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2banks1swap.avi posted:When do you move past junior level and into the mid level, exactly? The olds have their own thread, so what about people still getting established, but who don't need their hands held? What's the criteria? What makes or breaks it? It's not any one thing, but what would those things be? Considering that no two companies define "junior" the same way I don't think you can expect a coherent globally relevant answer to this. One of your questions in an interview for a position that is specifically designated "junior" should be "How do your junior level engineers advance in their position?" or "What specific qualities do you look for as a junior developer advances to a more senior role?" or something to that effect. Even if the position doesn't have "junior" in the title it could be a good thing to ask about method of advancement or career tracks during the interview process.
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Feb 24, 2014 04:24
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seiken posted:I've no idea how a candidate would get my contact details to send me a thank you note, which is good because it would be weird and off putting. It's very difficult to do that and come across as genuine. The only time I've ever received "Thank you" emails from candidates they've been forwarded to me by the HR person the candidate has been interfacing with during the interview process. It's rare to get one though - maybe one in twenty or one in thirty send one. Usually it's intern candidates that do it. When it does happen the contents are usually a simple "Thanks for your time, I was glad to talk to you about <<specific from the interview to show they were paying attention>>, I hope to hear from you soon." Occasionally if the candidate didn't do that well on a problem given during the interview they add something to the effect of "I thought about it some on the way home and I should have done X." Word to the wise though: if you do this, please make sure X is an actual solution to the problem and not worse than the solution given during the interview 
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Mar 14, 2014 15:28
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No Safe Word posted:Yeah, there's no reason for you to have to bring your own laptop unless you want to demo something you've built or something. The only person I know who brought a laptop to his interview did it because he wanted to demo something...and then whipped out code from his current employer's closed-source NDA-protected codebase. That didn't go down very well.
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May 19, 2014 03:19
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Skuto posted:The point that I was trying to get to is that "not doing any programming on your spare time" carries an implication that your interests are limited to the stuff you already know and work on. I've used it as a sign when hiring and the arguments so far don't really show it's wrong, IMHO. The only implication in "not doing any programming on your spare time" is that no programming is being done in that person's spare time. It says nothing at all about interest.
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Apr 3, 2015 21:25
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Skandranon posted:Be careful with titles like "Analyst", a lot of companies use them for "does bitch work". You should what kind of work you will be doing, and probe them on it. I would guess 99% fixing bugs no one else wants to on software that no one else knows/cares about. When I worked for a state university's statistics department as a developer my title was "Programmer / Analyst 2" or something like that because that was the title they had on the Government List Of Titles. It certainly wasn't 99% bugfixing / bitch work. I'd guess a county office in Texas is probably using the same basic rules of title creation. Definitely probe them about specifics though, that's always good advice.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:42
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Skandranon posted:Obviously this depends on the company/industry. Well yeah, which is why I shared my experience with the industry (if you can call public sector an 'industry') Spiritus Nox was talking about.
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Jul 21, 2015 13:41
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JawKnee posted:wait, like not even 'find the largest palindrome in this string' but just, 'is this string a palindrome'? I use this on R&D intern candidates. It's actually a pretty good sieve because it can have multiple answers that are strictly correct but less efficient than other answers, plus it's a quick one to alter requirements on without altering the basic idea too much. "input.reverse() == input ... okay, that fits the problem definition, but I'm going to use this on gigantic strings and memory usage is important. Can you do it in place?" "for (int i = 0; i < input.size(); i++) ... can you do this without iterating over the entire input?" - if the candidate generates this first then it's a sure bet that they're going to freak out over whether size / 2 will handle odd-lengthed inputs correctly. Now it's time to talk about test cases. "Your project manager says your newest customer disagrees that Anna is a palindrome. How would you let the caller decide?" - please do not write a second isCaseSensitivePalindrome and totally reimplement the first function but with a different character compare.
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Jul 30, 2015 14:26
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Siliziumleben posted:I'll just put both. "US citizen - can legally live and work in the US." Just don't put "Proud White US Citizen" on your resume in a red-white-and-blue block next to your name. Seriously.
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Sep 14, 2015 19:22
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Siliziumleben posted:Should I show up dressed like this for the interview? I never got to find out because this guy didn't get past the phone interview stage, which we had to conduct twice because he slept through the first appointment. We asked HR not to schedule a phone interview at all because we weren't going to hire anyway based on his resume but that got us an accusation of "reverse racism." That was an awesome conversation.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:15
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D-Tron posted:Haha figures I would be over thinking this poo poo. I won't stress about it to much but I am looking for any advantage I can get The founder's as much a human being as you are. I'm sure you like being asked about and bragging about the things you've accomplished and you know that they've helped to found at least one company. How about asking what it's been like and where he/she wants to take the company in the future? Basically just don't be a total socially inept goon and you'll be fine
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Oct 29, 2015 18:19
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I have an interview tomorrow afternoon. It's a junior level Java and SQL position. I'm working through the Java questions I know (interface/abstract class, stack/queue, array/arraylist) but I'm not sure what I should know about SQL. I'm going to Google SQL interview questions, but does anyone here have suggestions? Same question for Java. I know more about Java, but with the local university's curriculum, so will my competition. For me it would probably depend on whether or not the role would be expected to design schema or just query it but in roughly decreasing order of "I care whether a junior person knows this immediately":
This is also assuming relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle. There are difference between them all but I wouldn't expect a junior position to know the weird little differences between the syntaxes and interpretations of ANSI SQL unless the applicant specifically claimed that on the resume. edit: I accidentally said "increasing order" originally, I meant decreasing. Might be helpful to know about ORDER BY statements too 
csammis fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 21:19
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The March Hare posted:Third normal form is, in my experience, what people mean when they say normalized. Yeah, same here. If you get asked about normalization in a junior SQL dev interview they're almost certainly talking about 3NF or just "no obvious redundancies" - not denormal. I wouldn't consider the formal normal form definitions a fair question for an interview that wasn't specifically for RDBMS schema design.
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Nov 13, 2015 04:02
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Simplicity of implementation and ability to flex the specification is exactly the point of asking the palindrome question. Personally I start with a simple definition of a palindrome and if the applicant gets it right, then I ask how to extend their solution for more complicated cases like case insensitivity and punctuation. The biggest thing to remember for any "implement this" question: clarify the inputs and expected outputs with the asker. It's expected of you to do this.
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Nov 13, 2015 22:49
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Every domain I've been in uses Perl / Bash / batch / whatever to glue together the industry-specific heavy lifters. Maybe that's why?
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Dec 14, 2015 15:26
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Xun posted:I've feel like I've hosed myself over, I'm in the spring semester of junior year and have a 3.1 GPA and not that many projects due to brain poo poo. I COULD get an internship with my dad at an (apparently?) pretty important tech company but that's gross. Do you guys think that's my best shot? You made anything outside of school. If you put those (at least the working ones) on your resume it would put you ahead of 90% of the new-grad resumes I've ever seen. Is the idea of the internship gross because you don't want to work with your dad or that you think the internship would be worth less because it's with your dad? Because you put "Internship, Summer 2016" on the resume not "Internship I Got From My Dad, Summer 2016". Many jobs are received because of networking with the people you know, including family, and if you're legitimately qualified for the internship and learn from it then no prospective employer should care if your foot-in-the-door came from your parents or not. Have you tried using your university's resources to help you find an internship in your area?
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Jan 26, 2016 16:58
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Xun posted:Yeah I've been to the fall career fair, sent out a bunch of resumes and got no callbacks. Maybe I was aiming too high or my resume is just bad If you want feedback on your resume you can post it here. quote:Working with my dad is gross is kind of about the whole nepotism thing, but also that'd I'd be stuck in China for the summer. Would tech companies in the U.S. even care? It is well regarded internationally in it's field (3D printing). Of course companies here will care. Why wouldn't they? No one is going to say "Hm, Xun worked at PrinterBotX to make their printer's software more usable and delivered the project on time and was well reviewed by his peers on the team...but he was in China at the time so gently caress him." The entire idea of internships is to get a shallow experience in the field in general to get used to the idea of working as part of a team on actual deliverables. The company doesn't have to be "well regarded" or even physically in the US as long as what you're learning and doing is applicable to Real Life Work. Just don't spend the internship fetching drinks for employees instead of learning job skills.
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Jan 27, 2016 15:25
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JawKnee posted:My guess is [SQL is] unlikely to be tested on in an interview unless it's absolutely central to the position? Without saying anything about lying or not lying on your resume, if it's on there then you should be able to talk about it for five minutes. If I saw "SQL" on a resume I would at least ask about the level of experience, what database engines they'd used, and so on. Seeing "SQL Server 2010/2012" is oddly specific enough that I'd probably want to get into it a bit.
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Feb 16, 2016 04:33
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In my experience it's a pretty standard clause even for software companies if the company (a) bids for and receives government contracts, (b) develops something which could cause human injury or death if it fails, or (c) especially both. The bigger the company the more likely this is. That said I've worked for eleven years at companies which have that clause and I've never once been tested (Missouri and Kansas, not "we value the rights of the individual" states like California). It's a CYA clause more than anything.
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Jun 10, 2016 13:22
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Shirec posted:I guess my questions mainly are: am I hampered by my BS You aren't hampered at any place that applies an ounce of critical reasoning to applications (as opposed to just straight up keyword filters that might not match "Accounting"). One of the best developers I ever worked with has a BA in film. Others don't have any completed degree at all. quote:should I get a masters in CS If you absolutely want to get more higher education in computer science then consider doing another bachelors degree. A masters degree program is going to start assuming more computer science fundamentals than you may already have and obtaining a masters likely won't get you an edge if what you're looking for is an entry level software development job. That said, pursuing another degree is going to be expensive and time-consuming and may not really help in the long run (see above). quote:what should I do before I try to make the leap to actual programming? I just started poking around GitHub and thinking of a project to work on. Having public projects is a good start as is branching out from only knowing VB. It sounds like you're already on your way with taking a certificate program. In addition to those points I'm a big believer in understanding the fundamentals of computer science and computer architecture in general as part of being a good programmer...your certificate program might cover some of that? What exactly are you looking to do with programming?
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Jun 21, 2016 18:00
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Shirec posted:Ok, that's a huge relief. I've run into a bit of elitism here that a masters was absolutely required before a good company would look at you. The masters was going to be a huge money/time sink so I'm happy to pass as it currently stands. As in there are multiple companies telling you this? A masters is absolutely not required in the majority of entry level software development jobs in the US, though it's very common to require at least a masters if not a PhD for research roles and some specific jobs in certain industries. Are you in the middle of a research hub or aerospace or something? quote:What I want to do, from what I've observed so far, is software development. I want to create things, all that jazz. That's fine and good but when it comes time to figure out what you want to do career-wise (and also when picking a project to put on github) I think it would help to be more specific about what you want to create and why you want to create it. Do you want to create a game for smartphones that will while away the hours waiting at the DMV? Do you want to create new fantastic databases to get middle management their dashboards faster? That sort of thing.
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Jun 21, 2016 18:25
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I'd say that if you're just trying to dash together a rough UI to show off a project that has nothing to do with user interface design then it's probably no big deal. If the addition to your portfolio is specifically something that shows off UI design in .NET, you aren't doing yourself any favors by choosing Winforms just due to its age and relative clunkiness. Disclaimer: most of my personal and professional projects are backend servers or data-crunchers. I don't particularly care for UI development these days but if I need to knock together a UI for visualization or control I'd be choosing WPF or HTML depending on available platform.
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Jul 27, 2016 20:48
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ToxicSlurpee posted:titles are largely inconsistent and kind of meaningless This is the only truth. It's a topic that comes up from time to time in the interview threads. Here's the last time it came up in the Oldie programming thread. Basically, KidDynamite, the title "Senior Web Developer" at your current place doesn't mean anything consistent to other companies. If you don't think you want to apply for senior positions somewhere else then don't, but keep in mind that the reverse also applies! If you see a job posted that you want but you don't apply because the title says "senior" and you don't think you're senior enough then you've only got yourself to blame. Plenty of people have "senior" in their titles without knowing anything about anything. Don't worry about relative difficulty of the interview process or whatever. Just Interview and see what comes of it. You might be pleasantly surprised
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Jul 31, 2016 20:23
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Zero The Hero posted:A lot of the people at the top are able to reap the profits from aggressive gambles while pushing the losses off onto innocent and unsuspecting people. This is why I'm never working for a startup. Don't labor under the impression that this is somehow limited to startups!
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Aug 4, 2016 19:31
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quote:Established companies rarely pay stock in lieu of an actual salary Not in lieu of but it certainly can be a significant chunk of an overall compensation package. That's what we've been talking about here.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:49
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Zero The Hero posted:Strangely enough, if I were to start working on a personal project and improved my skills on company time, that would be a big problem. But actually wasting the time? That's tolerable, within limits. The difference is that other companies can't profit from you wasting time 
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Aug 12, 2016 15:30
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As far as I've experienced (Kansas, Missouri, Iowa) it's standard practice for a new place to not start coverage until the first of the month following your start date. Same as Munkeymon my previous employer's plan would cover through the end of the month of the last working date. This last job hop I managed to line those dates up to have a week off without a coverage gap 
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Aug 25, 2016 15:43
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If it is state dependent and Kansas handles this they way they handle everything else, it's the bare minimum in order to not get sued in federal court. But it might also be down to the company or even the insurance carrier that the company contracts with. That's one downside of the system that we've got in the US: it's sometimes hard to tell who specifically is loving you.
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Aug 25, 2016 15:55
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And unless you're working by yourself in your mom's basement, that revenue has to pay for other things besides your own bad self 
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Sep 15, 2016 15:19
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The job descriptions being identical makes me think that the only real difference would be the salary band. They probably pay an "entry level" developer less than they pay a "mid-level" developer. Not knowing anything about the company in question, I would email the company's HR or whoever gave you their card or contact information at the career fair and ask "given my level of industry experience put together with my master's degree, which should I apply for?" Or just apply for both and let them sort it out!
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Oct 12, 2016 03:15
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Zero The Hero posted:Where would they ever get that number? It could be the bottom of a salary band that they are hiring into, market research might have shown it to be a competitive salary for the position that they were hiring for, it might have shown up in the engineering director's tea leaves that morning, but the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter because they believe you're worth it and are willing to pay. Don't fight it
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Dec 13, 2016 20:35
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baquerd posted:Lock yourself in a closet for a few days so you crave Human contact. This is why they used to keep computers in dedicated rooms. Isolating them from ambient contact made them all the more responsive when actually used. 
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Jan 20, 2017 05:23
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:Is a Mac of some kind absolutely necessary for getting into coding? 2017.txt 
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Feb 6, 2017 15:03
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Roses are red Violets are blue This poem invoked undefined behavior
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Feb 17, 2017 15:41
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:1. Don't use a two column format - it screws up copying pasting the resume into a text field. I've used that exact template for two job searches now and no one's complained about it  If it screws up recruiters copying-pasting the resume into some mutable field, that's a bonus.
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Apr 30, 2017 23:06
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Congrats! This is your experience-building time. Learn absolutely as much as you can from the people you work with.
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May 1, 2017 12:59
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camoseven posted:What kind of programming job requires you to pass a medical check? Unless you mean a drug test, and even then it's kinda weird. A drug test is common with companies that take government contracts. I had to take a drug test for my current job even though I'm not in the segment that does work for the feds.
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Jul 29, 2017 14:54
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Love Stole the Day posted:Open question for any of you guys: when you were trying to get your first job in this industry, what do you think it was, looking back, that landed you the interview(s) you needed in the first place? Was it because you had an extensive catalog of interesting personal projects that demonstrated expertise in a relevant library that the employer cared about? Maybe it was because your Github/LinkedIn page looked really good? Maybe you just knew the right person? Or maybe it was just luck? For my first job, I was probably the only one that applied for the position. It was a low-paid programmer position with a university but I needed the job so  For my second job, it was a meat grinder organization that would've interviewed me even if I had been clinically dead but not yet room temp. That job, terrible though it was, gave me a chance to build my network in a new city. For the three subsequent jobs, it was all people I knew inside the target company that got my resume flagged as Good for setting up initial interviews. Pollyanna posted:I thought that was the kind of thing I’d get ostracized for admitting to Nah, it's a good story. Besides this isn't the first time you've told this story in CoC, and if I recall correctly the last time around it was generally agreed that the situation was not your fault and that company was bottom-of-the-poo poo-barrel stupid.
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Oct 23, 2017 19:16
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Skandranon posted:If you have some better 10-15 minute whiteboarding questions, I'd love to hear them. Determine whether a string is a palindrome. Super simple problem, easy to define, and there are a few different ways to knock it out each with their own problems.
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Dec 2, 2017 22:35
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geeves posted:A junior dev's website was run off of wix and I asked them about it and why they didn't manage themselves. "I have no interest in that." If having no interest in running one's own website is a shibboleth for being a Bad Developer then I haven't been a good developer in like fifteen years.
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May 1, 2018 15:06
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huhu posted:So I just had a job offer rescinded. I wasn't given a reason but I suspect it was because I didn't properly explain my situation with my last job, Foo. From my brief research when I left Foo, I assumed that "let go with severance" meant "laid off". But actually now that I look more it feels like "fired but not for any strong reason so here is money, don't say anything bad". Pretty sure saying I was laid off was why it was rescinded. Sorry to hear about your situation  I'm a little confused as how you're interpreting the cause-and-effect. Let me see if I follow the events:
It sounds from your description that you think 3 was "Bar consulted Foo, discovered something they found to be negative, thus making them decide to rescind the offer"...is that right? Or as Shirec is saying, do you think that 3 was "Bar did not like your explanation of 1 so they rescinded the offer" ? It seems strange that Bar made you an offer - as in, you had a verbal if not written agreement that you would start at X time for Y compensation - and then rescind it based on something you said in the interview stage. It also seems sort of unlikely that they made an offer before consulting your prior employers if that was a thing that was going to happen at all. In my experience offer rescinding is usually more prosaic: hiring manager's budget fell through, someone decided not to quit and a headcount went away, that sort of thing. All that said Shirec's advice is very good. When you have to explain the circumstances of a prior termination, keep it short and high level.
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May 11, 2018 18:46
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