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Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Is anyone here familiar with the programming bootcamps in the Los Angeles area?

There's a lot of them, so many that apparently this time last year California started cracking down on them. I'm interested in them, and looked into a few but honestly so many reviews sound like they're bought("I didn't have any programming knowledge, I took the 12 week program and now i'm making $80k a year! Wow!") that I'm extremely skeptical of most reviews. That said, I have only seen a couple of negative things, so I'm still interested.

I'm still pretty new to programming, but i'm thoroughly convinced this is what I want to do. I have been working my way through the Codecademy lessons on various languages and even going back to just debug code for people who are having problems just for fun. Unfortunately, a 4-year degree is pretty much out of the question for me but I still want to dive into this. I was hoping to get some simple entry code job and work on other projects while doing whatever that job is, then pursue something in game dev in a few years when I have more experience, connections and languages under my belt.

But, the bootcamps seem to be all over the place in terms of quality, reviews and quality of people going into and coming out of them. I was hoping to find a person or persons with actual experience going through one in the Los Angeles/Orange County area so I could have a better direction.

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Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

It's still a fraction of the money you'd spend on tuition getting a degree.

A university is out of the question for me and dropping 20k on a three month education in programming where they claim a 90% job placement rate literally feels like the bargain of the century. I can't even believe how good of a deal it is.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Space Whale posted:

More douches, dumber asians, you lose a gun if you shoot homeless people (what if it was ag assault?) and motorcyclists are all badasses - gotcha!

Wait, who the gently caress actually calls someone "human being" anymore? I mean unless you're into that.

I'm in California now, coming from Louisiana. It's not really that big of a change.

In addition to what was already said, everyone is casually racist, significantly more than back in Louisiana. Drivers are not fundamentally BAD, but nobody knows what courtesy is, if you need to get over, cut that other guy off or you'll never get there. North California and south California have a stupid rivalry, like Mississippi and Alabama football teams, do your best to stay out of it. Everything is crazy expensive and don't tell anyone if you like a Mexican restaurant because no matter how good it is it's not good enough and they will say you're bad for liking it.

It's not really a big deal, if you're from Louisiana everyone will ask you how it compares to True Blood. If you're not from Louisiana I can't say but you'll be a novelty at the least

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Your job could be giving supermodels oil massages and you'll still have bullshit to wade through. That's why they are jobs.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Tunga posted:

Just did my second Google online/telephone interview. Got asked to check if a string is a palindrome, ignoring case and skipping non-alphas. So I think that went fine. And I guess if I somehow hosed that up I can just quit being a developer.

This was the first code challenge I ever did that wasn't part of a "Beginners guide to javascript" course.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Daric posted:

Does learning Python not have anything to do with programming?

Someone explained it to me like this.

Programming is like writing a novel. You have to understand how writing works, how a story works. Rising action, falling action, climax and conclusion are all part of it. Speaking English doesn't mean you can write a novel in English, just like you might not be able to write a song or poem.

Similarly, knowing a language like Python doesn't teach you how to write a program. You know the words and grammar but not the substance.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I feel like you know the answer, but just typed it out in order to give yourself clarity of mind. Which is fine, but there you go.

Take the new job, stagnation is the second-greatest mind-killer after fear. It's time to grow.

Re: math and the n! thing. I've been trying to expand my knowledge of math, particularly related to programming. I've worked my way through a pretty big portion of the Project Euler archives, and since there's over five hundred challenges I'll be busy for awhile, but I was hoping you guys had some other resources to use alongside it. I've learned a LOT, both about math and programming, and making them work together, however a more focused series of challenges that expand on the previous ones would be preferable. Any ideas?

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I wonder how his family would feel reading that letter.

"You quit your job, sold the house and moved us 200 miles for a job you didn't research and now you're quitting it because you're too cool for it? loving really?"

"I'm a rock star, Jennifer, and I NEED to ROCK. They said that could be weeks away. WEEKS. "

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

ddiddles posted:

I was actually looking into their program. I'm self learning the front end dev world, and while I can understand the concepts I learn, it's hard for me to figure out what to do next once I've learned something.

Unrelated to the schoolwork, but the "okay, what's next?" Was a huge problem for me. There's a million beginner level programming tutorials/books etc, and a huge amount of resources for advanced work, but very little intermediate information.

The solution that worked for me is to just build something that I knew would be out if my league. When you hit a part you don't understand, start researching it. Rinse/repeat until you finish it, then start another. For web dev, "intermediate" largely means learning applicable code libraries like jQuery and underscore and learning how to research solutions.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Isn't the goal of programming to have as few lines as possible? Ask him what Par is and give him a negative number, refer to programs you've shown him in golf terms like birdie or eagle.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Ithaqua posted:

The goal of programming is to have a working solution to a problem that is maintainable by other people ("future you" counts as "other people").

Yeah, you right. I was gonna mention how within reasonable legibility as few as possible is ideal, but that's still not necessarily true so I stand corrected.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I disagree about the second part. He participated as part of a team to develop an application as a software engineer.

The title should be software engineer because that's what he was. Don't mention on your resume that it was part of a curriculum but absolutely do mention it in an interview if they ask. Do mention exactly what you worked on and don't take credit for parts that you didn't.

It's important to not lie on your resume, but don't sell yourself short either. If an interviewer says "oh, you said you were part of a team but in reality you were part of a class, I get it now. I think we're done here." Then you lost nothing, because they would never have called you in the first place. And you can still say "I'm very confident in my abilities, I'm more than willing to prove it if you'll give me a code challenge" because they actually called you in for the interview. No chance if they don't.

Regardless of all of that, you absolutely should post your resume when you get a good draft of it. Goons will pick it apart for you, don't stress.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Zero The Hero posted:

Recruiters and employers play this game where employers request senior devs but only offer a high enough salary for a junior dev, so the recruiter sends junior devs to interview with the employer to try and convince them to pony up more cash. This is part of why you always hear companies saying, "We're hiring, but we can't seem to find anyone." It really just means they can't find anyone willing to work for bad pay.

I'm stuck in a terrible job search in Los Angeles where the opposite of this occurs.

Recruiters posting 120-150k jobs for low experience requirements. I wonder how that goes down for the person who actually gets the interview.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

Maybe, but I heard them say at my job that a lot of self-taught applicants have had no idea what they were doing so they're suspicious by default.

I'm a bootcamp grad, and at my job they told me that people they've interviewed from my very bootcamp almost universally know nothing.

"So why did you consider me? Do you still have concerns?"

"We looked at your commits, decided you knew what you were doing, and if we still had suspicions we wouldn't have hired you."

It's a good idea to be suspicious but it's also pretty easy to find out what people know.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Can you write functional programs? That's what matters more than anything. Half of programmers don't have a computer science degree. Something like 10% of programmers never even went to college. At all. For anything. Moving internationally might be difficult in the short term as a new grad but my understanding is that once you get some experience you'll be in super high demand just everywhere.

Yeah, I never went to college for anything and I'm doing great. I won't be doing any super math related jobs like making software for graphics cards, but I'm doing great in my Java/JavaScript/python role. To push it further, I never even went to high school, that's always a fun topic in interviews.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

lifg posted:

Never went to HS, or dropped out? I've known quite a few dropouts, but never anyone who never even attended.

Never attended. It's a long story outside the scope of this thread, but the short version is that my parents asked if I wanted to be homeschooled, I said "Not go to school? Sure!", then they realized that homeschooling was too much work and left me to my own devices. Used the internet to learn, got my GED later. Probably wouldn't do it again, as there's a lot of prejudices involved("You were homeschooled in Louisiana? How old do you think the Earth is? Just curious."), but it worked out fine.

More on topic, it was weirdly not a big hurdle to overcome. An awkward topic in interviews, sure, but everyone I've met in the tech industry, from meetups to work, has absolutely not given a poo poo about anyone else's education unless they went to the same school and want to reminisce about the campus. People only seem care if you know how to do the thing they need done, or if you want to learn the thing they like talking about.

I had to work harder to get a job than just about every person I know, but it still wasn't particularly BAD, you know? In the end, I had sent out over 400 applications using indeed/glassdoor for about 4 months in Los Angeles, and out of those 400 I only had a handful of interviews. Of those handful of interviews, everyone mentioned they liked what they saw on the personal projects/open source section of my resume then called me in to ask more about them. They went over why I made choices I did, how I did certain things, then we did the algo-trivia(And, for every javascript interview, setTimeout shenanigans) everyone wants to do and eventually one gave me an offer. Nobody brought up education(specifically with regards to college), and if they were not abundantly clear when asking if my experience was paid, I quoted them on how long I had been doing code. If they explicitly said "paid", though, :smith:

The job I have now required a degree in computer science and 2 years of experience, for what it's worth. I had neither.

Vincent Valentine fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Mar 1, 2017

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I did the bootcamp thing, and while I don't necessarily regret it I have a hard time suggesting it to others. It was incredibly stressful(on more than one occasion I saw students crying over how hard it was) and incredibly expensive.

That said, there were two reasons I went. One, it massively expedited the process. Two, and most importantly, it gave me a roadmap of what to do.

I had to know quite a bit going in(everyone had to rebuild a lot of lodash/underscore.js functions, and I had to build a project which ended up being a side scrolling spaceship shooter game using canvas) but I was at a bit of an impasse. I knew html, css and JavaScript, I built some stuff, but I didn't know where to go from there. I didn't even know react/angular existed, and if I was told to "learn some frameworks" I wouldn't even know where to start.

I am 100% certain that I would have been able to learn without the schools aid if I knew WHAT to learn, but I sure as poo poo wouldn't have pulled it off in three months.

Short version: learn html/JavaScript/css, build something that takes you 35 hours just to see if you even like it. Then figure out a roadmap of techs to learn.

I have heard very good things about freecodecamp.com, but it honestly looks like major overkill.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

For what it's worth, personal projects are the only reason I got my current job. I don't believe they truly cared what the app did, or much at all. Just that I had code they could see and talk to me about.

It didn't even work when I got there, the https certificate expired that morning without me noticing, which meant everything that use location didn't work, since right before that was when Google put in the thing with chrome where location only works in https. But it didn't really matter, just the fact that I had visible code did.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

It greatly depends on how you're using vue. Depending on what tools you use with it, it can go anywhere from a simple view layer to a "framework".

I'd have to see your code to say more, but typically if you're using vue as just the view layer, then there shouldn't be too many methods on the components. Especially not enough to make it look messy. Almost all of the logic should be on your controllers, which then just pass data to be displayed to vue. If you still have too many methods controlling how a component displays data to make the code hard to follow, you might consider breaking that component down into smaller parts.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I'm of the opinion that your resume exists to get you an interview, and it's up to you to get yourself a job. That means, buzzwords go on the resume, details happen in the interview.

You should absolutely talk about the things you have experience with, even if you don't think it's "much." Your resume shouldn't have, you know, lies on it, so don't say "I'm SUPER experienced with Java*!!!" because a job posting says they want 5 years of experience in Java and you have done a single tutorial on Java on, like, Codecademy because you're gonna waste everyone's time and piss people off. But for the most part, you should let your interviewer determine whether or not your depth is appropriate. Like, you mentioned you didn't learn much in terms of REST. Whatever you learned I can pretty much assure you it's more than enough for day-to-day. If they want you to be, like, I dunno, Head Guy In Charge Of The RESTful API, then they'll determine that it's insufficient when they interview you because you have no way of knowing that Head Guy In Charge Of The Restful API is even a position that can or should exist.

Let your interviewer decide whether or not your skills are deep enough, and use the breadth to your advantage.

Vincent Valentine fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Mar 30, 2017

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

JawnV6 posted:

The #1 skill I liked in QA folks was precise error descriptions. Tools can help out with that, but I'd still prefer "On the User Settings page, clicking 'Post History' leads to a broken page" over "Malformed post-history request receives 403 response" with 0 indication of how that particular request was formed.

Yeah, this is actually what is nice about my QA team, in that they are separate from the team that writes tests. They know precisely gently caress-all about programming and it's great, what they do know is to be extremely descriptive to make up for it. They don't know how to inspect network traffic, so they aren't going to try and tell me an API is broken. They don't know how CSS works, so they aren't going to try and tell me a property isn't set correctly. It's just gonna be: "I clicked on the Report List page from the main page and there should be 12 reports per page and it's displaying 11 reports per page." Awesome, that is genuinely the most useful thing you could have told me.

I need to know exactly what someone did to make a thing break, in as many steps as possible. That makes my life so much easier.

Vincent Valentine fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Apr 25, 2017

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

TheCog posted:

Warning, this is a vent post.

ARGH.

I too had zero professional experience, no degree, and sent out hundreds of apps. I was clearly technically skilled, I had plenty of projects to show that. I did fine in tech challenges, so we're in a pretty similar boat.

Where we differ is that you got WAY better returns than I did. I only got a handful of interviews before I got an offer.

If you're going through that many and not getting an offer, I'm guessing it's one of two things.

1) your resume is misleading. This can be entirely unintentional. One of my interviewers saw a personal project I did(which was clearly labeled as such), was very impressed, then asked what it was like at the start up that owned the project. Once I explained it wasn't a start up, they were far less happy. Make sure your resume isn't hinting at more than you have. Certainly talk yourself up, but things like "I have two years of experience programming" means "paid, professional experience" to an interviewer, even though you were just saying you've been programming for two years without indicating context. Once they find out their expectations don't align with reality, you get the "Sorry, we need someone with more experience" cop out.

2) Your personality/interview skills need work. People in tech looking for junior devs don't seem to care much about capability, you'll learn as you go and they know that. What they want is for you to be pleasant to be around and talk to, because if you're junior, they're gonna be talking to you A LOT. About potentially frustrating things. Don't interview like a robot trying to hold logical, calculated conversation. Talk to them like you just met them in a bar, and you found out both of you like some band. When they ask about your hobbies, don't say "I like to code", say guitar or Batman or something. Be friendly, bright and enthusiastic. The image of the programmer being some guy hunched over a keyboard in the dark who hates people is long gone.

Try to do mock interviews with your friends, get their feedback. I know it's embarrassing and awkward, but it helps.

Outside of that, there's not much to say without more details. Just keep at it.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Pollyanna posted:


A lot of these companies make it really hard to write that "send a note of introduction to this company!" pre-requisite blurb sometimes.

Those are some weird requirements.

What in the world are you supposed to get with two years of json experience that you don't get in the first 8 hours?

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Median salary for a company seems like a pretty useless metric. I mean, that could include the CEO for all we know.

You should figure out of that number is for the company or the position. If it's for the position, risk asking high. If you're genuinely too nervous to ask for the full 40k, nobody is going to laugh you out of there if you say 35k. Say something like other people have suggested. The HR people you will be talking to have done this once or twice before and are used to it.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Pollyanna posted:

Why are there so many sales/marketing/analytics platforms out there? It's like every other job posting is for a Salesforce clone or random CRM stuff. Is there a reason why it's so common?

I wish I was into that stuff, but unfortunately I've found customer management/sales products to be supremely boring.

I work at a marketing analytics company, and while the software is indeed supremely boring(trying to explain predictive budget allocation to my friends puts ME to sleep, can't imagine what it's like for them), the work itself is challenging enough to make up for it. We handle really, really big clients so there's a shitload of money flying around. That much money breeds a need for very good, powerful software. Very good, powerful software is very difficult to build. Very difficult to build things are innately challenging and challenge is the enemy of boredom. I'm not saying all of them are like this, they can't be, but that the right one is just as good of a pick as some company developing software relevant to your hobbies/interests.

I grew up in a poor swamp town in Louisiana, making rich people richer is something I super don't care about. But challenging work means I'm engaged and interested, and I'm getting better at what I do pretty much every day.

One day It'll stop being so challenging and I think that's a good time to start looking for software/companies that are actually interesting to me or have a better ~*~Culture Fit~*~. But for now, it's honestly pretty ideal.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

code:
//This function creates N additional universes. By choosing a random number from a passed-in N range, and then selecting an item at that index for an array,
//the user creates separate timelines/universes which must exist,  based on the possible outcomes for the scenario. Each time a user passes a value
// into this function, they are essentially rolling the dice on whether or not we continue on this path, or diverge into a different eternity where
// things may be drastically worse.
// Is this a risk we are willing to take? Perhaps we should refactor this.

function getRandomArbitrary(min, max) {
  return Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min)) + min;
}

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I think I'd like that, honestly. Quality of code, standards, best practices, etc all go a long way to making debugging faster and easier. If they tell you to debug their code and you have a hard time making sense of it, you may not want to work there anyway.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Yeah, regardless of what happens next, your future is going to be good.

That said, two things. First, start building stuff asap. Not just online tutorials where you'll feel like you've got it and then the moment you open a text editor you don't know where to start, but build actual real tangible things. I'm not saying it's 100% required, but I guarantee your opponents looking for jobs have projects to show off. Your goal isn't to look good to an employer, it's to look better than everyone else.

Second, a few weeks into your job search for your first tech job is super early. Most people I know took about three months, personally mine was around four(technically five due to complications). Don't worry just yet. If you feel like you've got a bum deal in that bootcamp job, just don't take it and keep looking. It will take time, by you'll be happier for it.

I was offered a job very early into my search, and I turned it down because it didn't feel good. Then, no luck on anything for months, so you know that whole time I was regretting not taking that first gig and was stressed out every day about how I blew it and nothing was going to come my way. Then, eventually, something good came and I'm super glad I didn't take that first one. So believe me, I know that poo poo is easier said than done, but the stress is worth it in the end. Be patient.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Pilsner posted:

I'd really like to discuss this "portfolio" topic a bit more, since i see it mentioned constantly. Do you know from personal experience that hiring managers want portfolios, or did you just read online that they do?

I'm pretty sure our head of development head never heard of neither GitHub nor the concept of a portfolio in software development, and she's the one making the final hiring decisions, most of the time completely autonomous without technical interviews. Without having any concrete numbers, I'm willing to bet that hiring managers who don't even know what GitHub is outnumber those who do by a big margin, when talking of the industry as a whole, not just the big Silicon Valley companies. Remember that managers are very rarely active developers, many have never written code in their life. How would they even judge a GitHub portfolio?

Personally, if I were on the other side of the interview table, I'd weigh a candidate with just one year of real job experience higher than some new grad who had 20 hobby projects on GitHub. Hobby projects don't display an ability to meet deadlines, follow requirements or work as part of a team at all. I think it's a shame for all new grads if they feel they have to make a portfolio of junk just because.

If I were you GrimmGamer, I'd first of all finish the CS master's degree, then set your ambitions a bit lower and apply to your average corporate internal software dev positions, to build job experience.

Sort of? Our company doesn't have a hiring manager in the traditional sense, but I can tell you from personal experience that it gets you pretty far here. Our devs do the interviews and make our case to HR/etc on which candidate we want. I was only called in on merit of my portfolio, because the team in question wanted someone who had a lot of experience in the tech stack one of the projects used. Every no-experience junior dev/recent grad goes through the same process where we look for a project built on our stack and see how much of it they remember building and can talk about. Not necessarily about the project itself, but individual parts of it, practices, etc. We're also a big company and not a startup or anything so your mileage may vary.

That said, of course a year of experience is gonna get you further than hobbyist projects,. I don't want to imply someone should not go out and look for a job and they should stay at home making random poo poo for a year instead, that's super not the case. But you can build pretty cool stuff pretty quickly if you set your mind to it and stay disciplined to keep working on it while you're in the job search. Getting that first job sucks though, and anything you can do to gain an edge, you should.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I use four and I can't imagine going any lower. Before coding I thought more than two was ridiculous overkill. Funny how that works.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

Mniot posted:

Can you describe what you do with them?

I'm reasonably happy coding on just a laptop screen. The main problem is that it's not very wide. I feel like I can use two monitors effectively: the biggest thing I can get for my editor (the important thing is to be able to split the window as many times as possible without wrapping everything to hell), and an extra monitor for everything else (email, chat, browser, terminal). But sometimes two feels like too much. If I face directly at my code (which I do) then I have to turn a bit to look at the other monitor so I just don't bother looking at it.

Laptop screen: code editor
Monitor 1: the software I'm working on, so the website or app.
Monitor 2: terminal, dev tools, etc.
Monitor 3: email, music, Skype, slack, etc.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

The Dark Wind posted:

Yikes, as someone who's about to finish a bootcamp in the next few weeks, these tales are a little discouraging. Any encouraging words of advice you guys could give about things you wish you knew at the start?

I'm willing to move to more or less any major city, so hopefully that can help make the journey a little easier.

I went to a boot camp. I had zero college, I did not even go to high school. I also looked for a job in Los Angeles, which is a heavy skew towards senior devs. My job experience consisted of lumberjack, delivery, firefighter, bartender, etc. It took me many hundreds of apps, but I got a job within six months of leaving my boot camp. It was not easy, it was very stressful, and the best advice I can give is to not give in to the stress and take a job you know you'll hate because nothing else has come along. There's taking a bad first job for experience, and there's taking a poo poo job out if desperation.

The company who hired me called me in because of my portfolio, and said they had interviewed many boot camp grads who turned out to know nothing, so definitely don't assume you're done learning. Keep practicing, keep building stuff.

Edit: bartender was actually very useful background. It turns out devs have a hard time communicating, which is a valuable skill bartending teaches. Practice that however it's convenient

Vincent Valentine fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jul 21, 2017

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I get to work at around 12:30pm and leave just, whenever(usually 6-7). That poo poo is thoroughly good. I'm sometimes on at home before and/or after, but it's a tiny price to pay to not sit on the 405 in Los Angeles. If you're not familiar, the 25 miles I drive would take two hours to get to my job by 9am. There's one guy who does the opposite, he's usually in around 6am and I usually catch him leaving as I'm arriving.

That's the one thing that still really gets me about how much better this industry is over everything else I've done. I've never had another job where showing up more than thirty minutes late without a drat good excuse would have ended in anything other than firing. Here, and with all but one of my friends at other companies I've asked just to make sure it's not just mine, the policy is "yeah, just show up whenever, man. Or don't, nobody cares. Just make sure you show up to make meetings and often enough so that people don't think you're on vacation."

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

The way it was explained to me was that the HR person goes around asking the engineering team what they think a new candidate should have. Someone says "They should know how to use react. This is the most important thing." and they write that down. Then they move on to the next person and they say "5-10 years of experience. This is the most important thing." Then the HR person drafts up the "we need someone" entry based on everyones requests and now you need 5-10 years of ReactJS experience.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

InevitableCheese posted:

Does anyone know some good resources for some more "project based" books or courses? These online course sites (TreeHouse, Codecademy, etc) are so segmented that I end up learning things but have no idea when/where to use them. Either that or they are forgotten with disuse.

Not really, but honestly just start building something. The very first thing I built was a game, and I didn't know what I was doing at all. I just knew what I wanted the end goal to be and started googling poo poo to get there.

One of the other things I've heard working well is to find a piece of something you like(menus from an app, an inventory system from a game, login panel from a website), and build it. When you don't know how to do something, Google it, do it, then move on.

Project based learning is definitely better, yes. But the problem I had with following someone else's is that I had all the answers, so I breezed through it without really absorbing it. It really changed when I said "I'm going to make this specific game" and tried to do it. Lots of problems, lots of thinking about those problems, which made the lessons stick.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

BirdOfPlay posted:

I've been doing a "long interview" arrangement like this for, like, 7 months now with a game developer. It has almost completely burned me out doing game dev, and I, actually, really love the kinds of coding I'm doing. :(

Dude bring that poo poo up to your employers. Tell them exactly that paragraph up there. That's like, the complete opposite reason I've heard people burn out of game dev. Usually it's "I love the place and my co-workers and what we do but I work insane hours and the code is a nightmare and it makes me want to die"

If they still don't budge, honestly just look at another employer. Don't let yourself burn out if you like what you're doing but hate where you're doing it.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

I super disagree with personal projects as a barometer for passion for anyone with more than a year of experience, but at the same time it's made a difference at my current place. Between updates to frameworks that aren't backwards compatible, and new frameworks that can solve new problems, being aware these changes are important.

But at the same time, if that's what you want out of your employees, maybe give them work hours dedicated to that continuing education instead of hoping they do it themselves?

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

InevitableCheese posted:

This'll probably sound really stupid but what are the chances of programming being automated and the field shrinking to non-existence within the next few decades? Reading books on A.I. and the Singularity make my shower thoughts go wild, especially now that i just got into the field.

I think that even if we get a super smart, problem solving ai, which is not likely anytime soon, developer jobs will just move to interfacing with those a.I. You know how in video games like mass effect and whatnot, it's always one guy talking to Computer™? That's because if product managers were the ones talking to it, it would kill itself after trying to discern what the gently caress the pm means by "more engaging. You know, like, make it pop." For the thirteenth time. Can you imagine being a flawless person, interpreting things precisely with no error, and still being told you're wrong all the time?

In short, the industry is still strong, don't worry. And if we do end up being replaced by computers, it'll be far enough away that we can all retire.

Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

To follow up on what others said, there's way more jobs than people to fill them. But, a lot of times it doesn't kill development to let that position stay open for a long time. And as long as development keeps moving, they'll keep waiting for that perfect candidate rather than settle.

I'm in the L.A. market and I feel it's the worst offender. Almost every job here is for "senior dev with 5 years of experience" and that job has been available for 5 years. It's awful. It's a lot better now that I've been in the industry for awhile, but man I was fighting like hell for table scraps this time last year.

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Vincent Valentine
Feb 28, 2006

Murdertime

"Overly Broad Intellectual Property Clause" is that, and it us exactly what it sounds like.

Yes, they own anything you create. Typically, courts will not find in their favour as they generally say something like "you make retail software. This is a sculpture of a squid. They aren't competing with you. Maybe don't be a dick." so if you REALLY want this job, that's a risk you need to consider yourself. Despite that, I did a lot of research on this while job searching and the short answer is that if it's too broad, just find a new job. Like pretty much everyone else here, I am also not a lawyer, though.

To be fair, most companies have one of these to some degree so don't bail in EVERY case. I believe "anything you create while on the job is ours" to be fair, but the wording can be bad if you're salaried or remote(I.e when are you "on the clock").

The other common one is "anything you create that can directly compete with us", which I believe is also fair. Mostly because I work in an industry where I have access to a lot of info and data that would make it trivial to create very powerful alternative. Even if I create it on my own time, my own implementation wouldn't work well without my up to date info.

It really depends a lot on where you work and what you do in your free time. Work at Nintendo, and want to make platform games in your own time? Second one is not for you, but the first will work fine. Want to make games in your spare time, but work at a marketing firm? Both are probably fine. But always stay away from overly broad clauses that basically say they own you. If for no other reason than they're probably a lovely company.

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