Interview Discussion - July 26, 2018 CS Career Questions |
- Interview Discussion - July 26, 2018
- Daily Chat Thread - July 26, 2018
- Should I "Americanize" my first name?
- Depressed about current role and career prospect
- The best way to gain a wage increase is to get a new job...
- What do entry-level programmers do? How can I test myself if I am good enough? Have you ever thought that you were not good enough?
- How do you figure out what you want to do / work with?
- Got this as a question "can you do 2 to the 24th in your head?"
- Company only hires juniors
- Hispanic/Latino: boon, neutral or liability?
- Is it easy to get a job as a remote software developer? Are those jobs rare or abundant?
- I am leaving a new job because it isn’t a good fit. How do I comfortably tell my coworkers?
- Does anyone work autonomously?
- What are the minimum technical skills required of a Java Web Developer?
- Is working as a programmer in a small IT department a "career trap"?
- I feel almost like a fake on a new stack. It's like I understand bits and pieces of everything but not enough to do anything significant.
- Partnership for Software consultancy?
- First Job as Embedded Systems Programmer in C++
- College Career Fairs - How do you use them?
- How do I show employers that I know SQL? Are there SQL-only side projects one can show?
- What is living in a big software engineering hub actually like? (SF/Silicon Valley/etc.)
- What do I need to learn to be "considered" a good developer?
- Burnt out and potentially killed my career?
- In high school and looking at App Academy or Holberton School
- How hard is it to earn some pocket change as a web developer / mobile app developer?
- UX + Front-End + Design + Strategy... What's my title?
| Interview Discussion - July 26, 2018 Posted: 26 Jul 2018 12:07 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 - July 26, 2018 Posted: 26 Jul 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]  |
| Should I "Americanize" my first name? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 03:01 PM PDT I have a foreign sounding first name (Farokh) but I'm born and raised in America. Would changing my first name to a similar American sounding nickname help? Anyone have any experience with this? I'm thinking Farokh->Freddie or Fred [link] [comments]  |
| Depressed about current role and career prospect Posted: 26 Jul 2018 11:11 AM PDT Edit: Just wanted to give a little background about myself. Graduated with a Computer Science degree (3.5 GPA) from a decent UC 2 years ago. I was able to complete all my programming assignments and pass all my classes so I'd like to think that I'm not too terrible at programming. Unfortunately, I've forgotten everything I've learned in school by now. Thought things would get easier after graduating... Hi everyone, I apologize for the giant wall of text in advance. I am falling into depression and it is affecting the way I feel and act towards my SO, family, friends, and coworkers and I don't know what to do anymore. I currently work as a "developer" in an IT department of a large health care company in the Bay Area. The reason I put "developer" in quotes is because I am not doing any software development. What I really want to do is application development or web development professionally. I've been with this company for around 2 years rotating around different IT departments and have recently joined the current team I'm in now a couple of months ago. Being with different groups and working on various projects, I was able to gain a bunch of different skills but none of them offered me professional, production-level software development experience. Most of the work I had involved working with vendor software or creating small POCs. The team I'm in now is great. The pay is below market for a high COL area but the benefits and work-life balance are great. The people are great and they are doing cool things -- things that I want to do. They are building microservices and web apps on the cloud with the latest web stack (Node, React, etc) and this is exactly what I wanted to do -- and what I thought I would be doing. While most of the people on my team are working on that side of things, myself along side with a couple of other senior developers are working on setting up and developing policies for an API management gateway. We, as a company, are trying to move away from our legacy stack and into a more modern service and API economy. Now, I know this is very important work as this will impact the whole company but I am not enjoying this AT ALL. I'm afraid this will pigeonhole me into API management roles when what I really want to be doing is web development or application development. Since my team is relatively small and most of my team were already working on web dev stuff, their budget is maxed for those projects so I had to be put on this project. To make things worse, I'm sort of the main developer on this platform so I'm stuck doing this even if new cloud projects come in. I don't have time for anything else. I can see this effort continuing for the next couple of years as we have a ton of services to migrate and accommodate. I am getting to the point where I absolutely HATE going into work and HATE interacting with anyone in meetings related to my work. I'm not motivated to do anything at work. This is affecting every aspect of my life and is making me irritable towards everyone in my life. I don't know what to do anymore. I want to quit but I know that that's not a smart decision. I want to look for a new job but I cannot pass any coding interviews to save my life. I've recently made a firecode account but couldn't even doing the first few challenges without a hint. I've never been good at data structures and algorithms, even fresh out of school. I feel too tired and exhausted after work to doing any studying or work on side projects...which leads to another problem. Since I haven't had any profession experience developing software, I think I absolutely need to work on some side projects. How do I find the time to work on side projects AND study whiteboarding questions? Even though it isn't a smart move, a part of me still want to quit my current job and focus on my future job prospect. I'd have 3 options if I go with this route, I will have all the time in the world to:
Please help me evaluate my options and what I should do to have the best future career prospects. TLDR: I hate my current job (no coding) but I have 0 profession software development experience and I suck at interviews and data structures and algorithms. Don't know what to do with life anymore. [link] [comments]  |
| The best way to gain a wage increase is to get a new job... Posted: 26 Jul 2018 02:28 PM PDT I found this to be true. But when you get a new job. You have to prove yourself to your new company and to your new coworkers. Which is exhausting af. Every new work environment I got into, had coworkers that assumed I am a complete beginner. I can't recall the number of times I got the "is this your first job?" question. Every new job had an on-boarding interview with a developer who always assumed inexperience, pushing for tech training. It's almost as if he wanted me to be inexperienced just so that he could feel superior. All the coworker jerks who take a jab at me just because I am new. Which I guess is a sort of a "rite of passage". All the cliquey behavior, teams going to lunch separately. My worst experience with cliques is when my company put me in a team with two women (both slightly older than me). Two women who were "BFFs", covering each other's backs, always chatting and going for smoke breaks together. And in the end, one of them (the team lead) complained about me to our manager (without talking to me first). This situation made me depressed. In some companies that have canteens. Teams forming groups was less of a problem, but then old employees formed cliques excluding newer employees... even when we are of similar age. I mean, they were nice and all, but you never feel completely accepted. But the most damaging thing is the amount of time required for companies to include you and give you real work. They almost always assign you some internal meaningless project, just to test your skills. You won't learn much from this project. All of this makes me want to switch to freelancing. But I assume that freelancing has it's own flaws. /rant [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Jul 2018 08:01 AM PDT Hey, I hope this fits this sub, if it doesn't, I'm sorry, also sorry for these silly questions. I'm currently in high school, but I am interested in programming and I'd like to relate my future with programming, but I don't know if I am going to be good enough and I wanted to ask you how can I test myself if I am good enough for an entry-level programming job? What do entry-level programmers do? Do they program a lot? What things should I focus the most before going to university(if I do so)? Have you ever thought that you were not good enough for something CS related? How did it end up? Were you good enough at the end? Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you figure out what you want to do / work with? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 02:44 AM PDT As the title suggests, how did you all figure out what you want to do? I'm utterly bored at work and feel like I'm stagnating. There isn't that much career progression and we are working with semi-modern tech. Further, whenever I try to introduce new tech or streamline build-processes that everyone knows are failing, I get told that it's not financially viable... So, for the people who have found their "dream" job, or are finding yourself loving working in a particular industry, how did you get there? What made you realise that you wanted to work in that particular industry? And finally, what can one do to help understand what one wants to do? I know some of you might say "just try it out", but problem is that I have the attention-span of a gold-fish. So with all the new frameworks and libraries popping up everywhere I just want to try everything and find myself going from one language to another, moving from development to devops or from web development to machine learning. [link] [comments]  |
| Got this as a question "can you do 2 to the 24th in your head?" Posted: 26 Jul 2018 11:27 AM PDT So...I'm sure there's a trick here I'm just missing But how would one solve that quickly in their head? I've also had some trouble looking up how you're supposed to do it [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Jul 2018 10:35 AM PDT My company only hires juniors, and causes them to leave after a few years by not giving adequate raises. I have no idea why they are doing this, to me it seems like an experienced developer who knows about the product would have orders of magnitude more productivity even after you normalize for salary. My question is, should I quit? You would think this would give me the opportunity to step up and make my own architectural decisions but there are so many feature requests that there's no time for refactoring. Plus I have nobody to look up to and learn about best practices. [link] [comments]  |
| Hispanic/Latino: boon, neutral or liability? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 01:02 PM PDT I have been putting down Hispanic/Latino on the Voluntary Disclosure portion of applications. I'm in the US applying to jobs in the US. Will this help, hinder or do nothing to my chances? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it easy to get a job as a remote software developer? Are those jobs rare or abundant? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 05:38 PM PDT For anyone that is a remote developer, do you prefer it to working in an office? [link] [comments]  |
| I am leaving a new job because it isn’t a good fit. How do I comfortably tell my coworkers? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 05:34 PM PDT I am leaving a new job because it isn't a good fit. How do I comfortably tell my coworkers? I feel really awkward about it and don't know what to say since I am new and don't like it. I don't want a lot of questions. [link] [comments]  |
| Does anyone work autonomously? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 06:14 AM PDT I'm an experienced dev and one of the things i hate the most right now is not knowing what i will be working on until it is spoon-fed to me by my manager. At best I will have an assignment that will take a week to complete but mostly it's call in the morning, get one or 2 trivial or annoying tasks and complete by EOD, and do it again tomorrow. I have experienced this in several work places so far. Is this 'agile'? Seems almost unproductive because anytime I don't feel like chasing my manager down for my next assignment I'm just burning the clock. /rant [link] [comments]  |
| What are the minimum technical skills required of a Java Web Developer? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 05:24 PM PDT If you were hiring a Java developer for building web applications, are these the bare minimum skills you would expect from them? -
Would you add to them or remove any of these? [link] [comments]  |
| Is working as a programmer in a small IT department a "career trap"? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 08:12 AM PDT Most of my experience has been working in small IT departments, writing apps that are used by the employees. I get actual development experience, so it's not like I am doing the hardware side of things or help desk/tech support. However, I hope to get a job on a larger software team eventually. I am still in my 20s, but I'm worried that working in these smallish IT departments is a bit if a trap. Am I wasting my early years on jobs that aren't preparing me for the reality of software development? I have never worked anywhere that uses testing, code review, or strict coding conventions. Most of the time, you'll have the requirements for an app or feature and have free reign to implement it any way you like, and manually build and deploy it yourself. Am I missing out on gaining important skills while I'm in the early stages of my career? Would this be setting me up for failure or taking a pay cut when I go to a team that uses these techniques? Is it even worth it to try to transition out of these small IT roles into a proper position on a large software team? Hoping to get some feedback, potentially from someone who started in small IT departments and moved into a software company. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Jul 2018 04:20 PM PDT I just started a new job and I sadly don't know how else to even say it. I feel like a fake, a charlatan right now. I am used to java/spring/hibernate/javascript/html/css and have never really touched Azure seriously or WPF or any of these technologies used at the stack of where I work right now. Do I want to learn them? OF COURSE! I totally find these useful and want to take what I learn into the future with me. But today I was asked by a senior engineer with 13+ years of experience to review his code and I felt my stomach almost turn, I felt like I was going to puke and be dizzy. The general syntax and layout made sense when I looked at it, I understood what was going on, but the rest was a complete painful mystery to me. I don't know WPF so these words made no sense to me that were being brought in. I don't know Telerik's little details (the front end API we are overly reliant on). And then to make matters worse we had a bug on the front end that I had absolutely no idea how to fix and so the senior engineer took it from me. I feel like fake news and it fucking pains me to say that because I want to do this but I feel like a moron. I don't understand all these Visual Studio fancy functions and features. I am used to IntelliJ and Netbeans and the plain VS Code. I don't even have the faintest idea how Azure works or putting little webservices in it works (are they even called webservices still?). I've done RESTful API programming on a mega scale but never have done this sort of stuff and it's just so creepy and weird to me. I am overwhelmed and I feel like a fake. I have come home depressed and defeated every day and I feel just like a lie. I feel like I'm probably going to start crying tonight. If anything the title should be changed, I DO feel like a fake. I feel like a complete deception and a failure. Instead of feeling happy or joyful that I managed to land a job after university with great benefits and salary and even a huge office for MYSELF I just feel complete and utter misery. [link] [comments]  |
| Partnership for Software consultancy? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 01:12 PM PDT You often see law firms that are made of partners. Regular employees who buy in. No one owns it, the managing partner can be fired ect. Wouldn this model work for a software consultancy? [link] [comments]  |
| First Job as Embedded Systems Programmer in C++ Posted: 26 Jul 2018 02:45 AM PDT I am a new grad starting my first job in two weeks. I will be mostly writing in C++ for sensors, networking devices, and similar embedded hardware. I was an EE major until sophomore year (graduated in CS), but I think I have lost my knowledge about stuff like oscilloscopes, assembly, etc. I have taken systems programming and operating systems courses my fall semester of my senior year but I feel a little rusty in that respect as well. What I would like to know is what are some best practices in embedded system development, useful textbooks/online resources to get better, and also generally what to expect on my first few days/weeks on the job. What sucks is I would love to commit to doing nothing but studying this stuff but so much of my energy is spent right now finding a place to move to several states away for the position. All advice appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| College Career Fairs - How do you use them? Posted: 25 Jul 2018 11:35 PM PDT So I know the 'go to them'. But what if they appear to not fit my needs/wants/desires/some word? I go to a small school and the companies that come don't seem very impressive. But alr, ill still go to the career fair. Now what should I ask them (CS Major here ofc)? What should I take notes on, etc etc? I'm also open to internships so I'm assuming I should ask them that? [link] [comments]  |
| How do I show employers that I know SQL? Are there SQL-only side projects one can show? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 08:04 PM PDT So a lot of the jobs that I'm interested in have SQL as a desired skill. I feel that I've done enough exercises and online courses on my own to be fairly comfortable with it. But how do I show that to employers? Are there "SQL side projects" one can show on github? If so, how does that work? [link] [comments]  |
| What is living in a big software engineering hub actually like? (SF/Silicon Valley/etc.) Posted: 26 Jul 2018 10:40 AM PDT I've lived in mostly rural areas my entire life and I'm not really sure what to expect if/when I start working in a big city. The career counselors at my university told me that I should start my job search by first picking 1-2 cities and working from there. I want to pick a big city so that I have more opportunities around me for things to do outside of work. I really don't want to get in the habit of working and then spending the rest of the day on my computer or watching tv. I interviewed at Google and I didn't really like the "feeling" I got from Mountain View. My interviewers mentioned how "everyone is a software engineer" and I didn't really feel like there was much of a community outside of software. Is this the case in some of the big tech hubs? I don't want to exclude places like SF from my job search but at the same time I am afraid of living in a super high cost of living community of software engineers. [link] [comments]  |
| What do I need to learn to be "considered" a good developer? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:16 PM PDT I coded simple sorting and graph searching algorithms(Qsort, merge sort, BFS, A star, IDA star...), I coded a simple assembler and a virtual machine, I'd consider myself a full stack web developer, I don't feel like there is a website that I couldn't code myself. I want to do a bit of computer graphics just for fun (Raycasting, raytracing, fluid simulation...), I also want to reimplement some basic AI concepts (Expert System, Minimax, Perceptrons, Regressions...) I'm (was?) a freshman, but I don't think I want to finish school, I want to stay a few more months in college, then launch my own startup(s), if that doesn't work out in the next 5 years, I want to do freelance work and do the bare minimum to live a frugal life. I don't want a 9-5 job, so my goal isn't a degree or a good resume, I just want to have good fundamentals and to be a good developer. What else do I need to learn to achieve that goal? [link] [comments]  |
| Burnt out and potentially killed my career? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:10 PM PDT Hey guys, This is my first post on r/cscareerquestions; any advice would be greatly appreciated. So the dodo bird of a human I am accepted the first job offer I got out of college. Fast forward exactly one year later and I'm still at the same company (let's keep its name a secret :)). For a number of reasons, I desperately want out. They gave me the title Software Engineer, but I spend most of my time doing ETL, BI work and TSQL. (I've tried unsuccessfully to find traditional coding work within the company) Now, the TSQL is alright, but the rest of it I find excruciatingly boring. (apologies if that is your job) I've been able to keep my coding skills somewhat alive by mini side projects and automating things at work (I recently replaced an SSIS package with a python script I wrote) But I understand it looks very bad to other potential employers that I'm labeled a software engineer, but rarely write OOP code at work. I've applied to maybe 40+ places over the year and had 3 interviews, none of which worked out. I know for sure one of the interviewers was "afraid my code my be rusty" To top it off. I'm beginning to get very burnt out. Coding projects I once thought were fun aren't so much anymore. I don't have the passion to spend my time off work on open source projects. I've honestly entertained the idea of giving up coding altogether if it meant getting out of this company. I don't have money to go back to school and I'm morally against taking out more loans. TL;DR I'm a "Software Engineer" but I don't code much except for TSQL. Also I'm feeling very burnt out right now. Is my CS career over? What options do I have/should try. Any advice is appreciated, thanks for your time reading this! [link] [comments]  |
| In high school and looking at App Academy or Holberton School Posted: 26 Jul 2018 06:56 PM PDT So I am going to be a senior in high school this year and I'm stuck on deciding how I want to pursue what I love. I love technology and coding and I only want that. I don't particularly want to go to a college and have to do the English, Science, etc and not even use those things on the job. However, if anyone thinks it is a good idea to go to college and obtain a solid "overall skill set" in said subjects, then please say so. My plan is to do the "Learning to Code" Nanodegree program at Udacity next month. I do have coding experience, but I want a more well rounded and just overall more exposure to it. Then after that, I wish to do App Academy's online bootcamp prep to get an even better exposure and learning experience. However after that, and after I graduate high school, I am not sure what to do. I am stuck choosing between going into a bootcamp like App Academy, or a more full fledged "school" like Holberton. I would already have a pretty good experience with coding and whatnot with taking both Udacity and the online bootcamp prep and I have heard that Holberton is more for people with no experience in coding. My goal is of course like most people, whether I choose App Academy or Holberton, is to get a job and be self sustainable. So my question is, after doing all the things that are going to lead up to choosing between these two "schools" (Udacity and bootcamp prep), which would give me the most efficient education and best chance at getting a good job? Also, any other bootcamp, school suggestions, or personal experiences with either App Academy or Holberton would be great and much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| How hard is it to earn some pocket change as a web developer / mobile app developer? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 07:41 AM PDT I'm a junior front end developer out of college working full time, and making decent pay at that, but I was wondering how difficult it is to make some side revenue with my current skills. I am almost entirely front end (angular) but I have experience building relatively simple Node apps with RESTful routing / authentication with passportJS and basic DB interactivity, but nothing too crazy. I'm also interested in building android apps (mainly games) buy have exactly 0 experience with that. Don't know very much Java and even less C# so that'd be an uphill battle. Not looking for $5k/mo on the side, just something I can build and let go / occasionally update or patch. What am I looking at, and what's some advice for moving forward? [link] [comments]  |
| UX + Front-End + Design + Strategy... What's my title? Posted: 26 Jul 2018 06:13 PM PDT I was recently hired as a graphic designer (in this case meaning paper collateral, flyers, mailers, Facebook ads, etc) at a software company (~50 employees). During my first week, it came out that I also do UX, front-end, and a little marketing strategy and backend. The higher-ups had a meeting and decided they want to create a position for me with a totally different salary negotiation and title. They want me to pick the title. I was thinking UI/UX Developer (I know this is used in the industry but still feels a bit strange). My portfolio says Front-End Developer and Designer... thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
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