career-advice

[mortal wedge]

How's the tech sector look like in the U.S. right now? Hearing mixed things and am curious.

TRying to decide if I should whether the storm at my current company or try to jump ship immediately

[deft herald]

IME there are ebbs and flows all the time in tech. One year your company is going to do great; hiring left and right, huge bonuses, whatever. 4 years later, they'll be firing and underfunding bonuses, canceling programs, reducing opex.

[mortal wedge]

I agree, but right now I have people simultaneously telling me it's horrible while also saying it's amazing lol

[deft herald]

Not sure how this differs where you are. My experince is limited to multi-national companies anyways

[deft herald]

Yeah "tech" is a very broad umbrella

[deft herald]

What specific industry are you in?

[mortal wedge]

I'm in software as a medical device, but things are bad enough at my current position that I would probably be willing to take any sort of software developer position

[delicate bane]

its a yes and no. like meltz said, depends on industry. another thing to note: for those without exp/entry-level, its tough rn. for those WITH exp, its much easier to land a job depending on what youre looking for

and by tough, its tough

[mortal wedge]

Yeah, thankfully I have the experience but if I'm switching industries I'd have to convince them it's transferrable

[summer roost]

I'd say the market is currently "fine". Not super hot, not super cold. Much warmer than January, much colder than 2021

[mortal wedge]

Fair enough

[delicate bane]

id say give it a shot. why not

[mortal wedge]

Well, poor mental health and looking for an excuse to give up before I start, but yeah I should just give it a shot

[delicate bane]

understandable. either way, sending you good vibes bud

[fringe sphinx]

The craziness from the FAANG layoffs and economic fears seems to have subsided; regular hiring has resumed/etc. There’s a backlog (a lot of applicants in the market) but the jobs are out there (basically: agree with godlygeek)

[gilded valley]

just curious, what do you mean switching industries?

As in, tech -> not-tech, or python dev in healthcare -> python dev in insurance?

[mortal wedge]

Moreso the second. I have contacts at playstation and sony, for example.

[gilded valley]

I think as long as you're open to a wide range of industries it's pretty solid.

my company (a niche within finance) - which isn't doing great right now - is still hiring.

I imagine if you want to go to XYZ specific industry, it's more dependant on the macro environment for that industry

[mortal wedge]

Okay, nice, that's good to hear. Yeah, I think I'll still try to focus on my current industry but try to keep my options industry agnostic.

[gilded valley]

depending on motivation levels, might be worth having 2 CVs. one focused on your current industry, another more generic one which avoids the industry jargon

[mortal wedge]

Oh, that's a great idea!

[gilded valley]

the way I did this for mine was ott with jinja+latex

[mortal wedge]

Nice

[late flame]

You can look for jobs while still working. It's way less stressful that way.

I switched jobs recently and had no shortage of interest.

[true harness]

it's also straightforward with just tex's \def and \ifdefs

[sleek egret]

yes

to me, that's sort of like asking "is knowing what you're doing important for getting a job?" 🙂

[gilded valley]

I don't know tex - why bother to understand the tools I'm using when I can just hack together a worse version that takes more effort?

[true harness]

when you understand jinja, then you can just use it for everything: SQL, python macros, whatever your heart desires

[gilded valley]

you do understand!

[pulsar patio]

Is it wise for me to go for the PCAP (Pythons version an associate cert) to get the upperhand in the cybersecurity industry

[graceful mason]

To get an upper hand in the cybersecurity industry you should do cybersecurity certs. It's one of the few industries that actually values certs, often companies will sponsor you to do them

[full cedar]

Absolutely. More experience you have the better the salary lol

I’m doing Python & cyber sec courses and it will benefit me a lot. Even my professor said. The more you know the better. Trust me

I’m planning on getting bachelor’s in computer science (for Python), cyber security, and Phycology.

It is all up to you! Like I said, more things you know the better

[full cedar]

True. You don’t necessarily need certifications to obtain a job within the cyber security world. However it will boost your resume to get the job you want

[true harness]

this cert specifically has no relevance anywhere

[pine sleet]

Yeah there are certs that do actually have value but unfortunately the PCAP is not really one of them

[gilded valley]

certs only matter if they're from respected institutions - the kinds of thing SANS teaches - the PCAP is irrelevant bullshit

cyber security, networking, and about 2 or 3 certs in finance are the only places I know where they matter

[full cedar]

Exactly

Mostly focus in COMPTIA Certifications.

[gilded valley]

to be clear, I'm strongly disagreeing with you when you say the PCAP is worth it.

it's a waste of time and money

[full cedar]

Such as Networking, Security +, A+ Hardware, etc

[gilded valley]

comptia is worthless outside of networking/Sysadmin

[full cedar]

True, although some folks would want to get their certification from PCAP

[full cedar]

True, but is best to have acknowledge then not having any. Again, it’ll boost your resume

Overall, it is up to the individual to decide what they want and how they want to approach for their career. Everyone has their own opinions and preferences. In my opinion, focus in COMPTIA certifications and other major certifications.

[pine sleet]

Again, it’ll boost your resume
Not really to be honest

[full cedar]

Any certifications will to be honest.. It just depends in what the employers are looking for

[fringe sphinx]

I have no opinion on pcap, but didn’t you say you’re a CS major? Python cert really is completely useless for SWE positions, imo

[full cedar]

For instance, do you have any certifications in cybersec or Python? If so, have you tried putting that in your resume for employers to look forward to? If they did, they’d talk with you about it

[true harness]

have you had this happen in an interview? specifically, the PCAP cert in question?

[full cedar]

Yea lol

No but I was just generally saying any certifications are good to be in your resume

Even if it’s not worth of getting, why not achieve it for the heck of it? lol

[true harness]

opportunity cost, for one thing

[fringe sphinx]

It’s all contextual. A lot of folks come here asking about certs in lieu of a degree.

[full cedar]

True but employers can spend their time for you if you’re worth it

[full cedar]

Oh alright, makes sense..

I mean I like to get bachelor’s and certifications for my own self interests and work ethics. I’d like to go abroad for employers espc my boss to see how I am and what I got to show and proof for the organization

It’s all about time and patience

[late flame]

Some certs provide no value so they're just a waste of time and money. Personally I never look at certs and most positions won't either.

[fringe sphinx]

What field are you looking for? SWE or Infosec?

[full cedar]

infosec

well im tryna be a cybersec engineer

[vapid jay]

I'm (21) on the verge of enrolling in a bachelor's program for information systems. Beyond acquiring relevant knowledge, my goal is to connect with motivated peers to enhance my social network. I will actively seek out discussions on potential internship opportunities within the student community. Additionally, I plan to dedicate an hour every day to learning English, Chinese, and Arabic on Duolingo. After completing five semesters, I'll prepare to pursue a scholarship for master's degree in computer science, either within my country or abroad. Initially, I'll complete the university-provided coursework before delving into online resources. Simultaneously, I'll be on the lookout for projects to join, draw inspiration from, and eventually embark on my own ventures.

As I plan my journey, I'm curious about what else I should consider doing?

[sleek egret]

internships

not sure why arabic is helpful wrt software dev or IT, but if you wanna learn it, good luck!

[fringe sphinx]

Write code. Frequently. You won’t become a good software engineer (if that’s what you want) without a lot of practice..

[vapid jay]

Don't wanna flex but I won a coding competition using scratch and won 2k 🤑

I'm a professional pro coder

[fringe sphinx]

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill

[warm vortex]

https://discord.com/channels/267624335836053506/1145872493932990534 pls

[celest kite]

Do not spam around asking for attention in your help thread. It's a bad look

[vapid jay]

👋

New here. What's people's preference on tech stacks to work with?

[peak halo]

For what kind of work?

[vapid jay]

I do webdev, but I'm just getting into python. Seeing what people got going on though

[peak halo]

I don't work in web development, but I think django is the most popular option for that.

[vapid jay]

I was thinking about switching over from flask to django. What's your setup if not in webdev?

[peak halo]

I work in AI.

[vapid jay]

Very cool 👌

[pine sleet]

Not that personal preference matters much but I like using FastAPI + Next.js

[vapid jay]

Oh I'll be trying those out. They look clean and easy. Any thoughts on their scalability?

[pine sleet]

Both are being used in deployment by very large companies

It will probably come down to how well you build your system architecture rather than any inherent framework limitations

[vapid jay]

The future is now

Thanks for the input

[pine sleet]

You can always chuck machines at the scalability problem until it goes away /s

[sleek egret]

heh, there are limits. points of diminishing return

[pearl veldt]

how would you guys answer this interview question? " Are you someone who believes that the best policy is to tell people what they want to hear?"

[dull star]

I would probably go silent in thought for a little bit. Then tell them that it depends on the situation. I wouldn't have a good answer

[fringe sphinx]

Uh, “No”

[pearl veldt]

ty

[fringe sphinx]

Best policy is truth, but with consideration of circumstance and tact.

Answering yes is admitting to being a sycophant, I think

[sleek egret]

while in most companies the reality is "yes", what they want to hear is "no". thus you should say "no"

either that or be a smartass and ask back "is this a trick question?" 🙂

[dull star]

bro is not getting the job if he asks that

[sleek egret]

true, but it'll be lol

[peak halo]

What would an interviewer's goal be in asking that?

[dull star]

to see what type of person you are probably

[peak halo]

A better question is "how would you go about telling someone something that they don't want to hear?"

[dull star]

Huh, I think I'd actually be stuck on this question for a little bit

[peak halo]

And I would still want a more concrete scenario than that.

[sleek egret]

I was once recruited by a larger firm and the HR gal asked me "if we put you on a project to do XYZ using fortran, what would you do?" I answered, "I would quit". she was rather surprised at my answer and the guy who wanted to bring me in was quite upset at me for not giving the expected answer. lol.

[pine sleet]

did you get the job?

[fringe sphinx]

Didn’t she see your tattoo: COBOL 4 EVA

[sleek egret]

that would require intelligence and good judgement on the interviewer's part to judge your answer. so that's not gonna happen with HR.

[peak halo]

Which company's HR person did you date and why did they break off the engagement?

[sleek egret]

I think it was at that point she realized that I didn't give two shits what she thought. which upset her.

[fringe sphinx]

Lol, you just reminded me of a candidate who, when asked to whiteboard a BFS said: I don’t do whiteboard (coding)

[sleek egret]

oh no, that I would do

[dull star]

What's a BFS?

[sleek egret]

breadth first search

[fringe sphinx]

Nowadays yah, but for a junior position? Perhaps a bit too strong a take

[dull star]

Ah

[peak halo]

And how did you (or whoever was interviewing) react?

[sleek egret]

it wasn't for a junior position. I was honestly annoyed with her that she was treating me like an idiot.

[fringe sphinx]

The point was, it wasn’t intended to be a hard problem: I wanted to see how they’d interact and communicate

[sleek egret]

I would not advise others to be like me and act like a smart ass

[fringe sphinx]

Was awkward, I don’t remember how we handled it but it was more or less an interview ender. We were prob nice about it, but that’s it

[dull star]

yeah just become a bootlicker fr

[sleek egret]

the objective is to get an offer. you can be a hardass after that.

[fringe sphinx]

Oh, and remembered another candidate like, wow, 2000 or 2001. He refused to fill out the Hr paper. Said it was all in his resume. I still remember his name. Smart guy, but we just didn’t want drama.

[sleek egret]

lol, that's a bit odd

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, not a great first impression

[sleek egret]

he did have a point though

[dull star]

hey bro you should help me get a job frfr (in 3 years)

[peak halo]

Okay but tbh it's really annoying when you have to enter your whole resume when you already upload your resume

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, I mean, not wrong and I think we all agreed, but you just don’t want to be ‘unusual’ for the wrong reasons

[sleek egret]

oh I agree. just sayin' 🙂

[fringe sphinx]

He became a running joke when we didn’t want to do somethingZ

[fringe sphinx]

We all will 🙂

[true harness]

why not get a job right now

[golden pagoda]

Hey guys whatre you’re career paths with python hehe

[sleek egret]

to me it's just another language I've used along with a long list of others. ain't no big woop.

[dull star]

getting a job at 15 sounds a bit difficult 😞

[summer roost]

so is getting a job at 18. Get a degree.

[dull star]

fr that's what I'm trying for

[true harness]

the world needs more burger flippers

[dull star]

if I fail at everything I will become a burger flipper and help the world with this amazingly important job that only the finest and most classy people could have

nah but it doesn't seem too bad to get a job at fast-food

That'll probably be my first job

[fringe sphinx]

“do you know what they call a qtr pounder with cheese in France?” (Dunno why this is what I thought of?

[dull star]

I don't get it sorry 😭

[fringe sphinx]

Movie quote.

[dull star]

Oh

[golden pagoda]

Royale w cheese

[smoky quest]

are we talking about college level?
Because that doesn't match what I see on the market

A CS degree is the path of least resistance and with the most opportunities and compensation

it's a path with more resistance and with less opportunities and compensation

Each job ad has thousands of applicants, most of which have degrees, great projects and awesome internships. What would be your plan to stand out?

[harsh river]

it's a lot harder though, and you really need to have demonstrable skills

[smoky quest]

many people enjoy it rather than suffer through it.
That would point at something wrong there

[gilded valley]

depending on where in the world you are, you might already be able up get a part time job. I'd recommend it if possible

[flat dune]

Legitimate question for senior devs. My coworker (a fellow research scientist) wrote a stacked PR, ~800 lines changed, that nobody on the team is qualified to review, because it contains abstractions that are the result of theoretical research, which at this point only he understands. Usually the solution is to schedule a meeting and make them explain their bullshittery, but we're busy, we have our own research to attend to, we have alpha in less than a month, and we need his solutions merged to unblock us. We will probably only understand this PR by building on top of it.

He wrote a bunch of good tests, and the tests are passing. Usually I would start aggressively writing more tests for edge cases, but it's not clear to me what those edge cases are.

How do you review a PR like that?

[buoyant seal]

There is always an option to request submitting in smaller parts

[flat dune]

It's submitted in parts through ghstack, but the problem remains.

[buoyant seal]

Tbh, we often approve code nobody understands too. Because a single dev with knowledge in that domain works

It is great to review everything... But real world kind of asks for sacrifices and not upholding golden standards

[buoyant seal]

Just make observation of e2e behavior of the code, measure performance is okay to your requirements. Treat code as black box basically
Then u will be able to confirm its expected behavior without line by line reading

[smoky quest]

sounds like a slippery slope.
If you are too busy to understand their "bullshittery", then there is no reason to think others wouldn't be too busy as well to understand your "bullshittery".
If what they do is important for your release in less than a month, then it would suggest that it should take priority over your work. And if everything is important for the release, then nothing is and you have bigger problems

[marsh wind]

the other question to ask yourself here is what will be the impact of things going wrong in his PR, basically what is the cost of mistake there. If it's high, ie loosing client confidence, loosing actual money, stopping some mission critical operations for indefinite period of time - you have a problem. If on the other hand, the impact would be that it'll block your team/coworkers and force to go back, check and fix that solution and then all good - you probably can merge. It's still a slippery slope as recursive said.... and if it happens often it'll inevitably snowball and hit you when you least expect it. But, in many ways risk management and mitigation is what should drive your decision here

[finite coral]

hi everyone,

I hope you're all doing well. I wanted to share that I'm currently on the lookout for new opportunities in the field of manual and automation testing. Unfortunately, my previous company had to let me go, but I'm excited to bring my skills and experience to a new team. If you know of any openings or have any advice, I'd greatly appreciate your support. Feel free to DM me if you have any leads or suggestions.

Thank you all for being an awesome community! 🙌"

[fringe sphinx]

College isn’t about teaching you current skills, it’s about exposing you to different ideas and problem solving. It’s unfortunate most schools don’t strike a better balance (some colleges emphasize project-based learning, which I think is right). Being a good software engineer isn’t about the latest and greatest. Bjarne on this topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-QxI-RP6-HM

[fringe sphinx]

What kind of alpha are we talking? If you have a bunch of research scientists building it, this isn’t some corporate ‘must ship’ product… it’s likely some novel project. I’ve seen several projects that come out of academia start their early life with a lot of ideas that are straight out of reearch papers: the database world is often full of this stuff. Sometimes it’s ok to merge something that’s risky or overly complex -if it’s well compartmentalized-: I would look at the boundaries (interfaces) of this code. Can it be isolated to a package? Etc.

[late pewter]

should i still learn to code if im graduating in 6.5 years. will ai take over over jobs/extremely harder to land a swe job

[fringe sphinx]

Yes, no (but there may be more math involved)

[gilded valley]

why are you graduating in 6.5 years? are you still in high school?

if so, any skills you learn now are valuable

[gritty rivet]

What would you do instead? If you have found some future-proof skill you would rather learn, please let us know. If the choice is learn to code versus do nothing, then I would learn to code.

[vapid jay]

Why do you know better than Microsoft?

[fringe sphinx]

What are you asking?

[vapid jay]

You seem to put down what they did but.. do you know better than them? Maybe you do...

[fringe sphinx]

I stated facts about what they did. Documented facts.

[lapis wind]

Honestly anything to avoid modlers from using basic to unit test formulas...
I don't think you would use it for major manipulation, partially because editing and linting seem a bit awkward and also hard to scale, but meh it's fine for simple things

[near ocean]

are you implying the MSFT themselves are an authority after abandoning VBA and the JS API for office they created to move away from VBA?

they fucked up and just cause its a huge corpo doesnt make them experts on anything

[fleet reef]

The JS is abandoned?

[fringe sphinx]

I think we should just not engage on this / take the bait.

[near ocean]

they've been setting a lot of bait recently it seems, why not just take care of the source instead?

[fringe sphinx]

Do you have evidence of that? 😉

[near ocean]

kind of? its definitely not as extensive as vba is/was

and msft announcing python support feels like theyre ready to ditch the JS api as well

[gilded valley]

well JS support is more for extending Excel - you can create extensions and I think UDFs with it, but it's not alternative to formulas - python is meant to be used by just normal users in addition to formulas

[vapid jay]

When asked by a recruiter what your biggest weakness is, is it bad to say Gold-Plating?

[near ocean]

what does that mean

[fringe sphinx]

That's a joke question. "I care too much". It's a throwaway question that doesn't need to be answered seriously.

[vapid jay]

It's a term in several text books used to describe the addition of features that are unnecessary to the minimum viable product.

[fringe sphinx]

The trick to those questions is to answer with a strength, rather than a weakness.

[vapid jay]

It really is my greatest weakness though

[fringe sphinx]

You don't owe them that true an answer.

[vapid jay]

Tell me to build something, I'll try to make the best one that ever existed.😆

I had a professor one time give us a project on reverse pollish notation and I submitted a project that used ANTLR when he just wanted us to use a Stack. he told me "Now were not trying to build the best calculator in the world" and he made me redo it using a stack.

[fringe sphinx]

The standard joke response to that question is: "I care too much". Your answer is basically that.

[vapid jay]

would you say its bad to mention gold plating though?

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, why would you admit a weakness? And, use an expression that someone might take out of context. Just saying that you care too much is good enough.

[vapid jay]

I always give a description of what gold plating is as well just in case they dont know the meaning of the term

[fringe sphinx]

You're being such an engineer! (i mean that with love)

[vapid jay]

I had a professor beat these terms into me, Ill use them with HR and make them learn them too 😆

[fringe sphinx]

You have to treat HR as you would a small child.

[near ocean]

i did have to ask tho just now 😔

[fringe sphinx]

An interview is not the time for soul-searching truths. They're just looking for good enough answers to the behavioral questions. Going off on a tangent explaining some term when asked "what is your greatest weakness" will lead to them taking the note: "Talks too much and can't answer a simple question".

If you want some ideas: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-your-greatest-weakness

[vapid jay]

I believe I read it while studying for CompTia project +. Lot of valuable jargon that you would not otherwise read about.

[vapid jay]

I'd rather talk too much and have someone clearly understand my aptitude then talk too little and have someone fail to understand what I am capable of.

[fringe sphinx]

HR is not the audience for that. They're not there for your aptitude.

But, just my opinion 🙂

[vapid jay]

I also feel like there would be a correlation between the duration of the meeting and the familiarity with the candidate. Low familiarity with candidacy would probably yield lower higher rates.

[fringe sphinx]

A behavioral interview is not the time to impress them with lengthy expositions. Think of it more like dating: they want to know who would be pleasant, a good co-worker who can listen and collaborate. For example https://jobs.gartner.com/life-at-gartner/your-career/5-tips-to-ace-a-behavioral-based-interview/ : " Be clear and concise with your communication, yet specific. "

[vapid jay]

I've never dated. haha

[fringe sphinx]

Good luck though! It's a throwaway question anyway 🙂

[strong socket]

guys does anyone know any good internships
python based
decent stipend

[peak halo]

if you're a university student, you should ask the career center what companies are seeking interns from your university.

if you're not a university student, you pretty much won't get an internship.

[late pewter]

how do i develop a passion for coding

[fringe sphinx]

You’ve asked this a few times. #python-discussion message and #career-advice message to pick two. Did you not like our answers?

[celest kite]

Are you trolling at this point?

[buoyant seal]

Minecraft is great for programming with visual 3D syntax. when you play electro technical mods.
U need to think with 3D... block/words, how to automate everything, automating acquiring resources, autocrafting on if conditions and for loops next items
until u have fully automated base producing end level space stuff automatically 😄
Pretty much... programming.
Digging through mods documentations is very similar to researching/reading official docs for libraries during programming too
Next level, writing your own scripts/little mods to go beyond

[harsh river]

Redstone is Turing complete afaik. So yeah

[vapid jay]

But your interpretation of that being "bad" Vs "great" is a matter of opinion entirely, isn't it? Is Microsoft a bad company because of this?

[vapid jay]

Explain how they f* up? I am confused

[vapid jay]

What is a strength you have you can personally camouflage as an answer to "what is a weakness you have" without sounding silly?

[vapid jay]

I certainly agree with this

[vapid jay]

Also true

[fringe sphinx]

These are probably questions for OT, I don't think we need to discuss them here.

[vapid jay]

Unlikely. Most people don't have one, I guess?

[low sun]

Very rare, but when it sparks, great things happen

[summer roost]

I don't think it's that rare. Lots of professional coders also code stuff in their free time - or hang out in servers like this, volunteering time to help others learn. They wouldn't do that if it wasn't a passion for them

[summer roost]

"I'm sometimes too much of a perfectionist", for instance.

[sleek egret]

does anyone actually believe that response?

[fringe sphinx]

My weakness? “I am a great coworker and really good at my job”.

[gilded valley]

perfectionism and stubbornness are two answers I've specifically been told never to give. just give a real answer framed well

[vapid jay]

my go to is im bad at spelling seems to work so far what do you guys think of that one

[analog sun]

Hmmm

If I had to give one it might be that I struggle to stay organized with only verbal requests. I can manage my tasks better if there is an email / protocol to follow up on, but if it is just passing conversations or phone calls from 4-5 people in a day then something is going to be dropped

[gilded valley]

my answer would be that I'm sometimes too quick with communication - and need to remind myself to check that I'm on the same page with people rather than going off on a tangent

[plucky cloud]

It’s no longer viable to do programming as a career without a degree is it

[sleek egret]

I say something along the lines of "I find it difficult to actually care about trivial personal problems that my collegues may have. for example, if someone says they have a sick cat."

[gilded valley]

I think that answer amounts to "I struggle to have empathy" which does actually sound like a red flag

[sleek egret]

yes, but they sort of expect that for technical folks 🙂

[summer roost]

Does it matter?

[sleek egret]

probably not

[gilded valley]

maybe. I think empathy is just a super important skill, especially the more senior you get

[sleek egret]

depends on the company. at bridgewater, it's frowned upon

[true harness]

I think the main goal is to also describe how you're fixing the problem

[sleek egret]

that sounds like a good approach

[gilded valley]

really? I'm not sure I believe this. I'm at a hedge fund, certainly still valued here

not disagreeing. they have pretty different cultures. I just haven't heard that about Bridgewater

[sleek egret]

bridgewater (or rather Dalio) is weird. look up their management philosophy stuff. it's definately far outside the norm. I know a few people who have worked there. it's a strange place.

you know that whole "don't place blame on individuals" thing that most of corporate america follows? well, bridgewater has a policy of always placing blame on an individual. as I said, weird.

it's "brutal honesty" philosophy or something like that

[gilded valley]

reading about it now. seems fairly similar to what I hear from Citadel.

this kind of brutal attitude is definitely common enough in hedge funds, but I don't know the extent to which it affects business teams vs investment teams at different companies. Here it's almost like 2 separate worlds

[sleek egret]

from the two people I know who've worked there, they say it's somewhat self selecting for a certain type of personality

lots of new hires quit fast when they find out their interviewers/recruiters were not blowing smoke

[gilded valley]

on the investment side, it's 100% necessary, you need people who will give very literally 100% of what they can into being great at their jobs. tech is just tech though, same as anywhere else

[late flame]

They don't. Anyone that can't be empathetic doesn't get to work on my team, full stop

[late flame]

It really never was. The vast majority of people that are in this career have degrees, or some other valuable resources to make up for it. Bill Gates didn't need a degree because his parents were millionaires and worked at big tech companies already.

[sleek egret]

it didn't hurt that he got into and did well at harvard until he decided to leave before finishing

[fringe sphinx]

I agree with your overall point, but I do know many exceptions who made full careers out of it. I’ve hired some too (altho, tbh, they had a pretty high failure rate)

[smoky quest]

exceptions don't mean it is viable though. I also know some folks who went from a full on phd in biology to something super technical and nice in dev, but that doesn't necessarily make it viable.
I would put viable in the sense of: "this is one of the normal path to do that career and that's completely okay to aim for that"

[rugged zephyr]

My team of 10 devs has two computer sciences degrees and their both in information not in programming or engineering

We have 2 devs who did a bootcamp

One we one who was a secretary who learned appscript cuz she needed to automate her job so she could game more,and then javascript to keep that train going, and then got moved to dev team from office secretary cuz all she did was write code and goof off

It just kinda depends. Some employers will wanna see a degree , most ppl don't care at all how u learned in the beginning , it's how u learn now that matters

[smoky quest]

that works fine for roles like frontend/backend, but not so much for more advanced roles

[fringe sphinx]

I'm always conflicted during these conversations because there's a lot of nuance that we can't really cover. Certainly we all agree on the optimal path, and agree that a bootcamp alone doesn't make an engineer. But, there's a lot of alternate paths that might not be equal to, but are viable careers.

[rugged zephyr]

Ya but I feel like that's the starting point regardless of degree/bootcamp/udemy/self-taught and then u move on to a more advanced role. Like after u get ur first role for 2 years everybody's on equal footing

[wraith rune]

Hello, I was struggling to find a good programming language to start on and I want to start with either python or lua, but I don’t know which one is more beginner friendly or is more useful to learn can anybody help me with that?

[near ocean]

what are these advanced roles that require a degree, and not because its one of the employer's whims

[marsh wind]

Lmao gotta love the dedication.

[marsh wind]

Tbh getting from stem phds into dev/data world is probably what over a half of those getting phd end up doing 😁

[peak halo]

this is the python server, so we're just going to tell you to do python

[wraith rune]

Yeah I thought so but then I at least have an answer so I got an excuse to not learn lua any further

[peak halo]

you should learn lua.

[wraith rune]

Hold on, which one is it? 😂 now I dont know anymore

Is it more beginner friendly? Or something

[peak halo]

I couldn't even tell you what a lua program looks like, but python is designed to have a gradual learning curve.

[wraith rune]

Oh alright, thank you

[gritty rivet]

Employers whims matter a whole lot when you're trying to be an employee

I think most employers who toss out resumes based on education understand that there are people without the degree who could do a great job. Most just don't care enough to search that way

[near ocean]

Im trying to understand

that works fine for roles like frontend/backend, but not so much for more advanced roles

What are these more advanced roles and why are they more advanced

[lunar comet]

I've seen the same type of employer hire people that are very sociable and friendly, but who don't meet the requirements. It all depends

[smoky quest]

yeah that works well for frontend/backend, but not so much when you want to work in advanced optimization for solvers, expert systems or compiler theory.

[smoky quest]

anything is possible with different degrees of plausibility

[elder forge]

All jobs exist because there are tasks that need doing.
Sometimes these are tasks that the management knows perfectly well how to do, they just don't have the manpower.
Other times they need to hire someone because they themselves don't have the skills to complete the task.
And finally there are tasks that they don't know if are possible at all.
Different levels of education prepare you for doing different kinds of tasks.

[crystal flume]

I got a help desk role I start tomorrow is it normal to feel nervous and feel like I don’t know anything but I do have customer service experience it’s all about learning and taking notes correct in this type of job and learning on the job right and doing a bit of researching outside work and learning

[fringe sphinx]

"is it normal to feel nervous and feel like I don’t know anything": I'd be worried if you didn't feel that way!

Self-doubt is perhaps healthy. As long as it's not crippling!

[crystal flume]

I have no IT experience or certifications or qualifications

[fringe sphinx]

So? They hired you. They like you. You got this, just be pleasant, take notes, and learn!

It's the people who walk in first day of the job thinking they know everything that are the problem.

[crystal flume]

Yeah they hired me I will be learning on how to troubleshoot on the job and do other stuff

I will self teach myself stuff outside of work

[subtle orchid]

Hi

How are you guys doing?

I have a challenge....
I am a new fiverr freelancer. Python actually. I just recently filled out my profile and fiverr replies me that my seller profile was not approved.

Please what do you think could be the cause of the situation and what can be the best way to solve it.

Thanks for reading

[rugged zephyr]

Aren't their like 18 ppl total Doin these roles though?

[lucid vapor]

There aren't anywhere close to as many roles for those types of things, but there are also far fewer people interested in them.

[rugged zephyr]

Like I never heard of anyone aspiring to be a compiler theorist and failing cuz of their lack of education. It feels more like a self selecting thing.

[elder forge]

It is not uncommon for PhD programs in STEM to have a 50% failure rate, but you tend not to hear about the ppl who fail.

[rugged zephyr]

Well ya they design the courses to create washouts. I've never entirely understood why. They did that in undergrad too.

[sleek egret]

they do it because subsequent courses have a pace and difficulty that those who washed out cannot handle

[elder forge]

A PhD is not about courses, a PhD is about working independently to break new ground and do something that has never been done before. It is qualitatively different from undergrad.
While there are courses in PhD programs, that is not where students fail.

[fringe sphinx]

my phd qualifier exam had a 90% failure. it was ridiculous.

[sleek egret]

that seems reasonable

[fringe sphinx]

it was literally: here's 8 text books, test is in 6 months.

[sleek egret]

a buddy of mine got into a PhD program for linguistics. they said "learn japanese, bengali, swahili, arabic and russian by the end of the summer"

[fringe sphinx]

one of the books was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics

[sleek egret]

or something equivalent. so he did. the guy is now a professor of linguistics at a major state university

[rugged zephyr]

And that's how my professors explained it to me.
But imagine a world where course 1 prepared you for course 2 and course 2 prepared you for course 3.

Instead of course 1 identifies those who already possess the aptitude to pass course 2.

[lucid vapor]

There are a lot of compiler/language theory jobs in academia, in which case you pretty much need a PhD

Most* industry compiler jobs are probably not doing a whole lot of theory (yes, this is a massive overgeneralization, but there's some truth to it i think)

[rugged zephyr]

Ya that's true, u right. Academia does hard require degrees

[woeful bone]

They are structured this way. Course 1 prepares you for the rigor you will face in subsequent courses.

If you are stumbling in Data Structures, you are going to have a really hard time with Compilers and Operating Systems

[sleek egret]

what? you mean you use DS&A for actual stuff? that's crazy talk!

[lapis wind]

There is only one true data structure: trees.

[rugged zephyr]

But what if it prepared some one who was stumbling? And not just some one who was killin the game?

[woeful bone]

You misspelled "graphs"

[lapis wind]

🤣

[woeful bone]

The idea is to help you see that you might not have the aptitude for it early. College is expensive. Better to switch disciplines as a sophomore than as a senior

And Algorithms will beat the hell out of you. You gotta be ready

[sleek egret]

it will? it seemed pretty straitforward to me

[woeful bone]

it will if you are struggling in 200 level courses

[rugged zephyr]

I agree with u 100% and but imagine for a moment education where the courses aren't designed to be a sorting hat but instead are designed to raise minds to meet any challenge they may face

[sleek egret]

you cannot structure actual education around platitudes you feed to 8 yr olds

[woeful bone]

I guess I feel that my degree program did just this. The sorting is a byproduct of the difficulty of the discipline

[sleek egret]

you tell little kids things like "you can be anything you want" so that they'll try hard at lots of different things. but it's actually a lie. at a certain point in your life you have accept this.

[rugged zephyr]

So for my math degree I skipped class, slept during the ones I accidentally went to, and had to cover my Hundos when the test got handed back so the kids beside me wouldn't know I'm the one who stole their dream of getting a curve.

And I just watch kids constantly getting crushed by shit they were never reasonably prepared to deal with

[sleek egret]

what are hundos?

[rugged zephyr]

A perfect score on a test

[sleek egret]

oh. so @rugged zephyr was one of those kids...

[rugged zephyr]

Ya I'm the asshole they designed the sorting hat system for, and clearly it didn't do me much good and it crushed a buncha ppl it wasn't designed for. So maybe the sorting hat is suboptimal

[elder forge]

If you skipped class, how do you know what the students who actually showed up were supposed to know?

[rugged zephyr]

I attended office hours cuz it seemed to be a better use of time

[woeful bone]

So you are smart. Then you can understand how there is innate ability to grasp concepts.

I washed out of my math program because I hit Real Analysis and Modern Algebra and the concepts didn't click for me any more. I just didn't have the right kind of brain to just 'get it'.

The same thing is important for people to face in CS. No amount of preparation can help if the talent is not there. Better to save the kids time and money than to let them move onward in a discipline they are ill-suited for.

[elder forge]

I do not know any educators, at any level, that do not want their students to succeed, and I do not know any professors who have intentionally design a 'sorting hat' system.

[rugged zephyr]

I refuse to believe ur innately incapable of comprehending modern algebra

[sleek egret]

analysis is hard

[woeful bone]

Well....truth be told, I missed way too much class in that course. But, the point is, it didn't come naturally any more. I passed RA, but with a C. It told me that Math wasn't my field

[woeful bone]

Also, there are plenty of people who can't comprehend basic algebra. Talent is a real thing.

[elder forge]

There are many aspects that go into designing a study program, in general they are designed to make as many students succeed as possible

[woeful bone]

I found it so. The elegance of the proofs just blew my mind. When I had to try to prove things I felt like a chimp with a stick next to... well, Newton.

[smoky quest]

lol not at all

[sleek egret]

that seems like a poor goal to me

there needs to be a minimum level of knowledge transfer. if you just want to maximize "success" then just pass them all whether they attend or not, whether they learn or not

[woeful bone]

Only if you define success as passing classes, though.

[sleek egret]

you can pass people with 0% correct answers

[woeful bone]

I think most professors think of success as students mastering the concepts.

[sleek egret]

now that seems like a reasonable and worthy goal

[elder forge]

Succeed as in learn, not as in pass
Also succeed in their future career

[fringe sphinx]

I think the goals shift year to year. As a freshman, it's just churning out classes. Mostly repetitive, cookie cutter lesson plans.

[sleek egret]

most freshman university students can only barely think

but I guess most eventually learn how over the next few years.

or at least that's the hope

[rugged zephyr]

Like yeah I'm being a little disingenuous by calling it the sorting hat system. The heart of the complaint is just that courses designed to get some one to switch programs never quite made sense to me.

[sleek egret]

they only want people who love the topic and are dedicated

[woeful bone]

I think because you come from the perspective that anyone can succeed in Computer Science. Others, including myself, don't think that's true.

[sleek egret]

expansion or popularity is not everyone's goal

[gritty rivet]

Unless.you're at the very top of your field, talent is a thing but it's not everything. Outcomes are something like talent x interest x effort. If you were interested enough and/or made enough effort, you could have chosen to follow through with nath

[sleek egret]

anyone can learn to write code. but learning how without the theory (CS) is sort of like learning how to play guitar without learning music theory or taking formal lessons. certainly possible and you can still become a really good player. but without the theory, it makes understanding the why of what you're doing much more difficult.

[rugged zephyr]

I mean I don't think anyone can succeed at this but I think anyone who loves the game enough to practice every day and spend their free time working to create or solve will .

And maybe u gotta get further than two courses on C++ syntax designed atleast partly as a barrier to entry to fall in love

[woeful bone]

I have no doubt. But I wouldn't have been excelling in the field. I would have been a poor mathematician. Instead, I switched degrees and found real success.

[woeful bone]

You just described someone who is willing to work hard enough to pass the gateway course, though. Not someone who is going to switch degrees because it gets tough.

[rugged zephyr]

I agree. but I left room for the existence of some one who is willing to work hard enough to pass the gateway only once they see what's behind it. Which you can't unless you passed.

[elder forge]

You are making a straw man argument. You think the course is designed extra hard to convince students to switch.
This is an idea the students have invented, that gets passed from older students to younger ones. It is not how the professors think.
Professors are generally passionate about their subject and want students to succeed within their field. If they could stucture the study program differently to increase the learning outcomes for the students, they would.

[sleek egret]

well, as the rolling stones once sang, "you can't always get what you want / but if you try sometimes you'll find / you get what you need"

[woeful bone]

I suppose. Hard for me to be objective, because I loved writing code from the start. The love did carry me through the struggle to grasp pointer logic...but, let's be honest, it isn't really that hard. People make c++ out to be a bogey man, but you don't really even scratch the surface of complicated c++ in 200 level courses

[rugged zephyr]

You may be right. I was first exposed to this idea by a professor I respect. He may have been wrong that the course was designed that way. Or I may have been at uni gone rogue.

But I know some darn good educators who would never design it this way. So it's very well possible courses aren't designed that way.

[smoky quest]

sounds highly specific to the school/country/whatever.

I haven't seen gateway classes myself, but I am sure there are some schools where it exists or even schools where the intent is to not exist but some professors use some classes as such

[gritty rivet]

You certainly wouldn't have excelled in the field without effort. From the sound of it you chose not to make much effort, so you don't actually have much basis to evaluate your talent

[elder forge]

Don't get me wrong, some courses are hard, and will cause some students to switch, but they are not optimized in this direction.

[rugged zephyr]

I didn't like it. Wasn't pure math so it was dumb. Then I took ML2 and was kinda diggin it. But still didn't love writing code. Then after school I met SQL and that kinda opened my eyes to how cool this field can be.

[woeful bone]

Well....you don't get to 300/400 level courses in a degree without putting in some effort, my friend. I was comparing my talent against other people in the degree. They were grasping concepts I wasn't. I admit I didn't try as hard as I should have. However, I also recognized that my talent in mathematics wasn't at a level where I felt I would be successful in that field.

[woeful bone]

Man, that's a weird journey! Most people hate SQL. I love solving a really complex difficult query, but I haven't met a lot of other devs (not DBAs) that feel the same way.

[balmy star]

This is such an interesting conversation to me. When I was getting my CS degree there was talk of "filter classes" but never once were they talked about as a class intentinally designed to get people to switch majors. It was a way of saying "this particular class is required but is also quite hard and many people decide to switch after taking it". It was often more conceptual or technically in depth classes.

But I never thought that it was implying some kind of nefarious plot to discourage students, only that the class was particularly difficult and functioned as an incidental filter on the student body.

Very much like number theory for math majors.

[woeful bone]

But what even is a number, man?

[gritty rivet]

Maybe math is a different sort of field where talent really matters more then I realize. But in general I think people find it easier to blame things on a lack of talent.

I regret that I told myself / let people tell me that I was bad at math all through high school instead of telling me I need to try harder

[rugged zephyr]

Number theory at my school was Greek simulator 2000's edition. Each night you were required to prove some theorem that some guy got in a history book for proving. If the teacher had any way to show that u googled an answer or talked to some one in class about it u we're going before the board. The next day u had to present it in front of your peers. And u got counted off for punctuation and grammar.

But I don't think it was our filter class. It was probaly a filter class for the math Ed majors cuz they were required to take it though.

[woeful bone]

This rings true for me. I do wish I had tried harder and gone to class a lot more. Math fascinates me, and I would have liked to have learned more.

[elder forge]

What many think of as filter classes are classes that attempt to teach consepts that are qualitatively different from what has come before. This is data structures and algorithms in CS, organic chemistry in medicine, thermodynamics in chemistry, solid state physics in material science.
And I guess number theory in math 🙂

[rugged zephyr]

I think that's fair

[fringe sphinx]

I’ve repeated this idea a lot: there’s an idea of mathematical maturity, and it’s not a straight line (it’s multidimensional). Students need to develop along multiple axes to succeed: see the five strand model here: https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2019/04/15/precise-definitions-of-mathematical-maturity/

[balmy star]

Yes, and its building foundational knowledge required for the later classes.

[fringe sphinx]

(And I think this mathematical maturity carries over to software engineer)

[rugged zephyr]

I've always really like that quote that's like " those who are good at math are so because they are the ones who have suffered the most at the hands of mathematics".

I've always been really proud of the games I've lost. And it's allowed me at times to be enthusiastic about losing or feeling lost in the sauce at work

[steep gate]

I'm 17 and I'm really into coding. I've learned the basics and I'm trying to find what to do next, what should I do?

[fringe sphinx]

Besides go to college? Practice coding!

[fringe sphinx]

If you need coding project ideas, ask in #1035199133436354600 , there's lots of ideas they can share

[worldly smelt]

I wanna ask, if I learn Python, can I get a job if I have only completed high school?

[peak halo]

Not really. Just "knowing Python" isn't enough for any job, including for those who have a degree. Even more so if you don't.

If you're a young person without any experience, the path of least resistance with the most reward would be to get a degree.

[worldly smelt]

I'll obviously learn the specifics like machine learning or web development

[peak halo]

You will not get a job in machine learning without a degree, just so you know.

[worldly smelt]

Im 23, so I guess its not a good idea to join college now

[peak halo]

That's when I started my CS degree.

[true harness]

avast, that is not the case

[worldly smelt]

What kind of degree is needed?

[peak halo]

At least a bachelor's in CS, or another bachelor's related to ML. More likely, you would need a master's.

[fringe sphinx]

Also: there are many jobs in tech. It's not just pure software engineers: there's QA, operations, support, sales engineering, etc, all with wildly varying responsibilities. And, there are many evening and part-time programs to finish a degree, if that's your plan. So, if you don't have the privilege, perhaps getting an entry job in tech while working on a degree parttime.

[worldly smelt]

So I can get entry level jobs without a degree?

[peak halo]

The jobs in tech that you can get without a degree are considered less desirable than the ones that typically require one.

[worldly smelt]

I cant get a degree right now:(

[steep gate]

According to my dad and all the interviewing youtubers that I watched, people tend to look for more expirence

So internships are a good look on resumes

[peak halo]

Sure, but the kind of experience that is most valued is difficult to get if you don't first have a degree. Portfolio projects aren't taken all that seriously. And internships are usually only offered to current students.

(my company only offers internships to students.)

[steep gate]

Aww that sucks

[worldly smelt]

Can I get a degree from an online uni or course?

[steep gate]

I was looking for an internship last year and i found 3 of them that did interships for seniors in high school.

[fringe sphinx]

So, let's just be realistic: without a degree or relevant experience, you just want any opportunity to get into tech. Support, QA (test), etc are all good starting points. While there, build up your education and work towards your goal.

[peak halo]

An online degree with perceived value will still be as difficult to obtain as an "in-person degree", sans any difficulties associated with being physically present at the campus.

[steep gate]

I'm not sure what to do after learning Python basics. Every project I try to do feels like I have to have my hand held throughout the entire process.

[fringe sphinx]

Ask for project ideas on #python-discussion , there's lots of suggestions out there. Just explain what you're looking for

[summer roost]

so long as the degree is from an accredited institution, it doesn't really matter whether the courses are all online or not. At least, not to employers, though you would probably get more out of in-person.

[knotty drum]

What online degrees in particular would you say hold weight? Like are coursera/udemy tier degrees worth it?

Obviously you WILL learn stuff, but do you think employers think they're valid?

[peak halo]

I don't think Coursera or udemy have degree programs. Certificates are not degrees, and do not purport to be similar to degrees.

[knotty drum]

Oh

[smoky quest]

By degree, people mean things like a bsc or a masters

[knotty drum]

Well damb

Damn*

I was hoping that my udemy data science course was worth it title-wise

[peak halo]

Definitely not.

[fringe sphinx]

It just depends on what type of jobs you’re aiming for. Entry software engineer jobs are generally bachelors minimum. Go look at job descriptions to get an idea

[peak halo]

Anything that claims to impart "data science" credentials that isn't a university degree is essentially predatory.

[knotty drum]

Mm why do you say that

[peak halo]

Because their business model is "there are people who have heard that data scientist positions pay well, and they would be willing to pay for a data science certificate on the false premise that it would make them a competitive applicant for data scientist positions"

Not to mention that the whole concept of "data science" is just hype. There is no "science of data" that is a separate thing from statistics.

If "data science" wasn't a useful vocabulary item to encompass the scientific programming stack, it would have faded away by now.

[knotty drum]

Doesn't data science imply that it's based on machine learning models and frameworks?

[buoyant seal]

Data science is the science of analyzing raw data using statistics and machine learning techniques with the purpose of drawing conclusions about that information.

So briefly it can be said that Data Science involves:

Statistics, computer science, mathematics
Data cleaning and formatting
Data visualization
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-become-data-scientist-a-complete-roadmap/

[vapid jay]

hello

[smoky quest]

@vapid jay I would typically recommend as far and abstract as you can. It won't close doors (ex: going into cybersecurity) while enabling you to go deep into some areas.
So something like a masters in CS with some specializations can be a good opportunities. There will be as many specializations as there are areas in the field (ex: distributed systems, development methodologies, correctness, optimizations, image processing, ml/ai, compilers, programming analysis, etc.)

the masters in IT, cybersecurity, etc. will typically be more around a specific career path

[vapid jay]

That's what I was thinking, If I were to get a master's it would have to be in software engineering, CS, or even AI

AI masters sounds kind of fun

[smoky quest]

AI is fun

[vapid jay]

Do you know any good online masters programs in the field of AI? Self-paced master's programs would be preferred.

[smoky quest]

nope.

On that note, while online masters are great, I would also encourage in person if you can.
It can help maximize your learning, your interactions and building your first professional network

[vapid jay]

I don't care for traditional education anymore. I actually progress more on my own than when someone is telling me how to learn a particular subject matter.

I do best with an outline of criterion that needs to be met and then just mastering that subject matter. Lectures bore me to death and I zone out frequently.

traditional education does not transfer well into the real world either.

[smoky quest]

that has not been my observation

[vapid jay]

you have someone lecture you for hours on how to do an assignment?

or a particular subject matter?

[smoky quest]

That's typically the intro and presentation of the teacher.
They do set their expectations for the year(s) to come

But no, they won't go over how to do an assignment for hours

Unless I misunderstood the question

[vapid jay]

I care more about focusing on my own abilities to teach myself than I do about being taught by others. Being reliant is not good. Being thrown in a metaphoric fire and getting myself out of it alone has always been my best teacher.

much faster as well

[smoky quest]

That also implies taking longer to arrive at the same point.
There is a huge value in learning on your own and being able to research and assess potential solutions. But there is also a lot of value in benefiting from the experience and skills of vastly more experienced people.

[robust dome]

Guys are you guys aware of any good bachelor programs in the UK for computer science that has overall a B requirement?

[vapid jay]

That's what the outlines are for. I want someone who is a subject matter expert in that field to give almost like a syllabus of outcomes that I should have proficiency in and nothing more. This way I still learn the material and am introduced to complex unknown topics, but in a faster way. One thing I recently started doing is certification exams. They are great because they give an outline of what needs to be learned and validation that the subject matter was learned by providing the exam.

[smoky quest]

I mean, don't stop learning. Continue doing that.
But also don't miss on the stories, context and wisdom of the teacher and classmates. It's not that different than being in a community like discord where you can talk about different experiences and learn from each others

[vapid jay]

One thing Im studying for right now is Oracle Cloud Associate Java Programmer. Now my traditional in person university taught Java and I passed with straigt As. However, studying alone for this certification exam is teaching me more about the Java language than that university ever did. Its a night and day difference.

[smoky quest]

projects also go a long way to teach you skills and diving deeper

[vapid jay]

Yeah experiences are great when they are relevant and engaging and in a conversational style. My biggest reason Im opposed to the traditional education system even after graduating is that Lectures are the worst way to learn and thats what most college classes are.

[smoky quest]

I haven't seen better ways that work for most

[gilded valley]

the way to get onto a great course with mediocre grades is to do it just after results day by ringing around good universities.

kings college is a great university that starts out with relatively low requirements

[smoky quest]

And in my experience, of all the classmates that skipped classes because they thought they knew better, they all missed on something

[vapid jay]

I agree, you know what though. I honestly think these certification exams teach me more than a project would. Projects I can use a lot of the same things to solve a problem. I have an approach that I use to solve most coding problems and it gets me into a rut. It works well and solves the problem. However, that is not learning, the certification exams force me study things I otherwise would not give the time of day.

[vapid jay]

oh I never skipped classes but I may as well have. Gained next to nothing from sitting there.

[smoky quest]

The main thing is for you to learn and have fun along the way.
So whatever works for you! No reason to stop

One thing to note on the certifications though, is that a lot of them are skill based (ex: java, networking, db, etc.) and not so much on how things work and more abstract skills (ex: logic programming, how to actually implement a DB, etc.). Not a reason to stop, but I would also spice them up

[vapid jay]

oh the basics of that are already known. I feel like I have all the breadth that i need to with Java, C#, SQL, Javascipt, Python, HTML/CSS, and Dart. Now I just need to do a deep dive into what makes those languages unique. I'm debating learning golang, but I dont feel its really necessary. I really just need deeper knowledge of what Im already familiar with.

Certification exams really hone in on depth and less on breadth.

[smoky quest]

golang won't bring much to the table.
I would suggest non-C/java style languages. Look at more functional languages like ocaml or haskell, logic programming like prolog, look even at things like erlang for the actor model

[vapid jay]

I haven't seen any jobs for those fields. I have seen a few embedded systems gigs for C and C++, but at the same time I don't care much for that type of programming. I feel like C and C++ are on there way out in terms of use. People use to use C++ for the speed, but now Golang is faster so C++ does not even have that.

Also C not having a garbage compiler is pretty bad. I imagine many people are avoiding that language for that reason alone

[versed mauve]

The most basic and probably most important reason is performance. Another is that they have also been in industry for so long and I don't know, if I met a computer expert that hasn't been exposed to one of those 2 languages.

[vapid jay]

You say performance, but Golang and Rust are performing better so thats no longer valid. The other reason is "they are already in use" Thats not a very good reason. Thats actually the leading reason people mention when the languages are dying. Java for instance, a lot of people use java, but any chart shows the use of Java going down overtime. Thats why in the case of learning new languages I try to stick to languages that are growing and not declining.

[smoky quest]

the language won't make you get a job or not. And languages aren't like pokemon, you don't need to catch them all.
However knowing other paradigms will help you expand the way you think and frame problems

[vapid jay]

I firmly disagree based on the interviews I have been given

[smoky quest]

People who frame themselves as a <LANG> engineer are just limiting their own opportunities

[vapid jay]

breadth has never been an issue, only depth. 7 languages is enough at the moment.

[smoky quest]

I can guarantee you, you won't have an issue getting a C# job if you only know python or java or C

What people care about is what you do with these languages, not if you know language A or B

You can see languages as screw drivers. You can use that to fix your bike or build a space ship. But the expertise is never in the screw driver

[vapid jay]

False guarantee. I've had interviews where they ask me about keywords that are not even in the languages anymore and havent been for 5-10 years. Questions that require a very very deep understanding of the language and not something trivial like explain time complexity, data structures, or something like that.

It was probably different in other job markets, but the current job market is brutal

[smoky quest]

If you encounter such interview, they are the exception rather than the rule. I would also argue you have avoided a bullet

I have had zero issues being hired on languages I never worked with, I have hired people not even knowing the language and that has been the same in my network

[vapid jay]

when was your last interview for a job that you were hired for?

[smoky quest]

it doesn't matter.

[vapid jay]

that is not true and also not an answer

economic downturns have a huge impact on the difficulty and requirements of interviews

[smoky quest]

no, because asking for keyword is a shitty way to assess demonstrated skills.
It's something people were doing like 30 years ago. It's not even a popular practice anymore because it's not useful

[vapid jay]

So is age, but they do it. Just have to accept it

[smoky quest]

how is age related to keywords?

[vapid jay]

you need to be N years old with N years experience to do this task. Job ageism is a very real thing.

[smoky quest]

that's not a thing

[vapid jay]

I encourage you to apply for jobs in the current market and say you have 2 or less years experience then 🙂

[smoky quest]

Let me rephrase it: it's not a thing in the USA and EU

[vapid jay]

Ageism is huge in the USA

[smoky quest]

I can assure you that I have access to all the information that I need to

[vapid jay]

I actually started getting more job offers when I took anything related to the number of years experience of my resume entirely lmao

Doesn't matter how good you are if your resume gets filtered out

even college, I dont have what year I graduated lmao

[smoky quest]

Misleading people may help you get more attention, but may backfire down the road.

I suggest you read resources like:

• https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897 , which covers all the roles and responsibilities at a tech company from the intern all the way to CTO
• Career ladders like https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit#gid=0 or https://dropbox.tech/culture/our-updated-engineering-career-framework
• Companies guidelines to interviews like Amazon or Google

None of these will mention asking for keywords or discriminating based on age or to mislead people

[vapid jay]

If misleading people from making discriminatory or assumptive decisions that are based on factors humans cannot control then I feel no shame in it whatsoever. Its similar to the ethnicity question employers ask.. why does it matter?

[smoky quest]

You are misleading on your experience

[vapid jay]

experience != age

[smoky quest]

How does that relate with age?

[vapid jay]

I worked for several people with 20 years experience and they were worse than most college students. They should get the position because they are older and less skilled?

The reason I do not put age identifiers on my resume is I want judged on my apptitude and skillsets, things that I can control, rather than things I have no control over such as age or race.

making an argument for ageism or racism is entirely immoral.

[smoky quest]

I would assume you don't have enough experience to understand yet how they are judged. If someone with 20 years of experience is judged on the same criteria than someone with none, then they have bigger problems.

The whole thing has nothing to do with your age. It has to do with your experience, or rather it's lack thereof

[celest kite]

Okzoomer

[vapid jay]

false

[smoky quest]

ok

[gilded valley]

I've heard positive things about this approach to resumes:
no company names, no dates. just a section for each job with an appropriate header, and some slightly longer than typical bullet points talking about actual impact.

I know someone who took this broad approach to get into a much better company

[vapid jay]

Thats kind of what I do, I do have the job title and dates I worked. Its fair to ask those questions because maybe you see a gap in employment and are curious if an event transpired over that time. Then my job description is pure bullet points of what I did in that position.

[gilded valley]

tbf, the person who did this had a fairly atypical background and skillset.

I think the generalised version is: will this information help or hurt? if the latter, remove it.

but you apply it to every section, including the ones that are seen as "must-haves" like company names or dates etc

[vapid jay]

I agree with the help or hurt thing. I do not see being a recent graduate as something that would help

in my case I was the first person an an organization to write software and was the lead software developer of a major project with a top 10 company in the health sector. That's not something an intern would normally do.

[gilded valley]

mostly agree - but if you have the dates of your jobs on there, it's kinda obvious

[vapid jay]

so being disregarded purely because of age is incredibly immoral

[smoky quest]

people wouldn't disregard you based on age.
People at different levels have different expectations

[vapid jay]

I could test it I suppose with the dates. Definitely leaving the titles though.

[vapid jay]

Look into what ATS scanners look for when you submit job resumes. Many do look for dates and filter based on that.

[smoky quest]

no, that's not how ATS work

[vapid jay]

false

[smoky quest]

you have no clue what you are talking about

[gilded valley]

to be clear, I don't use the approach I described myself, it seems quite risky - it's just an alternative

but it your first job started 1y ago, it's obvious that you have 1yoe

[vapid jay]

cope

[smoky quest]

you are only proving my point 😉

[vapid jay]

Why risky?

[gilded valley]

people like recursive_error will bin your resume without giving it the consideration you'd want. they're not even necessarily wrong to do so.

it's just an atypical approach which means it's harder to know how it affects you

[vapid jay]

I've tested both in the current market and recieve more offers without graduation dates.

as far as working for someone like recursive_error who is ageist.. I have no desire to do that. Ageism is close to racism in a lot of ways and not a quality I look for in an employer.

[smoky quest]

again, that's not even close to what ageism mean.

People aren't rejecting you because of your age, but because of your immaturity and lack of experience. I recommend you to read the resources I gave earlier

[vapid jay]

you can respond all you would like, you're already blocked and I have no idea what your saying 🙂

[gilded valley]

i don't really agree - but I think even without graduation dates, age is obvious from the job dates.

seems like it might just be coincidence to me

[vapid jay]

It may be obvious, but I can at least see some benefit to knowing if an employee has long gaps in their resume.

It would be interesting to test the removal of job dates though. Everything I have said has been tested on my own personal data. That's why I have an opinion on it.

[smoky quest]

I would also expect some misrepresentation.
If someone sends a resume as leading projects, without dates and the hiring team takes a chance to talk to them, I would suspect there would be quite some disappointment once they get to the filter stage and learn more about the details. It would certainly increase the calls back, but may end up backfiring

In a sense, it's far from ethical since the intent is less about demonstrating you are a strong candidate and more about misrepresenting some facts.
It wouldn't be the first intern I have seen trying to pull some shit.

[gilded valley]

I agree that more callbacks but much lower hitrate on those callbacks is likely. .

but that can still be a net benefit. it all depends on how it goes from there, which depends on too many idiosyncrasies to have a full view.

And selling yourself like a senior engineer when you don't have those skills is almost certainly a net negative

[smoky quest]

yeah, that's why I link it to the intent.
Sometimes some information is missing or wrong or people are just bad at describing themselves and their experience. But as long as it comes from the right place, it tends to be alright

One thing entry level engineers are missing is the experience to know that interviewers are reviewing thousands of resumes and have talked to thousands of people over the course of their career. So it's not obvious to someone who starts their career and who has only talked to a handful of people that the interviewers have seen all sorts of things, positive and negative.
As such, they can catch up pretty quickly on shenanigans to game the system.
That said, I am sure there will be some interviewers who would not catch it, but that also says a lot about the company the candidate would be about to join

[true harness]

ageism is clearly different from filtering based on lack of experience though, right?

[vapid jay]

And here too, on this server, apparently.

[gilded valley]

OK zoomer

[vapid jay]

Cope?!?

[vapid jay]

I'll report you again as you are clearly doing this on purpose. Stop age profiling me. Deal with what I say, not who I am

[gilded valley]

OK

[weak cape]

its not that big of a deal lmao

[gilded valley]

zoomer

[vapid jay]

You are creating an unwelcoming environment

[weak cape]

shut the fuck up both of you

[vapid jay]

I will bow to your authority as soon as you demonstrate you have any

[gilded valley]

OK zoomer

[weak cape]

you're a scared little man @vapid jay

<@&831776746206265384> guys i think this is bad

[vapid jay]

How dare you putting a person down like this?

[weak cape]

you're annoying

[vapid jay]

I am a little man? How dare you?

Let's see what the Moderators think of this..

[weak cape]

sir... chill right now

[ivory sluice]

!mute 152515077512232960

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied timeout to @gilded valley until <t:1693400546:f> (1 hour).

[ivory sluice]

!mute 1143623064156897301

[inner wren]

:incoming_envelope: :ok_hand: applied timeout to @weak cape until <t:1693400556:f> (1 hour).

[ivory sluice]

there's absolutely no reason for this conversation to have devolved into pettiness. abide by our #rules and #code-of-conduct or don't participate. it is that simple.

[true harness]

I think it's difficult to discern whether you're being rejected because of your age or your lack of experience

[vapid jay]

Depends on how that experience is defined. If someone simply can’t pass the technical interview that’s on the candidate. However, Punishing people who learn faster or work harder than others isn’t exactly fair is it? The age requirement only incentivizes bare minimum work to meet an age requirement and not a skill requirement.

[true harness]

from what I know about ATS, this isn't true. the recruiters at the company i work for (and the ATS they use) does not pull dates except for years of experience. but the ATS itself isn't filtering any candidates from consideration, it only ranks them based on how well they "match" a certain job description. it basically just pulls keywords

[true harness]

i'm not sure what you mean by "age requirement"

[vapid jay]

It does vary across systems. The one I’m referencing actually logs a JavaScript error in the browsers developer settings. Really sloppy work.

[vapid jay]

Jobs will say “have N years experience at Y”. They should ask us “what experience do you have with Y”.

I mean I could touch Java a single month out of the year for 10 and I guarantee that 10 year’s experience is less valuable than the person who hasn’t gone outside in 2 years and has done nothing but study that particular language.

[fringe sphinx]

I agree, experience != competency. But, those are generally guidelines, even if it says "must have".

[true harness]

that's what the resume is for though

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, and even in my manualy reviews, this is more or less what I do: sort by total experience (as a SWE) and look for interesting keywords.

[vapid jay]

Depends on the use, what I’m mainly against is resumes of skilled individuals never making it to a human because of a less than equal to operator.

[fringe sphinx]

You're thinking about how unfair it is from your perspective: but think about the employers perspective - with hundreds of resumes that need to be filtered down, we need to sort the pile into Positives and Negatives. We want to minimize False Positives (resumes who pass the screen who will fail an interview). We aren't so worried about False Negatives (great candidates who failed the screen)... it's accepted as an inevitable.

[elder forge]

It is a very common sentiment to reject evaluation by a number (in this case 'years of experience'). It feels very unfair (and it is unfair) to be reduced to a number in this way.
However it is worth noting that 'years of experience' is quantitative and there is a general consensus about how it is counted. This makes it very easy to filter candidates by.
Replacing this with a qualitative assessment is difficult because there is no general consensus on how qualitative measures should be ranked. Ranking candidates by self-reported achievements or knowledge is therefore very time-consuming for the recruiter.
I believe recruitment generally is a two-step process, where candidates are filtered and then the candidates that pass the filtering are evaluated in a qualitative way.
The requiter needs quantitative measures to filter candidates, while qualitative measures will be important for the final selection.

[fringe sphinx]

(well said)

[vapid jay]

That’s fair, but at the same time, one of the topics I discussed in here today was noticing that after I removed my graduation date from my resume I had more interviews. Quantitatively, a bachelors is a bachelors, but what I’m finding is I actually get less opportunities if I mention I graduated this year.

[sleek egret]

consider this. don't you think you'll be a better developer in 2 years, in 5 years, in 10 years?

[vapid jay]

Everyone is on a different track in life. Some move faster and others slower. Holding people who work harder on the same level as those who don’t work at all is what I dislike.

[half plinth]

Hi, I have a question.

[sleek egret]

that's a cop out

[half plinth]

Is it possible that I can land a job as a developer overseas remotely? I am based in the Philippines.

[vapid jay]

Hm?

[sleek egret]

the typical fresh grad barely knows what he's doing

[elder forge]

This is fascinating, and I guess it is a lesson we can recommend to others who come looking for advise in this channel later.

[sleek egret]

most fresh grads think they know most of what they need

[sleek egret]

it's very difficult. the vast majority of US/European firms do not hire foreigners directly. they almost all go through agencies in various nations.

[fringe sphinx]

What have you done that demonstrates that you work harder? Genuine question.

Things that would impress me: a significant project. Contributing to a medium/large open source project. Placing highly in Kaggle challenges. Etc.

[half plinth]

ohhh

[vapid jay]

I’ve had fun testing it. I have three resumes that I cycle. One decorated with color, one bland with dates. Lastly, one bland with only dates pertaining to the jobs themselves. The one with the least amount of dates over doubled my chances.

When this experiment is over I’ll tally the results

[half plinth]

may I know if there is a possible way in landing a job?

[sleek egret]

that's because if you have "jobs with dates" and no university graduation date, it gives the impression that those jobs were full time and that you graduated years ago. i..e it pretends you have 2 or 3 or whatever years of experience when you don't

[half plinth]

I always see tips such as "impressive portfolio", "communication skills". I always wonder if that is enough or not.

[sleek egret]

seems pretty obvious to me

[sleek egret]

it's possible. but you will have to be in the top few %+ of university grads from one of the most elite schools in your nation to even be considered for such special treatment

further, you will have to show hard practical skills along with your academic achievments

[half plinth]

so basically, I would have to always go the extra mile.

[sleek egret]

there's a shit ton of paperwork and legal BS a company has to go through to hire a foreigner directly

[vapid jay]

Lead developer for multiple projects with Fortune 500 companies. I put specifics on my resume but not here cause some people are toxic. I actually had the project manager at my previous position tell me to slow down because they were running out of work and seniors were pissed about it and worried about their job security.

[half plinth]

thank you for answering my inquiry

[sleek egret]

and that will costs them like $10k to $100k on top of what they're paying you

[half plinth]

so it really is difficult, unless you're very important and godlike huh

[vapid jay]

Your assumptions are not my problem

[sleek egret]

I'm talking about direct employment by western firms. there's 100's of thousands of devs indirectly employed by western firms in less developed nations

[fringe sphinx]

They kinda are: ruff (and I) have experience reviewing and screening resumes. We're telling you how we would interpret a resume.

[sleek egret]

most larger western firms use agencies in less developed nations to outsource development staff

[fringe sphinx]

So, the assumptions we make are at least an indicator of how a generic hiring manager might see a resume.

[sleek egret]

that doesn't take a more than being reasonably competent at programming nand the language (typically english)

[vapid jay]

If you assume wrong that’s a you problem. What I write is nothing more than what I write

[half plinth]

thank you man

[sleek egret]

de nada

[fringe sphinx]

If the hiring manager assumes wrong, it's still a you (candidate) problem.

[true harness]

isn't it also a you problem if it causes you to be rejected?

[vapid jay]

It doesn’t

[sleek egret]

ever done filtering of outsource staff? if you have, his attitude won't surprise you. it's pointless to argue about it 🙂

[vapid jay]

Asking the right questions is a very important duty for screening for candidates. I answer whatever questions I’m given open and honestly. Whatever that recruiter makes up in their mind has nothing to do with me.

[true harness]

you can't hold this opinion and also believe it has nothing to do with your being accepted or not

[near ocean]

I've never seen a job ad say anything like this fwiw, have you?

i feel like it would be a slam dunk case if recruiters openly discriminated like this in public

[vapid jay]

All the time.

[vapid jay]

Are you in the US?

[near ocean]

can you show us? maybe youre misreading the description

[vapid jay]

I don’t follow

[vapid jay]

Where do you apply at? Years experience questions are on almost every LinkedIn and indeed post

[near ocean]

years of experience yes, not years of experience and at X age

[vapid jay]

I didn’t say that

[near ocean]

what does this mean

Jobs will say “have N years experience at Y”.

oh, i misread then, carry on

[vapid jay]

Example would be “have 10 years experience at Java

[near ocean]

yea i dont see the problem here

[vapid jay]

You know what I’d like more, “list 5 projects you worked with Y”

Tell us 50 times you did X

Things humans can actually control

[near ocean]

"I signed an NDA, next question".

since i've started working i've stopped working on personal projects
if they ask me for my github rn i'd be slightly annoyed

[vapid jay]

I just made several small but intricate projects and setup some DevOps, a fancy read me, and deployed them as public libraries. Didn’t take long but I think it’s what they’re after?

Examples of the full SDLC

[rugged zephyr]

Wait so you graduated this year.(assuming may?) and you've had multiple jobs including being lead?

And are currently applying for more jobs?

[bitter iron]

Hi guys, I'm a junior in university now and am looking for internships for next summer. What kinds of internships have you all done? Currently, I've just applied to a few talent pools and will soon apply to specific internships as they open up.

[late flame]

I can't imagine any company that asks you to slow down because you're doing too good of a job. What kind of place was this?

[near ocean]

There's always more work to be done, slowing down isnt a thing

[young edge]

Hello, i have a question

Is TopCoder good for improving your programming skills?

I mean if u learned about Data Structures and Algorithms and know all of the basics concepts in Python

[harsh river]

companies dont, but the people in it def would.

[late flame]

If you're so good then you're helping them hit deadlines and they can move on to their pet projects.

[fringe sphinx]

Yah, I didn't say it, but that fell into my "didn't happen" bucket.

[harsh river]

not when the company doesn't know that, other devs might feel threatened without the company ever realizing

[true harness]

or it may have been said jokingly

[fringe sphinx]

There's a bunch of sites people use. Codewars & leetcode are also mentioned a lot. I don't really think it matters, as long as you're learning (and not "grinding" for meaningless status)

[young edge]

grinding can also be a way of learning

[fringe sphinx]

Diminishing returns, perhaps.

[rugged zephyr]

Also this really only makes sense if u were on a waterfall team. Which doesn't exist.

[smoky quest]

We are talking about an intern doing an intern project. So that does change the context and expectations quite a bit.

[graceful mason]

I mean... This is what you're supposed to put on a resume. Surely if you've done 5 significant projects with Y then you have X years of demonstratable experience with it?

[graceful mason]

Making recruiters have a positive image of you in their head is your entire responsibility when applying for jobs. Isn't that why you've changed how you represent dates on your CV?

[smoky quest]

yeah, but not so much when you have a 3 months internship in Y and make it pass as your are mentoring and leading teams and projects for X years. That's just setting yourself up for failure

[graceful mason]

Yeah I agree, meant to reply to his comment about wanting to put projects instead of years of experience rather than what you said

[icy scarab]

Company did layoffs this week and severance includes pay+healthcare until the EOY. Why do layoffs at all? Company is dumb.

[true harness]

they don't have to pay you after the end of the year

[icy scarab]

i mean, if we bring value/business to the company, layoffs don't have to happen

[true harness]

well, yeah. if nothing bad happened then everything be great

[pale frigate]

hello

[summer roost]

3 months of severance is not particularly much, FWIW

[smoky quest]

That would be a sign that it is not the case. That could be a sign that:

• The revenue generated is too low comparing to the costs
• They want to divest or re-allocate that budget to other things for which the impacted people aren't needed
• They may have over hired in the hope of the $$$ following but that did not happen
• etc.

Could also be for some stupid reason

[digital fjord]

You can also just fire people to reduce expenses and make the company more profitable to bring up the stock price.

[dense mesa]

May not be a strong relationship between layoffs and stock price increases

[fringe sphinx]

Most companies go through cycles of e expansion and contraction . My old big tech company would have layoffs like clockwork every two years, around 6months before fiscal year end.

[vapid jay]

What

[fringe sphinx]

Maybe it was three years. I dunnoz

[dense mesa]

In a large enough organisation, every team will tend towards waterfall

[vapid jay]

A positive image of what I’ve wrote. They were saying what if the recruiter assumes things and to that I was saying I have no control about what someone assumes. I fail to understand why this is an ongoing conversation since it’s entirely illogical.

[summer roost]

executives of publicly traded companies have (at least in the US, but I'd assume it's similar in any western capitalism) a fiduciary duty to put the needs of shareholders above those of employees, and arguably above the long term best interests of the company. Prioritizing current shareholders' needs means that you may be making decisions that are not in the best interest of the 10-years-from-now company

[vapid jay]

As much as I’d like to be professor X from X men, that’s not possible.

[rugged zephyr]

Ya that's starting to sink in. Thanks

[sleek egret]

not exactly. first off, the whole "fiduciary responsibility" thing is a myth, not law.

[sleek egret]

your general thesis is correct though. but since many people don't understand that shareholders are the owners, IMO, it's easier to say "executives must put the company owners interests first". you know, because they get fired if they don't.

[rugged zephyr]

So let's say my company hired a hotshot tmrw and he completed 99% of this sprints work all by himself.

They'd just double the amount of work they put in next sprint and keep chuggin

[sleek egret]

even marginally competent managers know that some people are just better/faster than other people

[smoky quest]

or the very likely scenario that if you ask the seniors on the team, the intern just put up a bunch of incoherent PRs that need to be rewritten, that have tight coupling, that have little tests, etc.
Different perspectives can happen of the same situation

[summer roost]

Hm? https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibility-corporations.html - we can argue about the implications and to what extent it causes short term thinking, but it most certainly is law

[sleek egret]

you will note that nolo doesn't actually describe what these fiduciary duties are

[summer roost]

it has a list of 5 of them

[sleek egret]

those are all extremely vague and essentially meaningless

[summer roost]

"I don't like the law" is different than "it is not a law"

[sleek egret]

except for disclosure. and that one is wrong.

[fringe sphinx]

Did I just see a Tesla thing about an investigation because Tesla was building Elon Musk a house? A breach of whatever?

[summer roost]

and the fact that they're vague is exactly why we can have arguments about to what degree they impact decision making. But that doesn't mean that executives aren't making decisions based on their understanding of those vague laws.

[sleek egret]

I've served on boards and as an officer of corporations.

[fringe sphinx]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/doj-sec-investigate-tesla-over-secret-glass-house-project/ar-AA1g0bzi

[sleek egret]

there is no fiduciary duty of disclosure as described by nolo. at least not in NY or Deleware or Nevada

it really is best just to be aware that shareholders are the owners. and that the board must act in the best interest of the owners (as a group). and that the executives are employees retained by the board to execute directives issued by the board (on behalf of the owners).

problems arise when there is disagreement about "best interest". and those are typically settled through lawsuits if a compromize cannot be reached.

[summer roost]

sure, and that's exactly my point: the board needs to make decisions about what's in the "best interest" of the shareholders, and some shareholders are happy to sue (alleging a breach of fiduciary duties) if the board makes decisions that value long term stability or growth over short term profitability, and so boards necessarily need to consider that view

[sleek egret]

then we're in agreement 🙂

[fervent grove]

and i got hired lel

[cobalt moat]

Bruh I am so pissed off… I’m a freshman in college doing comp sci and I already have 4 years experience in software development. There is no way for me to jump ahead of my peers so my peers are catching up while I’m unable to progress and all of my previous experience is being wasted….

[near ocean]

years of experience usually refers to professional experience where someone paid you to write code for them

[smoky quest]

congrats!

[smoky quest]

What kind of experience are we talking about?

But yeah, degrees do have a lot of value

[delicate bane]

congrats

[fervent grove]

now i can show em my py print("Hello World!") skills

[balmy spade]

When you cool down I'd suggest reflecting on this statement of yours:

There is no way for me to jump ahead of my peers so my peers are catching up while I’m unable to progress and all of my previous experience is being wasted

First thing I see is that you are measuring yourself against others. That's not only useless in terms of comparisons but it's quite likely killing your own energy reserves. The second thing I see is that you think that you're now gated behind this class and cannot progress without it? Given you entered college with experience already you've already proven this false.

It sucks that you have to struggle through what will likely be boredom with a course you could test out of. That doesn't stop you from pushing forward on your own.

[cobalt moat]

Its not that im bored with the class its that my time and more are being wasted

I need to find a way to apply my experience but i cannot find one

[balmy spade]

Thank you for the clarity. I incorrectly assumed boredom from personal bias. I believe the rest of my statements hold water.

[dusk ruin]

You can apply your experience by trying to freelance, creating side projects, etc.

[vapid jay]

That is sprint work. Whether you are Agile or Waterfall there are contracts that contain project scope. Project scope occurs in the planning phase of the project management lifecycle. Developers are not very involved in this process. Most of my work is done in the execution phase of the project management lifecycle. What would happen is our execution phase was less than are, discovery, planning, monitoring and controlling, and closing phases within the project management lifecycle. This results in less work and more benchtime for the developers as project management and stakeholders are forced to focus on things such as changes in project scope which also take considerable time. Furthermore, the creation of additional contracts take even more time.

[cobalt moat]

respectfully i have tried both, free lance im always going to be beat by some guy in another country who is charing 1$/h and my side projects have counted for nothing so far

[fringe sphinx]

I don't get your complaint. That means you have tons of time and resources to work on projects, push forward with learning new applied stuff, etc. Nothing is holding you back.

[cobalt moat]

whats the point of pushing forward if im going to have to do it again in 3 years for a class

[dense mesa]

Start your own venture?

[vapid jay]

If a project manager makes a work break down structure that is supposed to take 6 months and its completed in a few weeks... that causes a lot of bench time and makes managemet scramble in my experience.

This is why I came to the conclusion that employers dont actually want the best possible candidate, they want the candidate who can perform within the predetermined timelines

[sleek egret]

predictability and reliability are often more important than speed

[sleek egret]

what you describe is the best possible candidate for some companies

[fringe sphinx]

So learn something else? There are a lot of things to learn.

[dense mesa]

For the most part yes, the timelines are typically dictated by the business. Rushing through them doesn't do any favours

[fringe sphinx]

I'd take a team full of reliable B players anytime, over a bunch of prima donna super stars.

[sleek egret]

reliable players are A players, not B players

[vapid jay]

Its not, not at all. It burns a lot of bridges and makes other developers on the team nervous and brings down overall moral. That is why my previous project manager reached out to me to tell me to slow down. It gave others imposter syndrome and lowered team morale.

[sleek egret]

you need to understand that different people have different priorities

[fringe sphinx]

tbh, you dont come across as the hero in these descriptions.

[vapid jay]

have you seen me code ?

[smoky quest]

projects do count a lot for internships and jobs. They help demonstrate relevant skills

[sleek egret]

when you can execute faster, you should spend the extra time improving your code and helping your teammates improve

[fringe sphinx]

Oh, I think I've met a lot of people like you.

[vapid jay]

This is probably the most assumptive channel i have ever seen which I find fascinating given its a technical community that should be based on logic and reason more so than their own assumptions with little to no proof other than there own biases. This is what I would expect from non technical people and find it pretty dissapointing.

saying things without proof is pretty uneducated

[dense mesa]

The obsession with logic is what gets me tbh

[sleek egret]

I've interviewed dozens of people and hired a few people out of the philippines for dev work before. let's just say that the average skill level is not great.

and gage could really be super awesome. we don't know

but he's probably young. I suspect that he doesn't yet realize in his heart that software development is a team sport.

[fringe sphinx]

The fundamental point I'm making is: hiring decisions are as much subjective as they are objective. I don't think this requires any proof.

[sleek egret]

which is hardly surprising. it's very common. hell, I was like that when I was younger.

[smoky quest]

it's also back to school season.
Not the first kid coming in thinking they know it all and are the best

[fringe sphinx]

And the secondary point is: You can certainly influence other peoples first impression of you... starting with the resume.

[dusk ruin]

Soft skills 🙂

[vapid jay]

Could you show me where I said I disagree with that? My stance is I wish it was more objective.

[vapid jay]

You can and you should! however if someone says, I think so and so is capable of X, that's their own conclusion and part of being respectful of the thought processes of others is accepting that others can make and have the right to make assumptions about you with the knowledge that their assumptions of you do not necessarily define you as a person.

Going out of your way to manipulate what someone thinks about you is the fast track to being miserable.

I put objective information on my resume and leave out things that could hurt me.

I confirm the data could hurt me by testing it through a series of applications.

This is entirely based on logic.

[vapid jay]

Another assumption

[rugged zephyr]

I'm not good with corporate speak. Did u say the bottle neck to more work in the sprint is planning not dev workload?

[vapid jay]

This is useful to understand, I found CompTIA to have a very good project management program https://www.comptia.org/certifications/project . It does cause a bottle neck though, yes

I haven't gone for PMP yet, but Comptia mirrors PMP pretty closely.

[rugged zephyr]

I read the phoenix project and I worked in an IT department and I read that thing where Adam smith whines about a pen factory for two chapters. And that's how I learned about this project management stuff I never rlly did the corpo cert strats

[vapid jay]

Comptia Project + was hard. was a little over 110 questions in 90 minutes. They say 90 minutes for 90 questions but some questions ask multiple questions and all questions are about a paragraph or longer.

[rugged zephyr]

Did ur school offer that?

[dusk ruin]

@vapid jay what software positions normally look for these type of certs when you're applying?

[graceful mason]

Life isn't objective, people won't hire you if they don't like the vibe you (or your CV) is giving off regardless of how good you believe you are.
Recruiters build their 1st impression of you solely based on your CV. It's important that you write it in a way that doesn't leave space for negative assumptions
You have a lot of control about the assumptions that they make

[vapid jay]

Its pretty boring and most people agree that its boring. Its very useful to understand though and I was really surprised how objective the project management lifecycle is. Similar to the software development lifecycle, the project management lifecycle is surprisingly logical. Realizing that was what I enjoyed most about it. It also made me respect project managers a bit more as I now understand how difficult it is to understand the scope of all the documents in the project management lifecycle. THeres a lot of well documented processes in project management.

[charred flower]

i want to have a good career

[rugged zephyr]

I thought u graduated this year? How did u already acquire and lose a dislike for pm's so fast?

[rugged zephyr]

Same

[cobalt moat]

How often do freshmen get a paid summer internship?

[digital fjord]

In Czechia, it is very common

[true harness]

in the US it's not too common, but possible

[vapid jay]

I never disagreed and actually supported your first sentence. I actually mentioned excelling is not always good. Your second sentence I also agree with this is why I stated I only put what benifits me and exclude things that hurt me such as the year I graduated. Your third sentence supports my stance for the same reasons as your second sentence. your final sentence is a ticket to being misserable.

,I'm pretty over-talking about this to be honest. Ill respect that you were unable to come to the same conclusions as me.

[rugged zephyr]

This makes me miss my summer interns so much

[true harness]

I can help you with that 😉😉 (/hj)

[dusk ruin]

A majority of my peers in college were able to get paid internships in the US

[true harness]

as freshmen?

[dusk ruin]

not freshmen lol

usually they want you to take data structures first

[late flame]

I went to a school with an integrated internship program. Getting 5 or 6 internships were a direct requirement for graduating, so everyone got a paid internship after the first semester. We weren't necessarily good at our jobs, but we got them.

[cobalt moat]

Where do students find internships

[sleek egret]

most universities are part of internship recruiting systems

[cobalt moat]

My uni isn’t in my home town

[sleek egret]

did you ask? or are you simply assuming?

[hearty island]

linkedin is good for internships

[cobalt moat]

Did I ask if my uni is in my home town?

[dusk ruin]

your school should have a career center with listings for students

[cobalt moat]

But like it’s going to be rare to find one that just happens to be in my home town

[late flame]

Ok, then don't get one in your home town.

[sleek egret]

well, most students don't want internships in the same city their school is in or the same city they came from

[cobalt moat]

I have to live with my parents over the summer

[late flame]

Really? Why not? I had the opposite experience, everyone was ready to move as far as possible.

[sleek egret]

that's exactly what I wrote

[dusk ruin]

remote internships are def a thing, more competitive though

[cobalt moat]

I just can’t afford housing

[late flame]

Not if it's a paid internship. In fact most of the places my friends went to had free housing for students.

[cobalt moat]

Free housing for students what????? Who pays for that

[late flame]

I am totally out of it, I completely read that wrong. Sorry.

[sleek egret]

internships will often come with enough pay or a housing stipend or room & board

[sleek egret]

companies do

[cobalt moat]

Ooo I need me one of them

[dusk ruin]

a lot of companies provide housing stipends

[cobalt moat]

How soon do I need to apply for next summer

[dusk ruin]

start now imo

[sleek egret]

offers go out around winter

[fringe sphinx]

Not discussed yet is: what can you do to increase your chances? My usual answer is: code. Write code. Have the experience and ability to sustain a technical conversation with potential hiring managers who ask about what you know. Helping answer questions in #1035199133436354600 is one way to reinforce skills.

[cobalt moat]

I can do that

[late flame]

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, RIM, Xtreme Labs, Palantir, etc.

Half of my class got free housing, the other half hour more than enough money to pay for housing. Honestly tech internships fully just pay better than most full time jobs that adults have.

[cobalt moat]

Yeah but those kind of internships gotta he highly competitive and I’m a freshmen

[sleek egret]

that's not hard given average wages

[vapid jay]

Does your program have a very high post-graduation employment rate?

[late flame]

Your school will know, but do it early. As soon as openings are available, apply. The best jobs go quick.

[cobalt moat]

WE RIDE AT DAWN

[fringe sphinx]

Hey, they can only say no. (Phrased poorly: the worst they can say is No)

[cobalt moat]

What’s the incentive to pay an intern so much who is going to leave after the summer

[sleek egret]

it's a recruiting tool by the company

[late flame]

Everyone in my class got an internship after the first semester (i.e. didn't even finish freshman year) and they all paid double minimum wage at least. By second year everyone was in one of the companies I listed and had insane experiences. If you ever wondered why Motorola released so many weird and shitty projects in a row, it's because literally the entire development team was interns and like 1 or 2 full team adults to manage them.

[dusk ruin]

companies usually give return offers to high quality talent, they want to retain young talent

[sleek egret]

most people don't really understand how expensive it is to recruit good people

[cobalt moat]

Your entire class???

[late flame]

Above 90%. To be fair you've already held a number of jobs by that point so getting a full time one is pretty easy

[sleek egret]

internships are normal, not exceptional

[cobalt moat]

Ok I need to beef up my portfolio

[vapid jay]

Yes, I would imagine it would have excellent placement given the work experience requirements.

[late flame]

It was a required part of the program, but as ruff said internships aren't rare. Getting good employees is so hard that companies will pay just on the off chance that you turn out to be the next bill Gates.

Joel Spolsky, who helped create Microsoft Excel and led the creation of stack overflow, once said that he was happy to invent jobs for high school kids just to get them into the door. They wouldn't be on the job market for ten years, but you have to start networking early.

[sleek egret]

internships are essentially "try before you buy"

[cobalt moat]

Surely it can’t be easy to find a paid internship with room and board

[sleek egret]

companies would love to do that with normal employees too. it's just that 95% of adults would never do it.

[fringe sphinx]

Hire fast fire fast.

[sleek egret]

if they provide free housing, the pay will be lower

[cobalt moat]

That’s fine

I just can’t afford housing and a minimum wage job

https://github.com/Saratii would anyone mind taking a quick look and make suggestions to make it stand out more

[vapid jay]

right? People poop on the idea of lower wages and paid housing, but it's great for a lot of people. There were times in my life I would have glady worked for free if the company I worked for provided the bare necessities to support its employee.

[cobalt moat]

I got 1 semester to strengthen it

[late flame]

It's tech. You get more than minimum wage. A lot more. Aside from my very first internship I never got paid less than 3x minimum wage. I even got a work visa for an internship in the US. This is fully standard if you're even average.

[cobalt moat]

This gives me so much hope

[sleek egret]

mcd workers get paid at least twice the national minimum wage these days

[buoyant seal]

Smth starting from 10'000 euro 💶 just for recruiting process 😅

[vapid jay]

I think that would be a good idea for companies like retail or fastfood. Procure a local appartment building in that area, procure food, pay low, but have a living setup for the employees.

[sleek egret]

well, in most cities anyway

[sleek egret]

it's not cost efficient for them

[cobalt moat]

I would gladly take a minimum wage internship with housing food and other necessities provided

[vapid jay]

exactly, it costs more to provide the bare minimum to survive lmao

[sleek egret]

your definition of "survive" is not the same as that of low wage earners

[vapid jay]

I talking about the lowest level of maslows hierarchy of needs

[cobalt moat]

What country?

[sleek egret]

that takes apx $8k/yr, so about $4/hr. less in low cost of living areas

[late flame]

You have a GitHub? Eh that's good enough.

I never had one. I just did coursework and played videogames. If you're able to do well in the interviews (i.e. know your leetcode) then you'll be fine.

Not to discourage you if you're enjoying yourself of course. Just don't feel like you need to stress out so much.

[cobalt moat]

I have an entire machine learning library as well as a custom compiler… surely that’s worth something

[late flame]

We've had company towns before it's not great. If you can't save money and all your needs are provided by your company, then you quickly become a slave to the company.

If I quit my job I won't be homeless. If my job owns my home...

[vapid jay]

how the hell did you find the time to do that. nice job!

[buoyant seal]

Just having GitHub is rather low bar that is actually not valid enough on its own 😅
It needs to have quality enough code that will match technical interview results
Difficult big code sized projects as well

[cobalt moat]

I enjoy coding, I find the time

Do I need to remove my bad projects that I made when I was a noob or would it be better to keep them

[vapid jay]

See, you say its not great, but that was in times were everything else was better right? When you look at places like LA or NY or most US major cities, you'll see a staggeringly high number of people who work and can't even afford shelter. Company towns at least provide the first level of Maslow's needs

[sleek egret]

staggering?

[buoyant seal]

😉 when I check GitHubs of candidates, I make sure to check a bunch of last ones until I find the best example candidate can provide. So, I would personally not cared about older worse projects

[late flame]

Well quality matters a lot, and the compiler at least is something you can do in school (I've done a few as part of coursework myself), but it's still good to have. At the very least you got some good practice out of it.

[vapid jay]

yeah, LA for instance, did you know there are over 70,000 homeless people in LA?

[cobalt moat]

Do you have any suggested project types that would make my GitHub stand out?

[late flame]

He's not even a sophomore yet, it's impressive enough at that stage.

Hell I've never had a GitHub. I've talked to recruiters I've worked with and gone over resumes; I check if they have one but I do not take the time to look at it. It's really not a big deal.

[vapid jay]

the streets of LA look like a 3rd world country

[sleek egret]

that's out of 12 mil people in the greater los angeles area

i.e. < 1%. and a substantial portion of those people are drug addicts or have mental health "issues" (or both)

[sleek egret]

most of LA has zero homeless people on the street

[buoyant seal]

For that u need to answer which job role do u pursue

[late flame]

Homelessness was still bad during those days. Just giving people money and the freedom to spend it as they see fit is a much better system than having your life owned by an amorphous organization.

[vapid jay]

Do the math on it, divide the amount of homeless people by the square footage of LA. You could put a homeless person on every block of LA

[sleek egret]

you could, but they're not evenly spread out.

[cobalt moat]

Short term: tech anything
Long term: research programmer/scientist

[vapid jay]

And I dont think saying "well there are N number of people who are not homeless so its fine" is a good argument. I think those 70,000 people matter a lot

[sleek egret]

I'm not saying homelessness isn't a problem... but it's caused mostly by substance abuse, lack of forced mental health services and a large dose of overregulation of what makes a residence "livable"

[sleek egret]

I don't. most of them will be a drag on society no matter what you do. I think we as a society should help more, but I don't fool myself into imagining that they're "valuable"

[late flame]

Like in a lot of cases just giving them places to live for free doesn't work. We literally do that already and it's not enough.

[fringe sphinx]

May I suggest that we're venturing heavily OT

[vapid jay]

yikes

[rugged zephyr]

Ur a freshman who made a compiler and a library?

[sleek egret]

most of the street people are not people who are just down on their luck and willing to work

[cobalt moat]

Library isn’t the focus… I basically wrote tensorflow completely from scratch with no imported math helpers

[sleek egret]

people who have fallen on hard times and willing to work (and able to hold down a job) get a shelter spot and soon move out to their own place

[dusk ruin]

I'm of the reopening asylums position

[buoyant seal]

All software development roles related enough at least in tech require same thing pretty much.
Write any type of project, that just has More of a written quality code, with proper clean code, good documentation of a project. Having some purpose of a project that resolves real world problems at least of few people.

Book: Code complete by McConnell tells code quality essential begining

[fringe sphinx]

That's a nice start. What are you going to do this year?

[cobalt moat]

It’s multithreaded and optimized for cacheing

[sleek egret]

either way, not really a #career-advice topic, let's not continue

[cobalt moat]

Idk yet I’m trying to figure that out

[fringe sphinx]

My usual suggestion to people who are stuck are: contribute to a significant open source project. That'll teach you a whole additional set of skills.

[dusk ruin]

@cobalt moat I don't see any webapp's on your github, maybe you could do one for variety?

[buoyant seal]

Sounds cool 😎

[cobalt moat]

I contributed to one giant one

[rugged zephyr]

http://thecodelesscode.com/case/193

Don't worry too hard about intern ships that one sentence u just said will probably always guarantee you gainful employment

[cobalt moat]

❤️

[dusk ruin]

Anyone grinding leetcode?

[sleek egret]

have you ever shipped an intern?

[modern ore]

do cf instead 🔥

[dusk ruin]

codeforces?

[modern ore]

yea

[smoky quest]

It's a great start!

The main feedback is it lacks craftmanship. These are things like:

• proper README, license
• build and ci/cd
• tests (and meaningful tests)
• Code that follows typical conventions
• Use of libraries (ex using a logger instead of println)
• shouldn't be any unnecessary binary files in your repos

[cobalt moat]

What is build and ci/cd? What code conventions am I missing

[graceful mason]

Make sure to also pin the projects you want them to look at

[cobalt moat]

And what is a license

I’m self taught I don’t know ethical things like licenses and conventions 😂

Also which project were you looking at cause my compiler has like 3000 lines worth of tests

[smoky quest]

take your ml library. There is no maven or gradle config.
And there is no github action configured

[cobalt moat]

I don’t use maven or gradle

[smoky quest]

a license is the document that specify how you are sharing your code and what can people do or not do with it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license for instance

[smoky quest]

yep, and that's a problem. That would not match industry practices.

[cobalt moat]

There is like very very few imports

[smoky quest]

it has nothing to do with imports

[cobalt moat]

Doesn’t maven and gradle add other libraries

[smoky quest]

they are more about project management. So they will deal with dependency management, but also how to build, test and publish your project, how to generate doc, and a bunch of other things

It's also an industry standard so that anyone looking at a project will instantly know how to contribute and use your stuff

[cobalt moat]

Hmmm ok

What do you think of the compiler? Besides needing read me and licensing @smoky quest

[smoky quest]

pretty much same feedback

[cobalt moat]

it has tests and it is in rust so no gradle or maven

[graceful mason]

You might want to reconsider public static double[][] conv2dAllahAkbar 😬

[rugged zephyr]

Depends what u mean. I interviewed like 10 last year and recommended 3 for hire

[cobalt moat]

oh i forgot that was in there

what file is that in, its been a while since i worked on that project

[graceful mason]

Sounds like a great opportunity to read through and check for other issues 😅

[vapid jay]

I'm trying to move to a python role. Would a personal website deployed into AWS be convincing enough? I want to get out of Java haha

[buoyant seal]

😂 that is hilarious. I am trying to get out of Python into Java.

[vapid jay]

Uh oh why??

[buoyant seal]

It would be quite cool if u do that yeah, with some good ways of deployment beyond simple. I often saw job vacancies of python dev with strong AWS (and different its services)

[buoyant seal]

Lack of typing. It makes very very hardly possible proper OOP, defining any normal interface/contracts to hide complexity of classes. Private and public methods and attributes aren't enforced, so.. u can't encapsulate even if u wish to do it in soft way, just because your IDE is not even hinting anything to you if your code uses private methods and attributes outside a class.

Mind u that is all fixable withv static typing library like mypy

But in real world u will never ever find other python devs that actually can use it, have static typing experience and able to play into code architecture

I am feeling constrained that without static typing, fast refactoring to clean code is very hardly possible to do easily. Feedback from unit tests (half of hour at big projects) is too long to compensate for lack of typing.

When u have static typing u can rapidly align inputs/outputs after refactoring across all your code. Not possible at python without mypy (that anyone rarely uses, usually having untyped code, and dynamic typing is quirky in general)

[vapid jay]

Gotcha, Java sounds right then

Or TypeScript

[buoyant seal]

I want building long term maintainable software that is easy to maintain

[buoyant seal]

I hear it is having situation not really far from python situation (or even worse). No 🙂

[buoyant seal]

I certainly enjoy how it all works in Golang for sure 😊 now transitioning to learn in Java

[vapid jay]

It's a lot of rewriting types with all the interfaces, abstract classes, etc., but the strong types definitely streamlines the debugging

IntelliJ is amazing

[fringe sphinx]

Fwiw, I love/loved my years of Java. Good language, a lot of great innovation in the JVM and Language. Good ecosystem, etc.

And omg, I miss free threading (nogil)

[buoyant seal]

Also, speed of python, being slower many dozens of times by default unless u use all the extra tricks makes kind of sad too. In situations where u hardly have any problems, because u a brute forcing your way with sheer computational speed... In python u will encounter that u need to make considerable effort for your program to be having speed of other langs

It excludes pretty much ever possible fast working with many many files in your program, if they need a lot of in memory loading unloading.

Or any other memory and/or CPU heavy computations

(Yes u can use all extra tricks to compensate for it. Not convinced. Thank u very much)

[buoyant seal]

Yeah, add lack of proper multi threading too. Easiest parallelism with shared memory not that properly available

[vapid jay]

I figured with data science being handled with Python a lot of the time it could do the work

[fringe sphinx]

Darkwind isn’t wrong, exactly, except: the community, ecosystem, libraries, etc mean that while bad code is slower on Python than other languages, good code is often faster

Now: being able to write bad code and have it run adequately fast was what I liked about Java I wrote some really crusty code sometimes

[vapid jay]

Makes sense. Java is still at the top for enterprise software.

[fringe sphinx]

But especially for ML and data science: almost everything is being computed at lower levels. You’re not writing loops to iterate through matrices.

[vapid jay]

I'll check out golang then. Seems like there's a lot of good stuff going on there.

[fringe sphinx]

If you’re starting somewhere, and interested in Ml/Ai, Python is the place to start

[vapid jay]

AI/ML seems pretty daunting since I've only done web. A lot of places hire people with degrees, so I feel like I'd miss the details.

[buoyant seal]

It is great, its typing system is superior than in Java
#career-advice message

Rapidly easy to setup projects, unit testing, super easy cross platform compiling to any OS or CPU architecture.

Must have to have in toolbox language for building dev and web infra tools

The philosophy of community in general aims for long term maintainance software building (use less deps, stable steady evolving of a language with low speed in adding features)

Also in comparison to Java, has minimal memory footprint (not requires hundreds of mb from a start) and magnitudes more rapid booting speed (or initialization to run tests)

[late flame]

It's funny I actually prefer Python for all the reasons you hate it. It's more flexible than Java

[buoyant seal]

Too much flexible 😕 any object can have any methods or any attributes at any moment of a time. Only during runtime and unit testing (that is potentially too long to run), u can discover your code is not actually working 😔

A lot of unit testing in python is done just to test against it

[potent zenith]

.

[late flame]

Eh, you can add typing if you want and it's honestly not that big of a deal for testing

[vapid jay]

They did not comment on the compiler itself because it's much easier to give a superficial look and say "does it have Maven/Gradle? no? then I'll say that and put down the project". It's much harder to look at something as complicated as a compiler, zoom into the details and actually produce a thoughtful assessment. @smoky quest will quickly dismiss something by looking at something they can say easily, in my experience.

And the paradox @cobalt moat is that actually having something that every project has makes no difference but perhaps building a compiler does. So, reading my previous message, you must be careful to give these "rapid fire answers" too much credence.

[smoky quest]

I thought you stopped reading my messages and were blocking me?

Either way, you are missing the point again and letting your bruised ego take the better of yourself.
Having a project demonstrating expected skills in the industry is a basic step. Not setting your project in a way that shows you have industry experience will hurt you. So it helps convey craftmanship and that you understand the expectations of an engineer in their job.
If someone doesn't demonstrate the basic skills, then it's unlikely for the reviewer to dive deeper. I could have commented on the code of the compiler but they would not have been happy with my comments either.
At the end of the day, you want the reviewer to be impressed and to project themselves into how it would look like to hire you. If your code does not reflect professional practices, then you will not appear as a professional.

[smoky quest]

Another point you are missing is that these comments were meant for them to learn about these practices and to ask question about them so they that they can improve it and fix it.
There is nothing that would prevent them from addressing these comments other than some bruised ego 😉

[bronze sinew]

Hi can anyone tell me any material to obtain these skills

[smoky quest]

Is there a question?

[bronze sinew]

Yup

[smoky quest]

I see the edit 😉

The answer would depend on the job description. Mind sharing a bit more about it?

[bronze sinew]

Kk here

Check out this job at JPMorgan Chase & Co.: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3701718434

[bronze sinew]

Any ideas

[smoky quest]

skimming through it, it looks fairly generic.

You could take inspiration from https://roadmap.sh/ though

[bronze sinew]

Ok let me take look

[smoky quest]

For system designs, there is a great series of book called "system design interviews". It's more geared towards backend/ml

For programming, I would recommend a book about algorithms and data structures. "Introduction to algorithms" is the best book around

and for troubleshooting and debugging, I would probably suggest to practice and have projects to build that muscle

[bronze sinew]

Any example of that you would like to suggest, I have never done any troubleshooting b4

[smoky quest]

I am sure you did.
troubleshooting is when you have an unexpected behaviors like a bug and have to understand why

[bronze sinew]

Oh ok that means it doesn't require any different project, just normal coding right?

[smoky quest]

yeah

[bronze sinew]

Thanks a lot

[smoky quest]

like in an interview, someone may ask you a question like: can you describe to me the most interesting (or difficult) bug you have had to find?

[bronze sinew]

Ic

Probably need to do a project 4 that

[smoky quest]

the job is about a software engineer 2. So that would imply they aren't looking for a complete beginner

[bronze sinew]

Hmm i would look 4 other jobs then

[vapid jay]

What would your comments be about the compiler?

[smoky quest]

Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts and 2+ years applied experience

Are you anything close to that?

[bronze sinew]

Not really

I'm a fresher changed my branch from ee to IT

[smoky quest]

at least you are ambitious

But yeah, you may have more chance with something closer to your situation

[smoky quest]

do they have other job listing for entry level people?

[bronze sinew]

Well thanks, no doesn't look like it

Probably gonna ask a friend to give a referal on this job post if possible

[buoyant seal]

Code Complete by McConnell is universal book that teaches everything, debugging, speaking with managers, how to name variables and functions, do u need writing comments and etc

That is just a theory though, for truly learning u need practice

[bronze sinew]

Ok thanks will look into that

[proven crest]

Is Spark mainly for data engineering? Where is the line between a DA and Developer?
Also are there any good resources to get a basic understanding of Spark/PySpark for a beginner as I’m being put onto a project using this soon!

[buoyant seal]

every DA is a developer, but not every developer is a DA. 😄 DA is specialized developer.

[trim crypt]

There's lots of Developers. Front-End, Back-End, Full-Stack, DevOps. And as what Darkwind says, that's true. DA is another kind of Developer.

[finite granite]

Does this server have a job board?

[marsh wind]

no, you can check the channel description

[finite granite]

Ah yes thanks

[knotty rose]

hi

[vapid jay]

@smoky quest what would you comments be about that compiler?

They asked you the question and you dodged saying (pretty much) "they would not like them". But.. what are they?

[elder forge]

There are two things at play here.

One is that you want to get the participation trophy of having completed the bootcamp. This is not my field so I cannot say how important this is for your career. However the bootcamp is probably not that long and the money is probably already spent.

The other thing is that you had anticipated an opportunity to learn new things, but the lectures are moving so slow that this opportunity appears to have been taken away from you. However, you appear to be relatively skilled compared to the other attendees. This opens an opportunity to work on your communication skills in helping your classmates. Learning how to explain advanced concepts in a simple manner is an important skill, and it requires practice.
This is not the role you signed up for, but it appears to be the hand that you have been given, and my advise would be to play the hand you have been given.

[lapis wind]

I don't think that is what recursive error said at all.

They said it's missing industry standard things, like CI, formatting, readme, etc.... Which it is.

Secondly, if you don't know the language then it's hard to actually comment on the 'compiler' code itself, but you can easily notice things like it missing consistent formatting, documentation, etc...

To some extent I would argue that maybe rather than trying to convince others to ignore other people's feedback, as you seem to be doing. You could instead try and build on the existing, advice and actually give some feedback specifically about the thing you think everyone else has missed...

[gritty rivet]

Is the problem that they are still doing basic stuff that you know already? If it looks like things get more advanced later on, might be worth sticking it out. If you're really sure you're not going to learn much at all and can still get a refund, I would probably do that. Most bootcamps are crazy expensive.

As far as getting a job, having a completion certificate on your resume can help a little (especially if you have no degree and need to compensate for that) but only very little. The question is can you build a portfolio that is just as good without paying all that money? The portfolio is really the main thing that matters in terms of bootcamp outcome.

I do strongly agree with tryhvrad's point about teaching your classmates. I did a lot of that in my bootcamp and it was good practice.

One of the less experienced students who I was helping out ended up giving the lead that turned out to be my first job! So don't discount the networking aspect of the bootcamp as well.

But if you're not really challenged, it could be that you need a different bootcamp or don't need one at all. I do know people who regret paying for a bootcamp because they would have been fine with self-study but that's relatively uncommon.

BTW,. I'm curious what bootcamp? I did Nucamp Backend personally.

[vapid jay]

What @smoky quest literally said about the compiler code was:

pretty much same feedback
and yet... this is entirely unhelpful unless one gives the concrete feedback.
One should not, on this career advice section, just put somebody down with generic feedback without showing how code could be improved. The sentence:
pretty much same feedback
was in response to the user asking:
What do you think of the compiler? Besides needing read me and licensing
It's too simple to look at something superficially saying this:
proper README, license
build and ci/cd
tests (and meaningful tests)
Code that follows typical conventions
Use of libraries (ex using a logger instead of println)
shouldn't be any unnecessary binary files in your repos
you could say that without having read the actual code. Where does the code not follow the "typical conventions"? What are these conventions specifically? Which library could have been used that wasn't? etc.
It seems to me like there is eagerness to dismiss code which @cobalt moat wrote by "lack of craftmanship" (?!?). Craftmanship? Let's give him some compiler-specific code-based feedback, if you are able to, @smoky quest

[dense mesa]

Dude what 😂

[buoyant seal]

Sometimes u just need to stop
checked #career-advice message @smoky quest comments and and concur https://github.com/Saratii/Custom-Compiler/tree/main

That at bare minimum we need proper README

• with description what it is
• why it was made
• and how to use 😅
  lack of it, immediately removes more than 50% of any project value. (or even 75%+)
• I also recommend abusing mermaid.js to build some more meaningful graphics/diagrams to the project description as a code https://mermaid.js.org/intro/ (for dependency flow of a project, may be even class diagrams, important algorithms to document and etc)
• optionally screenshots can be demonstrated.
  README is heavily important to PRESENT a project, which is goal of a portfolio.
  and screenshots/diagrams make it even more accessable and better presented
• sometimes makes sense to build proper documentation with static assets into Github Pages

Besides that yeah... meaningful tests, CI CD, and etc could be cool to see too.
pressence of tests is minimum requirement to qualify software engineering work for potentially middle ranked in quality
without tests, it is definitely sign of lower quality

CI CD in automating testing and building, serves as important part of self documetnation how to work with your project too
Besides that kind of cool to document management commands in Taskfile.dev https://taskfile.dev/usage/

P.S. automated meaningful tests actually serve as part of code documentation too. those all things are increasing maintainability and documentation of your project