• Breaking News

    Wednesday, March 20, 2019

    Home Unlabelled Daily Chat Thread - March 20, 2019 CS Career Questions

    Daily Chat Thread - March 20, 2019 CS Career Questions

    March 20, 2019

    Daily Chat Thread - March 20, 2019 CS Career Questions

    Daily Chat Thread - March 20, 2019

    Posted: 20 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.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
    [link] [comments]

    Big N Discussion - March 20, 2019

    Posted: 20 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.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
    [link] [comments]

    I could cry.

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 10:09 AM PDT

    I got word today that I got accepted to a direct-hire boot camp program that feeds into a good IT company doing what I want to do, which is web developing. I'm beyond stoked, as I've lived most of my life being broke as hell. This will give my family two things; a stable career for a long time and financial security that I've never known.

    Just had to share my excitement.

    submitted by /u/KyleITcareer
    [link] [comments]

    Is there any market for skills such as C, assembly, reverse engineering binaries and stuff?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 05:18 AM PDT

    I keep browsing LinkedIn and some job boards and all I can see is frontend, backend, fullstack, react, javascript, devops....

    It's like everybody and their mother is doing Web development, or maybe a bit of embedded here and there.

    I find Web development horribly boring, and lately in my studies I've started working with low level stuff such as assembly, understanding and exploiting binary files, C (that's not low level but oh well)...

    Is there any future in this kind of stuff or am I wasting my time?

    Edit: tons of answers! Thank you all for the input, going to go through everything you guys said!

    submitted by /u/RedAcid7
    [link] [comments]

    Wayfair Name and Shame Ft. Blind

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 02:22 PM PDT

    Someone posted this on Blind, a pretty interesting read, especially if you want to learn what bad architecture looks like

    https://www.teamblind.com/article/Technical-incompetence-at-Wayfair----is-there-anything-worse-43wn8iLT

    Full text:

    Is there anything worse than Wayfair at this scale in terms of sheer technical incompetence and poor engineering practices???

    I've worked at other companies, and I've never had to deal with so many problems due to poor engineering practices across the entire company.

    If you're wondering why I don't just leave, well, my full year isn't up!!!! I was warned by several people after I got the offer, but I didn't imagine the technical incompetence would be this bad.

    There are directors and managers who need to be fired for pure technical incompetence. Their leadership is why Wayfair's codebase and infrastructure are stuck in a pathetic, sorry state. The php repo, the databases (which are all mirrors in some way), the vertical scaling -- it is all complete garbage and needs to be blasted into orbit if the company wants to save itself from getting eaten up by competitors.

    By pure luck and an absolute miracle Wayfair is still around today!

    Wayfair seems to be trying hard to get outsiders to join. Just based on some people sharing TC offers -- recruitment seems like it's trying, but there is no point in hiring competent managers from other companies if you don't give them the power and tools to do what they need to do.

    - There are directors and managers who have only ever worked at Wayfair, believe they are God, think because they have ivy league degrees and hire from top schools that Wayfair has a top engineering culture. But they refuse to give teams access to the cloud to spin up new infrastructure.

    - There is so much red tape just to use a new framework, such as an ORM that's been around for 20 years.

    - The way Wayfair uses Composer has been completely destroyed -- they don't even use it correctly and commit their vendor modules into that godawful php repo!!!!

    - The DBAs are clueless and think the only way to scale is to scale vertically.

    - The main DB has 3 TB of RAM and *still* has load trouble.. the funny thing is nobody on the cloud offers a database with 3TB of RAM because they assume companies will just scale properly and horizontally.

    - The DBAs advise all developers to read from the database WITH (NOLOCK), which is essentially a TRANSACTION READ UNCOMMITTED, meaning you are reading UNCOMMITTED DATA FROM THE DATABASE!!!!!!!!!!!!! They say it's for "performance reasons", and, sadly, it's the only way Wayfair could "scale" the database so it could handle the reads and writes. Hmm, I wonder why some customers end up with duplicate couches on their doors or why they don't get an order coming at all...

    - SQL tables are being used as QUEUES!!!!! Why can't teams just use GCP Pub-Sub or AWS SQS? IT TAKES SECONDS TO SETUP AND CAN HANDLE WAYFAIR's SCALE!!!!!

    - Static methods all over the place that open and close database connections and sessions.

    - SQL queries that span thousands of lines because according to a senior engineer, he said that it's better to shove everything into one SQL query instead of making a few separate calls to the database.

    - Forget SOLID principles, forget service-oriented architecture, forget Domain Driven Design (a lot of these competent engineering practices aren't new either -- they've been around since the 90s). Nobody Googles anything here and they believe they can just reinvent the wheel.

    - Most of the php teams have never heard of a simple model with setters and getters and if you add it to the code, they will freak out and ask what it is and tell you to consult a useless working group about it. Forget using the builder pattern too. They won't know what it is and will tell you to get rid of it and to instead shove everything into the model. Their models use a DAO, and the business logic is shoved all into it. There are models that span 5000 lines of code.

    - Has anybody heard of PAGINATION ever?????? A TECH LEAD I talked to never heard of the OFFSET keyword for a database query and didn't know what index-based pagination was. There are queries that don't do any sort of pagination and just grab all items in one go.

    - Can't use SQL Server's Change Data Capture due to "performance reasons" for event-based architecture.

    - Speaking of Change Data Capture, Wayfair uses TRIGGERS for everything!!!! They use it for audit history and business logic. If DBA cares so much about performance, why are they letting people use TRIGGERS for everything but the competent developers who know what they're doing can't use the CDC for their database????

    - No foreign keys because "performance reasons" lol

    - Kafka has been destroyed. Pretty sure all of Wayfair is using the same damn Kafka instance and teams just split it up by topics. Also, messages can only live in the queue for 1-3 days due to "performance reasons."

    - Wayfair has trouble scaling Redis. I had a manager tell me that "Redis sucks", even though Redis is being used at hundreds of companies, and they don't have the scaling problems Wayfair has. For one Redis wasn't on the cloud. It was internally managed. Two, they made TEAMS SHARE THE SAME SOURCE OF TRUTH!!!!!!! So they did replicate and cluster Redis, but it all pointed to the same master, and, yes, you could accidentally overwrite another team's key.

    - They make all the Wayfair teams share everything. It is so stupid. No wonder there are so many scaling problems. We have several influxdb databases, but most teams pick the general database, and it is sooooo slow, no matter how many times they horizontally scale it. Horizontally scale across TEAMS too! Give them their own damn influxdb servers (and on the cloud so we don't have to manage it)!!!!

    - I read somewhere that Wayfair implemented COOKIE-BASED database sharding for customers and ran into problems and had to change it. Whose idea was this, and did anyone ever Google anything on how to shard??? Because I'm pretty sure no article would ever suggest to shard a database based on a CLIENT-SIDE COOKIE!!!!

    - Stop. The. Internal. Tools. Just stop it!!! Wayfair does not have competent enough engineers to deal with the shitty internal tools. Google how to do things properly, use a SaaS and IaaS providers and for the love of God, use the Cloud!!!!!

    - Speaking of internal tools, their Kubernetes strategy is completely stupid. You need to get through 3 different internal tools to get a Kubernetes application up. You can't just use the damn cloud.

    - Pretty sure their Kubernetes architecture is completely bastardized. There was one team who accidentally took up the resources of another team's app and brought down that entire app. I can think of one way how that could happen....

    - Jenkins... LOL They use Jenkins jobs for everything. For one PHP doesn't do multithreading, so they just spin up multiple Jenkins nodes to do concurrent work. Even the Python and Java apps are using Jenkins for concurrent work... again, Google... did anybody Google anything and realize you can leverage multi-threading with Python and Java??? Oh, but if only we could use GCP what's it for -- we could go serverless and spin up one-off or thousands of jobs!

    - Jenkins, Jenkins, Jenkins...a great system design question for a Wayfair engineer: "how would you handle sending billions of emails to customers in a concurrent fashion?" I'll bet the engineers, including the directors and tech leads who haven't googled anything, would say "spin up thousands of Jenkins jobs and read from a SQL database!"

    - The execs and directors here don't believe in microservices or having separate repositories and think because Google and Facebook can scale a monorepo, so can Wayfair. Looooooooooool. The main codebase is the php repo, and it's completely fucked and makes our GitLab very slow when you have 2000 engineers pushing and pulling from it. There are other teams with separate repositories, but they deal with the slowness that's being caused by the php repo.

    - Testing... most teams don't test their code and can't tell the difference between an integration test and unit test. There was one team that broke a runner because their unit tests were creating actual PDF files. They had to hire an entire team to hose down bad tests, so code can pass the pipelines and get into production. There is less than 1% code coverage. For the teams that do test, the tests are completely useless and break all the time because they are just testing spaghetti code. There is no point in testing spaghetti code.

    If you want to work here and just want a paycheck and believe none of this will affect you, like I thought before I joined, well, you're wrong:

    - Do you really want to wake up at 4 in the morning for a critical because some incompetent engineer forgot to screw in the hard drive when they upgraded the database?

    - Do you want to wake up at 2 in the morning the next day because your app relied on somebody else's shitty app and the connection failed and you have no idea why?

    - Do you want to edit a small piece of code and have an entire system break down and be blamed for it even though you didn't touch that part of the code? The spaghetti code is unbelievable. The business logic is shoved all into the models. They load everything at once. It's like changing a home's lightbulb, and then the entire roof crashes, and you get blamed for it.

    - Speaking of being blamed for bugs, if you drink the kool-aid and just mindlessly follow what management tells you to do without questioning anything or telling them about best practices, you can get away with committing bugs and breaking things all the time and still get promoted. It is more about keeping up with appearances than actually doing any good work. But if you start to question things and complain about all the bugs and try to promote better practices, you will be blamed for the bugs in your performance review.

    - Do you want to see a serious scaling problem that wakes people up at 3 in the morning and easily could be solved by being on the cloud and be told by management that they're still evaluating the company's cloud strategy?

    - Do you want to be told you can't use setters and getters and private members due to "performance reasons" by an incompetent director?

    - Do you want to see incompetent engineers promoted to tech leads and directors?

    - Do you want to promote documentation And articles on the internet written by Martin Fowler, Kelsey Hightower, etc, only to be told by some Wayfair lead that "Wayfair doesn't do it that way."

    - Do you want your code reviewed and criticized by a team lead to tell you not to use exceptions for "performance reasons"?

    - Most code reviews are ridiculous and useless and can take forever. They complain about the smallest things and are completely unaware about larger problems going on. It's like complaining about crumbs on the counter when there is a massive pile of diarrhea on the floor.

    - Do you want to be told by management that the cloud is too expensive to use to its full potential? I mean, no shit the cloud is expensive, especially if you scale the way Wayfair scales (every team would use the same DB, every team would use the same BigQuery, every team would use the same Kubernetes architecture!!!!!). But if you scale horizontally and properly, the benefits are far more and you won't have to hire piles of incompetent engineers to keep up with the infrastructure. Plus the costs of upgrading the actual hardware is humongous!!!!!!!!!!

    If you really don't care about any of this stuff, just want a paycheck and have a family to support, then go ahead and join Wayfair. There are honestly happy engineers here who like it and are completely oblivious to the problems and are OK with adding band-aids to gashing wounds and think the weekly criticals and post-mortems are just a normal part of being a software engineer. Surely there are some teams doing better than others, but they can't unlock their true potential with execs and directors micromanaging them and telling them they can't use the cloud or can't download a library package.

    There are definitely teams without as many criticals. You're either a team in Berlin, one of very few US teams who know how to code, or your app is just further away from affecting customers. The less severe the criticals, the further away you are from customers. You can also pretend you're "incompetent" and don't understand how the codebase works and can get away from a criticals rotation.

    The only hope for this company is to listen to and empower the competent engineering teams (yeah, there are a few, and a lot of the members end up leaving in frustration), but a lot of those employees happen to be in the Berlin office. Unfortunately, the US office isn't listening to their advice and just block their advice with red tape and stupid working groups that end up bastardizing a process. There are competent engineers scattered in the US teams, but they seem to have no power to make real changes, haven't been at Wayfair for very long, get blocked by upper management, and leave in frustration.

    If it were up to me I would give the Berlin teams the power to do what they need to do and follow their technical direction and fire the 300-400 incompetent directors and managers in the US who are responsible for this sorry mess ... the Berlin teams are our only hope.

    I heard some execs went to the Berlin office and told all the competent engineers there that they can't use GCP and the Cloud and have to wait until management is done evaluating their strategy!! LOL!!!!!!!!!

    Speaking of their "cloud strategy," the strategy so far is to have a hybrid cloud with on-premise servers as the source of truth and to mirror the data to GCP. So that means you can't use GCP's APIs to spin up a Kubernetes cluster if you want. You can't use GCP's Application Engine and serverless architecture. Everything still has to go through Wayfair's shitty internal tools!! So yea they have some things on the cloud, but they are just mirrors or clusters being hit by a reverse proxy (not sure if they have HaProxy or Nginx on the cloud).

    With their "move" to the cloud, they are even building their own version of Terraform essentially that will spin up on premise servers or whatever. Lol!!! Why can't they just use the damn cloud?!?!

    Junior engineers here... they are well intentioned and want to learn, but they are learning horrible practices, and a lot of it is just bad luck that they ended up here. If you tell them any differently, you will just look crazy and be outcasted because you have higher ups and technical leaders telling them differently. I've definitely seen juniors move on to better things, but they really ought to learn outside their comfort zone and do research outside of work to learn how to do things properly -- (and some of them are just good at whiteboarding and bullshitting and can go anywhere). Some of them, like some L2 engineers, are already brainwashed by the purple kool-aid, and there is no hope in telling them how to do things better. Surely they are all smart enough to learn good practices. After all they were able to quickly learn the complex business logic and the completely over-engineered, fucked database schema, the spaghetti code "MVC" architecture that isn't really MVC, and all the stored procedures being used for business logic. But, nope, they are lost causes, already drank the kool-aid, and they'll completely ignore you if you tell them any differently even if it's just plain common sense.

    I really thought that one time when their internal emergency SMS system went down was pretty bad. There was a water pipe that broke at the Boston office. The office water was fucked and full of shit. Wayfair attempted to send emergency texts to employees early in the morning to tell them to NOT come into work. Well, their new emergency SMS system wasn't tested, and it broke and didn't send messages. They had to use their legacy SMS tool, and it went off in an O(n) fashion (probably through a Jenkins job lolzzzz!!!!). Employees got emergency texts by the afternoon when the water pipe was already fixed. Imagine if something really bad happened, like a fire or shooting in the mall!!!!!!! This shit could be serious!!! People would hopefully get fired!!

    But anyways I'm sure after that team's post mortem, the execs said "great job everyone! Thanks for getting it fixed!"

    Is there anything worse in terms of sheer technical incompetence????

    ​

    submitted by /u/Shwne
    [link] [comments]

    Is anyone else passionless and using CS as a means to live comfortably?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 11:38 AM PDT

    Maybe this is speaking to a deeper issue of mine but I don't care about anything. I've tried everything and I'd rather just sit around all day than work a job or go to class. I feel like I'm just doing this to check off the career box. Can I even sustain this? Is anyone else completely indifferent like me?

    submitted by /u/OrbitBrazil
    [link] [comments]

    Taking a stab at enterprise software consulting - any reason NOT to form an LLC?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:41 PM PDT

    I'm an enterprise software implementation expert and have a niche skillset in a couple of different products that I can very easily pick up contract work for. I believe I can take the knowledge I have, and through my own LLC, train another person in one of the products I know, farm out work to them, and slowly scale this repeatable pattern into a sustainable consulting business I can manage.

    What's different about pursuing contract work behind an LLC vs directly? Are firms (My contacts are boutique and Big 4) reluctant at all to engage with a contractor behind an LLC, and if so, why? Any anecdotes you have to share about your own experience? Any pitfalls to watch out for? Any good books / websites I should check out?

    I'm trying to wrap my head around this - I recognize an opportunity I think I need to snatch up and want to do my due diligence.

    Thanks, all.

    submitted by /u/startup__throwaway
    [link] [comments]

    Just Learned I Didn't Complete College Degree After Background Check

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 11:19 AM PDT

    I am in my late 20s and searching for a new job in Sacramento. I graduated from a large state university seven years ago and immediately moved to NYC after graduation. Like, packed up my apartment and moved the day or two after I walked. I've been working for the past seven years in NYC, but recently moved to Sacramento with my fiancee. I've been applying for jobs here and it was recently brought to my attention after a background check for employment that I did not actually receive my degree. I called the school to ask about this and they told me that I am two credits short of my degree.

    I was shocked to hear this, since it had never been brought up before. I'm terrified to continue applying for jobs and get turned down or expose this information further, but I need to find a good job. I've been working in the corporate world for seven years and don't know if this is something that will be held against me for the rest of my life or if I can salvage the situation. Obviously, I can take these two courses easily and complete them to receive my degree, but I'm worried about how this will play a role in my job search now and down the road. I'm also upset I didn't learn about this sooner, as I could have easily completed these courses years ago and it would've been easier to explain. Please help!

    submitted by /u/leapfrog2821
    [link] [comments]

    how is indeed recruiting process and summer internship?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:39 PM PDT

    Just got invited to an on-site interview for the summer. I'm wondering if they pay for travel reimbursement since I live very far.

    And does anyone have any experience with their summer internship? Is housing provided? How was the overall program?

    Thanks!!

    submitted by /u/fbmker
    [link] [comments]

    Does anyone here go to meetups?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:28 PM PDT

    Does anyone here attend meetups?

    ​

    Are they beneficial to you from a tech point a view, or are they seen as a networking thing more so?

    ​

    ​

    submitted by /u/Deviso
    [link] [comments]

    What should a fresh-out-of-college software developer student know in terms of coding to get a job?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:23 PM PDT

    So I'm in my last semester of college and I have been applying to a ton of entry level jobs and have not gotten past the phone interview, I just realized that I have barely any experience in java (I know the language somewhat but no project experience) and have forgotten a lot of sql and I have zero experience in javascript. I am kind of panicking because I am at the level where I dont even know what I dont know.

    What should I know to get an entry level software developer job. What are some questions that are asked in interviews?

    ​

    Edit: Recently I have been practicing doing Stacks, Queues, Hashmaps, Binary Trees, reading/writing to files, threads, and reversing strings. But my memory in a lot of this stuff is still hazey

    submitted by /u/p511
    [link] [comments]

    Is this situation normal for a junior?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:13 PM PDT

    Hello

    I started working at my current company 3 months ago as a consultant. I have 1 year and a half of experience under my belt so far.

    Thing is, the company i am working at has almost 0 documentation of the system. The product is entirely finished and working. They now want to improve the system. All the competent people who developped the product left. Due to nda s I can t tell the details, but the system is extremely close to a car (same degree of complexity as well). I have been asked to:

    • analyze the realtime behaviour and scheduling of the system and write the documentation of how this works

    • develop kernel drivers on this OS

    I have no support from colleagues because nobody knows how things work. Neithercan anybody provide support when I am facing more technical issues, as nobody knows anything about drivers and rtos.

    The consultancy firm who sent me to this company doesnt want to give me a rais because they say I am a junior (due to my age). Yet I feel like what I am being asked to do and the situation is far from being normal for a "junior". Am I right?

    submitted by /u/wjwwjw
    [link] [comments]

    Have You Ever Stopped Showing Up for Work? How did it go?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 01:59 PM PDT

    My job is a fucking nightmare. I am the only developer and we've switched to an "Agile" system at my request. I made my estimates assuming I would be able to develop 30 hours a week, but because of the demands of other supervisors about handling their "urgent" issues and having to manage all of our vendors, I have < 5 hours a week to develop. Some of our vendors have basically been committing straight up fraud (faking hours, charging us for access to their senior developers but using outsourcing firms, giving outsourcing firms access to our environments) and I am having to address the situation, which means I am going to be responsible for migrating our hosting environment from said vendor to the cloud, with no support. I have pointed all of this out to my boss and her response was "she'd bring it up at the next senior management meeting" that people are abusing urgent requests, but that no deadlines would be moved.

    The only reason I came back to this job (was on medical leave for 3 months related to issues from this job), was because I was supposed to get a junior developer to handle support tasks, documentation, basic bugs and content editing tasks staff couldn't figure out. That request got denied, and all of the people who were competent in our CMS left recently. Everyone else is "too busy" to let me train them so everything is my responsibility.

    I have panic attacks every morning getting ready for work. I am out of PTO because I end up calling in sick once a week because I can't take it anymore. We just moved to an open office layout and I struggle to focus, but they won't let me work from home more. I am job hunting, but I forgot what a slow and frustrating process that is. Trying to juggle the search for a quality employer, prepping for interviews, and dealing with this job is impossible. I've been working 50+ hours a week trying to keep up with everything, but I'm totally burnt out now and most days just leave work early and give into the urge to drink myself to sleep.

    I don't know if I can survive another 2 weeks of this to resign on good terms. I am pretty sure they would expect me to stay on for a month because there is so much knowledge to transfer. I am not getting the support I need, I am not being given access to the tools I need to do my job, no one seems grateful for the work I am doing, and I hate my life right now and am about to stop showing up to work tomorrow.

    Has anyone walked out on a job like this before? How badly did it affect your employability?

    submitted by /u/UMadBreaux
    [link] [comments]

    Lateral transfer. Does it look bad?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:45 AM PDT

    I've been a dev at govt in WA for almost a year now. I can't stand my boss, and I've been doing barely any development here. Some SQL and bash script work, and a lot of coming up with my own unit tests/documents for existing apps that should already have these established. Lots of dealing with customer problems and just fixing stuff on the database, small bug fixes on shitty VB.NET apps. Honestly feels like a whole lotta nothing, career wise, and I honestly felt a little misled when I accepted the position. It's been 10 months now, and I've yet to touch a Java app, and only made 1 dinky little C# app. Rest have been VB bug fixes, queries, and bash scripts........

    I got a chance to transfer to another section (where my friend works) and the guy who interviewed me seemed like my type of dude - talked about design patterns, OOP, clean code, and even some game dev (not common to find in higher level government devs).

    I told my current boss, and he seemed upset. He was like, "why would you want to start over in a new section, it usually means you hate your current section", to which I explained that my friend works over there, but he wasn't buying it. I realized that my boss is my only co-worker because the previous workers all transferred out too - there were 2-3 workers who all left within 1-2 years. My boss said it would look bad on me to do a lateral transfer, but I think he's more concerned it would look bad on HIM for having so many people leave, since he's the supervisor here.

    What do you guys think?

    submitted by /u/thingsIcontemplate
    [link] [comments]

    Are HR/company recruiters evaulated/held accountable in any way?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:29 AM PDT

    I'm currently going through the whole job hunt adventure, and enjoying all the little things that come with it, and most of all - the wonderful world of HR!

    Some of the HR I've encountered have been truly wonderful - competent, pleasant, good at their job, the works. However most, and from what I can tell all my developer friends say so too, have been "meh" at best.

    They ask weird questions that make you think they're asking them because they read something on medium that says they should, without actually serving a purpose. A lot deem it totally normal to just stop replying all of a sudden, without notice. And then there's the ones who ask "technical" questions, or worse yet, give technical feedback. I've also encountered a few who are very obviously on a weird power trip.

    My question is (if anyone here knows) - how are they actually evaluated? As a developer, you can always check what one of your workers is doing. But how can you check a HR's work, namely emails between potential future employees? This is illegal, or not? They can also submit feedback on a candidate without any proof, or point of reference. Not to mention the rude behaviour during skype/live interviews.

    I try to look beyond the recruitment process of a company, as the HR and actual dev work is most probably totally unrelated, but there are some experiences that drive me crazy. The level of unprofessionalism, and simply how terribly bad they are at their jobs, is astounding.

    ​

    e. regarding:

    have been "meh" at best.

    I was asked "at what?" I meant the recruitment process, namely the first screenings. I haven't had bad experience with the later stages of recruitment (and HRs involvement there), all my bad experiences have been with the first contact.

    ​

    ​

    submitted by /u/HorseLove
    [link] [comments]

    Bachelor's Degree or Master's Degree?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 05:03 PM PDT

    Hey all,

    I have a bachelors in chemistry and a minor in computer science. I have been job searching for awhile, but it's clear that more schooling would be very helpful as well as help get an internship. I love school, so I'm not upset by this. I can't decide which would be more beneficial though. A bachelors would be easier, but since I'm going back to school anyway should I just go for the masters? Does it even matter? I think they will both take about the same amount of time at this point. Thanks!

    submitted by /u/eevee132
    [link] [comments]

    IBM Data Science Professional Certification

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 04:52 PM PDT

    Hey guys I enrolled in this 9 course specialization through coursera (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/ibm-data-science-professional-certificate)

    This may not be the right sub for this, but I am an information systems major at a top 5 business school (non ivy in the midwest). I've always wanted to work as a data analyst in the future and was wondering if this certification along with my degree would be enough to secure a data analyst or data science job. I expect to graduate with around a 3.5 GPA and three internships, two from multi billion dollar companies, one pharmaceutical and another software (pharmaceutical was sales internship and software will be business analyst). Any tips on breaking through to the industry?

    submitted by /u/herbertbailbonds
    [link] [comments]

    What book would you Recommend someone Graduating College?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:17 PM PDT

    Always appreciate hearing from my CS fam

    submitted by /u/anonymouspsy
    [link] [comments]

    New Job after Master CS Degree + PhD: can code for research but want to improve coding as a Software Architect, recommended tutorials/guides?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 02:14 PM PDT

    So a bit of background: I have a Master's Degree in CS and will obtain my CS Doctorate/PhD in a couple of months.

    In the degree, I've learned all the regular master degree concepts, so not a novice.

    In the PhD, I've developed several projects on my own or in limited collaboration to a proof-of-concept stage to demonstrate certain research questions (for instance, creating an operating system for embedded devices that is multi-tenant secure through software).

    During the PhD, I often wrote code as a means-to-an-end, just for myself. The coding was almost exclusively done in Python, Java, and C. So there was not a lot of focus on clean design, more advanced development/architecture, working as a part of a bigger team. As such, I'm afraid that I am now rusty in essential skills for a more 'conventional' job.

    I'll start work in a couple of months for a services company that focuses on IT automation. They basically send consultants that help run a companies IT workflow automatically so that their services and processes are run more effectively. They do this through regular cloud management and automation tools. Now they want to go for a new self-developed product that enables this efficiently, and so integrates or uses Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Packer, Azure, AWS, ...

    During the PhD, I developed a similar framework as part of research and I will become the responsible person for developing the product.

    I'd like to prepare for this as well as possible. Given my background, and what I'll be doing, what tutorials, guides, etc can you recommend that can help me tackle this? It is a bit of an open question but I hope you can suggest several worthwhile resources.

    Edit: Summarised, online free sources that help improve skills a Master CS/PhD guy might lack or have not developed once he enter the industry job market (in an automation IT context).

    submitted by /u/Kalenden
    [link] [comments]

    Will accepting an easy stress free job make it hard to upgrade in the future?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:11 PM PDT

    I'm almost my CS degree (my second degree). I've been stressing

    I don't want to stress anymore (for at least a few years). I'm probably going to take a government job with low pay. But I'm afraid I'll lose my knowledge and skills in those years if I do decide to apply to a competitive position later on. Any thoughts?

    submitted by /u/SaraLawman
    [link] [comments]

    Quitting first job after 6 months to travel for a year. How stupid am I?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:08 PM PDT

    Basically, the title. Over the past few months, I have had an insatiable desire to travel more and more. I've been able to save up a lot of money in a short amount of time (decent salary, low COL, frugal mindset, etc.), and I have decided to quit my job. I'll be riding a bicycle from Istanbul to Singapore, and I figure it will take me around a year to complete. Depending on how much I like it, and how much money I have left, I might go longer. I've been pretty set on this for a while, but now that the time is approaching to finally pull the trigger, I'm starting to get cold feet (isn't that how it always goes?).

    The part that worries me the most is finding work after I return since I will have only had one job, and only for 6 months. I've been a good employee during my time, but there's a chance that my coworkers won't like me leaving so soon which may ruin my chances for references. Additionally, I'm sure this stint won't look great on a resume. I figure, worse comes to worse and I'm not able to get a job after I return, I could try my hand at freelancing?

    I know it's not the best idea career-wise. But to what degree? Would love to hear if anyone has been through something similar so I know how much I'm screwing or not screwing myself over.

    submitted by /u/Apengo
    [link] [comments]

    How to present yourself with a non-CS background?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 07:51 PM PDT

    I got my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. I knew I wanted to swtich to CS late in my degree, but I was too far in so I finished it out. My first year in Mechanical Engineering industry, I definitely knew it was not right for me and began taking undergrad classes for CS.

    Eventually, I got into grad school for CS and quit my job to go to graduate school full time.

    Question for people who interview: How should I present myself? I have a few projects, but no industry experience in CS. I have a loaded Mechanical Engineering experience based resume with experience at two Fortune 100 companies. However, these positions were all Mechanical Engineering with very little programming besides MatLab.

    Because I am in grad school, most people assume I have a graduate students level of CS experience, which they later find out I do not have. How should I go about presenting myself to help overcome this problem?

    ​

    ​

    submitted by /u/LostInTheSauceeeee
    [link] [comments]

    Physics grad wanting CS grad job...

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 10:53 AM PDT

    I'm an undergraduate theoretical physics student with basic knowledge of Python, C++, Matlab and Fortran 95. What steps should I he taking to find dev jobs or grad schemes that will suit me? I'm applying to everything I can find I was wondering if there anyone knows of any good graduate recruiters in UK. ? I'm feeling overwhelmed by the whole grad job process. I should graduate with a first in two months.

    submitted by /u/Monty_harr
    [link] [comments]

    The Slow Path to Management

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 07:41 AM PDT

    I've been a developer for about 15 years. I spent a good part of that time being perfectly content to write code to solve problems and to get better and better at doing so, uncertain if I'd ever want more than that. About 6 years ago, I become enamored with agile, and shortly after that, I took on a scrum master role. I've filled a scrum master role on and off ever since. Although I've remained a developer, my interest in leadership and in having an impact beyond the individual contributor level has grown.

    A year ago, my department lost a manager, and I started reporting directly to my director. My director asked me if I would be interested in management, should he get the okay to bring on another manager. I said that I would, and he started giving me whatever leadership opportunities he could to prepare me for that step. Everything was going well, and my director wrote on my yearly review that I was ready for management.

    But, shortly thereafter, my director announced that he was leaving. Now, everyone under him is going to start reporting up to one of his peers from a different office. We have been working closely with the folks from the other office for several months, and it's not a bad group. But, there are some things they do that bug me, and with the change, it seems I'll be proving myself all over again. I'm going to start on their management path soon, but that means 6-12 months with just two direct reports before I can get a real promotion. And even then, they expect their managers to spend no more than 20% of their time on management activities and to mostly focus on continuing to grow as engineers. While I'm sure that's perfect for a lot of people, I'm tired of working on being a better engineer and more interested in growing other skills. I think it's clear that as long as I'm at this company, all I can do is to keep traveling down the path in front of me. It might not get me exactly where I want to go, and it might not get me there as quickly as I'd like, but it's at least moving in the right direction.

    But, it's frustrating because I've seen so many people take seemingly bigger and faster jumps to management over the course of my career. If I had started down this slow path of taking on a couple direct reports a year or two ago, I would probably think it was a good way of doing things. But, I'm anxious to do more now. I feel like I've been wasting years just letting things happen to me rather than taking initiative and I hate that the next step is more patience.

    The obvious other path is to look for jobs elsewhere, but that seems difficult from where I'm sitting right now. So many of the the management job postings I see out there seem like a big stretch. I see a lot of jobs that sound like they want an expert architect more than a people manager. Then, when I find a job description that sounds like what I want to do, it turns out that they want a technical background in the Microsoft stack or embedded programming or something else other than my web/mobile background.

    I think I just need to be patient: keep doing what it takes to advance at my current company and keep looking for jobs that sound like a better fit. But, if anyone has any advice or encouragement, I'd love to hear it.

    submitted by /u/Ph4ntorn
    [link] [comments]

    Is it worth moving to the SF Bay Area / NYC / Other High CoL area if you aren't working for the Top Tech Companies?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 08:59 AM PDT

    Most of the people I know who do end up moving to these High CoL area:

    • Got a job offer at a Big N or Unicorn
    • Has startup / VC ambitions
    • Lived in these High CoL areas previously for college or has family living there

    What if I had an opportunity working for Visa or Oracle or IBM? Obviously in terms of overall prestige and pay/TC, they will be significantly less than Google or Facebook. So I'm wondering at that point, is it worth making the move to these areas IF you have a similar offer in a lower CoL area (Austin, Atlanta, Raleigh, etc.)? Or is living in the SF Bay Area regardless of company/pay going to help you in Tech?

    Let's say I had an offer for Visa in SF Bay Area for 115k base. And an offer for Visa in Austin / Raleigh for 85k base. Which one would be better at that point?

    I'm only asking because it seems most people only stay in the Bay Area for a couple of years anyways. If I get an offer working for Visa for just 2-3 years and then move back to a low CoL area, what benefit would I have gotten. Sure, Visa is a good company, but if you got an offer for Visa or Oracle in Raleigh or Austin, would you take that over the SF Bay Area offer? Thoughts?

    submitted by /u/NearbyAuthor
    [link] [comments]

    Full stack dev for $41k/year?

    Posted: 20 Mar 2019 07:21 PM PDT

    I got an offer from a hospital near me for a full stack development position, contact the higher, for the above pay grade. It's in a lower cost of living area then obviously San Francisco or New York. The problem is, I still feel like I can find something better than that. I've been working in IT job at the helpdesk for the last year even though I have a bachelors in CS and the math. I really am leaning towards not taking it, but I also feel like I might just jump on it. Anyone have any thoughts one way or another?

    submitted by /u/thisabadusername
    [link] [comments]
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment