Resume Advice Thread - January 08, 2019 CS Career Questions |
- Resume Advice Thread - January 08, 2019
- Daily Chat Thread - January 08, 2019
- Struggling rather hard with phone screenings, advice? Also, have they gotten harder lately?
- How did you improve your UI/UX design skills?
- Give it to me straight - am I crazy for not being excited about big companies?
- Chicago’s tech scene?
- Failed client’s drug test
- I snapped and made our intern cry, now i have an HR complaint. Anyone have any experience with this?
- Should I ask to be taken off a project when I have no idea how to do the given task?
- What are some projects that look good when applying to internships?
- New job with zero mentoring?!
- Career advice for a web developer
- LinkedIn Internship offer / Housing related
- Working on "application-level" problems vs working on "lower-level" problems
- Remote work long term
- Is my current role a career killer?
- Is being hired as an "independent contractor" a red flag?
- Thoughts on Stitch Fix?
- What was the best thing you ever did for your career?
- Leaving an amazing job for family business, what should I take for consideration with a hiatus?
- What are my Career Options (Mostly SQL experience)?
- Computer Graphics vs. Mobile Development
- What are some good materials for getting into financial and banking programming?
- Recruiter for consulting position asked for transcript, I have a bad GPA
- Linux for devops - is it necessary?
- Companies to apply for in Los Angeles that aren’t on the west side?
| Resume Advice Thread - January 08, 2019 Posted: 07 Jan 2019 11:06 PM PST Please use this thread to ask for resume advice and critiques. You should read our Resume FAQ and implement any changes from that before you ask for more advice. Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk. Note on anonomyizing your resume: If you'd like your resume to remain anonymous, make sure you blank out or change all personally identifying information. Also be careful of using your own Google Docs account or DropBox account which can lead back to your personally identifying information. To make absolutely sure you're anonymous, we suggest posting on sites/accounts with no ties to you after thoroughly checking the contents of your resume. This thread is posted each Tuesday and Saturday at midnight PST. Previous Resume Advice Threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| Daily Chat Thread - January 08, 2019 Posted: 07 Jan 2019 11:06 PM PST Please use this thread to chat, have casual discussions, and ask casual questions. Moderation will be light, but don't be a jerk. This thread is posted every day at midnight PST. Previous Daily Chat Threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| Struggling rather hard with phone screenings, advice? Also, have they gotten harder lately? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 07:27 AM PST When I got my last job, I had like 3 interviews and ended up in a position I stayed in for like 5 years. I've been unemployed for a few months now, and everything sucks. I'm having a real low success rate with phone screenings. I keep grinding leetcode questions and reading ctci, but things feel way harder then they used to. From my past experience these interviews were just like easy checks to be sure you have some competency. Things i've been getting lately are problems I look up after the fact to see they're rated as leetcode hard and I totally flub them. Its really kinda fucked my confidence which only makes things worse with each subsequent interview. Its especially irritating because I know damn well I can do the job they're hiring for, as I've already done it for years. Interview questions though are just unrealistic to the conditions you actually work in. So many just feel like puzzles with super specific "ah ha" moments required. and if you don't have it you're stuck with shit runtimes [link] [comments]  |
| How did you improve your UI/UX design skills? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:34 PM PST I wish I had decent design skills because all my side projects look like garbage. But I didn't learn this stuff in school, and I don't design at work. The designers do, and front end devs to an extent. Any tips or recommendations on resources to learn? [link] [comments]  |
| Give it to me straight - am I crazy for not being excited about big companies? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:45 AM PST 1 YOE. Big Tech Companies. They pay so damn well. I have an int coming up with the Rainforest but...I am just not excited at all. I don't know why. The money would be a massive step up (make over 80k right now in a lower COL area than SF / Seattle / LA and am decently comfortable). I am the sole provider for my wife and myself at the moment so we don't save TOO much but we aren't struggling at all. Live in a nice area, can buy gifts without worrying, etc. I can objectively see how getting a big tech salary at a young age would make the savings and retirement accounts so happy. But my job right now is chill (super boring but pretty stress-free) and the idea of possibly adding stress and longer hours to my relaxed schedule isn't that enticing. Right now, I hit that 40 hours (actually less since I usually take long lunches) and forget about work while I'm not at the office. I have pretty wide autonomy to work on what I want and pursue projects for the company using whatever tech I deem appropriate. But, again, my brain keeps coming back to having that "BigTechCo" name on my resume and getting that big salary early in my career. I don't know. Do you guys feel like me? Am I crazy for not taking advantage of the benefits here? Is the potential short-term discomfort worth the long-term savings, resume booster, etc.? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:38 AM PST Does anyone have any information about Chicago's tech scene? Is it good? Is it growing? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 10:11 AM PST So I work for a tech consulting/contracting and I didn't have to take a drug test for my company. However, when I joined a project recently, the client wanted to background check and drug test all the employees on the project. I got a call this morning from the 3rd party lab that drug tested me and I came out positive for marijuana. They also told me I have 3 days to make a choice of retesting the same sample before letting my employer know. This retest would cost $150 out of my own pockets. Should I talk to my employer now? Wait for them to approach me? Or drop $150 for a retest that probably will fail again. I know this is a dumb situation to be in but im dumb and just want to focus on not being dumb in the future. Thanks guys. Tl;dr Failed client's drug test and know this before employer does. What do? [link] [comments]  |
| I snapped and made our intern cry, now i have an HR complaint. Anyone have any experience with this? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 09:53 PM PST I am a senior developer at work, and over the last 5 years today was probably the worst day i have had in a long time. A nasty fire on production that led to an outage, etc. My manager and a bunch of my team is still mostly on vacation, and thus the entire office descended upon me and ignored my email / slack messages to complain to me about the outage, etc. Not a great day, unfortunately one of our brand new interns kept trying to get my attention for help with something completely unrelated. The first two times i brushed her off and told her to give me awhile, only for her to come back 10 minutes later and tap me on the shoulder again. The third time she came by, i feel awful but i snapped and told her to "duck off" when she tapped me on the shoulder. I think she started to cry, but she didn't come back for the rest of the afternoon. Only after i fixed the problem, did i really realize what i did. I sent her an email/slack message apologizing but she didn't respond. Now a few hours ago i apparently got an HR complaint about my behavior. I don't know what an HR complaint really is, but i have a formal meeting involving the head of HR, and our CTO now. Anyone ever screw up like this in a major company? What happened? **EDIT** To clarify a few things because gender keeps coming up i am not male, and even if i was i feel i probably would have made the same dumb mistake. I also realized after sleeping on it i was trying to push blame on them, when i should be taking all the responsibility. Update: Thanks for the advice, i ended up getting a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately our intern doesn't want to come back unfortunately. [link] [comments]  |
| Should I ask to be taken off a project when I have no idea how to do the given task? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:31 PM PST I'm an intern at a large company. The project is a legacy project requiring Windows 2000 and the code is all in Visual Basic and Visual C++. The code is total spaghetti code containing 30k+ lines (at least it's spaghetti from what I've written/learned in school and read in open source repos). There will be 20+ header files included, and variables from these files will be assigned and updated all over the place in numerous amounts of .cpp files. There is absolutely no documentation nor version control other than the project being backed up on numerous hard drives. The platform is an interactive GUI. There are over 50 buttons for the GUI and in the code each button event is called, "Button1", "Button2", …, "Button50" with little to no comments explaining what each button does. There is duplicate code throughout the entire project that can very obviously be taken into a method with certain flags to save hundreds and hundreds of lines of repeated code. On average, function lengths are about 500 lines. The code is littered with commented out code with no message saying why it was commented out. There are empty if statements all over the code and most of the time the if statement structures don't make sense, such as an if statement being empty followed by an else statement that has code within it. To add delays for message sending, there are multi-nested for loops scattered through the code to delay full seconds. This is what I've found over the past week or so. I explained the project situation so someone can inform me if this is normal or not, as I'm currently in my senior year of my CS degree and have only ever interned at this job doing other smaller programming tasks. For me personally, the state of the project has made it nearly impossible for me to accomplish what was asked as I have difficulties understanding the functionality of the software and how to replace what has been asked to be replaced. When asked if I would help with the project, I was only told about the languages used for the project and nothing else. Again, I'm an intern, so I've tried to be eager to work on whatever was asked of me hoping I would learn lots in the process. I've been informed by multiple people that the high up management really wants this project to be finished asap. Unfortunately, there is no expert understanding the system completely, so mentorship/guidance or asking someone for specific help isn't really an option. In fact, as of right now, I'm probably the most well-versed person who understands the code structure (yikes). However, I am sure that there are tons of people who are much more experienced in dealing with these situations than I am and could have the project updated in no time, but I personally do not know of people like this. At this point, I'm quite defeated and am tired of trying to unravel this black box. I'm not sure what to tell my manager as I really need this job and don't want to be looking for a job when school starts up again. I'm also a decent candidate to be hired on once I graduate, but don't want to be stuck working on these types of systems, unless I was trained extensively. I was thinking to email my manager, explaining the above situation to him and that I would like to be taken off the project asap. Would this be a good idea, or should I just keep trying to chug along? Is there a certain way I should explain everything to him? I wouldn't mind these types of situations (bad code) if I was shadowing someone/closely mentored by someone who knew what they were doing and how to untangle these types of mess. This idea of shadowing a Computer Scientist sounds amazing to me, as I've received no technical training for the 2 years I've interned. Is mentoring/training not popular in SE types of positions? [link] [comments]  |
| What are some projects that look good when applying to internships? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:30 PM PST Trying to improve my resume and I hear that personal projects are good but what are some examples of these? Would something like a Twitter clone be a good personal project? I'm only a sophomore so don't know a ton yet and wondering what kind of stuff I could work on to help get an internship [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:49 PM PST I've been in my SWE role for a couple weeks now and while I love the position so far, I'm concerned by how little mentoring I get here. At my previous tech job I had a lot of one on one meetings with my immediate supervisor teaching my things, showing me their stack, explaining their workflow and all that good stuff. In the beginning of that job I spent a ton of time sitting side by side with coworkers with them going over how to do things. At this new place it seems like it's entirely on me to figure out the system. I've scheduled a bunch of meetings with people and ask a ton of questions, which they've all been more than happy to help with, but there has been absolutely nothing in the way of "this is what you should learn to get up to speed here, so-and-so will pair program with you and show you some things, here's an easy ticket for you to tackle with so-and-so and they'll be able to walk you through it." My immediate supervisor told me he expects me to spend "a few months" ramping up and in the meantime my job is to learn things. But that's really it. If I wasn't scheduling meetings and figuring out things to fill my day with I wouldn't know the first place to start. I still barely do. I'm definitely learning a lot and feel comfortable with what I know so far but their system is very complex and there's still a long way to go. I just wanted to know if anyone else has been in a similar situation, whether I should ask my boss about it, or whether I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill and this baptism-by-fire is just standard. Thanks y'all! [link] [comments]  |
| Career advice for a web developer Posted: 08 Jan 2019 03:34 PM PST Hi, web developer here. TLDR: I don't want to do web development forever, I want to do something that will be relevant for a long time (I don't think web will be). I think that's machine learning/iot/ai, but I don't know what to choose. I am starting this degree this year: https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-computer-science-london. I am open to suggestions. Who I am: I started studying web development in 2016 from scratch, I landed my first job in Italy in 2017 (full stack Angular, Laravel, Linux). One month ago I (unexpectedly) received an offer and moved to London for twice the salary to work with Angular (front end position, C# on the backend). I tried to keep myself up to speed with the bleeding edge, and I did it until I found a job, then it became quite more difficult. Where I am now: I started a cybersecurity course at the university in Italy before even thinking about London, which was in October (2018). I thought I would be able to get out of Italy only after getting a degree. But just a few weeks later I started receiving HR messages on LinkedIn, and now I'm here. I am dropping out because I didn't study anything since I was moving here and I don't feel like going back to Italy 10 times a year to do the exams (It's an online course, but you have to go there for the exams). I still want to pursue a degree for the value of the piece of paper and the opportunities that come with it (mainly for immigration to other countries [Australia, USA (maybe)]). Why I started: I wanted to learn programming and JavaScript was the most accessible technology to learn at the time. Why I want to change: I want to know what's "out there". I don't want to work with the first and only path I have found. I feel like it's frustratingly tiring to stay on the bleeding edge, especially for web development. I also believe that in less than 10 (5?) years web development won't be paying as good as it is now unless I become highly skilled with something specific. But to me, it feels like digging deep until one day you hit the bedrock and can't dig anymore, then you have to find another place and start from the surface again. The problem: There are so many things to explore out there that I really don't know what to pick and where to start. So far I've been playing with JS (node), python and Linux only. I am enrolling again here in London for a BS degree in CS (https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-computer-science-london). As you can see there are many opportunities for the specialization. I think web and mobile would be the easiest and most obvious choice, but I will feel like I would be missing out a lot of things. I think the future is in AI, IoT, decentralized things, machine learning, and not the web, but the web is the easiest path for me now. What I like: Money. JavaScript, Linux, Node JS, learning new things, automation. I get excited about learning new things. What I don't like: I'm not sure, java. [link] [comments]  |
| LinkedIn Internship offer / Housing related Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:04 PM PST Okay. I have an offer from LinkedIn for my summer internship and everything looks good on the offer except one aspect, the housing. They're providing a 2bed/2bath apartment in Sunnyvale and supposedly it is to be shared among 4 people, so I have to share a room?!?! I know it's a first world problem but I'm 25 years old and I have not shared a room ever but what's weird is they're not compensating for housing if I don't choose their accommodation. Was really excited about this until I read this... is it the same for interns in other good companies in California? [link] [comments]  |
| Working on "application-level" problems vs working on "lower-level" problems Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:59 PM PST Maybe I'm naive because I've been working only for six months, so I'd like some opinions from more experienced people out here. I work at a an e-commerce company, and the job has business problems that are challenging, such as issues of scale, latency and so on. But I feel that the work I'm doing is not exciting from a tech standpoint, because we mainly use fairly mature products that provide most of the features we require out-of-the-box (ex. AWS products). So my question is: is the work in the "lower layers" similar? Say for example a CDN service (like AWS CloudFront) that I assume works closely with the networking layer. Are their approaches to hard problems similar to what my company would have? Do they build out their solutions or "glue together" other systems? Is the work more focused on CS stuff that I learnt in college like networks, databases or OS? I'd also love to hear your perspective on some hard problems I may have missed that I might encounter in my current job, which could be more tech focused than merely solving a business need. They would help me ask for work more aligned in that direction! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 05:45 AM PST I'm a US citizen, I'm planning to move outside US, (wife is Asian) looking to hear from people which have been working remotely for American companies for few years. Which companies allow you to do that? (I'm a SWE, BS/MS in CS. 15+ years experience, work for big N) Edit 1. Destination country: Malaysia [link] [comments]  |
| Is my current role a career killer? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 07:41 PM PST I've been working as an SDET at a start up in NY for a couple of months, fresh out of college. My intention was to get into a SDE role doing back end but I got drawn to the SDET role for a variety of reasons like being more laid back than a traditional dev role (note: I do have a strong engineering background) I've learned the tools that I use day to day within the first 2 weeks and ever since then I haven't really learned a new tool or had the opportunity to. Most of the work I've done is very repetitive, I've done a lot of clean up, some test scripts, and a few coding. The coding that I get to do to support the test scripts are very simple. The role that I'm taking on is slowly turning into more managerial/pm type where I'll do a bit of test scripting but mostly maintenance. I know the stigma the role has, but I'm stuck between pursuing a more traditional role or not. My day to day tasks aren't difficult, I get paid relatively well, I don't stress at all. I'm worried that, being relatively young, not so much the position but what my role consists off will hurt me in the long run whether I continue to scale the ladder in Automation or make the switch to traditional dev sooner or later. Can anyone here provide me some advice, do my tasks sound just about right or should I look for a new role? [link] [comments]  |
| Is being hired as an "independent contractor" a red flag? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 07:31 PM PST I'm from a smaller city with very few career options but have a good, stable, job with a decent salary. I've got an interview coming up with a company that is looking for a developer to hire as an independent contractor. The pay would be about twice as much as I'm making now and pretty far into the 6-figure range, assuming 40 hours a week. COL and taxes would both be pretty low too. I'm a bit worried if being hired as an independent contractor in this sort of situation is sketchy, though. Tbh I'm not that worried about being let go unexpectedly. That can happen at my current job now, anyway. I'm more worried about weird grey areas like whether they can just say they only want 20 hours from me this week, and I have to decide if I am willing to quit over that. Is that a real worry in this kind of situation? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 07:08 PM PST Stitch Fix is a personalized shopping service startup in San Francisco. Does anyone know anything about working there? Glassdoor does not have any reviews from Software Engineers. [link] [comments]  |
| What was the best thing you ever did for your career? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 02:59 PM PST What was something you did at (or out of) work that you feel had an incredibly positive impact on your career? [link] [comments]  |
| Leaving an amazing job for family business, what should I take for consideration with a hiatus? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:26 PM PST TLDR: Making approx. 75k, leaving for a brand new restaurant but the business itself isn't new. How should I explain hiatus if I ever plan to come back to SWE field? I will have 3 years work experience this year. Backstory: So not to sure how to lay this out but basically, my family has run a small little food truck since I was 10 years old. It was my deceased mother's dream to be able to have her own restaurant but they could only afford a food truck 17 years ago. Sadly my mother was never able to work in the food truck as cancer beat her to it, and obviously never able to see her dream of a restaurant. My father gave up his job as a welder and took this plunge. He purchased the food truck because it was my mother's dream, and ran it. In the beginning, it was super slow. I remember working there and only having sold 25 or so dollars but now the business really picked up. Current status: Now though the food truck is approx. selling around 500 dollars per day and upwards. My family with the food truck are approx. Saving about 5-6k per month and that includes wages, bills, and even personal bills. This allowed the business to be able to get an SBA loan to build a restaurant on the land that my father purchased and has had the truck stationed for over 10 years. Our business is top rated in Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Google. We are the number 1 food truck in our small town, and also the most well-known taco stand in the area. With how much the food truck is making we could afford to pay the restaurants bills with only selling 500 or so per day but we believe the restaurant will at least triple our sales but if compared to our local competitors we are seeing a sale increase of 5-10x our current amount. Taking into consideration drive-thru, and now an actual seating area. Tech being set up in the restaurant: As a developer, I have set up the following technological items that will be used at the restaurant.
In house apps developed:
I have been working as a technological architect deciding what the restaurant needs based on what I have learned working as a developer. I love being a developer, but working in something that I know my family has worked so hard for makes me want to take the plunge. I'm thinking about leaving or working at the restaurant for a year to lower employee costs but I see myself returning to the SWE Field. If I was to leave and work at my family business, how could I explain the 1 or few years hiatus if I ever decided to work as an SWE again? [link] [comments]  |
| What are my Career Options (Mostly SQL experience)? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:25 PM PST Im 23 with a degree in CSIS and a minor is business. I graduated 1.5 years ago and have some okay expereince so far. My first job was working in warehouse building servers, which turned into me being a sql dev. I learned a lot of SQL Server and created a windows forms import tool using VB.net. i also learned SSRS and some SSIS plus a little C#. My current job is a data analyst role and I still use a lot of SQL Server. The job is also very heavy with Excel and VBA. Their ERP System uses excel in the backend (i know). I also use a little Power BI and possibly some more VB.Net in the future. Im scared my current job is too specifc and is hurting my future. They pay me nice but the company is small and im the only person on my team. What are my options for future career paths? I dont necesarilly just want to do SQL. I want to do more programming. What are some things i can do to help myself? Am I stuck? [link] [comments]  |
| Computer Graphics vs. Mobile Development Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:07 PM PST Should I take Computer Graphics or Mobile Development? Right now I'm trying to decide between taking Computer Graphics and Mobile App Development. I thought Computer Graphics would be interesting because I would be able to learn how that part of computing works. In the past though I have taken a different mobile development class and thoroughly enjoyed that. The Computer Graphics class teaches triangle rasterization, fragment shaders, perspective correction, vertex shaders, projection transforms, it then goes into OpenGL with shadows, BDRF, tesselations, geometry, and compute, and finally visibility determination. I have done next to nothing with graphics, so I'm not even sure what all of that includes. Mobile App Development will go over widgets, files, intents, activities, dynamic ui, fragments, libraries, login, text to speech, restful API's, local databases, remote databases, games, localization, and react native. I don't plan on or want to do game development, however animation may be interesting in the future. I already like Android Development and this would further my knowledge, but computer graphics could show useful in the future. What do you reccomend? [link] [comments]  |
| What are some good materials for getting into financial and banking programming? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 09:28 AM PST Recently I landed a job as a .Net developer and will be working on an investment banking application. I was wondering what technologies and other useful materials I could read up on to be as efficient as possible as someone who hasn't worked in any finincial field. [link] [comments]  |
| Recruiter for consulting position asked for transcript, I have a bad GPA Posted: 08 Jan 2019 03:15 PM PST Had interview for tech consulting (CS / Data Science) new grad interview today. At end of interview, recruiter asked for transcript. I got 2 F's last semester (forgot to drop 2 classes). Two semesters ago, I had a medical surgery that also affected my grades. While this surgery didn't cause my 2 F's, is there a way to explain my bad grades in a way that doesn't sound too bullshitting? FWIW, hiring manager will look at transcript and recruiter's notes before deciding to move me on next round. [link] [comments]  |
| Linux for devops - is it necessary? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 04:37 PM PST Currently a seniors trying to go the devops route. My current stack is python, AWS, Docker, and Jenkins. Haven't learned any CI/CD or some other things but I plan to. I usually do all my self learning on windows but I've read several places Linux is the best for devops. I've installed Ubuntu to dual boot and honestly it's not my cup a tea. There's a learning curve that I can't seem to grasp and everything seems so tedious. Any input from any devops would be greatly appreciated Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Companies to apply for in Los Angeles that aren’t on the west side? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 02:24 PM PST It seems like most of the tech companies in LA are on the west side: Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City. I live in the San Gabriel Valley and don't want to take 20 years off my life by commuting to the west side everyday. Are there any companies for me to look out for that are closer to downtown or more east? I really don't want to move to the west side because I really like where I live right now and I kinda don't like the lifestyle of west LA and what it has to offer (besides work). [link] [comments]  |
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