career-advice

[harsh river]

you're never going to get programmers to agree on a single standard (unless you force them to) , good luck with that

[fluid fern]

It's hard enough to get 2 people to cooperate to make a product due to different opinions on paradigms etc. Image 10 in the same room babbling

[wispy oriole]

Well we can vote for who will be the lead coder or director?

[fluid fern]

Sounds like a tech lead lol

[spark cobalt]

Suddenly your entire office is political bureaucracy and scrutiny

[ivory sluice]

i don't think a co-op would gauge its success similarly to that of a fortune 500 or typical corporation

[spark cobalt]

Part of companies being successful is to limit cost, employees are a part of the cost (and for tech companies, a huge part).

[wispy oriole]

When i get advanced enough, what do you think of blender assets being my first jobs?

Even if i don't get paid, this is a good way to improve on marketing as i did something useful and get experience with handling products

[fluid fern]

wdym by blender assets

[wispy oriole]

Plugins i meant

[fluid fern]

depends on what job you want

[fiery dragon]

R

[smoky quest]

That's one of the reason why companies give out some equity in the USA.

[halcyon willow]

https://www.udemy.com/course/python-complete/

Is this course a good base for python knowledge? The uni Im going to vaguely said that I needed a “background in python” but also mentioned that I didn’t need to know much

[buoyant seal]

Head First Python book for absolute beginners 🙂 (as long as u compete exercises, and probably will go through Automating the boring stuff too and doing its exercises.. learning how to read code of small programs and how to write on a spot too, that can be what is expected)

[tender jetty]

Hi, I've got a question about a master thesis subject.

For localsearch there arent alot of python libraries and the goal of the thesis is extending a generic python localsearch library with extra functionalities like algorithms, visualizations and benchmarking tools.

Does anyone have opinions on this subject?

[buoyant seal]

sounds like three completely different subjects smashed together.
Library should do one job, and do it well ^_^

for visualizing we have matplotlib https://matplotlib.org/

for profiling there is known lib too inbuilt one https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html

algorithms is too generic word and can encompass anything

[tender jetty]

thanks for responding. The thesis subject comes from the university, but I understand what you are saying.

I feel like the goal is putting multiple things together in 1 library, which can be bad since the library then has multiple purposes

The visualizations and profiling will be for the different solutions the library offers

[buoyant seal]

additional comment:
if u a going to make like algorithms for sorting, graph searching, or even encryptions.
that can be especially bad if u reinvent it all from zero, because such algorithms are usually hard to write for production environment (and student usually don't really make you know any mature solution u can use)
and python has additional complexity due to being bad for CPU sensitive tasks (which such algorithms usually require), and there could be wished C optimization to python library (python library numpy speeds up its working because it is C implemented, but can be used by Python) (plus many inbuilt libs for sorting and data structures are C implemented too)

[tender jetty]

Could I code algorithms in C and then use them in Python like numpy does?

[near ocean]

If numpy does whats stopping you

[buoyant seal]

yup. book Python Expert Programming 4th edition by Packt teaches how to do it.
But my personal opinion... that within frame of student work it could be more awesome doing it in more modern language that would allow to have it in more maintanable way

I don't discourage from using C, but i see personally as hard to use language which can be screwed up pretty easily if u aren't professional (even goto insrtuctions are possible there)

https://poweruser.blog/embedding-python-in-go-338c0399f3d5
it is possible briding python with any C compilable language, like Golang or Rust.
Seeing implementations in Rust could be fun ^_^ it is very low level system language as well but very memory sensetive. Good candidate for such stuff implemented.
Golang can be a good candidate too though

I would say, in this topic Rust is trending for such stuff.

[tender jetty]

Have you ever used localsearch libraries

[buoyant seal]

never heard about them, what do they do

[tender jetty]

the goal of a localsearch library is to find solutions for opimization problems in an efficient way

And the visualization and benchmarking part is to compare the different solutions

[buoyant seal]

sounds like the same thing for which we used Matlab during university

or well, same stuff that python data scientists do in Jypiter to present quickly their usage of Numpy / Matplotlib in a quick article way to others (see examples of works in competions at https://kaggle.com for examples)

[tender jetty]

Alright thanks for the info.

Got any opinions on the following topic:

The thesis goal is to implement different linux drivers of different types in both C and rust. These drivers then need to be compared in performance, implementation difficulty and memory safety. If other differences arise they also need to be quantified and described. The results should be compared with existing metrices when possible.

[buoyant seal]

that reminds me about chapter 20 from Code Complete, as it has many possible characteristics to software specified as well

External characteristics:

• Correctness: The degree to which a system is free from faults in its specification, design, and implementation.
• Usability: The ease with which users can learn and use a system.
• Efficiency: Minimal use of system resources, including memory and execution time.
• Reliability: The ability of a system to perform its required functions under stated conditions whenever required—having a long mean time between failures.
• Integrity: The degree to which a system prevents unauthorized or improper access to its programs and its data. The idea of integrity includes restricting unauthorized user accesses as well as ensuring that data is accessed properly that is, that tables with parallel data are modified in parallel, that date fields contain only valid dates, and so on.
• Adaptability: The extent to which a system can be used, without modification, in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.
• Accuracy: The degree to which a system, as built, is free from error, especially with respect to quantitative outputs. Accuracy differs from correctness; it is a determination of how well a system does the job it’s built for rather than whether it was built correctly.
• Robustness: The degree to which a system continues to function in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental condition

[buoyant seal]

and Internal software characteristics:

• Maintainability The ease with which you can modify a software system to change or add capabilities, improve performance, or correct defects.
• Flexibility The extent to which you can modify a system for uses or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.
• Portability The ease with which you can modify a system to operate in an environment different from that for which it was specifically designed.
• Reusability The extent to which and the ease with which you can use parts of a system in other systems.
• Readability The ease with which you can read and understand the source code of a system, especially at the detailed-statement level.
• Testability The degree to which you can unit-test and system-test a system; the degree to which you can verify that the system meets its requirements.
• Understandability The ease with which you can comprehend a system at both the system-organizational and detailed-statement levels. Understandability has to do with the coherence of the system at a more general level than readability does.

[buoyant seal]

Using Rust, can greatly improve the written software just because modern languages already have better defined all inbuilt libraries for every day usage
configured easily to write testable code with more maintainability
and it all cascades to improvement in other internal characteristics
questions slightly araise how you gonna measure all those attributes though. that is probably the most dfficult part

[tender jetty]

I think the main reason everyone is shifting away from C is the safety

[buoyant seal]

that's too. But i think it is one of reasons, but not all of them

[buoyant seal]

anyway, most difficult part in this thesis will be how you are going to measure those attributes ^_^
Lets say memory safety... in both cases you can write same level memory safe algorithm. Difference is in only in amount of put effort to reach this end result

or how you are going to measure such attribute as readability for example ^_^ or pretty much any other attribute

well, i let room for others to contribute to it then. I am to be honest very far from such low level language usages... the most low level languages for me is Golang ^_^

i remember we have C/C++ expert, he/she can probably contribute better to answer your questions. was it godlygeek probably? (can't find him/her in list of users)

[buoyant seal]

ah, here we go. We summon you, oh the great @summer roost ! To make an input to this acolyte questions. (if you don't mind)

His first question was for this master's thesis: #career-advice message (which we hopefully answered)
and his second is this one #career-advice message which looks like in your domain

[tender jetty]

I would really like his opinion.

[spice delta]

!pastebin

[inner wren]

Pasting large amounts of code

If your code is too long to fit in a codeblock in Discord, you can paste your code here:
https://paste.pythondiscord.com/

After pasting your code, save it by clicking the floppy disk icon in the top right, or by typing ctrl + S. After doing that, the URL should change. Copy the URL and post it here so others can see it.

[coarse spoke]

which book should i read first im not that new but i am a begginer and havent read a book yet

[peak halo]

I do hope those aren't pirated.
You can start with Think Python, and then Fluent Python.
This is the career discussion channel, so please make sure the rest of your messages here are about that.

[coarse spoke]

ok thanks btw they arent they are from my course

[summer roost]

My only thought here is: quantifying performance is (relatively) easy, quantifying memory safety is hard, and quantifying difficulty is practically impossible. You can implement the same thing in 2 languages, and you can say which one you found easier to implement and which you found harder, but that doesn't mean that the language you found more difficult is more difficult in any sort of objective sense. It could just mean that you're less skilled at one language than the other. Likewise, you can count, say, the number of memory safety bugs in a program, but that only tells you something about the quality of the implementation and the skill of the person who builds the implementation. It doesn't tell you anything objective about how memory safe the driver would be if implemented by another person

[tender jetty]

Thats very true, thanks for your opinion

[hearty island]

if you've already been in college for more than 2 years... does that basically mean you've already completed an associates degree?

[peak halo]

it means you've probably done equivalent coursework for some associates degree, but it doesn't mean that you have one.

[hearty island]

i see

[white relic]

I wouldn't even be sure about the first part.
An associates is generally less in depth and might not map well on to the first two years of an "equivalent" bachelor's degree (if such a thing even exists)

It just depends.

[peak halo]

why do you ask @hearty island?

[hearty island]

i was just wondering

[white relic]

If you're looking at job postings, an employer that requires an AS "or equivalent" may well consider the first two years of a BS to meet the criteria.

[hearty island]

yep ^ this is why

[white relic]

Or they might not. Hard to say.

[gusty laurel]

guys im currently 16 what do you guys suggest for me to pursue and how do i make my resume good

[peak halo]

If they didn't, I would wonder what they would consider "equivalent"

[peak halo]

if you want to be a developer, and you're 16, your time would be best spent focusing on doing well in school.

[white relic]

I've not really seen any openings that actually require an AS that I can recall. They aren't common in tech in the US

[peak halo]

I haven't, either

[gusty laurel]

i finished grade 10th, 11th and 12th grade in my country is only focused on subjects physics maths and chemistry. This is the last year i would have time to learn something thats why i want to do all i can

[peak halo]

What country are you in?

[gusty laurel]

India

[peak halo]

Ah. I'm in the US. I can't really give informed advice to people in India.

[gusty laurel]

Noo like what can i do through college to build up my resume, if it works in us it would work in india :p

[peak halo]

what kind of developer do you want to be?

[gusty laurel]

a web developer

[peak halo]

You could make a website and post the source code on github, I suppose.

[gusty laurel]

hmmm sounds like a good idea ill give it a try thank you!

[summer roost]

Years of professional experience, for one thing. Completed BS degree as well. Probably a BA degree as well.

[summer roost]

The education system in India is very different from the one in the US, from everything I've learned about the Indian system. You have different degrees than the US has, and I believe you have a system where the courses that someone takes prior to university limit what degrees are available to them.

[rustic gull]

!resources

[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.

[sleek egret]

yar

[hearty island]

continuing to apply to full time jobs

[sleek egret]

we may sell ourselves into contract bondage

[hearty island]

lmao what

[sleek egret]

frequently, when one company buys another company, the acquiring company wants the "key personnel" of the company being bought to stay on for x years. they thus make the acquisition dependent on that so you have to agree to stay for a while.

[hearty island]

ohh

[sleek egret]

on the plus side, if I stay, I get a bunch of money. so ...

[hearty island]

Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know

[strange frigate]

I’m currently working as data analyst 1 for past 1.8 year i would like to be promoted to data analyst 2 what are things i need to do to accelerate my growth

[peak halo]

You should ask your supervisor.

not all companies have numbered levels for their employees. And for each company that does, the expectations and procedure for going up in level aren't going to be the same.

[hearty island]

is it true that the higher up you go in seniority, the more managerial your role gets? or does that depend on the organization?

[peak halo]

depends on the organization and what "seniority" means in that org.

!mute 890684331083849758 "10 minutes" Please stop shitposting videos in our channels.

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied timeout to @vapid jay until <t:1680984172:f> (10 minutes).

[smoky quest]

It's more focused on the scope/impact, which generally goes through impacting multiple people rather than just yourself. No matter how great you are as a 10X engineer, you can't compete with an entire team

[fluid fern]

Heavily company dependant i assume but from what I've learned in my current company, being a yes man get u the position if u survive long enough

[smoky quest]

being a yes man would not demonstrate the required skills to go up the ladder

You can see an example of expectations on career ladders. Here is CircleCI's career ladder as an example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit#gid=0

[fluid fern]

Which is why i say company dependant, current manager knows jack about CI/CD and our current SA doesn't even understand sql types

Our SA enjoys making everything a varchar, varchar true false, varchar date, varchar integers even

[smoky quest]

That's a great teachable moment. A senior engineer would think about how to upskill their team mates and make the whole org better

[fluid fern]

Firing shots is frowned upon in my company unfortunately, better to just wait it out or you risk being shelved for later projects or fired

I should note that this is a eastern company, work culture is extremely different

[smoky quest]

Sure, things may be different.

That said, there are different ways to bring up and help with that problem.

The tricky part in the IC route is to learn to have influence without necessarily having the power

[fluid fern]

Im sure therethere is a way, but i feel that it's better for me to just hop off the boat to another one

[smoky quest]

oh yeah, I am not passing judgement on your situation nor claiming to know what's best for you.
Just speaking in general terms, assuming a random company

[hearty island]

IC?

[smoky quest]

individual contributor

[fluid fern]

Well, i guess i should have expected it when i signed up to work for a low level hardware company lol

[gaunt wren]

what skills would i need to start in it like entry level no prev anything

im trying to get into it and would like to know where i can start

[vapid jay]

Anyone willing to rate my pitch deck?

[gaunt wren]

i know there is alot of different jobs in it but I eventually want to code

[smoky quest]

If you are in HS or college age, a CS degree will be the path of least resistance and with the most opportunities.

With regards to the curriculum and skills, you could check:

• https://csed.acm.org/cs2023-beta/
• https://roadmap.sh/
• https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

[gaunt wren]

I have family that owns a car software company and after i get ged i can work there but i just want to prepare

[smoky quest]

That's great, but that would still limit your options the day you want to find a job that is not given by a family member

[gaunt wren]

Oh let me rephrase I am going to get a cs degree but i want to work while i do it and get some xp at the same time and want to know what would be the best starting pos for me

[smoky quest]

Oh yeah that changes quite a bit.
Then in the mean time, have fun and learn things. Explore new topics and prioritize for breadth over depth at this stage. It will help you survey what's out there that you didn't know exist and what you like and dislike.
So pick a programming language like python to get started and try things

[gaunt wren]

okay thank you vm

[summer roost]

it's true that more seniority is associated with running projects, organizing and coordinating people, pitching ideas to managers about possible areas to expand into or problems that need solving, etc. It's not true that the only way to become more senior is to begin managing people, but it is true that the more senior you become, the less you'll be head down focused on the work that you've been assigned, and the more you'll be helping to coordinate, design, and drive projects.

[sleek egret]

mostly but not always. some larger orgs have non-managerial "executive" ranks, but that's not the norm.

[sleek egret]

even if you're not officially a "manager", you'll be expected to at least help with selecting and nurturing talent. you'll be asked for your advice and often be given responsibility for some technical decision making

software development, for all but the smallest of systems, is a team sport

did you know that more man-hours were spent building Windows NT than the Hoover Dam?

[summer roost]

Even companies that don't have official roles for non-managerial senior engineers usually have people working in those technical leadership but not people leadership roles. They might call them "tech leads" or "architects" or "subject matter experts" or things like that, even though their job title might still just be "software engineer"

[sleek egret]

and recall that the hoover dam was built in the 1930's. think about that for a bit.

[summer roost]

more seniority does mean more involvement in "running things", but are many more ways to be involved in "running things" beyond the obvious one of becoming a manager and having a team of engineers report to you.

you definitely don't become "more senior" by just doing the same job every day year after year.

[sleek egret]

what if I told you that I did

[celest kite]

Then I'd say you really didn't

xD

[summer roost]

I suppose I'd say that there's only a few possible reasons I can see why that would be the case:

• you picked up new duties, responsibilities, and roles slowly over time, and never noticed that the daily job duties have steadily shifted over the years
• you were performing senior level work from the start, and haven't gained any new seniority but have gained additional recognition
• you are mistaken about having gained seniority

[celest kite]

Many times "moving up corporate ranks" doesn't actually correspond to performing above level. Sometimes it's easier to promote someone to where you (the manager) don't have to deal with them any more over firing them.

I also read a thing once about how mediocre coders can gain seniority because they a) cause a big honkin issue with bad code and then b) are the only ones that can solve the big honkin issue but take longer than if a good coder was working on it. And c) get a lot of attention by management by being the speaker in the checkpoints corresponding to the big honkin issue. And inevitably end up being recognized as a hero for solving the big problem they caused

[summer roost]

I've never really seen any of that, personally. Both of those sound like failures of middle management. Perhaps I've just always been lucky enough to work under decent middle managers

[celest kite]

I'd say pretty lucky. I've run into some terrible ones

[slate bone]

Hi, looking for nice medium or big companies in EU or US that focus on developing micro-services with AWS, FastAPI and K8s. Do you know any that work with those technologies on daily basis and offer good salary?

[smoky quest]

These are pretty common technologies, so yes, a bunch

[slate bone]

Nice, could you share with me on priv some of those that pay most? I found many companies myself, but most of them have FastAPI only for R&D project and it isn't their main focus or they pay too little...

[smoky quest]

That will depend on your location, education, experience, skills, how well you do in interviews...

It's best to look them up on linkedin and indeed

[slate bone]

8 years of experience and I'm looking for DevOps or Cloud Dev role

[summer roost]

What sort of role are you working in now?

[slate bone]

DevOps with AWS, microservies and Flask

There are tons of offers on LIn, but even if they mention new technologies like FastAPI and K8s it is only for R&D or small fracture of projects

What I'm looking is for is company that focus on new technologies on organization level and pays well

I will be working remotely, so location doesn't matter for me

[summer roost]

So... FastAPI has only existed for about 4 years. If a company has always used FastAPI from the start, it's probably a very young company, not a "medium or big company".
So that leaves companies that wrote a lot of stuff using other frameworks up until 4 years ago, then decided to rewrite all of their critical business systems to use FastAPI sometime in the last 4 years. I'm not surprised that there wouldn't be many of those.

[slate bone]

Yeah, it is true. There aren't many companies that were willing to switch because FastAPI compared to Flask doesn't bring much benefits in cloud micro-services environment. Some could argue that async is a thing, but in reality you could do much more with serverless queues and functions that make async redundant

[rose perch]

aws devops gang

[slate bone]

However, I feel like trying some new technologies to simply don't get bored with what I do

[slate bone]

... is coming to town?

[rose perch]

we're gonna precipitate on them. right outta the cloud

[summer roost]

Finding companies who are using FastAPI for new stuff they write shouldn't be tough. Finding companies who have rewritten everything in FastAPI would worry me, though. Throwing away working code for minor improvements isn't a healthy thing for a company to do

[slate bone]

True as well, what bothers me is that companies usually prefer to send most qualified people to support their core business and that almost always means legacy code while new tech is for R&D mostly

Especially in case of FastAPI

However, if there is company that could somehow guarantee they will only give me projects with K8s and FastAPI I'm willing to join asap 😄

[slate bone]

There is a saying that fastest way to migrate to cloud is to burn everything, be aware, what or who will your DevOps burn next?

[summer roost]

If it were your company, wouldn't you want your best developers working on the stuff that makes you the most money?

[slate bone]

Yeah, but if it was my company I wouldn't want them to leave, so I would consider switching tech to better one if it means making them stay with me longer

[rose perch]

I wouldn't want all of my best developers working on the old way of making the most money forever. That means there won't be innovation. You need a bunch of your other best developers doing skunkworks type projects pushing the cutting edge of whatever you do

[slate bone]

It is more expensive to hire new people and introduce them than changing framework

[smoky quest]

This is not an either or situation

[slate bone]

Not really, attracting new competent people is also easier with new tech. You can make people stay longer with your company, but they will still leave at some point

[summer roost]

Sure. But switches like that should be gradual. It's reasonable to treat older libraries as technical debt once something better comes along, but it's not reasonable to drop everything else that you're doing and rewrite things. There's always a balance. Usually that balance falls on the side of keeping the old stuff running until it needs a major change, and then using that as an opportunity to use new libraries, since it needs a lot of changes anyway.

[rose perch]

it's not either or meaning you have to do both.

Having all of the best working on keeping legacy stuff running is wrong.
having all of the best doing experiments is also wrong

[summer roost]

Yep. I think everyone here would agree

[buoyant seal]

What makes for u difference to distinguish fastapi over flask?

[slate bone]

Well, both of you guys have a point here. It is true that everything is about balance. Business is business and I would be hypocrite if I don't agree with you as I usually recommend same approach as you in my projects

[buoyant seal]

Flask + flask library for openapi documentatio + using pydantic = kind of equals FastAPI
No big point to desire fastapi over flask

[slate bone]

However, it doesn't change the fact that I personally want to try new things and FastAPI is one of those technologies that sounds worth trying to me

[slate bone]

Yeah, what you have in FastAPI you could do with Flast + Pydantic + Swagger as well and as I mentioned a few messages above async Python isn't really needed for microservices

[buoyant seal]

Try in pet project 🙂 I can honestly say I fully saturated my fastapi curiosity with single pet project and not really wishing to pursue it further

Whole depth of fast API is kind of small

[summer roost]

I'm sure it's much easier to find companies where some projects are using FastAPI than companies where all projects are.

[slate bone]

Yeah, that's why I asked here. It isn't trivial too find one that would give you any guarantee to work with FastAPI

[true harness]

can't you just search "fastapi" on LinkedIn or something?

[slate bone]

I did my own projects with FastAPI and TortiseORM and it was a lot of fun, you could say it is same as Flask, but making things async isin't as easy as it sounds and requires to change approach a bit. It is like fresh air to man looking for something new

[sleek egret]

seniority is not necessarily "moving up". quite often, it's just outlasting other people, lol

[sleek egret]

personally, I don't like async that much

I think threading gets a bad rap. it's not problematic if you're careful and disciplined about what data gets shared and how

[buoyant seal]

I see the importance of fastapi with its static typing friendliness / pydantic integration / openapi integration
Async I tbh don't like either, because works unstable and breaks Celery (I think python is still not ready for async in general, as it kills access to its library rich ecosystem)

Best to compiment usage of fastapi with mypy

[slate bone]

Of course I did! There are tons of offers here! However, my time is limited and most of those are waste of it. Maybe it is my personal experience, but it seems like HR on LIn are lying a bit in their offers. I know it is to make offers more attractive, but how could you say you use FastAPI when in reality there isn't any project I could join that uses it! I had this kind of situation a few times and I'm sick of it!

[sleek egret]

indeed. the very idea that things need to be "rewritten for async" is very bad, IMO

[slate bone]

You don't need Celery tho, just use SNS and SQS

[true harness]

well yeah, but the issue is that it's difficult to be careful and disciplined

[buoyant seal]

Sqs experience is best when accessed with Celery[SQS] :/

[slate bone]

Is it? SQS could be used to trigger separate Lambda for every item. You just put data in SQS using simple SDK call and you don't have to worry about anything

[rose perch]

the best way to multithread in python is to just launch more instances of your program and have it be stateless. one thread per instance. no threading bullshit

[buoyant seal]

Anyway, celery is just example. Async framework with snowflake unique async engine kills much more libraries from usage

[slate bone]

Well, it is simplified, you probably would want DLQ too, but is is something for Solutions Architect to worry about actually

[slate bone]

It is true that there are many libraries that don't work well or don't have alternatives for async, but for me personally it is great opportunity to write them myself. It is quite boring to only work with existing pieces and I would be happy to create some new libs myself from time to time

It is also one of the reasons why I'm looking for FastAPI projects, because it gives you those opportunities

[buoyant seal]

Regardless, I just see more important direction of my development than going into half broken async ecosystem

I see cooler to go into Golang/Java direction and enjoying static typed code that is easier to read and write further ^_^. Going into place where static typing is not optional

It allows more room to write easier more code without getting confused what is going on 😉

[slate bone]

Go is a thing too, but I would like to take it from infra perspective. Maybe write some providers for Terraform... but it is even harder to find company willing to investing into it than finding one with FastAPI 😄

[buoyant seal]

That is why I learn Java in addition. Static typed too, but has many jobs like python

Plus Linux friendly language too. Has ecosystem support for infra integrations / tools

[slate bone]

Java isn't that great, because most of offers are for legacy sofrware...

[buoyant seal]

It is not like python is not having its own legacy too

[slate bone]

There are project like Knot.x with Kotlin that try to bring mircoservices to Java world, but in reality is is all about supporting monoliths...

[summer roost]

What changes when you outlast them?

[sleek egret]

well, your misery level probably goes up, lol

[summer roost]

Why?

[sleek egret]

would you be happy doing the same shit day after day, year after year, afraid of change and unwilling to take risks?

[summer roost]

What does that have to do with seniority? I don't think I understand what you're trying to say. You say that you can gain seniority by outlasting people. I asked what changes when you outlast them. You said that your misery level increases. Do you use "seniority" to mean "misery"? If not, I totally don't understand what you're trying to say

[sleek egret]

seniority at many places just means you've been there a long time. it does not imply more responsibility, more authority or even more respect

[summer roost]

Then you're just using a different definition than I.

You're referring to definition 1, I'm referring to definition 2.

In any event, when someone asks about "going up in seniority", they clearly aren't just talking about getting older.

They're clearly talking about gaining responsibilities and privileges.

I've only really heard "seniority" being used in the sense you suggest (longer tenure with the same job duties) in the context of union labor, not software development.

[smoky quest]

Changing tech for the sake of it is a waste of time and energy for everyone. That would signal a very junior workforce that do not understand how to upskill themselves or bring value to the table.

However, there is value changing tech for something that do bring some benefits. If a "new tech" is not better than the existing ones, then I would argue that isn't a new tech in the first place

[summer roost]

Seniority can mean "long tenure" or "high rank", I've been assuming we're talking about the latter.

[smoky quest]

Java is actually very modern. Just look for modern companies with modern practices 😉
But yeah, it can be expensive for banks or larger company to migrate and that would be the same regardless of the stack

[slate bone]

You have to try new things, otherwise you will be simply bored with your work and not 100% effective. In my case I want my work to by my passion and this is why I'm considering changing tech even if it doesn't bring any benefits to business

I don't care about my rank as long as they pay good, respect me and are giving me opportunities to improve myself 🙂

[smoky quest]

I would still argue it's not optimal.
A new framework is not where the cool things are. The cool things are in the things built on top of them.

[buoyant seal]

Pet projects are better suited to try small stuff. I would prefer changing job for bigger tool change ^_^

[smoky quest]

Feeling the need to change frameworks to not feel bored would signal something wrong with the job and that a more interesting job may be more appropriate

[buoyant seal]

Although u said u checked with pet project. All right then. If u are sure wishing, then who am I to stop u 😉

[smoky quest]

I would also add that learning fastapi does not make you a better backend engineer than someone using django just because fastapi is newer. That's not how one grow in seniority, experience or skills.

[buoyant seal]

Agreed, u can do similar stuff with flask, or even with Django (whole Django ninja was made to bridge Django with fast API features)

In the end all of it does not matter because code architecture goes above framework. Matters more unit testing / gradual typing / code architecture choices
Or using databases to full capacity / distributing workload horizontally in a good way

[smoky quest]

yeah, it just means you can write a controller in 3 different ways since you know 3 different apis to do the same thing. But you haven't gotten deep in them since you keep changing and missed out on all the fun parts

[slate bone]

Yes, but to make something big of new tech you need company that has money to do so 😄

[slate bone]

You want have experience @ scale with small pet projects...

[slate bone]

If you stopped wanting new stuff it means you stopped improving or stopped careing imho

[slate bone]

I don't really need to grow with "seniority" at this point. I already could handle any project on my own, it is more matter of freedom and preference to pick what I like

[smoky quest]

That's conflating new framework with value

[smoky quest]

The problem with that statement is that it could be interpreted as wanting to be paid to show up and do random things. That is not healthy for a career

[slate bone]

I think you are missing one important factor here, all of those new fancy technologies were created by someone who didn't care about your definition of "career progressions" and was willing to think outside of box.

[smoky quest]

Not really

That's a pretty bold assumption about how frameworks come about

[slate bone]

Is it so? I did read a few books about k8s recently from its authors and it is what they said actually

[smoky quest]

curious to hear more about it if you have a source

[slate bone]

If you want to crate something new you have to take problems from different angle and only way to do this is to try new things

You can't always do same and expect different outcome

[smoky quest]

that's a non sequitur.
How you solve problems and innovate has nothing to do with considerations for the value you create. The core of the discussion here, is wanting to just work on new framework without regard of their value or impact

[slate bone]

Value is relative, there are short term and long term perspectives, but anyway I don't want to argue on it here. I just want to find suitable company that offers both FastAPI and K8s so I could work on those myself and decide if they are really worth of it or not, even if I fail I will at least learn something new

[smoky quest]

sure no problem.
Good luck!

Just avoid the hacker news driven development 😉

[slate bone]

😄

Ahh, I just noticed that I could be misunderstood here. It is not that I completely disregard business value, but I believe currently FastAPI and Flask are quite similar in value, so if I'm given choice I would go for FastAPI that has more to offer out-of-box. I also believe that given enough time async could mature and bring more to the table that it seems, same goes for K8s and other relatively new technologies

I still remember when Docker was still new and people didn't believe it will change anything, we had Chef, Ansible and Puppet, business was happy with it, wasn't it? Now-days it could be considered standard to work with immutable infrastructure and Docker

[smoky quest]

ah totally agree then!

The main thing is to be able to articulate the benefits and trade offs. Bonus point for avoiding the "big rewrites"

[slate bone]

Yeah, this is way I'm looking for company that focuses on those technologies and could guarantee I will work with those

[summer roost]

What sort of influence do you currently have over the technology decisions your current team makes about new projects?

[slate bone]

Well, as DevOps my influence on new projects is quite high, but it is rare opportunity to work on those. Most experienced staff has to support what you already have and there isn't any benefit of rewriting those

[slate bone]

There isn't much room for "big rewrites" and I personally believe it isn't even worth it

but if you ask people if they want to work with k8s and FastAPi they would say "big yes"

I figured out that only way to make it possible is to find company that already decided to make FastAPI its core

[summer roost]

Technology changes tend to be incremental. The next time a new project comes up at your company, advocate for FastAPI if you think it's the better tech

[astral quiver]

someone help me brooo #1094438326162964550 😭

[summer roost]

Is your question somehow related to jobs or careers?

[astral quiver]

im trying to fix some code

[summer roost]

So, no, then?

[astral quiver]

i guess not

[summer roost]

Then this channel isn't the right place to ask for help

[astral quiver]

alr sorry but no one's responding

[smoky quest]

There is still the question of what to do with it when introducing a new technology. The old technology is well known by the other engineers and teams, has a bunch of internal code written against it (libraries, ci/cd, scripts, etc.), people know how to operate it (ex: failure modes, what the exceptions messages mean, etc.). Plus people don't want to end up with as many technologies as there are engineers.
So when proposing a new technology, it's typically expected to have a story for that. Do we migrate it? Do we leave them as is? Do we write new implementations for our libraries for the new stuff? Do we help the release engineers updating their scripts?

[smoky quest]

I understand the frustration, but it's not a reason to spam other channels. You can try again in the appropriate place a bit later, in case the right person has shown up

[slate bone]

I'm already doing that, but realistically it would take another 2 or 3 years and I don't have that much time

[slate bone]

Right, this is why it's hard to propagate new technology in bigger companies, but if you take it from other perspective it also means that companies aren't as flexible and agile as they should be

It has to be a part of bigger goal or/and culture to invest in new tech, otherwise business will wait till last minute or even much longer with migration. It don't blame them, from their perspective it makes sense

[sleek egret]

get yourself on a smaller project that's less dependent on other existing systems and use the tech you want on that smaller project

[summer roost]

it's surprising to me that you have so little influence over technical decisions with 8 years of experience. If you're going to switch jobs, you might get more value out of searching for one where you'll be able to develop influence over technical decisions, rather than looking for one that already happens to be using the technology stack that you would recommend if you had that influence. It would be better for your career in the long term.

[sleek egret]

this will demonstrate that your new shiny toy works and allows you to later argue that the skills/knowledge exists inside the company

[slate bone]

I already did, but small projects don't make money, so I'm looking for company that did same, but @ scale

[slate bone]

Actually, I could select any tech I want for new projects, but those are only secondaries. There are years of development invested in current tech stack for core projects and it isn't going to change for at least a few years

[summer roost]

sure, but that will be the case at any medium to large sized company.

the only companies with no need to support the tech stack chosen by the previous developers will be companies with no previous developers - so, startups, basically.

[slate bone]

It is oversimplified, medium and bigger companies also adapt new tech, but it is simply taking longer and it also depends on culture and products of specific company

[summer roost]

sure, of course they adopt new tech - for new projects. Just like your current company does.

they likely don't throw away working code just because the tech it uses isn't the most in vogue. Companies that throw away working code just to rewrite it in a more fashionable tech stack don't survive to become medium to large businesses.

[slate bone]

Well, my current company is in fintech sector, so due to many outside requirements it has to take longer, but I expect there should be some companies out of there that finished this process or are close to that. K8s and FastAPI aren't technologies that popped out yesterday, there was plenty of time to adapt it and there are companies that did it

[slate bone]

It is true, but on the other hand companies that are too late are eaten by those that adapted in time

[rose perch]

Give me FastAPI and K8s or give me death
-Moroon probably

jk lol

[slate bone]

Yeah, exactly 😄

[summer roost]

of course. Often the way this works out in practice is that old systems are maintained using the languages and stack they were written in until it's no longer practical to maintain them at all - the costs have grown too high, or enough needs to be rewritten to support some new feature that it's barely more expensive to rewrite it entirely - and that's the point at which there's a jump to a new tech stack.

[sleek egret]

"if it's ain't broke, don't fix it" is a prudent and wise principle

[smoky quest]

There are some strong assumptions baked into that statement.

I would refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm#/media/File:Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png in terms of generalization of adoption

[summer roost]

My company is in the fintech sector. We definitely use K8s. I'm sure there's some projects that use FastAPI as well. 🤷‍♂️

[sleek egret]

it's highly highly unlikely that the choice of web app frameworks will have a material impact on a financial company's performance

[sleek egret]

do you think the company would "fall behind" competitors if you guys used flask instead?

[slate bone]

I agree, this is way I don't see any option to push for those kind of drastic changes in my current company, they simply aren't ready for it. It isn't about my influence, but about what makes money

[slate bone]

It is good to hear, give me their contact then 😄

[sleek egret]

if you guys were creating an app who's purpose was to provide a REST API, use of FastAPI might make sense

[summer roost]

no, I don't think using FastAPI rather than Flask conveys any competitive advantage. I think the other way around, honestly - using Flask is probably more advantageous than FastAPI, as there are more developers that know it, and so it's easier for new hires to hit the ground running. But I think the difference is small, in any event.

[sleek egret]

requirements should drive technology choices, not the other way around 🙂

[sleek egret]

exactly. if I had my druthers, I'd use a different language than python at my company. but it's what available talent knows, so it's what we use. <shrug>

[smoky quest]

you could argue the maintenance, documentation, questions in stackoverflow and availability of something battle tested could have an influence in its TCO. That goes both way for very early adopter or laggard

[summer roost]

yep, definitely.

[slate bone]

I believe difference is small currently, but going forward FastAPI makes you expect more while flask is already at its peak

[summer roost]

I see no reason to believe that, but I also see no reason why switching in the future would be more expensive than switching now, so even if true, that's not an argument in favor of early adoption.

[sleek egret]

IME, writing code to for async is slower and requires more highly trained staff than for non-async

[slate bone]

It is true, but business requirements aren't only thing to consider. Otherwise we would be still deploying projects using bash 😄

[slate bone]

Actually, it isn't that much harder, at least not using FastAPI

[sleek egret]

Long story short though, if you want to be in a position to make these sort of choices, you should learn to play the political/management/business game so you can move into executive leadership roles. Then you can dictate, "you will all use X, Y and Z". Then your staff can complain about your choices in online chats 🙂

[summer roost]

sure, but we build systems in Python rather than bash because it lets us deliver value to the business faster.

[slate bone]

Yeah, but I don't have energy for it, so I'm looking for place where someone already did it

[sleek egret]

what happens when they change their minds?

[smoky quest]

It's not even playing games. It just being able to articulate why they should invest in X

[slate bone]

I mean, if we talk about politics there are companies that sill use technologies that are 10 or 20 years old and are fine with it

[sleek egret]

I meant it in the "game of thrones" way, not "silly games people play" way

[sleek egret]

lol, 10 to 20 years is not old. I've worked at companies to migrate systems built in the 1970's

that were still working fine. but they had to migrate because if it broke, they'd be screwed. so it was a risk mitigation effort.

[slate bone]

10 years is already old in IT I believe, I wouldn't want to work with technology written in 1970 even if they paid double

[summer roost]

Python's 30 years old.

[smoky quest]

and Linux

[slate bone]

There are multiple versions of Python and many features introduced over time

[summer roost]

same for Fortran.

[slate bone]

It isn't technology that was developed 30 years ago and forgotten...

[sleek egret]

don't take this the wrong way... but contrary to what many young people believe, the software technology world moves at a glacially slow pace. most of the tech in use now was invented 30+ years ago. the tools used today are only marginally different from the tools I used when starting out in late 1980's

[summer roost]

neither are the systems that rmah is talking about. They'd have been actively developed for the last 50 years.

[slate bone]

Ok, then maybe I misunderstood

[sleek egret]

you mean technology like OOP (40 years old) and GUI's (40 years old)? functional programming (50 years old)? asyncio (50 years old)? AI/neural networks (50 years old)?

IDE's? application frameworks? I used them in the early 90's.

are the ones we have today better? sure, in lots of ways. it took decades for these things to enter the mainstream

[slate bone]

It is like comparing Twisted to FastAPI, botb are asnyc Python, but there is huge difference between features they use

Especially writing async functions is much simpler

[summer roost]

Both are concurrent applications with coroutines running on an event loop, not fundamentally different from libuv in C, for instance.

[sleek egret]

I wrote a shit ton of async code in the early 1990's. it was hell. and everyone wanted "real threading".

[slate bone]

Linux is old, but there are many distributions with different update cycles

[sleek egret]

then we got threading... and a decade later, everyone wanted async. lol

[summer roost]

and yet, parts of that kernel are 30 years old, and have never been redesigned, because they work.

the kernel is still written in C, because it would be wasteful to throw away a ton of working code.

[slate bone]

Yeah, but if we talk about value it is much easier and faster to develop something in "new" async

[sleek egret]

not IMO

[summer roost]

sure. But that's sugar and polish.

[sleek egret]

tools today are much more polished and much MUCH more customizable. which I love.

[summer roost]

the underlying technology is basically the same, we've just made it more accessible.

[sleek egret]

of course, everything is also 1000x slower too. oh well, can't have everything, lol

[slate bone]

We can always write it in Assembler if its too slow 😄

[summer roost]

sure. Everything is tradeoffs.

the maintenance costs of something written in assembly are much higher than something written in Python, but the performance is much better. For some things, that tradeoff might make sense, and for most things it doesn't

[slate bone]

You could say that about any tech, you could say Kotlin is same as Java, but more accessible or Python is same as C...

We could also say that K8s isn't anything new, it was written on top of Docker

[summer roost]

Isn't one of the major selling points of Kotlin that it retains access to all of the JVM libraries that existed for Java?

[slate bone]

It is just how technology progresses, you use old things to make new ones

Just another layer of abstraction that extends or replaces previous ones and makes them closer to KISS principle

[smoky quest]

As much as I like k8s, I wouldn't say it's getting closer to KISS

I have heard good things about nomad though

[slate bone]

It is, making everything follow same rules it what makes k8s follow KISS.

labels and annotations are good examples of that, there aren't any technologies that are as good as k8s at utilizing them

[summer roost]

🤷‍♂️ We've digressed. The point is, when companies make decisions about technology, they weigh lots of factors. Rushing to adopt a new thing has some costs (what if it's difficult to train people on it, what if it fails to scale under load, what happens if that new technology turns out to be a dead end, or its maintainers cease to support it, or...), and some benefits (appeals to developers who want to be on the bleeding edge, provides a better development experience, whatever). Often, that cost-benefit analysis will land on the side of neither being an early adopter nor a late adopter of some new technology, but instead adopting it at around the same time as everyone else.

[slate bone]

There is only one provider for each type of object, higher level of abstractions like deployment has to reuse existing code, thanks to that you have a lot of options to adjust your cluster without recreating any resources

[slate bone]

I totally agree, it also depend on specific needs of organization and their budget for innovations. I'm not gonna argue on that part, I believe we are on the same page

However, better question would be whatever it is good time to switch to k8s and FastAPI - imho yes and I'm looking for jobs that involve those two, if you have any let me know

[sleek egret]

good luck on your search!

[summer roost]

we don't advertise jobs in this channel, or on this server, for what it's worth.

we can give career advice, but if you want jobs, you need to search job boards.

[sleek egret]

maybe a jobs channel would be appropriate

[slate bone]

Is there any?

[summer roost]

it's a deliberate choice to not have one. We don't want to be in a position of amplifying scams, nor of needing to identify and moderate them.

[slate bone]

I understand, but I think it shouldn't be against the rules to let me know on priv if someone want too

[summer roost]

it's not, in so far as our rules don't really apply to DMs at all, only to things that happen on the server.

but of course, if you get scammed, that's not on us.

[sleek egret]

fair enough

[slate bone]

I already did, but the more the merrier. I believe asking on channels with tech people has more value

[summer roost]

and also, job ads are (mostly) location-specific, "Python jobs" aren't really a thing so much as "software developer" jobs are, etc. Ultimately, there's just better places to look.

[slate bone]

Sure thing, if they scammed me to work with FastAPI and K8s I wouldn't really mind 😛

[summer roost]

that's... not how scams work. You'd be more likely to be scammed into giving your bank account details to a fake company that withdraws money from your account instead of depositing, or something like that.

[slate bone]

It was a joke...

[sleek egret]

I saw that job offer scams are on the rise

[summer roost]

a few people in this channel have reported scams or potential scams...

[slate bone]

There isn't anyone better to ask than people who actually work with those technologies and know specific companies internally. HR would always tell you that everything is as green as grass

[sleek egret]

our grass is currently still yellow

[slate bone]

Chances are I will find one or not, but still even just discussing with you guys is way more beneficial than talking with HR 😄

[summer roost]

sites like glassdoor can give you a more accurate picture.

[slate bone]

Awww, so they lied to me?

[summer roost]

Teamblind as well. Though both tend to amplify the people who are either most happy or most unhappy. Neither necessarily gives you a good view into how the average developer feels.

[slate bone]

Not necessary, people who write interviews are usually only ones with bad experiences or paid actors to make company look better

It could give some insights tho, especially in case of very bad companies, but too little to make good decision for better ones I think

[smoky quest]

there is also a huge variance depending on which team you are in

[summer roost]

You'll find that people who are willing to talk about companies they've worked at with strangers online are mostly the ones who have a strong opinion, good or bad. That'll be the same for Glassdoor or Blind or Discord.

[slate bone]

Yeah, large companies have a lot of teams and projects, so unless you know someone who works there you won't get whole picture about current situation

[sleek egret]

indeed. consider this: goldman sachs employs something around 10,000 developers. they are probably working on 1000+ projects simultaneously

[summer roost]

even if you know someone who works there, they probably don't work on the particular team you'd be joining.

[slate bone]

It is still better that forums online...

[summer roost]

I'm not convinced that's true, but - well, all we can do is make our own judgments about how to weigh various pieces of imperfect information.

[slate bone]

In the end we have to combine all options from different sources and create our own

Ideally it would be best to have a few people from one company to talk with, but it usually to much to ask

[summer roost]

I can tell you that, even within companies that I've worked at, I know of departments that I would gladly work in and departments that I'd never work in, and it won't be obvious to a job applicant which department a particular job ad is for.

[slate bone]

I had similar experiences, but there is always bottom line, even knowing only about best and worst could be useful to find average

[summer roost]

Even if someone knows the company well, and they're inclined to accurately pass on all of their knowledge, they still might not be much use to a job seeker

[slate bone]

And yeah, I always check other offers from same company to find more about who they hire and why

[slate bone]

If someone asked me I wouldn't have any reason to lie actually, but there are different people, so yeah, it is nice to know more, but own research is first after all

[sleek egret]

when I worked at this one media conglomerate, they powers that be seated the team developing a new system (all younger guys) next to the team maintaining the system being replaced (all older guys). needless to say, there were... tensions.

[summer roost]

I'm not saying I'd lie, but if I wanted someone to join my company, I probably wouldn't be telling them the horror stories of the bad teams I've seen. And if I'm currently unhappy at some company and thinking about moving on, I'd probably not be telling them about the good teams, for that matter. People's answers will depend on how they're feeling about the company, which won't necessarily tell you about how things would be outside of their immediate team. Maybe I'm stressed because 2 team members quit in the last year and I don't feel that middle management has put enough effort into replacing them and giving my team the resources we need to be less overworked, for instance. That would be a very reasonable thing to feel, and to tell someone who's thinking about applying - but it might also have no applicability beyond my immediate team, or maybe the set of team leads who report up to the same middle manager..

large companies have lots of engineers, by definition, and expecting that people's experiences within the company will be relatively similar is naive. You could sample 100 developers at a large company and wind up being given different pros and cons from every one of them.

lots of engineers means lots of managers, and even if a company tries to guarantee some level of uniformity across groups, in practice that's hard to guarantee, and lots of individual developers' experiences will be driven by the small set of people they work most closely with.

to that end, conversations with/reviews by current or former employees are probably most useful if you can read a lot of them, and start to notice any aggregate themes. If one person complains about something, that tells you something very different than if dozens of people complain about that same thing.

[slate bone]

Every opinion has to be, well... opinionated. No matter where and who we ask, but if you get even one more opinion that it is available on internet it is still better than not getting it

Talking over discord has additional benefit, you could always ask your own questions that probably won't be ever answered if you ask them on forums

[smoky quest]

it depends. If you get an opinion that is irrelevant, you may draw conclusions about the whole company while being completely wrong

you could assess it as an irrelevant opinion, but then you would be back to square one

(and how would you assess it as such in the first place?)

[slate bone]

There aren't any irrelevant opnions, even if you don't learn any facts you will at least know how other person feels about company

[smoky quest]

the relevancy is about how much it is relevant to your opinion or decision about that company

[slate bone]

If company can't handle their own employees with care and respect and makes them angry it makes me doubt if it really good company

[smoky quest]

that doesn't really mean anything in any company with more than 20 employees

that's also baking another specific situation into the discussion. Opinions aren't necessarily that extreme

[summer roost]

as I said above, the people most likely to share opinions about their company with strangers online will be (almost by definition!) vocal minorities. And vocal minorities sometimes amplify absurd beliefs or grievances not held by the majority (the earth is flat, or birds aren't real, or ...)

[slate bone]

credibility has to be taken into account of course, but still even if there was a person who told me only obvious lies I wouldn't say his opinion was completely irrelevant

[summer roost]

even in an information theoretic sense, you don't gain much data by only factoring in the statements of people known to be outliers.

[smoky quest]

what if they said straight truth but the people involved there don't work there anymore?
Or what if it's in a completely different country? Or department?
Or what if they were biased and only had their side of the story?

The problem with these hypothetical situations is we can construct any situation that fit the answer we want to give

[slate bone]

I could be one to work with person who believes that earth is flat and wouldn't want it so it would be actually quite nice to know it beforehand 😄

[harsh river]

i've noticed that there's been a trend in scammers that have you do the work for them but not pay for it (not here ofc, but in general)

[slate bone]

It is same for any question you ask people that is related to their feelings and personal experiences actually

[slate bone]

You work for those sweet SHARES that will be paid to you later... maybe...

[smoky quest]

right. That's why you have to take into account how relevant it is to you

[summer roost]

sure, but those were just examples. The types of misinformation or disinformation or truly held but incorrect beliefs that you encounter from strangers bitching about their jobs online won't be nearly so obvious. And you'll have no basis for evaluating whether their grievances are valid and relevant to you.

[harsh river]

i've noticed some that even go as far as paying you for initial work and then for the rest of it, zip, zilch, nada

[slate bone]

Yeah, but more sources I have the better

[smoky quest]

I don't think anyone was disputing that

[slate bone]

There is a difference between asking for information and believing it. It is usually quite easy to spot people who are too focused on bad or good aspects of specific company, so we have to take their opinions with grain of salt

[summer roost]

I don't think anyone was disputing that
just that, ultimately, you have to decide how to weigh the various pieces of data that you collect, and you won't have much of a basis for assigning reasonable weights.

[slate bone]

BUT it doesn't make them completely irrevelant, they are still useful

[summer roost]

I'm not sure that's true. And taking my example above - say, a single bad middle manager, where maybe 50 people out of a company with 10,000 engineers are affected by their decisions - I don't think you have sufficient information to weigh even a legitimate beef aired by someone.

[slate bone]

If they paid you at all you were lucky

[harsh river]

i don't think this is an appropiate channel to talk about this but scammers do increase their sosphistication

[smoky quest]

cryptocurrencies aren't a topic to be discussed here

[harsh river]

[summer roost]

that is, maybe everything they're saying is perfectly accurate, and gives a very good reason why you wouldn't want to be one of those 50 people reporting to that middle manager, but that gives you little to no information about what it would be like to be one of the other 9950 engineers at the company. And, worse, you run the risk of over-weighting that negative report, because you have no visibility into how broad the scope of the dysfunction that the person is correctly reporting to you goes.

[slate bone]

It is tradeoff as in everything, even if it turns out that I was wrong about a few of companies that I investigated because of opinions of others I won't lose much really. There are so many other companies to try

I mean, even if I'm wrong I still saved time and energy to check every company myself

[summer roost]

Sure. And I'm not saying to just throw your hands up and give up, just that, ultimately, there will be a lot that an outsider cannot possibly see, in any company of sufficient size, so no matter how much data you collect, you'll have to live with the fact that you're making a decision based off information gleaned from too small of a sample populated almost entirely by outliers to one extreme or the other.

[smoky quest]

you are right in pointing out there is a cost to join a bad company as well as a cost to be wrong and miss on a great company

[harsh river]

i don't think i mentioned cryptocurrencies did i?

[slate bone]

You sound like you are working for company that has some problems you mentioned, with company image and defectors or is it my imagination?

[slate bone]

It was joke I believe, because you mentioned "increase their sosphistication"

[summer roost]

I'm quite happy with my company. We've got thousands of engineers, though, and I'm sure the number that are unhappy is in the hundreds at any given time, for any number of reasons. You'll rarely find a company where >90% of people will self-report that they're currently happy in their job.

[smoky quest]

yeah, you mentioned scammers. That's the joke 😉

but if you have to explain the joke, it means it's not a funny one

[summer roost]

it took me a second read to get it. Would've probably been more obvious in person than in text. 🙂

[smoky quest]

and tbh, given a number of engineers, you will expect a certain level of attrition.

[harsh river]

are you saying crypto is a scam?||~~ cuz if so i suppose i should be taking offense since i made a decent chunk off (crypto) money of it but i dont care since time for partay~~||

[harsh river]

||that statitic will increase to >90% if you hold a gun to their head||

[summer roost]

in any event, the point I'm making isn't "don't bother trying to collect data at all", it's "accept that the data you collect is likely to be badly biased, and try to make what use of it you can anyway." Trying to notice major trends and red flags that are consistent across several different people's reviews is one way to draw inferences about what the culture might be like in a company from a collection of random anecdotes given by randomly selected highly opinionated people.

If one person says "management changes their mind and cancels projects on a whim", that's not super informative, but if you see 10 or 20 glassdoor reviews that say the same thing, maybe spread across several years, that probably tells you a lot.

[slate bone]

I was once invited this year to recruitment that included five, yes, FIVE meetings lasting for at least 1 hour each, they also required you to take blood tests and get psycho diagnosis. I gave up after first meeting... it was simply too much trouble to make it worth my time

[harsh river]

sounds like mil contractors

[smoky quest]

I know people who declined an offer from whatsapp (prior to acquisition)

[summer roost]

that was my first thought as well. The "psych diagnosis" part in particular sounds like it would likely be illegal in the US, unless it was for a job that required clearance

[harsh river]

that's tricky, since i think employers can require mental health or "psych" evals and be perfectly legal, but for most jobs they can't discriminate based on that result

[summer roost]

sure, but I'm betting that a lawyer wouldn't need to be Johnnie Cochran to argue that there's no reason why they'd be performing mental health evals as part of the hiring process unless they planned to use those as a factor in the hiring decision.

[smoky quest]

this is very uncommon in tech companies in the USA

[slate bone]

I agree, but it doesn't contradict my point here that is good to ask on Discord to have more opinions to work with

[harsh river]

i was speaking in general (for the usa) but i do agree it's uncommon for tech jobs in the USA

[summer roost]

personality tests happen a bit for US tech jobs, but that's quite different than screening for mental illnesses would be.

[harsh river]

when i was looking into EMT work they required psych eval, at least in my county*

[harsh river]

for EMT, i was required a full psych eval by a licensed psychologist (in my county, but most other counties didn't)

[slate bone]

I didn't even care if it legal or not, but it told me that company is very inflexible and as DevOps I wouldn't want to work in such environment

[summer roost]

that's a fair takeaway - but also, if it is illegal, that tells you a lot about the company, too.

[slate bone]

I mean, if they can't make 5 meetings in to one or two how should I expect them to allow me to improve their processes for their projects?

In fact, it was so abstract to me that I didn't even bother to ask where their company is located, it could be perfectly legal for them to require those tests, especially for some government or fintech projects

[summer roost]

oh, the number of meetings doesn't sound unreasonable to me. That's about what I'd think of as average. I know some companies with fewer rounds, but I think my company's process adds up to about 5 hours for a successful applicant.

• 30 minute initial technical screen
• <30 minute chat with HR to schedule a full interview (and decide which teams to interview you for, based on your background and skills)
• 1 hour with a pair of senior engineers
• 1 hour with a different pair of senior engineers
• 1 hour with an engineering manager
• final 30 minute wrap-up with HR

[smoky quest]

4-5 interviews is the norm in the USA

[slate bone]

Maybe I was lucky or jumped some loopholes then, but I usually had only two

[smoky quest]

tbh, I would be worried if I only had 2 interviews. That may be a sign of weak coworkers

[slate bone]

Not really, the still did all of things mentioned, they simply didn't split it into 5 meetings

[smoky quest]

you cannot physically fit all of it in 2h

[slate bone]

2x2h *

[summer roost]

wait, so that's the same amount of time, and the only difference is how it's broken up, and which people are in the room when?

[smoky quest]

okay. That makes more sense, even though 2h session is brutal

[slate bone]

Yeah, maybe a bit shorter

Mainly because you could skip initial interviews with good CV and chat over LIn

[summer roost]

I'm looking at the steps in the hiring pipeline I laid out above, and I have no idea how you could possibly condense that down to just two 2 hour meetings without losing some important stuff. Do they interview every applicant without filtering any out for lack of skills before wasting senior engineers time? Do they not have the candidate chat with HR in advance to figure out which teams might be the best fit for their skills? Do they not give the candidate a chance for a conversation with a manager? Or not give a chance for a conversation with HR after the interview is finished?

[summer roost]

I can't imagine how you could skip those steps. People lie on resumes. People apply to tech jobs to work as software developers and cannot write a hello world.

I can see how you can replace some of that "manual" screening with something more automated, but I can't see how you could drop the screening and not wind up totally overwhelmed by terrible applicants.

[slate bone]

It isn't that hard to check if someone is lying and if their account is fake

and if they are really good and lying they will pass initial interviews with HR too, those only a few simple questions after all

[summer roost]

it's next to impossible without actually talking to them and seeing them write code. They can easily just have someone who does know how to code helping them write their resume or helping them fill out tests

[summer roost]

my company's initial screening would be done by a software developer, not by HR. It doesn't seem like something that HR ought to be responsible for, nor that they could do well.

[slate bone]

I guess they believed I won't do that 😄

[summer roost]

I can see skipping that screening step if they had a strong referral, or something like that. Like if you had a friend working there who vouched for you. I can't see skipping it for every rando who applies, though. Unless they just don't get many applicants.

[slate bone]

Idk, but DevOps world is small, so that could be the case

[summer roost]

perhaps. I've never worked in or hired for any sort of ops role, so it could also be that my intuition of what hiring practices would be normal for software engineers are off for dev ops

[smoky quest]

people are trying to lie and cheat in all sorts of ways

[smoky quest]

They are generally the same

[slate bone]

If you remove initial screening and remove second pair of senior engineers, then you could easily make it into 2x2h

[summer roost]

how? Having the engineering manager and HR in the room at the same time? That sounds very odd, given that they'd want to talk about entirely different stuff

[slate bone]

I understand talking with engineers, hr and management separately, but having second pair of engineers come means that company doesn't really trust its own employees... it doesn't feel right to me

[smoky quest]

the em and hr aren't necessarily conducting technical interviews either. They have different goals and objectives

[smoky quest]

they are assessing different set of skills

[slate bone]

So you need 4 people to test skills of one? 😄

[smoky quest]

you need 4 people to assess like 6-8 skills of one person

[slate bone]

Why not? HR could talk to you, then leave you with technical people and came back later

[summer roost]

why not just have 2 back-to-back meetings at that point, then?

[slate bone]

I also prefer remote interviews, so it is even easier

[summer roost]

if they need a different audience/attendees, I'd expect different meetings

[summer roost]

but having second pair of engineers come means that company doesn't really trust its own employees
It's practically the opposite, actually: it gives candidates a second chance. Lots of candidates are so nervous that they perform really poorly at the start of an interview, but when given a chance to settle in and answer some questions, they start to perform much better. It tells something very interesting if the first pair of employees says "they did poorly on several questions", and the second pair says "they did very well". Just changing out the interviewers mid-way through gives candidates a reset, and a chance to get out of their own head about any questions they may have answered poorly and a fresh chance to build a rapport with people who didn't hear their first answers.

[slate bone]

Ok, in this case it makes sense

[slate bone]

So one person has only 2 skills while new recruit has 8?

[summer roost]

the point that recursive was making wasn't about how many skills the interviewer has, but about how little you can glean about a candidate's skills in only 2 hours, if I understood them correctly

[slate bone]

Tbh, when I have choice I always opt for less interviews if possible, even if it means I get less time or fewer chances

[summer roost]

interviewing is hard, and 2 hours is not much time.

[slate bone]

It is, you usually have 2-3 min per question at most

[spark cobalt]

Remote interviews and less interviews give you less of a chance to understand the position, the work environment and culture, and to understand if that's a role you'd be interested in compared to other offers on the table. Setting yourself up to make a less educated choice.

[summer roost]

that sounds incredibly weird. I'd expect any question that involves writing code to take at bare minimum 10 minutes, and usually more like 20.

[spark cobalt]

Questions like to tangent into new topics 🙂

[summer roost]

I know one person whose favorite interview technique is to ask exactly one question, and try to fill the entire hour with the answer and tangents off the answer.

[slate bone]

Not really, you just need to be prepared beforehand and ask right questions. It doesn't bring you much value if you do starring conquest with HR for half a hour longer or shorter

And you always have a chance to ask additional questions later or organize additional meeting if you need one

[summer roost]

my experience having conducted interviews is that it's basically impossible to ask a candidate to implement solutions to more than 3 algorithms questions in a 1 hour interview.

especially if you're trying to leave 5 or 10 minutes at the end for the candidate to interview the interviewers, as is customary

[smoky quest]

What do you mean?

[slate bone]

8 / 4 = 2

[smoky quest]

I still don't follow

[summer roost]

they're implying that, if it takes 4 people to evaluate 8 of a candidate's skills, that means each person would be checking for exactly 2 of the 8 total skills the company wants to evaluate

[slate bone]

In my experience there is at most one question about algorithms and one short code example if any, everything else is about principles, architecture, good practices, understanding different concepts and technologies and so on. Perhaps interviews for cloud engineers and devopses are simply different than regular ones

However, it doesn't mean questions are simple, if you don't experience you won't be able to answer any

[summer roost]

perhaps the types of questions are different. But even granting that, 120 minutes to learn about the candidate's proficiency with 8 different topics only leaves 15 minutes per topic. Even if questions take 2 minutes on average, that means that there would be time for less than 8 questions per topic. Even if those questions are things like "what is a RESTful service", "how is Flask different from FastAPI, and how is it similar", etc - I would think it's pretty tough to figure out how much someone knows about, say, writing RESTful services in Python using only 7 questions.

[smoky quest]

Sure. That's tautological

[slate bone]

I was never asked those questions actually, I believe those are too obvious and too time consuming to be asked

[summer roost]

I'll just leave it at this: I suspect anyone who thinks that 2 hours is plenty of time to get an accurate read on a candidate's skills and weaknesses has probably only ever been a candidate, and never been an interviewer.

[slate bone]

It's all about asking precise questions that could be answered fast

[summer roost]

Pretty much every interview I've ever conducted, I left with several more questions I would have loved to have asked and didn't have time for.

[smoky quest]

yeah, to add to what @summer roost is saying, I would suggest to check out a book about leadership/management.
https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Teams-Strategies-Successful-Organizations/dp/149195227X is a good intro to the topic

It will help see the pov from the other side.

[slate bone]

If you didn't asked what you wanted you either didn't prepare well or didn't manage time well

[summer roost]

You can't see any other possibilities than those 2?

[slate bone]

What are other ones then?

[summer roost]

A third, glaringly obvious one is that I wanted to ask about more topics than the candidate could answer questions about in an hour

[slate bone]

It could be the case that something unexpected happened, but if we talk in general then I think those two are most likely

[smoky quest]

Every candidate is different with their own story. They have one or more applicable story.
Diving into specific question/experience/story takes time and is a lot more than a yes/no answer. That takes time.
It's also compounded by their verbosity as well

[summer roost]

Right. Things change throughout the interview. Based on the answers they gave to my earlier questions, I'll have noticed things that they seem not to understand, or things where they seem to have a surprising level of expertise that I wasn't anticipating, and I'd want to dig into those, but might not have time.

[slate bone]

Even if you dig into their additional expertise, if they don't have knowledge required for specific role it won't change much, or will it?

[summer roost]

It absolutely could.

[slate bone]

It is true, everyone has different background and own story, but if we talk about tech interviews then main focus should be on checking knowledge

[smoky quest]

The main focus is on assessing demonstrated skills. Based on that, a decision will be made.
The skills assessed should be the same across the candidates. And there should be an understanding of which skills can be trained for VS required for the job

[slate bone]

I would rather work with a team that doesn't have any impressive stories to tell, but knows exactly what to do than opposite

[smoky quest]

The assessment is not a succession of multiple choice questions or yes/no. They can be a lot more interesting like designing together an architecture for a specific problem. That is not answered in a few minutes

[summer roost]

Hiring isn't just a set of checkboxes to tick off. You're trying to determine the person who is most likely to succeed in some role. That could easily be someone who doesn't currently have every skill that the role requires, but has some that the team is weak in that they can help to spread knowledge of.

[slate bone]

Ok, if you are talking about skills that are nice-to-have then it sounds right

[smoky quest]

It's a set of skills. Sometimes, a manager will be willing to trade some weaknesses for specific strength or promise

[slate bone]

Don't take me wrong, you don't have to answer every question, but you have to answer most of them to have some baseline to work with

[summer roost]

Every individual skill is nice-to-have.

[spark cobalt]

It's more than just what you can provide now, but in 5 years as well.

[smoky quest]

maybe not that far in the future, but yes

[spark cobalt]

It's fun to work in an environment where everyone's learning everyday and growing everyday.

[slate bone]

In 5 years you should be in other company or even next one

[spark cobalt]

I don't think anyones hiring with the mindset that you should be gone in 5 years

[slate bone]

but it is reality, spending 5 years in one company is stagnation for IT-related roles

[spark cobalt]

I mean I have and prefer a different approach, if you're happy with how you approach it then that's great

[summer roost]

I suspect you'll have a different opinion on hiring once you reach the level of being involved in a company's hiring decisions. As things stand, I think you have a superficial understanding of what the job of an interviewer is, and that you'll see things very differently once you find yourself performing that role.

[harsh river]

Very true

[slate bone]

I know personally people who worked more than 10 years in one company, they liked it, it was stable and comfortable, but then they realize they didn't progress much and are way behind in both salary and knowledge

I believe only ones that were happy were those that had strong connection to upper management and simply didn't need to progress anymore

[slate bone]

I guess you assumed that I wasn't involved 😮

[summer roost]

I did. Am I wrong?

[summer roost]

I think it's tough to generalize. Some people may stay in the same company for a long time and stagnate, others may stay in the same company for a long time gaining increasing expertise in niche topics that are relevant to that company and gaining increased institutional knowledge that puts them in a position to guide strategic decisions. Ones in the former group won't see much of a change in comp, ones in the latter group will, since they're not able to be easily replaced by generic new hires because of all their specialized knowledge.

[slate bone]

Well, yeah. I actually had experience with requirement and also guiding juniors and it went good. I handed over my projects in quite short period of time without problems, so I believe it somehow proves that my judgement about who to pick wasn't bad

However, DevOps job is quite specific one, so maybe that's why our standards are different. If you don't have most of knowledge before taking this role it would be quite hard to catch without delaying sprints

and yes, whole sprints, because if there is no infra other people are blocked

[slate bone]

I agree, but in my experience people who keep finding new topics in one company are only a few out of many who don't

[summer roost]

It seems odd that others in the team wouldn't be able to cover for missing skills until new members could be trained up on them

[slate bone]

If they can do everything themselves then they wouldn't need to hire new DevOps

Everyone have one or two sprints to adapt, but it is not enough to learn everything from 0, especially for DevOps

[summer roost]

Surely it's enough time to learn one thing from zero, though. Imagine someone knows Docker but not Kubernetes: surely there's ways they could be useful in enough other tasks that it's ok for them to need time to learn k8s?

[slate bone]

I also want to add to the topic of working for same company that sometimes people want to try new things but simply company has strategic reasons to keep them in specific stack/project and it would take a lot of time to move them, like months or years

[slate bone]

Not really, I saw people who tried, but they usually resign themselves after a month or two

[summer roost]

That sounds like a company with exceptionally poor internal mobility

[slate bone]

Most likely, but I heard those stories too, so it happens

[smoky quest]

it's sop though.
The rule of thumb is it takes ~6months to be fully ramped up.

In two weeks, you barely have time to setup your laptop, go through onboarding and figure out the basics on the org/architecture

[slate bone]

6 months is complete project or at least MVP!

[smoky quest]

it's for the engineer

[slate bone]

Well, if you keep him in R&D for this long it could work - maybe?

[smoky quest]

if you don't, you have bigger problems

[slate bone]

In 6 months you could train junior to mid I think, so it is quite extensive to give this much time to just setup laptop and get accustomed with work

[smoky quest]

a junior takes years to get to mid. These are unrelated

[summer roost]

How do you deal with upskilling people and training them in new tech generally?

[slate bone]

It depends of their willingness to learn and talent

[smoky quest]

not at all.
If it takes 6 months to take a junior to mid-level, it means an entry level engineer can be senior in 1 year. That does not even make sense

[summer roost]

Yes, but 3 years is how long I'd expect for a motivated and talented engineer.

[slate bone]

No, from mid to senior it would take at least 3 years

[smoky quest]

mid stands for "middle"

[slate bone]

Yep

[summer roost]

Why would you choose a point 1/6th of the way between two things as "mid"?

[smoky quest]

So:
|----|---------------------|
Junior Mid Senior ?

that's not industry standard

[slate bone]

There are many different ways to do it, but if you hire people for specific role you usually want them to already know basics, otherwise this process will be to lengthy.

[summer roost]

Sure, but when I said "generally" I meant not for new hires but for existing employees

[slate bone]

Aaaa ok then

[slate bone]

Junior is someone who already have a year or two of commercial experience, but can't do tasks without additional help. Mid is completely independent and know best practices. There isn't that much of knowledge gap between them

[summer roost]

So then junior to mid takes 1.5 to 2.5 years, not 6 months

[slate bone]

Mid compared to senior is a bit different, because you need to go deeper into details of technology you are using and also understand business principles behind it

[smoky quest]

It's a bit more nuanced than that. I like to refer people to public career ladders like https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit#gid=0

But junior could go from 0 to 1-2 years of experience. It's just the beginning. Although sometimes it may be split from entry level to mean the very beginning

[slate bone]

From 0 to mid *

Well, if you take it from other perspective it depends if you treat candidate/trainee with 0 experience as junior or different role

[smoky quest]

it's easier to think of mid as the mid point between 0 to senior

[summer roost]

That's what I'd have said. I don't use "mid", but if I did, that's what I'd mean by it

[smoky quest]

it will come soon enough!
If you are in HS or college age, a CS degree will be the path of least resistance and with the most opportunities and compensation

[slate bone]

I think it easier to think that mid is simply your role without any prefixes like junior or senior, but if we take my and your definition those won't be compatible

[smoky quest]

removing prefixes and keeping it open just open it up to ambiguity

[slate bone]

Especially when you look at this sheet you provided

[smoky quest]

which can be confusing for < senior

[slate bone]

Engineer is just E2, right after junior and 4 roles behind highest levell

[smoky quest]

yeah, the "mid" is what they call "engineer"

[slate bone]

|------|------------| mid?

[smoky quest]

that hardly look like a midpoint

[slate bone]

Yeah, but according to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/ it would be accurate

[smoky quest]

I would rather say:
|----------|----------|

[slate bone]

How would you fit other roles on this cale then?

[smoky quest]

that's where it gets interesting:

• Senior can be a terminal level
• The impact beyond senior can be non-linear since people aren't linear as well

[slate bone]

And I just briefly went through some of requirements proposed by this document and I believe Senior Engineer would be just Engineer in my projects

I would probably move whole scale one role to the right

If you are mid you have to write production-ready code and have to leave comments when needed while preferring clear self-documenting code. You also have to be able to debug all of the micro services. Same goes for abstraction and isolation that was mentioned, it is still scope of "mid" in my opinion

I would be surprised if Engineer didn't know what scope specific task has and if it involves changing CICD or not, definitely under "mid" instead of senior

[knotty drum]

Programming fundamentals: This includes learning programming languages such as Python, Java, or C++, as well as concepts such as data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented programming.

Computer organization and architecture: This involves studying how computers work at a low level, including topics such as computer hardware, memory management, and operating systems.

Data structures and algorithms: This covers the design and analysis of algorithms, as well as the implementation of data structures such as stacks, queues, trees, and graphs.

Databases: This covers the design, implementation, and management of relational and non-relational databases, as well as database querying and indexing.

Operating systems: This covers the design and implementation of operating systems, including process management, memory management, and file systems.

Computer networks: This covers the basics of computer networking, including network protocols, data transmission, and network security.

Software engineering: This involves the principles and practices of software development, including software design, testing, and maintenance.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning: This covers the basic concepts and techniques of artificial intelligence and machine learning, including supervised and unsupervised learning, neural networks, and deep learning.

Is that an accurate description of a CS degree?

[smoky quest]

there are a few more topics

[buoyant seal]

Sounds like cs degree topics to me.
Completely no any form of math is strange though

Linear Algebra should be at least must for CS degree

[knotty drum]

What math is needed, i know vectors and linear algebra is useful for game dev

[slate bone]

I have to get some rest. Thank you guys for nice discussions here, even if we don't agree on some details I still get your points and learned from it, so it was interesting 🙂 Especially @smoky quest , thank you for your recursive discussion! 😛 I had to make this joke here, you know, right?

[smoky quest]

no worries, it was interesting

[knotty drum]

Stats too heh

[wild snow]

Anyone here learning Flask?

[storm mesa]

I taught myself programming the last year.
I wanted to start a degree in CS in October, but I got a job offer, sort of.

Some college offered me to go through a 2 month course and study AS 400 RPG of IBM, for free and then get a job in the financial sector as a developer in the same program.

I honestly don't know which option i should go for

[buoyant seal]

2 month courses and then IT good job is usually a lie in 99% cases

Go for CS degree, this is path which permanently increase your luck of landings IT jobs

It is impossible to compare study program for 4 years and 2 month.
You will univetably learn very very much more in 4 years

[near ocean]

if they have a job lined up, why go for a degree

[buoyant seal]

But he does not. He has shaky promise for smth after 2 month courses

[near ocean]

oh i see, the job offer is dependent on the 2month course

[glossy grove]

Motivated and detail-oriented Junior Python Developer with a strong foundation in Python programming fundamentals. Experienced in developing web applications using Flask and Django, and proficient in working with data analysis libraries such as NumPy and Pandas to extract valuable insights from complex data sets. Developed Image Processing Engin such as FaceSDK using OpenCV and TensorFlow. Proficient in Git version control systems and experienced in working collaboratively with cross-functional teams. Proven ability to write efficient, clean, and maintainable code, and troubleshoot errors.
I am looking for outsourcing programs. Who can help me?

[true harness]

indeed.com

[dreamy spade]

What the hell? https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-tech-workers-say-they-were-hired-to-do-nothing-762ff158

[peak halo]

I remember godlygeek saying that big tech companies will sometimes overstaff just to deprive competitors of talent.

[dreamy spade]

Wow. What an interesting hiring strategy.

[near ocean]

And then announce layoffs? Sounds in character

[true harness]

it probably pays off more often than not if they're doing it

[steep scroll]

hi howd can i get $100k annual job

[near ocean]

Go to school, move to the US, find a job

[summer roost]

especially if you think that having Meta as a previous employer on your resume will help you land future jobs.

[true harness]

as long as you can BS about doing something if you were actually just hired to do nothing. though i suspect it would help you get more interviews

[wispy coral]

Hey! I'm an 18 year old Indian undergraduate. I have cleared my 10+2 in the previous session (marks are yet to be announced). I have quite a lot of interest in IT. I known python, HTML, CSS and little bit of MySQL as well right now. I plan on learning JavaScript, advanced Python and PHP within next few months. I want to get a join with the knowledge i have so that i can get more knowledge as well as an experience. I do not have a clear path in my mind on how can i get a job. In July/August, i plan on moving to Australia as well to continue my education there. I want to be enough skilled and experienced by then so that i can get a job within IT field while studying in university there. Kindly guild with your knowledge so that i could go for the best path.

[summer roost]

I don't know Australia's laws, but I'd be extremely surprised if it would be legal for someone to work while staying in Australia on a student visa. Unless you have Australian citizenship?

[near ocean]

You can usually work on student visas but only a set amount of hours that probably is not enough for full time stuff

[wispy coral]

Parhaps they do allow students to work

[wispy coral]

As of my knowledge, it would be 48hrs per week from 28th june 2023

Or was april i guess

[summer roost]

https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/student-500/temporary-relaxation-of-working-hours-for-student-visa-holders
Looks like it's 24 hours per week (48 per fortnight) from 1st July 2023

[near ocean]

In the UK it seems to be 20h which is so restrictive
Can you work the average part time job on 24h?

[wispy coral]

Oh, i certainly misunderstood that. My bad

The only way to take care of your expenses while on study visa is by doing a job simultaneously. Therefore most of the international students do part time job in restraunts or work as a taxi driver which certaining has the minimum wages set by that particular country's law. I do not plan on doing such jobs and would rather go for a part time job with IT field if such a thing exists

[near ocean]

You're going to struggle more than if you just had some job to cover expenses

[wispy coral]

Well i might still go for it if i had no other choice but considering i'll go for a job within IT field. Please guild me on what should be my skills and experience gaining strategy for next few months.

[dreamy spade]

I read somewhere on Reddit reading resume tips that the company you use to work for is more impressive than your previous position title itself.

[summer roost]

"impressionable"? I don't think that's the word you mean.

[dreamy spade]

Impressive*

[true harness]

"impression" probably does fit there, though not how it was used

[summer roost]

People recognize company names easily, but don't necessarily know what job duties are associated with any particular job title at those companies.

[near ocean]

Not sure why people would be impressed with a Netflix experience when you posted an article further up about how they literally dont do shit at work

[summer roost]

people think (often incorrectly, I think) that large and well known companies have exceptionally high hiring bars, and so anyone who has worked for those companies must be a very good candidate

It's definitely true that exceptionally large companies have a huge number of applicants for each job, and so they can afford to be picky. But hiring is time consuming and expensive, so it's also definitely not the case that if they get 5000 applicants for one job opening, that the best qualified of those 5000 applicants will be the one who gets the job.

[sleek egret]

no one thinks that

they think that larger, well respected, companies will do as good or better job at hiring than your average company

[summer roost]

how is that different from what I said?

[sleek egret]

what you said used an absolute scale and said "best qualified", what I said was about relative outcomes

or rather, the perception about relative outcomes

[summer roost]

people think (often incorrectly, I think) that large and well known companies have exceptionally high hiring bars
That's the same as what you're saying, isn't it? I'm talking about relative outcomes.

[sleek egret]

ok fine, it's the same

[summer roost]

And you seem to be agreeing with me that the best qualified out of the hypothetical 5000 candidates isn't likely to be the one who gets a job offer. It seems like we agree totally.

[sleek egret]

ok

[sonic mica]

If I wanna work in the US, is it possible to immigrate to Canada, get citizenship and work in the US under TN status?

[sleek egret]

yes

[near ocean]

Would getting canadian citizenship be easier than US?

[sleek egret]

I can't speak to how difficult it is to get Canadian citizenship though

[sonic mica]

Yes, much easier

[sleek egret]

given that canda's population is 1/15th that of the US...

[sonic mica]

And it's not a lottery like US immigration

[delicate bane]

apparently its a point system

[sleek egret]

there are 2x more immigrants (and their children) in the US (apx 90 mil) than the entire population of canada (apx 38mil)

[delicate bane]

single vs married get dif points too

[near ocean]

Wouldnt it be easier to get a us work visa than a citizenship anywhere?

[sleek egret]

I don't think many people would characterize anything about the US immigration system as "easy" 🙂

[near ocean]

Surely its easier to get a work visa though

[sonic mica]

Definitely not, you'll have to get an H1-B, which sucks, it's pretty much a lottery (1/3 acceptance rate, you re-apply next year if you don't get accepted) and if you get laid off and stay jobless for more than 60 days you'll be deported and go back to square one

Not to mention how the employers exploit H1B workers a lot

[sleek egret]

well, in fairness, H1-B visas are not supposed to be for people who want to stay in the US

[sonic mica]

Thing is, there is no other way, so you either make that work or you get canadian TN status

[near ocean]

To get a canadian citizenship you need 3 of your last 5 years in the country, how do you intend to do that

[sonic mica]

Work there until the 3 to 5 years are over

[near ocean]

How would you work there, dont you need a visa?

[sleek egret]

yes, you need a visa

[sonic mica]

Yes, you do, and it's definitely way way easier to get than H1B

[sleek egret]

what sort of visa do you need to work in canada as a non-citizen?

you know that 1 in 7 americans are immigrants, right? and the % is increasing

[sonic mica]

Haven't researched much, but for me I'll get an immigrant/refugee visa by having five friends do the paperwork in canada

[near ocean]

That sounds like you'll be busted for visa fraud

[storm mesa]

Nah it's assured in this case.

I think 4 years lf experience working can be better no?

[buoyant seal]

sounds like pretty much every online course assurance to me ^_^

sure, 4 years of working experience is pretty much equvalient at some point to having university (or even better)... but not always. For some people lack of university will remain always red mark. Some people will think in 4 years your will be only equal to junior. (depending on how much you learned stuff in the process). With some lack, you can be equal to middle level worker i guess, depends on your progress and how hard you do self study, and also on type of work you was provided with in a company

The main benefit of working for 4 years, of not becoming more poor in those 4 years though ^_^

[pastel thunder]

anyone with experience in arduino? want to ask some basic question on industrial practices

[storm mesa]

The course is free and its physical, they get paid by their customers

[buoyant seal]

questions araise like what your job duties will be after being hired

and also what is precentage of people that gets hired, when asking people not directly responsible for this project

hard to believe that job duties will be IT/software dev relevant after 2 month courses ^_^

[dreamy spade]

I don’t know who it was but someone earlier said the process of landing a job after graduation is suppose to be “fun” and I vehemently disagree.

[ivory sluice]

fun i guess in the sense that there's a lot of unknowns and uncertainties in a sea of opportunities. otherwise it's a grind

actually landing the job/receiving the offer is great though. maybe that's what they meant

[dreamy spade]

I wrote a series of OAs that was presented as an interview.

Maybe it wasn’t an interview and they wanted me to perceive it as an interview.

They emailed me and the title had the word “Interview” in it

Title of email was “[Company Name] Interview B1) Java Developer”

Subject was

“B1) Java Developer
Powered by HackerRank
Further to your application for employment with [Company Name], you are invited to participate in an online written exam. This is the first step in [Company Name] Global Assessment Process.

I had 3 more different email versions of these in various programming languages including Python.

[inner forum]

I am 17 years old, and this is my last year in high school. My exams are after about two months, and I did not prepare well. My problem is that I live in an Arab country. They only care about the certificate. So my question is, can I start programming with myself online? I am very distracted.

[sleek egret]

of course you can start yourself. only you are stopping yourself.

[honest goblet]

Hi guys i got into one of those consultancy 12 week coding bootcamp thingies that will help me find a job

How can i makw the most out of it?

[sleek egret]

as long as you don't pay them anything, the worst that can happen is you lose a few weeks of your time

[honest goblet]

I dont pay anything nah

I only pay if i leavw in weeks 2-12

If they cant find me work i dint need to pay

[sleek egret]

there ya go then

[honest goblet]

Nah but how can i makw the most out of it

I will learn sql, java, python and a bit of web development

[sleek egret]

that seems unlikely to me but perhaps I'm wrong

[near ocean]

these schemes are hella sketchy and i dont recommend them

[delicate bane]

sounds predatory

[true harness]

I think the fun is when you actually get a job

[spark cobalt]

Major issues with these consulting companies:

• They tie you in to a long period time contract to try to siphon as much money from you as possible.
• "If they can't find me work, I don't need to pay" - I'd be VERY cautious about this, the fine print for many consulting agencies that do this say that this lack of ability to find work needs to be a year, and have crazy requirements to be qualified to not pay.
• Its super common that these courses are taught by college kids or super super junior engineers and super common that these curriculum are very lacking.
• For some, you have no bearings in terms of what kind of job you'll get. By all means you could be getting a job of maintaining legacy codebases or doing something extremely outdated (think about it like this: Employers could just hire a CS major, why would they work with these consulting agencies to get someone that's generally nowhere near as capable as one of them? Then think of what kind of jobs these employers are exposing to these consulting companies. One reasoning could be: They're training you on legacy stuff, so you can do legacy work. And they're giving you work that CS majors wouldn't wanna do)
• You need to check the pay for once you get a job as well. Typically it's very low and for some people it's unsustainable.
• You're not guaranteed a job. Just because you didn't pay doesn't mean you didn't lose anything, you just lost a year and don't have a job.

The list goes on...

After I interviewed at some of these places and read the fine print I just completely put these consulting agencies outside of my considerations

[buoyant seal]

@honest goblet TLDR: Free cheese can only be found in a mousetrap

[spark cobalt]

[honest goblet]

yeah i guess

i spoke to a lot of linkedin members and they were happy with it actually saying they actually liked the work placements. the pay is 30k apparently
i spoke to some who didnt get a placement and they said the waiting time is 2 weeks

[spark cobalt]

Not trying to say these consulting agencies aren't a route, but I'd personally prefer a bootcamp over them by a million miles.

[honest goblet]

in a class of 25 only 5 should struggle to find a placement apparently

[spark cobalt]

I'm just saying you should read the fine print, every line of it. At least in America it's a "the story gets longer" kind of thing

[honest goblet]

i will 100%

[near ocean]

30k isnt much, is this wiley edge perchance?

[buoyant seal]

depends on country though, in some countries it is salary of Middle dev

[near ocean]

Im assuming this is the UK, i think they mentioned this before in the channel

For the rest of the UK it might be ok, still pretty low
Wiley edge, formerly mthree does more fintech stuff so jobs would be in london and 30k in london is so low

Its 12 people in tiny apartment, sardine mode low

[summer roost]

some of these types of programs say that they guarantee you a job offer if you successfully complete the program, but the job that they wind up offering to everyone who graduates is an offer to be an instructor and teach future classes for the program. Which is just a pyramid scheme.

[near ocean]

If its the scheme im thinking of they dont even have that guarantee 💀

[honest goblet]

albany beck

[dreamy spade]

I actually applied for them a few times.

[dreamy spade]

No way. Really?

[honest goblet]

thats what linkedin members told me

one who didnt get a placement said they experimented with 34, and out of the 34 only 12 didnt get a placement

[honest goblet]

im 21 so i dont expect 1000000000/year

but yeah ill do the 12 weeks because its not like a got a job to go to 🤡 worst case scenario i get 12 weeks of coding to put on my CV

[spark cobalt]

How do you plan to advertise it on your CV?

You can be taught Java but if you aren't able to demonstrate that you know how to effectively use that knowledge, it's still back to square one. Except you could probably be more successful self studying and building projects doing things you want to do. And if you were 1/3 of the people who didn't get a job, is that to say you were the bottom 1/3 of the class?

[near ocean]

Theres unrealistic salaries and then theres scraping by, and 30k is barely scraping by

I guess its better than starving

[spark cobalt]

There's always something being sold to the desperate

[near ocean]

At least now you know to look out for things

[honest goblet]

pretty much yeah. i think during the 12 weeks 5 projects for the CV will be done, some will be group work

[honest goblet]

i live with family so i dont mind, i just want my foot in the door you get me?

[near ocean]

Yes, but you know, be careful

I've seen some of these having training bonds in the fine
You dont want to be stuck with thousands in "training"

[honest goblet]

Im gonna read the entire contract word for word when i get it

Just to make sure im not getting too scammed

Is it ok if i drop the contract in here when i get it?

Like legally and all that?

[true harness]

unless you sign something that says you can't, but then again, what are you going to gain? you're not getting good legal advice over discord

[honest goblet]

Idk if you guys wanna see it or something i guess

[smoky quest]

no one can gives you specific answers. You would need a lawyer for that.

I would assume there would be some penalties depending on when you drop out of the contract

[honest goblet]

After the 2nd week dropping out incurs a fine, if they cant find me a placement im more than happy to end the comtract

Huh now that i think of it why do consultancy businesses exist?

[buoyant seal]

if you haven't signed any NDA, then sure ^_^

[true harness]

to make money

[honest goblet]

Nah but like assuming their clients are banks and stuff, what do they do for banks exactly?

[near ocean]

They loan out their devs to teams that need extra hands

[spark cobalt]

Give them developers trained to do work they presumably couldn't convince CS majors to do

[delicate bane]

legal stuff in #career-advice

it wouldnt be the first time, thats for sure

[true harness]

though the other time, they were banned after repeated attempts 😔

[delicate bane]

[worldly cypress]

anyone here learing django rn?

[vapid jay]

guys im confused which i cant decide what should i go with machine learning or software developing? i have a good skills on developing but machine learning i am new to it. i will have my interview after some months for my job, idk what should i master either ML or software developing, since doing ML is highly paid job, but im a begginer in it. im confused

[peak halo]

You'll need to have a degree that's related to ML to work in that space. Is that something you have the option to do?

You also won't "master" ML. Nobody has. It's an ongoing area of research.

[azure jacinth]

Hello, everyone! I need some advice. Is it realistic to develop apps in a team of 2 programmers, 1 graphics/animation designer, and 1 marketing person, for a start? I think I can comfortably pay their salaries for the next 6 to 12 months, without needing outside investments/loans. And the sort of apps I have in mind are simple 2D online games, or educational apps related to music.

[buoyant seal]

yes and no. totally depends on skillset of people

and on a good System Design and Analysis. Having plan to which you all go to reach

[dreamy spade]

And for some reason, employers still want candidates to have a degree. Smh.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-are-losing-faith-in-college-education-wsj-norc-poll-finds-3a836ce1

[azure jacinth]

I wouldn't care about a degree. Would rather go through a portfolio.

[buoyant seal]

major probably trouble with low skilled people, that they can quickly reach the end of code quality capacity. You all can quickly reach the stage after which effort to change code is harder than you have human brain capacities to do it.

development is a tricky process, of choosing the golden path, of moving forward, while cleaning up stuff in time in order to have capacity/room for going further

So... again... carefully chosen technologies and your skills matter how smooth your road will be, and if it will be able to reach Minimum Viable Product at all.

[true harness]

it's paywalled, can you summarize it?

[buoyant seal]

• cleaning up too much? and you are standing on one place
• choosing too much complicated stuff and tech? potentially not finishing in time within money constraints
• choosing bad tech and having insufficient skills? making stuff a mess beyond ability of comprehension to walk further.
  development is balance to keep between cleaning road in time, choosing simple enough path to reach the goal, and yet not forgetting to moving forward to defined requirements

so... equilibrium is hard to seek. Than higher skill, then easier to find it though and bend to your wishes.
having good plan helps to stay focused ^_^ but good plan in IT can be born only with quick feedback between people knowing Tech and people knowing business goals they wish to reach

[true harness]

is there information about the demographics surveyed? the tiny preview of the article claims "women and senior citizens", but is there any specifics? also, this seems more general, i.e., talks about degrees in general

[dreamy spade]

Women and older Americans are driving the decline in confidence. People over the age of 65 with faith in college declined to 44% from 56% in 2017. Confidence among women fell to 44% from 54%, according to the poll.

People ages 18-34 are among those who have the strongest doubts about the value of a college degree, a new poll finds.

[smoky quest]

That sounds quite a lot to start with.
Start small and lean and iterate

[true harness]

that seems reasonable for the lower age group. there are so many videos of "i got a job in x without a degree, just follow these steps". but for "over the age of 65", i don't know what could cause that drop. did they present any stats about men or people from 34-65?

[true harness]

no

[azure jacinth]

Thanks for the advice, guys. I'll research this further. 😇

[true harness]

interesting. though this is generalized across all degrees, not just CS. and even if you look at all degrees, the stats show that those with higher education earn more, at least in the US

they are not a student

well, they can i guess 🤔. but those usually start in like, a year. i think they're trying to find work that starts soon. i believe they graduated about a year ago

i meant start date, when you start working

[buoyant seal]

👍 the highest chance in super small team to reach conclusive product (not telling about receiving any business proffit), is to know tech stuff and experience using it for many years in order to know limit of your strength and ability to make things happen.
if only there was person knowing tech and having solid business plan (which considers obstacles like getting necessary legal standing too...)... at the same time then there is chance to gain smth useful out of it.

Otherwise not really recommending a lot going into this path. only very very very small percentage of startups is succesful for a reason ^_^
Basically... my recommendation in knowing enough to make this possible to happen on your own.. this is path of... higher chance to succeed.
Planning in IT products without knowing tech and relying on low skilled people do this for you, is not really good plan in a short or a long run ^_^

P.S. speaking as experienced startup killer.

[dreamy spade]

For new grad?

What do you mean “new grad”?

Grind for new graduate

Over 1200+

0

[true harness]

they're just jobs for newly graduated people, or entry level jobs

[smoky quest]

Have you upgraded your projects since last time?

[dreamy spade]

No

[smoky quest]

That is probably the main reason you don't get called back then

if they are hiring people able to write ios apps, then sure

I have some buddies working on siri and doing java on GNU/Linux, so ymmv

[true harness]

you probably should. it's one of the main things you can control on your resume right now

[smoky quest]

the projects were also way below the expectations of a new grad

[true harness]

well, i wasn't gonna say that, but 😔. though maybe being more honest would be better

[smoky quest]

I am not gonna sugar coat it. I am here to help, not reinforce your feelings.
As long as it's NOT done in a jerk way

[true harness]

i hope you mean "not done" 😄

[smoky quest]

I do

[dreamy spade]

I see what they’re saying. I don’t know how in depth they were expecting my projects to be. I just make projects to demonstrate the fundamentals of full stack development.

And also, I’m aware about how most recruiters aren’t even technical to begin with so they don’t bother to check out my GitHub repositories.

I don’t want to waste my time making a 3 or 4 month project only for it to not be checked by a non-technical recruiter.

I just really focus on making short term projects that demonstrates a full understanding of web development

[true harness]

short projects do not demonstrate full understanding. from what i remember of your projects from last time, they did not demonstrate any real understanding at all.

even if your resume isn't getting read by a technical person, you can still impress them with a good project. you're right they don't look at github, which is why describing them properly on your resume is very important

[spark cobalt]

It's all relative to your competition. They can only expect what they can reasonably get, which is everyone else applying to the same level of jobs you are.

I don’t want waste my time making a 3 or 4 month project only for it to not be checked by a non-technical recruiter.

Most of your competition did spend those 3-4 months 🙂

[summer roost]

that's interesting - have you hired software developers before?

[smoky quest]

I am very technical like many other managers and even us won't read your github at the first pass. However the complexity of your project would also be reflected in it.
Right now, assuming the same projects than last time, they do not pass the bar.

[azure jacinth]

No, I haven't. But I've learned a bit of Python and Kotlin in my free time. I realize degrees are valuable for other reasons, but I know that working on mini-projects is a better way to judge how skilled a person is. At least, I think I know that...

@summer roost

[summer roost]

I don't think I've ever heard someone who is involved in hiring say that they wouldn't care about a degree. It's a unique take, which is why I asked where you're coming from.

[summer roost]

And also, I’m aware about how most recruiters aren’t even technical to begin with so they don’t bother to check out my GitHub repositories.
Recruiters generally don't have deep technical expertise, which is exactly why they're not the deciders of who does and doesn't get interviewed. Engineers make those decisions.

[dreamy spade]

Interesting…because 2 interviews I’ve had were all conducted by non-technical recruiters.

[summer roost]

that recruiters don't decide who to interview? They certainly don't at any company I've ever worked for

[azure jacinth]

I have a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, and when I started working, I quickly realized my degree only helped me to get the job, but as far as the actual work goes, my degree has been of zero, or near zero benefit. We had on-job training to teach us exactly what we are needed to do. If I could have bought my degree, I would have saved myself 4 years and been able to do the same exact work I'm doing now. I imagine the same thing is true for many other jobs. :/

[summer roost]

recruiters are responsible for finding candidates to bring into the pipeline, and guiding those candidates through the process - scheduling meetings, selling the company, describing the role, etc. But they don't decide which of the candidates who applied get interviewed. Hiring managers make that call. At my company, even the initial resume reviews would be done by engineers.

[smoky quest]

If a recruiter is rejecting you, that would signal an attitude/behavior problem that scared them off

[summer roost]

hiring managers are the people who are trying to fill a job vacancy in their team/group. They're by definition engineers, if they're hiring for engineering positions

[smoky quest]

Most of them used to be engineers

[summer roost]

yeah - that's fair. I suppose you could become a middle manager of a group of engineers without ever having been an engineer

but that would be very, very rare.

[smoky quest]

In software, there is a lot more benefit from a CS degree, especially in the more theoretical or demanding areas.
Not leveraging such knowledge would mean the job is on the simpler side

[uncut quest]

Are most technical interviewers people you would be working with if you're hired? Or is any engineer just randomly picked to conduct interviews?

[smoky quest]

Sometimes there is a mix, but more often than not, it would be someone you would be working with

[summer roost]

managers need more managerial skills than tech skills, but they also need to be able to understand what the technical people who report to them are saying, in order to be able to make informed decisions. It's pretty rare for someone to wind up in a position where they're 1 or 2 levels above engineers without themselves having been a tech person.

[summer roost]

that depends on the company. It's not even necessarily consistent within one company.

[uncut quest]

I see

[summer roost]

if there's a specific team that you're being hired for, you'd expect people on that team to be involved in the hiring, but lots of big companies have job pipelines where they're always hiring engineers, and they'll try to match them up with a group after deciding whether they're worth hiring or not. In those cases, the interviewers would just be random engineers from throughout the company, not necessarily ones that line up with the team you'd be placed on

the more niche your skills are and the deeper your expertise, the more likely you'd be being interviewed for a specific group, and the more likely your future coworkers would be involved in the interview process. New grads are at the other extreme - a large company might decide they're going to try to hire 10 new grads that year and sprinkle them around through different teams, since their skills are basically interchangeable. In those cases, it's pretty unlikely that your future teammates will be interviewing you (since they wouldn't even have planned out what team you'll be going on at the point where your interview is happening)

[tidal dawn]

it says i need 50 messages to boucce chat

ita anoying

[peak halo]

Yes. Be sure not to spam to get them. Please let us know in #community-meta if you have a question about that.

[tidal dawn]

oh hey your bio is really intresying!! so you study ai and lingustics ?? have you done sound recognitiona nd or word recognition

[summer roost]

when people do spam to try to circumvent that rule, we temporarily ban them from getting voice access.

[peak halo]

I have not. I deal almost exclusively with text. You can ask me about that in #data-science-and-ml

[uncut quest]

I have an interview coming up tomorrow. I'm super excited because this interview has been the only thing on my mind for the past 2 weeks. But I'm also nervous.
Any tips on calming down and keeping my composure during the actual interview?

[summer roost]

my usual advice is to remember that the people on the other side of the table don't want you to fail. There's nothing less fun than being stuck in a room with a stressed out person who knows they aren't doing well. If the interviewer tries to give you hints or tips, take them. If the interviewer asks whether you're sure an approach is right, give it some serious thought to whether they might be trying to steer you away from a wrong answer. If the interviewer suggests moving on to another question, let them move on.

[ruby prism]

might be random but who in here has adhd or autism? if so, and if you don't mind sharing do you find work with computers to be stimulating enough to not be boring? i ask because some people can get really bored with the work that they do and they say it is best to pursue more creative work instead. i am not diagnosed with adhd but i want to get checked for it.

[azure jacinth]

I'm sorry, I know this is probably not the right place to ask this, but it is related to the topic I discussed in the beginning, about wanting to hire people to create apps. Can someone tell me what programming languages are used for both iOS and Android apps, frontend and backend? I googled it, but I'm getting seemingly conflicting answers. Also, google says Kotlin is used for both frontend and backend, but from my limited exposure, I thought Kotlin was used as backend in Android Studio, with XML being what's used for frontend?

I'm basically trying to figure out what programming languages I should require from job applicants.

[true harness]

for iOS, Swift. for Android, kotlin and Java
wait, how do you plan to know your applicants know the language if you don't know the language

[azure jacinth]

Good question... I was hoping they can show me a portfolio, and go through a bit of the source code from their projects together? I can familiarize myself with some keywords/syntax from these programming languages, to make sure I'm not being jerked around? 😂

[true harness]

I don't think that will be enough to verify anything. you would need much more than the basics to really evaluate someone

I think in your situation, you would be even more reliant on candidates having degrees, not less

[smoky quest]

If you are at that level of questions, you aren't ready for hiring.
That said, props for doing your homework!

Note also that there are cross platform languages/frameworks like react native or flutter

[true harness]

and technically, you can use python, but I don't think anyone actually does that

[uncut quest]

Got it. Thank you for the advice!

[azure jacinth]

@smoky quest - I'm sure you're right, but I have to start somewhere. This is me, doing research. 😇 And I don't have to start hiring until I know enough.
Would it be easier for me to find people experienced with React Native and Flutter, or are there more people who use native languages (I think that's what they're called?), like Swift and Kotlin?
Also, can React Native and Flutter work as both frontend and backend?
I can program in basic Python and Kotlin, so a lot of this is new to me.

[smoky quest]

My first question would be to validate the need and derisk the project.
There is nothing worse than hiring people, spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in project to have it go unused and without people interested. So the first part would be about validating your idea with spending as little effort as possible.

Then in terms of technical trade offs, if you use platform specific technologies, it does mean you would have to rewrite multiple times the same thing for each platform. So trying to reduce the investment can pay off, albeit with a different set of trade offs.

And then, there is also the people side. Finding someone technical to complement you can be scary and risky

[smoky quest]

javascript/dart can be used on the backend, but they aren't necessarily as popular as other languages/frameworks.

[azure jacinth]

Hmm. Would it help if I gave an example of an app I have in mind? There was a game that was popular back in the day on Facebook, called Word Blitz. You would play it against another player. You would each have tiles of letters that you need to connect to make as many words as you can, before the timer runs out. At the end of the game, you will see your scores. If I wanted to turn that into an app (I'm sure it already exists, but this is just an example,) would React Native/Flutter do the job?

[smoky quest]

yeah, that sounds simple enough that almost anything could do it

[azure jacinth]

That's awesome! I'll start researching both now. Thanks, @smoky quest ! 😇

[smoky quest]

have fun!
I strongly recommend to focus on prototyping and getting feedback. It will help keeping you grounded.
The "build it and they will come" doesn't work

[azure jacinth]

Yeah. Today I learned about a thing called MVP, and I compiled a list of friends who I think wouldn't mind helping me with testing prototypes. 😁

[smoky quest]

I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118960874/

[azure jacinth]

And with a budget for 1 year (I could potentially extend it to 2 years if I save more aggressively,) I think I'll have enough time to put out many small apps, and one or two big apps, and stomach more failures.
I'll have a look at that link!

[heady wagon]

can anyone explain me about while loops and for loops in python

[snow rapids]

50-80k USD FT, is it good salary range in US for remote job in software? What's average/ median for example? This one particular is in Natural Language Processing with Deep learning.

[snow rapids]

Probably better to ask in help #❓｜how-to-get-help

[uncut quest]

For loops are good for when you already know how many times you want to loop for.
While loops are good for when you don't know exactly, but you have a certain condition that should break the loop.

[smoky quest]

it depends on your location, skills, education, experience, etc.

[snow rapids]

Is there like an US average/ median?

I was under impression average would be higher than that. Especially lower range 50k. Seems pretty low?

[smoky quest]

the pay is based on your location, not the company's HQ location

[smoky quest]

it's pretty low for an entry level engineer with a bsc located in the USA.
But that's completely different for someone living outside of the USA

[snow rapids]

I know it's usually based on location. Yes that's what I thought its rather low range for US. Thank you for confirming.

[smoky quest]

if you don't have a bsc or are located outside of the USA, the answer would be different

[snow rapids]

Got it. Agree it's different depends where you live. In this case a US company is looking to hire remote outside of US. And if you don't know why then it's always the money lol

[smoky quest]

in general it's either because of very niche expertise or they are looking for throughput instead of expertise

But you cannot expect a US salary from other countries

[snow rapids]

Thing is it's nothing special what they offer compared to local market. But advantage could be building network in US for better paying job in the future

[snow rapids]

Why not

[smoky quest]

supply vs demand.
I can hire a bunch of other engineers from your city for your local rate

[snow rapids]

It's probably more difficult i agree. But it's possible for sure. With remote jobs.

[smoky quest]

and why would a company outsource to another country with different laws and timezones if they had to pay the same rate than the local engineers? Might as well hire people local

[smoky quest]

If you can, sure. But is it realistic? definitely not

[snow rapids]

Hiring contractors is no extra paperwork

[smoky quest]

it is extra paperwork, especially when it relates to laws, taxes, etc.

[snow rapids]

It is. I know ppl that do that. It's more difficult for sure

[snow rapids]

For employees possibly yes don't know. For contractors not so much

[smoky quest]

good for them! They must have some specific skills that no one else in the world has
That's still far from being common or considered in general

[summer roost]

They may pay slightly better than their local talent competitors, just based on having a higher benchmark for what an acceptable cost of labor is. But they're certainly not incentivized to pay much more. Maybe if you're used to buying shoes for $100, you'll think nothing of buying a pair for $20 in another country, even if the average cost of shoes in that country is $10. But, if the average cost of shoes in that country is $10 and you wind up paying $100 for that same product, you've badly screwed something up.

Those numbers are a bit hand wavy, but that's the rough idea, anyway.

[snow rapids]

I mean similar for employees. Why should I bother applying for jobs for some remote employer, a startup if the pay is the same as local market

[smoky quest]

no one is saying you should.
You should do what's best for you. If a remote employer for another country is best, then do that

[summer roost]

Like I said, they usually do pay slightly better than the local market. Just not drastically better.

[snow rapids]

Not in this case.

[smoky quest]

working for an employer in a different timezone would come with its own issues like being available super early in the morning or super late in the evening. If the market makes it such there are less supply of engineers, then the rates would go up to make it up for the downsides

[summer roost]

Working remotely as a full time contractor for a start up in another country reeks of a scam to me, for what it's worth.

[smoky quest]

the fact you brought up 50-80k do give me some vibes that you are senior in somewhere EU / east EU and are just being offered the local rate

[snow rapids]

That's what I think too. Pay is too low compared to local 'stable' jobs

[smoky quest]

unless you are in switzerland or the UK, 50-80k seem fair

[summer roost]

Hiring foreign nationals as contractors rather than as employees seems like it's trying to skirt tax and employment laws, or push risk off the company and on to you, in the best case

[smoky quest]

it does simplify some of the overhead.
It does also help at the very beginning when the startup isn't proven yet and you need people to help on some problems

[summer roost]

https://sftaxcounsel.com/foreign-independent-contractor/ is interesting reading here. It says that the US tax law says that

an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done.

Which means that if the company hires you as a contractor, and then goes on to demand that you complete a task using particular tools or making demands about the exact steps you follow in producing the final product, they're likely misclassifying an employee as a contractor, and breaking tax laws

[smoky quest]

they get paid in cash rather than equity and gets things going

[summer roost]

Also:

In some countries, incorrect classification of a worker can result in a U.S. employer having to pay back vacation pay, mandatory benefits, and significant foreign civil and criminal penalties. For example, a misclassification of a Mexican worker as an independent contractor can result in a fine that is 250 to 5,000 times the minimum wage. Even where a foreign individual is correctly classified as an independent contractor, taxes and other fees may still be required to be paid to a foreign taxing agency.

I'm no expert or anything, just Googling since this piqued my curiosity, but it seems pretty fraught and risky to me (Albeit more for the employer than the employee/contractor)

[smoky quest]

wait until you hear about 401k outside of the usa 😉

or RSU

[summer roost]

Do startups tend to have their legal ducks in a row well enough to handle things like the extra legal hurdles that come with hiring workers in other countries? From what I've heard, it can be difficult to handle hiring workers in other states, let alone countries, but admittedly I've never worked at a startup, so perhaps I'm not giving them enough credit, and they have reasonable coverage of payroll laws with the help of firms that they contact with to help manage payroll...

I don't know that I'm the right person to ask. I'm not an immigrant, and so less familiar with our immigration system than many others.
My impression is that if you care about maximizing compensation (to retire early, or send money home, or whatever) that SWE work in the US is probably worth it if you can get it. My impression is also that, in most countries, wealth inequality isn't nearly so drastic as here, and there's much better access to health care, education, and social safety nets.

[smoky quest]

am not Godlygeek, but travel expand the mind.
Two possible cases:

• You like it and decide to stay
• You don't like it and go back home. You now have international experience

[summer roost]

I can say that all the H1B employees who I've ever chatted with about their lives have seemed pretty happy with their choice to move here. But I'm not sure how much that really counts for, since there's certainly some amount of survivor bias to be factored in there - I'm only chatting with ones who are still here

[jagged tusk]

still there is jobs that can pay like for one job for one hour?

[smoky quest]

Can you expand on your question? Not sure to follow

[jagged tusk]

can you make $ 200 in python in 25 hours if you want?

[hearty kindle]

working a full time job? doing gigs? freelance work?

[jagged tusk]

freekabce work

[hearty kindle]

yeah i mean that’s 8$ an hour so if you have the skills and someone to pay you you’re gonna make more than that

[jagged tusk]

here's the problem I don't have skills

[smoky quest]

if you are in HS or college age, a CS degree will be the path of least resistance and with the most opportunities and compensation.

Besides that, nothing prevents you from acquiring more skills

[jagged tusk]

I work with research in college they don't pay you

[smoky quest]

then why are you doing it?

[jagged tusk]

love for science?

[smoky quest]

I would rather love science that pays

[jagged tusk]

you can do

[smoky quest]

I do. Don't let people take advantage of you

in the words of the great Beyonce: if you like it, put a ring on it.

[summer roost]

Some people make that in 1 hour. It would all depend on what skills you have, and whether you can convince someone to pay you for them.

[jagged tusk]

I can print things do for loops

[hearty kindle]

question. i’m a cs student, finishing freshman year. i’ve got a few small projects on my github, most of them are very whatever though. just got hired doing an IT internship at a relatively big law firm. despite feeling like I should be way ahead of the curve with all this, I know how competitive CS is. I guess I’m just not really sure how to pull ahead of the competition further and be in a better position for internships next summer

[summer roost]

Sounds like it'd be tough to convince someone to spend hundreds of dollars for access to skills like those. They could learn to do that themselves in a day or two using resources that are free online.

[hearty kindle]

you’re in the very early learning stage, you shouldn’t be thinking of how to monetize it yet. think about how you can continue learning in a structured and sustainable matter, so that you can develop skills that people will pay for 👍

[smoky quest]

it's too vague to say much.
Think of the skills you want to expose in the future and how your current internship helps you learn them and prepare you for them

[hearty kindle]

my current internship is honestly more of a resume flex than something i’ll really learn much at unfortunately. i think i’ll mostly be doing tech support, but i was very attracted to the job because i’m going to have a lot of downtime where i can work on my own thing

[hearty kindle]

i know it’s vague, i guess i don’t really know what else to say haha. I don’t know what I should learn, no idea what field or area i want to go into, no ideas for projects that would look good. it’s rough!

[smoky quest]

So take a step back. If you don't know what you want to get into, then it's difficult to chart a course for it. That means your first order of business is to try different things and learn about what's out there so you can figure out better what you like or dislike

[smoky quest]

fyi, names carry little value. What you do in the internships carry far more value

[jagged tusk]

same

[autumn leaf]

hello

[hearty kindle]

i see, that’s true. at worst it’s a networking opportunity + somewhere i can get paid while working on my own shit. just means i need to get some ideas so i have stuff to work on

[autumn leaf]

Should i expand rather than just using python because im rn about to choose computer science as my path

[jagged tusk]

I'm learning from openai

what did you guys think of that

[hearty kindle]

i am going to highly advise against this. at best chatgpt will be regurgitating other resources that are already available in much higher depth and accuracy online. there are good online courses out there that are highly structured

[smoky quest]

let go of physical posessions

[smoky quest]

Sure. But project yourself when you graduate and want to use the internship experience as a way to get interviews

[hearty kindle]

definitely, i want more directly cs related positions after this

[smoky quest]

of all the things jane street has to offer, that's the one thing you bring up?

[hearty kindle]

but how do i even do this 🤪 are there resources to guide me thru it a little?

[jagged tusk]

like what?

[smoky quest]

welcome to adulting:

• Look at the jobs the alumni of your schools are doing
• Look at the jobs in your target areas
• Look at the jobs related to your classes
• Look at the projects/jobs related to stuff in general

[hearty kindle]

google “free python course” or look it up on youtube. I liked “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” a ton, that really formed my love for this

[smoky quest]

you could even look at the topics of the channels of this discord server and related jobs for them

[jagged tusk]

the problem is time-sensitive

that's the thing that brokes everything

[hearty kindle]

there’s no shortcuts unfortunately, and in any event you’ll learn much faster that way compared to asking chatgpt random questions

[jagged tusk]

in programming or irl?

[hearty kindle]

yes

[jagged tusk]

irl there is a lot, I know a lot of people that makes big amounts of money

[smoky quest]

you may want to look for other types of jobs that are easier to get like waiter or working at a coffee shop.
People in CS would typically study full time for 3-5 years to get a high paying job

[jagged tusk]

so drop the college?

[smoky quest]

How the hell did you come to that conclusion from the previous messages?

[hearty kindle]

don’t drop college or your goals but realign. understand you’re not gonna just become hirable in a field like CS overnight

[jagged tusk]

it haves CS in it

I'm very dumb to explain right now, but I'm not in that research to get a CS job

[lavish igloo]

I droped the job after 1 year with the money that i earned, can i survive min 6 months to keep studing Python full time. Working 8 hours and studing 4 keep me k.o. every day

Idk what Will happen 😅 but lets play

[halcyon quail]

hi, tomorrow I have an interview for the intern position. any suggestions what I shall do a day before that?

[summer roost]

If you haven't done many interviews yet, I'd suggest focusing your last day on researching tips for how to interview well. Selling yourself well at job interviews is a skill, and like any other skill it's something you can practice and get better at. You can spend some time rehearsing how you should respond to behavioral interview questions - https://www.themuse.com/advice/behavioral-interview-questions-answers-examples seems like a good example of the sorts of behavioral questions to anticipate. @uncut quest I should have suggested this to you, too.

Beyond that, you can look up general advice on how to do well in interviews.

My usual advice is to remember that the people on the other side of the table don't want you to fail. There's nothing less fun than being stuck in a room with a stressed out person who knows they aren't doing well. If the interviewer tries to give you hints or tips, take them. If the interviewer asks whether you're sure an approach is right, give it some serious thought to whether they might be trying to steer you away from a wrong answer. If the interviewer suggests moving on to another question, let them move on.

You should be able to figure out lots of tips like that by doing some research.

[halcyon quail]

Thanks for kind word. I will take a look at those.

I don't find those behavioural questions hards because I have experience in those kind of situations 😄

The technical part of codding is the only one I am afraid of

[summer roost]

I'm not sure if this will make you feel better or worse, but you're not likely to be able to move the needle on how well you do on technical questions with only one day left. At this point, either you know the material or you don't. The best thing you can do is probably researching what types of questions you're most likely to be asked, and making sure you have a plan for how you'd answer them.

[halcyon quail]

actually, assuming intern is the lowest level I read all the questions and find them simple...

[sleek egret]

yar

[sleek egret]

is codding when you fish for cod in the north atlantic? 😋

[halcyon quail]

hhhhh :d

[vapid jay]

Where should I chat

[hearty island]

guys i have two interviews this week

[hearty island]

big hype

[bright nimbus]

Should i do a bootcamp instead of college. If bootcamps cost 18k for 6 months then it has to be good. It also has verified hiring partners like Google or Microsoft. Wouldnt it make more sense to go to bootcamp?

[hearty island]

i heard bootcamps are overrated

[sleek egret]

many companies do not hire people without university degrees

some companies do not promote people without degrees over certain ranks

many VC's won't invest in companies led by people who never at least attended university

if you can, go to university. it is possible to "succeed" without attending university, but it's more difficult.

[hearty island]

where’s wilder at

[near ocean]

18k for a bootcamp are you joking

[pine sleet]

Pretty sure a whole year at my university costs less than that lmao

[near ocean]

Dont link videos without context, why did you post this?

[smoky quest]

Bootcamps don't compare with college degrees in terms of value and ROI.
If you have the opportunity to go to college, I would recommend it over other options

[sacred veldt]

Is there a particular channel here on the Python Discord for teaming up on business ideas?

[peak halo]

No. This is by design.

[sacred veldt]

Fair enough. Does anyone know of any good resources for doing so?

[vapid jay]

yess, consider research a area with jobs, or at least that will lesser affected by AI

[next ridge]

I have completed BE in IT 2022
I have knowledge about core java , html ,css, javascript , python and django

So what will I learn next reactjs or java framework ....suggest me

[hearty island]

i don’t understand

[true harness]

is phone number expected for US resumes? I don't include it but then in an interview the person told me they expected it 😬🥴

[hearty island]

the job i’m interviewing for requires 5 years of experience and a PMP cert. why are they wasting time interviewing me?