Big 4 Discussion - April 18, 2018 CS Career Questions |
- Big 4 Discussion - April 18, 2018
- Daily Chat Thread - April 18, 2018
- Company wasted my time with technical prep
- Going back to school to study CS
- Going for an MS CS degree: would turning down a funded offer in favor of a potentially better fit be a terrible mistake?
- How often do programmers work in a language they don't like in a full time job?
- Do most companies allow you to install Linux on work computers?
- I got the job I wanted
- Anyone ever been invited on-site despite a sub-par technical phone screen?
- Is it bad to lie about my current location?
- school choice?
- One of the senior programmers in the team is adamantly harassing me and I don't know what to do.
- Is it better to take more money now or work for JP Morgan?
- Can I apply for an internship that opens to undergraduates as a graduate student?
- I think it might be impossible for me to try to find a job while school is in session. Does anyone else feel the same?
- Seattle vs Minneapolis?
- Co-founding a startup with a funded team vs joining a large corporate engineering environment?
- Semi-public person hoping for a fresh start, concerned about online reputation
- My day to day experience with programming...
- Leaving BigCo on the cusp of reaching Sr/L5 a mistake? + Portland (OR) Compensation
- As a self taught developer, how can I ensure my career doesn’t stagnate?
- School choice different person
- Majors to work in Tech
- How much does being employed matter during job search?
- Is your job easy or hard? Why?
- What should I know before considering a contract position?
| Big 4 Discussion - April 18, 2018 Posted: 18 Apr 2018 12:07 AM PDT Please use this thread to have discussions about the Big 4 and questions related to the Big 4, such as which one offers the best doggy benefits, or how many companies are in the Big 4 really? Posts focusing solely on Big 4 created outside of this thread will probably be removed. Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk. This thread is posted each Sunday and Wednesday at midnight PST. Previous Big 4 Discussion threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| Daily Chat Thread - April 18, 2018 Posted: 18 Apr 2018 12:07 AM PDT 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]  |
| Company wasted my time with technical prep Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:03 AM PDT I applied to a mid-size company (with decent glass door reviews) and got a phone screen. The guy seemed interested and asked if I'd like to do an online coding interview. He told me to spend the weekend studying specific x, y, and z libraries so that I would be ready. I spent all day Saturday and Sunday working on the stuff he told me and then I didn't hear back. When I called after 7 days to follow up he told me that they had already hired someone else. What a waste of time. Is this sort of thing to be expected? [link] [comments]  |
| Going back to school to study CS Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:35 PM PDT Hi cscareerquestions. I've been lurking on this sub for about 2 years now. I've always been fascinated with the variety of threads that get posted here on a daily basis from success stories of getting the dream company/position/pay to horror companies/workmates. Just a little backstory about myself. In my early twenties, I was a nursing student. went through each block(that's how semesters are called in nursing school). Studied med surg, obgyn, pediatrics and psych. The first year of nursing school was more like an intro to the world of nursing and the second year is where the real nursing experience starts. Having said that. I've realized during my final block(acute/ICU rotation) that i'm not cut out for this.. i can't work like this.. and always caught asking myself "is this it?". Ultimately, I failed my last block(needed 76 only had 75.6). I could've gone back to retake only the last block but decided not to. It may not be the wisest decision at that time but I felt I was already out before even i failed. A lot of people know nursing is a noble vocation but it was just something I don't want to pursue and do in the long run. However, during my time in nursing I've always been interested in patient data(vitals, medication, imaging, patient history and what not). Now I'm 27 and looking to go back to school and study CS. I know i'm kind of late entering this field.. but like what Tony Soprano said "what are you gonna do?".. So i guess, the purpose of posting this thread is.. I just want to say Thank you to all that contribute to this relatively small yet active subreddit. It means a lot those who want to pursue a future on CS just like me. Cheers to all. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:34 PM PDT tl;dr: I'm going back to school for an MS in Computer Science degree to explore a potential career in academia and also give myself more time to mature for a better chance of doing well in industry. I'm trying to decide between a fully-funded offer at Colorado State University, versus an offer at Georgia Tech with no funding that I had a better "gut feel" about, ignoring the cost. I'm trying my best to choose a school while minimizing my regrets, and I thought people here might have advice that would help me decide. As background, I got my BA in Computer Science from a small liberal-arts college two years ago and started working the summer after graduation at a large software company. I found the learning curve overwhelming and decided my interests and personality were probably more suited to academia, so I quit last summer after working there for a year. Since then, I've devoted the past year to investigating, applying to, and visiting grad schools. I decided I wasn't ready to commit to 5-6 years in grad school, so I applied strictly to MS programs with the hope that I could easily pivot back to industry or on to a Ph.D. depending on how my interests evolve over the next two years. Now, Georgia Tech (in Atlanta, GA) and Colorado State University (in Fort Collins, CO) are my top two picks among the schools I've been accepted to. CSU is offering me funding via a TA position, which would fully cover tuition and provide an $1875/month stipend, while Georgia Tech is not guaranteeing any funding. However, after visiting both schools in person this month, I feel like I'd be slightly happier at Georgia Tech if money wasn't an issue. GATech feels like a better fit in terms of my research interests (especially computer graphics), and as a top 10 CS university in the US, I'm more optimistic about the job prospects and networking opportunities they would provide. I was also impressed by the beautiful weather during my visit this month. After flying down from Wisconsin, the city and campus felt like a botanical garden by comparison, and I felt like the warm climate would be good for my mental health. I don't feel like I'd be making a bad choice with CSU, even though the school didn't "grab" me the way GATech did. I grew up about an hour away from Fort Collins, so I'm more familiar with the area. CSU doesn't offer any graduate research in graphics, but I am interested in their computer vision research group, and the small group of CS faculty and students seemed close-knit. The weather in Fort Collins is generally nice, but I had the misfortune of visiting during a spring snowstorm, which I think subconsciously turned me off of the school a little bit. Would it be better to take my funded offer at CSU, or try to make Georgia Tech work? They give funding priority to Ph.D. students, but the professors I talked to said there's a minority of MS students who get TA or RA positions. I have several semesters of experience grading assignments for CS classes as an undergrad, as well as experience tutoring students one-on-one, which I'm hoping will make me a more attractive TA candidate. I'd most likely need to take out student loans (which I didn't need to do for undergrad), but I'm hoping my job prospects after graduation would be good enough that paying the loans back wouldn't be too big of a strain. Thank you all for any advice! [link] [comments]  |
| How often do programmers work in a language they don't like in a full time job? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 12:09 PM PDT I recently applied for a Graduate Java Developer role and I've made it to the on site interview stage. However, I don't really enjoy Java. Issue is I'm in a race against time to secure a job but I don't want to put myself in a position where I am working with a technology I don't really enjoy for 2 - 5 years of my early career. I've heard of situations where developers are using a language they don't like in their full time jobs and use a language they love for personal projects. I wanted to know how true this is and any other things I should consider to solve my dilemma. Extra Context: I'm currently undertaking a Master's degree in CS. My main interest lie in Web applications and back end systems. Its not that I hate Java as a language but I hate its ecosystem. I had an assignment this winter where I had to develop an enterprise grade web application with Java and Glassfish and I had a miserable experience getting all my frameworks and dependencies to work together, I found documentation difficult to read (which I myself consider as one of the most important skills a developer should have), debugging errors was a nightmare because most of the time I couldn't tell where they were coming from (whether it's in my dependencies, Glassfish or my code itself). Point is developing web applications in Java is a lot more frustrating compared to Node.js which I am used to. So far, I am currently learning C# because there are a lot of good things in its ecosystem that I like. I hope this didn't turn out to be a rant about my experience developing web applications with Java. I just need some advice in solving my dilemma. [link] [comments]  |
| Do most companies allow you to install Linux on work computers? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 11:40 AM PDT I'm doing a Software Engineering Internship this summer at a large Fin-tech company (I imagine the company uses Windows much like most other fin-tech firms). Throughout the school year I use linux full time and am orders of magnitude more efficient in a linux environment than Windows, or even OSX for that matter. Is it normal for Fin-tech companies to allow you to install a different OS on the work computer/laptop, especially for development purposes (I'm doing a bit of market research as well)? I'm not one to impose on others to use particular operating systems but I find it incredibly hard to develop anything in a Windows environment. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 09:50 AM PDT Thanks for everyone's help. I was so focused on an academia job for the longest time and wasn't able to get it (I find out now it's most likely because I didn't go there). I changed my scope, still got rejections but one company actually flew me out for final rounds and I just heard back I got it! I'm ecstatic because it's in the field that I want too! [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone ever been invited on-site despite a sub-par technical phone screen? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:24 PM PDT During the technical phone screen, I usually get an easy/medium leetcode problem I've seen before and can solve quickly. This usually results in being invited on-site for a loop. I've had experiences where I've gotten stuck on test cases that wouldn't pass and even they couldn't figure out a solution; I've had nearly perfect syntax that was deemed "unacceptable pseudocode" despite having correct logic and talking out the solution; I've had communication difficulties due to accents/poor connection. In all of these cases, I was never invited on-site. I feel like these were all external factors that prevented me from performing the best... you would think they'd see the potential and still offer an invitation on-site? My question is: Do you always need to solve the problem with flying colors to be invited on-site? Can you talk about some of your experiences? I'd like to think if I was ever working through a solution with a candidate, I wouldn't be that anal about their code as long as their syntax was close, logic was correct, and they could articulate a solution... thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it bad to lie about my current location? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:22 PM PDT Hello everyone! I'm a senior in college at the moment and will be graduating next month. I'm hoping to relocate to NYC shortly afterward. Would it bad to lie about my current location? I've left it out of my resume, but I can't help but wonder if not being in NYC is hurting my chances of being considered for positions. How terrible would it be to lie about where I'm currently located? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:12 PM PDT umich vs ut austin, umich ends up being a little more expensive. [link] [comments]  |
| One of the senior programmers in the team is adamantly harassing me and I don't know what to do. Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:54 PM PDT So, there is this one guy on my team, pretty senior. He has been working for this company for 4 years now, prior to that he was a mathematical quant for 20 years. He is a Chemical engineer who studied in some really awesome colleges. But frankly speaking, I don't feel like he has a firm grip on the fundamentals of CS. In contrast, I have been at my current job for 6 months now. I went to mediocre to good colleges for my Bachelors and Masters both in computer science. This is my first job after college. I have had some friction with other members of my team initially, but they are all very much pleased with my performance. Even during the performance, my boss told me that he is amazed by the work I did being a fresh out of college student. Now, I absolutely don't get along with this senior programmer in my team. We both are Indians and he almost sees me as my parent or something. He literally behaves with me as my dad behaves with me. Also, I am pretty sure that he knows that I went to a mediocre college in India. This guy went to like a top 6 college in India. He made me do a project initially and I struggled a bit, cause we have a lot of in-house infrastructure and I was really new to this job. I couldn't Google search how to use it. So I developed a buggy solution. He was very angry at me. The next project he gave me, was a high profile project and I literally had two days to deliver it. It was crazy. I was running out of memory, I was transferring a huge amount of data from a system to one of our databases. I had to transform the data. It was chaotic. Halfway through I realized that my transformations were CPU intensive and hence I had to move from a threading-based solution to a multi-process solution. He was vocally against the idea. I profiled my code and proved him wrong. He then told me to run my multi-threaded solution on multiple machines and deliver the solution as it is. I refused to do that because the machines we were running on were not my team's machines they belonged to another team. Whenever my process was taking up too much memory, I had to kill it using PS and AWK. Doing it on multiple machines would be impossible for me to manage. Finally, we delivered a bunch of reports that we were supposed to deliver in addition to two more "services" that I had to deliver. There were bugs in the system I delivered. There was too much pressure on me. This guy was saying mean things to me because of the bugs and I snapped at him. I shouted at him like crazy. That night I wrote an email to my boss and my grand-boss asking me to transfer to a different team. My boss read the email before my grand-boss and he scheduled a meeting. I had second thoughts and rescinded the email before my grand-boss could read it and told my boss that I would like to continue in his team because I like the projects that I am working on and frankly I am loving the projects that I am working on. Now after the incident, this guy started harassing me. In the daily stand up meetings we have a timer and everyone gets to speak for 3 minutes. When my turn came, he gave me 1 minute to speak. He did this for a few days and my boss stepped in and said: "He gets 3 minutes like everyone else, if not more than 3 minutes". There were a few more incidents where he shouted at me, finally, he was like "I treated the poor guy unfairly" in one of the scrum meetings. Today we were revisiting the original solution we built. One of the other teammates proposed that we use my solution and distribute it across various machines using a piece of script in python and a database table. In our team, we use Kafka to distribute the workload and I wrote a Kafka wrapper in Python for my team. I pitched the idea to use Kafka to achieve this, and the senior developer stepped in and said: "he is going to finish his work and after he is done, he is going to demo his stuff". I lost my cool and I shouted at him saying, "Kafka was built by a guy who holds P.Hd from Berkley, it comes with really cool features like replaying messages, distributing the messages. If you use Avro, you get schema validation on top of the messages, If you don't use auto-commit feature you get even more cool features like a system that is load aware, fault tolerant and in some situations you can even do leader election using nothing but Kafka alone." He said something along the lines of "You said you have an optimized version of your code 3 weeks ago and yet you haven't delivered the system. What are you doing?". I said, "This is not the only project I am working on, there were other high priority tasks for me this sprint". He responded with "You need to prove your solution works, this is how things work in real world.", I said "Look we are already using the Kafka wrapper I wrote for the other projects in our team, what is there to prove? I am just trying to save the time of our other teammate." and he says "I am sooooo sorry, I wasted your time. I didn't know you were such a busy person(satirically)." I said go to hell and came back to my desk. I couldn't focus on my work after that and I came back home. I have to god damn look at him tomorrow again. I just want to fucking murder this asshole. He is getting on my nerves. What should I do? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it better to take more money now or work for JP Morgan? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:36 PM PDT I have an offer to work as a technology analyst for JP Morgan in Houston, but I'm not sure that the benefit of having a big name and financial tech experience outweighs making more money (about 10k) working at a small healthcare tech company. Which one would be better for my career? [link] [comments]  |
| Can I apply for an internship that opens to undergraduates as a graduate student? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 06:37 PM PDT In the job description it says that they need a student pursuing a bachelor's or master's degree, but I'm a graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree. Does it mean that they consider only undergraduate and master students? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:21 PM PDT I'm simply way too distracted. There's too many things going on with both my school and my social life for me to be able to actually prepare like a normal person "supposedly" should. Plus, every rejection from a company (and there have been many this past year) really destroys me on the inside and diminishes my confidence in myself and my desire to even be a software engineer... Does anyone else feel the same way? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 06:53 AM PDT TL;DR 120k in Minneapolis or 170k in Seattle? Leaning towards staying in Seattle for a few more years, but any insight from engineers who have worked in Seattle or Minneapolis is welcome! Background about Myself Hey there, I have 3 years Big N experience and I am grateful to have just received 2 offers from a couple different companies in these locations. They seem to be almost equivalent adjusted for CoL, but I am leaning towards staying in Seattle for couple more years to save some money and pay off some loans, and I would appreciate this sub's input. I grew up in Minneapolis and have family there, hence why I interviewed in Minneapolis. I break down why I would stay or go later on in the post, but your insight is welcome! Seattle Company Household name that is not known as a tech company. Good company with a sizable engineering department. In an awkward stage where they're almost a tech company, or at least trying to be, but aren't quite there. Will be mostly backend, cloud-based logistic solutions. Everyone stressed they've never had better WLB than at this company; i.e. very Type B. Oncall every couple months, but very light oncall according to the team. Usually, I'd take that with a grain of salt but this company is known for good WLB so I believe it. Minneapolis Company Subsidiary of parent company, very tight knit engineering org that acts like a startup but promises I wouldn't be oncall. Very selective in who they choose so I know I'd be working with smart guys. Promised I'd have good WLB. My existing skillset aligns with what they do so I could hit the ground running, and it sounds a bit more interesting than what the Seattle company is doing. Why I Would Go to Minneapolis
Why I Would Stay in Seattle
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| Co-founding a startup with a funded team vs joining a large corporate engineering environment? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 01:43 PM PDT Hey, I am in somewhat of a good dilemma here I suppose. I have some questions at the end, if you guys can please help answer them. Sorry it's long but there's some important background info. Hope this can help people in similar places. Skip to near the end for my questions which summarize everything. I'm in the later stages of interviews for a few larger companies I would absolutely be about (not the big tech companies but still great companies for me). There's a startup that's potentially joining Ycombinator this year that is still very small and I would be coming on and helping build the engineering team (they already have a technical product created from high-quality consultant devs). At the startup, I'm being offered co-founder status at half the base pay at the larger companies; however, this includes housing expenses (I currently live in NYC so much of my salary here would be going toward rent) and food, as well as the minimum 10% equity. I do really like the product of the startup, although right now it doesn't have a lot of software challenges that would appeal to me (working with large infrastructure, machine learning). But because I am coming on in a role with a lot of ownership (it's essentially CTO but I "downgraded" it to Founding Engineer or something, so I can stay on the technical side and avoid management), I can propose and work on exciting tech / features. I'm early in my career (graduated last year), and wanted to join a large structured team to get mentored and learn quickly. After graduating I worked at a corporation doing boring work, then left to build a MVP for another startup as a contractor. I am definitely not considering any other small (<20 people) startups besides this one, because I liked the team a lot and they've already made an offer. The startup is currently self-funded but they have a few options / connections for securing more funds, and I believe will be good enough to get into Ycombinator's cohort this year. Their team is smart (currently non-technical though), and has enough money to bring their product to the market in the next year or two for sure. A few things that weigh heavily on my decision: I'm hoping to go back to school to get a CS degree (second degree, mostly just for the education since my first degree was a creative one), and continue on to a grad school program and do research. I was hoping to be able to do this next year, so I would have to be working part-time hours then. I also really consider work-life balance to be important, and would rather stop working at 40 hours a week and not take work home with me all the time, which does not seem to be compatible with the VC / startup life. My questions are:
In my mind, co-founding a startup is not what's right for me right now. If anything, it'd be something I'd consider in 5-10 years after finishing up grad school. There are also a lot of side projects I want to work on (both tech and art-related) literally in the next year, which partly accounts for why I don't want to be making a startup my whole life for a while. I have heard from a few people that the startup opportunity really is too good to pass up, considering the team running it is able to keep it thriving through self-funding alone (for a while). I also am sure I would be able to keep an okay work-life balance (50 hours max) with the startup, and return to school after a year while continuing with them part-time. I am not so sure about how much I can save for grad school when I'm making ~20k less than your typical SF software engineering position (this is after factoring in free housing as 30k and free food as an additional 10k to the startup base salary, which seems pretty generous). Really wrestling with myself on this decision, and I would appreciate any insight or feedback that you guys can offer. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Semi-public person hoping for a fresh start, concerned about online reputation Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:58 AM PDT Posting under a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I'm beginning to appreciate the benefits of living a private life IRL for the first time but my situation goes a bit beyond the usual "drunk photos on Facebook" predicament since my past activities have made me a somewhat public person. Who I am:
I was a naïve kid who took pride in their "hobby projects" and wanted to show them off to potential employers to prove my skills - this taught me skills in full-stack dev and infrastructure management that put me far above and beyond most of my peers at school. So I never bothered to separate out my identities. This worked for landing several great internships but I wonder how many times I might've been passed up for being linked to stupid Internet drama, as I've received many rejections or non-responses, too. Unfortunately, I turned out to have no interest in professional web dev, which greatly reduces the technical value of these projects for my portfolio going forward. I'll be pursuing grad school abroad to pivot into my dream career (still in software but a small, highly specialized niche of it) and wonder how much all my previous work and reputation might hurt me over the rest of my life. Is it wise to use my move to a new school, city, and country as an opportunity to reboot my identity? I'm contemplating whether to change my legal name, or at least what I go by IRL, to obscure my past before I begin building a new network of friends, mentors, and other contacts in a new industry. I fear being a single googling away from being written off by a picky recruiter as an "undesirable" person; it seems that one may be better off being a nobody online than having a divisive reputation there. Any advice would be appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| My day to day experience with programming... Posted: 18 Apr 2018 10:28 AM PDT Some days are smooth sailing, but other days I'm tearing my hair out contemplating changing careers because I'm clearly not clever enough for this. Does anyone else feel like this? [link] [comments]  |
| Leaving BigCo on the cusp of reaching Sr/L5 a mistake? + Portland (OR) Compensation Posted: 18 Apr 2018 10:46 AM PDT
My questions:
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| As a self taught developer, how can I ensure my career doesn’t stagnate? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:23 PM PDT So I'm about to start my first real developer job soon. I'm a fully self taught web developer, training and teaching myself JavaScript, html, css and some JS frameworks. My question is, I can imagine at some point my lack of formal education and knowledge will hinder my development and ability to progress and work on really interesting projects. How can I avoid this from happening? Should I teach myself CS? Will that even be useful as a web developer? [link] [comments]  |
| School choice different person Posted: 18 Apr 2018 08:01 PM PDT University of Houston or McGill University (in canada) ?I'm studying computer science ,McGill would put me in double the debt and take me a year longer. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 18 Apr 2018 08:00 PM PDT I know people will probably say that it doesn't matter what major you have as long as you show that you can do the work, but I feel like HR will be using some key words and such related things to filter people out, one of which may be major, therefore I feel like I should be concerned with what I major in. My question is this: Should I double major in Cognitive Science + Specialization in Computing B.S. in addition to Linguistics & Computer Science B.A. or should I just graduate with the Cognitive Science + Specialization and not even both with tacking on the additional major. I wanted to add the Ling&CS since it includes "Computer Science" directly in the major name and I figured that would help me through any type of filtration process. I'm currently taking the last few Ling classes that I would need to complete the double major but I'm afraid of failing these courses, so this is an added reason why I'm thinking of dropping the major so that I don't tank my high GPA. What are your opinions on this matter? Does major matter? Should I bother double majoring or not? If I were to only major in Cog. Sci., I would finish 2 quarters early, and would also save some money (though not that much). [link] [comments]  |
| How much does being employed matter during job search? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 04:10 PM PDT I am being let go from my company beginning of next month. Currently I have been applying for positions in the DC area but so far the companies I heard back from haven't been a job I think I would really enjoy. There are a few companies I'm in the early stages of interviews with a few companies I like too but at the same time I feel like i wanna spend more time(another month) looking for a quality new job. Since I'm being let go, I was wondering if I should still say I'm employed so that my offers will be more competitive. Or does that really not matter as much as I think? I know the general salary ranges here are pretty competitive already. [link] [comments]  |
| Is your job easy or hard? Why? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:53 PM PDT |
| What should I know before considering a contract position? Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:49 PM PDT I am looking for a new job and many recruiters have come to me with opportunities that are contract positions in the 6 month to 1 year range. What experience do you have with these jobs and what sorts of things should I consider before taking these jobs? For reference I have ~4 yrs experience as a software developer. [link] [comments]  |
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