Daily Chat Thread - March 13, 2019 CS Career Questions |
- Daily Chat Thread - March 13, 2019
- Big N Discussion - March 13, 2019
- Bullying?
- I'm afraid that my CEO is taking advantage of me
- How do you code while others are talking?
- How do I build a portfolio to show I actually know how to program? Do I just upload things to GitHub?
- Is 86k in Austin at 3 years of experience too low?
- Dear God, 8 hours is a long time to be stressed out and mentally strained
- Junior Developer looking for a job, how do I get employers to look at me?
- I'm a software engineer, and my team is turning into a DevOps team... no more coding?
- What kind of SWE experience can prepare you to work as a data engineer? I have some examples to talk about
- How do I work with unresponsive workers?
- SE intern @ IBM or 23andMe??
- When should I let my manager know?
- Are there any unspoken rules on emailing company recruiters on LinkedIn?
- least saturated field of software engineering
- Bootcamp student need help dealing with daily stress
- Software Development might not be for me.
- Current intern at a famous company. I feel like I am not doing almost anything related to software Dev and I am in the wrong team
- How do you respond to knowledge based questions you just don't know?
- How to resign?
- Was an Intern Last summer, saw a job posting they put up for the same role, applied, got a phone screen, did good and lady said she would let the boss know and...
- 78k salary, software dev with 2 years experience in Toronto, financial industry. Good?
- Niche job search not gaining steam
- What can social science students do in order to be part of the tech industry?
- First IT job, should I quit?
| Daily Chat Thread - March 13, 2019 Posted: 13 Mar 2019 12:06 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]  |
| Big N Discussion - March 13, 2019 Posted: 13 Mar 2019 12:06 AM PDT Please use this thread to have discussions about the Big N and questions related to the Big N, such as which one offers the best doggy benefits, or how many companies are in the Big N really? Posts focusing solely on Big N created outside of this thread will probably be removed. There is a top-level comment for each generally recognized Big N company; please post under the appropriate one. There's also an "Other" option for flexibility's sake, if you want to discuss a company here that you feel is sufficiently Big N-like (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc.). Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk. This thread is posted each Sunday and Wednesday at midnight PST. Previous Big N Discussion threads can be found here. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 02:09 PM PDT Started working for a startup a month ago. This is my 3rd startup job, I'm really excited because it has a lot of promise, career development, etc. I was assigned to a team where most of the devs are overseas, including the lead. So all my training comes from them. I understand that it is difficult for them to do it via Skype, but this was not disclosed to me during the interview. Now, I'm overweight. Have been my whole life. The bullying stopped after high school so I was confused when I heard the team making jokes about it in the background of my video calls during training. Now it happens every couple of training sessions or so, and I can see whichever person is training me reacting and smiling at them. Calling me names, making animal sounds, childish stuff like that. How do I stop this without destroying the relationship with the team? I like the job and it has a lot of promise. [link] [comments]  |
| I'm afraid that my CEO is taking advantage of me Posted: 13 Mar 2019 06:27 AM PDT So this feels like a hard situation. I'm a fresh grad with my CS degree and I work for a company that I think is awesome. However, when I started with the company, I was in my last few quarters of school, so I took a position in tech support with the intended plan to move into engineering in the near future after my degree is finished. Fast forward a bit, and the company was purchased by a family with the patriarch installed as CEO. On the outside, this seems like a great deal....our previous owner had no real knowledge of our industry, and her background was more in HR than anything specific to it. The new CEO has an EE, and has previously been a CEO and other high level management of other companies in the same industry. He knows the importance of quality engineering and he seems to be working to turning the company around and improving. So as he learns of my desire to transition from tech support to engineering, he seems supportive. Though I'm cautious because my direct manager says that she is concerned that he tells us (employees in the office) what we want to hear, and he tells our customers something different. We're still trying to get a read on him, but he seems supportive. So now we come to the time where I'm trying to move. He's offered me this deal: He's assigning me to work as a software engineer on two really cool projects....I can't say more about them because of my NDA, but they are projects that, as far as I can tell, no other graduate from my program this recent has the opportunity to take part in. However, he's making it clear that my "day job" is in tech support. I'm being allowed to take one hour per day off of the support queue (only if the rest of my support team can handle it....and so far, that's been about 50/50) and work on the engineering project. He expects me to supplement this time by working on my own off the clock in order to show my loyalty and commitment to an engineering career. After all, the engineers are on a salary and often work long hours and go beyond the 40 hour work week (in support, I work hourly and so get paid overtime when I'm over 40 hours). Also, there's no salary increase even during this engineering hour. The senior engineer that is functioning as my mentor is absolutely amazing and I love how enthusiastic and helpful he is to me. He and the other guy who is a senior level engineer (yes, the company currently has two senior level engineers) are both excited by me and seem open to moving me to engineering full time immediately. However, the CEO "values my award winning abilities in tech support" so much that he won't let me make this transition until I've "proved myself" and after someone is ready to replace me in support (of which, there's no mention of hiring anyone). I don't want to leave this company, but realistically I'm not sure if I can afford to stay. I'm worried that I could be stuck in this situation for months before a decision can be made on whether I'm able to move to engineering or not. I look in my email box, and I see 20 emails from my senior engineer and an engineer that we contract for work, and I realize that I might be being set up to fail. In the one hour of time I have available for engineering work, I can barely even get through my engineering emails in order to figure out how the project is going and even less actually figuring out how to contribute to it. I'm afraid that I need to put in many more off the clock hours to catch up, and I'm not comfortable setting that precedent that I can work without pay. I think what's being asked of me is immoral, and probably illegal. It's a venting post, but I have to get it off my chest. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you code while others are talking? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 12:33 PM PDT The dude sitting in the cube next to me eats hella loud. Little sounds like clicking and such, ruffling of clothes. Especially talking. (The guy behind me mumbles to himself a lot) Can't concentrate. Tried lstening to music but doesn't work. Anyone have this problem? How do you work around it? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:18 AM PDT This is one thing I've never quite figured out. I can explain logically how I would use solve a problem. But I cannot remember syntax for the life of me without Google. So how do I prove I know what I'm doing? School and personal projects on GitHub? [link] [comments]  |
| Is 86k in Austin at 3 years of experience too low? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 11:51 AM PDT My previous company experienced layoffs a few weeks ago, and I've been searching for a new position in the Austin area. I have an offer for 86k at a mid sized company, but it does seem a bit low for 3 years of experience in Austin. The upside is that the team and manager are a good fit. However, I don't want to undervalue myself and there's also the stress of being unemployed for too long. Is 86k too low to justify at my experience level? Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Dear God, 8 hours is a long time to be stressed out and mentally strained Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:08 PM PDT I get they want interviews to be tough, but I'm going into an onsite tomorrow thats supposed to be a solid 8 hours long. Granted, there is a lunch in there, but still thats a long time to hold it together and stay focused. I'm getting anxiety just thinking about how long I need to be there. Even if things go well its still going to suck real hard. And if things go south at the 2 hour mark? I imagine its rude to just admit i'm fucked and leave, and suffering through the remaining 6 hours of pointlessness also seems like a waste of everyones time [link] [comments]  |
| Junior Developer looking for a job, how do I get employers to look at me? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 02:33 PM PDT I am a junior developer and I'm currently looking for a job, my last gig was at a extremely small company, with about 4 developers (including myself), 2 of which I hardly had any interaction with, since they were working on projects I wasn't involved in. I was with this company for about 8 months now, bringing me up to a little over a year of experience in professional development. I was the only person working on our front-end written in Angular, and basically had no direction from my manager (the only dev I worked with), and since he wasn't familiar with Angular everything was done on my own without help. I learned a lot but I'm still severely lacking in Back-end skills, I know a bit of C#/.Net and was able to get very little experience working on our back-end. Now that my contract is over, I've been having a lot of trouble getting employers to actually look at me and give me a shot. I'm on LinkedIn, but mostly the only people hitting me up on there are recruiters looking for more senior positions that I know I'm not ready for... My older brother suggested 'fluffing' my resume, but I'm also worried if I put something on my resume I'm not too familiar with, I'll end up in a position where I have no idea what I'm doing... I don't really have a GitHub, I do, but there's not really anything on there, do I absolutely need side projects and an active GitHub for people to look in my direction? I also don't have any formal university/school education or a degree in anything computer science related, I do have a 'coding bootcamp' certificate, but honestly the school was such a waste of time and money, and I learned nothing from it. I'm in the Atlanta area, so I know jobs aren't scarce here. My main issue is just getting even a reply and I've applied to so many jobs I cant even count at this point (probably around 100+). I feel so lost and I feel like giving up sometimes. What can I do to convince employers to give me at least an interview? [link] [comments]  |
| I'm a software engineer, and my team is turning into a DevOps team... no more coding? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 04:56 PM PDT I started my first post-grad job this past summer, and it is in a rotational software engineering program. I really liked my first team during the initial six months, because the people were nice enough, and I was getting some coding in. However, there was a change in our organization recently. Now, there are basically a bunch of inner-sourcing/use-case teams, and my team has become a "Core team". This means that basically all coding work is being done by the contributers from outside of our team, and our job as a core team is to review their code, make sure our overall application functions well, and integrate our app with some new tools. I slowly began to realize that with the use-case teams doing more and more of the coding, my team is basically becoming a DevOps team. We just support the infrastructure of our app and moderate others' contributions to our codebase. This is not what I signed up for. I hardly code anymore. I'll definitely talk to my boss about wanting to code more, but I'm also not sure what else he can do, since we don't have a lot of coding projects coming in to our actual team anymore. I also will not be rotating teams until July/August, and that is a lot of lost time where I could have been coding. And what if this same thing happens on my next team? I don't want to leave this program with little coding experience under my belt, and lose practice over the next year and a half. While I will certainly be practicing on my own and working on my own projects at home, I've become disappointed with what I do at work, and I don't think it is good for my professional developmnet. Any advice on what I can do in this situation is appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 01:01 PM PDT From what I've read in some job descriptions, Data Engineer sounds a lot like a specific niche in backend software engineering. It sounds like you usually process and clean batches of data and possibly put it in a new type of data store. Back when I was a junior SWE at an agency most of our clients wanted standard WordPress sites or e-commerce, but we had a few clients that required "odd jobs". One instance was for a company that to revise SKUs of their products and dumped on us a massive Excel spreadsheet which had to be re-organized in a new categorization scheme. The original plan was to do manual data entry and split the work across people. But that would still take too long. Despite being only my second SWE job I was well versed enough in back end work so I wrote a PHP script to automate the data formatting, which it did well and took me a few hours to do instead of spreading the work across several days. Another client wanted a new proprietary survey system. The old one was awful- it stored key-value pairs as columns rather than rows in a database and badly needed to be normalized. Again I wrote a script to migrate and re-organized the data into a new schema that I had built. I hardly have to do this kind of data processing work anymore, but I still feel capable at it. Is this what Data Engineering mostly involves? Would I be fit to work as one with this kind of experience? I think the only major hurdle is most jobs would probably have you using Python or Go and I know neither language. [link] [comments]  |
| How do I work with unresponsive workers? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:29 PM PDT Generally when ever I need a coworker to review something, I just get an "okay". And they never get it. I get it they are busy and I am usually extremely patient (which seems to be a downfall) Recently I needed to get information for my coworker so (assuming passive aggressively) assigning me a card to reach out to someone to get information. I had a task today to get information, unfortunately since I'm reaching out to another lead they have been mostly short or unresponsive. They said they will meet with me tomorrow indtead of today... Which is fine, but they haven't accepted my invitation to meet tomorrow at 2 yet. How to I handle this, or with coworkers in Genet who just give me an "okay" and don't say anything afterwards, when it's dependent on getting my own tasks done? I hate to be annoying but sometimes it feels like I'm pulling teeth. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 11:29 AM PDT Which do you think would be a better experience. The 23andMe would be in San Francisco while being apart of the Code2040 Fellowship cohort which is an additional experience on its own. The IBM one would be in Cambridge. I'd also get paid more with IBM. This would be my first internship as a Rising Junior. [link] [comments]  |
| When should I let my manager know? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 03:50 PM PDT Hello everyone, I'm currently an co-op intern at a local company, I was accepted for the Spring season (January - beginning of May); therefore, I'm working for about 20 hours a week. However, the internship program may be extended to me afterwards, but I do not plan on accepting it as I will be interning at a Big-N this upcoming summer. My manager incrementally assigns me task (he just assigned me one that may take a few weeks) based on our 1-1. He also has a tentative schedule for the summer. However, I have not given any sign that I will not be returning for the summer; therefore, would it be fair for me to plan out the next 6-8 weeks with my manager to ensure that I get my fair-share of work done before my internship ends? Or should I wait a couple more weeks before I break the news? If I do the former, how would I approach this? Thanks in advance everyone. [link] [comments]  |
| Are there any unspoken rules on emailing company recruiters on LinkedIn? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 09:33 AM PDT I am trying to get an internship with a specific company. I have applied to many internships on their website (about 60). I made a cover letter and got 1 interview so far but i have started slightly changing the cover letter per job. (the jobs generally have lots of overlap in their descriptions/desired qualifications). However, I heard here on this forum that it can help to contact a recruiter you find on LinkedIn. Almost all the recruiters I found by searching "companyName recruiter" are in some kind of senior position: senior tech recruiter, senior healthcare recruiter, senior recruiter, etc. I found 2 that aren't listed as senior recruiters, one is listed as a contact recruiter, the other, HR recruiter. Are there any unspoken rules here I should make sure to follow? For example would it be inappropriate to contact the senior recruiters? Also if the non senior recruiters are listed as contact/HR/etc recruiters but I am of course looking for tech related positions, would it still help to email them? I just want to make sure I don't offend anyone since I don't want to anger a recruiter and then have them purge all my internship applications or something like that. Thanks for the help. [link] [comments]  |
| least saturated field of software engineering Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:22 PM PDT This is probably a stupid question but I'm very curious to learn more about which types of software engineering jobs receive the most and least number of applicants. I don't mean the type of company, e.g. big-N, banking/finance, non-tech, blah blah; I mean the type of the role. E.g. web development, embedded development, low latency C, devops. Intuitively I would guess frontend development is the most saturated because the barriers to entry to get into frontend are very low. E.g. lots of people believe if they learn basic HTML/CSS and JS + jQuery they know enough to become a junior frontend developer. Of course this isn't the case because the frontend has gotten more complicated with the growth of SPA technologies like Angular and React. This is reflected in the number of applicants london junior frontend jobs get. E.g. I looked at some junior frontend gigs on LinkedIn where it shows you the number of people who applied and almost all of them say 200+. If I were to rank the different types I would rank them like this: Most saturated Frontend web development Mobile app development (iOS/Android) Machine Learning Least saturated Backend development (REST apis) DevOps Embedded development Security development What are your opinions? Which development jobs are the most saturated and which have the lowest and highest barriers to entry? [link] [comments]  |
| Bootcamp student need help dealing with daily stress Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:22 PM PDT I'll keep this short. So I've been at a coding bootcamp for the better part of 6 months and the time has come to work on my capstone project with a group. The progress we've made in the time allotted (it has been 4.5 weeks already) is incredible but I just can't shake off the feeling of stress. Each morning I wake up now, I'm always thinking about all the stuff that needs to be done in the short amount of time to get our app looking the best it has ever been, almost to the brink of getting a migraine. We all have put a lot of honest, solid work on this app but I'm just not satisfied with the outcome of our app so far. How do you all deal with the feeling of stress when it comes to projects and deadlines? I notice myself stressing every second of every day (even on weekends) and can't seem to just enjoy the fact that I get an opportunity to do something like this daily anymore. [link] [comments]  |
| Software Development might not be for me. Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:11 PM PDT Hey everyone, so I got my first job as an Entry Level Software Developer 4 months after completing a coding boot camp. I struggled thru the boot camp trying to learn more advanced JavaScript, React, and Node but somehow managed to complete the course. Now a few weeks into my new job and they're using Vue and thought I can pick up after a learning React but after about a week, still can't seem to grasp some of the concepts. I constantly I have to ask the other developer for help, forget details, and when he explains some of the concepts and looks at me like I'm an idiot for not understanding it. Another thing the other developer and manager will ask me if I have any thoughts or ideas on particular features but my mind goes blank and can't think of anything. I'm thinking this career might not be for me? These guys are computer science grads and been in the industry for years. Idk how I'll be able to think like them. The manager doesn't really say much and is hard to read to not sure if I'm doing a good job or not? What do you guys think? Is this normal starting out your first job? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 09:55 AM PDT So I was hired as a Software Developer Engineer Intern at one really famous company (you can guess by my title) and I have started some time ago. The environment is really nice and chill and the pay is honestly quite good. My Manager is also a really nice and smart person. I also like the company in general and some of its ideas but there are some pretty big problems: 1) In my team I am the only Software Dev. Most of the other people are Business Intelligence, Operational stuff and very few Data Science people. This is already a bit weird because nobody can supervise me and most people don't even know what Linux is. Also I have been asked to do some very unrelated stuff to "help". I don/t mind helping the company but it's a bit weird. 2) So far in my first month I have been mostly doing some Python to automatize certain processes and some data manipulation with it. Which is better than nothing but honestly it's a bit random. I was expecting code reviews, tests, software architecture, OOP, git and stuff like that, but there is basically nothing and I can't really get any kind of feedback on the code itself. I would much rather fix a bug in a structured codebase than doing my current thing. I feel like that going forward not much will change if I don't bring it up. But my questions are: 1) Should I even bring it up? Or should I just do my best and still get the prestigious of it on the resume? 2) If I bring it up how should I do it without sounding rude to my manager? I was thinking of saying "I was wondering if there will be some possibilities to work with more software engineers on some projects since that was my initial expectation." Thanks for the help! [link] [comments]  |
| How do you respond to knowledge based questions you just don't know? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:03 PM PDT So in an interview they asked you something like "explain how MongoDb works under the hood", and you just have no idea because you never used it before Do you just say you don't know and hope they move on? Try to explain away your ignorance of the topic? Try to say what you do know about mongo even if its not related to what they asked? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 10:48 AM PDT I work at a mid-sized tech company, and have been there nearly 10 years. It's been fairly boring the past year, so I accepted an offer to leave for a more interesting role. The offer is confirmed with a start date of Monday, 4/8. I'm new to changing jobs though, and have no idea how to go about this. Here are my questions and timeline:
I have a good, long work relationship with my manager and team, and I'm finding it really difficult to leave. I figure if I were to leave, now is the time since we're in between projects. Still, is there a way to soften the blow? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 06:51 PM PDT I never got an email to schedule the interview. I checked the application status on the website. I did not get picked for this position. This has got me feeling odd, but it was indeed fishy at the start. If they had a job opening for something that matched my skills they would have just called me first before putting the ad up. What did I do wrong? The people I worked with said I was a good intern. I was told by my mentor that I should message one of the workers (not the boss) and act oblivious to the fact that you applied just to bait out a reason why you didn't get hired. Should I do this? [link] [comments]  |
| 78k salary, software dev with 2 years experience in Toronto, financial industry. Good? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 01:27 PM PDT As per the title, i'm wondering if this salary is considered bad? good? normal? Any others in the financial industry have any data points for comparison? [link] [comments]  |
| Niche job search not gaining steam Posted: 13 Mar 2019 02:28 PM PDT I'm a SF based mid senior level Program Manager, very experienced Tech Project Manager with a lot of customer facing experience but I am struggling to get any bites. I've transitioned out of the technical and have a lot of process improvement, strategy, team management and sales experience. I'm a bit worried that because I straddle that ground between business management and IT management I'm not an obvious fit. I'm looking to stay away from the technical because I enjoy it more and have much more impact being a liason between tech/non-tech. I'm fairly certain i'm extremely employable but im thinking i'm failing with my visibility somehow. -Resume professionally written -LinkedIn profile updated (all settings correct) -Reached out to recruiters ....just crickets. what am I missing here? [link] [comments]  |
| What can social science students do in order to be part of the tech industry? Posted: 13 Mar 2019 08:49 PM PDT Currently a sophomore studying political science and economics at my university, but I would really like to get into the tech industry. I've had suggestions regarding switching majors, but I run into a dilemma as our university has a special rule where I would have to start again from freshman year. Since changing my degree isn't an option, I decided to do as much internships as possible. So far, I've done 3 internships and on my 4th one where I use SQL to do digital marketing analysis. However, I still feel like this isn't enough to get involved in the tech industry. To summarize my post, I have a series of questions...
Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Mar 2019 04:53 PM PDT See title. I graduated last August from a good 4-year uni with a good GPA (CS/Math, 3.5), but no internship experience of any kind (very, very poor decision on my behalf). I got desperate in the job hunt and took a role as a "developer" with a consulting firm with a bad rep I now fully believe in, working since the start of January. From the moment I got hired I've done literally nothing but sit on the bench and train for roles. As far as I've been told, I was going to be put on a project (QA) where 3 people were wanted and now that they've dropped I'm hanging in limbo- I've spent my entire time here sitting at a computer screen, messaging/calling my managers and hearing a vague "yeah we're working on it" once every 2-3 weeks. The office is loud and distracting, laptop use is not permitted and I can't install any software on the 50% of the work computers that boot up (got in trouble today for downloading Python)- I'm learning what I can from reading and algorithm questions but I feel like there's a hard limit to what I can properly remember without hands-on coding experience. Unfortunately I can't get away with working from home. I feel like I shouldn't complain- there are half a million things worse than getting paid to do nothing. That feeling hasn't kept me from losing my mind, though. I'm very concerned for the future because I know it won't look good if I leave (early at 3 months, and without ever being put on a project) and it also won't look good if I stay (bad rep QA might not give me much upward mobility). By the time the day's up I just feel dead and dead tired I guess the question is, can I do any better with my background or do I need to get over this hurdle? I'd be perfectly fine with a drop in pay if it meant a role with more room for growth. I spent most of my time applying for internships after graduation but in hindsight I don't think most of them were willing to consider a graduate- maybe I might have more luck with entry-level jobs? Are there any alternatives to the interview process that might be more likely to find me success? Would grad school be a feasible option? I've paid my March rent, and April is covered (shoveling agreement with my landlords) so going by my rent cost and maybe 400 a month for living expenses I can make it until roughly January 2020 before I end up full hobo. Thanks for any advice [link] [comments]  |
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