Big 4 Discussion - May 09, 2018 CS Career Questions |
- Big 4 Discussion - May 09, 2018
- Daily Chat Thread - May 09, 2018
- You guys stress me out
- A healthy dose of "not caring"?
- AMA - Just accepted my first software engineering job. Graduated with culinary degree, went to a bootcamp
- Recovering from a large gap due to mental illness
- Did you see a PIP coming? What were the signs?
- I wrote a small webapp a while ago and a bigger website expressed interest in using it. They asked me what I would charge and I have absolutely no idea where to even begin.
- Is it unethical to take on a fulltime job knowing that I'll quit after three months?
- should i trust the glassdoor pay scale?
- Not getting assigned enough work as an intern, should I coast through or push for more?
- Computational Geometry
- Need advice on how to approach my remaining internships and where to take my career, feeling aimless/lost as an undergrad
- No summer internship this summer what should I do before I graduate next year to land a job? Also how often do new employers hit up old employers to talk?
- If you were starting your carrer today, which fields would you try to pursue? Why?
- Finding fulfillment in working life
- I have a fishy job offer I need some advice
- Finding meaningful work that leverages engineering background?
- Pluralsight. What are your thoughts?
- Where to find freelance work outside of my fulltime job.
- GitHub Profile Pic
- When to give up
- Just got internship at great company! But I know absolutely nothing.
- Path to take in regards to a career in CS and programming.
- Which first internship should I pick?
- Mid-career, I can do a LOT of things, but none of them very well
| Big 4 Discussion - May 09, 2018 Posted: 09 May 2018 12:08 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 - May 09, 2018 Posted: 09 May 2018 12:08 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]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 05:20 PM PDT This sub is so stressful man. Reading through posts gives the impression that there's like a winding golden path to success in this field and any misstep will through you off a loop. People saying "don't take x it'll make you an x guy forever", or "if you can't answer xyzadbc or don't know these 8 esoteric things you'll never find a job". Fuck me I thought people got into tech because of the flexible job market. I don't get that impression from this sub at all, people sound like they're fighting like crazy to get entry level positions and no one with a job is ever positive or reassuring about job prospects. Why am I even in this field if I'm going to have to spend 500 hours to prepare for an interview? Might as well go management or something and skip all of this stress. Is this really what its like out there or is this just the environment in this sub? I just started my first position and it seems like people I know are finding new, better positions all the time. I'm not at google or anything but the job market does not seem so bad from my perspective. Why is the atmosphere on this sub so glum 24/7? [link] [comments]  |
| A healthy dose of "not caring"? Posted: 09 May 2018 07:15 AM PDT I'm working as a software developer for a large tech company and two weeks ago notified my manager that I will be leaving in June. Something magical happened when I did this. My stress level, which was ridiculously high, was cut in half. I stopped worrying about what my peers thought of my work. I stopped second guessing my design decisions. I walk confidently into meetings and am able to smile and keep a good attitude even when people are tearing apart my mockups. I'm working an hour less a day and my development hasn't been faster. Is this what being a developer is supposed to be like? It's amazing!! Take away all the worries, and I can see I am actually pretty good at my job and all my stressing was useless and was actually holding me back. I am probably 10% more efficient since I gave my notice. Thinking forward about when I start my new job, I want to keep this healthy dose of "not caring". Any suggestions on how to do this? How do you stay chill at your job? How do you stop second guessing yourself? (That is, besides knowing that you're going to leave in a couple weeks) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 06:54 PM PDT My career path has been quite.. interesting? I started out studying chemical engineering, dropped out b/c depression, went to culinary school in SF to get my mind off of things, ended up with a hospitality degree in Vegas, worked in big data analytics at Lyft, and ended up in NYC studying software engineering in a bootcamp. Tbh Im still processing all of this, it's the first time in my professional life I've felt proud of myself, and can really see myself doing this (coding) long term. Here's the timeline and preparation steps for my application. Along with what I learned, hopefully this will help some of the other bootcamp grads looking for a job! I became a TA for the bootcamp right after graduation. While my all of my peers were applying to jobs, I was busy building a poker game that I came up with when I was in Vegas, just a personal goal of mine. Turns out this was a big mistake that significantly delayed my job search!! True, it was a "well-put-together" enough application to show employers and put on my resume, but since I was focusing so much on mobile development I forgot a lot of the finer details of web applications and domain knowledge. So I fucked up a few important interviews that asked me HTML questions and what not. Mobile roles were hard to get into because it generally required more experience and knowledge in Swift/Java, I just knew the jabroni-Javascript. For those of you coming from a bootcamp who think that your resume lacks applications to show employers, listen to me when I say it doesn't matter!!! It's not worth spending a lot of time to build a *new* application. Focus on your existing ones, spend no more than a week polishing the hell out of it, and make sure you have pretty github readme page for each one. But even that doesn't matter too, too much (I'm only speaking about applications built in the bootcamp). For the most part employers won't even click on your links, they'll just ask you to talk about them. I had to forcefully show my app to employers/recruiters for them to even realize that it was published on the AppStore/PlayStore. Anyways. At first I got almost no responses, which led me thinking that my resume formatting was shit. It was. A few kind people on this subreddit helped me improve my resume and I got responses back immediately. I even resubmitted my resume to the same companies and got replies back! Apparently my old resume was that bad lol. Make sure it's very clear what kind of engineer you are. Fullstack? Frontend? Mobile? Put your skills at the very top so that it's easy for recruiters to see, and make sure your bullet points for your applications reference those skills. I applied to about 200+ companies, got responses back from about 50. By responses I'm including rejections. Out of those 50, I did outreach to at least 90% of them. It really felt like I wouldn't get a response back unless I did outreaching. Download clearbit-extension on chrome, and then find the recruiter's email for your target company and do outreach. It works. I can give more tips on how to stalk/find recruiters if you'd like. Out of those 50 responses, around 15-ish gave me a coding challenge/phone screen. I was always pretty confident in my skills and whiteboarding because I practiced a ton of leetcode, and during my time as a TA I would hold after hours just to help others practice whiteboarding. So the technical portion was always easy to me. My major roadblock was how I talked about the technical stuff. Turns out even when you know what is going on, if you can't communicate that properly using the right terms, people won't believe that you actually know it. This is especially true for bootcamp grads. We know how to implement certain data structures and how to do BFS and all that. But it's really, really important that you talk about it like an actual software engineer would. You gotta use the right terminology and phrases, each interviewer basically have mental checkboxes for those terms and are just waiting for you to say them. It's honestly just practice, it's annoying but necessary. Out of the 15 companies, I got to final round with 5 of them. Not too bad in terms of conversion considering the horror stories I hear. 2 gave me an offer, which I used to negotiate a higher salary for the company I really wanted. I didn't do a good job negotiating imo, but I'm happy with the company and excited about the team. I also got really lucky. The company I signed with is a food delivery start up. So my culinary background, and experience at Lyft fits perfectly. They also use the same tech stack that I used to build my poker game.... so things just worked out for me in that case. I just wrote down all the stuff that's on my mind, not sure how well it reads. Happy to answer questions regarding the application and offer itself, especially those of you coming from bootcamps! [link] [comments]  |
| Recovering from a large gap due to mental illness Posted: 09 May 2018 02:02 PM PDT I have a Math/CS degree with a good GPA, but shortly after graduating my undiagnosed mental illness caught up with me (I went insane and was hospitalized, it was messy). I've been in limbo since then, with a simple job working for a direct family member, with some periods of being a shut-in mixed in. Nothing tech related aside from hacking around with some personal projects at a rather disappointing rate (though I have been speeding up lately). I have never worked as a programmer. I struggle with feeling quite doomed, worrying that with such a large gap that I am just unhireable, regardless of how competent of a dev I may actually be (or rather, regardless of how much effort I put into improving my abilities in my spare time via coding and studying algorithm-type interview questions). This may be absurd, but sometimes I wonder about just starting over. Getting another Bachelor's degree and doing everything right: networking, co-op work experience, etc. I got the good grades the first time round, but failed on every other aspect. Or maybe, just maybe, I volunteer (for free) just to get my foot in the door and earn some experience. I am OK with this as long as I can have a work/life balance. This is feasible for me because my parents have deep pockets; I don't have to play by the same rules as everyone (now if only my brain wasn't broken). Any advice is appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Did you see a PIP coming? What were the signs? Posted: 09 May 2018 05:44 PM PDT Questions to those who received a PIP or know someone who got one. Did you see it coming and what were the signs? Also state whether it happened at the l(A)rge company known for piping. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 06:29 PM PDT Honestly my first impulse was to say "I'll let you use it for free because your interest alone validated the time I sunk into this project". The webapp is very simple; about the same level of complexity as say a rhyming thesaurus, but for a niche field that doesn't have such a tool readily available yet. However, I've no experience in selling my work. I don't know where to start. If someone can give me an advice as to where to start or even some options to consider I'd be all ears. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Is it unethical to take on a fulltime job knowing that I'll quit after three months? Posted: 09 May 2018 03:28 PM PDT In two weeks, I'll graduate undergrad. I signed a full-time offer starting in September at a company that I'll call B. However, company B's offer stipulates that I start in September, 3 months after graduation. I need/want to work, and I can't afford to travel, take off time, or go live with parents. I've been applying to internships. However, I haven't gone past phone screens, because the hiring manager often says that I can't apply for internships as a graduate and they become suspicious after I mention my signed offer with company B. I doubt the folks at company B would care what I do over the summer, so I'm free to work wherever on whatever. However, given my circumstances, I was wondering if it would be unethical to take a fulltime job fully knowing that I'll quit after 3 months. I figured that it would be unethical for a few reasons: 1) I'm wasting a hiring manager's time, 2) I'm wasting any mentorship/lag the summer company would have used on me as a new grad, and 3) I'm wasting the costs of onboarding a fulltime employee. Or do people normally take a fulltime job to hold them over between positions? Edit: Thanks for all the replies. I'm going to talk to my boss/ keep applying for internships (and a pizzeria). Since the hypothetical summer job would only be for three months and I have an excuse for not working during those months, I would just never include that experience on my resume, so I wouldn't face any (immediate) consequences. However, since the comments and support of each comment seem to suggest an even divide of support, I think it's ambiguous enough to decidedly call it unethical. [link] [comments]  |
| should i trust the glassdoor pay scale? Posted: 09 May 2018 02:53 PM PDT Hi all, I work at a small software company (less than 15 people) and while I do a bit of everything (all our social media, some photoshopping, a weekly blog, FAQ) my main job is working with the development team. I meet with them every morning for a scrum, I'm responsible for QA before releasing updates for the (fitness) app, I assign, organize, and update tickets on Jira(I'm the administrator on jira, though I report to the product manager). I am comfortable navigating and editing things in our database, I'm familiar with mixpanel, appsee, fabric, android studio, wordpress, etc. I take notes during meetings for our product manager, I did the set up and run the day to day operations of our user support, I handle a lot of the bug reproduction and tracking for our developers, and generally assist the product manager with various things he needs help with or doesn't have time to get to. I've worked here for almost two years, but most of my responsibilities were given to me just over a year ago. I started as an intern doing market analysis and social media. Since then we've gone from 4 of us in the office to 9 (more are remotely working) and I've picked up quite a few relevant skills along the way, along with enough programming ability to be able to debug from time to time. I get paid 12.50 an hour, working 40 hours per week Glassdoor tells me I should be making about 50k per year (marked my position as a QA specialist, located 30 minutes out of Los Angeles) but I don't really know what to even call my position here so it's hard to get an idea of whether or not that's accurate. Please help me, Reddit. I need more knowledge before I approach my boss about the possibility of a raise 😀 [link] [comments]  |
| Not getting assigned enough work as an intern, should I coast through or push for more? Posted: 09 May 2018 02:04 PM PDT This internship is over a year long at a large and bureaucratic company. The team is super chill and easy to get along with but there's not enough work to cover a full 8 hours. I have asked for more work and my request is basically ignored. I don't know if I should keep pushing for more work or just coast through and use the extra time to work on my own stuff. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 07:56 PM PDT Hello, I was wondering if anyone here works or has experience in this field that could shed some light on the day to day / thoughts on this area? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 05:29 PM PDT I am kind of at a crossroads in terms of what I want to do with my future career after kind of aimlessly exploring the computer science field for the last few years. Here are some facts about myself:
My main concerns:
The only goal I've really been able to come up with so far is to maximize my earnings (important to me, as I come from a very low income family that I need to support once I graduate). Furthermore, I'd like to get proficient enough at both engineering and with business acumen in order to eventually become an entrepreneur - I don't think this is something I'd want to do right after graduating, but rather wait until I'm relatively comfortable with my finances and career. I have liked every framework/language I've worked with so far so I think I would be happy working with almost any technology. Other than that, I feel very aimless at the moment and for the first time have run out of things to focus on outside of school. As a result, any advice about what to focus on/where to take my career from here would be much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 05:14 PM PDT Hi I'm going to be a senior next year and this summer I don't have an internship and because of that I'm thinking I should just study my cs topics hard and do projects like an iOS app or web app for my resume. I do have 2 previous cs jobs and 1 job as a CS tutor. Although my most recent cs job I was fired mainly because I did not tell my boss in time that I was going to take off to study for finals. I did tell him a week in advance but I guess that's not enough and the internship was unpaid. Anyways I don't believe my old boss and me are on good terms. The workplace was toxic and I was going to quit in June anyway so it was unfortunate I was fired for wanting to study for finals. Boss isn't cool enough to allow me to say I quit and honestly treated my fellow interns and I as slaves and everyone either quit or was fired besides one intern who is probably quitting soon. But yeah, if my new employers want to talk to my old boss what do I do? Do they typically ask for old employer references? Although the internship was horrible and I ended up doing things I was not promised to do E.G I interviewed to work on backend and was told I'd do backend but was doing front end, I still feel like I need to include the internship on my resume to have it full. TLDR: old boss was shitty and can't use as reference but need the job on my resume so what should I do? Also how do I prepare myself for senior year to land a job at the big 4 tech companies as a software engineer or iOS developer? Thanks a bunch!! [link] [comments]  |
| If you were starting your carrer today, which fields would you try to pursue? Why? Posted: 09 May 2018 08:27 AM PDT |
| Finding fulfillment in working life Posted: 09 May 2018 07:12 PM PDT Hi reddit! I am a senior graduating this june and will be starting a swe job as a new grad sometime in the fall. To be honest, I feel apprehensive. My whole life up to this point has been pretty much predefined - I would go to school and work towards these structural goals that are in place (that is not to say that I don't have goals for myself, but that the system usually points me in a direction). Since this kind of system generally devolves as we head into the working world, what do you guys do to find fulfillment in post-grad jobs? Although I enjoy programming, I find it the idea of a 9-5 job everyday performing (possibly) insipid tasks for someone else for the rest of my life somewhat terrifying. Do you find enough purpose in your job? Contribute to open source projects? Work on self improvement/health? [link] [comments]  |
| I have a fishy job offer I need some advice Posted: 09 May 2018 08:02 AM PDT A recruiter that I have been in contact for a while said Tbh, I don't know if I'm ready to move but I can go just "fuck it" and move but I don't want to fall into a trap I can't get out of. The client is pretty well known so I'll keep it anonymous edit: Apparently he hasn't applied me for the position and was waiting for my confirmation to apply. Huge miscommunication, happens everytime with recruiters though. [link] [comments]  |
| Finding meaningful work that leverages engineering background? Posted: 09 May 2018 03:06 PM PDT I'm a software dev at a big tech company, and while I generally enjoy what I do and get compensated very well for it, I have a gnawing in me to do something that's more socially impactful. I'm particularly interested in education and research. I've thought about going back to school for something completely different, like law or economics, but it seems silly to throw away a really valuable skillset that may not be common in this sector. There are lots of organizations whose goals interest me, but none of them are specifically tech-oriented and so their positions are mostly IT, systems engineering, etc. Anyway, kind of just interested in hearing from anyone who's maybe made a career move like this or are thinking about it. [link] [comments]  |
| Pluralsight. What are your thoughts? Posted: 09 May 2018 06:35 PM PDT Are the IQ test results worth anything? Should these be shared through Linkedin, StackOverflow, Twitter, or personal site? Do employers use these results or courses completed at all as a deciding factor for hiring? What are your thoughts on the courses themselves? If I'm being honest, I like udemy better. With udemy, I can pick an up to date course that has tons of solid reviews. Even if the course is a bit older, it (the good ones anyway) gets updated to stay more relevant. The learning "paths" on pluralsight are okay but some of the courses are so old and haven't been updated. Quite a few are from 2012, 2013, 2014, etc. I can't help but feel I am learning incorrect, obsolete, or just play wrong ways of doing things. My plan is to obtain "expert" or "proficient" in all the categories I need to on Pluralsight but plan on doing the actual learning through Udemy courses. Any thoughts, concerns, questions or general input is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Where to find freelance work outside of my fulltime job. Posted: 09 May 2018 04:18 PM PDT Yoo what's up. I'll try and keep this short. I'm coming up on the 1 year mark since I started my first fulltime job out of college. It's been great so far and I plan on staying there for the foreseeable future. I typically show up to work around 10 and get home around 6. The thing I've been struggling with is what to do with my free time once I'm home from work. Historically, pretty much all of my free time has been put into videogames. While I enjoy videogames, the fun that I have with them has been slowly declining over the past couple of years. During the past few months I've tried picking up new hobbies like piano, music production, drawing, etc. but nothing has really stuck. I also don't really have any friends so I'm not spending a whole lot of time outside of my apartment. All that said, I do really enjoy programming, which typically leads to me playing around with Leetcode or something. I've tried a few projects on my own which never really get anywhere because I lose interest. I want to do something more practical with programming in my free time and get paid to do it if possible which leads to my question. Where can I find freelance work? My coworker was talking to me about how someone contacted him with a catalog of their old antique collection and wanted them to get this catalog into a database and into something like Shopify. Where can I find stuff like this? Is there some sort of job board for one-off things like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 08:24 PM PDT Do you have one set? Is it a logo or a picture of you? If it is of you is it professional looking or just a normal pic? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 May 2018 02:17 PM PDT I've been job searching for 4 months, over 400 applications and one interview. I am starting to come under the impression that my career is terminal and I need to give up and pursue a different career track to software development. Has anybody given up and had it work out? Conversely, has anybody been in a similar position and ended up getting on the right track eventually? [link] [comments]  |
| Just got internship at great company! But I know absolutely nothing. Posted: 09 May 2018 08:02 PM PDT Hi, So I just landed a pretty sweet job at a solid company for my first ever internship and I really want to impress, as they have given me this amazing opportunity. I come from a C language family background which is what we learned in school, and for this job I am working as a web developer where the companies entire stack is JavaScript. I will be mostly working with react and redux and have absolutely no idea where to start. I have a solid base of JavaScript/HTML/CSS, but ES6 and the whole React JSX transpile craziness somewhat confuses me. I am trying to learn on my own, but I find I run into some code in the tutorials that I do not understand, and the tutorial just totally skips over it without explanation. What I am asking for is help in a learning strategy (ex. ES6 -> React-> Redux etc...) and any resources that will help me get jumpstarted and going in the right direction. I understand I will still need to familiarize myself with the companies codebase, and my team has totally agreed that they want to get me to start looking/working on some code, but I feel I am at such a low level compared to them that I will not be any help whatsoever. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Path to take in regards to a career in CS and programming. Posted: 09 May 2018 07:58 PM PDT I m a junior in High School and the school year is about to end. The more I think of what to do after next year, the more questions pop up. I ve set my eyes on a major on computer sciences for a long time now. I understand some of what it has to offer. Though the career path has a pretty high salary as I have seen, I m also interested in the field itself. The concept of trying to figure out a problem appeals to me. The thing is, I don t know a bit of coding. I ve tried teaching myself through online videos and such but I just haven t been able to follow without actually having a teacher present. My high school provides 1 elective class in basic computer science and I wasn t able to get it my junior year because of scheduling conflicts/not having enough people. (hopefully I m able to get it senior year). So going into a major on computer science, would that mean that a student would have to have prior knowledge on programming already? What kinds of thing should I be doing before looking for a college or even major? Any help would be appreciated. Note: In regards to a specific career, I've been thinking something along the lines of a computer software engineer but it's only been a thought. [link] [comments]  |
| Which first internship should I pick? Posted: 09 May 2018 07:53 PM PDT Hey guys! I still have finals so I'll keep this short. Currently, I am a freshman CS major at ASU and have an offer working in my university's supercomputing lab that I verbally accepted recently but I just got informed that the state of Arizona will also be offering me an internship where I will be "working with Google transferring everything to their platform from Microsoft's." I have been leaning towards the first offer since I already sort of accepted it, will have a good mentor, and will be working with very influential people in my university's engineering department although I wanted to see what you guys thought. The internship is for the state and not really with Google so I'm not sure how good it will be but it is an internship nevertheless. Any and all info would be great. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Mid-career, I can do a LOT of things, but none of them very well Posted: 09 May 2018 07:51 PM PDT tl;dr; question is this: should I be concerned with my diverse but not-a-stone-cold-expert-in-anything skill set, and if so how should I go about improving or fixing this? Trying to keep this somewhat short, working with a web small agency as we've grown into a larger web agency, I've had to learn a lot of different things. I can't do everything, but I can at the very least speak to a lot of things. In addition to knowing a lot of languages I've spent a year+ on about 3 or 4 different "enterprise" platforms (CMS, commerce, etc). I tend to do more "backend" work these days so in my spare time for some reason I'm driven to do little side projects with various AWS services or modern "frontend" tools to build little serverless react websites, or writing little commerce websites with Angular + some new tool I find cool, etc. But, as confident and generally "well rounded" as I often feel, when I compare a real expert in any one of the things I can do, I'm just sort of "meh", at best really. And I'm not just talking about languages or skills of frameworks, but concepts as well. Can I follow some "enterprise integration patterns" and write an integration between some big systems using apache camel and activemq/jms or sqs or something, yes, I can. But can I do a great job, with some super highly scalable billions of orders ultra reliable system? probably not. Or yes, I can write some VCL for Varnish to do some custom caching stuff for whatever? Yes, but will I have to google most of the syntax? Yep! Or, can I use I feel like in the end I've spent SO much time with client work just trying to do the best job I can in the timelines and budgets that I have, and so often I'm driven by stress more than anything, and when it's a "fun" project it's normally more surface level stuff / little side projects. I have started to get this feeling like at the end of the day all software is pretty much garbage when you come down to it, and most of what I've written or worked on I'm not REALLY proud of. Anyway, the point here is that I'm not sure what to do about this situation. Sometimes I think what I should do is start looking for a job working on more of a "product", and I should make sure that product is something I believe in or care about, and I should use that as a means to get really more in depth with something. It doesn't really matter what, because it's not just about the platform or language I'm talking about, it's about the core skills where I'm really focused on making something quality. I'm not such a hardcore great employee that I always have perfect attention, so I'll admit even now I COULD be better utilizing my time to hone my craft even more. So perhaps the reality is with my attention span and personality, stress is what motivates me to work hard, and boredom is what motivates me to be creative and do hobby projects to learn lots of things, so perhaps I'll never be a GREAT software developer. OK, that's enough words, thanks for any advice or thoughts! [link] [comments]  |
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