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JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...
It's sorta common, in my experience, for startups to think they've got HOT loving poo poo coming through, oh my god you've never seen code like this.

Oblivious to the fact that market timing is going to make or break 90% of them before any human decision tipped their fate, they obsess over made up problems instead.

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Plorkyeran
Mar 22, 2007

To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed
A startup thinking that they need people to sign an NDA before looking at their code or that the NDA would ever do something useful is definitely a sign that they're somewhat delusional, but startup founders being somewhat delusional is also sort of normal.

Lockback
Sep 3, 2006

All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.
My guess is you'll be looking at architecture if it's a senior role, which is slightly more understandable for an NDA. Still probably wildly unnecessary but if I'm generous they maybe trying to prevent you from spilling how ugly things actually are behind the curtains.

StumblyWumbly
Sep 12, 2007

Batmanticore!
I declined the NDA and the interview is still on. I think they wanted me to check out some code built by a consultant, and they don't have the background to know what is key and what is standard.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Arguably the startup asking you to sign an NDA is a sign the startup might be someday successful. If the founders are that jealously protective of their tech, they might be focused enough to get the company someday profitable

Random: many moons ago I signed some NDA not for their primary product but apparently they ran one of those free/low cost VPN products (think NordVPN - I forget which one but it wasn't that one) and then monitored traffic for connections known to be API end points for mobile apps and then resold that data. They're still in business but I'm sure DNS over HTTPS is gonna ruin their business model

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
I wore a suit-jacket (blazer?) to a technical interview, I feel like I made an impression as it seemed like I got a lot of peoples attention when I entered their office, but was it a good impression?

So far I think in retrospect the worst thing I probably did was my tendency to ramble when nervous, as I feel like I probably end up saying things that ultimately are counter productive to coming across as proficient in the skills for the position I'm interviewing for, I dunno yet what the result is but I suppose I'll try to practice and write down some more concise answers for some of the questions I've answered. So far I've taken a sort of casual approach of not really practicing for the interviews as I'm not really in a rush but some of these jobs (looking for game development positions) do look really nice and professionally satisfying and would be nice to get the job offer for even if my unemployment benefits last a whole year and if I budget carefully can probably make that work to focus on indie gamedev.

Questions I tended to get asked IIRC:
- Tell me more about your technical accomplishments/roles.
- A bit of a curve ball but I got asked about some more specific Unreal frameworks we didn't use at my past job so my answer was "no, it never came up".
- What's an example of something like a Character you've implemented, i.e ai, state machines, etc.
- Would you change how you approached the above?
- Any experience implementing multiplayer?
- What sort of gamedev do you see yourself as, do you like to push the envelop of technology/performance, or do you prefer implementing gameplay features?
- Any questions for us? (I usually ask what a typical day is like, how are issues handed out, I should ask next time what sort of training they offer for personal growth?)

kneelbeforezog
Nov 13, 2019

teen phone cutie posted:

code academy is usually when I start when trying out a new language. it's low effort and hands-on enough to make you actually feel like you're getting something out of it:

https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/language/sql

I got roped into paying them 40 bucks a month for a few . How is it for .net stuff? I have a pluralsight subscription for my work but got roped into the interactiveness of codeacademy, but found the course structure not really easy to access. as in i could never pick up easily where I left off

teen phone cutie
Jun 18, 2012

last year i rewrote something awful from scratch because i hate myself

kneelbeforezog posted:

I got roped into paying them 40 bucks a month for a few . How is it for .net stuff? I have a pluralsight subscription for my work but got roped into the interactiveness of codeacademy, but found the course structure not really easy to access. as in i could never pick up easily where I left off

no idea, but I also have seen varying levels of quality from pluralsight as well, so I wouldn't say one is better than the other as a blanket rule.

Magnetic North
Dec 15, 2008

Beware the Forest's Mushrooms
My experience with Codecademy has been mixed. It's great that it's interactive, but some of the questions will not accept answers that are actually correct and there are essay style questions that don't actually check poo poo. If you've got it, try it.

Pluralsight is probably more consistently quality, based on the 8-ish courses I've done there. I don't think any have an interactive component, though.

Love Stole the Day
Nov 4, 2012
Please give me free quality professional advice so I can be a baby about it and insult you
Today, I accepted an offer for an L5 role in figgieland with a TC above 500k (after annualizing the RSUs) at a large engineering organization you've definitely heard of.

Exactly six years ago today, on April 17 2018, I posted the following itt while laying in the bed of a shoebox hostel room of a poor neighborhood of Osaka, which I later redacted because of getting flamed by some people itt who perceived my monthly updates as whining and which was how I got the red text attached to my forum name because I dared to push back on what I can now refer to in hindsight as terrible advice. I was told that maybe this tech stuff just isn't for me.

Love Stole the Day posted:

8 yrs after getting my math degree in 2010, the most I've ever made is 17k and have only been employed for a total of 7 months. I knew how to do fizzbuzz 15 years ago. Graduated a year early, had a 3.25gpa, was president of two clubs, played for the soccer team, was on the putnam team, worked 2 part time student jobs, spoke a bunch of languages. More than 200 applications since I started tracking the data last year. No one cares.

I've gone from being a new graduate at the height of the recession competing for jobs against recently laid off career folk with far more experience than me to being an unemployable amateur with no professional experience competing against the people that geeves complains about in his posts itt for entry level jobs.

The last job offer I ever got was 6 years ago and the company shut down one month after I started for lack of money. The job before that lasted 5 months before they went under as well. The job before that was $4/hr and I slept in the Greyhound bus terminals in Baton Rouge and Houston to get the work visa and fly halfway across the world for because I was homeless after my family disintegrated because I couldn't find a job.

Now I'm in a youth hostel in Osaka on my umpteenth visa run to return to the only person in the world who cares, who also went through similar circumstances in the recession, and who works a lovely desk job hoping that I'll eventually find a living wage somewhere back home to support the both of us.

A few days after I posted the message quoted above, a poster itt began trying to give advice. After a few months of watching his advice not have any effect, he finally threw up his hands and explained via PM that he's actually a hiring manager in the US, and wants to see for himself what's going on here. He gave me a link to apply to a job opening he had just made, and several years later he wrote in a recommendation letter that within 4 minutes he knew he had to have me.

That poster itt used his hiring budget to pay for me to fly halfway across the world. A couple months later, he told me in a 1:1 that I "knocked the cover off the baseball" by taking ownership of a project that no one else in the engineering org had cared to touch, which later became one of the biggest the wins of the entire year. That win enticed another big company you've definitely heard of to poach me and then promote me again after a year... and which now, a few years later, is rinse-repeat'ing again with this new job!

According to the IRS statistics, I will be in the top 1% of personal income earners in the USA with this new job. As long as nothing stupid happens, and if I'm careful not to burn out or wash out somehow, I will be able to more than make up for spending all my twenties as a traumatized, borderline homeless person and may even end up get to that FI/RE amount of savings before 45.

Thank you to [forum redacted because I don't know if he'd be okay with the forum name drop but will edit this if he says it's okay] for giving me the chance that I needed.

Thank you also to forum poster Shirec for her empathy: incidentally, she ended up in one of my sister teams at this same large engineering organization. Two years ago, Shirec and I somehow wound up in a meeting together, by chance, and noticed each other. It was the first time we had seen each others' faces. We smiled.

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


I love hearing goon success stories, sucks that your first post got that kind of reaction but you sure showed those nerds.

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ThePopeOfFun
Feb 15, 2010

Love hearing a feel good story. Congratulations!

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