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My impression is that a Software Engineering degree will have a heavier focus on actual software development, methodologies, design patterns, maybe using particular frameworks and languages. Whereas CS leans more towards theory, calculus, statistics, algorithms, etc. Unless there is a SE program that is part of an actual Engineering faculty, which I've never heard of. Seems that area is covered by Computer Engineering, which shares many courses with CS but with more focus on electronics and hardware, and other engineering coursework. These are my impressions from Canada though. I wouldn't be at all surprised if CS, CE, and SE all mean totally different things from region to region. Your SE program description sounds like you shouldn't have any problems at all.
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Mar 17, 2011 02:45
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I would also never wear a suit to a dev interview. I definitely wouldn't wear jeans, but I would consider a suit way overkill. e: also some relevant articles for this thread Some tech leaders and their Class of 2011 speeches and advice. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/051811-2011commencement-chambers-cisco-wozniak-apple-ballmer-microsoft.html Article about some US hotspots for work, and skills in demand there, http://houston.citybizlist.com//17/2011/5/18/Houston-Called-Hottest-Jot-Market-for-IT-Professionals-by-Staffing-Agency--cbl.aspx Pweller fucked around with this message at 02:56 on May 20, 2011 |
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May 20, 2011 02:52
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FinkieMcGee posted:I'm starting a new job in a week and the only reason it happened is because I applied for a gig I was mildly unqualified for. They ended up basically building out a position that fit me pretty well because they liked me during the phone interviews I had. Just goes to show, never any harm in applying, Congrats!
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Jun 20, 2011 01:46
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Chasiubao posted:Play along with whatever they're doing is my suggestion. I would do this, and focus on being 'friendly and polite'. Trying to be funny will probably make you look like a huge tool at best.
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Jun 23, 2011 20:27
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^^^ I need advice about asking for a significant raise. I have a student term position ending very soon, and am expecting to be sat down to discuss whether I'd be interested in a fulltime position any day now. I am somewhat interested in staying only if I get a fairly significant pay raise since I'm not really working on the types of projects I've been developing myself for... basically they think of themselves as a tech company but... aren't really as much as an advertising/media company. How do I verbalize this without sounding dickish and/or putting them on the defensive? I'm being paid decently for a student, but I am worth more... I have several other offers for work... but telling people this seems dickish. How can I present my case reasonably? Have a baby on the way in a few months and my days of messing around for 'experience' are behind me.
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Jul 14, 2011 20:48
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Standish posted:You don't ask for a raise, you ask for a "performance review". Okay. I'm getting super uncomfortable since they're grooming me for stuff... this would be so much easier if everyone had agents or whatever as mediators.
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Jul 14, 2011 21:17
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necrobobsledder posted:... about as high as you could go as a developer without being in finance ... but I'm like 6 years out now ... anything less than $150k / yr including bonuses seems like I'm a slacker compared to many of my peers. How big is your peer group?
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Jul 30, 2011 05:28
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Puddy1 posted:What do you think of companies that train first then ship you out to work for their clients? Here's an example posting I found http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/se...campaign=Indeed If it isn't some sort of scam, it sounds like there has to be a slew of grants and funding that are being exploited here, which makes me think this isn't going to work out in the best interests of the contractor-employee. That and they sound like they're recruiting previously educated individuals to educate... and throwing around buzzwords and PHDs from Stanford, Goldman Sachs, etc. And specifically seeking international students (culturally naive, lots of money) seems like a HUGE flag to me.
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Aug 11, 2011 19:37
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krisis posted:All this talk about software engineering is compelling me to post the talk Glenn Vanderburg did about the subject. This is a pretty interesting presentation, bit of a mini history lesson.
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Aug 24, 2011 17:53
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Does the US not have some sort of subsidy for hiring students/new grads in tech roles? I would think there'd be all kinds of grants with all the 'omg we need STEM students' I've been reading about... I'm pretty sure the following is accurate, or at least close, in Canada (perhaps this is a provincial-level thing), employers can apply get $9-10/hr towards internship/co-op students which they're supposed to bump up to at least something like $16-17/hr, and I think they can also get $25k towards new grad salaries, possibly dependent on if it's a startup or not. e: US dept of labour says unpaid internship is legal only if a for-profit employer isn't getting work of any immediate benefit to them (ie. a waste of both your time) http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf Criteria for legal unpaid intern: 1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment; 2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern; 3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff; 4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded; 5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and 6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship. Pweller fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Sep 17, 2011 |
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Sep 17, 2011 03:22
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Sab669 posted:On one hand, if I'm telecomuting and can work whenever, I can maintain my current job and schooling. I've participated in projects with similar premise to what you describe, not necessarily shady (though the ad read as shady). Could be a great experience or waste of your time. For me it would come down to their perceived level of enthusiasm and possible levels of expertise and experience. The project is very likely to be poorly organized if you're all doing your own thing, and its momentum will probably be determined by the weakest team member. I don't understand all this stipend talk (and internship seems to mean so many different things in the USA), but unless you're getting paid by the hour or some weekly rate that is reasonable for your hours put in don't bother. If it's work that you would be proud of after a couple months while you're concurrently a student, well then that's a whole other story too, couldn't hurt to try it out for a couple weeks.
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Oct 4, 2011 16:35
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Fastest way I can think of off the top of my head would be some sort of recursion where you don't pursue identical substrings as they're built. You probably did fine from the sounds of it. e: good morning, I didn't read the question clearly before bed and thus failed the interview ha, missed the provided dictionary part Pweller fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Oct 20, 2011 |
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Oct 20, 2011 03:57
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Read this today http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/tech-careers/noncompete-agreements-carry-high-cost-for-engineers Talks about new hires getting blindsided by non-compete agreements. I've signed these before, since I didn't feel I really had a choice... What are your guys' thoughts/strategies here? IP is such a shitstorm it makes me worry about getting sued if I ever were to start my own company (without basing it on any other company's work).
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Nov 4, 2011 03:26
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Haha just had my kid wake me up and hand me the phone, impromptu telephone-to-speakerphone interview. Don't need coffee this morning now.
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Jan 4, 2012 18:44
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nvm 
Pweller fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jan 5, 2012 |
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Jan 5, 2012 23:21
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What are people's impressions of the title 'Programmer Analyst' vs 'Software Developer'? Do you think hiring impressions would be different for applicants with one or the other title in their last role?
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Jan 20, 2012 22:29
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Doc Hawkins posted:Yeah, everyone's told me that you always say "I'm not comfortable talking about that until you've come to a hiring decision." This isn't too bad, I might use this in the future. In last week's interviews I simply countered with "What would you say is the typical range you pay current employees in similar positions?" , since I'm still figuring out how far I can push in my region. Got some interesting 'dodge' lines to use in future meetings ha. I also set a deadline for when I planned to be hired by, which set off some panicked reactions at a couple places, which was good I think.
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Jan 24, 2012 18:10
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Does anyone have experience getting a written document to to be signed by an employer saying they aren't affected by work done outside of work hours and duties? Any specific wording I should use? eg. Employer acknowledges that it is acceptable for employees to conduct business outside of blah blah so long as it does not constitute competition with the business... Is there a decent template to start with out there?
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Feb 4, 2012 19:22
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shrughes posted:Being in California is a good place to start. I thought this was a dumb reply at first, but several days of on and off reading and conversations later I understand what you meant. Unfortunately I am not in California. Will be talking to local lawyers.
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Feb 8, 2012 21:04
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I would keep looking. If you get another offer you can call them back and say so, hoping they drop the guy taking too long to decide.
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Mar 28, 2012 20:03
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unsanitary posted:Hey goons, I'm looking for your thoughts on my career situation... As long as you complete some decent projects doing whatever it is specifically you want to be doing as a full time job, you should do fine interviewing later. It's worth exploring quitting and getting an internship or two. I quit and went back to school mid-twenties and ended up with internships that paid as well as I had been making fulltime anyways. e: are you being realistic with your expectations of graduating in less than 2 years as a part time student?
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Apr 7, 2012 14:11
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You shouldn't take a minimum wage dev internship. Companies are willing to pay, and have grants available to them for hiring students. Is there someone at your school you can talk about this with? Might be a nice hookup there.
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Apr 7, 2012 14:49
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Markov Chain Chomp posted:Yep. I'm going to go ahead and say that if you're changing code such that related comments are no longer relevant, and you're not changing those comments as well, you are a terrible developer (and probably a terrible employee/coworker in general). This half page of commentchat is full of terrible opinions in my opinion.
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Jun 11, 2012 02:59
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Markov Chain Chomp posted:Of course you try to catch stuff like that, but if your thesis here was actually correct, code reviews would also catch all bugs. They don't. Things slip through, even with a review process. I wasn't calling any specific person here a terrible developer, sorry if it sounded that way, but I agree that mistakes will inevitably sneak through the review process, and there will be bugs that creep in and can snowball over time. Ideally you will fix those bugs and misleading comments as you come across them. If you're forced to waste a fair amount of time figuring out how a chunk of code works, then you should be correcting and adding comments in there so that the next guy (or likely yourself again 2 months later) doesn't have to wrack their brains for more than a minute or two. I honestly haven't ever read a text or even heard someone say that comments aren't to be trusted before, unless it was in the context of using meaningful labels at the expense of overcommenting. I'm pretty baffled by a lot of what you're saying tbh, and I think it can be misleading for newbie jobhunters who might find themselves saying things in an interview that gets them cut because of it. I do think that setting up a github account is a great idea for someone without a lot of experience, since it can indicate a lot of good things. I don't think it's necessary however, since a shop that's going to want to make sure you can actually code, will have you code something small in front of them.
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Jun 11, 2012 17:40
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hieronymus posted:Another aspect is that comments aren't international - I have had to deal with codebases that are written entirely with Japanese comments and Russian comments before and frankly it wasn't obvious what to do with the comments in those languages (if we don't know what the comments in a section of code that we are changing mean, should we add our own comment that the original devs can't understand, do we delete the comment, do we use google translate to try to get across how trying to patch over a visual artifact bug?) I've never had to deal with this and I'm curious- were the variable names based in English? How would a Japanese or Russian programmer do their job if they didn't know english, since the alphabets are different? I'm guessing that in order to be a programmer you've got to be familiar with basic english to ever get started in the first place, since all the major language syntaxes seem to be heavily based in english.
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Jun 12, 2012 18:09
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aBagorn posted:Apparently not. Just got an email from the VP asking if I was good to come in Wednesday. Sounds like the HR person is a huge tool and everyone in that company probably knows it.
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Jun 21, 2012 17:09
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All kinds of starting salary numbers getting thrown around in this thread. I'm not from California, what do you guys think about this San Francisco municipal proposal that claims average starting salaries for new grads hover around $67k? I think a lot of you have been repeatedly saying the area pays significantly higher. http://www.wired.com/business/2012/07/new-silicon-valley-patent-office-faces-tech-giants-in-war-for-talent/
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Jul 3, 2012 23:06
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Teabiscuit posted:What are the good freelancing programmer websites? I'm desperate for some work but couldn't take on a full time job at the moment so they seem like a good idea to earn some cash. So far i've signed up on freelancer.com , guru.com and vworker.com . All of them seem very 'pay more money to us and you will get more jobs!' and most of job listings revolve around spam bots. Most of my experience is in python and its the language I'm happiest in. All of the freelance sites I've checked out have had jobs with a crazy amount of work vs little pay. I'm curious if anyone here has had any success along this route in the past, because the posted hourly rates for completed jobs have seemed pretty scary. Maybe the final negotiated rates end up being significantly different than those originally posted?
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Aug 7, 2012 19:00
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I would also consider that your boss is not actually a cold-hearted, evil, imbecile who looks forward to putting everything on you until you break. I'd be willing to bet he's simply run out of money, leaving him with no choice other than to shed employees even though he knows he doesn't know gently caress about what's left to do. He's desperate to keep the project going until some sort of release so he can recoup some costs and not end up a homeless, elderly, failure at life. Take off your dress and stop putting in unpaid overtime. You are a professional developer being paid for a service that someone is not able to provide for themselves. Bottom line is, hello, you are a professional developer, and if you're at your desk working for 40 hours and come up with X amount of work at the end of it, well guess what, you can't reasonably expect much more than that. You shouldn't feel guilty for not *finishing*- there's always another feature or bugs you missed. Pweller fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 2, 2012 08:03
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^^^ This is a good breakdown The other thing to do is just start working, don't make a big stink about the IP-related documents, simply don't sign them. Since it's usually an HR person you never deal with day-to-day who's tasked with gathering all those docs up, and there's probably a lot of them, it's usually pretty easy to give them a soft runaround by sending over documents piece by piece. They'll eventually forget about you or decide it's not worth battling over when you've already been working for a month and a half.
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Sep 25, 2012 16:43
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Ensign Expendable posted:I'm a dual citizen with two foreign passports, plus the country I was born in no longer exists. Those details don't mean you're automatically excluded, it very likely depends heavily on which countries.
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Oct 15, 2012 22:58
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Sab669 posted:Another dumb question, but what exactly is classified as a 'unit test'? In my education we of course discuss how to debug an application, but never really testing it. We were encouraged to enter unexpected data where we could to try and break it, but that's it really. A unit test doublechecks that an isolated piece of functionality works correctly. An example that would test an object's getter method is to set it up with predictable values, then call the getter method to see if those values come back. If the returned value matches the expected value, the unit test passes, otherwise it fails. Then you write more unit tests for different scenarios where different values might be returned by the getter. And so forth. The end goal is to have lots and lots of these little, very simple tests, that should test all permutations of the possible states of a program when combined. Pweller fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Oct 29, 2012 |
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Oct 29, 2012 20:58
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melon cat posted:I hope I'm in the right thread. I work in the financial services sector, but I've really been wanting to get into web development for a very long time. I grew up making websites for myself and friends, but I really want to get into the different coding languages that I've seen sprout of over the years and make a living out of it. Depending on your age and family situation (kids? spouse who also works?), I would make sure you've researched your new potential career in terms of local opportunities and entry-level salary. Web development has plenty of aspects that are also "as fun as it sounds", be careful. That being said, I think web dev is definitely something you could pick up on your own. I'd recommend focusing on javascript, and picking a target language to end up focusing on, depending what types of shops are in your area (C# .NET, PHP, Ruby). That's not to say you need to start with any of those by any means, Python or anything would be fine to learn the ropes. You probably also want to spend at least a little bit of time going over basic SQl statements and handling JSON and XML. Pweller fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Nov 1, 2012 |
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Nov 1, 2012 16:43
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gucci void main posted:Last week, I had an interview for a Rails position. I found it through SO Careers and I suppose the code samples I do have were acceptable enough to have a chance to come in after a phone screen. The interview lasted three hours, and during that time I met with a number of people, but I thought it was a positive experience. I was also able to complete the coding exercise(s) for the most part. This sounds pretty typical. The same companies complain about employees moving on after a year, and treating the company like a stepping stone in their career. Don't worry about it too much, keep looking and you'll find a good fit. You sound like your head is in a good place.
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Dec 4, 2012 17:14
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The whole dev industry is pretty messed up in terms of an employee's career development and experience. Once you've got your foot in the door, a junior developer could be someone with <2 years of on the job experience. Regular developer maybe someone with > 6 months experience, senior developer could be someone with > 2 years experience. That is hosed up. Smooth operators can get much, much further than they should and faster. This can be a good or bad thing for you and me depending how you look at it. If you go into an interview and are confident with the tech they use, and are someone people would want to be around for long periods of time, you should be able to land a job you'll be happy in after a given number of attempts. I'd argue that job titles in this field are a very poor indicator of anything. If an opening says they want a "Senior Developer", it just means they want the type of person that can reliably field questions with authority from 'junior developers'. You can get there by focusing deliberately on something over only a month or two in many cases (edit: presuming you have experience in the 'business' and design of software development already). Pweller fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Dec 4, 2012 |
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Dec 4, 2012 18:40
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The premature optimization talk reminds me of this presentation by Jonathan Blow, talkin straight about his opinions on software development http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/ It's an interesting listen, think I was introduced to it in this thread awhile back. ShadowMoo posted:For someone who had been into programming but has dropped out of college, what would be the go-to language if one wants to learn a marketable language fast and get a decent job? Depends on the area, but if you want 'fast', probably HTML/CSS & javascript for a web development gig.
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Dec 10, 2012 23:29
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AlsoD posted:I know Fortran. I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to program in it ever again. Do I put it on my CV? No.
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Dec 13, 2012 19:12
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Think of it as a game. The interviewer will restrict the game's rules more and more to see how you consider the problem under varying circumstances. This is almost certainly an exercise you do every day working with code. Don't think of the questions as black and white, or adversarial, the interviewer (probably) isn't looking at it that way. Saying there is a better solution is simply a gentle prod to let you know it isn't a trick question. Interviewers want you to succeed, try to relax man, you'll find a good match soon 
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Dec 13, 2012 21:43
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The whole point is that the solution itself doesn't even matter at all so long as you explain what you're thinking along the way and don't give up until the interviewer is satisfied.
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Dec 13, 2012 23:47
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Another venue for people jobhunting- go to user group meetings. Meet other like-minded people, etc, there are people that go to these meetings specifically because they're looking to hire someone interested/experienced in X-technology at the monthly X Meetup.
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Dec 18, 2012 18:10
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