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Why do I keep forgetting the golden rule? Never read twitter comments, especially on a Jezza post.
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Nov 1, 2019 10:29
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Eschenique posted:Where's the magic money tree Jezza! Where is it!? "You say no billionaires, Jemery but you yourself have up to 3 millian poonds!" I feel like people just don't understand how much more money a billion is than a million.
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Nov 1, 2019 10:32
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bump_fn posted:swinson must know that shes just out there to split the vote? does she care? Yes, about herself.
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Nov 1, 2019 13:21
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Momentum volunteering signup form: https://forms.gle/rSApq7hYfYSKzKzg6 (I don't think it matters which team you tick on there, the teams are all organised within Slack from what I can tell). You'll get a few emails back with stuff to sign (like a data agreement for GDPR presumably, and so on), then a Slack invite email. There are teams for photo and video production, research, computer touching, calling, texting, so don't worry too much about whether you have particularly applicable skills! I will say that so far the Slack has been a very positive space and seems to be fairly loose with rules and such so if you feel like you might be interested, then it could be worth a look. You'd also be able to lurk for a while if you fancy it without really getting involved in discussions. While I appreciate that might not help people suffering anxiety about helping out (and that's okay!), I figured I'd mention it. As others in the thread have said - from each according to their ability.
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Nov 6, 2019 12:13
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Shakespearean Beef posted:lib dems [...] personable and dynamic Lmao
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Nov 6, 2019 20:30
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Failed Imagineer posted:Very motivated to vote Tory by this video of Alexander Jòris dePfeffermint Bonestorm walking extremely slowly through his house I feel like he wanted this to be set to Clubbed to Death. (in anticipation of his new benefits policy)
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Nov 7, 2019 12:08
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Miftan posted:While you're right, it's a double standard since nobody who criticises him for going on Iranian TV would bat an eye lid if he went on US TV, a country that has done much worse to far more people. The media there ranges between 'absolute denial' and 'somehow worse than Middle Eastern state sponsored propoganda' as well. But the Middle East (all of it) is The Bad Guys and "we" (the UK and the USA which are broadly the same) are The Good Guys so this is worse.
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Nov 8, 2019 12:29
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twoot posted:For those that signed up to the secret Momentum volunteering form - how long did it take to get a reply? It was just a few automated reply emails for me, giving me stuff to read and accept - then it emailed me a Slack invite and I signed up and joined that. Maybe it wasn't automated, it was just someone really on the ball?
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Nov 11, 2019 13:38
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Bundy posted:As someone that works in IT, is a programmer and understands security in IT, electronic voting is a catastrophically bad idea. Same. The Nissan Leaf when it came out had an app so you could remotely turn on AC, lights, lock and unlock, etc. It turned out that the only security on the messages from the app to the car was that the device making the request needed to send the VIN to authenticate itself. A VIN is a) public information and b) usually displayed on the loving windscreen of the car. Imagine this but for voting.
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Nov 11, 2019 16:51
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Continuity RCP posted:Thanks for this. I get that a lot from people with qualifications coming out their ears and it's intensely frustrating. I'm not great at maths stuff but I touch computers for a living. While I do have a degree, it's in something intensely unrelated to the job I do (as is the BTEC National Diploma that got me into university in the first place). There's a lot of good resources online for self-teaching code stuff if you'd like to pick it up with a view to switching careers. If you're interested I could maybe try and effort post a bit about how I got into it and recommend some stuff?
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Nov 12, 2019 13:03
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Probably bad form but re-posting this just so this doesn't get lost at the bottom of the last page, in case it's helpful:Continuity RCP posted:Thanks for this. I get that a lot from people with qualifications coming out their ears and it's intensely frustrating. I'm not great at maths stuff but I touch computers for a living. While I do have a degree, it's in something intensely unrelated to the job I do (as is the BTEC National Diploma that got me into university in the first place). There's a lot of good resources online for self-teaching code stuff if you'd like to pick it up with a view to switching careers. If you're interested I could maybe try and effort post a bit about how I got into it and recommend some stuff?
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Nov 12, 2019 13:09
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biglads posted:quote is NOT edit *Opens skills wallet* *Moths*
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Nov 12, 2019 21:26
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 Coding job effort post incoming Sorry if this is weirdly structured or just generally rambling and not very helpful. If that is the case the discord has a #robot-prole-call channel for (I think) tech discussion, feel free to ping or just PM me on Discord (SurpriseTRex#2646) to talk about this if you have specific questions, I'm more than happy to help because more coders means more people in cushy office jobs that pay well and fewer people doing lovely jobs they hate. If I don't reply it's just that I'm busy and will get back to you eventually (yell at me if I don't). CGI Stardust posted:Would appreciate something like this, yes please, even if just a Discord channel. Just resumed an MSc Comp Sci (after a year off for MH issues) as a career transition but have no idea what the current best technologies are or how to get into a coding job in the UK as a mid-30s dipshit Bobby Deluxe posted:What I would want is more specifics about "here's how you get a qualification that coding jobs will accept" or "here's how to get a coding job circumventing not having a qualification." The hard part is that first job. Once you've got experience, the second job is significantly easier to get because you have proof you've at some point been hired for coding. Qualifications don't matter a huge amount. I've got a degree but it's in Film and CGI, and I have a BTEC National Diploma in Game Development which was really just 3D modelling and game art. Each of those courses had a single module touching on code. C++ in college nearly put me off coding forever, and I didn't even consider it again until my Python module at university and it made much more sense but the module wasn't very in-depth. I also 'helped' my friend develop a game in C# for a Game Jam (I watched and/or typed what he said to type). Most Computer Science education focuses on the theoretical side of things - algorithms, CPU architecture, data structures and so on. While this stuff is really interesting and useful in some cases, it's not really the most direct route to "learning just enough to get paid to code". The stuff that becomes more relevant in the job are things like "writing code so that people can maintain this part of the overall system for years or decades", "using version control", "unit testing", "separating bits of code that handle totally different things into their own discrete modules". A lot of that is just stuff you pick up as you go along anyway, and often isn't taught on CS courses at all. You won't usually be implementing sort algorithms from scratch, you'll just use your language's list.Sort() method and be done with it. It's a great time to be someone who can code. The skills are in actual demand. There's barely a day that goes by without a recruiter reaching out to me with jobs on offer now I have a few years under my belt, and while a lot of recruiters are poo poo or scummy, they get a commission for placing you in a position so it is in their best interests to get you a job. My advice for the kind of bare minimum you'd need to get a job: 1) Pick a Language to Learn It doesn't matter that much, but for employability's sake, it's worth limiting the choice to a few big ones. Other languages are pretty simple to pick up once you understand the underlying concepts anyway. If you really can't pick one, I recommend C#. It's a very employable language and useful for a lot of different things. - Java and C#/.Net are big in the enterprise world but also used in small to medium businesses (at least C# for sure). I picked C# because I really only knew any of Python and C#, and indeed.co.uk just had a lot more C#/.Net jobs in the East Midlands and that was good enough for me. - Python is similar but less popular in the big enterprise world and seems more popular with smaller, trendier companies. One big advantage if you don't know how to code already is that it's got a VERY beginner-friendly syntax with no weird semicolons or strange brackets flying around, and keeping your code nicely structured is literally part of the syntax. It's also mega-popular in the Data Science world, so I'd recommend taking a look if that intrigues you. - Javascript. While originally a language to run in the browser to make monkey gifs dance when you moused over them, it's now possible to write JS for server-side code too, which means it's as general-purpose as the rest of them. This is used everywhere, but a lot of the JS-heavy jobs will be mostly front-end. React and Angular, which you may have heard of, are Javascript web frameworks. - Honourable Mention: if you want to get into game development, then C++ is your friend. It's THE Games Industry-standard programming language, and it's going to be a long time before that changes. You can also pick C# and get stuck in if you want to work on stuff in the Unity engine which tends to be smaller indie games or mobile stuff. If you only want to make games as an indie or hobbyist there's a ton of other stuff you can use, see the Forums' own Game Making Thread. 2) Learn the Language Do some poking around on https://www.codecademy.com. There are 'introduction to X' for each of the languages above, as well as 'skill paths' for some of them, which are more focused on guiding you through a dummy project. At minimum you'll want to understand variables and types, functions/methods (same thing), classes and inheritance, loops, and if statements. Don't feel too dumb if you still get held up with syntax, I constantly google basic things every single day. Other good stuff to learn if you understand the above list: - A framework for building websites - if you pick C# to look into ".Net Core MVC". Python has Django, JS has React and Angular. Java I'm not really sure. - How to set up and read/write to/from a database (like SQLite, MySQL, or Mongo). Sites like HackerRank and Advent of Code can be good to practice using the language too but can fall into that Computer Science trap of being very algorithm-focused and leave you feeling like an idiot because you didn't know the best way to calculate the first 120 prime numbers or whatever. 3) Build Something A lot of people online recommend stuff like "get involved in an open-source project" which I always thought was a cool idea but didn't really know how to do that, or what that meant, or which project. If you already feel confident that you could do this then I'm sure it'll look good on a CV but if you're like me don't worry, just build something of your own. Doesn't really matter what. Command-line calculator, short text-based Choose Your Own Adventure with branching decisions, a dumbass twitter bot, something that pulls the temperature from 4 different weather APIs and averages it out. Learn the bits you need as you go. Put it on Github (demonstrates you understand Git well enough to just about get by, even if you don't really 'get it'), and if it's something like a website or API then you can even look into how to get it hosted somewhere online so there's a 'live' version in the wild. 4) Apply for Jobs Apply for every Junior or Graduate developer job, anything that looks remotely entry-level. Treat the requirements in the job posting as a wishlist, not a baseline. Impostor Syndrome is the name for feeling like you're not good enough at a thing, and it still affects me after 6 years. You will feel like you should ignore my advice and not apply for that job with a few too many requirements on it. Just ignore that and apply. Worst that happens is you get no response and wasted 5 minutes, which is also quite likely even if you met every single requirement they listed anyway. Companies are bastards sometimes. Most postings will be from recruiters, and some (most) of the sites will want you to upload a CV but also go through the tedious process of filling in lovely forms anyway. Because of this, eventually, you'll make it into a ton of recruiting company databases via osmosis, and at some point in your career recruiters will start reaching out to you with jobs instead of you having to go looking for them - but probably not for your first job. If you have anything relevant (like an MSc or previous IT/coding knowledge) play it up on your CV. List any of the random poo poo you built in step 3 on here too, along with the Github URL and a quick description of how it works or what it does. I don't honestly know if anyone ever looks at personal projects but it can't hurt? These projects will become less important as your career progresses, but while you have no provable coding experience, I feel like it's worth the effort. Brush up on common interview questions. There will be lists, blog posts, and articles online about them. It tends to be almost language trivia - in C#-land we get a lot like "what is an abstract class?", "what does the override keyword do?". These will differ a lot based on the language used in the job. Most job searches I've done follow the pattern Talk to Recruiter -> Screening -> In-Person Interview -> Offer/Decline/Silence. "Screening" here tends to be one of three things: - Phone interview to make sure you've not just changed the name on someone else's CV and that you can at least answer basic questions. - Take-home coding assignment which can vary wildly in difficulty and the amount of time they expect you to put in. The last one I had was to make a shopping cart app that runs in a terminal window, making sure it totals the items correctly and can do offers like 2 for 1. - Online code editor with some number of small tasks to do, usually timed but sometimes not. This is basically like doing a few Codecademy lessons. "Calculate whether a year is a leap year given these rules" and that sort of thing. In interviews, I played up the fact that while inexperienced, I'm a fast learner and willing to get stuck into picking up bits that I don't know yet. Pushed the whole ' self-taught' angle. Honestly, people should expect Junior developers to be pretty green and need hand-holding a bit. I assume those of you changing careers will have some stuff to talk about from those jobs or MSc courses and so on. Don't be too shy about telling them your reasons for switching careers either - I found that when people asked about my pivot from film degree to coding, people were just interested, not "testing me". Thankfully, I've never been hit with one of those horrible-sounding whiteboard interviews that I hear about a lot online where you're asked to brainstorm a breadth-first search over a binary tree without a computer or the internet (and I'd have to take a minute to think about how to do that even now). I think those interviews are more of a US thing. Slight tangent: I've also found that while it can be hard if it's a job you really want, the less I treat an interview like an interview the better results I get. I try to mentally reframe it as "I'm going in to chat to them about this job and how it suits me" instead of being a grilling that I'm being subjected to. It might be that I'm more comfortable doing that now that I'm more experienced though so I don't know whether this bit is helpful advice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's a lot of words really just to say like "learn the basics of a language, maybe make something interesting with it, apply for a lot of fuckin' jobs even ones you think you're unqualified for, blag your way in as hard as you can, and don't worry - you'll pick it up as you go." I hope some of this is helpful to at least one person. 
Surprise T Rex fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 02:11
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Superterranean posted:... And to continue the cooking analogy - it helps you appreciate what you do and don't like, and what's hard and what's not, about other people's programs. Which is why I'm now incredibly angry all the time at websites with 1mb of content and 20mb of tracking Javascript or poo poo like this
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Nov 13, 2019 09:41
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Deketh posted:This was super interesting, thanks. I'm 33 and desperate to change careers at the mo, but paralysed by fear and indecision. Gonna seriously consider this route It's definitely worthwhile. It's not always the most exciting job ever because sometimes the thing the company REALLY needs right now is yet another webpage that displays boring grids of information but it's usually at least interesting. The pay is great, and at least at most of the places I've worked, the offices are very relaxed. Even if you're not that interested in computers or coding though, it's at least a well-paid valuable marketable skill you can pick up exactly like any other job you don't like doing. There is also A Thread and an entire subforum for IT/coding stuff (because of course there is, SA has everything). I don't post in the newbie thread much much but it has some helpful advice, though I find a lot of the discussion to be extremely US-centric. e: snype 
Surprise T Rex fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 10:47
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coffeetable posted:Great job for putting this together, but I think it falls into the trap that most every career advice does: giving the advice that did well by you personally. Yeah, I felt this a lot when I was writing it but couldn't really put my finger on what was wrong. I mostly avoided talking about things like bootcamps and apprenticeships because I have no experience of either and honestly couldn't tell you the good ones from the scams. Boot camps tend to focus on getting you up to speed in Javascript from nothing to "I can make a website" though, so can be good. Some of them even have guarantees of work placements after they're done. As for apprenticeships, a friend of mine started as an apprentice and recommends it massively. I'd say to only do a single 'level' of an apprenticeship though if that's still a thing, another friend started as an apprentice and kept getting convinced by the company to do the 'next level up' or whatever, which meant they could basically just keep paying him less. Three years into both our careers he was earning a good £10k less than I was for basically the same work.
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Nov 13, 2019 11:32
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Deketh posted:Is there much/any freelance work for coders? Do you get many people working remotely? What's the office culture like? Sorry if these are dumb questions, just trying to get a sense of the field compared to my current. Freelance work: there can be if you're good at marketing yourself. Everyone needs a website and most people don't need one that's much more complicated than a shiny brochure. Things like SEO and social media marketing also play well in this sort of work, if you can position yourself as someone who can do branding and website design/creation. There's also space for more complicated 'web app' style website development for clients, or developing tools for integrating some of their disparate systems in some way - importing Shopify orders into some accounting software or similar. If you get the right clients and market yourself well you can easily charge silly money for incredibly basic work because you can price based on "value provided to client" rather than "value of time spent" - like multiple thousands for what amounts to a pretty HTML/CSS template you bought for £30 and edited slightly. Sort of related to freelance work: contract work is big in the industry. Often there are a few contractors embedded at a company for a temporary boost in resources while a big project happens. You'll see these advertised as 3 or 6 months "with the possibility of extension" but every software project overruns and every contractor I've ever met says that they almost always get at least one contract extension from each company they go to. This can pay £300 per day at the lower end, maybe £600 a day at the higher end (of course depending on where you live and work). Bigger money for the same work but you're self-employed so no pension, you have to pay an accountant or sort out your own self-assessment tax. There's also the potential for gaps which can presumably make life more stressful. Remote work: It's not like "every other company" or anything, but it exists and I feel like it's becoming more common. Some companies have started bribing people with 2-3 days per week remote, some are full time remote (after onboarding in the office for a couple of weeks). Even lots of jobs that don't really provide 'remote work' still allow working from home on an ad-hoc basis if you need to be in for a boiler service or your car doesn't start or something. If you can get a remote job with a London salary outside of London you're probably set. Office culture varies wildly. One of my previous jobs was very chill despite being an Experian subsidiary - turn up at whatever time, leave at whatever time, as long as the work gets done, lots of joking around, IT's "lock your goddamn computer" security policy was enforced through the mechanism of "if someone can get onto your PC and send out an email about cookies, you have to buy cookies for everyone". On the flip-side, my friends have in the past gone to work for a company that requires a full suit and tie every day and don't allow you to have an 'in-between' beard so you either have to have full facial hair or be clean-shaven. One of their 'benefits' is that they dry-clean the suits they force you to wear. I avoid companies like this, personally.
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Nov 13, 2019 12:11
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RockyB posted:...Only £30k for a coding bootcamp!" stuff with a dose of reality. It can work but you need the right mindset for, and frankly a good dose luck to make it in an oversaturated global market... I do feel like the bootcamp things are churning out a lot of candidates with the basic "Javascript plus Angular or React" skillset which is probably oversaturating that specific niche, but honestly "oversaturated" feels like a bad word to use to describe my experience as a dev. I'm nothing special, skills-wise, and I've been able to move jobs quite a lot without too much hassle so far. Perhaps that's just the C#/.Net scene in Nottingham, or perhaps I'm just very very lucky, but it feels like companies are constantly hiring developers. It also feels like a 'safe' career to get into, because while a lot of jobs are at risk of being replaced with robots, software developers building bespoke tools are probably a likely candidate for being one of the harder jobs to automate. The burnout stuff is different though and definitely a real problem, but again, capitalism and "you must work or you will starve".
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Nov 13, 2019 12:29
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Sorry if any of this "arguing in favour of coding" comes across as argumentative or defensive, I'm trying not to discount other people's experiences or feelings on it.  RockyB posted:1.) Low barrier to entry doesn't mean that everyone is cut out for it These are definitely true. Coding is a skill anyone can learn, but being a software developer is only partially coding. A good chunk of the job is navigating incredibly vague requirements, tracking down bugs that seem impossible, working out why your thing won't deploy properly, estimating stuff wrong by an order of magnitude and then getting stressed that you're taking too long, learning new stuff constantly because everything you work on is going to involve a set of slightly different skills and knowledge, and just plain having the sheer patience to smash your head into understanding why something that SHOULD work just... isn't. It's not something everyone would enjoy or want to do for sure, but again, I suppose neither is telesales or insurance claim management and at least this pays pretty good. Surprise T Rex fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Nov 13, 2019 |
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Nov 13, 2019 13:11
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Bobby Deluxe posted:My friend who regularly programs stuff in Java both for work and hobby projects said Unreal is mostly Java. As for Unity, the documentation has (or had two years ago) the option to view examples in c# and java, and when creating code blocks the dropdown lets you do it in C# or Java (although I might be misremembering and it's actually JS, which I know is a distant bastard cousin). . Yeah as Private Speech says, in Unity that's Javascript (or more accurately, UnityScript), which is no longer officially supported by Unity. As for Unreal, I wasn't aware of any way to write code in either JS or Java for that - officially I think it only supports C++ and Blueprint which is a kind of visual coding language. C# and Unity is a great combo for making games because it does a lot of the complicated stuff for you, but it can be a bit weird to get used to the workflow at first. Lua and LOVE2D is also a good shout if you want something super lightweight and easy to get to grips with, Lua is a very simple language, although in many ways not very similar to other languages you might want to learn later. Check out the Making Games thread (plus its Discord) and the related-but-more-technical Game Development thread for a lot of helpful info.
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Nov 14, 2019 08:35
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OwlFancier posted:
New costume unlocked. (Why is he always in boxing gloves?) 
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Nov 14, 2019 16:53
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Inhaled some of my coffee giggling at this, you bastard.
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Nov 18, 2019 11:47
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Spangly A posted:somebody please tell me there's a loving mirror I'm seeing a lot of talk that the Raab bit is a fake.
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Nov 19, 2019 16:58
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Co(ngratulations/mmiserations), comrade.
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Nov 26, 2019 18:31
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^^^^^ I can make my own blank PDFs thanksIgotadigbick posted:I hope when Corbs gets in our media is taken out and replaced with something less corrupt, given a good wash you know? New from Labour: Leveson anti-bias spray. Bang, and the smear is gone.
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Nov 27, 2019 13:41
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