DEAR VALUED CONTRIBUTORS -- FRIDAY RANT THREAD FOR March 09, 2018 CS Career Questions |
- DEAR VALUED CONTRIBUTORS -- FRIDAY RANT THREAD FOR March 09, 2018
- Daily Chat Thread - March 09, 2018
- What is your favorite method for figuring out if an employer is any good?
- Women is CS, what have your experiences in the field been like?
- Got an offer of 78k with a 2k signing bonus in the LA area- what's the best starting point for negotiation?
- Is it bad to lose interest in a company due to their recruiting process?
- Job without a degree is a myth?
- What are some books/resources that you recommend and why?
- How do you deal with imposter syndrom?
- [OFFICIAL] Salary Sharing thread for EXPERIENCED DEVS :: March, 2018
- How do I deal with a colleague who's being dishonest/keeps stalling for time?
- Writing code off the top of your head?
- Is there a CTCI / leetcode equivalent for trivia-type questions?
- Hackathon Attendees: What Are Cool Things You've Seen At Mentor Booths That Have Helped You Solve Problems Or Helped You Relax?
- Is it easier to get a job in a specific city if you're currently living there?
- How to be a successful intern?
- What should be questions/criteria to judge stealth-mode startup?
- Can't get my non-technical/sales-focused manager to set clear requirements and commit to deadlines. Questions inside.
- Do any of you work rotational schedules?
- How meaningful are certificates from Coursera Courses?
- Less populated cities with good engineering opportunities?
- Planning to interview with at least 50 companies, am I crazy? Will update if this ever materializes.
- Acquiring USA visa for internship for Canadian Citizen
- Do you use Apostrophes or Quotation Marks?
- Grad School good gpa vs taking "hard/smart" courses
- Is It Ridiculous to Ask New Company to Buy Out Current Unvested Equity?
| DEAR VALUED CONTRIBUTORS -- FRIDAY RANT THREAD FOR March 09, 2018 Posted: 08 Mar 2018 11:08 PM PST AND NOW FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP DON'T STOP CODING! THIS IS THE RANT THREAD. IT IS FOR RANTS. CAPS LOCK ON, DOWNVOTES OFF, FEEL FREE TO BREAK RULE 2 IF SOMEONE LIKES SOMETHING THAT YOU DON'T BUT IF YOU POST SOME RACIST/HOMOPHOBIC/SEXIST BULLSHIT IT'LL BE GONE FASTER THAN A SPEEDING TRACER. (RANTING BEGINS AT MIDNIGHT EVERY FRIDAY, BEST COAST TIME. PREVIOUS FRIDAY RANT THREADS CAN BE FOUND HERE.) [link] [comments]  |
| Daily Chat Thread - March 09, 2018 Posted: 08 Mar 2018 11:08 PM PST Please use this thread to chat, have casual discussions, and ask casual questions. Moderation will be light, but don't be a jerk. This thread is posted every day at midnight PST. Previous Daily Chat Threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| What is your favorite method for figuring out if an employer is any good? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:02 AM PST Just curious, but are there any questions to ask, red-flags or green-flags to look out for, or other subtle things that might alert you to how good an employer treats its employees? [link] [comments]  |
| Women is CS, what have your experiences in the field been like? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:41 PM PST I have a year left until I get my CS degree, and am a 25 y.o. woman. I entered this field because I've always loved computers, and like many grew up tinkering with my dads old discarded machines. My school's CS department is pretty small, tight-knit, and supportive, so I haven't had many negative experiences here, aside from watching the few other girls in my classes drop out of the program like flies left and right. There still seems to be some negative attitude towards women I've noticed in circles outside of school, and at times it is quite taxing. I think some of the experiences of being a girl playing games online when I was younger really had an effect on me. You can't just avoid getting on mic/not mention your gender to avoid being treated differently and getting flamed when it comes to real life. Of course people behave much worse from the safety of their keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean that attitude is not a part of people's attitudes. I really hope this is just in my head. In professional experience, has your gender affected your day-to-day work experience? Or, men, have you noticed gender play a role? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:29 AM PST The industry is space and defense, and the following skills were listed in the job description:
Furthermore, I've been interning at this company for almost a year; I even worked with this team briefly last summer. Research is showing that the market average is around 80,100 for this industry and level. I was considering throwing away the 2k signing bonus and asking for a higher salary, but I'm not sure what number to ask for! Some people are saying I should ask for 85k, others are saying only 80k. Any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it bad to lose interest in a company due to their recruiting process? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 06:03 PM PST I was very interested in a summer internship with a smaller company. I met with an executive and they thought I was really sharp, so they told me the next steps would be a personality test and a take home project. After the take home project they explained the next step would be onsite coding interviews. But this wasn't the case. Turns out the next steps were to take an IQ test (Wonderlic test), and then a personality test. After this you had to wait for the results on the IQ test + Personality test to move onto the next phase. If you "passed" both test you get to move onto the take home coding challenge. If you pass that then you move onto the onsite interview. As soon as I found out the interview wasn't a personality test + take home project, but instead the first step was to take an IQ test I lost interest. I decided to pursue other opportunities with companies that don't have such requirements. Is this normal? [link] [comments]  |
| Job without a degree is a myth? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 03:39 PM PST I am a software engineer with 2 years programming experience, a portfolio, gitHub, a developer page on Google Play, and even a personal website (launching in a few days). I have been looking for a job for over a year and I have been applying to places all over the world but mainly local, but of course I have yet to get ONE interview. You read everywhere on the internet that if you have the skill and experience as a programmer that you can get a job without a degree (at the very least entry level). So why on earth am I not getting even a call back? I feel like I am a fairly charismatic guy, but I just can't seem to get a foot in the door. [link] [comments]  |
| What are some books/resources that you recommend and why? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 08:53 AM PST As the title says, what are some books that you've read or resources that you've used that helped you understand coding and software engineering alot better? Like what are some things that just stuck with you after reading X book or seeing Y website and it just helped guide you with coding. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you deal with imposter syndrom? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 04:02 PM PST I just got my first IT job after my 2 year degree and i am feeling overwhellemed. I have been working as a server administrator for 6 months and it is so much to learn and i feel like i am always making mistakes. I ask questions every day but i feel like things aren't coming to me the way they should and im starting to feel defeated. [link] [comments]  |
| [OFFICIAL] Salary Sharing thread for EXPERIENCED DEVS :: March, 2018 Posted: 08 Mar 2018 11:08 PM PST The young'ins had their chance, now it's time for us geezers to shine! This thread is for sharing recent offers/current salaries for professionals with 2 or more years of experience. Please only post an offer if you're including hard numbers, but feel free to use a throwaway account if you're concerned about anonymity. You can also genericize some of your answers (e.g. "Biotech company" or "Hideously Overvalued Unicorn"), or add fields if you feel something is particularly relevant.
Note that you only really need to include the relocation/signing bonus into the total comp if it was a recent thing. The format here is slightly unusual, so please make sure to post under the appropriate top-level thread, which are: US [High/Medium/Low] CoL, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, ANZC, Asia, or Other. If you don't work in the US, you can ignore the rest of this post. To determine cost of living buckets, I used this site: http://www.bestplaces.net/ If the principal city of your metro is not in the reference list below, go to bestplaces, type in the name of the principal city (or city where you work in if there's no such thing), and then click "Cost of Living" in the left sidebar. The buckets are based on the Overall number: [Low: < 100], [Medium: >= 100, < 150], [High: >= 150]. High CoL: NYC, LA, DC, SF Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, San Diego Medium CoL: Chicago, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Riverside, Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Austin, Raleigh Low CoL: Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Detroit, Tampa, St. Louis, Baltimore, Charlotte, Orlando, San Antonio, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Kansas City [link] [comments]  |
| How do I deal with a colleague who's being dishonest/keeps stalling for time? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:14 AM PST Hi guys. I have been working as a developer on a project for a customer for around 3 months now. For my company, it's relatively big in scope. We have a single outsourced, remote dev from India, who was assigned to the project 1½ months ago, but has been included in meetings and so on since the project's inception. It's a pretty important project as it gives us some much needed income after a rough quarter, which is why I'm a bit stressed about the success of the project. I seem to have problems communicating with this colleague. Our manager asked me to introduce him to the project, and the first task he'd start with. At this point I'm pretty annoyed with him. Here are some of the patterns that I've noticed in his behavior.
A month ago, I presented some software, that I worked on in my sparetime, for my boss and manager as something I thought would be a good idea to include on the project, which they approved. I say this, because I demonstrated a prototype that was well on its way to being done, and I understood its purpose about as well as you could. I felt it was a day or two's work away from being done. So we had a task created for implementing the software in the project. As the sprint starts, he says he wants to work on that task. He'd told me that he already had experience with the libraries and protocols involved in it, and I didn't want to let my ego get in the way, even though I wanted to finish my pet project myself, so I didn't say anything. As soon as the sprint starts, he asks me questions about how it's supposed to work/what the task actually is, and I end up a lot of time trying to explain it over a shitty Skype connection. He never takes notes or anything, so I often end up explaining the same thing multiple times. Once again, after multiple times of asking him to commit his code, so I can more easily understand his issues, he finally explains that he couldn't get my prototype to compile either, and commits a new repository with a less capable piece of software, where he seems to try to hide the fact that it doesn't actually work, but runs on hardcoded values. I don't really know what to do. I dislike him by now, because I know he's repeatedly lied to me and our manager about his progress. I've been asked to review his code to check whether it does what it needs to or not, which it absolutely doesn't. I'm wondering what the right thing is to do here, because I can't tell, if I'm actually the one who's been a shitty colleague or where things went wrong. I feel I've tried to be a good colleague by repeatedly stressing that he should not be afraid of bringing up problems at our daily scrums, and I've worked extra hours to try to help him with the tasks, but at this point I don't really care for working with him, because I feel like he's lying to save his own skin, and causing problems for everyone in doing so. [link] [comments]  |
| Writing code off the top of your head? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 04:02 PM PST So, I was telling a friend about a personal project I would be building to help get into a CS related (it's has programming, Human computer interaction design and IT) masters program and he was telling me that "unless you can write the app off the top of your head without using resources like books, Stackoverflow, W3, online docs, YouTube, etc you wouldn't stand a chance at ever getting into the program or even an programming/ IT job" Now, I can write some stuff of the top of my head in a few languages but if it's something I don't do often, I'll refer to old assignments, books or online resources. So, is coding off the top of your head really expected all the time in the real world? I know after years and years it gets easier but I can remember functions and how to use them if I use them rarely. I don't think I have the skills to be a software developer (plus I wasn't a CS major so that too) but I think with more experience I could definitely build some custom (nothing crazy obviously) webapps in JS or python if my job required me to (with help of course). [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a CTCI / leetcode equivalent for trivia-type questions? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:36 PM PST I keep missing these on the interviews that I get, and I think it's dinging me at a lot of companies. Any systematic method for preparing for these? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:07 PM PST Hey All-- I work at a start up that has been getting more involved in the hackathon scene over the past couple of years, and I recently took over organizing my company's mentor booth. For folks who have attended hackathons previously:
I am really hoping to find ways to get our mentors more engaged with students who are working on projects (or who are just taking a quick break from working on their projects). I'm open to any thoughts you have, even if they don't answer the exact questions I asked. Thanks for the help! :) [link] [comments]  |
| Is it easier to get a job in a specific city if you're currently living there? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 10:35 AM PST My wife and I finished college this past year, with her graduating with a Business Administration degree and me with a CS degree. She was able to get a promotion at her current retail job and I've been working part time at a couple places with little luck getting responses. Currently we are living in a small town in western Kentucky and we've contemplated using her experience that she's built up already to move to a bigger city. We have decided that we would like to live in the Dallas / fort worth area and today she landed a phone interview at a company in that area. As the title asks, my question is will this make it easier for me to land interviews / a job? I'm hoping that i can at least try to earn some side money while searching but i'd like some reassurance it'll help so that i can focus on building my resume more than having to search for another part-time position while looking. [link] [comments]  |
| How to be a successful intern? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:22 AM PST Hey guys, I recently signed an offer with NVIDIA for a summer internship. The job is a robotics / ML related role but my specific position is as a Embedded Systems Engineer. What I could be focusing on seems very broad- anywhere from developing kernel/user mode software to CPU scheduling to device drivers to communication middleware development to more high level ML related work. I'm a little nervous for this because while I have quite a bit of experience working as an intern (5 previous internships) but I always had low expectations so it wasn't hard to impress. I've also never worked as an embedded systems developer, all my previous jobs were in web development (I have more relevant experience through personal projects and other endeavors, however). I'm currently a sophomore with 4 more internships left after NVIDIA, and if possible I'd probably want to go back to work again at NVIDIA in the future- so I want to do the best I can do to prepare so I can also get a return offer. So I wanted to ask, what are some tips to be a successful intern? How do you go above and beyond their expectations? Also, I'd appreciate any tips for a first time embedded systems dev :D [link] [comments]  |
| What should be questions/criteria to judge stealth-mode startup? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:10 PM PST I am fresh graduate and having an offer equivalent to big 4 in my country, in terms of compensation and job security. I recently got interviews with a stealth-mode startup and got passed them. The final result is yet to come, but interviews were kinda positive, and I am sure to get in. They get me sign an NDA and shared their product video, team size, and so on. Their team include PhD co-founders, Masters and ex-big4 interns and full-timers as per LinkedIn (15-30 size).
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| Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:41 PM PST Hey guys, I'm in a pretty difficult situation that I'm not sure how to deal with. I'm a fairly recent (about 8 months in) technical lead, replacing the old CTO who left. The owner of the company (let's call him Joe) is an extremely competent salesman, but I'm having a really hard time communicating with him. Joe is almost always travelling, trying to get new customers. We're a small tech company, offering a B2B product for enterprise, so the sales process is very high touch. Unfortunately our product is no where near ready, and Joe keeps over promising features and timelines to customers. At the same time, he doesn't clearly communicate requirements to me and the team. He usually sends me hastily-written emails that contain half-baked ideas for features or something a customer mentioned in passing as a nice to have. It's often very hard to say what these features actually mean and how to translate them into proper technical requirements I can pass on to the team. I've tried having regular meetings with Joe to nail down these features and make them more specific, maybe even do some wireframing together, but he keeps cancelling these meetings, and when we do have them, I can't ever get him to commit to anything concrete. The tech team uses JIRA as our PM tool and I've tried to get Joe to use it to create tickets, but he only did so twice, and both times it was completely unclear what the actual issue was. After that he reverted to writing emails. With all these unclear requirements, it's super hard to actually plan anything and commit to deadlines. He keeps asking me when certain components/features of the product are finished, even though it hasn't even been clearly defined what the component entails. When I try to explain that to him, he gets annoyed, because he feels like he has already explained the requirements sufficiently. I've also tried to just design the features and components myself without his input, so that I can do proper estimates. Unfortunately this is very challenging, since I don't have enough insights into what the customers actually want - I'd really need Joe's input here. I've thought about joining him on more sales trips to talk to the customers first hand, but that'd take even more time from me for working with the dev team and I'm already swamped to begin with. As you can probably imagine, this is super frustrating, so I've started to become pretty defensive when it comes to deadlines, and Joe now just ignores them and promises the customers features even though I straight out say that it's impossible to finish them until that date. The situation is getting more and more tense and I really don't know how to deal with it. My concrete questions are:
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| Do any of you work rotational schedules? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 08:09 AM PST I'm in school. Almost all of my pervious jobs have had odd schedules. 7 days on 7 days off 12 hours a day 20 days on 10 days off on call. 4 days on 4 days off 12 hour shifts. I personally love these types of schedules but I'm guessing it's very uncommon in the tech industry. Is that accurate? [link] [comments]  |
| How meaningful are certificates from Coursera Courses? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:08 PM PST How much do Coursera courses mean to employers (more specifically in the UK)? I have BA in CS and want to work in deep learning field. We only had one course on machine learning at Uni, but it was introductory and only had two lectures on neural networks. I managed to get a job as "Junior Machine Learning Engineer", but the company I work at only focuses on Computer Vision and I would like to potentially be able to work in other areas (Speech recognition, robotics). To broaden my qualification, I was planning to do the "Deep learning Qualification" courses on Coursera, but they seem very rudimentary and boring so far. Will getting these certificates mean anything to my prospective employers or should I just watch some lectures online? [link] [comments]  |
| Less populated cities with good engineering opportunities? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 04:34 PM PST Hello, I'm a new grad currently with a job lined up in the bay, but long term I really don't want to stick to living and working in a super crowded and populus city. Eventually I'd like to move to a somewhat smaller area but ideally still have decent career prospects. I don't care at all about 'nightlife' or many of the attractions that come with the culture of living somewhere like SF or Seattle. I was really considering Utah as a prospect, but the main thing that defers me from living there is the pollution issues brought by the areas weather 'inversions' during the Winter, which sort of tempered my thoughts of moving there. Other areas I was considering were Minneapolis and North Carolina, but I was hoping to stay a little closer to the west side of America, though I wouldn't count east coast areas out. My question is if anyone has any suggestions for possible areas that meet some of my criteria above. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Planning to interview with at least 50 companies, am I crazy? Will update if this ever materializes. Posted: 09 Mar 2018 07:53 PM PST I'm actually slightly sadistic in that I kinda enjoy the thrill of an interview. I've actually not prepared at all for some interviews and just winged them (not entirely voluntary, I was busy). I found some interview to be really fun, I'd go to checkout a company, chat, and find out about cool (or boring) stuff they're building, almost like going on a date. I'm currently thinking of embarking on a journey to interview with around 50 companies, spanning across various areas of the field. I think it would be a pretty educational process: finding out what sort of things companies are working on: be it distributed systems, AI, blockchain, VR, and whatnot. I would be informing the companies I'm interviewing with that I''m looking for a position at least 6+ months out. What I'm uneasy with is: would you consider what I'm doing somewhat unethical? I.e. I'm "wasting" employer's time? To be fair, I fully intend to find and lock-down a new position, but I just thought it'd be interesting to do this. Since I've been on the other side of the table as an interviewer, I don't think I'm necessarily being malicious in what I'm thinking of: if a company has no qualms with interviewing dozens of candidates for a given position, I don't think they'd be in a position to criticize. The only problem is when I do get offers, I gotta some how string employers along to continue my enndeavour. Any thoughts? Cheers. [link] [comments]  |
| Acquiring USA visa for internship for Canadian Citizen Posted: 09 Mar 2018 10:59 AM PST Hi, I received an offer from a mid/large company in the states to be a software engineering intern. However, I am canadian and the company said they don't directly help with the visa of interns (they help with full times) and said the school should be able to handle it. I went to the school today to ask but they said since the job isnt directly from the job portal, the career centre cant help me directly apparently. Has anyone been in a situation like this and know how to get a visa or know if there's a good chance for me to get a visa? My start date is in 2.5 months. I would really like to work for this company. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Do you use Apostrophes or Quotation Marks? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 07:43 PM PST I am wondering everyone's personal preference or is there a good one to use over the over? Shouldn't you use quotation marks because you can still use apostrophes in the function? PS: This is for printing. I don't know if it's just for Python though because that is the language I am learning right now. [link] [comments]  |
| Grad School good gpa vs taking "hard/smart" courses Posted: 09 Mar 2018 07:38 AM PST Hey, sorry for titlegore but basically I plan on going to graduate school for CS. I plan on attending hopefully UofT in Canada and I'm coming from not a very well known school. In third or fourth year of my school you need to take and complete electives/liberals to graduate. Basically I'm wondering if it's better to just focus on the schedule that's given to me by my school IE. One liberal per semester then chose cs/math courses, or take all my harder courses before fourth year, then in fourth year just take stupid easy courses to secure a high GPA because UofT states they want a 3.3 gpa in your LAST year of study, So do they look at your courses as well as marks? [link] [comments]  |
| Is It Ridiculous to Ask New Company to Buy Out Current Unvested Equity? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 06:42 AM PST My current company was recently acquired with our equity being bought out in cash. I have half of my equity vested & unexercised which will be paid out in cash next month, and from there my equity that will vest will be paid out in cash. It just so happened that before our acquisition I'd had recruiters from a couple Big 4 companies reach out to invite me to interview that I accepted. In my salary negotiations would it be absurd to state that I'd be leaving a lot of money on the table by leaving my current company, and that having it bought out as part of my starting bonus would be a guarantee acceptance of an offer? I've spoken with a few close friends at my current company who have stated that can be common in a situation like this, but I'm really not certain. Anyone have any advice? [link] [comments]  |
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