career-advice

[near ocean]

you moved states right? at what point in your career?

[sleek egret]

I worked in philly, where I went to school for a couple years, then moved to NYC

tried a brief stint in memphis, but it was not for me. so I came back to NYC

[near ocean]

i know its the same country but were there any difficulties with moving across states?
with finding new jobs, like qualifications not being recognized, references not counting, etc

[dreamy spade]

These behavioural questions will be my downfall

[sleek egret]

it's easy when you're young. gets harder as you get older because you've built up contacts

in hindsight, I really should have moved to silicon valley during the 90's. c'est la vie

[wanton birch]

6. Significant change: Thanks to Covid everyone should have a good story. @dreamy spade

[dreamy spade]

“Describe a situation.” “Provide an example of a time.” I have to recall these events off the fly

[dim bay]

what's problem now? is it expensive or just holding back bcz of contacts in Ny?

[true harness]

but you don't. prepare situations you want to talk about beforehand

[sleek egret]

you don't remember your own life?

[near ocean]

and be some silly hoodie, cargo shorts wearing flip flop smacking tech nerd?

[sleek egret]

I know many more people in this area than I do out west

so yes. cost is not really an issue

[wanton birch]

He forgot to take notes.

[dreamy spade]

These are things I don’t ponder about in my life. Yes.

I have to memorize these lines like a theatric play

[dim bay]

but as programmer silicon vally is gold mine of opportunity right?

[sleek egret]

interesting

[wanton birch]

probably only if you are the top talent type

[sleek egret]

it's tougher now than in the 90's, but yes. many many firms both old and new.

[true harness]

do you actually read the advice you're given? you always seem to come back to the idea that you are forced to think up everything on the fly, but it's not true. all the advice you get indicates that you can prepare beforehand

[near ocean]

there's millions of people that work for SV companies, not everyone is a top talent

not everyone is mid, even

[sleek egret]

not that many, SV is actually not that large. maybe 2 mil population TOTAL, including SF and SJ.

[dreamy spade]

The video that I posted yesterday even suggested to memorize my lines

[sleek egret]

so only a few 100k working as software devs in the valley

[near ocean]

what about remote workers?

[wanton birch]

Dude! YOu don't memorise the whole thing. You just practice it and commit the jist of it to memory. The bulletpoints. The general idea. The rest is supposed to flow naturally.

[dreamy spade]

“The next question you might have is well,
8:38
Dan, does that mean that I have to
8:41
memorize a script of some sort?
8:44
And the answer is absolutely yes.
8:48
You don't want to go in unprepared.
8:50
In fact, you want to write it out, practice it,
8:54
rehearse it many many times.”

[sleek egret]

they don't count because they don't get promoted

[leaden jasper]

@dreamy spade You've been given advice previously about behavior interviews specifically in this channel. Do you have a more specific question? If not, this channel isn't just for general venting or ranting.

[true harness]

I'll admit you might memorize responses for highly common questions like "tell me about yourself", but it doesn't work in general

[sleek egret]

ok, I'm exagerating somewhat. but think about it. being remote means less contact, weaker relatoinships, etc.

[near ocean]

why do you have to be an old man about WFH situations

[sleek egret]

ok, I lied. remote workers are treated 100% fairly wrt promotions and opportunities

[dreamy spade]

??? How am I ranting?

[leaden jasper]

this channel isn't just for general venting

[wanton birch]

momorising a "script of some sort" != commit entire multi page story to memory

[sleek egret]

actors can do it. it's not like they're all geniuses

[true harness]

I do memorize general stories I want to talk about, and I do fully memorize a few questions

[dim bay]

They even pay lot less salary even pay lower based on your location in remote jobs

[sleek egret]

@dreamy spade to be clear, I'm not suggesting you memorize canned responses. IMO, that's a bad idea

[dreamy spade]

I’m not seeing how I’m venting. I’m just having a conversation. I can disengage from it if you want.

[leaden jasper]

posting these kinds of things and ignoring advice previously given and not asking specific questions is what I would classify as venting

[sleek egret]

companies don't want to hire robots

[dim bay]

is it just me or like almost every other developer starts it'd dev journey thinking one day he will build commercial product / company of his own?

[true harness]

that's probably somewhat common

[sleek egret]

it's very common. 90% give it up when they see what it actually takes

[slate cave]

i started my dev journey like this, built a commercial product when i was 16-17 before college

[sleek egret]

but 10% is still a very large number. of those, most fail.

[wanton birch]

@dreamy spade There is not much you can do at this point. If they want you to answer those questions and you want the job, one way or another you have to answer those questions. So no point in dwelling on the negative.

Think about it in a positive way. How fortunate it is that you have access to these questions in advance. You can use this time to go through your memories, organise your thoughts, practice speaking it out loud etc. You can get pointers from people on here or youtube videos. That's really neat! So just focus on preparing. Every second wasted moaning is to your detriment.

[sleek egret]

some try again, and a few succeed beyond their wildest dreams. thus inspiring the next generation.

[near ocean]

By the time they get some expertise with technology, most just give up
It's not easy to build an entire product yourself

[sleek egret]

even if you can, a product != a company

turns out, for a company so succed, you usually have to actually convince people to give you money. who knew?!?! 💀

[near ocean]

Are there stats on the background of founders* of successful startups?
the one I worked for was a languages graduate

but it seemed that the industry was kind of that way

[sleek egret]

many, first thing to understand is that most tech startups are very niche and stay smallish. second is that VC financing is actually quite rare, only a few hundred to low thousand deals happen each year globally.

that said, IIRC, around 80% of startups fail within the first 5 years. VC's anticipate maybe 3 or 4 in 10 to survive. and 1 in 10 or so to make it big.

[dim bay]

But if thousand of programmers build competing products most of them gonna fail , bcz for expample people don't need 1000 diffrent accounting software may be just few to chose from is fine

[near ocean]

the stat I know is 90% dont make it past 2 years 💀

[sleek egret]

just FYI, VC's often invest in more biotech/drug/pharma firms than software/saas/"tech" firms

[sleek egret]

that is true, but every industry supports a thriving industry of specialized software just for them. consider zoo management software => https://www.capterra.com/zoo-software/

[summer roost]

No, you don't. You need to sell yourself to the interviewer. You do that by having items about yourself that you know you want to highlight. You don't need to memorize lines, but you do need to have a plan for what points you need to communicate, and then you find ways to bring those points up when given open ended questions.

[sleek egret]

in the landscaping industry, there's landscaping design software, landscape job management software, and probably others

and there's thousands of industries. I knew a guy who made a decent living selling software to run hobbiest embroidery machines

[dim bay]

ya but even in zoo management software few top rated one are gonna make most money there are about 2 dozen mentioned their some of them are already not recovering their cost , and it gonna get toughr as newer software gonna keep coming

[sleek egret]

of course. pretty much every industry has a mature software ecosystem at this point.

that said, many of these companies are quite old and their product sorta sucks. others are awesome and cutting edge. it varies a lot.

[wanton birch]

So the only plausible break one can have is via disruption. Which implies that you've come up with something very new. Which again is unlikely from most devs.

[sleek egret]

the key is often just to be different. let me give you an example...

[dim bay]

so now new developer is like entering a gold mine where all plots are already captured by someone else

[sleek egret]

I met a guy who started a new company to build devices + a saas service to track shipping containers across transportation modes (ship, train, truck). now, there are multiple huge established players in this space...

he differentiated himself by giving his devices a "cool" design (think sleek plastic shell in fun colors) and a leading edge web UI. something that looked stylish, modern and non-industrial.

[near ocean]

make your own plot? a product being established doesnt mean its good, maybe users are looking for something just a little bit faster or easier to use than X existing solution
You dont need new features

[sleek egret]

was it "better"? no, not really. but it was different. and that's all it took for him to grab a small share (but of a huge market, so some pretty decent revenues). one of the established corps eventually bought his company.

[wanton birch]

A lot of the time, companies and organisations stick to inferior products just out of legacy reasons. This helps them avoid retraining a lot of people, seeking talents who know this new software and also helps them use their legacy stuff. It happens a lot with military and government contracts. You'll often see them heavily regulated to be using tech that makes no sense to us.

[sleek egret]

it's important to understand that no market is monolithic. there are people that care about appearences, and people who don't. some want the product to be butt ugly. some care about speed. some don't. some want lots of features. some want something very simple. etc, etc.

[smoky quest]

not really. It's more complicated than that

[summer roost]

Not really. You can outcompete entrenched players with better UX or better ergonomics. Apple might be a good example of that: Apple's big comeback in the 2000s was based on them building new products that were just better, more polished versions of existing things. The iPod was just an MP3 player. The iPhone was a BlackBerry with a touch screen. Nothing super revolutionary, just polished.

[sleek egret]

you want to establish why you're different and then clearly communicate it. if you do so, you WILL get customers. only question is, will you get enough fast enough?

[sleek egret]

it's very dangerous to think in terms of "better" unless you have a huge budget.

[wanton birch]

Of course you can always do that. I was saying what is more likely to be the case. I don't think the average lone software dev guy has the resources, pull, influence, or anything of Apple.

[summer roost]

Neither did Apple in the early 2000s, to be fair

[sleek egret]

think in terms of "how can I be different?" instead. that's much easier to execute.

[wanton birch]

Still inifinitely ahead of the average random CSE grad

[smoky quest]

look at how airbnb got started

[wanton birch]

Not to mention, you are only counting the hits and ignoring all the failures of even the biggest tech giants.

[smoky quest]

Or how slack got started

[sleek egret]

also be very careful when using VC financed firms as templates. those people have a LOT of money they can burn before they need to be profitable.

[summer roost]

Well, sure. Most people won't design new hardware. But the same approach is possible, at a different scale, for software products as well as hardware

[sleek egret]

if you have $10mil in the bank, you can execute a very different strategy vs if you're using $100k of your own, your friends and your relative's money

[summer roost]

New companies come and go all the time, big players become less important. New players find ways to attract customers by distinguishing themselves from established players.

[sleek egret]

exactly. differentiation and clear value proposition communications is the key

[summer roost]

Yeah. Disruption doesn't take huge new ideas. Just something different enough.

[sleek egret]

especially when you're mostly self-financed

[sleek egret]

let's be real. you're unlikely to disrupt shit 🙂

[summer roost]

Of course. Most startups fail.

[sleek egret]

you don't have to disrupt an industry to succeed

[wanton birch]

Wait! You have a startup? @summer roost

[dim bay]

ya I chose GameDev thinking most CS grads would be in mainline so here would be less competition but I was wrong almost every other CS guy atleast one thought of building games

[sleek egret]

there are literally millions of companies that gross a few million $'s a year of revenue who's owners do very well for themselves

[summer roost]

I don't. I'm quite happy with my 9-5. Startups are much more work for much lower expected value

[sleek egret]

lol, the game industry is where young devs go to be exploited 🙂

[wanton birch]

LMAO! Almost every single CSE student I've ever come across who wasn't compelety clueless and randomly doing a CS degree said they wanted to be game devs

[sleek egret]

I knew a young guy who quit my company to go work at a game studio in vegas. their offer to him was $0/yr and the possibility of being hired for salary in six months.

[summer roost]

What do you mean by "mainline"? Video games are incredibly mainstream

[sleek egret]

he was that desperate to work in gaming. needless to say, he came crawling back, lol. I shouldn't laugh, he was a good kid, just a bit naive.

[wanton birch]

Probably they mean working for FANG or other generic software/web tool stuff

[summer roost]

FANG employs, what, like 1% of developers?

[sleek egret]

oh no, much more

[wanton birch]

They were not talking about where most end up. They were talking about the flashy things most are drawn to. Like most Aerospace grads fantacising about working for Boeing or Lockheed or NASA or something

[sleek egret]

more like 5% or so, as much as 10% of SV. they have hugely bloated head counts. literal geniuses from MIT working on which color button is best. it's sadly funny.

[near ocean]

UX is a science

[sleek egret]

during the 2010's the FAANG co's would literally hire top talent just to keep them out of the hands of the competition

[summer roost]

5% seems too high to me, but ok, let's take that and run with it. That still means 19 out of 20 people would be doing other stuff

[smoky quest]

With the recent layoffs, it has been a great recruiting season

[wanton birch]

I've recently come across two FANG folks discussing this and bonding over it. I couldn't believe that these talents are wasted like this. They are smarter than God in many regards. lol. It's sad and funny at the same time to see them not being used.

[sleek egret]

google employs something like 30,000 developers alone

the other FAANG's are in the 20k range. that's like 100k devs. most in the US.

they probably only need 1/3 of them. if that

[wanton birch]

I wonder if part of it might be strategic. I mean, if you had the money and could take the talents out of the market, that'd just deprive your competition of much needed expertise and labor

[near ocean]

So dont apply to meta yet, gotcha

[sleek egret]

the gross profitability of those firms is off the charts

google's ad business prints money hand over fist. AAPL makes around $2B of net income (after tax profit) each month

that's real money 🙂

[summer roost]

Google tells me there's around 4.4 million software devs in the US, so 100k makes up about 2%

[dim bay]

now tell me how can I make that with software dev?

[sleek egret]

that number doesn't make sense. the total US workforce is only 160mil or so

[wanton birch]

Holy shit that's a lot of software devs. I thought there'd be 100k max

[near ocean]

go work for them and make a tiny sliver of that

[sleek egret]

so 1 in 36 working people are software devs? I don't think so

[summer roost]

That's based on BLS numbers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographics

[wanton birch]

They are probably counting Excel

[near ocean]

theres no salary estimates for software engineers on that wiki page 💀

[sleek egret]

The BLS numbers say about 1.1 mil

"software engineers" + "computer programmers"

and the references listed for the 4.4 mil number say 1.7 mil, lol

I suspect someone added incorrectly.

[wanton birch]

Even 1.7 million sounds like a lot to me. I didn't realise software devs were that easy to come by.

[sleek egret]

the US has more per capita than any other major nation. as you are probably aware, the USA is the center of the global software industry outside of china

[wanton birch]

Well! Learnt at least one thing good about the US then!

[sleek egret]

either way, even if your assignments are boring, if you get an offer from a FAANG or really any "name" company, you should take it. work there for a year or two. it is strong "social proof" of your skills.

[dim bay]

on that note, what if China surpasses US and Yuan becomes global currency and we got Chinse FAANG companies hiring top talent? will that open up flood opf opportunities for software devs?

[sleek egret]

quite often, if you worked at google or apple, your chances of an interview go way up. and when asked why you left, you can easily say "my assignments were boring/not challenging". which shifts the dynanic to the having to sell themselves to you.

[sleek egret]

the yuan will not become the global currency any time soon (by that I mean in the next 10 or 20 years)

[smoky quest]

They already are hiring top talent

[dim bay]

Why you so sure about that

[sleek egret]

I don't know how many software engineers china graduates each year, but I do know it's a LOT. and not all of them suck, just by the law of large numbers, some of them will be top talent.

[summer roost]

The euro would be a far, far more likely replacement for the dollar as the international reserve currency than the yuan.

[sleek egret]

because it takes time and the yuan is not even close to 5th place in terms of being a global currency. it would not surprise me if the RMB became the top global currency in say 30 or 40 years, but it's not happening soonish.

the yuan is still soft-pegged to the USD, after all

[summer roost]

https://realeconomy.rsmus.com/why-the-dollar-remains-the-worlds-reserve-currency/

[sleek egret]

further the chinese would have to run a large trade deficit for many years

the current USD is the most trusted and most widely accepted form of money in human history

this will not last forever, but it is the current state of things

[smoky quest]

3-5 years ago, someone would have at least mentioned something about BTC or ETH in this conversation

[sleek egret]

you just did 🙂

highest volume traded crypto is... USD-denominated stablecoins

[wanton birch]

Do most software dev work for some sort of web stuff?

[sleek egret]

no. not even in web-first companies.

if even 20% of google's developers touch web UI stuff, I'd be surprised

[dim bay]

so what "most" work on?

[sleek egret]

everything else. from finance to reporting, from monitoring to infrastructure management, from HR systems to data transfer, from analytics to database management, etc, etc.

in advanced economies, pretty much every aspect of business operations relies on software

wanna make gun barrels? you do it by programming the machine that runs the hammer forge

[dim bay]

but aren't most those software built in web? like greytHR software is loggend on by employees in web

[sleek egret]

wanna make steel? you do it by programming the machines that mixes the proper ratios for thea alloys, monitors the temps, controls the heating elements, cleans and monitors the air, etc.

[sleek egret]

that's just the front end UI. for every line of UI code there is 5 to 10 lines of code for stuff that runs behind the scenes

[wanton birch]

I always assume that stuff like that don't require that many or that much developers

[dim bay]

isn't that backend web dev?

[sleek egret]

lol, stuff like sales tax (for retail) and payroll is very complicated

[sleek egret]

sure, if by "backend web dev" you mean "everything that's not front end web dev". which is like 80% of software development 🙂

[dim bay]

now what I mean is are these jobs done by one who call them Full stack web devs? like if I do certification in Full stack web dev will II be able to do that?

[sleek egret]

let me put it a different way. let's say you work at a large company in their data warehouse group. your job is to manage the schema and data of a set of big SQL databases. you also help other devs in your firm formulate/optimize their queries. your database is hit by lots of apps with web UI's. are you a "back end web dev"?

or say you work on software to control how automotive assembly line is coordinated. the UI for it is written using web technologies. are you a "back end web dev"?

you see what I'm saying? "web dev" is just the UI in front of the stuff that does the actual work.

[smoky quest]

If you are in HS or college, a CS degree will be the path of least resistance and with the most opportunities and compensation.
full stack web certs have zero value

[dim bay]

apart from technical software dev naming conventions I am interested in choosing course/certification whic makes me eligible for Most of those 80% you talking about

I mean specilization not degree

[sleek egret]

you pretty much need university for that. it's possible to get into those fields without a degree. but it's quite difficult.

[near ocean]

No certification will teach you these things, you learn on the job

[sleek egret]

one viable path is to 1) learn about an industry domain and 2) learn how to write software. this combination of skills/knowledge is VERY valuable to companies. the downside is that your specialization in that industry is difficult to transfer.

not super difficult though, people shift industries all the time

but unless you wanna be stuck moving buttons around all day, you should go to university if you can

[dim bay]

my question is will one with exprties in backend stack like "PHP, Javascript, Python, along Django maybe Postgrey sql will be able to do that

[smoky quest]

focus on the skills, not the language that happen to be popular now

[sleek egret]

those things are just tools. required but not sufficient. to use an analogy, they're like grammar and vocabulary. sure you need them to write a novel, but they don't make you a novelist.

language are simply the means by which you express concepts and ideas. to put it bluntly, learning X, Y or Z programming languages is the easy part.

[dim bay]

so can elaborate more on what skills needed other than programming language skills and tool expertiese?

[sleek egret]

so learn them. of the ones you listed, I'd prioritize python, js and sql first. but you'll need to pick up other languages over the years.

[sleek egret]

a lot depends on what industry you go into and what tasks/projects you'll be assigned to.

[smoky quest]

Look at the names of specializations. They aren't "php dev". They are about "software quality", "distributed systems" or "software verification and programming languages"

[sleek egret]

if you do gaming, you'll need linear algebra (algebra with vectors). unless you're working on the networking parts, then you'll need distributed systems and network knowledge, possibly graph theory too.

iow, it depends. don't sweat it too much. you will learn the basics in university and, more importantly, learn how to learn complex stuff rapidly.

[dim bay]

ok got it but other skills will come with experience, to start I need to decide on language and tools now

[smoky quest]

so you need to decide on a screw driver or wrench prior to deciding if you will build a car or a house?

[sleek egret]

no, they come when your boss gives you an assignment and you realize you have to remember that stochastic calc class you took in school 10 years ago over the weekend. 🙂

[near ocean]

Oh god no

[dim bay]

let me refine my question this time, which tech stack should I choose to be eligible for most of these jobs?

[sleek egret]

look, don't take these bits of advice as saying "don't learn XYZ framework/language/tech". you should learn them. but it's more a matter of learning how to learn new languages/tech/frameworks quickly. it just takes practice.

[gritty rivet]

Focus on what you want to build. That will guide you to appropriate tools

[near ocean]

It doesnt matter and it depends on your local market, not our opinions

[sleek egret]

it just changes, brah. over my professional career, I've written software in C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, Hypertalk, Object Pascal, assembly, SQL, VB, etc, etc

and I'm nothing special. everyone my age has done that but with a different mix

languages, frameworks, tech come and go. ya just gotta roll with it

[dim bay]

you were talking about 20% jobs at Fang being about web dev and other 80% aren't, so among those 80% also I wana know distribution, not very specifically, but wanna chose tech stack to hit most jobs among those 80% at FANG

[smoky quest]

different jobs will require different tools and languages.
Over the course of your degree, you will get to learn a few languages. As a practitioner, you will get to use multiple languages in the same job.
So don't over-index on that

[near ocean]

Youre going to plan your learning over what 5 companies use? What if they change?

[dim bay]

Then I am doomed, bac in my basement playing video games

[sleek egret]

they use languages like C++, Rust, Go, Python, Java, C#, SQL, Javascript, Typescript, Clojure, etc. and given their size probably a bit of VB and more

[gritty rivet]

Which jobs? Find a list of job openings in your area that require a given set of tools and that tells you enough to know it's a viable skillset. But you can't learn everything so you focus on whatever interests you

[near ocean]

Just make the correct decision? Its not that hard to not do what you just said would not work

[wanton birch]

That worries me a lot too. Every other thing I come across asks for their own list of software tools and I don't know how to specialise in all that at once. There's only so much I can learn well. I'm now trying to focus on C++, Python and some bash

[sleek egret]

essentially, at every large company, you will a wide variety of languages in use.

[near ocean]

Job requirements are wishlists, youre not meant to check all of them especially as a junior

[smoky quest]

They all start to look alike after a while.
I wouldn't worry

[summer roost]

you don't need to specialize in everything. You need to be enough of a generalist to pick up new skills as required. And specializing in some particular technology might allow you to get jobs that require a deeper knowledge of that technology.

[sleek egret]

don't sweat it too much. after you learn a few imperative languages (things like Pytho, C++, Go, JS, etc.) learning a new one won't be a big deal. once you understand the concepts, it's just a matter syntax variations

[gritty rivet]

Right, you can't specialize in everything at all at once, nobody really expects that if they're not going to pay for an experienced person

[sleek egret]

recursion is recursion, closures are closures, etc, etc

[wanton birch]

I am banking on them believing that if I know a few, the others I can always learn. When they see what I have done and can do, they will hopefully be able to trust me.

[sleek egret]

they are too

[near ocean]

At my current job the only requirement I checked out of like 6 was python

[sleek egret]

back a few jobs, our company got a request from a major client to fix some existing software they had. My team caught the assignment. the software was written in C#. no one on my team knew C#.

[gritty rivet]

Yes, that's how it goes. For example I know people who were hired for Django-heavy jobs even though they had no real experience with Django.

[sleek egret]

so I told one of my guys, "learn C# and fix it. you have two weeks." he was all "WTF? I don't know C#?!?!? How can you expect me to do this?!?!?" but I knew he was sharp enough. he learned it and got it done.

[wanton birch]

What were their backgrounds like until they got that job?

[sleek egret]

my little C# story is a bit of an extreme case, but it is illustrative.

[dim bay]

ya you guys are neck deep into programming, New guys like me worry thinking how much it took to learn first programming language

[wanton birch]

LMAO! That reminds me of my masters project supervisor. He asked me to develop a software package for something in C++. I was like "WTF!.". He was like "You know you can learn these things, right?".

[gritty rivet]

They definitely had some demonstrated Python skills, and other adjacent stuff like SQL.

Other people have given even better examples though where people learn whole languages on the job

[near ocean]

The first is always hardest, you spend 18 years studying your native tongue

[sleek egret]

when you start your first job, you think you know a lot. you then realize you know almost nothing 🙂 after a few years, you think you know everything. then you get put in charge of a project and realize there's an entire world you know nothing about. rinse and repeat a few times 🙂

[sleek egret]

dont' stress too much about it. just learn as much as you can and the puzzle pieces will start to slot into place easier and easier.

[dim bay]

what;s your C# story?

[sleek egret]

^ this

[wanton birch]

The one where they fixed c-hastag project without having previous experience in that "language"

[dim bay]

so u learned c# for one assignment?

[sleek egret]

not me, I ordered one of my team to learn it. and yes

he was very anti-microsoft too. which made it even funnier.

[dim bay]

how much time you gave that guy?

[near ocean]

The real question is how much money, not time

[sleek egret]

he had a few weeks (I think it was two but maybe three or four) to learn it and fix the client's software.

[wanton birch]

20-25 per hour

[sleek egret]

he got paid his salary and a bit of a larger bonus come the holidays

[near ocean]

What industry was this project in, anything fun?

[sleek egret]

honestly, I can't recall what the software did. our company did outsourced graphics automation for large retailers. I guess it can't hurt, the client was disney

we did the job to keep them happy, it wasn't really part of my team's remit

[summer roost]

anyone who knows Java can probably learn enough C# to get a job done in just a couple of days, honestly. Maybe a week.

[wanton birch]

wait! how old are you? If you don't mind me asking

[sleek egret]

so very old. so old that I have some grey hairs.

[broken heath]

This is my channel for free courses https://t.me/Udemyfreeo

[sleek egret]

congrads?

[broken heath]

Thanks

[wanton birch]

This is not the place for promoting your content

[broken heath]

I don't do it But I wanna give people gifts dude

[wanton birch]

That's kind of you. But this isn't a gift giving channel either.

Question:

How common is it to have to do around 6 interviews for a job?

[sleek egret]

that's a bit much but not completely outrageous if you can do it in 1 or 2 sessions

[summer roost]

I'd expect the norm to be around 4-5 hours of interviews total for a tech job.

[broken heath]

Dude I don't wanna anything from you only wanna benefit people

[wanton birch]

I came across a nice company with very nice roles. Some research on them suggest that their process is like:

1. Email invite
2. Phone interview
3. Phone interview with hiring manager
4. In person behavioural interview
5. In person coding test
6. In person mathematics test
7. In person some other technical knowledge test

[summer roost]

!rule 6 - this isn't a place for advertising your channel.

[inner wren]

Rules

6. Do not post unapproved advertising.

[sleek egret]

as long as the in person interviews are done in one session (two max), it's extensive but not outrageous

[wanton birch]

They are all separate sessions.

[sleek egret]

they want you to visit their offices four separate times? that is unreasonable.

[near ocean]

It sounds like theyre hiring a whole department 🥴

Thats like 3 persons' worth of interview time

[wanton birch]

Well they want you to know some coding stuff, physics stuff , mathematics and engineering stuff.

[near ocean]

How long is each session?

[wanton birch]

About an hour it seems

[near ocean]

So 4 hours total spread over multiple days? Excluding HR calls and non technical stuff

[wanton birch]

Yes
4 hours are just the dedicated techncial skills interivews. Before that you have to pass the 45 mins - 60 mins interview with the hiring manager. And before that the short 30 mins interview with their recruiter/screener.

[summer roost]

6 total hours is a bit longer than I'd expect, but not far outside the norm. Though scheduling 6 separate calls for that seems really annoying. I don't think that process reflects well on the company, personally

[near ocean]

I would give that a miss, thats insane

[wanton birch]

I wonder if 6 hours, at least 4 hours of technical stuff, might end up being too taxing for the candidate. If done in one go I mean.

[summer roost]

perhaps, but 6 separate calls seems like a worse solution for that than just fewer total hours

[near ocean]

4hours for in person technical stuff is wild and definitely one to consider before attending

[wanton birch]

So how would you hire an entry level person in a tech role?

[near ocean]

Recruiter call
Tech interview, 2-3hours
Thats it, maybe a short 10min HR call or whatever

[sleek egret]

our firm does a take-home test as first filter, then a phone interview, then two more interviews (home or phone) in one session. so if you make it the whole way, about 3 hours of interviews plus an hour for the test.

[near ocean]

Does it really need to be any more complicated?

My first job was a small take home, a short call to discuss solutions to take home and an in person session with a presentation (2h) and i had to travel to london beforehand to show up on time and it was incredibly tiring

[sleek egret]

is london nice during the summer?

[wanton birch]

That doesn't seem all that different if you are doing 3 hours instead of 4

[near ocean]

3h from the comfort of your home though, thats how I interviewed for current job, it wasnt as hard

[wanton birch]

So you do the tests online? like zoom or something?

[near ocean]

Zoom and replit or jsfiddle or other such tools

[wanton birch]

But yeah! I agree. Not having to travel and make all that arrangements would help immensely.

[near ocean]

There really isnt a need for in person interviews, maybe offer them if the candidate wants to and throw in a tour but not require them

[wanton birch]

Who knows! Maybe they want you to show up many times to score you on your "vibe" and "feel" on the side.

[near ocean]

They get one, anything more they can suck

[wanton birch]

Okay. I need some major help with something. It's got to do with preparing for technical interviews while practicing and learning more C++ and Python. I don't know how to use my time in the most efficient manner. Should be doing 1 hour of leet code stuff a day or something? Or do I focus solely on getting better at those target languages and making things with them?

[near ocean]

When i was looking I just did the daily leetcode for a couple months
3 of the 4 problems they gave me I had solved in these daily leetcodes

[wanton birch]

I'm also having to review a lot of engineer/physics and mathematics on the side. So efficient programming is a must.

I never tried leet code stuff. I kinda feel like starting it might crush my hopes and dreams 🤣

[near ocean]

Its not that hard, quite literally just practice and suddenly youre doing hards

It feels closer to training muscle memory, muscle memory thats kind of useless?

[wanton birch]

One benefit is that it might desensitise me to random abstract tests. Which would make me feel less nervous in an actual test situation and just sit there calmly trying to do what needs done

[near ocean]

You should try their weekly/biweekly competitions then as well

[modern ore]

Need to pass google screening 😠🙏

[spark cobalt]

[wanton birch]

Question:
I am trying to upload all my code to my github for employers to see. My code has a lot of commented out code in it that I didn't remove. Is that okay or the messy look will reflect poorly on me?

Here is a sample for example:

[summer roost]

That will reflect poorly. That's below professional quality.

[radiant moon]

I'd make it look as if you were ready to check it in For Realz at work

[wanton birch]

@summer roost @radiant moon Thanks guys. I'll clean it up and leave no unused code in it.

[pine sleet]

This isn't related to the topic of this channel

[chilly furnace]

Hey, so about 2 years ago, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science. I am not sure where people get jobs...... but I was talking to a guy in a discord server saying something about computer science grads getting clerical jobs first and then moving up. Anyway, I am completely unfamiliar with this process.

How do you guys get jobs? I don't understand

For clairification, I do have a job, its just not relevant at all and I don't understand how people get those actually related jobs.

Not that it matters, I am moving away from computer science now

[smoky quest]

There are job ads about computer science related jobs posted on job boards such as linkedin or indeed.
People apply to them, go through the interview and then get said jobs.

No need to start with clerical jobs

[chilly furnace]

what kind of jobs?

[smoky quest]

computer science related jobs. Like software engineer

[chilly furnace]

I dont understand. Is that actually how they do it?

[smoky quest]

yes

[chilly furnace]

do you have a job?

[smoky quest]

yes

[chilly furnace]

how did you get that job?

[smoky quest]

I got contacted by people looking at my profile on linkedin and were looking for people with my special kind of skills

[chilly furnace]

ok, my Linkedin has to be bugged somehow

[smoky quest]

if you are entry level, no one will go out of their way to recruit you, unless you are very special.
That will be on you to apply

[chilly furnace]

How did you get your first related job?

[smoky quest]

It doesn't matter.
What matters are the jobs are advertised on linkedin and indeed. You should look for a job there and apply. If your resume is appealing, they will reach back.

Having been two years out of the field, you should be prepared for some difficulties though

[dim bay]

I got and e-mail from HR for an Interview, their email Id got error Gmail says Google coun't varify if this mail was sent from XYZ domain, I also checked their Linkedin Account where HR and Domain head does not have photo attached, I asked can you send mail from diffrent account to varify or could send/accept me LinkdIn request to confirm they got offended and asked me to drop this job opportunity

[azure heart]

!rule ad

[inner wren]

Rules

6. Do not post unapproved advertising.

[dim bay]

guys do you think I was at fault? or did right thing?

[smoky quest]

not enough data to compute.
I wouldn't overthink it

[lilac quail]

Weird interaction. Switch your focus, you don't want to work for people with poor communication anyway

[chilly furnace]

I've had immeasurable difficulties immediately after graduating

[white relic]

you graduated in 2021?
The US job market was kinda weird at the time, don't know where you are/were looking

[proven crest]

You got an email that you believed could be phishing. You took steps to verify they were who they purported to be.

Any normal company, especially one working with technology and sensitive data will train or expect staff to be trained in exactly those steps.

Either A: It was some type of phishing email.
Or B: They absolutely aren't the type of people / company you want to work for.

So, yes you absolutely did the right thing. You either saved your identify, money, time, or, whatever else they were phishing for or saved yourself time and stress working within a terrible company.

[lime bramble]

As far as web and software development goes, Python, followed by Java, JavaScript, and C++, are among the most popular programming languages in today's market. Whether you're looking to improve your coding skills or start a career in technology, learning a coding language can bring many benefits.

[true harness]

recursive error is not lying to you. at this point, if you're not applying to jobs, you're not going to get a job

[gritty rivet]

By applying for jobs. If you're doing that and not getting interviews, then you need feedback on your resume. You can share anonymized screenshots here

[buoyant seal]

in my case to get first job, it was enough to post my resume at local hiring web sites. i just got invited to interview of a job that was located in same town as i am
my city was big enough to have a plentiful of IT vacancies and people in active search of people at same location
P.S. my resume contained stuff of fresh graduate from uni, with participation in open source project

[fringe sphinx]

One thing too; cs majors end up in all sorts of jobs. Not just SWE, but qa, devops, technical sales, etc.

[lilac quail]

Not sure where to post, I came across this and thought it would be cool to share for the various people that were asking about data engineering:
cc @wanton birch @stiff oracle
https://lakefs.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/1200X630-lakeFS-State-of-Data-Engineering-Report.png

[stiff oracle]

Thank you. This is helpful

[proven crest]

I applied to jobs with resumes and cover letters tailored towards that job and I contacted companies and relevant people on LinkedIn, especially if I found a person relevant to the job I was applying for (e.g applied to X role in Y company, found talent manager for Y company, messaged him.)

One thing I'd say is don't take your foot off the gas at any point, its easy to get an interview and relax with applications, but that'll bite you in the long run if you don't get a job. There is often a week or more of lag between an application and a response. A month after I got my first job I still got invited for an interview for a job I applied to before that one.

Another thing is don't be afraid to send follow ups if you dont hear anything back after a week or so (just make sure its casual and not desperate). Find a pipeline that works for you, track your numbers and stick to it. Treat job searching as a full time job.

[hearty island]

my boss wants to leave this company so badly

he was like man i’m not gonna be here much longer 💀

[proven crest]

computer science grads getting clerical jobs first and then moving up

I guess I'm not entirely sure what a clerical job is, but isn't that completely separate from a comp sci job? Kind of like getting a job as an air host(ess) to move up to become a pilot? That doesn't make much sense to me.

[untold mulch]

i need some career advice

[proven crest]

Whats up?

[untold mulch]

i dont have any degree yet is it possible for me to get a job just by learning python?

[true harness]

no

[untold mulch]

then what are the minimum things that I should know in order to get a job

[proven crest]

It's possible, you'll probably need to branch out and learn to work with some popular libraries and will probably want to know some basic SQL and DSA.

It'll be harder, but it can be done.

How old are you / what country are you in? Is there any reason why you can't get a degree?

[crude moon]

You definitely can get a job without a degree.

[untold mulch]

im 23 and from india and the reason is that i have a huge gap between my 12th and now

[crude moon]

You need some evidence that you can code, projects, etc.. Certain places will not hire people without degrees, but a lot of places will.

[untold mulch]

like making a portfolio?

i m also learning web development

[crude moon]

Yes, exactly, a portfolio. How the portfolio looks or whether it is just your github depends on what job you are going for. If web development, that for example, is easier to enter without a degree than say data engineering. With web development, without a degree, then I would expect to see a website with some example projects.

[untold mulch]

i hear people say data engineering data science and data management and all that, are those all different?

[crude moon]

They are different, yes.

[untold mulch]

i started learning web deva few weeks ago so far i have covered intermediate css and but as for python i know till classes and a few modules

[proven crest]

Whats the minimum length of washing line to dry clothes?

[vital egret]

Data engineering is about architecting / creating / coding data pipelines, ingesting data, modelling databases, distributed systems. It is an engineering role, which can be anything to do with data, usually at large scale. Data Science is typically focused on Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. Data Engineers also often integrate Data Scientists work in to production environments. There is also a role called Machine Learning engineer which is a kind of hybrid of the two roles.

[proven crest]

You're quite young. Getting a comp sci degree would be the easiest path as its all planned out and structured. Its designed to impart the knowledge you need to start a career.

[untold mulch]

ah thats how it is

[untold mulch]

getting a degree is hard for me, its just complicated

[proven crest]

In that case do you know what kind of job you want? You mentioned Web Dev, is that where you want to get into? Front end or Back end?

[untold mulch]

mostly front end for now but will go for full stack

[untold mulch]

and im not sure about job yet thats why i came here

[proven crest]

That makes things a fair bit easier IMO.

You want to start learning HTML, CSS and JS. Start thinking of and building projects independently (don't follow youtube project tutorials.) That's a big task in itself, but when you become reasonably proficient start learning a framework. Make sure you have a GitHub and learn how to use Git. <- do this first so people can see your process and commits

[untold mulch]

this much is enough to be a web developer?

[radiant moon]

certainly not "full-stack". it'd be enough, I guess, to write front ends

[untold mulch]

i mean as a starting point to be a freelancer or something?

[bronze moat]

dude my python stuck on progress

setup progress

oh it got to core iterpreter

[proven crest]

Again, it’s very difficult to answer that. If you are proficient in all of the above, have a strong understanding, good portfolio and can independently create front end sites and apps then yes it should be

[gritty rivet]

Getting a job as an SWE with no degree of any kind and no relevant work experience is likely to be even harder and more complicated

[gritty rivet]

If you can settle for very low pay like US$3/hour then it's worth a shot

[untold mulch]

i think i should be looking for a roadmap instead

[gritty rivet]

There are lots of roadmaps available for different specialties so you can take your pick. roadmaps.sh has some decent ones. You should also be looking at the job market in your local area as you decide what's worth learning

[gritty rivet]

These titles are fuzzy though, and to me it seems like a lot of Data Scientists don't necessarily do AI/ML but or more like statisticians

[lilac quail]

I never met a Data-scientist only doing statistical work and not touching any AI/ML model. But as you said, titles are titles.

[small geode]

Don't focus on Python itself really, you're never guaranteed a language to be working in as they're just tools. What is your current situation (education, work experience)?

You can do almost everything in almost every language. I don't want to say something that would make you believe it's a path to a job, because none of them would be. How old are you if you don't mind me asking?

[sleek egret]

you should learn all parts of python. also all parts of javascript, C++, Java, Go, Rust, HTML, CSS, C#, etc, etc

[small geode]

If you're already going to college, get the degree. If your plan is to get an SWE job without a degree, you're going to find it extremely difficult compare to going through school.

[sleek egret]

to be blunt, learning programming languages is the easy part

[small geode]

In what way?

That's not an easy answer, and you shouldn't be aiming for money. You'll end up with a job you hate that way.

[vapid jay]

Hey guys I'm a newbie and I need advice

I can start Web Dev right now (I have a gaming PC, no need to invest)

or

Spend money on a MacBook Air and start iOS app dev

[near ocean]

You dont need a gaming pc to do web dev or a macbook to do ios apps

[vapid jay]

What's the point of making iOS apps if I can't submit them?

[proven crest]

Why don’t you make android apps?

[vapid jay]

You know anyone using Android?

[true harness]

you can use a VPS for development. very cheap

[proven crest]

Yeah 70% of the world

[vapid jay]

Our parents and grandparents maybe

[true harness]

¯_(ツ)_/¯ ok

[vapid jay]

Sure they need apps too, but It's probably smarter to get into the more in demand field

[proven crest]

No, 70% of the world is not just your parents and grandparents.

[proven crest]

iOS will more than likely remain a significantly smaller global market share to Android.

[vapid jay]

If I was to make android apps id want them on app store too

But if i have to choose id choose ios

[true harness]

you can use a VPS for development. very cheap

[near ocean]

People ignoring advice seems to be a common theme here

[proven crest]

Yup

[vapid jay]

Sorry I googled what is VPS and forgot about it, im about to check it out

VPS monthly plan costs a little less than a monthly payment for a MacBook Air so I'd rather just get a macbook

[proven crest]

I just don’t understand the logic here. You have the tools required to learn to develop android apps, which have a significantly larger global market share than iOS. And far more learning resources. And the tools have been around for a lot longer than swift. And they can use frameworks used in web dev which you’re also interested in.

BUT you just want to jump through hoops to learn proprietary swift because your grandparents have android? Or you somehow think the android platform will soon be replaced by iOS?

[true harness]

maybe for top tier ones.. you can get a VPS for $5/mo

[small geode]

I tend to not try understanding the logic of Apple diehards.

[vapid jay]

I just really don't like Androids to be honest

[vapid jay]

Can't find that, but it's probably going to be laggy for that price

[near ocean]

I dont like technology but here we are arguing about it

At the end of the day youre knowingly limiting your choices and its all in your hands not to do that

[true harness]

your assumption is based on nothing. on the other hand, I have developed on such a VPS, and it's perfectly fine. but honestly, you should just listen to the other people telling you to just develop for other platforms

[vapid jay]

I was mainly deciding between Web Dev and iOS apps, is Web Dev no good?

[near ocean]

No good in terms of what

[proven crest]

No one said that.

We said that android app development and web development use a lot of the same technologies whereas iOS apps are developed in Swift.

[vapid jay]

Just in general If you guys had to choose between web dev or mobile apps

[near ocean]

Webdev

Because why limit myself to a single platform, especially one thats Apple
I already do stuff for mobile anyway (sadly)

[proven crest]

When you become proficient in web dev it won’t be too difficult of a task to create mobile apps. Then it won’t be too difficult of a task to port them to iOS

But paying $1000 and $100 a year to limit yourself to 27% of the global market share I don’t understand. Especially as someone who is just starting out.

[vapid jay]

Okay

[near ocean]

You can die on weird apple scented hills after you get going with a career

[proven crest]

If you were already a seasoned developer and wanted to learn swift that’s a different story,

[vapid jay]

I have an iPhone so it would be pretty stupid to make Android apps and not be able to use them, or having to buy an extra Android phone

I guess ill get into Web Dev with the Odin Project

[near ocean]

This is such a silly argument
I work for a gambling services company, does that mean I need to start throwing money away in casinos?

[gritty rivet]

Reasonable... But even Apple will tell you that you don't need a Mac to develop for iOS.

[proven crest]

You don’t need an android phone to test them. If you wanted to test on a real device you can get one for $150.

[vapid jay]

Wouldn't you want to use your own apps on your own phone without having to buy a new android

[proven crest]

I’m so confused with this guy.

[near ocean]

If I only developed things I would use i'd be dead in the streets or living with my mom still

[gritty rivet]

Same, but beginners generally start with things they want to use and that's not a bad thing at all

[lilac quail]

Remain broad in your choices and specialize later ✌️

[proven crest]

But again can you really sleep soundly at night advising someone to learn Swift to develop iOS apps as opposed to web development and androids development which have so many cross technologies?

Especially when they’ve already said they’re interested in web development

[vapid jay]

Okay so iOS apps are too niche, got it

But I still have to decide between mobile vs Web Dev

[fringe sphinx]

Why do you ahve to decide?

[vapid jay]

So that I don't have to do 2 things at once?

[fringe sphinx]

You're asking, what should you work on right now, at your stage of education?

[gritty rivet]

Only to start, and almost anyone will tell you to start with basic web development because it's just way more beginner friendly. Diving into mobile app development without any web experience is likely to be difficult and discouraging

[vapid jay]

Yes

I am a Noob, one day i shall be an overseer

[proven crest]

Learn web development(HTML, CSS, JS). When you start to become proficient in JS learn React. When you become proficient in React you can start thinking about mobile development.

[vapid jay]

which site is this?

[vapid jay]

Ok thank you

[vapid jay]

RealPython

[lilac quail]

A better strategy is to remain broad until you really identify what you like and what's valuable on the market.
If you feel you can develop a passion for mobile, iOS apps then go for it.
Just be aware of the risks entering a silo: that technology alone has a risk to disappear or be under-evaluated some day.

[vapid jay]

My bad, I just realized I was in the wrong chat.

@lilac quail I like the idea of coding while having to understand what looks good and what doesnt, pretty much programming and being creative at the same time

[proven crest]

You’re describing front end web development more than anything

[vapid jay]

Both web dev and mobile apps need to look good tho

[lilac quail]

Then I'd follow all advices already said, study front-end as a whole. Don't get stuck on mobile yet.

[vapid jay]

Alright thanks a lot

Guys i need some advice for taking decision in important point!

so in india there is concept (Pay after placement) so its like coding bootcamp for full stack developer or data scientist so its like 8 month course after completion they will help you to get in job for 5laks salary/year(which is considered good) in india if we got job we have to pay 20% of your income every month for 36 months

they will teach you to full stack developer,and soft skills training,resume buliding so simple whatever need you to get job

my question is : joining this kinda bootcamp is worth the money we giving or it would be foolish to join?

[fringe sphinx]

Do you know anyone who's done this and successfully gotten placed?

[vapid jay]

yes this is trusted company instructors are employees of top mnc (google,microsfot...etc)

[fringe sphinx]

Says who? (sorry, I'm just saying: don't be too trusting. Lots of people say that they have top talent/teachers/placement). 20% of income seems pretty steep, but I'd be very careful.

[near ocean]

What happens if you dont get a job at the end

[vapid jay]

1 year total duration after completion of course if you didnt get job you dont have to pay anything.

if you fired or layoff from job agreement will pause untill you get new job

[sleek egret]

20% seems rather steep. at $40k/yr over 3 years, that's $24k

at $80k/yr, that's $48k

[near ocean]

So for any job you get a year after you finish you have to pay these people?

Why cant you just get a degree

[vapid jay]

ya 20% from monthly salary for 3 years.

[proven crest]

You need to read the full terms and small print. Research and read critical reviews. From what you’ve said, it seems like you’d be a fool not to.

You know what they say about things that are too good to be true…

[near ocean]

Thats crazy

[vapid jay]

yes but you think its high or low?

[gritty rivet]

This is common in the US too, it's called Income Sharing Agreement (ISA).

It's better to avoid it if you can. Take self learning as far as you can, save up for a more affordable bootcamp, etc.

[vapid jay]

yes 100% its isa here too exactly.

[proven crest]

Cheaper and quicker than a degree though

And with a guarantee degrees don’t come with

[sleek egret]

um, most universities cost less

[vapid jay]

i alreay have bachelors in commerce but ass techs only hire science or engineer graduates as fresher else you need 1+ year minmum experience in india

[near ocean]

Theres no guarantee here either, you might not get a job after this

[sleek egret]

guarantee of what? that you'll be charged $48k+ for a year of vocational education?

[proven crest]

Less than 24k?

[proven crest]

A guarantee of a job paying 80k after a year of vocational education, yes.(using your numbers)

[vapid jay]

yes if we cant able to get job we have to pay anything.

[sleek egret]

there's no guarantee of a job

[near ocean]

Youre wasting 8 months then

What are the chances people get jobs after this thing

[vapid jay]

actually its likely job gurantee means if no job pay nothing kinda

[proven crest]

The you don’t pay iirc? And you got a free education to a standard that most people get a high paying job from

[sleek egret]

so they guarantee that you're "likely" to get a job?

[near ocean]

An 8 month bootcamp isnt any standard

[fringe sphinx]

They probably have some very generous legal language too... lots of "outs" for them.

[sleek egret]

but probably none for you

[proven crest]

That’s what you wanna watch for, read full terms

[sleek egret]

I'll bet you have to pay 20% no matter what kind of job you get. so if you can't find a tech job and take a job as a messenger, 20% to them!

[wanton birch]

I don’t want to sound negative but it sounds like overall it would be better to use student loans to pay a company to let you learn and intern there for the whole duration of your degree. I wish this option was available where I could teach myself formal stuff from online and what not and then work at a company. After the 4 years, that’d put me way ahead of even most junior engineers.

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, that sounds like a great business. I'll "train" 100 people, and take 20% of whatever they earn for 3 years.

[vapid jay]

1:3 but they hunt job and arrange interviews through thier network clearing interview in our hands

[sleek egret]

here's a life tip: the main reason people run for-profit schools is to... make a profit.

your well being is pretty far down on their list of priorities

[vapid jay]

edtech business is fire in india lol😂

[sleek egret]

that's a skill you need to learn

[fringe sphinx]

Yah. The problem is: on one hand, it could be a great deal. On the other hand, 20% for 3 years is really really big to me: recruiters in the US get paid directly from the hiring company (usually 20% of first year salary)

[vapid jay]

thats why im completely fucked up in this dilemma.

[fringe sphinx]

also, if your english is this good (you write very well), do you really not have other options?

[sleek egret]

it's hardly a dilemma. there are a ton of vocational education programs out there

[vapid jay]

yes end of the day you have to bulk fee at start or income sharing agreement thats what current situation. if masters its take long time and big bag money

[proven crest]

I don’t understand here. If someone says to you I can get you a job doing what you want to do, plus it’ll be a high paying job. You just pay me 20% for 3 years. If you lose the job we’ll get you another.

If you read though and there are no strings why would you say no? What’s the other option?

Self learning has its struggles, flat fee bootcamps may or may not be good. Degrees are expensive and take 4 years

[sleek egret]

you think it's fine because you are a good person with a trusting nature

[proven crest]

No I’m saying he needs to read critical reviews and carefully examine the terms and conditions and small print

[sleek egret]

I strongly suspect it's 20% of any job for the next 3 years

with onerous penalties if you don't comply

[proven crest]

Then he needs to read into that and find out. If so he shouldn’t do it.

[sleek egret]

probably penalties if you don't seek out work too. penalties if you don't take a job they give you. etc, etc.

[wanton birch]

In a practical sense, why do degrees matter? I mean to ask what does having a degree convince an employer of?

[gritty rivet]

Not always. Especially in India I would imagine

[sleek egret]

it demonstrates the ability to learn shit you don't want to, to jump through hoops to get into the university, to delay gratification, the discipline to acomplish long term goals, etc.

[fringe sphinx]

In practical sense? Degrees tell me (as an employer) that you: achieve certain educational milestones, covered reasonable material, persisted through higher education, and have a stable enough foundation to be worthy of consideration.

[proven crest]

Again if so that might be a bad deal and he shouldn’t take it.

No one should enter any contract without fully reading the details of it. We can guess at all the things that may or may not be in it all day. If the fine print has different details and loops then it might not be a good deal. Based on what he told us, I think it would be

[sleek egret]

further, for better schools, it allows the employer to leverage the university's entrance requirements. i.e. it acts as a pre-filter.

[fringe sphinx]

yah, I'm 90% certain it's going to be predatory, but who knows.. and predatory things can also work out in your favor.

[gritty rivet]

In addition to the technical stuff, it shows them that you can do difficult work over multiple years and follow through . It's also just a filter sometimes, a box to check, a way to quickly throw other resumes in the trash

[sleek egret]

lol, 90% of people enter contracts without reading them

[proven crest]

Especially in India not all degrees are the same. But they do all take 3-4 years.

[fringe sphinx]

and 80% of statistics are made up on the spot 😉

[sleek egret]

sure, but only 71.63% of the time!

[proven crest]

Haha maybe they do once, but that’ll be the last time (I hope)

[sleek egret]

the value of a degree varies by school in every nation

[wanton birch]

So given that it can be expected that almost all candidates will apply with degrees, is there some system in place to rank their degrees and sort them by that and approve only the top however for consideration?

[proven crest]

That’s what I meant, they’re not all the same

[fringe sphinx]

in the us, I view it as: "top 5 cs schools, and every other school". The top 5ers never apply to my company, so it ends up not mattering at all what school someone went to: as long as they have a degree.

[proven crest]

But they do all take 3-4 years. So he can factor in the loss of 3-4 years of paid employment-20%

[wanton birch]

The value is minimum, right? I mean when everyone has one, it becomes not all that valuable at all. I am talking in a competitive sense between candidates. It’s just something you must have, like the right to work in the country you are applying to.

[sleek egret]

look, it's not fair, but there is a sharp drop off in perceived "quality" of young job applicants between university grads and non-grads. and then later, if you're lucky enough to build a career without a degree, you'll reach a brick wall for higher level positions at your company. people without degrees are almost never promoted to executive level positions at major corps. doesn't matter how skilled/smart you are.

[sleek egret]

yes, when "everybody" has one, it becomes a requirement

[wanton birch]

Yeah. Probably a better word.

[sleek egret]

and in advanced economies, it is rapidly becoming that

in india, no degree means no job at the largest software engineer employers. because the biggest ones like Tata, Infosys and Wipro make their bones doing outsourced work. and their clients demand university degrees.

[wanton birch]

I ask not because I am competing without a degree. In my search, experience has emerged to be the decisive factor and not degrees. It is rare for me to come across postings where they even require half of what I have to offer. Yet, the experience is what kills me.

[wanton birch]

India’s got to be ungodly competitive!

[sleek egret]

life in a capitalist system is competitive. it's what it is.

[sleek egret]

well, the good news is that mid-career, a degree is not as important.

it's at the start it matters most and no-degree puts a ceiling on your advancement (which some don't care about)

[true harness]

you have a degree though. you just don't have a CS degree

[sleek egret]

places like india, which embraced western advice of "educate first" have many issues with an "overeducated" workforce. essentially the internal demand isn't able to absorb all the educated folks. india has been able to provide services externally for a few decades, but that sort of thing can't last forever.

[wanton birch]

Even in my own field. The usual requirement is bachelors, and I have multiple degrees even above that. But none of that matters when I have to answer no to “do you have at least 2-5 years experience working ..”. That’s what I was getting at.

[sleek egret]

in places where you have "overeducation", lack of internal demand and no means to export those skills... you tend to see high levels of social unrest

[sleek egret]

oh, well, not all companies hire for entry level <shrug>

[wanton birch]

Most of them list their entry level postings with 2-3 years of specific domain related industrial experience

[sleek egret]

lol, that's "junior" not "entry level". bad HR posters!

[true harness]

around 2 is still pretty feasible if you have none

[wanton birch]

Sites like indeed and LinkedIn should let us report these jobs that are all listed as entry level. There is no option to report that. I find that unfair. It doesn’t allow us to even help them improve the adverts.

[quick eagle]

Hi everyone! https://www.bit-academy.nl/opleidingen/data-engineer
does anyone here have experience with this dutch course from bitacademy?

[hearty island]

does jake’s resume work for people who aren’t CS students too?

i’m looking to get a job in project management so that’s why i asked

[fringe sphinx]

yah, to be honest, for me a degree is more or less a minimum requirement. I sometimes interview non-degree holders, but rarely.

[sleek egret]

um, you are the resource they mine and sell. you have no rights on sites like indeed and linkedin. it's like saying the coal should be able to complain about the quality of the ovens they get burned in. 🙂

[hearty island]

i’m currently using jake’s resume now

[wanton birch]

I think it just skews everything so much. They get to claim high job creation and opportunity etc. while in reality these adverts are just there to try and poach each other’s trained staff .

[fringe sphinx]

It's a shitty market for zero-experience grads. I'm sure there's tons of predatory employers right now.

[wanton birch]

There are. I applied to this German company for an internship. They rejected. Then a few days later they sent me an email with an offer of paid training courses from them which might make me more employable and more eligible to intern there!

By paid training courses, I mean they were asking me to pay them.

[vapid jay]

its still not concluded XD

[sleek egret]

even the scammy chinese companies don't make you pay up front... instead they take the training costs out of your paycheck for the next year or two

[gritty rivet]

I'm not mid-career but I feel like that depends on the kinds of roles and companies you are interested in. I rarely see people without degrees above a certain level

[hearty island]

i’m talking about jake’s resume like the one on latex

[sleek egret]

exactly. no-degree puts a ceiling on your career advancement

[hearty island]

#career-advice message this one

[sleek egret]

but hey, if you don't care about that, then it doesn't matter <shrug>

[fringe sphinx]

however, tehre are many jobs besides SWE in tech

[wanton birch]

I wish Canadian companies would let me sign up to a deal like that. I am desperate and want some experience. I want to have a career.

[sleek egret]

that seems quite reasonable. the formatting is a bit meh but I see nothing wrong with it.

[fringe sphinx]

i do know plenty of devops and qa and tech sales and other roles with non-degree or no-cs degree

[hearty island]

thanks rmah 🙂, i’ll post an anonymized version after i finish my lunch

[serene apex]

Guys i am a new member in the server and i want to ask some questions can anyone tell me who i should ask

[smoky quest]

#❓｜how-to-get-help has some instructions

[sleek egret]

I would suggest making the typeface of the section headings experience, projects, etc. a bit heavier. at least matching the job titles and project names in weight

perhaps use gray text for the dates and locations so they don't draw the eye so much to the rhs

is it just me or is the line spacing for the technical skills lines a bit smaller than above? if so, add some leading

finally, if your name is not Jake Ryan, you'll need to legally change it to match your resume

[hearty island]

oh that’s a shame

[wanton birch]

Sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of superstition involved. Similar to gamblers with their lucky this or that or rituals, job seekers tend to place weird emphasis on CV/Cover Letter formatting. Of course they never count their misses either. Only the hits. Also, they disregards hits that comes from completely different presentations too.

[fringe sphinx]

or just take over his life

[smoky quest]

have you updated your resume to be more swe centric?

[wanton birch]

Kind of. But currently applying to engineering ones so didn’t finish that. I’d love your inputs on it when I share.

PS. Most of the engineering ones also want me to have programming and software engineering skills and knowledge. So it kinda feels very transferable. Your inputs have been very helpful with that.

[true harness]

programming do be highly marketable these days

[wanton birch]

Maybe I should go camp outside of company buildings and all with cardboard signs asking for a consideration.

[fringe sphinx]

You'll get a faster response if the signs contain threatening language.

(joke about response time, please dont)

[hearty island]

definitely a work in progress. any feedback is helpful.

[fringe sphinx]

Damian, my eyes glazed over the long descriptions.

[wanton birch]

“If you don’t hire me, I’ll break into your building, hack into your machines and leave a random indentation in your Python code”

[hearty island]

alright i'll make them shorter. thanks!

[fringe sphinx]

Yah. Maybe put a puzzle challenge to get your email address?

[hearty island]

i'll make it shorter so it's more readable

[fringe sphinx]

The question I ask when reading resumes is: What did this person actually do? Write code? Design the system? What kind of system? Were they an individual contributor? Team leader? etc

[wanton birch]

I marked my projects Team Project in cases where they were team. In the description I provided some details for what I did

[fringe sphinx]

I like the third job the most... the first bullet about "Performed data extraction....". That I know what you're doing.

[hearty island]

i think the long bullet points lies with the first job the most

[fringe sphinx]

But, "developed a comprehensive tracking system..." lacks any technical information. What did you actually do?

oblig office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_1lIFRdnhA

[hearty island]

i built a dashboard in power bi that evaluates how well problem managers at my company stick to the problem management format

[fringe sphinx]

Awesome, and, what langauges did you use? Any SQL?

[wanton birch]

Maybe you need to include that detail there so they know both the tools you used and what you did with the tools

[hearty island]

no languages used i just connected microsoft form responses to power bi

[fringe sphinx]

the thing is, when I interview from big companies, I run into a lot of people who did lots of useless things. non-technical skills.etc.

[hearty island]

yeah, but i didn't use any languages

[sleek egret]

but what if they're awesome at doing useless things?

[hearty island]

i don't really fall under the programmer domain anymore i'm more into project management

what about "Enhanced problem managers' documentation proficiency by 30% through the development of a comprehensive tracking system, showcasing improved competency in problem-solving and corrective action documentation. Leveraged Power BI for streamlined tracking and analysis."

[wanton birch]

Man I should go ask ChatGPT to make all my bulletpoints less wordy without losing information

[fringe sphinx]

Ok, then make that clear... very clear. Like, I'm going to look at your resume for about 30 seconds. I'm going to look for technical keywords, maybe something about the domain or size of team you managed, etc. And probably not even 30 seconds, realistically, unless I see something I like

[wanton birch]

30 seconds!?!?’ Folks tell me you guys spend 5-7 seconds

[fringe sphinx]

true, 30 sec if you're lucky

[hearty island]

but how do i make it more project management tailored 😦 the project mgt server i'm on said it was fine

but it's clearly not fine otherwise i'd have landed a job by now

[fringe sphinx]

First: this is just my opinion. Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone has one, and they all stink.

[wanton birch]

That’s not a valid conclusion

[hearty island]

how is that not valid

[true harness]

what does documentation proficiency even mean

[fringe sphinx]

Second, make it easy to read. Blunt. I am a project manager. I project manage. I project managed xyz, abc

[wanton birch]

Skilled at documenting important information I suppose

[hearty island]

well they kept missing categories on their template

[small geode]

Someone else interested them more

[hearty island]

“Improved Data Quality in Problem Records: Successfully implemented strategies to enhance the accuracy and completeness of problem records, ensuring reliable data for analyzing problem trends and facilitating informed decision-making by leadership.

Enhanced Problem Manager Performance: Developed a comprehensive tracking system to assess individual problem managers' proficiency in documenting problem records, reflecting their competency in applying problem-solving practices and documenting appropriate corrective actions.

Evaluated Problem Practice Performance: Implemented an evaluation framework to measure the effectiveness of training within the problem team. Identified areas of improvement across multiple team members, indicating potential training deficiencies that were subsequently addressed to enhance overall performance.”

[fringe sphinx]

Like: Project Manager for XYZ, a <brief description> for ABC Corporation. Roles included: Data Analysis and Dashboarding using PowerBI, Working with Customers to build Requirements and Roadmap, etc

[hearty island]

these are the alleged impacts my dashboard was supposed to have

[fringe sphinx]

I hate everything about this sentence: "Successfully implemented strategies to enhance the accuracy and completeness of problem records, ensuring reliable data for analyzing problem trends and facilitating informed decision-making by leadership."

[hearty island]

thanks i hate it too

[true harness]

too many words. brain hurt

[fringe sphinx]

and passive voice, etc

[deft herald]

"used Jira"

[wanton birch]

@hearty island I was talking to a tech recruiter in person. They told me that they often don’t even have the time to go through every application. Sometimes if they find prospective ones that seem okay, they just run with it and present them to the hiring managers. So the rest get rejected. It has nothing to do with you being bad or your cv being bad. They may not have even seen yours.

[hearty island]

but clearly something's wrong with it

the whole goal of resume review is that there's something to fix

[wanton birch]

That’s why we need well trained LLM to read resumes and not people.

[delicate bane]

whats the dif between a problem manager and a project manager again

[fringe sphinx]

I was once hiring at a big firm. We had over 200 applicants for 3 positions. The recruiter never handed me any resumes. I ended up hiring from internal referrals.

[hearty island]

a problem manager tends to have a cert like an ITIL v3/v4 cert and a project manager tends to have a PMP

[delicate bane]

only 200 back then. probably 4 digits now

[hearty island]

problem managers are like firefighters. they go around to incidents and try to uncover root cause for the problems. at least that's what i understand

[delicate bane]

i know PMP but i dont think i know ITIL

[wanton birch]

Senior positions?

[fringe sphinx]

Nah, midlevel SWE positions

[wanton birch]

That sounds too low. Normally I see sub 100 applications just on LinkedIn for senior positions

[hearty island]

so how do i fix this resume so i can get hired 😦

i mean i already do have a job offer but the salary is quite low

not that me fixing my resume will automatically get me hired but

[wanton birch]

So you already got success. You just don’t like what success looks like

[fringe sphinx]

yah, all we can say is: make it clear what you actually did. aim for a short bullet point:

[lilac quail]

Take the low salary job and start looking from day 1. There's no better feeling than getting paid to have interviews.

[hearty island]

yeah i already was planning to take the job offer

[deft herald]

Did you negotiate at all?

[hearty island]

not yet no

[fringe sphinx]

Responsible for Product XYZ, supporting a team of 10 engineers and 5 QA. - Created PowerBI dashboards for senior management to report product status - ...

[deft herald]

My first job, i didn't negotiate my salary and boy did i regret it

[hearty island]

well industry average for an entry level project manager (according to glassdoor in my area) is $72K

[deft herald]

I didn't know there was such thing as "entry level project manager"

[hearty island]

idk junior project manager?

something that ideally requires 1-3 years of XP?

[deft herald]

How much was your offer?

[hearty island]

well when we were having dinner he said ballpark $72K

[delicate bane]

what if you went for entry-level product manager instead. those would probably have a higher salary

[deft herald]

Oh did this come out of a personal connection?

[lilac quail]

Entry level product owner positions are already hard to find...

[delicate bane]

also i now hate my name. i blame mina and co.

[hearty island]

came out of my prior internship

[fringe sphinx]

tbh, if you have zero other offers, don't stress it. It's hard to negotiate when you have zero alternatives. This isn't the best market, so if you have a solid offer that you'll learn from, no harm in taking it and upgrading (moving) in a year.

[delicate bane]

from my understanding, product owner and product manager is also dif. but may have overlapping responsibilities depending on the company size

[hearty island]

yeah i was thinking of staying until i earn my PMP

i just like keeping my resume polished

[fringe sphinx]

yah, id say: judge the offer by how much you'll learn

[lilac quail]

Yeah you'll rarely see a product manager that wasn't a product owner at some point. At least if they went through organisations pretending to be Agile

[delicate bane]

pretending to be Agile
accurate for most companies.

jk. maybe.

[deft herald]

No, you're correct

[rugged pebble]

hey

where can I find help for my code?

[deft herald]

#❓｜how-to-get-help

[wanton birch]

Today was supposed to be my day off and I’m here still engaging with career stuff. 😞

[hearty island]

my company forced me to do these agile courses and we don’t even use agile

[fringe sphinx]

nobody does agile like those corporate training programs anyway

[vapid jay]

Is anyone here good at both Kotlin and Swift?

[hybrid oyster]

I'm a recent grad with a master's in comp sci. My bachelor's is in biology. I have no internships. I live in Colorado, USA. I'm applying for entry-level positions on Linkedin. I went to my college career center for help with my resume. Should I change my strategy and just start applying for internships? I can't even get my foot in the door because my resume is completely related to healthcare rather than programming.

[true harness]

why not make your resume related to programming then?

internships are for students; since you've graduated, you're probably not getting any

[hybrid oyster]

I tried, but there isn't much to put on there. Personal projects and research I did over the summer... I've only been programming for 2 years (the time to get my CS degree)

[smoky quest]

if you graduated, you should look for jobs, not internships

Also feel free to post an anonymized version of your resume

[true harness]

it will be much better than a healthcare oriented one, though. you can send your resume for review

[smoky quest]

Put yourself in the shoes of a reviewer: why would they call back someone with a healthcare resume for a non-healthcare position?

[hearty island]

if they have da skills to pay da bills

[true harness]

the resume would not demonstrate software development skills

[rugged pebble]

why I lost my permition to send a post?

[smoky quest]

I can see your message here

[peak halo]

You are currently on help cooldown because your thread at https://discord.com/channels/267624335836053506/1117875691350933515 is still open. Please send a message to @severe widget if you have a question about this.

[smoky quest]

they have da skills for a healthcare position, but that's not what the reviewer is hiring for

[hearty island]

then they have to tailor their resume for software dev somehow

??? mods ???

[hybrid oyster]

@true harness @smoky quest Here's my anonymized resume

[rugged pebble]

print("hi")

what?

why the print does not have colerfull thing

[lilac quail]

Why are you SOMETIMES SHOUTING at your the persons READING your RESUME

[hybrid oyster]

I did that to anonymize my resume. It's not actually capslock.

[rugged pebble]

?

[lilac quail]

Gotcha xD

[hybrid oyster]

You have to put 'python' at the end of the backticks

[fringe sphinx]

Good resume but lots of fluff language

[uncut quest]

This is #career-advice. You should direct python-related questions to #python-discussion

[hybrid oyster]

Suggestions? I'm taking anything I can get

[fringe sphinx]

Assisted in the… to determine the.

[delicate bane]

what position are you aiming for? bc it reads like youre going to apply for a research job

[uncut quest]

<@&831776746206265384>

[fringe sphinx]

Maybe rewrite to be less passive voiced… we want to hear what you did

[hybrid oyster]

Ideally, software engineering / developing.

[fringe sphinx]

Especially if you want a SWE job, then talk about what you wrote, did, skills. Not the result but what -you- did and can do

[delicate bane]

hmm i think we should emphasize those skills more in your resume then. maybe expand on that

[hybrid oyster]

Do I just expand my projects section then? The trouble is, when I apply directly on those websites, it's not like they have fill-in sections for projections. It's all experience / work.

[fringe sphinx]

Your top job is what I’d focus on: what did you actually do? What models? What tech? Did you write code?

[gritty rivet]

The whole professional skills line near the top can go, it's pure fluff... BUT you should demonstrate those kinds of skills in describing your work experience

[peak halo]

where is the passive voice? because "Conducted a variety of ..." and "Assembled a discord bot that ..." are not passive voice. they're active past tense.

[hybrid oyster]

A lot of CNN / RNN neural networks in python and tensorflow, but the truth is that the models I was implementing weren't successful. But it's what I spent most of my time doing during the summer.

[fringe sphinx]

Fine, grammar police caught me

[delicate bane]

this could be a good mental framework to build off of. i would obv take it it with a grain of salt and apply it accordingly: https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/#step-your-resume

[peak halo]

I'm not policing grammar

[fringe sphinx]

But it’s the kind of fluff speak that clouds a resume

[hybrid oyster]

I was informed to put those in to capture all the key words that matches the job description for companies. I have no idea if that's true.

[fringe sphinx]

Bro, talk about that! Tensorflow? Put that in the resume: trained and evaluated models using xyz to do abc

[hybrid oyster]

I feel so unconfident in deep / machine learning because I don't have much experience in it... it's why I kept it off the skills section. But I could be more specific in there

[gritty rivet]

I get the need for keyword optimization, by all means do that, but in a meaningful way with specific examples

[fringe sphinx]

If you spent a summer touching it, and are interested in it, I think you’re underselling yourself… as long as you don’t over exaggerate.

[fringe sphinx]

Oh actually, my comment was about the first job. Like the ‘assisted in the creation of…’. No idea if it’s truly passive voice, but it reads very passive to me

[peak halo]

"I assisted in the creation of x" is active, and "the creation of x was assisted in by me" is passive.

[warped dust]

I’m looking for a mobile app developer that is proficient in react native and/or flutter that’s looking for some work.

[peak halo]

This is not the place to ask; please review our #rules

[warped dust]

Where do I ask?

[peak halo]

Not on this server.

[warped dust]

My apologies, the career piece got me confused.

[hybrid oyster]

Resume aside, is there anything else I should do to switch up my strategy? Apply to jobs out of the state? Stop applying on Linkedin and apply elsewhere?

Insanity is repeating the same action expecting a different result. I don't want to get into that pitfall, but if I just need to apply to more jobs, please let me know because I'm getting discouraged.

[true harness]

widening your scope may help. if you can relocate, applying to out of state jobs is definitely something to consider

[gritty rivet]

Are you in contact with anyone at a similar spot (or slightly ahead of you) on a similar journey in your geographic area? This kind of networking was huge for me personally in finding my first dev job

Geographic area may just mean same country

[hybrid oyster]

I have no idea how to contact such groups other than randomly messaging university alumnis on Linkedin... which haven't gotten many responses. I mostly kept to myself in college, unfortunately.

[gritty rivet]

If you're in at least a moderately sizable city there may be relevant meetups in-person

On LinkedIn it may (or may not) be a question of approach... Take a genuine interest in knowing about people's experience so it's not just about you needing a job

[hybrid oyster]

Do you know how I could find such groups?

[gritty rivet]

Meetup.com is worth a look

[smoky quest]

• You should add some impact and details or claim to fame to your experience/projects. Like what's cool about them? What would set you apart?
• Flooplan project - WHAT algorithms? That's the core of your project and optimization problems are hard. So it's a great opportunity to showcase your expertise
• Overall, your project could benefit for more swe oriented projects

[sleek egret]

what's a floo and why would you want to plan one?

[gritty rivet]

A floo is like a floor but it's buns

[sleek egret]

i see

[tawdry patrol]

Anyone seen a sap ABAP programmer and a databricks data engineer all wrapped into one unicorn?

[inner wren]

:x: Invalid rule indices: 69

[fringe sphinx]

yah but the unicorn died from the weight.

[buoyant seal]

!rule 6 9

[inner wren]

Rules

6. Do not post unapproved advertising.

9. Do not offer or ask for paid work of any kind.

[ivory sluice]

why do you ask?

[tawdry patrol]

mostly curiosity, sap is huge, wondering if the world's are coming together

[fringe sphinx]

I dunno, I see a lot of SAP programmers getting retrained, fwiw

[tawdry patrol]

that makes a lot of sense, thanks. Wondering if I should spend any time doing ABAP training

[fringe sphinx]

(but I deal with mostly db programmers, so mostly snowflake/etc)

I dunno, it's a tough decision... you could end up being a super important specialist, or just another person cut because a company moves off of SAP. It's somewhat a specialty, but there's lots of companies using it. Hard to gauge.

(I'm more on the data engineering side, so don't often interact directly with sap)

[tawdry patrol]

data engineer as well, but 99% of my company's data is in SAP

[fringe sphinx]

yah, i know one group is training the sap folks on snowflake and olap sql stuff like duckdb

[sleek egret]

everyone loves SAP, amirite? 🥴

hey man, don't feel so sad

[tawdry patrol]

he's working with Sap

[young gulch]

Who tf is sap 😭

[sleek egret]

try to look on the bright side of life

[smoky quest]

don't worry about sap, it's buns

[sleek egret]

do you know what bun bun is?

[young gulch]

What fucking drugs are you smoking

[smoky quest]

Any specific question or topic related to #career-advice ?

[young gulch]

No

[dense fiber]

😂

[peak halo]

<@&831776746206265384> @young gulch is trolling

[sand patio]

!warn 1101977631815110666 this isn't a place to shitpost, take it somewhere else.

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied warning to @young gulch.

[summer roost]

That doesn't seem related to this channel's topic

[modest olive]

I agree

[dapper depot]

!cban 1101977631815110666 troll

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied ban to @young gulch permanently.

[finite helm]

Hi everybody , I'm studing python code and I would like to make experience with some projects. I'm looking for a working group where I could help and learn. Obvioulsy , I'm doing this without any price. Just for experience.

[proven crest]

If you're somewhat experienced you can look at joining a hackathon, you could also contribute to OSS.

[finite helm]

hackathon is in this server?

[dense fiber]

[lime bramble]

https://roadmap.sh/full-stack

[tranquil birch]

!warn 402827223201218561 Do not post inappropriate images/videos.

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied warning to @sterile crescent.

[vapid jay]

no bro

anyone loves Tkinter ?

[polar basin]

We have run code jams and the like…

[finite helm]

where to?

[proven crest]

Someone from work is leaving. As if someone sent round an email with an e card to sign and an electronic collection pot to chuck some money in for them ☠️☠️

Kinda a nice gesture I guess but pretty cringe imo 😬

[lilac quail]

I agree that just giving the money would be weird, but if this money is used for a gift from all the colleagues that donated... Why not? A nice gesture as you said. Don't feel obligated to participate.

[proven crest]

That would actually be pretty sweet, from what it looks like it’s a kind of go fund me thing where you can donate what you want and they can withdraw the cash.

Remote equivalent of putting 10 bucks in the leaving card (which I’d also find cringe non remote tbh). I think putting some cash together to buy a gift is really nice though, so maybe I’m weird that I find a difference in that.

[lilac quail]

I agree then, giving out just the money feels weird

[nimble coyote]

@mystic shadow bro how good are u at python?

[fringe sphinx]

That’s wild. Never seen people give money, except maybe for a baby shower

[true harness]

that's kinda funny lol

[gloomy slate]

Hello

[pulsar gyro]

Question

so...say a professor wants to take u under him for Phd.
but u have god awful cgpa... so can the university reject me even though the professor wants me in?

[gritty rivet]

Potentially, sure, but if they don't have a strict threshold and your application is good overall, you may be fine

[proven crest]

Why don’t you ask your professor or university? There’s no way we would know the internal processes of your university or the amount of pressure your professor could put on it.

All responses you will get here are guesses and opinions.

[brazen island]

Read the fineprint. I've heard of cases of people getting accepted by a prof and not getting through admissions because of their grades

[true harness]

the prof usually has a lot of leeway in selecting candidates

[brazen island]

Depends. If the uni has a rule where they want all candidates to have an average grade of > X that's final

[wanton birch]

From what I’ve seen during my time, professors can pick and choose. None of us know if your university has any special rules in place using which they can veto it.

However, if the professor makes the claim that they know your expertise and skills that specifically match the requirements for the research work they need you for, it’s hard for anyone to argue grades or degrees.

There are generally issues with the funding though. Whoever is going to be paying for it all gets to set some minimum standards to be eligible for the funding.

All of this you need to discuss with your professor directly and know the real answers to.

[pulsar gyro]

yeah i understand, there is still time tho so thats why i was just generally asking not looking for the specific answer, i still have 2 years more to get my masters, but he already offered me ...now so i was thinking, and my grades keep falling down

[pulsar gyro]

makes sense

[wanton birch]

Well if you still have 2 years time, you can try getting your grades up and becoming eligible.

Also! Who knows what other opportunities might arise by the time you are done. Heck! Even this opportunity might go away by then.

Are you interested in being an academic?

[pulsar gyro]

I cant man I'm getting too depressed, almost get anxiety attacks every so often, I'm a mathematics student and I love both CS and Math but I can't seem to find a way to maintain my grades... And i really try very hard to try my best but I can't. I just hate everything about my college, the professors, they all hate people who have interest in IT, every exam is just copy and pasting the stupid theorems and derivations exactly like they gave u in notes and if you don't write even a single line like they do you're done... What i study for exams in NOT mathematics but Literature more like history and I hate it really hate it because i don't like remembering stuff 🥺

[pulsar gyro]

maybe yeah but looking at my cgpa, it will be impossible, this prof is different because I've already worked 5+ months under him so he knows me and my capabilities, i was shocked when he offered my a Phd under him so early, but I dont know what are the rules of the University are although I have heard it has a strict acceptance criteria..

[strong lava]

Like people said earlier: ask

Ask your professor if your cgpa will be a problem for you.

[pulsar gyro]

im not here looking for answers that , just having a polite discussion

m just talking in general what is the criteria in different universities or if someone has a personal experience, i have 2 years to ask him

[worldly ridge]

Is a web scraping job damaging for ones carreer?

[gritty rivet]

Depression and anxiety are questions of mental health that career advice from strangers is unlikely to solve. Seek professional help. As a student you should have free resources available

[pulsar gyro]

ig if u use it on sites where scraping is illegal? but only if u do something bad with it otherwise scrapings fun lol

[gritty rivet]

Full time? If it's your first dev job that's not so bad but I would try to move on quickly

[wanton birch]

I know what you are talking about. It feels shit to do any of it while feeling that way.

The thing that I am wondering is if you are feeling this way at masters level, how are you going to handle doctoral level work? I kid you not when I say that my PhD absolutely ruined my mental and physical well-being. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever done to myself. It was unlike anything I’ve ever done. So many dropped out. You always feel alone in your struggle and clueless in the sea of very advanced knowledge.

I am not trying to discourage you. I just want you to have a more balanced view on whatever it is you think doctoral studies are like.

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, I was ABD and dropped.

[pulsar gyro]

because I am deeply interested in cs, love that, I also like working on research..like I really enjoyed writing one and experimenting in the last few months, the only problem is the course I'm currently taking is Pure Math, not at all interesting, I also taught in so many programming workshops and i enjoyed it.. academics is nice when you are researching or learning about something you like .. and are surrounded by good people ... my college is absolutely horrible, our dorms are like shitholes .. the situation is very bad , corruption is all there is ... people are given a year back if you fail to manage 75% attendance in all of their courses.. and you have to study every course you are assigned whether you like it or not.. last year we were forced to study biology, so many people failed that..... I can't believe Phd can get worse than this?

[true harness]

web scraping jobs don't exist

[brazen island]

Depends. Jobs can suck, PhDs can suck, interviews are where you hopefully find out

If your uni is as bad as you say it is then I'd think twice about signing up for 4-6 more years there

[pulsar gyro]

i think i made somethings unclear, i live in india and here the uni i currently go to is pretty shit, tho i cant leave for 2 more years unless i drop out in that case I will not get a degree .. so no job, no phd nothing. The phd offer was given to my by a prof in a french university, im also supposed to intern under him this winter.

[brazen island]

I live in Belgium and we have hard "gpa" requirements for PhDs that are impossible to get around. Better check with that prof if the same thing doesn't exist in France.

But tbf, they're not too high. 68 % or smth

[pulsar gyro]

Yeah i bet that could be the case , I will do that as I said im just here to chat nothing serious

[wanton birch]

How did a a professor form a French university get to work with you enough to be impressed by you and offer you a PhD?

[pulsar gyro]

so he knew a prof from our university and they were working on some research project, so my professor brought me into this project and I came up with a solution to solve their problem...basically they were trying to contribute to an existing research paper by improving their process and I helped in that, wrote all the code as well he liked my work so he immediatly offered an intern.

[proven crest]

What is a ‘web scraping job’?
Do you mean a job within a company that involves web scraping? Then no unless you’re knowingly engaged in illegal activity for monetary gain in which case a damaged career is the least of your concerns.

[wanton birch]

Wait! Web scraping is illegal!?

Ma Beautiful Soup!

[proven crest]

In the same way as driving a car is

[wanton birch]

Well programming is illegal too in that same sense

[pulsar gyro]

it is illegal if u indent using spaces

[proven crest]

Maybe a better analogy would be sharing PDFs, it’s not inherently illegal, but sharing copyrighted materials is. A job that involves distributing copyrighted materials would land you in trouble. Albeit probably less than designing and executing tools with the express intent illegal activities.

Also I think it’s dependent on territory, web scraping itself is a a legal grey area in a lot, however targeted companies can sue. Either way it’s not something you’d want to be involved in l.

[wanton birch]

Say my program reads every article title from a news site and makes a list of it. It’s their copyright but should it be illegal for me to make that list?

Personally I don’t think it should be illegal. I don’t know the law though.

[proven crest]

If you’re redistributing their work for personal gain, yes.

[wanton birch]

I mean how would search engines even be legal otherwise

[proven crest]

Web crawling is different to web scraping

[wanton birch]

Google didn’t ask for my permission before searching though, parsing and indexing and displaying my content snippets on their site

[proven crest]

That’s web crawling. Web scraping would be if instead of redirecting to your site they scraped the data and displayed it on their own site

And they did ask for permission, you (or your host) gave it

[wanton birch]

So permission is automatically granted because it’s online

[wanton birch]

Also! I can avoid copyright violations simply by hyperlinking?

[proven crest]

No permission is granted by you explicitly

[gritty rivet]

They respect robots.txt

[wanton birch]

And that’s the law?

[proven crest]

Yes, linking to a source of information is not copyright infringement.

[wanton birch]

It is 100%

You can’t upload a movie to YouTube and provide a link to the original and say you did not infringe copyright by distributing the content on your own

What I mean is that there must be some exceptions based on fair use

[proven crest]

No… that’s distributing, hence uploading.

You could link to a place where the owner made their content freely available

[gritty rivet]

I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure it depends on the country but violating ToS is a civil matter. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/77755/does-the-robots-exclusion-standard-have-any-legal-weight

More to the point, a company doesn't have to break the law to harm its employees reputation

[proven crest]

For example if I release a movie and sell it on Amazon, but I decide I want to put it on my website for people to view for free. You can link to that, no issue.

You cannot redistribute that movie and link to the free copy and expect to not receive a copyright claim

[wanton birch]

Hang on a second. Is there some web scraping thing I am unaware of? I don’t actually know if there’s existing debates and grey areas that are often talked about. I’m just talking out of my ass as usual right now.

[proven crest]

I can tell 😂

The US Appeals Court ruled that its not inherently illegal, I think last year or the year before?

[wanton birch]

Linking to a movie is not the violation. Using part of the copyrighted content to link is what I am asking about.

[proven crest]

I don’t understand what you mean? Linking is not illegal.

[wanton birch]

Like me hyperlinking “click here to read the book” is different than me reproducing a chapter where the text is hyperlinked

[proven crest]

Reproducing is the key word.

[wanton birch]

That seems like a violation of copyright

So I could make a list of article titles that are hyperlinked, publish them on my site and no laws are broken.

[gritty rivet]

Usually if you're scraping data from a web page, the point is to use that data. If it's copyrighted data, the problem is obvious

Facebook (for example, this is typical) has clear ToS about scraping its users data. It explicitly prohibits most scraping. Violating that ToS isn't a crime, but can have legally-enforceable consequences that most companies would prefer to avoid

[proven crest]

Exactly.

Otherwise feeds like hacker news and Reddit would be illegal. That’s precisely what they do.

Digg too

[wanton birch]

Digg still exists?

[proven crest]

I believe so, but regardless the point stands

[gritty rivet]

There are also privacy laws which I imagine you could easily violate if data you scrape belongs to individuals without their consent

[fringe sphinx]

You’re not a lawyer, and that’s not a safe assumption: they can go after you (criminally) for circumventing protections.

[proven crest]

I think the point he was making is that it’s not an inherently criminal act such as theft.

[fringe sphinx]

I’m saying that it can be, and has been, argued as such. Even bypassing the most basic safeguards can be called ‘hacking’

Putting you in reach of, say, dmca’s anti-circumvention or cfaa

[gritty rivet]

My point is that yes robots.txt has legal weight of some kind... Civil, criminal, whatever

[fringe sphinx]

Look up the sad story of Aaron Swartz.

[proven crest]

That’s not webscraping lol. He stole and distributed copyrighted information.

[fringe sphinx]

Oh, and webscraping isn’t?

[gritty rivet]

He wasn't convicted .. All that shows is that big companies in the US can harass you to death through legal action for looking at them crosseyed if they want to 😐

[proven crest]

Fraud and theft and different crimes.

[gritty rivet]

The charges were not about copyright

[wanton birch]

So how in the world does google image search display images on their website?

[fringe sphinx]

He was pursued under the cfaa act

[fringe sphinx]

Fair Use exemption to copyright, iirc

[wanton birch]

How is it fair use?

[fringe sphinx]

And a lot of lawyers, probably.

[proven crest]

Again, they’re linking to the original image im pretty sure. And again permission has been granted.

[wanton birch]

Oh so any site that allows web crawlers, I can display their content on my site as long as I link back to them?

[proven crest]

This is a circle and I don’t think you understand how indexing works

[fringe sphinx]

Im just saying: the game is stacked against you: copyright, dmca, cfaa. Even if you’re right, they can still lock you up with threats.

[gritty rivet]

They link to images on the public internet with clear attribution and respect robots.txt. Anyone can use robots.txt to tell Google they don't have permission

[fringe sphinx]

So be very careful and don’t listen to legal advice on the internet, including from me.

[wanton birch]

I understand it. I am trying to understand if it is legal if I do it.

[proven crest]

I was the one saying don’t get involved in it in the first place lll

[fringe sphinx]

Even with what you just said, they’d still violate copyright if not for fair use exemption.

[gritty rivet]

Correct, I was responding to the question of how it is fair use

[proven crest]

If you do what?

[wanton birch]

For example, if I want to make a site that displays the artworks of whoever on my site and using my interface. I will link back to the originals and attribution will be there.

[hearty island]

oh shit

[fringe sphinx]

I suggest reading about fair use, because what you described probably isn’t.

[gritty rivet]

If you're planning to use copyrighted material for commercial use in any way, please get a lawyer first

[wanton birch]

Which will cost me more than my site will ever make me 🤣

[proven crest]

Did they give you permission?
Are you clearly attributing them as the copyright holder?
And you adding onto it or just displaying it?

[fringe sphinx]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

[proven crest]

Have you ever written an essay @wanton birch?

[wanton birch]

Wait! So google manually takes permission from every photo owner!?!?

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, it doesn’t work that way.

[proven crest]

You understand that you can reference (including displaying) a copyrighted image in an essay right?

[wanton birch]

No. What is that?

[fringe sphinx]

fair use vs plagiarism. Citing a work, or a limited quotation for purposes of an academic paper? That’s probably fair use (ianal). Copying the work and putting it entirely in your website? Very different.

[gritty rivet]

Again, if it's on the public internet without a robots.txt file the permission is implied. At least that's my understanding

[fringe sphinx]

No. No. No. No. Please educate yourself here, I implore you.

[wanton birch]

No I am not. I am doing what google does in google images. I’ll just have a better interface.

[fringe sphinx]

There are automatic statutory damages for using copyrighted works. Like, minimum damages.

[gritty rivet]

I have said several times that dude should get a lawyer. We should let this channel get back on topic

[proven crest]

Exactly this

[fringe sphinx]

Ok, career advice: go to law school

[wanton birch]

That is not entirely true. I had issues with this very thing in practice. However, it’s usually easier to demonstrate fair use in non-commercial academic use when the image is directly relevant to what you are exploring than commercial use like google images.

[near ocean]

Not that this is career related but if your site doesnt have a robots.txt it will be crawled

Maybe move this to ot2?

[hearty island]

oh shit, i think i’m gonna get a job interview??

[proven crest]

Congrats!

[wanton birch]

The first productive and relevant post. Congrats buddy

[fringe sphinx]

First job?

[hearty island]

meh. they make around 63.7 k

[wanton birch]

Alcoholics Anonymous?

[hearty island]

yes that's the only company that wants to hire me 😔 (jk)

oh weird i can't find a salary for project assistant

[fringe sphinx]

Damian; it helps to say (next time it comes up) that you have a connection or reason to move. Like; I have friends and family in the area, etc.

Companies worry about people who won’t stay in the area.

[small geode]

I wouldn't be too sure about how much it matters. If they're young enough, that's a completely normal reason in itself.

[hearty island]

got it

thanks for the advice

[gritty rivet]

Don't lie though! What you said would be better then something factually untrue

[hearty island]

well i already have a job offer in hand i'm just leveraging offers at this rate. doesn't hurt to look around

[gritty rivet]

You've accepted an offer,.or you're holding on to one?

[hearty island]

holding

[gritty rivet]

Did they give you a timeline to accept? I agree it's not bad to look around but you also don't want to drag that out too long

[hearty island]

no timeline yet, the offer is basically mine to accept till i graduate

[fringe sphinx]

Companies worry about people who won’t stay in the area.

[dim bay]

I game dev domain I realized that working on your own game can be very interesting but working on someone else's game might not be that interesting, or sometime outright irritating , especially if they only assign me like donkey work after all god features implemented like debugging or platform porting kind of stuff is that case in other field also ? like Web dev or data Science?

[gritty rivet]

I don't know game development first-hand but I have the impression that it's a field with a lot of lower paying and repetitive work. In any area of specialization though, there can be lower-end work where you have to "pay your dues" a bit before moving up. Any good company wants to help you find the right balance between what needs to get done and what your skills/interests/desires are

[fringe sphinx]

Unless it’s donkey Kong.

[dim bay]

Which feild in software you think has less repetitive work?

[small geode]

You'll probably find repetitive work in just about any position.

[fringe sphinx]

There’s some dirty joke in there but I won’t say it. But; yah, it’s also a matter of what you enjoy. I don’t like front end work, and find it excruciatingly repetitive… but some people see it as always fresh and different

Game dev for the big guys is known for long hours, ‘crunch mode all the time’, etc.

[gritty rivet]

The one you're exceptionally good at 😉 Your interests and skills matter more then the field

[dim bay]

at what point in your programming language learning journey you call yourself "Expert"? what is criteria for that?

[pine sleet]

there is no hard criteria usually

[smoky quest]

There is no hard criteria, but it will be considered differently based on your years of experience and your achievements

I would also advise against calling yourself an expert if you don't have professional experience

[dim bay]

when would you call yourslef and expert ? I am asking about 'You" by your own standards

[pine sleet]

yeah like r_e mentioned, depends on how many YoE you have or professional experience

[dim bay]

so how many years of experince you consider reasonable for calling yourslef expert at it

[pine sleet]

I dunno, 5 years of professional experience?

[gritty rivet]

In what context? I would generally avoid using the word "expert" on a resume without qualifications (e.g. "subject matter expert")

[dim bay]

like usually mentioning on your linkedin or so

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, never say you’re an expert because there’s always someone who knows more

What you say is you have X years of experience.

[dreamy shadow]

Oh, that's actually pretty sound advice. I don't use the word "expert" but now have a better phrase to describe my experience.

[fringe sphinx]

And put concrete examples of what you did: use Tensorflow to train a model to detect malnutrition from dog feces pics

Don’t say: assisted in the creation of the ideation of cutting edge ml research

[smoky quest]

"show, don't tell"

[stray urchin]

Hey fellas, in some weeks I am about to start a job and I want to know by maybe some of you how low/high are the productivity levels in a company? I know that this is a very broad question, but I remember seeing a Quora question where people discussed that if it is okay to work on a button functionality for 4 days or if that is too much. Obviously in my opinion no amount of functionality can require a programmer to waste full 4 days on it, but I want to hear your opinions

[smoky quest]

I am not sure to follow.
Can you rephrase your question?

[stray urchin]

i don't know if i can rephrase it better.. let me see if chatgpt does the job

chat gpt: Hello everyone, I will be starting a new job in a few weeks and I'm curious to know about the productivity levels in different companies. I understand that this is a broad question, but I recently came across a Quora discussion where people debated whether it is acceptable to spend four days working on a button functionality. Personally, I believe that no functionality should require a programmer to dedicate a full four days to it. However, I would appreciate hearing your thoughts and opinions on this matter.

[small geode]

As you mentioned, this is a bit too broad to have an answer. It will not only vary by company, but by position and even by project.

[graceful mason]

This is a very vague question - but yes, it's easy for a task to take 4 days to complete. As part of your team's workflow you should have some sort of grooming where you estimate what a task requires and how long that might take
A button isn't a great example because it could be connected to any amount or frontend + backend functionality that may or may not exist
For me as an embedded developer I'd argue that 3 days is a pretty standard amount of time to finish a smaller feature:

• 1 - 2 days to figure out what I'm doing and implement it
• 1 - 2 days to get it tested + reviewed

It's worth keeping in mind that when you should probably be working on a couple of tasks simultaneously, since waiting on tests + reviews leaves you with a lot of downtime

[stray urchin]

🫡 thanks for your takes

[fringe sphinx]

My criteria as a hiring manager is: are you getting better at your job? Or flatlining? Don’t judge yourself against artificial metrics, judge yourself against your previous self

Like, once I hire you, just keep getting better, and we won’t have a problem.

[stray urchin]

that sounds reasonable and like a good manager, thanks

[fringe sphinx]

I’m a hire fast, fire fast kind of mgr tho.

[sleek egret]

what if you're the best of the lot by far but aren't getting better?

[fringe sphinx]

Fine, there’s a certain level of competency which makes you unfirable

Like, I’m not judging senior engineers by that criteria

[smoky quest]

senior engineers is also commonly a terminal level

[vapid jay]

should i starting search a new job? i'm working on a project that client company engineers doesn't specify what is needed and didn't test the product.

it's boring and no motivational develop for months with few feedbacks

[wanton birch]

You can only have that sort of title relative to or in reference to something. If someone is making command-line simple calculators and you have been programming those things for a while(3-5 years), you are sort of an expert when it comes to that.

[sleek egret]

sure, why not

[sleek egret]

I considered myself an expert after working professionally for maybe 3 or 4 years. I was very very wrong.

[thin zinc]

I've been programming in python for about 6 years now, I want to start making money with that but the main problem is that im 16
I will start working on a portfolio and everything, but what else can I do outside of that

[sleek egret]

go to university, then get a job

[thin zinc]

getting a degree will cost me money, plus I would be paying for other things before I graduate college too
I want to find something related to that career path to do on the side so I can save enough for student loans, a car, and other things