go forward to either a code review or a follow-up phone screening". Granted, my application process started off with a referral from an employee so YMMV.

What happened next is unfortunately why I came here to post...

11/27 - I took the assessment. Got told by the recruiter what the next step was, as I explained above.
11/30 - Haven't heard back from recruiter still, so I sent them an email asking if they had any updates.
12/4 - STILL hadn't heard back from recruiter, so I sent them an another polite email asking if they had any updates. I get a response the same day along the lines of "It's a busy time of the year and they're planning headcounts for next year". Okay, perfectly reasonable explanation to me!
12/7 - Recruiter emails me, asks me if I was married to the location of the original job I applied for, I said no not really, the recruiter then brings up a couple of suggestions for positions which unfortunately aren't the same position as the one I applied for, but that's fine with me, I tell them I'd be glad to hear what they have for me.
12/10 - No response since last time, which was weird because we were having a very rapid back and forth on 12/7 and they just kind of dropped off. So I send a follow-up email with some open positions I gathered on their job site that I would be interested in, to maybe help the process along.
12/14 - I'm at a loss for what to do at this point, I really want this opportunity so I don't want to let it go by, but I don't want to pester the recruiter either! So I emailed my only other contact at Amazon, my referral, and they very graciously track down the recruiter for me to try to find out what's going on. They hear back from the recruiter that, "Lots of positions have opened and closed very quickly, so they're having trouble finding a spot for you". Okay so it's still a work-in-progress, I would have really appreciated the recruiter tell me this themselves when I emailed them last...
1/8/2019 - Still no reply BUT I get that it's holiday season and they might have been on vacation for the last half of the month, so no sweat. I send another email hoping they had a nice holiday season and politely expressed that I'm still very much interested in hearing about those opportunities.

My last email I sent was a week ago and I still haven't heard back. They COULD have still be on holiday vacation up until the end of last week and are just trying to get through all their backlog of work, totally understandable.

But I'm still anxious about the situation, I don't want to be forgotten about and I don't want to come off like I don't want the job by not actively trying to move it along... Any advice?

# ? Jan 15, 2019 18:58

Che Delilas: Nov 23, 2009; FREE TIBET WEED

Uhh Nope posted:

But I'm still anxious about the situation, I don't want to be forgotten about and I don't want to come off like I don't want the job by not actively trying to move it along... Any advice?

First, I'd keep following up (I'd say about once a week) until they respond. They're not going to disqualify you for being eager as long as you aren't bringing down their mail servers.

Second, try to relax. I'm not sure about Amazon, but they're a huge company and Google for example is infamous for its months-long process and it would not surprise me in the least if Amazon, or at least some of its teams, had trouble maintaining hiring momentum sometimes. As you mentioned, the holidays do also complicate everything. Just keep chasing it up with those emails and wait for them to get through whatever they're dealing with and get to you, until and unless they tell you to knock it off.

Lastly, and I think most importantly: don't stake your whole future on this. Job hunting is a numbers game, and never more so than when you're new in the industry. Apply to other companies, of all types and sizes, and get more interview practice and maybe even an offer that will surprise you with how much it appeals to you. Amazon aint going anywhere any time soon, so if it's your dream company there's nothing wrong with trying again after you've worked elsewhere.

# ? Jan 15, 2019 19:40

Uhh Nope: May 20, 2016

Che Delilas posted:

First, I'd keep following up (I'd say about once a week) until they respond. They're not going to disqualify you for being eager as long as you aren't bringing down their mail servers.

Second, try to relax. I'm not sure about Amazon, but they're a huge company and Google for example is infamous for its months-long process and it would not surprise me in the least if Amazon, or at least some of its teams, had trouble maintaining hiring momentum sometimes. As you mentioned, the holidays do also complicate everything. Just keep chasing it up with those emails and wait for them to get through whatever they're dealing with and get to you, until and unless they tell you to knock it off.

Lastly, and I think most importantly: don't stake your whole future on this. Job hunting is a numbers game, and never more so than when you're new in the industry. Apply to other companies, of all types and sizes, and get more interview practice and maybe even an offer that will surprise you with how much it appeals to you. Amazon aint going anywhere any time soon, so if it's your dream company there's nothing wrong with trying again after you've worked elsewhere.

Thank you, this really made me feel better.

I think I'm especially hung up on this because studying for these code tests while still working a full-time software engineering job is HARD and to find out I passed the bar on this one meant I already got past the hardest part for me.

# ? Jan 15, 2019 20:54

Acer Pilot: Feb 17, 2007; put the 'the' in therapist

The recruiter I got seems pretty good, I think a lot of it is luck of the draw tbh. He emailed me last night and said he�d ask a dev to look at it in the morning. Thankfully, it seems like the dev who ended up reviewing my answers was cool with them. The recruiter emailed me this morning looking to setup the phone screen.

Anyway, I feel your pain. I had a terrible experience with some recruiters from Microsoft last time I tried out there. The guy I was working with ended up quitting right before he could arrange my travel to Redmond. His replacement took weeks to tell me that they�d filled the role already. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Just keep applying to places until you�ve signed your next offer. Worst case, just try again in a few months. Nothing to lose.

Should also check the amazon.jobs site if you applied through there. They update the status pretty quick it seems.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 06:37

Moto42: Jul 14, 2006

Alright. So I took y'all advice, and started modifying my site to not look horrible. hopefully.
So far the process has been "Try to do it from scratch, something is wrong, still looks bad, fight with css for a while, restart" until I just went out, found a bare-bones css framework to work with and now it's actualy doing things that I want...
May still look like butt.

So, the front-page is... about one step above a wireframe.

What do y'all think so far. (also, should I move this to another thread?)
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Moto42/Moto42.github.io/Spectre-rebuild/index.html
That link only works for chrome, firefox won't run half the css for some reason. I'd just merge it to the master build, but I want this branch to actually improve something before doing that.

There are three headers for comparison, the first is just 'unstyled' and the other two are ripoffs from a couple news-sites.

is this any improvement? Is the scrolling still horrible?

The actionable items I have have for the front-page so far, based on y'all's advice and my own goals...

Front Page
☑ Content should be centered
☑ Should have a navigation bar at the top
☑ navigation bar should resize/adapt to screen-size, not to that wierd thing..
☑ White Background
☑ content and layout scale/adapt to screen size.
☑?Contact form scales to screen size.
☑ Content should not 'stretch forever' as veiwport widens
☐ choose either image or color for herobanner.
☐ find images for the three cards.
☐ images in tiles should not appear squashed/stretched.
☐ images should be sized something close to their display size

Moto42 fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Jan 16, 2019

# ? Jan 16, 2019 08:46

Gildiss: Aug 24, 2010; Grimey Drawer

Moto42 posted:

Alright. So I took y'all advice, and started modifying my site to not look horrible. hopefully.
So far the process has been "Try to do it from scratch, something is wrong, still looks bad, fight with css for a while, restart" until I just went out, found a bare-bones css framework to work with and now it's actualy doing things that I want...
May still look like butt.

So, the front-page is... about one step above a wireframe.

What do y'all think so far. (also, should I move this to another thread?)
[url]https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Moto42/Moto42.github.io/Spectre-rebuild/index.html[/url]
That link only works for chrome, firefox won't run half the css for some reason. I'd just merge it to the master build, but I want this branch to actually improve something before doing that.

There are three headers for comparison, the first is just 'unstyled' and the other two are ripoffs from a couple news-sites.

is this any improvement? Is the scrolling still horrible?

The actionable items I have have for the front-page so far, based on y'all's advice and my own goals...

Front Page
☑ Content should be centered
☑ Should have a navigation bar at the top
☑ navigation bar should resize/adapt to screen-size, not to that wierd thing..
☑ White Background
☑ content and layout scale/adapt to screen size.
☑?Contact form scales to screen size.
☑ Content should not 'stretch forever' as veiwport widens
☐ choose either image or color for herobanner.
☐ find images for the three cards.
☐ images in tiles should not appear squashed/stretched.
☐ images should be sized something close to their display size

With this many issues making a basic profile page do you still feel comfortable listing yourself as "Full stack"?

# ? Jan 16, 2019 10:15

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Gildiss posted:

With this many issues making a basic profile page do you still feel comfortable listing yourself as "Full stack"?

He should. Definitely. As I said, there's no place for modesty in the resume. Just because you believe that "full stack" means that he has the artistic eye of Picasso doesn't make it true.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 14:44

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

Volguus posted:

He should. Definitely. As I said, there's no place for modesty in the resume. Just because you believe that "full stack" means that he has the artistic eye of Picasso doesn't make it true.

That's why I use bootstrap for everything. It looks decent (if generic) and can be tweaked as necessary.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 15:41

Uhh Nope: May 20, 2016

Acer Pilot posted:

Should also check the amazon.jobs site if you applied through there. They update the status pretty quick it seems.

Unfortunately I did not, the referral kicked off my application process so I wouldn't know where to look.

May I ask what division or team you applied to?

EDIT: I signed in to my amazon.jobs account some positions have appeared under my profile actually, and are listed as "Under Review" -- well at least I'm in the system!

Uhh Nope fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jan 16, 2019

# ? Jan 16, 2019 15:46

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

xpost the doomsday economics thread in cspam

Dumb Lowtax posted:

Check this whole thread... shaking my head so much here

Heard that it happened to me when applying at Disney animation. Crazy to hear so many stories of confirmation in the comments that yes, this does happen. What kind of sociopaths can sit there and interview someone with a straight face knowing that it's fake, who then has to go on wondering for months if they'll get the job (and not making useful alternate plans in the meantime). Much less take someone house shopping nearby like in one of the stories.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 16:26

huhu: Feb 24, 2006

moto42, a tip - don't show WIP stuff to people, unless you're ready to explain all the things in your head of "Oh I'm getting there" Get to some working state you'd like to get feedback on then go from there. I used to demo stuff like you're doing right now. Every bit of feedback I'd get, I'd respond with "Yeah... I'm getting there." Which wasn't helpful feedback. When seeking feedback, at least early on as you're learning web dev, make sure your todo list is generally done before seeking it.

(That was somewhat difficult to explain, let me know if it makes sense)

For example, you've got "Resume, Projects, Contact" listed like 4 times on your page. I'm guessing you're in the middle of redoing the navigation but that's all I can focus on right now.

On a serious note, you need to figure out why your site takes so long to load. It's painfully slow and if I was checking out your page I would have assumed it was broken and closed out of the tab before it loaded.

huhu fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Jan 16, 2019

# ? Jan 16, 2019 16:29

Slimy Hog: Apr 22, 2008

New Yorp New Yorp posted:

That's why I use bootstrap for everything. It looks decent (if generic) and can be tweaked as necessary.

This. I don't claim to be a UI designer and am not looking for a job that requires me to do a bunch of css/design stuff, so I use what's already out there and build upon it as needed.

huhu posted:

moto42, a tip - don't show WIP stuff to people, unless you're ready to explain all the things in your head of "Oh I'm getting there" Get to some working state you'd like to get feedback on then go from there. I used to demo stuff like you're doing right now. Every bit of feedback I'd get, I'd respond with "Yeah... I'm getting there." Which wasn't helpful feedback. When seeking feedback, at least early on as you're learning web dev, make sure your todo list is generally done before seeking it.

(That was somewhat difficult to explain, let me know if it makes sense)

For example, you've got "Resume, Projects, Contact" listed like 4 times on your page. I'm guessing you're in the middle of redoing the navigation but that's all I can focus on right now.

On a serious note, you need to figure out why your site takes so long to load. It's painfully slow and if I was checking out your page I would have assumed it was broken and closed out of the tab before it loaded.

I also agree with everything that huhu says here; get your site to a point where you'd be okay showing it to a prospective employer and we can give feedback that you may have missed.

The way it is now, we're all going to be saying the same things: multiple headers, your images don't work, your page is painfully slow etc.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 19:43

ddiddles: Oct 21, 2008; Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm a schizophrenic and so am I

I'm not sure you should market yourself as full stack if you can't create your own portfolio site from scratch without frameworks. Knowing how to make something thats pleasing to look at is a huge part of front end development.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 20:36

luchadornado: Oct 7, 2004; A boombox is not a toy!

ddiddles posted:

I'm not sure you should market yourself as full stack if you can't create your own portfolio site from scratch without frameworks. Knowing how to make something thats pleasing to look at is a huge part of front end development.

Not re-inventing the wheel and choosing a framework is a huge part of being a front end dev. There's a difference between being unable to write everything from scratch and not doing so because its a colossal waste of time.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 20:43

ddiddles: Oct 21, 2008; Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm a schizophrenic and so am I

Helicity posted:

Not re-inventing the wheel and choosing a framework is a huge part of being a front end dev. There's a difference between being unable to write everything from scratch and not doing so because its a colossal waste of time.

In the real world, for sure, no reason to recreate anything thats written and tested 1000x better than you'd be able to bust out. I was more referring to moto42, who was unable to create his portfolio site on his own, and jumped to a framework.

I dunno, is that expected now? I wouldn't hire an FE dev that couldnt recreate most of what boostrap/material design/etc offers at a decent level at the very least.

Not trying to be a dick, just think they'd have better luck marketing themselves as a backend dev.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 20:49

Harriet Carker: Jun 2, 2009

ddiddles posted:

I'm not sure you should market yourself as full stack if you can't create your own portfolio site from scratch without frameworks. Knowing how to make something thats pleasing to look at is a huge part of front end development.

I agree with this mostly, but disagree that frontend devs need to know how how to make something look pleasing - that�s a designer�s job. Frontend needs to know how to take a pixel spec and implement it. To that end, I�d recommend the OP of this issue take an existing, good design and mostly steal it.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 20:51

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

ddiddles posted:

In the real world, for sure, no reason to recreate anything thats written and tested 1000x better than you'd be able to bust out. I was more referring to moto42, who was unable to create his portfolio site on his own, and jumped to a framework.

I dunno, is that expected now? I wouldn't hire an FE dev that couldnt recreate most of what boostrap/material design/etc offers at a decent level at the very least.

Not trying to be a dick, just think they'd have better luck marketing themselves as a backend dev.

Recreate what and in how much time? To make all the bootstrap components would take quite some time. To make the grid ? Well, now you have CSS grid so you're basically there. To make it degrade nicely on older and shittier browsers , that's another good chunk of work.
All of it completely unnecessary. It's front end. And it doesn't matter. It has to look good and behave. Follow what the designer gave you. The actual work of the application and where poo poo does matter (data handling, security, etc.) is in the backend.

# ? Jan 16, 2019 21:49

ModeSix: Mar 14, 2009

Moto42 posted:

Alright. So I took y'all advice, and started modifying my site to not look horrible. hopefully.
So far the process has been "Try to do it from scratch, something is wrong, still looks bad, fight with css for a while, restart" until I just went out, found a bare-bones css framework to work with and now it's actualy doing things that I want...
May still look like butt.

Not to dogpile on you on top of the other issues that people have mentioned with your site, but on your github projects, you really need to learn how to properly utilize the .gitignore file because there's absolutely no reason you should ever be uploading your node_modules directory to github.

Ideally your basic .gitignore should look something like this:

code:

# dependencies
/node_modules

# testing
/coverage

# production
/build

# misc
.DS_Store
.env
.env.local
.env.development.local
.env.test.local
.env.production.local

npm-debug.log*
yarn-debug.log*
yarn-error.log*

ModeSix fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jan 17, 2019

# ? Jan 17, 2019 02:06

luchadornado: Oct 7, 2004; A boombox is not a toy!

Never check in anything that the code doesn't need. Credentials are the ultimate sin, but your dependencies, like node_modules in this case, are an absolute no-no because of how large they are. Take your very minimum amount of code, create a build/package/whatever, and do a git status to see what new files and folders were added and dig into them. You should know why your builds are creating things.

https://www.gitignore.io/ seems pretty cool, and I'm sure there are other sites like that. They can help get you on the right path.

edit: that's not a good commit message either. Give this a read: https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/

luchadornado fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Jan 17, 2019

# ? Jan 17, 2019 02:46

sterster: Jun 19, 2006; nothing; Fun Shoe

Had my 2nd interview and the director of engineering asserted his dominance. Asked me his 1st question and as I started to answer, he typed word for word what I was saying while not breaking eye contact or blinking. It was so fast and he maintained such strict eye contact it caused me to break my train of thought and he stopped typing. Super weird. Also he asked me to rate my Java skills 0-10. Thought about pushing back based on the recent discussion and how our scales wouldn't be the same. I just answered with a 5 :/ .

# ? Jan 17, 2019 03:27

huhu: Feb 24, 2006

sterster posted:

:/

Would you like to have him as a boss? No? Red flag dodged. (If you answered yes, what is wrong with you?)

# ? Jan 17, 2019 05:33

CPColin: Sep 9, 2003; Big ol' smile.

Don't kinkshame. Some people just like to subordinate!

# ? Jan 17, 2019 06:09

Gallatin: Sep 20, 2004

huhu posted:

Would you like to have him as a boss? No? Red flag dodged. (If you answered yes, what is wrong with you?)

100% agree - if he is that way in an interview with people he doesn't know imagine how he treats subordinates.

# ? Jan 17, 2019 06:58

sterster: Jun 19, 2006; nothing; Fun Shoe

To be fair, the rest of the interview was more relaxed and he did not continue the behavior. I think he was just really intent on listening but he was just holding himself that way.

# ? Jan 17, 2019 07:08

Gallatin: Sep 20, 2004

sterster posted:

To be fair, the rest of the interview was more relaxed and he did not continue the behavior. I think he was just really intent on listening but he was just holding himself that way.

That's good to hear, either way good luck.

# ? Jan 17, 2019 07:50

MickeyFinn: May 8, 2007; Biggie Smalls and Junior Mafia some mark ass bitches

huhu posted:

Would you like to have him as a boss? No? Red flag dodged. (If you answered yes, what is wrong with you?)

This is not a luxury some of us have.

MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Jan 17, 2019

# ? Jan 17, 2019 08:41

Joda: Apr 24, 2010; When I'm off, I just like to really let go and have fun, y'know?; Fun Shoe

Yeah, not every weird interview is some master manipulator poo poo. Some people are just bad at people, or inexperienced

# ? Jan 17, 2019 09:14

Private Speech: Mar 30, 2011; I HAVE EVEN MORE WORTHLESS BEANIE BABIES IN MY COLLECTION THAN I HAVE WORTHLESS POSTS IN THE BEANIE BABY THREAD YET I STILL HAVE THE TEMERITY TO CRITICIZE OTHERS' COLLECTIONS

IF YOU SEE ME TALKING ABOUT BEANIE BABIES, PLEASE TELL ME TO

EAT. SHIT.

Joda posted:

Yeah, not every weird interview is some master manipulator poo poo. Some people are just bad at people, or inexperienced

Bad at people managers are bad managers though

Seeing as it's (supposed to be) their job

# ? Jan 17, 2019 11:44

Gallatin: Sep 20, 2004

Joda posted:

Yeah, not every weird interview is some master manipulator poo poo. Some people are just bad at people, or inexperienced

The problem here seems to be this guy, if I remember correctly they made sterster come back for a 2nd interview with this guy only because he wasn't available during the 1st interview, contrary to the original plan. Hanlon's razor be damned, as a Director of Engineering he sounds like a piece of work

Private Speech posted:

Bad at people managers are bad managers though

Seeing as it's (supposed to be) their job

I 100% agree.

I meant what I said sterster, good luck. Hopefully this all turns out to be nothing and you get the offer you are looking for.

# ? Jan 17, 2019 16:48

sterster: Jun 19, 2006; nothing; Fun Shoe

They did want me to come back. More so because my would be direct manager wasn't available for the 1st interview. Director was added in on the 2nd interview. I'm chalking up what happened as Engineering awkwardness, my nerves. Again as mentioned everything went smoothly as the interview progressed and the behavior did not continue. Further more the direct manager was great and we seemed to hit it off and have a lot of the same view points on tech, progression path/growth etc. I'm still all in on this boys.

Also not sure that I want to apply to Amazon now they are finding dead babies in bathrooms at the tempe location I'd be working at.

# ? Jan 17, 2019 17:40

Keetron: Sep 26, 2008; Check out my enormous testicles in my TFLC log!

sterster posted:

Also not sure that I want to apply to Amazon now they are finding dead babies in bathrooms at the tempe location I'd be working at.

WTF?

# ? Jan 17, 2019 19:23

taqueso: Mar 8, 2004

https://www.azfamily.com/news/pd-ne...5e91223099.html

# ? Jan 17, 2019 19:29

Keetron: Sep 26, 2008; Check out my enormous testicles in my TFLC log!

holy poo poo.
So what is the deathcount on Bezos' billions by now?

# ? Jan 17, 2019 19:32

sterster: Jun 19, 2006; nothing; Fun Shoe

Got a call back from Carvana. I think they liked me. "[...] Carvana thinks you interviewed really well had thoughtful answers and wants to extend and offer in the upper bound of your requested compensation"

# ? Jan 19, 2019 04:19

Gallatin: Sep 20, 2004

That's great! Congratulations

# ? Jan 19, 2019 04:49

Keetron: Sep 26, 2008; Check out my enormous testicles in my TFLC log!

sterster posted:

Got a call back from Carvana. I think they liked me. "[...] Carvana thinks you interviewed really well had thoughtful answers and wants to extend and offer in the upper bound of your requested compensation"

That sounds good, grats!
Now to get an actual offer in hand, you know, chicks and hatching and so on.

# ? Jan 19, 2019 07:22

fantastic in plastic: Jun 15, 2007; The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

Congratulations!

# ? Jan 19, 2019 07:30

mmm11105: Apr 27, 2010

MickeyFinn posted:

You can't really do that ahead of time, but you can try exercises like reflecting on where you want to be in 10 years

I think part of the problem is at the moment I don't really know what that is. I've spent the last 5 years only thinking of the next 4 month period - getting through school terms and getting good and interesting internships. But now that I'm approaching the end of that I'm unsure what I want to be doing long term. This was compounded when I was in Japan - I liked it so much that it's making me reconsider my long term plans. I had previously thought I wanted to have a nice prestigious, highly technically involved job, with all the usual conveniences of tech companies (free lunch, a gym on site) and a nice cozy apartment with a nice kitchen to cook in. Yet somehow, despite lacking all of this, I was happier in Toyko than I have been in a long time.

MickeyFinn posted:

and whether you'd like being in Japan more than the money/future opportunities in New York or asking people who know you (not random goons) where they see you being happier*.

Asking people I know hasn't been very useful - people seem evenly split between not wanting to offer suggestions and having relatively strong opinions roughly evenly split in each direction. My more adventurous friends are telling me this is a rare chance to see the world, learn a new language, and gamble on a small risky firm while I have few obligations and ties holding me down, and if in a few years I wear out on it I can come back and find another job in the states - the tech market is strong, and Jane Street is known for being pretty open to people leaving and coming back at random points, so there's a good chance they'd still be willing to hire me in a year or two. My less adventurous friends, and those that are a little more ambitious and driven career-wise are saying I should take the NY job, settle down, and have the time to either make more aggressive career advancements or relax and get some more hobbies.

MickeyFinn posted:

Which choice has the best outcome if it is a total disaster?

This one is Jane Street by far - it's just a much more stable thing. However, I don't think the disaster case (excluding ultra-edge case stuff like natural disasters and the like) is that bad either way, I have the funds and connections that if I found myself hating it I could fairly easily find something back in North America and comfortably afford to move back. Disaster case for Japan is that in a year either I'm miserable and worn out there or the company in Japan folds, and I come back and get a job in North America, that may be a little worse at first and having given up a year of career advancement and some extra savings. It's not a good outcome, but not an unrecoverable one.

MickeyFinn posted:

If you're like me, you'll fail at most of these exercises, but what you cannot do is delude yourself in to thinking you can undo the decision, life usually doesn't work that way, although you might be able to recover from the consequences. I've said enough useless crap that sounds like its all bad, so let me finish with that you are really lucky to be in a position to make a choice, this is the kind of stuff that interesting lives are made of, go do the thing.

Yeah, I definitely feel a little guilty that I'm so distressed over this decision - people are (probably rightfully) a little unsympathetic to someone deciding between a stable 250k a year job and a jetting off to a foreign country and still making at least 150k/yr.

# ? Jan 19, 2019 20:48

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# ? Jun 10, 2024 15:31

Harriet Carker: Jun 2, 2009

Either one will be fine. They both have roughly equal pros and cons from the sound of it. Just pick one already!

# ? Jan 19, 2019 20:59

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Newbie Programming Interviews/Get a Job Megathread: Fake it 'til you make it

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