|
Dog Jones posted:I want to get into embedded systems. I think I am qualified. In general I am a very experienced programmer. I know a lot about programming in assembly w/ several different types of instruction sets, low level optimizations, operating systems, concurrent programming. However, I have never actually done anything with embedded systems, and don't know much about electric engineering. Should I bother applying for embedded systems jobs? There's this level nowadays where your hardware is powerful enough to run a full OS (usually Linux) but is weak enough that a strong understanding of all the things you list helps enormously in making good, performant applications, and where you maybe will need to debug some peripheral on an EE level every once in a blue moon. It's often still called embedded but you could also call it mobile. Sounds like you'd be a decent fit. Should also be obvious how to get some small extra foot-in-the-door experience in that area.
|
# ¿ May 15, 2014 07:57 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:36 |
|
Arachnamus posted:Is this whiteboarding business really that common over there? The last few jobs I've had have been on the strength of a conversation. I have no idea what "over there" means but the jobs I had in the US and Europe all involved coding as part of the interview. There can be exceptions, like if you have public portfolio and the work is consulting (where you won't get paid/get kicked instantly anyway if you don't deliver). How can you tell from a conversation whether someone can program?
|
# ¿ May 16, 2014 12:39 |
|
qntm posted:I thought "coding as part of the interview" was not exactly the same thing as whiteboarding. Sure, but both, even if not exactly the same, are pretty much opposite from "on the strength of a conversation". I've done both, and although coding on a real PC may make the interviewee more comfortable, it tends to be harder to have a good discussion during the solution. I don't see why you'd care if your stuff runs/compiles - it may make you feel good but I doubt it correlates much to your passing chances.
|
# ¿ May 16, 2014 13:38 |
|
revmoo posted:Also I get why Silicon Valley interviews are so thorough, a entry-level development job out there pays roughly what a C-level exec job pays here These kind of comparisons really ought to take cost of living in account. Rent in the Bay Area is totally nuts.
|
# ¿ May 22, 2014 19:44 |
|
revmoo posted:I've done "homework" in the past, gotten the job, and regretted it. Had I taken the "homework" as a red flag I would have been better off. The way you state this means that it should generally be interpreted as a red flag. Why is this so? From the rest of your post, I infer it's because you think companies that ask for homework cause the best developers to skip them and are hence left with mediocrity or below? I haven't been in the situation so I don't really know what I'd think about it, but one thing I do know: the faster your company moves in the interview process, the more likely you are to end up hiring.
|
# ¿ May 23, 2014 13:28 |
|
JawnV6 posted:Uhhh Ever heard of a contractor? Yes. Not sure what that has to do with anything. You're still looking for someone that can make himself available for a week. Which isn't going to get you any people that are already regularly employed, and contractors may not be too interested in regular employment, so you're not hiring them in any regular meaning of that word either. So you're looking at unemployed people or contractors that want to stop contracting, or something.
|
# ¿ May 25, 2014 18:52 |
|
JawnV6 posted:I agree, it's pretty ridiculous to call it "unemployed people only" when there's this other obvious contingent of folks who make a really good fit. Contracting and contract to hire is much more common for ME's, EE's (layout is $80/hr, can even source it on craigslist), and EE technicians. Sorry if I denigrated super special snowflake CS folks by suggesting this as another totally reasonable option in common use in other fields though. Given that a major benefit of using contractors or doing contract to hire is the lessened risk on both sides if the other side turns out to be lovely, I don't think it's a particularly sensible idea to compare hiring procedures between them and regular full time hires.
|
# ¿ May 26, 2014 16:25 |
|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The flip side of jumping from job to job is people quitting to recover from a job with full confidence that their job search afterwards won't be terribly prolonged. Definitely seen tons of people do it, so a 1 week trial isn't terribly outlandish, especially if the company is extremely hesitant to add an additional head at all, and is trying to keep head count down. Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying that you were unemployed and are talking about people that are also unemployed in the above paragraph. So you're really reinforcing the point that was made about the problem with that hiring method.
|
# ¿ May 27, 2014 07:24 |
|
Mniot posted:"None" would be a total nightmare, but getting stuck with Perforce was not much better. Although I prefer git, I've had a consulting gig that involved working with Perforce doing big merges day in and out. I didn't find it too bad. Like, most stuff just worked, and the merge UI was good. We got into problems because Perforce doesn't scale. When I looked into what Google (who also use/used Perforce heavily at the time) did to make it scale, I found scripts that rebooted the server if certain conditions were true. (At least Mercurial isn't immune from those either. And I can make github die as well, so I guess git too)
|
# ¿ Jul 12, 2014 11:39 |
|
Arachnamus posted:This may be straying into e/n, but do any of you find yourselves so disillusioned with software development that you seriously entertain the idea of throwing it all in and never touching a computer again? This can be caused by a bad working environment, a depression that may or may not be related to the working environment, looming burn-out, etc. There's various reasons why people end up with your feelings, but strongly correlated are usually the inability to improve your working environment (say your boss doesn't let you use source control or anything) or the complete disconnect between your performance the companies performance, i.e. the feeling that what you do doesn't matter. The problem may not be directly caused by your current job, or your career (if the feeling happened in past jobs), but it may be useful to find out. Don't stick around if you're unhappy and the job is one of the causes. I've seen people vastly improve their happiness as a programmer by switching jobs, but I've also seen one guy who worked at Apple become happy by becoming a marriage counselor, another guy leaving a programming job to start a bar, a chip engineer become a manager in a racing-pigeon company. Programming a nice job but it's not the only nice job.
|
# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 12:14 |
|
syntaxrigger posted:but apparently I used words I shouldn't have like "work/life balance" I wouldn't be too disappointed about not getting the job.
|
# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 09:12 |
|
1) "You come in at 8.30h sharp and everyone hits the shutdown button at 16:59h." work/life balance: static 2) "You come in when you want, leave whenever you need to run errands or pick up your kids or whatever, but are often busy till 19h or later." work/life balance: dynamic 3) "We need you to stay in late to get this release out the door but this weekend someone's going to schedule a meeting at 9.30h on Monday and we're going to raise hell if you don't show up in time." work/life balance: lol One of these, while not being bad in itself, has an easier slippery slope to (3). I'll let you guess which one. That doesn't preclude management & peer pressure from loving up (1) as well by shifting 16:59h to 18:29h, but it'll be obvious from the first working day. In any case, if a company balks at the idea of work/life balance or requires keywords such as work/life "integration" these are simply not good signs. Whether you're willing to deal with this depends on your personal situation and what $ they offer in return.
|
# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 13:07 |
|
wins32767 posted:My former boss called me today and offered me a job as a developer in a smallish (~200 person) company. When she left my current company (a megacorp) 6 months ago, I was promoted into her old position. After a rocky adjustment period, I've really started to enjoy being a manager and I'd like to continue on that path over the long term. However, this new offer would be for substantially more money (30-40%), in a city I want to relocate to, and would lead to a management job in 6-12 months provided the company continues on it's current growth trajectory. It sounds like a great offer assuming the company does well, but my concern is if it fails to continue to grow. Am I wrong in thinking that going from manager back to developer after 6 months would be an issue if I wanted to find another management job in a year if things don't work out? Unless you're clearly the oldest among your peers, and you feel the step back at this point in your career is problematic, the upsides just seem overwhelming here. That said, if you can get one such offer, maybe you can find more, including one where you stay in management. It sounds like you were actually pretty happy where you were and weren't shopping around when this offer came, so figuring out where the extra 40% comes from may be interesting.
|
# ¿ May 13, 2015 08:34 |
|
ultrafilter posted:Why would what you were doing ten years ago enter into my decision to hire you now? If you've done similar things since, talk about those instead. If not, leave it off unless it's something exceptional. I would say the opposite. If you've done something 10 years ago and that was different from the 10 years that followed I'd like to know about it. Especially if it's potentially relevant. Did you end up not enjoying it or was it a matter of opportunities etc...
|
# ¿ May 18, 2015 07:32 |
|
Strong Sauce posted:Right now my plan is to truncate the last few jobs into smaller blurbs while keeping the last two jobs current. If you pass the initial screen sure why not. On the other hand what you put there only has so much influence because for all we know it's all terribly exaggerated and you're really incompetent at all the things you claim to have done.
|
# ¿ May 18, 2015 07:54 |
|
Strong Sauce posted:2. Anyone want to share experiences about working remotely? I would like to work remotely from a different part of the world where at best I can share the last 2 hours and the first two hours of the work day here in the US. I am not worried about my focus as much as being able to interact with other workers. Not having any commute time is awesome. Setting up your office exactly as you want it is nice, on the other hand if your employer has good offices and gives the employees good equipment it's less of a factor. You want to make sure the team you work in has a significant amount of people remote, preferably a manager, too. If there's 10 people, and only 2 are remote, they will suffer because nothing will be documented online or in emails and they'll be clueless to everything. I like being on IRC so there's some non-work chat & banter even if the rest of my team is asleep and I'm sitting alone in my mancave. Overlap will probably steer your hours to some extent, you need to have enough joint time so meetings can be scheduled etc. The flexibility is nice to do groceries or for hobbies, but on the other hand all the meetings end up being scheduled at the same time I should be putting the kids to bed, oops. Personally I find that my mood is very dependent on the amount of *verifiable* work I get done. If I'm stuck debugging, I feel miserable, even outside work. I know my managers understand how software development works but I also know that realistically at some point you're judged on your outputs.
|
# ¿ May 18, 2015 09:32 |
|
You'll be fine.
|
# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 21:03 |
|
Paolomania posted:The ability to eat poo poo and roll with the punches (while not loosing sight of my goals). ...and then being able to cash out on that come performance review time. Failing that, negotiating skills when looking for a new job.
|
# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 08:31 |
|
Google doesn't hire unlucky people. http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people.html
|
# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 21:34 |
|
Time for an honest talk with the people who originally poured their money into the startup? If you have the clout that you can get someone fired, I'd assume they'll listen to you. The thing that could gently caress you over there is that sometimes people stick their head in the sand and might not like the bearer of bad news. But from your description nothing short of a coup could substantially extend your time there.
|
# ¿ Jul 20, 2015 20:14 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:36 |
|
Achmed Jones posted:when the rubric is insufficient, you update it. One of the conundrums with rubrics is that sometimes a candidates' responses will want you to update the rubric, but or course if you do that then you could hardly call the rubric the fixed objective measure it's intended to be. I remember presenting a candidate with an impossible situation requiring various tradeoffs, and their first reaction was to ask if they could get help getting it done. I don't know what it says about us that none of the interviewers nor any of the past candidates had considered that answer.
|
# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 08:45 |