career-advice

[smoky quest]

Hi!
It's not a shitposting channel

[mortal wedge]

The market needs testers, whether it decides to employ them or not

[tepid hare]

yes, i work with robot framework

[spark cobalt]

By going to college.

[true harness]

I was under the impression that the QA job was being taken over by just normal devs. though I did see some postings

[rough helm]

I heard college as boomer is not recommended, do u have any tips for college as boomer in 2022?

[spark cobalt]

Do you have a degree to begin with?

[tepid hare]

what, why

[smoky quest]

Overall, testing is more and more automated. So there is a trend about that.
That said, there are things which will require manual testing for a long time. If you want to hedge your bet, you could invest in acquiring skills to help automating testing

[mortal wedge]

Wear hip new clothes so that you look young and don't talk about your hip replacement surgery

[rough helm]

Ok I will steal some from the cleaners job I still hold somehow

[tepid hare]

almost no one in my team of 21 people is a dev, but work with manual testing most of the time

[true harness]

you said you've worked at the cleaners for 20 years. there's still like 20 other years that aren't accounted for

[rough helm]

ah, the eighties, they were a confusing time for me

[summer roost]

it's easy to pay off student loans when the degree increases your earnings for 40 years worth of career. Less so if you only have 10 years left to work. The benefits from a degree compound over time, so the case for getting one late in life is less compelling

[tepid hare]

was really easy to get this job actually, i worked as an intern one year (my contract was of 2 years) and then they hired me after just 1 year, now working full time.

this gave me an impression that companies are needing good testers, so im thinking about trying to live abroad focusing on this career path

[rough helm]

So what can I do? Us boomers had it so rought ngl. But at least we left you young grasshoppers a very easy life 🙂

[summer roost]

how much savings do you have? How are your investments?

and what country are you in? How many years until retirement?

[rough helm]

I am in Mexico City and my savings are null

currently staying with my brother in law but he says I need to be out after christmas

I thought I could learn some django, but it seems it's dying in 2023

[summer roost]

you may find a boot camp useful for picking up skills quickly, if you can't afford the cost (and opportunity cost) of college

age discrimination is always a risk, though, and it will be tough to convince someone to hire you with only boot camp experience, with prior jobs unrelated to the industry, and with no degree.

[rough helm]

that's what I feared

[vocal locust]

What are people using instead?

[vapid jay]

is it dying the same way many thing in technology die

[daring root]

that's bs, unless you don't have the money you should absolutely go to college if you have the fortitude to learn

[vapid jay]

o, they have departed

[true harness]

i don't think that's practical. as godlygeek said the value of a degree is that over a lifetime you will earn more. but it comes at a heavy heavy cost + opportunity cost. if you don't have a lifetime left to earn, then it's not necessarily worth it

[daring root]

this doesn't apply to tech jobs, because you could very well get a return on investment within 5 years and have even more saved for retirement

[summer roost]

so very clearly if you have less than 9 years left before retirement, it's a bad investment then

[daring root]

even taking tech courses in community college would suffice

[summer roost]

imagine someone hopes to retire in 4 years: there's no chance that going back to school for a 4 year degree will pay off, because that's 4 years of negative income (no job income, and instead taking on loans) followed by 0 years of increased income.

there clearly is some point at which the costs (both actual costs and opportunity costs) outweigh any potential benefits.

and the youngest baby boomers were born in 1964. If someone is literally a boomer, and they intend to retire at the normal age, even the very youngest baby boomer only has about 7 more years of work left before retirement.

[dense mesa]

Lindy effect would say otherwise

[slim stream]

is it worth it to get a tech job in highschool? Im worried about getting into university so I am looking for any advantage I can get

[vapid jay]

I'd DM Steve Jobs directly if I were you

[vapid jay]

It can only help strengthen your expertise and knowledge, go for it!

[true harness]

it would be worth it, though on average it would be very difficult to find a place that would hire you

[forest kestrel]

four big guys

[summer roost]

realistically, I imagine it wouldn't give you any particular advantage.

[slim stream]

I mean in life in general

[summer roost]

I mean it might give you more spending money while you're still in high school

it likely won't affect your life after that at all

[slim stream]

Are startups with it? I’ve gotten job offers from them in the past but have been talked out of it because I hear it’s bad

[slim stream]

Damn

[summer roost]

universities tend to care much more about extracurricular activities, school activities clubs, community service, etc than about any high school job you've held, and once you have the degree, no one is gonna care what your high school job was.

[true harness]

a job might show that you're a responsible worker

[slim stream]

I’m fucked 😭

[summer roost]

why?

[slim stream]

I’ve gotten pretty bad grades, haven’t done much service, and did no clubs last year

[summer roost]

How bad are the grades? How many more years before you graduate? What country are you in?

[mortal wedge]

@true harness Hey, was that internship requiring someone to be a minority an unpaid internship? I asked someone who was a lawyer and they mentioned that the federal courts generally rule that civil rights protections do not extend to unpaid internships, aside from some specific states for minorities.

As far as disability, courts are in agreement that it is not illegal to discriminate against people WITHOUT disabilities as people without disabilities carry no special protection.

I know I probably dove too far into this, but it stuck in my head

[true harness]

no, it says

Salary range: $25.50 - $38.25 per hour, plus may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. Actual compensation within that range will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, qualifications, and applicable laws.

[mortal wedge]

Damnit. I thought I solved it

[true harness]

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment at PwC without regard to race; creed; color; religion; national origin; sex; age; disability; sexual orientation; gender identity or expression; genetic predisposition or carrier status; veteran, marital, or citizenship status; or any other status protected by law. PwC is proud to be an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer.
it does say this though. so like /shrug

[mortal wedge]

Yeah, that's pretty typically boilerplate

I'm back to giving up, with a slight lean towards they're not allowed to do that.

[summer roost]

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

though perhaps internships are some sort of exception, since they're meant to be educational and affirmative action is generally legal for education...

[true harness]

here's the actual if you want to look at it https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?currentJobId=3185300482

[summer roost]

aha, yeah, https://www.pashalaw.com/organizations-diversity-program-open-discrimination-claims/ says:

The provisions of Cal Gov. Code 12940 relating to interns, the primary law that the Getty Foundation is alleged to have violated, are actually fairly new law, having only been put in place in the past few years. By adding those provisions, California became one of only a few states in the country to offer anti-discrimination protection to interns, which is a separate category from employees or students.

my best guess is that it's legal only because it's an internship, and most states' anti-discrimination laws don't apply to interns.

[true harness]

that's annoying. the article seems to imply the protections mentioned in the article are relatively rare

[summer roost]

well, IANAL, but - the relevant PA law is https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/li/uconsCheck.cfm?txtType=HTM&yr=1955&sessInd=0&act=0222.&chpt=000.&subchpt=000.&sctn=000.&subsctn=000 and I don't see an obvious carve-out for interns...

It's always possible that the courts have interpreted some of that in a way that's not obvious, though.

[delicate bane]

dont do pwc

i mean you can but my friend says its not worth it

so take that with a grain of salt. since its basically 3rd-hand experience by now

[true harness]

he just said "it's not worth it"? is there any other context

[delicate bane]

eh you should know i dont use apostrophes by now

he said a couple other things but its been more than a year and i have the memory of a goldfish

hmm yeah no i dont remember the rest. i only remember the tldr portion

probs best if you verify with at least 2nd hand info

[quartz sage]

are python questions difficult for data role

[smoky quest]

it depends on how much code will be expected from you in that role

There is no hard rule

[pastel thunder]

i think my descriptions are pretty lame, is it really true

and also should i mention "internship" again and again

[smoky quest]

• It's way too dense. Add some breathing room to make it easier to read
• It lacks impact and outcome.
• It lacks details in the broad strokes about how you went about them
• Yes, I would keep specifying internships

[pastel thunder]

is this better:
MEGMEET | Software Development Engineer | Internship
rather than
MEGMEET | Software Development Engineer Internship

[smoky quest]

First one I guess

[quartz sage]

what is the best that i can do

if my school does not allow internships (foreigners not allowed to take up internship be it paid or unpaid)

[smoky quest]

You could contribute to an OSS project

[pastel thunder]

which country is it?

[quartz sage]

SG

im just looking to spamming projects to make up for that, though I'm not sure if that would even suffice

[pastel thunder]

oh i see, yup competitions tough
you can try for remote internships in country other than sg, i think thats allowed

[dim charm]

Hey guys

[spark cobalt]

Hey

[tacit talon]

Hello I'm new here.. I'm tryna learn python as my first language does this computer programming language offer a good job, and do i need to learn other language beside python to create a project such as apps, webs etc. thank you

[summer roost]

Almost all real world applications are written in a mix of several different programming languages. Knowing Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and SQL would be enough to qualify you for a lot of full stack web development jobs, for instance.

[gilded valley]

Same things as most other large organisations

They have a massive push for diversity, so being a minority helps

[crisp frigate]

hello guys, who like group calls and wanna develop something together?

[near ocean]

Not the channel for that

[outer tapir]

https://discord.com/channels/267624335836053506/1047864147519479929

pls help me

https://tenor.com/view/apik-apyg-pls-op-gif-21360433

[serene kindle]

damn don't spam this channel pls

[outer tapir]

sry

and i am not spaming

oh sorry i didn't see this it is the wrong channel

[umbral crag]

i think the main way to learn code is at school, or thats how im doing it....

[placid violet]

Depends on the person. I have a CS degree but had to teach myself some core concepts of coding because professors do not give real world problems for homework.

[true harness]

that's unfortunate. in all of my math/cs (read: 2, so kinda small sample size) so far the prof have linked back to real world

[umbral crag]

but I think we can agree that starting by yourself is a bit complicated: What to start with? etc

I started by myself on code academy but the teachers directed me towards doing small projects etc

[placid violet]

I could agree. I started my freshman year with C#. I never wanted to code again. Switched it IT for a year, found a JS course online and fell in love. Once I learned basic logic, I love coding in all languages now.

[ancient widget]

what's poppin

[radiant moon]

snow

[true harness]

The position is unpaid for now. However, if a product is developed with a successful commercial outlook, you may get compensated according to your contribution.
bruh

[delicate bane]

bruh indeed. startup?

[hearty island]

oh hell no

[near ocean]

Startup founders truly be trippin

[lapis wind]

Is this a Crypto startup by any chance 😅

I have seen so many be like that, or paid in their own currency.

[delicate bane]

yikes.

[spark cobalt]

Your teachers are right.

[balmy mural]

Crypto trading startup I worked for luckily actually paid wages. Wasn't a lot, but for a temp job while studying it was some free money, bit of experience and a line on my CV

[dreamy shadow]

What are some questions I should ask during a 3 round interview? (Not hiring manager, but people in manager positions)

[mortal wedge]

Depends. For me, I let the higher ups/management ask the big pictures questions while I grilled them on the technical details. Are you familiar with some of the technical details of the role? If so, I would focus there. Otherwise, I'd suggest looking at common questions and asking things like "What's the most interesting bug you've found recently?" or "Tell me about a time you made a mistake. How did you handle it?"

[smoky quest]

• What's the criteria for success for this position? What would make you say you were right to hire that person 6months later?
• What are the challenges the team/group/org/company is currently facing? What is being done?
• If you were able to change one thing at the company, what would it be?
• How do you organize yourself (team/group/org/company)? How do you decide what you work on and what you choose to not work on?

Basically going retrospective, prospective and how things are going

[mortal wedge]

Code academy is a great first step to teach you the basics, but your teachers had the right idea for the next steps after that. Python is a generalist language, but it will be helpful for you to learn how to work towards projects in specific domains. You'll never know all there is to know about Python for all topics, but if you're interested in web development for instance projects in that field will give you some valuable hands on experience.

[dreamy shadow]

Ok, I have some questions that cover those. e.g. Biggest problem can be solved, structure of different teams. Also, accidentally joined 30 mins early. Hopefully no one noticed lol

[mortal wedge]

If it makes you feel better, I typically join calls about 5 minutes early and one time I joined early, forgot, and then farted on a meeting recording.

[smoky quest]

you meant to say that your chair was squeaky

[mortal wedge]

Will have to remember that excuse if I do it again...

[true harness]

and on the other end..

Weekly base salary of $4,800 in addition to company-paid housing, meals, and other perks.

[mortal wedge]

may

[true harness]

yeah. idr what the first one was. but the second one is a high frequency trading company lol. even still, that's kinda wild. that's kinda 200+ a year

[outer rivet]

If I'm mainly working software development, particularly in web dev (first job I could get), but I want to get into hardware design, or at least something more hardware related, what should I do?

[balmy mural]

I really like asking this first question. It makes them visualize you in the role and also gives you a good idea of what their expectations would be of you

[buoyant seal]

web dev and hardware are literally the opposite fields in skill requirement / technology needs to be known
U could be interested then in getting as close as possible to it by learning... Embedded software development (Common languages required: C/C++, may be some modern companies start using Rust)
Probably knowing Assembly is must have i think for their case
Research job market what embedded software development requires

[tardy vale]

selam

[mortal wedge]

Steps:

1. Learn the information
2. Practice the information
3. Find a way to prove you know the information

Same way with most things.

[mortal wedge]

We typically don't use ASM for anything anymore. Generally it's C for embedded unless you're doing something esoteric I guess but I can't think of anytime memory is SUCH a concern that you need to drop down to ASM instead of C

[outer rivet]

Note that, I graduated from university studying computer engineering in 2020 and I preferred the hardware side of things. I picked a web dev focused job because it was the first company that said "yes" because of a web dev project I made in my last semester

[mortal wedge]

Got it. That's good and will go a long way towards proving you know the information. I'm assuming you have projects you can reference/speak to? Otherwise your next step would be to go over transferrable skills, brush up your resume, and start applying

[buoyant seal]

All right. I just assumed assembly is supposed to be known for embedded like...

JavaScript for backend. Not required, but needed to understand better processes happening at another side

[buoyant seal]

xD I picked web web because it was first company that said yes too. Luckily enough that is my favourite field at the same time

[outer rivet]

On top of that, I have experience in working with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's in college. I'd imagine doing hobby projects with them, and industry-standard microcontrollers, would at least get me better refreshed on this stuff, and get me some experience.

[buoyant seal]

What about C++?

[near ocean]

Arduino/RPI + breadboard set would be the easiest way to get back into it, fairly cheap as well

[mortal wedge]

Honestly? It's a fairly controversial topic among embedded engineers, most of the old school people prefer C and think C++ is blasphemy for embedded. Would hate to hear what they think of micropython

[buoyant seal]

Btw golang is easily compiled to any architecture and any OS.
Potentially good language for embedded on par with Rust, as new generation

Python honestly sucks to compile for another architecture or OS for sure though

[mortal wedge]

I'll be honest I have 0 experience/knowledge of golang

[buoyant seal]

I just make some Dev tool for friend in Windows, while I use only Linux. Golang made perfect choice to develop from Linux to Windows

Compiling for another OSes/archs, only matter of switching env var during build

[buoyant seal]

Regretfully... Probably too small market share golang and Rust will have for very long time. So not a good career choice for entry jobs for sure

[buoyant seal]

Rust was accepted as part of Linux Kernel.
Considering that programs in C can be compiled to Rust without refactorizations... Highly likely Rust could be next C massive replacement in embedded perhaps

[mortal wedge]

PRobably. A lot of these fields take a long time to update though. The older generation prefers software /langs that they learned and they teach that, so legacy software continues to exist despite better alternatives

[buoyant seal]

Are u in US? xD

[mortal wedge]

yep

[buoyant seal]

U have still not treated COBOL legacy there xD

[mortal wedge]

Exactly...

[buoyant seal]

Some contries are way more rapid to update in this regard though. My origin country was like this
Plus i heard Estonia is pretty modern

[mortal wedge]

Nice!

[buoyant seal]

Well, probably they are modern, due to more recently made process of digitalisation. Give it twenty years and they will be new COBOLs potentially though
Modern way makes all tools for rapid development and updates with DevOps though, so potentially they will not

[delicate bane]

if its microsoft teams, theyll notice

🕯️

[hearty island]

i don't see the huge problem tho

[delicate bane]

its not a problem until it notifies everyone else. one person did that for one of the meetings with 100+ peeps. yeah not fun.

[hearty island]

oh shit yeah nvm then

[delicate bane]

zoom should be fine though. they wont know until they join the call. then theyll just wonder why the clock has been running for a while lol but thats fine

since it didnt disturb them. unlike for teams, if they were in the middle of giving a presentation + screen-sharing or something and your notification popped up... 💀

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, teams has the problem where it says: X HAS STARTED THE MEETING.

Well, just finished 90 mins. Went from Super technical -> I'm from business, no technical please.

[delicate bane]

lol sounds about right

[delicate bane]

how long did you work at your previous job before moving on? i think ill stay at mine for 2 years or so for now unless something comes up

[dreamy shadow]

None of them asked about tenure length. Unlike the other company

[delicate bane]

interesting. well they probably saw it from your resume (if they looked at it before the interview)

[dreamy shadow]

Yes, but professionally it doesn't matter.

[delicate bane]

are you switching industries or nah

[dreamy shadow]

I switch wherever has more money. In this case, yes

Then again, insurance & healthcare are one and the same.

[buoyant seal]

so far the only valuable certificates exist only for cloud infra skills i think. AWS cloud certificates, Kubernetes administration by kubernetes foundation and etc certificates. Certification made basically by organization who invented/own their tech.

[delicate bane]

yeah many of the big players in the healthcare space are healthcare insurance companies.

im in that weird space in healthcare tech that isnt insurance. and my previous domain experience was on the clinical side of healthcare. so trying to figure out if i want to stay in this industry or move industries.

i think im leaning towards the latter

[dreamy shadow]

Well, I learned today is that you want to be part of the "revenue center" instead of "cost center" of a business.

[delicate bane]

but maybe if my next job has good pay and is in healthcare, then ill stay

[dreamy shadow]

Where revenue center generates money for the company, and cost is cost. So a company cuts cost centers.

[delicate bane]

yeah i think thats a theme mentioned here a few times

[dreamy shadow]

I mean, in hind sight it's obvious. But first time hearing about it today lol

[delicate bane]

someone had a really good article about it once upon a time

let me search the channel real quick

ah it was @ Anz #career-advice message

so i guess the takeaway here is

consider what team you are joining and which side of the spectrum they are closer towards?

[dreamy shadow]

Well, the interviewer that bought this difference up said it's a revenue center.

[mortal wedge]

Code maintenance = costs, new features = revenue. Lol

[delicate bane]

thats good. but you have to wonder if thats their opinion or if others agree haha

[vapid jay]

I'm taking a Python college course for school (kind of a running start program online) and one of the chapters is just for using Python for statistics, which is beyond my highschool knowledge LOL

[delicate bane]

sad but true. i feel like this is how the business views it. which only exacerbates problems like accumulating tech debt

[mortal wedge]

scipy.stats, pandas, and numpy will be your bread and butter

[vapid jay]

💀 no context given

[vapid jay]

I don't actually understand the functions themselves that they provide, stuff like gauss, limits, regression, etc

[mortal wedge]

Oh... that's not a python problem then. Just have to learn the stats concepts

[vapid jay]

Yeah that's what I meant by "beyond my highschool knowledge"

[mortal wedge]

This is offtopic for the channel though.

[vapid jay]

I got redirected here for school related stuff LOL, where should I go

[dreamy shadow]

Normal* distribution, limits, and linear* regression if I had to guess. These are basic statistics, which would be covered in some high school classes. Although rare. Limits though are part of calculus.

[mortal wedge]

!ot Either #python-discussion or one of the off-topic channels

[inner wren]

Off-topic channel: #ot2-never-nester’s-nightmare

Please read our off-topic etiquette before participating in conversations.

[mortal wedge]

Hooray!

[dire ferry]

Is google still hiring with foo bar?

[mortal wedge]

I doubt they ever were and it's a bad question anyway

[dire ferry]

Why?

[mortal wedge]

Is that the question where if it's divisible by 3 you print foo and 5 you print bar and both you print foobar? If so, it's because it seems simple that you want to optimize and have an elegant solution, but one doesn't exist so people overthink it and mess up

sorry I'm thinking fizzbuzz! Disregard

[dreamy shadow]

Time to stop stalling and write my annual performance review. Also because I only have today left

[hearty island]

the guy who emailed me is a project manager

[young wharf]

An repository can have 100 gb in github?

[dreamy shadow]

Project managers normally are not as technical.

They'll know some terminology, but not too much in depth.

[dire ferry]

What? Divided by 3 you get foo and 5 print bar? What are you talking about?

[mortal wedge]

I confused foo bar with fizz buzz

[dreamy shadow]

https://k3no.medium.com/fizz-buzz-in-python-2edea331d715

[young wharf]

seriosly

[delicate bane]

@dreamy shadow bruh...didnt we talk about this same thing previously?

[vapid jay]

muh fizz buzz

[dire ferry]

Hahaha

[dreamy shadow]

Yes lmao

[mortal wedge]

If anyone is curious as to why fizzbuzz is a stupid question: https://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/5/31/the-problem-with-the-fizzbuzz-problem

[delicate bane]

came up in a newsletter im subscribed to today

[dreamy shadow]

In my group, there's someone who used to be a DS but transitioned into project manager. There are a decent # of people who do this path.

[rain gust]

I got a question you think its worth getting a software development certificate? its a 8 month course

[mortal wedge]

Is it worth leaning the knowledge? Sure. Will the certificate be worth anything? Probably not by much.

[dreamy shadow]

Certificates are like awards you got in grade school. In the trash

[gritty rivet]

only if you find the structure helpful to your learning... employers don't care

[delicate bane]

how are they liking it. i probs have the opportunity to move towards a technical PM role but not sure if i want to

[dreamy shadow]

I think they like it? I mean, manager has it's perks compared to being technical.

[delicate bane]

oh yeah?

[dreamy shadow]

increased pay, less work

Although, more meetings is the trade off

[delicate bane]

i find that sometimes managers end up having to work extra too

[dreamy shadow]

Overall, it's less work.

[delicate bane]

like more hours overall. or is that just me

[mortal wedge]

Depends on the culture and such

[delicate bane]

hmm makes sense

[mortal wedge]

Enjoy responsibility without the power to enforce it

[delicate bane]

bruh

is there a role where you can do half/half

[mortal wedge]

Probably smaller companies/startups without predefined roles.

[delicate bane]

that would be nice

well just to explore

not to actually do long term lol

[dreamy shadow]

Startups without predefined roles is just slave labor with a nice title.

[mortal wedge]

Well, startups aren't long term, lol. They either fail or succeed.

[dreamy shadow]

WeAr MuLtIpLe HaTs

Startup imo only good when your starting up to get an idea of end-to-end process at a small scale.

Better understanding of what your role would be when going into a larger company.

As stated in the thank you card I got from my start up: "Once you're in, you're family and you never leave"

[delicate bane]

ive heard startups are better for when you are more experienced since you wont have much support as a junior at a startup

[dreamy shadow]

Eh, opposite experience for me. I got more 1-1 support with a daily stand up type deal, and then larger company was: Here's stuff to do for a week. (Although it only took a few days at most)

[delicate bane]

man dang i wish i had that. welp its too late for me now lol

[dreamy shadow]

Often there was weeks where I didn't do much at all.

Felt like going from 100mph to 30mph.

[vapid jay]

wait fizzbuzz is actually an interview question?? isn't it extremely beginner?

[delicate bane]

that would be killer for me lol

[dreamy shadow]

Felt like I was just going to be randomly let go every week, even though it's just how the company functioned lol

[delicate bane]

yeah i would be worried about the same. especially if someone is like 'wait. why is this person here and what are they doing?"

[vale sonnet]

@dreamy shadow where are you from

[dreamy shadow]

[delicate bane]

@dreamy shadow ok last one i promise.

are you sure you dont want to go for another job title?

anyway its bc im off today. ill stop for now

[dreamy shadow]

Well, looks like either I go into MLOps or ML Engineering. or modeling type deal. I know I don't want to handle data (Databases, cleaning, ETL, ELT type bs) and research type role (First place to cut cost when market down). Also, definitely stray away from Academia as that field is toxic af.

Just enough code, and just enough ML. w/e that means.

Honestly, I know I need to transition and specialize. I just haven't decided what.

[buoyant seal]

Bwhahaha. Exactly same three times I feel slowing down after moving from startup to more mature company

[dreamy shadow]

Lmao, I went from a 50 person start up to fortune 200. So definitely huge change.

[delicate bane]

i also dont know what i want to specialize in. maybe either product or ML engineering but they are kinda opposites. i guess as this field is maturing over time, it is expected that more specializations will pop up, and people are expected to choose a specialty as they progress in their careers

otherwise youll be expected to do everything. jk but am i

[keen gazelle]

Lot's of ML Jobs are domain specific

[dreamy shadow]

ML doesn't really fit into insurance imo. There's some ML work, not a lot. And not specifically within the scope of ML either. More like traditional stats.

[true harness]

isn't there the big question of "how much do we make this person pay us?" I thought ML could be used there

[dreamy shadow]

[delicate bane]

tell that to my friends company who has heavily invested into ML. my friend is ||an ML engineer at||

hmm i think i should probably redact that. you can kinda figure out which company it is i think. especially if you are in the insurance space.

[dreamy shadow]

Insurance is pretty big lol

Also, insurance calls some traditional roles as "Data science" now.

[delicate bane]

he said thats what happened to all the uhh what are they called

[dreamy shadow]

Actuarials?

[delicate bane]

yeah, those!

he said they are the worst about technology adoption vs. the more tech-savvy DS

[dreamy shadow]

lmao, that's dumb af. Since Actuarial is heavily on domain knowledge afaik.

They can run "Models" in an excel sheet.

[delicate bane]

they are the reason he has to ||deploy jupyter notebooks into production|| . (a sin i know. dont tell stel)

[dreamy shadow]

911 what's your emergency? THIS, THIS RIGHT HERE

[delicate bane]

funnily enough, an excel graph for monitoring distribution is one of the outputs hes responsible for. to give back to them to look at. 💀

[dreamy shadow]

This is why I want out of insurance space.

[keen beacon]

can anyone give me a solution for this in vs code probably im very new

[delicate bane]

yeah he keeps saying come work for X company. and im like 'nah fam. what you are describing sounds like a nightmare lol"

[dreamy shadow]

Another member of my team is working on turning excel sheets into python scripts lol.

The only upside of insurance is the # of PTO you get & holidays + work life balance

We got Friday after thanksgiving off, but someone working in a retail company didn't.

[delicate bane]

oof that sucks for them. we also got friday off

[blazing mica]

Try #editors-ides
Also, try selecting an interpreter by pressing Select Python Interpreter

[keen beacon]

tried but im unable to see

[dreamy shadow]

Finally submitted my annual review lol

Oops, a bit to general I think, oh well already submitted.

[vapid jay]

What types of projects do employers look for on peoples GitHub? Should I delete GitHub repos that I made as a student (of poor quality) or keep them alongside newer ones? What is the best way to learn GitHub?

[dreamy shadow]

Most of the time they don't even bother looking. Other times, you should specifically link a repo that's in your resume.

[vapid jay]

Okay, thanks

[wind rune]

i deen help

[mortal wedge]

Really depends on culture/environment. Basically, in a startup there are less barriers towards people doing what they want/need to do. For example, I was happy to spend whatever time it took to onboard new employees. If I didn't want to, I probably wouldn't do much of it. But at a bigger company, I probably could only allocate X time to do it. Does that make sense?

[mortal wedge]

This is a channel for discussing careers. If you need help, check out #❓｜how-to-get-help

[mortal wedge]

Yay, load off your plate

[mortal wedge]

Consider adding readmes to your older projects where you clearly say they were made as a student and add in what you might change /do differently if you redid the project now

[spark cobalt]

Best way to learn Github is just using it for your projects. Github has pretty nice cheatsheet which you can find here: https://training.github.com/downloads/github-git-cheat-sheet.pdf in case you need a quick reference.

[dense mesa]

People are against this?

[dense mesa]

A lot of models and basically most of modern society runs in excel

[dense mesa]

Same as the other message, this just sounds like a regular business task?

[mortal wedge]

Yes, wow.

[dense mesa]

I can't tell which is sarcastic 🤣

[mortal wedge]

Notebooks are barely good enough for datascience, I would never use a notebook as part of a production environment

It would be like deploying a neural net in excel

[dense mesa]

You don't need it performing logic in prod, it can be used for cheap monitoring of a prod service

[mortal wedge]

Why not use something like Tableau instead?

[dense mesa]

Easier to deploy the notebook and modify quickly

More accessible to people who don't understand python but need to productionise their notebooks

[peak halo]

I do a lot of ML ops, and if someone asked me to productionize a notebook, I would have no idea what to do or think.

[dense mesa]

Pretty good when you have portfolio managers with limited python knowledge, who just want to automate something and not spend hours on the technical aspects

[peak halo]

I work for a research company. but fortunately, I haven't encountered anyone who both experiments in notebooks (I don't care if people do that much) and expects to be able to pass off their notebooks to an ops person.

[dense mesa]

It's also possible to just deploy yourself 😃

[mortal wedge]

I thought it was a bad idea but the more this conversation continues the worse and worse I think this idea is

[mortal wedge]

I experiment in notebooks only for the explicit purpose of presenting the information to non-technical people. That is the limit and full extent of my usage of them.

Granted, I may do it just to be able to use cloud resources.

[dense mesa]

Any reasons beyond saying it's bad constantly?

Some domains are better suited to certain solutions, even if they seem unorthodox from the perspective of others. If it works, it works, no need to pour time and money for something which is marginally better

[dreamy shadow]

Also good for quick prototyping, EDA work.

[delicate bane]

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/best-practices-that-can-improve-the-life-of-any-developer-using-jupyter-notebooks

Because Jupyter Notebooks are a relatively recently-developed tool, they don’t (yet) follow or encourage consensus-based software development best practices.

[mortal wedge]

https://towardsdatascience.com/5-reasons-why-jupyter-notebooks-suck-4dc201e27086

[dense mesa]

Is that your article? What are your own reasons for it?

[mortal wedge]

Yeah, agree, but I wouldn't use them for production

[peak halo]

their list of best practices includes

A comprehensive test suite (e.g. unitests, doctests) for your Jupyter Notebooks.
how does that even work? do you use a third-party tool to import functions from the notebook into another notebook, and then run unit test cells one by one?

[mortal wedge]

1,3,and 4 are good enough reasons for me to not want it anywhere near a production environment

[dense mesa]

As mentioned earlier, running a report in prod isn't the same as using a notebook to make logical changes in prod

[delicate bane]

papermill does something like this i believe. my friend was telling me about it and i was like "you have to do what, with what workaround. what are you doing with the subprocess module, omg."

that was basically our convo.

[mortal wedge]

How do you handle version control? How do you control for the non-linearity across developers using it? How do you include it in your CI/CD pipelines?

How do you avoid common pitfalls and errors that a good IDE will catch?

[smoky quest]

Sounds like it would be best to answer these questions in #data-science-and-ml

[delicate bane]

yeah we should probs not start notebook wars here

[dense mesa]

Yeah started typing then remembered where we are 👁️

[peak halo]

This conversation started as being about coworkers asking one to productionize a notebook, and it hasn't entirely diverged from that.

[buoyant seal]

I would not mind using Jupiter as a visually more appealing console alternative xD
For quick drafts

Plus for data short articles it is good idea

[peak halo]

that part definitely diverges though; see #editors-ides

[dreamy shadow]

No, you def should not be using notebooks for production.

Anyone that says otherwise has a lack of comp sci training.

[vapid jay]

Im quite afraid about the “coding interview” questions people meme about

Those types of problems are the ones I have a hard time solving lol, but otherwise I do well when it doesnt involve a bunch of loops in loops dealing with crazy values

[maiden fog]

just show that you have a brain and you can communicate how you (at least try) to attempt to solve the problem

[spark cobalt]

Draw pictures!

[vapid jay]

?

[spark cobalt]

If there's an algorithm or some idea that you're struggling with, it helps to draw diagram trees of what's going on in your code.

In fact, in some cases of more advanced problems in interviews, pictures are one of the best ways to communicate to your interviewer your ideas.

[shut river]

can anyone help me with this problem?

[smoky quest]

maybe

[shut river]

sorry i thought this a a thread.

the community changed. there were helping threads, if i remember correctly.

[smoky quest]

We just migrated to a forum style help. See #❓｜how-to-get-help

[near remnant]

what is the best way to migrate from Python 2.7 to Python 3? not a big codebase, I'd say it's a middle sized codebase.

[smoky quest]

Hi!
That does not appear to be #career-advice related. You should check #❓｜how-to-get-help

[near remnant]

Sorry, you are right. Thanks.

[dense mesa]

Bit toxic but happy to discuss further in #data-science-and-ml

[vapid jay]

hey

[vestal hedge]

Besides game dev, I couldn't really find anything interesting to build. Would you agree that software development in general is more accessible and easier to start in then game development.

[hearty island]

my recruiter won’t pick up my calls 😦

[dreamy shadow]

Did they call you first? Standard of communication for me has always been email.

[hearty island]

hm, ok i’ll email then

[mortal wedge]

Sometimes they do call first. Sometimes they text, sometimes they email, sometimes they DM on linkedin.

[mortal wedge]

It's not toxic if someone doesn't agree with you, but yes better suited for another channel.

[dense mesa]

That second sentence was pretty rude, surprised you'd be backing it as a helper 🙂

[mortal wedge]

I just woke up and did not catch the second sentence. That stance is a bit strong but I still wouldn't call it toxic. Still, probably a better discussion for a different channel

[minor fulcrum]

hey
can anyone please help me about github
how can i make my profile active
i have heard from many programmers to make github profile active
but i don't know how

[mortal wedge]

Some people place too much emphasis on having constant/daily updates. Don't worry about that, I don't know any employer who cares if you have daily updates. Quality over quantity.

[minor fulcrum]

can i run programs on github like vs code ?

[hearty island]

well i gave them a deadline of december 5th to respond by, so i’m just waiting. if they don’t respond by then i’ll send an email and call the vice president of recruiting again

[mortal wedge]

Github is a version control platform. You don't run code on it, you use it to keep backups of your code and collaborate with other developers

[hearty island]

the website still says i’m under consideration for the role

[minor fulcrum]

i can upload on it ?

[mortal wedge]

Yes

[dreamy shadow]

I had one recruiter call out of nowhere. But they left a message and followed up with an email.

[delicate bane]

anz, i remember you talking about this previously, but if i had the option to move to a technical PM role, what should i consider

[hearty island]

then again it’s also a large company, i highly doubt they’d be done with their recruiting process by such an early date

[delicate bane]

i mean, uhh 'asking for a friend'

[dreamy shadow]

The ones that DM me on linkedin are always just casting a wide net. So I don't really bother with those.

When the market was hot few months back, I would get messages like: Here's a job for you!

Requirements 10+ YoE
Me with less than 5

[delicate bane]

if it says 'inmail' or whatever its called, thats usually the case. i think recruiters on linkedin have the option to check a number of boxes for a certain type of individual

then they pay linkedin some money just to blast that message out

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, they can specify location, active/not active. That's why you should always respond, even if to say no.

[mortal wedge]

They use keywords based off of your profile. Which can sometimes be hilariously wrong.

[delicate bane]

wait why

[mortal wedge]

Like, I do software research and development. Sometimes they just pick up on the last word and reach out to me for development engineer non-software role that is in a completely different field and pays far less.

[dreamy shadow]

There's a checkbox that's basically: "Does this person respond back?" Something along the lines of "Are they active"

Let me see if I can find the exact wording.

[delicate bane]

ohhh i wonder how linkedin decides that

because i dont want to be in the business of managing linkedin DMs

[mortal wedge]

Huh, didn't realize they have that for users. I know they have that for companies/roles ("Typically responds within X amount of time")

[delicate bane]

let me just contact their data team directly, and tell them to put me in the 'active' bucket forever, thanks. jk. 😛

[dreamy shadow]

Can't find the exact term linkedin uses.

But either way, it's good to be professional and just reply with a generic "Not looking right now" message.

[mortal wedge]

I always suggest people respond. You never know when they might reach back out with a better opportunity.

[delicate bane]

hmm wonder if i can have a script do this

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, I give up finding it. It was like some video of a recruiter showing the recruiter search tool.

Might have been this? https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/talent-solutions/learning-center/tip-sheets/en-us/HowSearchFiltersWork.pdf

[delicate bane]

"Hi, are you interested in Product XYZ?"
"Sorry, not at the moment."

"Hi, are you interested in Job Role ABC?"
"Sorry, not at the moment."

[dreamy shadow]

Since linkedin is a social media platform, engagement is def a measurement somewhere.

[delicate bane]

some KPI on some executive's dashboard.

[dreamy shadow]

Also, life pro tip. Unfollow the military nut on linkedin.

[pine sleet]

So, I'm a high school senior and I'm halfway through, so I feel like the time of "you still have plenty of time to figure it out" is over. Im a bit torn on which field I want to go into. I enjoy software development and coding, but my parents want me to go into a more hardware related field. I'm currently dual enrolled college student studying computer networking and on track for a Cisco networking associate certification, so in terms of a career I think I'm officially farther into hardware and might be better for a career. So I'm here asking for advise on how to best proceed 🙂

[delicate bane]

why do they want you to do hardware. also have you looked into embedded systems?

[pine sleet]

Not 100% sure but I think it has to do with job security and also that I'm already pretty far in :p

[vapid jay]

does anyone know any companies looking to hire apprentices? UK based

[mortal wedge]

I get the idea that you're currently invested, but I would still encourage you to keep an open mind. They're both solid career choices, but your level of enjoyment of doing a career over the course of years matters. In the grand scheme of things, you're still at an early stage and it will be easier to switch fields now than when you have, let's say, 10 additional years on your belt.

[young wharf]

Pytq5 works for mac?

i can t find this information

[pine sleet]

And yeah I do love embedded systems

[dreamy shadow]

Wrong channel. If you mean pyQT5 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34583811/how-can-i-install-pyqt5-on-mac

[pine sleet]

That's logical, thanks! I'll keep it in mind

[near ocean]

BT apparently, one of our new hires started out as an apprentice there

[vapid jay]

how to get job?

[near ocean]

Apply

[vapid jay]

computer science degree required?

[near ocean]

Probably yes

[mortal wedge]

Computer science degree is better than a STEM degree is better than a non-STEM degree is better than no degree.

[vapid jay]

thx yall. im gonna choose computer science then

[vapid jay]

oh sweet i'll take a look

[dense mesa]

Technical PM is a good role imo, especially if you're more interested in the "developing" rather than "engineering" side. Also gives good exposure to program management and general increased responsibilities, so recommended for the $$$$

[dense mesa]

We've been taking pre-uni, undergrad and grad apprentices

[vapid jay]

I had done computer science in school and since then I have taught myself what I know. I have applied to college for next year as they had no spaces left. But what company is this for?

[dense mesa]

DM'd

[mortal wedge]

This is also a solid career choice that marries hardware and software.

[mortal wedge]

"Hi, here's your dream job!"
"Sorry, not at the moment."
"WAIT I TAKE IT BACK"

[vapid jay]

Is there remote embedded systems?

[mortal wedge]

Do you mean remote jobs for embedded systems, or remote control embedded systems? In both cases, yes.

[delicate bane]

good to know. ill def think about it

[vapid jay]

Former

I’m not really able to move my location and I have good Internet, but i wonder what jobs are available for backend and low level people remotely

[smoky quest]

That will be constrained by the requirements of the job. If you need access to benches and physical devices, then remote options will be quite limited.

[maiden fog]

YO! I was one of a "select few" chosen by my professor to extend an invite to apply for an internship with the County as an Application Analyst. I am working on a cover letter right now. Need a good conclusion paragraph/proof reading if anyone wants to help a brother out!

Here is my first sentence of conclusion paragraph: This opportunity presents a unique chance for a student like me to gain priceless experience and insight into real world applications of technology

the rest of it i am just blabbling about my homelab

[valid bronze]

do you think it is easier to get entry level remote job with knowledge of C# or python? bcs I'm now in situation where I have to decide with which one to go, thanks!

[buoyant seal]

i would say it depends very heavily on your country of living.
if u a in US/United Kingdom /Microsoft dominated first world country => U can make a safe bet on C#
if u are from third world country, better making bet on Python i think + Python is very great for across boards works... due to being massively popular in the world and dominating its markets

[maiden fog]

java.

[valid bronze]

I'm from Croatia

[buoyant seal]

oh, we are neighbors then. xD i am from nearby country Serbia.

[valid bronze]

to find entry level job?

[maiden fog]

learn python then java, java and C# are very similar

then you can easily learn C# too

[buoyant seal]

Anyway, i would not recommend C# then, because it is very Windows/Microsoft centric language.. / first world country only language. (It is way too much expensive in its ecosystem)
Better choose between Java or Python. Both are very fine good options, popular in the world and good for entry jobs in third world countries.

[maiden fog]

taking java in college was super easy after teaching myself

[valid bronze]

alright!, thanks @maiden fog @buoyant seal for this information! happy coding

[maiden fog]

🙂 I would recommend learn python the hard way from Zed Shaw. It isn't free, but it is excellent material.

[buoyant seal]

Why to learn hard way, when u can learn easy way though 😆

[spark cobalt]

If you're just starting to learn, I'd just pick something like Python and use it to learn the general programming concepts through that. Once you have the concepts down, learning languages you need won't be an issue.

Languages are just some syntax to get a job done. Your real challenge isn't the syntax, anyone can learn that. But being able to solve problems and do shit with a language.

[maiden fog]

@spark cobalt that is exactly what I was trying to say, python is the gateway language. The others are pretty much the same, just with curly brackets (oversimplified)

[vapid jay]

Do you guys think an entry level backend role would consider me if I knew Python/FastAPI/Postgre/Pandas? Is this enough to demonstrate training potential?

[spark cobalt]

Yep Python allows you to just focus on the concepts without worrying too much on the syntax 🙂

[maiden fog]

although.... whitespace can be super annoying after working with curly brackets

@buoyant seal the hard way is the easy way.

[spark cobalt]

They're all kind of for different backend positions. Either way, Python isn't used often for backend.

Try the backend page from roadmap.sh

[maiden fog]

on that note, those code block things are pretty neat for learning basics too. MIT App inventor is super cool. I made a slick FF4 pong game

[graceful mason]

I've done fully remote embedded work but you shouldn't expect to find those jobs - you're going to be working directly with hardware that they don't want you taking home

[vapid jay]

Python is one of the ones there lol

[spark cobalt]

It depends on the type of backend you're doing. Because backend is literally anything that's not front end.

[vapid jay]

Yeah

[delicate bane]

pandas isnt part of traditional backend stack. thats for data roles (data analyst, data scientist, data engineering, etc.)

[spark cobalt]

Yep

[vapid jay]

hmmmmm

[spark cobalt]

FastAPI in general is too new. Most companies have stacks way older than FastAPI has been around.

[vapid jay]

Well yeah, Flask and other ones

[spark cobalt]

I feel like Python is kinda slow? At least my company mostly uses Go for backend

[vapid jay]

I wont be really entering the industry for another 3 years though

[near ocean]

Do you have projects to show for? Education?

[spark cobalt]

https://roadmap.sh/backend

[vapid jay]

I’ll be working on a CS bachelors soon and I’m starting to learn Git, but I am struggling to learn it lol

[vapid jay]

Yes I’ve read this page

[buoyant seal]

The easy way is easy way.
Better starting learning stuff with like Head First xD

[delicate bane]

gotcha. you can still try to get ready for internships during your schooling. aim for building some projects for your resume so that you are a competitive applicant

[vapid jay]

When I feel comfortable with stuff in Python I’ll probably learn something like JavaScript

[spark cobalt]

But JavaScript really isn't a backend language though

[vapid jay]

Please tell me thats fake

[mortal wedge]

JAvascript is front end. Sorry, wrong reply

[delicate bane]

Node JS is somewhat common

[vapid jay]

Node.JS ??

[spark cobalt]

Fair enough

[vapid jay]

If I have internships they would be remote, I’m not moving for collehe

[buoyant seal]

it is not. Their javascript book is definitely awesome (as well as many others like Design Patterns and etc
So far in 90% cases i was fully satisfied with their books. Best starting learning experience ever.

[delicate bane]

remote internships is not a problem. plus they would count as experience for when you enter the industry/you can figure out which area you want to focus on

[mortal wedge]

I love some of the more academic courses on coursera. REminded me of college but I felt they are good at fully preparing you, even if it's probably a bit overkill

[vapid jay]

Thats true, I’m just trying to learn the basic tools like git and some frameworks now for exposure, and finishing high school math

[buoyant seal]

Also... i am super excited.. Head first released book about Git recently. I haven't read it yet, but I bet it could be something finally to recommend others to git good xD
https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Git-Learners-Understanding/dp/1492092517

[maiden fog]

I haven't seen the headfirst, thats sick!

[mortal wedge]

lol nice pun

[spark cobalt]

[buoyant seal]

hehe, pun intended.

[maiden fog]

@buoyant seal we use think java in school it's open source, and theres think python as well.

[mortal wedge]

Git management can be a pita and complex to learn, but it's definitely a valuable skill in the workplace

[vapid jay]

Its mostly the fact that it lets you do… any workflow that trips me up. I dont know what is worth committing and when its worth

[delicate bane]

nice you could probably start building some projects to get familiar with stuff. better to do than just go through tutorial hell imo

[mortal wedge]

If you're just getting started, I suggest committing when you finish a new feature and at least once a day so you don't lose work.

[buoyant seal]

workflows are strictly enforced at the level of Git cloud platforms
We just have terraform code that automatically setups for us all git workflow rules for repositories, like forbidden to push branches, requirements for CI certain tests, requirement for code review by another person for Pull Request approval

[spark cobalt]

Probably also want to make separate branches instead of committing directly to main branch.

[vapid jay]

Im going through a great Python course for FastAPI, SQL and Git right now that I plan on expanding the project and uploading to github

[delicate bane]

thats good!

[vapid jay]

I have never heard of terraform

Perhaps its just the fact that I am free to commit whatever that makes it difficult 😄

[spark cobalt]

It sounds like you're not using separate branches...? It adds a level of security that shouldn't make you feel this way.

[vapid jay]

The last project I did I had a dev branch and a main branch, but I felt like I was not using the dev branch properly (I ended up just committing every 20-30 lines no matter if it was broken(

[buoyant seal]

that is instrument from cloud infrastructure tools / DevOps engineering side of web development.
It is instrument for automatic configuration of cloud provider actions, like buying/destroying servers, configuring DNS, load balancers, databases and etc.
The most useful feature that it is declarative. If u delete from code no longer needed resource, during next plan and apply of terraform code u can destroy it without writing code for deletion
Book to learn Terraform up and running
Must have for large cloud providers like AWS/GCP/Azure (their GUI is too overwhelming to work with without terraform)

[vapid jay]

Thats nice, something to learn later perhaps

[spark cobalt]

Hm maybe there's a book on like Git good practices you know of DW?

[buoyant seal]

i recommend to read just 5. Just 5 good practices regarding Git and to let them sink into your soul
https://deepsource.io/blog/git-best-practices/

[spark cobalt]

@vapid jay ^

[vapid jay]

Thanks

[true harness]

git becomes easy when you realize all the commands are just operations on a DAG

[vapid jay]

What is a dag

[true harness]

directed acyclic graph

[buoyant seal]

this presumption assumes knowledge of Data structures already being present

[true harness]

surely everyone knows their basic data structures right /j

[buoyant seal]

😂

that is bold assumption for sure. We have too many non university people lurking around / people transfered to IT from non CS degrees / bootcamp / online courses people. They don't know it usually

[vapid jay]

This doesnt sound like a basic data structure

[still edge]

besoin français

[vapid jay]

I only know the essentials, tree, stack, queue, list, lol

[true harness]

a tree is a kind of graph. (and stacks and queues could be thought of as graphs also)

[buoyant seal]

Damn. Where is hashmap in your list https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bId3N7QZec

[worn rain]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt3UL4qznoc

[vapid jay]

Im still learning hashmap

[delicate bane]

lots of people are high schoolers/teenagers or younger in this server too

[worn rain]

https://eloquentjavascript.net/

[vapid jay]

The main struggle I have with complex data structures is the algorithms to use them lol, quite complex. Loops in loops in loops

[buoyant seal]

😆 don't worry, then we start just using libraries already having them implemented
The amount of code to use them becomes veeeery small.
Learning with loops is just needed to understand how it works and when to apply

[smoky quest]

That comes with practice. Diagrams help a lot to visualize how they work too

[vapid jay]

Where could I get some examples for that

[smoky quest]

• https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-fourth-Thomas-Cormen/dp/026204630X/
• Codingame, leetcode, etc.

[true harness]

+1 for clrs. great textbook

[hearty island]

i like grokking algorithms too

[mortal wedge]

I thought the only data structures are list and dictionary. Graphs are the thing you use matplotlib for, right? ||/s||

[mortal wedge]

This is more of a #pedagogy topic, but I actually like teaching people about complex datastructures/algorithms in languages other than Python. Since in Python most everything is abstracted and there are easy methods to do anything you'd be manually implementing. Then data structures and algorithms seem amazing.

[buoyant seal]

Graphs are awesome way to build road connections between towns and calculating shortest route

Graphs are also good for social network data, who is who connected with? There is whole dedicated graph database Neo4j, we could try finding articles which usage cases the best for it.

Also essentially we use graphs as indexes in Postgresql for example / speeding up search algorithms
Probably many other indexes are some form of graph too.

Plus as we mentioned, git is essentially a dag graph... So good strategy for all covering Dev code version controlling

So.. graphs are kind of everywhere.

Binary tree is yet another overspecialized graph. Learning graphs u learn generics applied to every graph, or learning to which graph types u can apply which operations
Well.. and how to build this structure

[vapid jay]

Where can I learn graphs

[true harness]

.

[vapid jay]

Last time I said something like “i struggle to learn x” there they said it was a #career-advice topic lol

[buoyant seal]

I also saw graphs at the end of grocking algorithms book

[mortal wedge]

Weird... Well, #pedagogy is for conversations regarding the teaching of Python. General questions of how to learn something maybe could go in pygen?

[vapid jay]

Where can I see this book

[buoyant seal]

https://www.amazon.com/Grokking-Algorithms-illustrated-programmers-curious/dp/1617292230
Any book store

[vestal hedge]

I keep watching how to beginner, while I can already build software, what are some good projects with python.

[mortal wedge]

!projects
Either these for solo projects or search for something open source.

[mortal wedge]

I love this guy, haha. And that's absolutely how we do it

[vestal hedge]

where i find it

[mortal wedge]

!projects
Projects listed here
wait ugh....

[vestal hedge]

dont see that section

[mortal wedge]

https://nedbatchelder.com/text/kindling.html

[worn rain]

If you are starting to learn Java, have a look :

https://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/java/home/

[hearty island]

damn i thought a recruiter called me but it was some random woman from bronx 😭😭

[spark cobalt]

Oh right today's the big day!

[vapid jay]

What do you guys think of LeetCode? I see people using it all the time, and even the easy questions there can be quite complex, is that representative of industry expectations?

[spark cobalt]

You'll likely only see easy and medium in your internship/junior technical interviews

[vapid jay]

Yeah, but are those types of problems really representative of the work that engineers do for their job?

[spark cobalt]

No. Not at all.

[vapid jay]

that's odd, I wonder why they have it part of coding interviews then 🤔

[spark cobalt]

One of the few types of programming tests that can be done within the time limit of an interview.

[smoky quest]

They are about demonstrating some skills with regards to your coding practices and knowledge of DSAS

[vapid jay]

ah

How could I learn DSA effectively

[spark cobalt]

You should be learning it in your CS program

[buoyant seal]

Easy automatable to collect results from interviewed person with minimal effort. / Minimal Dev cost (remember each Dev hour is a huge spending)

Loved my non tech person, because it introduces simple measured quality to compare stuff

[vapid jay]

Yeah, that will be the next course after Python, I just mean for self study

[spark cobalt]

The problem themselves aren't the only test. Your communication skills, ability to understand a problem thoroughly, ability to ask questions, etc. are also looked at as well.

[smoky quest]

#career-advice message

[vapid jay]

Ah! i forgot

[spark cobalt]

You can catch a lot of red flags in a technical interview with a candidate. If you go on Pramp, a mock interview website, you'll see a lot of people just immediately jump into coding with 0 plan, and end up screwing up on some of the simplest problems the site offers.

[vapid jay]

"mock interview" ?

[spark cobalt]

Imitating what an interview would be like with someone else. A practice interview basically.

[vapid jay]

Is it safe to say that a lot of data structures and algorithms require more memorization than thinking?

[spark cobalt]

Uhh

[smoky quest]

it would not be safe

[vapid jay]

Alright

[spark cobalt]

Once you have developed a fluent understanding of DSA, they become part of your thinking.

[smoky quest]

If you have to memorize tons of things, it means you did not understand them and would have a hard time to apply them to novel situations

[vapid jay]

How could I test whether I understand them vs memorized them 🤔

[spark cobalt]

Btw another red flag I see in Pramp interviews, people spit out names of random algorithms they have no clue how to implement.

[smoky quest]

#career-advice message

[spark cobalt]

You'll likely know without needing to test it.

[vapid jay]

I saw a preview of that book, I think I'll need to get further in math before reading that one

[smoky quest]

It doesn't require much math. a first year CS students should be fine

[vapid jay]

I'm not graduated from HS :D, and my general judge is when i see the summation symbol LOL

[spark cobalt]

Ah so you're in college without high school?

[smoky quest]

The summation symbol is a basic and fundamental part of algorithms.
I would recommend to learn about it rather than trying to avoid it

[true harness]

is this really a red flag? i guess it would be nice if you did know how to implement it, but if it is correct, isn't it better than nothing?

[smoky quest]

that falls into the "read a book about it but doesn't know how to put into practice"

Assuming they do write some code, not just spit out some buzzword

[true harness]

is that not better than nothing, though

[smoky quest]

Sure. However it doesn't mean it demonstrates said skill.

Like, would you get into a car that someone else is driving when they can only say a few keywords but obviously don't know how to apply them? I wouldn't feel safe

[spark cobalt]

I always looked at it as bullshitting lol. Say some jargon and think it'll slide. It's like the people that say big words but tosses them aimlessly with less meaning than one would be able to communicate with smaller words.

Either way, I do think it's better if people started at brute force and then worked to improve and get to the point of the optimal solution rather than trying to just shoot a fast dart and hope it sticks and works out.

[true harness]

i don't think the analogy works. knowing an obscure algorithm isn't the core function of writing code. i don't really have a good analogy for driving, though. i guess we're thinking of two situations. i'm thinking a conversation like

interviewer: "you've solved it in O(n lg n), can you do better?"
person: "i think there's [algorithm] that can do it in O(n), but i don't know how to implement it"

in this situation you already know how to drive, but not how to like, drift around corners

[spark cobalt]

Oh yeah different situations definitely.

[digital fjord]

There is value in being aware of various algorithms, even if you can't implement them from memory, since well, you know about where to look given the problem.

[smoky quest]

yeah that's completely different from spitballing

[digital fjord]

of course, someone just naming various ways to explore a generic search space is different from knowing about point jump search and about which classes of problems it solves better than alternatives.

[vapid jay]

I'm doing some college-level courses while im in high school (It's like running start but not he official program), just so I can transfer some once I graduate

[vapid jay]

I guess I'll take a look sometime

[spark cobalt]

Like, courses at your local CC?

[hearty island]

that’s december 5th just 3 days

[vapid jay]

An online one

I graduate HS next summer

[mortal wedge]

I try to ask questions in interviews to check peoples understanding of the core functions of the position or if it’s on their resume. If you know what algorithm to use in a specific use case, I don’t care if you need to look it up to implement, is probably do the same thing. I want someone to be able to clearly communicate 1) things they claim to be an expert in and 2) fundamental parts of the job requirement

[vapid jay]

So, it's more about their ability to find the answer and can be honest about not knowing something, not that they have it on the top of their head?

[mortal wedge]

Yes. Because that’s what most of us do on the job. We don’t know everything, but we know how to get the information when we don’t. Unless it’s something like you claim to be a data scientist working with Python and never heard of pandas

Otherwise if you know some obscure thing I may be impressed but I’m certainly not going to hold it against you if you’ve never heard of Floyd’s Turtle and the Hare algorithm

[true harness]

i just used that yesterday for a dsa screen

[mortal wedge]

Badass!

[true harness]

the name is actually great

[mortal wedge]

It’s descriptive instead of just “UltimateChaos’s algorithm”

I did name my first novel algo after myself :3. Have seriously struggled naming any others since

[true harness]

yeah. though like, if you called every algo like "kruskal's minimum spanning tree algorithm" it'd be kinda annoying and probably revert to "kruskal's" in like 30 minutes

[near ocean]

about interview questions, how do I go about increasing the difficulty of the question set we currently use, or maybe introducing another set of harder questions?
i think the set of question we use right now is fine for a junior dev, but some guy with 8 years experience we interviewed recently breezed past them and i dont think that should happen

they range from leetcode easies to mediums

in comparison, even I had an easy time with them and i only got a year's experience + miscellaneous leetcode adventures

[mortal wedge]

Honestly? I think leet code style questions shouldn’t be used at all. It’s a somewhat arbitrary set of questions that someone is going to study just to pass, probably not connected to the job tasks, and if people breeze through them there’s a decent chance it’s because they’ve seen them before. Especially for a more senior person, id ask either ask general open ended questions to see their thought process or ask them to explain complex topics as if the listener did not have a technical background. I’ve found open discussions more helpful than question/response. Although I do ask a few of those. But if you’re well versed in X and engage in a discussion with someone about X, you should be able to suss out their level of expertise

[mortal wedge]

That’s basically what I started doing lol. Long descriptive names of what the algo did and people still don’t like how I names it. Maybe I’ll start just coming up with catchy acronyms

[true harness]

doesn't minimum arborescence sound better than "minimum spanning tree but for directed graphs" though. you need a cool/clever name that is somehow related

[mortal wedge]

One thing I like to do is ask a question with a few viable answers then continually increase the constraints to see how they react. This does require a deep knowledge of the problem/concept though

[mortal wedge]

Haha yup. I need to take naming lessons from you 😛

[smoky quest]

I would think about it less in terms of easy vs difficult and more in terms of the required skills.
What skills should the ideal candidate possess? Obviously, the skills demonstrated should be different than those of an entry level engineer

[near ocean]

It's less about the technical skills and more about stressing the candidate/pushing them out of their "oh i've seen this before and remember a solution for it" zone
Harder problems are more likely to do that, they dont have to be leetcode problems

I (a junior) dont really care if theyre technically capable as much as I care that they wont freeze up when they dont know how to solve something, communicate, ask about constraints, etc

[mortal wedge]

Oh

[near ocean]

guy walked in
"oh i've seen this before, let me pull up my memorized solution for x, y, z problem right up"
interview ends in half the time, shows no signs of struggle
offer thrown at him
This doesnt tell me much about how they work problems out, harder problems are the first step in sussing that out

[mortal wedge]

Yeah precisely. Then just throw some of the hardest questions you e ever seen at them XD.

I have a question you can start asking that I’ve never been able to solve. I’ve thought about it a lot and would be so damn impressed if done one solved it

[near ocean]

well, the other problem, being a junior, im looking for the proper approach for something like this that wont be dismissed as "this guy is cocky cause he did well with these problems"
im not even sure if this is something people might even think of

[white relic]

hard questions in a live interview can go wrong in a couple of ways

for starters they tend to be less well defined

[true harness]

tbh it'd be cool if you got a hard question but were given hints until you could solve it

[white relic]

but then you have to be flexible on time because if it's really a hard question you can't expect them to come up with the answer in a minute

and then you're spending the whole hour or whatever on one question?
or the opposite problem, they solve it faster than you expected and then you have to fill time

[mortal wedge]

I would encourage you to ask a hard question about something the business is struggling with. That way you can see if 1) they can solve your business problem 2) You or others are likely to have thought a lot about it so you know what would work/not work and 3) you get a feel for how they think and work on something practical.

Or just ask them this 😛
https://codeforces.com/contest/792/problem/F

[white relic]

when I've asked questions about actual job relevant stuff, I have noticed myself doing the thing where I underspecify the problem and expect them to come up with the answer I'm thinking of

[mortal wedge]

The lower you are on the totem pole the more you're expected to be the one grilling on technical questions while the higher ups/managers get to ask the behavioral ones.

[mortal wedge]

I would encourage you to keep an open mind with them and dialogue with them about the response. But underspecifying is okay! It's an opportunity for them to ask specifying questions. It's more of a warning sign if they DONT ask clarifying questions.

[white relic]

this is not to say that I think leetcode questions are a good idea either

[near ocean]

im so far down the totem pole, im in the ground
but i guess its also a good opportunity to go deeper into leetcoding

[white relic]

I didn't do a lot of interviews in my last job, but I've been doing a bunch this year. Definitely takes some practice.

[mortal wedge]

Yeah, I'm still the technical grilling guy at my company.

[white relic]

(Also, I'm not primarily interviewing people for programming skill.)

knew a guy who would always ask EE applicants "How do you make a low pass filter?"

this is like the fizzbuzz equivalent... should be a no brainer but surprising how many people can't get it

[mortal wedge]

I would much rather ask how to make a low pass filter than fizzbuzz. I can expand if you're interested, but I think fizzbuzz is actually a bad question to ask on interviews. I think it weeds out a lot of qualified applicants

[near ocean]

tfw fizzbuzz did the exact thing it was invented for in our last 2 interviews that used it

[white relic]

I've heard a lot of people say fizzbuzz is a bad question and I think they are misunderstanding the point.

But again, that's not the kind of interview I do, so 🤷‍♂️

[mortal wedge]

Fizzbuzz is a trap because it seems like there's an elegant optimized solution when there isn't. So people commonly overthink it. People who ask it treat it as if it's just a very basic check of programming knowledge.

[white relic]

I think you posted an article before, I read it at the time

[mortal wedge]

I probably did, yeah.

[mortal wedge]

What was it invented for?

[near ocean]

To screen out liars

[white relic]

I've asked someone the LPF question and they hemmed and hawed about it and said they'd have to look it up like it was something super complicated.

That's the filter I'd be looking for if I ever asked someone fizzbuzz. If you ask the question and then just let the candidate tie themselves in knots looking for a maximally elegant solution, I think you're missing the point.

[mortal wedge]

I think how you ask it is important

But yeah, I've had candidates who said they had a deep knowledge of neural networks and when I asked them to explain it in casual language said they'd have to go look up what one was. That interview was painful.

[white relic]

one question I've used on people with coding background is "What is binary search?"

[mortal wedge]

I think questions like that are fair. I'm not saying all easy questions are bad, or something like that.

[white relic]

people who actually understand it can just say something like, it's dividing the search space in half repeatedly, and I know they get it on a level
but many can't do that

[mortal wedge]

But like... google once asked a question "If you were shrunk down to the size of an ant and put in a blender, what would you do?" The answer is supposed to be "Since I would maintain the ratio of physical dimensions at size, I would jump out due to the cube/square principle of the mass/surface area relationship"

[white relic]

yeah those are like Bilbo level riddles

[buoyant seal]

Hehe, what is in my pocket?

[mortal wedge]

They're bad ways to find out if someone qualifies for a position.

[true harness]

i had a company basically send me like, personality and iq tests as a prescreen. like "which of these do you agree with more" and "which of these patterns when rotated are the same"

[mortal wedge]

I agree that you need to screen out liars, but you should also be able to do that by asking relevant questions to the job or relevant questions to their resume, both of which are presumed shared knowledge. Otherwise you're often effectively asking them "have you heard this riddle before?" or "Did you practice on leetcode?"

[buoyant seal]

With approaches like this, we can safely shuffle all the resumes.
And throw half of resumes into trash bin.

Those who remained, possess enough luck to get to next stage 🤣

[mortal wedge]

Pretty much. I get why these sorts of approaches are attractive to large companies. You can claim you've selected high quality candidates and you reduce your candidate pool.

[white relic]

I don't like leetcode problems, but I'd say they're fine for the liar test. Even if the candidate has solved the same one before or even just looked it up, if they retained enough to solve it again, that's a pass.

But I'd spend like 10 minutes on that on the absolute outside.

[mortal wedge]

That's a fairly distinct approach then Amazon's, who basically give two mediums to every applicant.

I don't know if they still do that, but they did that at the time I was applying to thier positions

[white relic]

yeah big companies are in a different scenario.

[mortal wedge]

Those were kind of fun. Maybe I'll apply to Amazon again to get some puzzles to solve and get a feel for what they're doing these days. I've heard too many bad things about the work culture to want to work there, though.

[white relic]

just like online dating, if you get too many candidates you start filtering on stuff that doesn't really matter just to make it manageable

[mortal wedge]

Yeah. Company near me just automatically filters out non-PhD candidates

For even their entry level positions

[white relic]

that seems like a pretty strong cultural filter tbh (maybe that's intentional)

[mortal wedge]

I don't have enough information to do more than speculate

[unique oriole]

Any python devs here

[true harness]

no

[unique oriole]

I am too afraid to even apply to any job postings .
Started like 9 months ago not even sure if it is too early or too late😆

[unique oriole]

I meant as in with actuall jobs

[true harness]

do you meet some of the requirements of job postings? generally requirements are a sort of wish list. if you meet more of them than other candidates, they'll take you

[unique oriole]

Yep i do sometimes.
Like do u know django yes i kinda know ins and out but I don't have fkn5 years of experience

Maybe i should go for some interviews

Then I'll know atleast what i know and what i am lacking

[buoyant seal]

Did u learn data structures and algorithms, OOP, SQL(Postgresql?), git, Linux, unit testing?

[unique oriole]

I learnt them on my own
I dont have a degree that's another problem but i know them to some degree

Jesus those keep increasing🤣🤣
Never did unit testing

[buoyant seal]

What u did not learn from the list besides that?

[mortal wedge]

It's much harder to get a python dev job without a degree. You can still try though. I suggest working with recruiters. They'll generally give you feedback about why you don't qualify and that feedback is valuable when you're early on in your job search and missing things like degrees. I also suggest networking, contributing to open source projects, etc. etc.

[unique oriole]

I kinda have worked with everything else beside testing

[true harness]

"kinda"? have you demonstrated it through projects?

[unique oriole]

Some basic projects of my own nothing wild

[buoyant seal]

Those two books can help u learning testing

First unit testing, then TDD

[unique oriole]

Thanks for books

[true harness]

that would be a good place to start then. without a degree you need something that makes a hiring person pay attention to you. plus you actually learn things

[unique oriole]

How does a python dev portfolio look like

[buoyant seal]

What is a python Dev job role? Never heard of it 😃

[mortal wedge]

Generally a github page or a website... ugh gtg

[unique oriole]

U know for web development or automation

[buoyant seal]

Anyway for Python Backend role..

Anything you make complex in functionality. Showing u know architecture
Or technologies related to web development

And show it at GitHub or Gitlab or whether

[delicate bane]

everything? DW is about to throw some devops at you. i will go now before that happens

[buoyant seal]

False alarm, not today
https://media.tenor.com/BKxN3odCI50AAAAM/game-of-thrones-not-today.gif

[mortal wedge]

Okay, I'm back. Generally there are two types of projects that are popular. One is something that's impressive to someone without much programming knowledge. Simple games, web apps, etc. Second is that shows your expertise/familiarity with a certain domain. If you're applying for neuroscience jobs for instance, I'd love to see you have a project on your portfolio of a project parsing binary files and converting them to numpy arrays or something.

[true harness]

something you did at work recently? :P

[mortal wedge]

I was applying for other neuroscience jobs and they asked for a code sample. I submitted what I just described and it got me an interview, lol

[buoyant seal]

there is also third case, what u do is useful tool for some group of people / good subject for open source contribution to somepeople
Basically tool has direct value to some group of people already

[mortal wedge]

Oh, yeah, you're right. It's also good to show collaboration, because chances are you will be collaborating with coworkers if hired

[buoyant seal]

it is especially good, because when u develop for people... it is already always semi-productional in quality. You go through the process of Software Development cycle, whatever you want it or not, system design and analysis participate when u develop for real users.
U receive real feedback and adjust plan of development, u receive bug reports, feature requests and etc

the best in terms of.. as close to real work as possible i think.

difference in only being hehe free work

and usually at smaller scale as u start developing as single dev

[smoky quest]

Some of the things I do:

• Take an actual problem that I faced and refactor it and remove irrelevant part as to package it into an interview question
• Using a more comprehensive set of tests. For instance, system design is quite important. And you could start with a vague problem, go through a design and narrow it down to a specific piece of code
• Asking questions that are a bit outside of the purview of leetcode, for instance asking about concurrency or distributed related problems

[smoky quest]

damn, rejecting people is tough sometimes. Especially interns

[ivory sluice]

how involved are you in directly rejecting people? email? or something more

[smoky quest]

Well, I passively pass it on the recruiter.
But you do see it on their face when they realize they screwed up

sometimes they almost cry too

[ivory sluice]

in realtime during the interview?

[smoky quest]

well yeah, it's a video call

[ivory sluice]

how can they be so sure they've screwed up that badly lol

[smoky quest]

Interview question: 2+2 = ???
Candidate: 10

[ivory sluice]

lmao

[smoky quest]

Especially if they get stuck. Not the lmao part though

[ivory sluice]

i can barely open a word file when i'm sharing my screen

are they screen sharing as well?

or this is just spoken question/answers

[smoky quest]

We used shared code pads

So it's like a shared vsc, but web based

That was worse pre-covid when everything was in office though

I did have a few candidates I was rooting for but failed next interviews and saw them walking out crying

Although, I did make a few candidates cry but they deserve it

[orchid trench]

There was a particular interview I conducted where the guy was in a dark room so you could see the reflection of the screen off his glasses, he was using a tablet to look up answers

[smoky quest]

the worst part is they still fail

[dreamy shadow]

All the more power to them. At the end of the day, the point is for the project to be finished. Not regurgitate what P-value means for verbatim.

Apparently, someone got a 100% in one of the tests one of my friend's company uses for recruiting. So they are going back to check if they cheated or not.
Like if they got 100%, it means they solved the problem via w/e method.

[summer roost]

I'm guessing you don't do any hiring

[dreamy shadow]

No, technically not senior enough to be asked to.

[orchid trench]

If it's some complex problem, go ahead
But if someone is trying to solve a basic question to test their fundamentals by googling, I'm not letting them through to next round

[dreamy shadow]

Sure, but also depends on what fundamentals is defined in this case. Some of the 'fundamental' questions I've seen in DS interviews from friends are beyond ridiculous.

[orchid trench]

list comprehension

literally translating a simple question to use list comprehension instead of for loops

[dreamy shadow]

Sure, or fundamental programming I guess.

[orchid trench]

at my work, manager explicitly told me not to ask DSA problems

[summer roost]

The point of an interview is to gauge all candidates' skills against a relatively consistent benchmark. If they cheat they've deprived the interviewer of all useful information. If they're caught cheating that's an instant fail because the interviewer gained no useful information for comparing them to any other candidates.

[orchid trench]

I even allow them to google when I ask around pandas and numpy

since nobody expects you to know all syntaxes

[dreamy shadow]

If it's a code challenge, then yea sure. Otherwise, knowing the functions should be sufficient.

[dreamy shadow]

Yes, I can see this perspective. Don't get caught lmao. Part of video interviews is checking how you look on screen.

[summer roost]

A well designed interview shouldn't be full of things that are easily googled. But googling something without permission is cheating, and getting caught cheating on an interview is an instant failure. Cheating on an interview at all is a very bad idea.

The best case outcome for cheating on an interview is that you land a job that you weren't qualified for. The worst case outcome is that it exposes you to civil liability for fraud. It's not worth it.

[dreamy shadow]

Except the flaw in that logic lies in no one's spending that much time to design a well designed interview. Hence all the google-esk interview questions. (Interview questions google asks*)

[summer roost]

My interviews are absolutely not full of questions that are easily googled.

If the question can be easily googled, it's not a very good question.

[dreamy shadow]

What would be an example question off the top of your head?

[orchid trench]

We had a senior guy recruited a few months before I was hired - who was in charge of training me when I got out of college. I was able to do what he was assigned and eventually he got put on PIP and removed, team never hired anyone experienced in python since then.
He even had to take the help of a guy experienced in Java who never touched python.

[dreamy shadow]

Also, no company's going to sue for fraud based off an interview. That's a terrible PR move.

[summer roost]

That depends on the circumstances. If they hire you based on your performance in the interview, and you do terribly in the job, and you wind up losing the company a lot of money or get someone killed with your performance, and then they find out that you cheated on the interview ,..

[dreamy shadow]

Lmao, if you get someone killed is an entire different legal matter. Suing for performance has to be at top level of a company. Otherwise it's a waste of time all around.

[summer roost]

Depends on how inept you were.

[dreamy shadow]

Well, to pass via cheating and not get caught as a certain level of skill to it.

[summer roost]

I'll grant that it's unlikely, but defrauding someone and then saying "what are they gonna do about it, sue?" is an all around bad idea.

[dreamy shadow]

Either way, my point is:
If someone cheated and passed the interview without someone knowing and still holds on to the position after a year or so. Nothing of value was lost. If they were truly incompetent, it would show fairly quickly.

[summer roost]

Something of value was still lost for the company. They got an employee who cheats.

[dreamy shadow]

That would be a morality argument that holds nothing in the world of free market imo. I chalk that up to crying IP theft in china. You can cry louder, but they still going to sell your IP at half your price.

Not to mention, depending on your definition of cheating. Then corporate espionage would be another thing of note.

[summer roost]

That's illegal

[dreamy shadow]

Yes, something I'm sure Uber cried real loudly as Didi stole their market share lol. Anyways, there's no point furthering this conversation as this point's a bit counter productive.

[dreamy shadow]

I'm glad for your boss that you guys don't allow DSA questions. Looks like a pain just looking at the "top 50 classical problems"

[summer roost]

Showing an example program and asking them to spot the bug is a common one. One of my favorites is just asking them how they'd go about tracking down an issue in a production application if they get a call saying the site isn't loading. Any live coding problem that can't be described in 10 words is relatively tough to Google, even if it's isomorphic to another common problem, as someone who can't solve the problem likely can't describe it to Google well enough to find a solution

[dreamy shadow]

Working through a problem sounds like a good interview method. Only problem is it's not very common as it takes a lot of time to do so. I also like take home problems. As those you can showcase what you know.

[buoyant seal]

My favourite question is going to be... How would u refactor/, improve this code.
Got from one guy especially bad code breaking all possible rules. Perfect target
https://github.com/darklab8/darklab_examples/blob/master/python/help/help_to_zhabiboss/before.py

[summer roost]

I like those types of questions as well.

[dreamy shadow]

Somehow, seeing while true always bugs me.

Must be from when I first started coding and the countless infinite loops I had to deal with.

[solar torrent]

Any idea where to HOST a discord bot?

[buoyant seal]

Hetzner for the win

[summer roost]

At the senior level, it's really tough to Google interview questions. System design questions and even OOP design questions don't lend themselves to googling

[dreamy shadow]

I got the stupid P-value question twice! TWICE!

[summer roost]

That doesn't seem like a stupid question to me. That's an important concept to understand

[dreamy shadow]

At this point, I might as well have sticky notes around my monitor for these definitions. And soon enough, I'll be able to spew it out just from pure frequency.

[summer roost]

Well yes, that's the goal - to have someone who has internalized the meaning of the term

[dreamy shadow]

I have yet to use p-value in anything work related. Edit: And I doubt I ever will

[summer roost]

That's seems like a sign that they're hiring for a different sort of role than you've been performing

[dreamy shadow]

No, it's among the generic DS interview questions now. "Tell me about yourself?", Tell me a time when..., TELL ME P-VALUE

Other generic ml questions include: Explain over/under fitting, explain difference between supervised/unsupervised ML models.
A better question would be: "What does an accuracy of 0.99% tell you?" (As this would both require understanding of over fitting AND data imbalance)

Of course my example is still a bit simple, but at least it's a bit layered. Not along the lines of: Give me the definition of a frog.

[summer roost]

Another interview question I like to ask is what the expected time complexity of a lookup in a tree is, versus a hash table. And once they answer that correctly, I ask whether they can think of a time when the one with the worse asymptotic complexity would run faster.

[dreamy shadow]

Those questions are where I'm glad I'm considered a DS and no one asking those questions. Barely recall what I learned about big O notation besides avoiding nested for loops.

[summer roost]

I love asking juniors what 2 languages they're most comfortable in, and then asking them to compare and contrast those two languages.

[dreamy shadow]

SQL and Python. They are nothing a like.

[summer roost]

They don't know I'll ask for comparing and contrasting until after they've named the languages. But I'd go through with it even if they said SQL. They're not totally dissimilar

I'd expect a good candidate to be able to name at least a handful of similarities.

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, sure. Funny enough my recent interview, they asked me to explain my SQL experience. When I reached CTE and Window functions, they were like "people who know this basically know all of SQL at that point"

[summer roost]

I know a guy who hires for web dev positions, who says that his favorite question is "tell me everything that happens after I type 'google.com<enter>' into a URL bar"

[dreamy shadow]

Magic happens and you appear at google.

Interesting question though. Similar to walk me through a DS project.

[summer roost]

That question could literally take up the entirety of a 1 hour interview. If it did, I could virtually guarantee that the candidate would get the job offer

[orchid trench]

I work as a ML Engineer, I hope the former isn't what gets asked a lot. Pure theory wont lead to much if they cant put it into actual problems and explain it.
Generally DS walk through a project as you mentioned and explain what they would do at each stage - including doing those tasks on a dataset given by the interviewer. (I'm just revising through all the theory again currently in plans of a switch in a few months as in some places MLE/DS handle the entire lifecycle)

[dreamy shadow]

How much coding would you say ML Engineer needs? I'm not sure if I really want to transition to MLE or stay DS. Although the cap for MLE should be higher as it falls into SWE?

[orchid trench]

MLE is more of SWE yes, my tasks just mainly involve implementing the feature engineering that DS come up with, in our internal ML platform along with adding support for other enhancements.
I would say a decent grasp of python should be enough, though for inference should ensure computations are performed quickly due to SLA.

At least at my current company, pandas and numpy are extensively used (we use pandas during training and numpy during inference)

[dreamy shadow]

I'm not sure how I feel about getting handed garbage and needing to convert that to working code lol

[orchid trench]

Yeah, have to implement all the steps DS do on their notebook into a platform application. Basically the entire ML Pipeline with various substeps within each of them,

[mortal wedge]

I'm a big fan of "assume I know nothing about X, explain it to me". Because if that's pivotal to the role or they claim to be an expert in it and they can't do that, what's the point?

[dreamy shadow]

I'm not a fan. "Assume I know nothing about Python, explain it to me". Does this mean you don't know anything about programing fundamentals? Should I assume you know what a data type is, a list? Or am I speaking on the level to my grandma? It was as annoying as: "Describe your python skill from 1-10" without giving any indicators what 10 is.

Partly stems from me overthinking, but also assuming makes an ...

Going to head off before I turn even more into a gremlin

[vapid jay]

how do websites count unique users ?

is it by the wifi they are using or by the computer id

[white relic]

Oh, I like that one. Another one I've done is, after asking their favorite programming language, ask them to name something they dislike about it

[ruby terrace]

I don't have a degree and I recently quit school, how likely is it that I can land a tech job now?

[lapis wind]

That depends on where you live

[ruby terrace]

I live in Vietnam

[white relic]

How much education do you have?

[ruby terrace]

What should I do to increase my likelihood of getting hired?

[ruby terrace]

Only first year knowledge

[white relic]

First year of what, more specifically

It probably doesn't really matter tbh, won't count for anything to someone hiring

I don't know about the job environment in Vietnam though

[near ocean]

Why did you quit and can you go back in? Finishing second year in most places at least gets you a certificate

[delicate bane]

some places with more technical DS who can write production-ish-level code, the MLE is doing more MLOps work.

[graceful mason]

Welcome to my TED talk on everything I hate about object-oriented programming

[vague bridge]

where is the talk? Does it worth watching?

[vague bridge]

How do you like MLOps, assuming you are a MLE and SWE.

[delicate bane]

nope. just a DS. this is info ive gathered from the MLOps podcast. highly recommend btw

hi. this is the channel for #career-advice. try #❓｜how-to-get-help

[vapid jay]

hey

how do you type a python code in discord like you have to type some word or like that

[delicate bane]

hi. also not the appropriate channel since it is #career-advice. you can probably get the answer to this in #python-discussion

[dapper steppe]

kk

[summer roost]

I have just under 2 years to learn to code and get job ready. I have no schooling cuz I'm 40 and have been a stay-at-home dad for 13 years to a son with severe autism. I am on my second udemy course (the first was pretty bad but I did learn a lot, second one is a 100-day bootcamp) what are my chances? 3rd course was gonna be javascript
So - not having a degree is less of a problem for an adult than for someone just out of high school. If you can afford the time and money, you may be able to get an associate's degree in computer science from a community college. Failing that, boot camps probably are your best option, and web development is usually the easiest area to break into. Good boot camps often have relationships with businesses that help most graduates get placed into entry level roles, so as you're picking a boot camp out, you'll want to look for that sort of thing.

[dapper steppe]

how long have you been coding?

[summer roost]

20 years, ish

[dapper steppe]

jesus

[summer roost]

I'm only a bit younger than you, but you're not gonna be competing with me for jobs, you'll be competing with 20 year olds.

[dapper steppe]

i been doing it for 6 weeks so far i am only just starting to be able to write code myself but i understand most of it well when i read it off other ppl

yea i mean its a complete switch for me i was a upholster for 10 year then my son was born

i intended to go back to work when he started school but becuz of his disability its made it differcult

upholstery is pretty much dead around where i live in the uk now its so expensive to get stuff redone when you can just buy stuff new so as im on my pc all the time i decided to try out programming

[summer roost]

plenty of people switch careers mid way through life. And if 2 years is your time horizon, that's probably enough time to build up sufficient skills to find someone who will hire you.

[vapid jay]

also to mention u have 10 years a valuable work experience to leverage as well

[dapper steppe]

yea i mean i can just get a shitty job whilst i can continue to build portfolios

that was 13 years ago tho

[summer roost]

one of the concerns that people would have about hiring an 18 year old with no degree is that they've never held a steady job or had a chance to grow up. That's not your story

[dapper steppe]

oic

[summer roost]

which is why I tell fresh college grads to include Starbucks or McDonalds on their resume. They often think it makes them look bad to include only work experience that isn't relevant to the job, but any work experience looks much better than no work experience to an employer.

Given 13 years since your last job, though, you're probably in a position where you would benefit from a cover letter that explains some of your history. Otherwise your CV will leave recruiters with a lot of questions.

[vapid jay]

those that have fast food experience so often diminish the soft skills learned u.u

[summer roost]

yeah. I don't think I've ever worked a harder job than the fast food job I had in high school, honestly. possibly because it's the one I had the least natural aptitude for 😂

[dapper steppe]

as a fresh learner have you any tips to get better at coding, i am doing this 100 day boot camp now which is alot better than the masterclass course i did. i really fucking enjoy coding as well like im getting right in to it but get frustrated with myself not being able to finish stuff atm and getting tiny bits wrong here and there not quite knowing how to fix it

despite googling for a hour on stack over flow and stuff

[summer roost]

that's everyone's experience. It's normal for someone to not be able to come up with a solution themselves, and then to see someone else write out the solution, and for everything to click and make perfect sense. You just get better at that with practice.

The best advice is just to pick out projects that you think are within your skill level, and try building them.

[dapper steppe]

i did 2 today went well but they was too simple i think

[vapid jay]

Yup! I switched careers, and somebody gave me a chance in IT. I learned so much and knew what path I wanted to go down. Now I am learning Python 🙂

[summer roost]

that's not the path I took, so I can't give super concrete advice, but learning a new career at 40 isn't at all a weird story.

[dapper steppe]

i have done 4 projects today one i got totally stuck on krrt helped me sort it out. I didn't know how to do percentages properly then i had syntax errors in this pizza one i did it right but was throwing errors and it was cuz i was trying to add $ signs to the price of stuff

[vapid jay]

ye, a recent flat-mate changed their career at 38. super proud of them too :3

[dapper steppe]

but i did a leap year calculater and bmi calculator by myself did feel good then got stuck on the pizza one and got disheartened

[summer roost]

most of learning to solve problems with programming is just figuring out how to break the problems down into smaller and smaller pieces until you reach a size you can solve. That takes practice and experience.

[dapper steppe]

good on them, its rough

[vapid jay]

ye, it was not easy on them at all but years of doing what need be done gave them the ability to push through again

[dapper steppe]

well tnx for all the advice i will keep it in mind and keep on giving it my all!

[vapid jay]

Hi guys. Do you have any ideas what I can add to my portfolio? I am a junior software developer and would like to demonstrate my skills through a portfolio.

[wet compass]

what project would you recommend for my portfolio?

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, this is what I was thinking. More of a MLOps type deal which I don't really want to do.

[plucky wasp]

hi,i have finished the lessons in Python. I want to advance şn the field of data analysis. How can I improve myself?

[rocky ibex]

Hey, guys I’ve been wanting to learn to code and finally got some time to start. I was wondering what’s the best way to start as a beginner. I kind of have to be self taught as I lack funds for real classes. Can anyone help me out?

Im looking more into automation coding. But obviously start off with the basics

[delicate bane]

vague senior data scientist role here we go. jk.

i really cant speak since idk which direction i want to go in

[hard mauve]

is freelancing really a viable option?

[summer roost]

#career-advice message

[hard mauve]

so then for someone who recently learned how to code sites like upwork and fiverr freelancing isnt worth it thn?

[summer roost]

you would likely make more money working at a fast food restaurant than as a freelancer.

[buoyant seal]

We also started to see 🙈 full snack developers. They do from Frontend and Backend to DevOps at the same time. Probably mobile and desktop too

Although who am I to complain about it (remembered i did same on first job)

Autobiographic picture of me during startup

[edgy brook]

Hello guys
In Germany and switzerland there is no requirements to get accepted to the university as long as you have a high school diploma. So there is no pre-selection which is why many people drop out. I wanted to ask: would it make sense for my case to just focus on computer science/ mathematics and not focus so much on grades during my high school years? or are high school grades still important for getting a job. Can somebody help, maybe somebody who lives in these countries and knows the system? Thanks in advance

[buoyant seal]

Better finding someone from Germany/swiss here to answer it

[summer roost]

we had someone here asking questions about the Swiss system a month or so ago, and not getting many informed answers. I don't think many Swiss or German professionals hang out in this channel.

[delicate bane]

not the full snack developer. your nicknames kill me

[spark cobalt]

If your goal is to make this a career, you should look into going to college. While debt isn't exactly that fun or that great, it'll almost ensure you a good paying job coming out that'll allow you to pay it off quickly.

While you may have the skills, it is a whole nother beast (and in my opinion, a far more complicated and difficult beast than the learning process itself), to do a job search without any sort of relevant experience and no degree.

!resources should have some resources for you to get started.

[inner wren]

Resources

The Resources page on our website contains a list of hand-selected learning resources that we regularly recommend to both beginners and experts.

[rocky ibex]

I will eventually. I’m in college right now. But I wanted to start off on my own

Thank you for your input!

[spark cobalt]

There is a book that's free (and in the resources page) called Automating something something with Python. Should be in line with what you're looking to do.

[rocky ibex]

Great this is Really helpful

[buoyant seal]

Automating the boring stuff

[rocky ibex]

Well, always have to start somehwere

[spark cobalt]

He meant the book title I was referring to

[prisma totem]

How is that book? I just bought it yesterday. I'm a network engineer (primarily cisco) for last 20 years and want to learn python and just joined this discord about 5 min ago.

Guess I should have joined this first and saved me $40 on the book.

[summer roost]

it's a good book.

[vapid jay]

How can i code please anyone teach me

[graceful mason]

Try #python-discussion

[vapid jay]

I asked a question😡

[summer roost]

you asked a question in the wrong channel.

[vapid jay]

Grrrrrr😡

[prisma cove]

hello, pls i need help, am trying connect to a trading async api but i just cant get it to work

does anyone knows how to work with api here

pls any one

[dreamy shadow]

Wrong channel. Try #python-discussion or #1035199133436354600

[prisma cove]

thanks man

[smoky quest]

Hi!
Unfortunately, that is unlikely

[summer roost]

#career-advice message

[peak halo]

Almost certainly not. Your time would be better spent focusing on school and preparing for university.

[smoky quest]

College is absolutely useful.
Being able to get an 80k job without college is not a given either

It's an investment to put in light with your future career opportunities and the fact your salary would be much greater than 80k

How would you be 160k in debt afterwards? Does that include a lamborghini and a house?

I would suggest to look at the actual cost of universities and colleges to get a better sense of what you would get into

Which one? https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/compare/tables/?state=CA

[dreamy shadow]

UC Berkley as out of state student lol

[smoky quest]

And for the sake of the argument, let's make it 200k.
If you make 100k with your first job out of college, that would be paid back rather quickly

[dreamy shadow]

College debt is a thing. But with a decent job you can pay it back AND you will 100% earn more with a degree than without one.

[smoky quest]

Exactly! So that would be the worst combination of all

[dreamy shadow]

Just giving an example of someone I know who did this lol.

[smoky quest]

That would be missing the point

[dreamy shadow]

I really hate this modern "Don't need a degree" BS.

Also, MIT, Ivy League are very selective. Which, depending on your race, will heavily count against you or for you.

[smoky quest]

How do you plan to earn a lot of money without college? I am sure a lot of folks would be interested too!

[summer roost]

student loans also tend to have quite low interest rates. Of all of the types of debt to have, student loans and mortgage loans are the least bad by far.

[dreamy shadow]

Yes, but on average you will earn a lot less. (Surprise, everyone's average)

Student loans are bad, and def is a problem. But doesn't mean you avoid college entirely. Unless you want to do trade school, but that's an entire different topic.

[summer roost]

as an example, even if you did take out $200,000 in student loans, that's much, much less bad than taking out $100,000 in credit card debt.

[smoky quest]

indeed. The system sucks, but we gotta do what we gotta do

[dreamy shadow]

Student loans from what I understand stay after declaring bankruptcy, but a mortgage doesn't.

So I put student loans at the top of "debts that suck massive ..."

[summer roost]

it's true that student loans aren't forgiven by bankruptcy, though it's quite easy to get onto a modified payment plan for student loans, and to get payments temporarily suspended due to hardship.

[smoky quest]

Do you have some experience with any of it?
These are very competitive and low pay

[summer roost]

absolutely not - credit cards are much, much worse. Medical debt is much worse as well.

[dreamy shadow]

And mortgage can be pre-tax dollars.

Medical debt can go away. Same with credit cards, they all go away under bankruptcy.

[smoky quest]

I would not recommend to believe everything you see on tv or youtube. They make a lot more money selling you the dream and the classes

[summer roost]

yes, but most people never declare bankruptcy

[dreamy shadow]

Oh, jk. Mortgages doesn't go away.

[summer roost]

if your mortgage did go away, you'd lose the house too

[dreamy shadow]

Yea, Not by choice anyways.

[summer roost]

no, not at all

the average person never declares bankruptcy in their lifetime

[smoky quest]

That escalated quickly from getting a degree to declaring bankruptcy and loosing your house

fiverr, upwork, etc.

[dreamy shadow]

But yea, back on topic. Not having a degree and making money isn't going to be as easy as you think.

[smoky quest]

it certainly beat being a cashier. But they would be low in the grand scheme of things for CS

[dreamy shadow]

Def lower compensation.

[smoky quest]

They are meant for coding monkeys, not the hard stuff

[dreamy shadow]

I think I had a coworker who used to be a teacher. Def lowest paid.

[smoky quest]

!rule 5

[inner wren]

Rules

5. Do not provide or request help on projects that may break laws, breach terms of services, or are malicious or inappropriate.

[buoyant seal]

That is direct scam

[smoky quest]

It breach terms of services and could end up breaching some laws.

I appreciate your enthusiasm in trying to beat the system, but I fear you lack the knowledge and experience at this time.
You would be better off making sure you can get into college and to sharpen your skills

[buoyant seal]

That is identity theft

[dreamy shadow]

Me who post things on craigstlist and get bot messages back.

[summer roost]

federal student loans for 2022 have an interest rate of 5%. The average credit card's interest rate in 2022 is 16%. Imagine you've got a choice between taking on $100,000 in credit card debt, or $200,000 in student loan debt. Imagine you can afford to pay $1400 per month towards paying off your debt. The total cost to repay the credit card would be $321,802, and the total cost to repay the student loan would be $304,530.

[dreamy shadow]

I think 1400 is a little high

[summer roost]

what do you think is a more reasonable number?

[dreamy shadow]

Out of college, maybe 60k-70k starting salary?

[smoky quest]

100k in the US with a degree

[dreamy shadow]

Out of college, 100k with a degree?

[smoky quest]

yeah

[dreamy shadow]

Uh no, not unless you're in CA

[smoky quest]

In CA the pay would be even more

[dreamy shadow]

Are you talking about strictly CS degree, or any degree.

[summer roost]

My company hires fresh college grads for software engineering roles for $100k in NY and NJ.

[smoky quest]

I am talking about tech jobs with cs degree

[smoky quest]

you could also not go to college and be depressed with minimum wage night shifts

[dreamy shadow]

100k puts you in the top 13%. Def not everyone easily gets 100k right out of college.

[smoky quest]

That's the market rate.
tbh, if a new grad can't get that, then, they are at the bottom of the pile

[summer roost]

the absolute lowest you can go is $1334 per month. That would result in a total cost to pay off the credit card of $765,580, or a total cost to pay off the student loan of $315,409. If you can't afford to pay $1334 per month, you cannot pay off the credit card at all - you never wind up beating the interest rate, so it accrues more debt forever.