Interview Discussion - June 11, 2018 CS Career Questions |
- Interview Discussion - June 11, 2018
- Daily Chat Thread - June 11, 2018
- On bullshit jobs
- One teammate outperforming everyone else
- $55k offer in NYC
- First job out of college, 2 year commitment, 30k fine for leaving early
- Unemployed mechanical engineer looking for a new start
- Switching from backend software engineer to ML role
- Would you give up a 100k office for job something lower, but full time work at home?
- If you accepted a new job and your current manager ask how much they’re offering you. Do you tell them?
- Am I wasting my potential?
- Delay graduation for a year for last chance at an internship
- how to build portfolio for website design?
- Is interning in another country a thing?
- If you have a job, how do you handle going to job unterviews?
- First role out of college: SDE or Dev Ops?
- Boston area: Want to get out of startup scene
- Is self-boot camp for me or should I just go back to school? Weird career path...
- How much do internships help if you do not have a CS degree?
- Is there a way to map equity with salary at market rate?
- New grad trying to decide whether or not to take offer from Raytheon.
- What should I do? Weird contracting gig.. not a lot of work despite apparently urgent need to hire, kind of unfriendly atmosphere (rant, long)
- Nobody in my list of closer professional contacts replies to me anymore.
- Recent graduate offered a contract-to-hire position with no benefits, how do I determine what salary to ask for?
- Is it safe to use a former manager of your current company as a reference?
- What do they mean when they ask about my "cloud experience"?
- Trying to get a return offer, summer internship
| Interview Discussion - June 11, 2018 Posted: 11 Jun 2018 12:09 AM PDT Please use this thread to have discussions about interviews, interviewing, and interview prep. Posts focusing solely on interviews created outside of this thread will probably be removed. Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk. This thread is posted each Monday and Thursday at midnight PST. Previous Interview Discussion threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| Daily Chat Thread - June 11, 2018 Posted: 11 Jun 2018 12:09 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: 11 Jun 2018 08:48 AM PDT I graduated three years ago and have since worked at several big-name startups in my region. The last three years of work I've maybe done 6 months of actual work, and often that work isn't even related to what I'm supposed to be doing (data science). At first I almost begged for work but then I gave up. Days, weeks, sometimes even months roll by where I'm doing nothing. I finished an EU4 campaign in 3-4 days at work for example. I just switched companies and the same thing seems to be happening. Should I just give up on the idea of doing meaningful work? Does anyone have experiences with this? [link] [comments]  |
| One teammate outperforming everyone else Posted: 11 Jun 2018 11:44 AM PDT We're a small team of four developers. One developer (the most junior), is putting in weekends and holidays to knock out sprint tasks. He comes in early, leaves late, and is extremely productive. This is a pretty enviable work ethic and in the beginning, I tried to match his pace. I quickly burnt out and stopped worrying about trying to compete with him. Now it's to the point where he's knocking out 80% of the sprint items on his own, while the rest of us work on the other 20%. Our most senior spends his time between the three of us helping us when we get stuck. Can't help but feel that this is an unstable setup (not to mention kind of embarrassing). What's the right response to something like this? I'm at a mid-level and even when I was fresh out of school I never put in that much work. I like to go home and spend time with my girlfriend, play games, watch netflix. Should I be putting in more hours or just let it be and worry about it when someone says something? I did well on my last performance review and most of the critique I've received has been on breaking down tasks when I get stuck, asking for help in a timely manner, etc. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Jun 2018 11:43 AM PDT Hello, I received my first corporate job offer for software development on a JUNIOR level. I went to college for 3 years and was working on freelance projects for about 2. I have experience with the MEAN stack and blockchain, which is what they liked. I was given the following offer: First year: $55k Second year: $62.5k Third year: $70k Working 44 hours a week breaks down to $26 an hour before taxes. I will be offered stock options after 36 months, and 5 sick days after one year. I can't help but feel like I'm being lowballed here, how can I make sure I'm getting exactly what I deserve without blowing the opportunity? Edit: this is not an entry level job, it's a junior level position. [link] [comments]  |
| First job out of college, 2 year commitment, 30k fine for leaving early Posted: 11 Jun 2018 06:16 PM PDT I'm going to be graduating in August and have an interview lined up for an IT consultancy. They work with big banks and Finanvial firms. Essentially, they would take me on and give me 3 months of training at minimum wage, and then I would have a foot in the door with big banks and the like, however once that stage comes it just becomes an application against everyone else again. The kicker is that I have to sign a contract saying I will be with the company for 2 years and have a set salary of 40k for year one and 45k for year two which is fairly low for the area (Toronto). If you quit within that time frame you are billed 30k (not exactly sure why but that's the number that has come up repeatedly). Normally I would pass on this, but I only have a college diploma in programming and I just do not feel competitive. I have some cool personal projects, but not much professional expereince on my resume and I feel like it's hindering me. The commitment seems daunting to me. Especially in a field that seems to have a lot of career movement. But then again I'm just a new grad. Please, any real world advice is greatly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Unemployed mechanical engineer looking for a new start Posted: 11 Jun 2018 05:14 PM PDT So I'm living in the Denver area and I graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 2014. Maybe I was just arrogant, but I thought that I'd easily be able to get established in my field. I started with two roughly 3 month contracts doing prototyping work and then was out of work for almost a year. I really felt like a loser and didn't really see much difference between myself and my former peers but they were succeeding. Anyways, I eventually found a job working with a university in testing and stayed there for two years before I decided to take a crazy risk to pursue an invention of mine. Long story short that didn't work out. So I'm back to unemployment and the job market is on fire but I still feel unwanted in engineering. I've had some job interviews but nothing has worked out. I designed some LabVIEW code in my past, took an intro to C++ in school and I've done the first 20 Project Euler problems in Python which I'm working on recently but I know that's still basically nothing in this world. I want to make a switch to something more software oriented and I'm honestly willing to just leave engineering behind but I'm still quite limited in my knowledge. I genuinely feel a strong sense of connection with writing code more than I do with engineering and I regret not doing CS in school. I know that I need to buckle down and learn and I'm happy to do that or go through a bootcamp, but I'm scared to go all in like that even if I do have the financial means. My resume has too much blank space and I wonder if that'll scare off future employers but on the other hand I feel like just getting a job to tide me over while I learn will just make me look like too much of a job hopper. I know that sometimes people can look at this field as a quick fix to their life problems, but I think I'm well suited to programming and I enjoy learning the material. I can see myself learning in my free time in ways I could never imagine with engineering. So any advice on making the switch? When I've read about people doing this I've heard people say they pulled it off in a year but then there's others who succeed after a bootcamp. Is there any way I could "self-bootcamp?" Or is that not respected enough to make the switch quickly? Sorry if this is a bit rambling, but any thoughts would really be appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Switching from backend software engineer to ML role Posted: 10 Jun 2018 10:58 PM PDT I will preface this by saying that I don't know much about ML roles in industry, and I know that ML can be broad, so please educate me here. I'm a mid-20s engineer working in the Bay Area as a backend software engineer (data infrastructure). The work has the potential to be interesting - building distributed systems. But in reality I don't get to do much of that. The salary is great but I don't see myself doing this work for the rest of my career. I'm thinking about learning ML on my free time and potentially switching to a ML-based role. My mathematical foundation doesn't go beyond introductory college classes (mandatory calculus 1/2/3, linear algebra, intro to probability and statistics). It turns out backend / systems work doesn't require heavy math. I'm open to learning more math/stats, but realistically I will never be on the level of someone with a PhD in statistics or even someone with a Masters focusing on ML/AI from a top university.
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| Would you give up a 100k office for job something lower, but full time work at home? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 10:54 AM PDT For example, would you take 90k? 80k? 70k? What's your lowest? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Jun 2018 07:16 AM PDT What are the pros and cons of letting your current employer knows about your new job offer? As in compensation and benefits of course [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Jun 2018 12:47 PM PDT I apologise in advance that this is rather long. I'm almost finished with my CS degree, but I feel like I'm going down a career path that is suboptimal or isn't going to use my full potential. I'm an average student, 3.2 GPA at a great school with a very respectable CS program, and everyone and their mother always told me I'd get a good job out of college. There are two problems in my career plan that are making me very worried though. First, I found out I despise programming if it's too open-ended or if I'm not given clear directions. I've discovered that I'm not very good at it in general, even though I got decent grades in tough classes. I just don't enjoy it, and I feel like I'm never doing a very good job. Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a developer or a software engineer. The issue with that is I feel like I'm in too deep and there's no point in changing majors without it being a massive waste of money. I have no plans of changing degrees, and I only need 7 more classes to graduate. Second, I had an entry level IT job handed to me by my girlfriend's mother (head of HR department) at a small company; she said it would be great on a resume; said it would be easy and flexible with my schedule, etc. It was all of those things, but it didn't feel like it was even remotely applicable to my degree. I didn't think much of it because it was just a little entry level job and I figured I could use it to show I can work with others, along with the two other retail jobs I had before it. Fast forward a couple of years and I get essentially handed a paid internship as a Network Engineer at a rather large company for the summer, since they liked to see that I had past experience in IT at another business. The job is also IT, and just doesn't feel like it's very applicable to my degree. It's been decent so far, the people are great here and the pay is quite good as far as internships go, and the company has very low turnover, but I can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong with my professional life. I feel like I'm inevitably steering myself down a suboptimal path that isn't what my degree is meant for. I feel like I'm wasting my potential. I searched all over this subreddit for advice on this topic but didn't really find anything. I'm hoping someone can help me make sense of all this. Any advice is greatly appreciated. I have no idea what to do for my career. TLDR; Going into senior year at Uni for CS, worked an easy IT job for two years and now in a Network Engineer internship. Internship has been enjoyable with decent pay but I'm worried I'm not using my degree the way it's meant to be used. Feel like I'm going down the wrong career path. I'd greatly appreciate any advice. [link] [comments]  |
| Delay graduation for a year for last chance at an internship Posted: 11 Jun 2018 06:32 AM PDT I'm starting my last year in comp sci next year but I haven't done any internships. I am only recently starting to realize that I may be fucked in trying to find a decent job once I graduate. I have the option of possibly delaying graduation by a year to take a 12 month internship interning at a small local company which is offering a telecommunications position (mainly coding and debugging based off the description) The main reason Im stuck on this decision is because I don't know if it's worth it to take a year off for this position but at the same time graduating without an internship seems like a red flag. My resume is currently filled with side projects and no work experience (some pretty large game development projects and random little apps I made at hackathons) so i'm not sure how recruiters would respond to this. I'm comfortable and confident in my abilities but clearly that's hard to show if I have no work experience Also wondering if just having 1 job to put as work experience is enough as I could possibly try to work through my campus during the school year in a work study position so I would have at least 1 thing to put under work experience [link] [comments]  |
| how to build portfolio for website design? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 05:56 PM PDT I'm trying to get into website design (front-end/ui). I don't have actual experience in this area, but I've worked on parts of some websites before and I have a decent knowledge of HTML/CSS/some web paradigms. I'm a college student and have internships under my belt, but all of them have been back-end related or not really pertinent to web design itself. How should I get into this industry and add to my portfolio? Should I just email random businesses in my area and ask if they need help redesigning their website? [link] [comments]  |
| Is interning in another country a thing? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 12:30 PM PDT I am in the US, and I see a lot of internships around the world (as well as those in the US). Are those internships generally available to people in another country? [link] [comments]  |
| If you have a job, how do you handle going to job unterviews? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 10:45 AM PDT People seem to brush over this but I don't understand how people are able to go to tons of job interviews and seriously look for another job while they currently have a job and responsibilities. Obviously telling my boss I'm going to a job interview isn't going to look good. I could say I have a doctors appointment and go to one with that excuse, but that would just be 1 interview and I'd be limted to interviewing for jobs in the area because I couldn't drive hours away. Going to a Big 4 type interview where they fly you out to them for a few days would be out of the question. My current job is even pretty flexible with hours but I still don't see how a serious job search could be done. Advice? Edit: sigh... Interviews* [link] [comments]  |
| First role out of college: SDE or Dev Ops? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 04:02 PM PDT I have 2 sure things. One is a role at my university with a connection I picked up at a 2015 internship. Civil Servant position where my connect has come in as a director and is trying to transform the garbage environment into something that is commensurate with current enterprise industry caliber. Effectively a "startup" environment. Salary range is 55-70 + whatever an academic role comes with (pension I think..). I have the choice of Full Stack Application Developer or Dev Ops, same salary range. I am confident I can pull the upper end of the range, as I'm skilled and well liked by her. Other is a no-interview, automatic offer for Software Developer I at a large private enterprise that spun off a Fortune 500 a few years ago. Interned at this place last year on their front-end UI team and am currently interning on their Cloud Platform dev ops team. This company is going through a lot of change as the new CEO is pruning and trying to drive a more tight and successful business. As a result, there were at least one round(s) of layoffs as well as the VP of engineering spontaneously leaving for a CTO position elsewhere. My old manager ended up being part of the lay offs and my old team as reorganized. Still, there are a lot of brilliant engineers here. Salary would be 68-78 + 8k sign on. Not sure where I would be placed here, could be any team dev ops / CRM / many other teams. My connection is willing to get me in and working soon after my summer at this company ends, a full 2 semesters before I even graduate. The company I'm currently interning at is going to wait until my grad date. But is forgoing any interviewing, which is nice to be honest. If I go with the first option, should I go dev ops? I'm interning dev ops right now and think it's really fascinating and way way more secure a job path than just a generalist web developer. But I'm not nearly as confident with the space as I am with front end, which I am self taught with since I was in high school. My connection is willing to overlook my lack of dev ops know how as they barely even have any dev ops to begin with as they are starting from the ground up on antiquated tech. So I'd learn as I become the subject matter expert there. Thoughts? Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Boston area: Want to get out of startup scene Posted: 11 Jun 2018 07:07 AM PDT Hi, After ~10 years experience, I moved to a startup. I had just been in the corporate world so long, I thought a new direction would be fun. Long story short, I feel it's just not for me. I interviewed with a bunch of companies I didn't feel I clicked with. They seemed to have very strange way of operating, odd practices and a lot of people in high positions who came off as having no idea what they are doing or any real world experience in the position they are occupying. I finally found one that seemed different to that but once joining, I feel they put on a good face early on but the cracks appeared quickly. Maybe it works fine for them, I'm just not feeling like it's a good fit for me personally. But now that I'm in the startup world, in all departments, it just feels like a carousell of the same people coming in and out from other startup companies. Job searches seem to be dominated by the same types of companies. Can anyone in the Boston area offer me some ideas where to look? I guess I'm looking for more established companies. [link] [comments]  |
| Is self-boot camp for me or should I just go back to school? Weird career path... Posted: 11 Jun 2018 07:32 PM PDT So I'm working in the field of safety at a mega pharma manufacturing plant, have a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. While I don't mind the job, I definitely would love to learn coding in my free time after work in the event one day manufacturing dies out in this country or even transition to automation department? (Don't know if this is possible) I'd figured to start with one of those self-learning udemy's web dev boot camp courses. I don't think I may have time to go back to full time school since I work full time nor do I prefer to take out student loans even if it's part time unless this is the only route I can take. Thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| How much do internships help if you do not have a CS degree? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 03:33 PM PDT I'm a poli sci grad a few years removed from school who has been studying CS and programming for a year now. Some of my best friends are senior software engineers and they said they can probably swing it to get me an internship. These internships would be a start-ups or mid-sized tech companies. Let's say I do a bang-up job and get along with everyone. How much can I leverage that experience into getting a job? I fully intend on getting a post-bacc in CS once I get into a more stable financial situation, but that is not something I can afford at the moment. [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a way to map equity with salary at market rate? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 07:05 PM PDT It will be 2 years since I've been working for a startup. I joined the company 6 months out of grad school for $45k/yr. I have not received a raise yet but I was told that my performance was exceptional. I will be eligible for a stock-incentive plan where I can buy upto 500k shares for 10 cents over the next 3 years. I realize that I'm very underpaid for a developer even for the low COL area that I live in. My classmates are making $75k/yr in the same area. I've already asked for a raise once and was told that there was no money to give anyone a raise and that the management still has not taken any salary (the company is 5 years old). However, I was told that we can discuss this matter in July-September, so the time is almost here. I'm going to ask for the market rate ($75k/yr). However, if they still can't pay me that or counter with a lower salary with any equity, how would I go about equating the provided equity with the salary I'm forgoing, so that I can negotiate better? [link] [comments]  |
| New grad trying to decide whether or not to take offer from Raytheon. Posted: 11 Jun 2018 12:58 PM PDT I recently got an offer for a software engineering 1 position with Raytheon. I have read a lot about people having difficulties getting other jobs after and have read a lot about everyone's negative views of defense contractors. I graduated about a month ago from a big state school (in the south) and have turned down one offer so far, but haven't had any others besides these two. I am not the strongest coder in the world and I know this is holding me back in technical interviews, but I also have a business degree. I am really just looking for an entry level dev job that will allow me to learn more and grow. Does anyone have any advice regarding Raytheon, or any advice of other places I should apply/look into? I'm a little worried I won't be able to find anything else if I say no to Raytheon. I am kind of having an existential crisis about what to do with my life. Any advice would be appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Jun 2018 06:53 PM PDT |
| Nobody in my list of closer professional contacts replies to me anymore. Posted: 11 Jun 2018 02:40 PM PDT I keep a small list of people that I know IRL and have met at some point either as colleagues (former coworkers or managers) and friends. And none of them reply to my messages anymore. My messages are something like this:
I've worked for four different companies in my career lifetime. None of them are big companies or hot startups. I know a few people that do work at high caliber places, though. What things can I do for them that would help out the situation? I have the experience, but none of my colleagues really comes forward to me to ask me if I'm looking for work. I'm always the first one to ask. I'm also at a loss for getting hired and interviewed more quickly in the job search game. I get plenty of phone interviews but just not as quickly as I need to, and they don't progress to on-site interviews anymore. My life has been a shit show ever since I lost any ability to get any offers anymore. I have $48 left in my bank account and I don't know what to do to get up and running with a job in just a few days. Can you help me out with getting a job more quickly? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Jun 2018 10:08 AM PDT Title explains most of it, I have ~9 months of internship experience from my school's co-op program and the position is in Manassas, VA. The recruiter said the average hourly rate for a salaried worker of the same position is $32 but as a contractor I could ask for "a little more." How do salary negotiations through a recruiter work? Does 45-50 sound reasonable? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it safe to use a former manager of your current company as a reference? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 05:55 PM PDT I'm currently job hunting and for obvious reasons, I don't want my current employer to find out. My former manager left the company about 7 months ago and I'm sure he can give me a positive reference. Is it a wise move to ask him for a reference? [link] [comments]  |
| What do they mean when they ask about my "cloud experience"? Posted: 11 Jun 2018 02:09 PM PDT I've had plenty of recruiters and interviewers ask if I have cloud experience. I don't really know what they're looking for. I have worked on projects that used web APIs and involved services that were hosted on AWS or other such cloud platforms, but I've never been the person responsible for setting up, maintaining, or deploying to those cloud servers. Does that count as having "cloud experience"? What does real "cloud experience" look like? [link] [comments]  |
| Trying to get a return offer, summer internship Posted: 11 Jun 2018 05:42 PM PDT What do I have to do to get a return offer from this company that I am interning at? Practice at home? For one, I think I already messed up with lack of confidence; haven't gotten to any coding just training but everytime they mention actually coding I get afraid and say i HOPE I'm ready. My mentor responded with: "I hope sooo.." I am also not a top notch programmer which is why I ask. [link] [comments]  |
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