I worked for Google as an engineer for a few years (2010-2015), and have no degree.
You basically need to get a referral to get the interview, and then you have to be pretty damn well perfect in that interview, or have enough additional "good signal" (referrals, previous jobs, etc) about you that it overcomes the missing signal of the degree.
I studied for that interview for months *and* had a near-perfect day; both preparation and luck were on my side.
Most folks eating "low carb"... would consider 30% carbs to be obscenely high; ketosis probably doesn't work for most people even at 10%.
Both the low carb folks and traditional dieticians would agree that fat is bad when you have enough carbs to trigger strong insulin responses. 30% carbs is going to trigger strong insulin responses, so both the low carb folks and the traditional dieticians could kinda look at this ahead of time and predict the outcome?
...most businesses don't really need programmers to be deep thinkers. For them, it's "just as worthwhile to hire someone from a physics lab who just used Python to massage some data streams from an instrument.
You're assuming that the folks who used Python while working in a physics lab weren't thinkers?
Trying to read various other people's C++ is a specific version of hell.
it's... just not a great language for long-term-projects, unless you absolutely need something it does that more modern languages don't.
Like, you can pat yourself on the back for being a "real programmer" because you know C++. Go for it. But if you've gotta stick a team of people on something, it's the hardest language to recruit for, and if your goal isn't to push the bleeding edge of the hardware at all costs - literally! - you don't want C++.
So, I used to work at Google. And my goal was HTTPS across all of www.google.com, which... was a task, and not one that I did solo, by any stretch of the imagination. I've worked in industry for 20+ years. I've never been more proud to work on a project.
As far as "there's tons of unmaintained content out there", I'm... not entirely convinced; that feels like saying something that should be true, but just isn't. Bandwidth costs money, so if you've got a machine serving any amount of content... someone's paying for that machine. Do you have examples or data backing up the claim of the tons of unmaintained stuff?
In tech, you generally lose the top half of your successful employees if you don't pay as well as other nearby competitors. Microsoft... does not pay as well as other nearby competitors.
The Ballmer years seemed to staunch slower product development with more successful sales, until that stopped working.
Nadella's been really successful at turning things around for their eng teams, and putting some balance back in there, but if they keep bleeding people... that's not good.
So, phones in the US generally have a lifespan of about two years, as that's what carriers subsidize. (After two years, you can just get a new phone.)
Which means operating systems running on those phones generally have a two-year outlook.
Hardware older than two years running a mobile OS... isn't as competitive as new hardware running the same mobile OS.
Google put out hardware, and let it sit for more than two years without a replacement. And usually didn't drop their price much after the first year, either.
So they wound up repeatedly selling tablets slower than Apple's, running an OS and apps that really weren't tweaked for them.
The experience of a Google-branded Android tablet was flawless for the first year, so-so for the second, and then left you wondering when the hell they'd announce a replacement. Again. And again. While friends with iPads had longer-term OS support by default, and new hardware was available Every Year if you were willing to part with the loot.
I finally gave up last year. I miss the apps on that side, though.
Okay, I <3 Tom, but it's worth picking out this bit:
"you may remember him from previous efforts to teach an AI how to play NES games"
And point out that that *may* have been a joke. Where he explained part of it in a Youtube video wearing a colander on his head. If he later actually made the joke work, that's terrific, but holy shit, submissions to SIGBovik aren't, uh, real?
This. Making things 10x more precise comes with a lot of cost, and without clear gain.
Toyota makes crazy-reliable things. They design for parts to have a certain set of tolerance, and when they get to tolerance that it was designed to work with, it holds up to kids spilling things on it, people driving them as taxi cabs, and every imaginable type of weather. And they work and work well for hundreds of thousands of miles.
10x more tolerance... may not be worth it, or will likely cost a lot more than it brings back.
Would you rather have ads in your content or cryptocoin miners running in the background?
Assuming content costs money, both seem ways of making money on pages with content.
That said, it might make sense to limit the amount of the CPU that the browser can use; if we're designing webpages that need >1ghz octo-core processors, we're already doing something probably pretty wrong.
I'm 40, but have already given my employer a 3-5 year heads up on retirement. (I'm lucky, and have a lot of focus on that goal.)
It's changed the dynamic, where high-stress things land on my lap at work far less often now. Since they know I could leave now... I get slightly better treatment, at least in those edge cases that would normally make me like my job less.
If you think your employer might let you go for giving them advance notice, stay quiet. If you think there's no chance they'd let you go early, tell them now. Otherwise, it took them six months to find *you*, so give them six months notice, and you've minimized risk while retiring with a clean conscience.
I have a Fitbit Alta. It's not ugly as sin, and it's not trying to fake looking like a traditional watch, either.
But it *does* pair with my Android phone to auto-unlock the phone when I'm around. The battery lasts a few days without a recharge. And again, it doesn't look god-fucking-awful, which is good for a watch, as they've been fashion accessories for years, so selling tacky-as-shit ones isn't really moving much product.
My Android (Nexus 5) is a tank; I regularly go a few weeks before bothering to reboot, and the reboot is because I let the battery die. (Battery life is 18-24 hours.)
My wife's MotoX (the original one) is just about the same, except the battery life is better (presumably because it's a smaller screen?) 24+ hours.
Unless you have the world's most amazing fire safe or root cellar, you have three options that I see.
First, easy: pick a drive that survives to zero degrees fahrenheit, and when you're not using it, put it in the freezer in your kitchen or garage. Most fires will kill it, but you'll get a bit more protection.
Second, harder: pick a small drive, like a USB Key. Write it once a month or so. Store it in a safety deposit box at the bank, where only you have access. Storing something *in* your house that needs to be fireproof is nigh impossible. Storing it somewhere externally that's easily accessed and still secure is a problem you can solve with cash.
Third, actually pretty trivial. Store it to *two* cloud providers, so if one goes out of business, you still have your data. Google Drive and Dropbox, for example. One trick; encrypt it locally before ever uploading it. Winzip (or Linux's zip) should both be able to produce and use strong AES-256 keys. Currently, the expected amount of time to get 50% odds of breaking AES-256 is exponentially more computers than currently exist running for the entire life of the universe, using suns as fuel. (With brute force, no one can do it, ever.)
So the "someone will hack me" is up to you. The "two cloud providers" is probably what you want.
If you're looking to get a software job, but can't get the interview, one thing that enormously helps is writing code for open source projects, or having sufficiently complex project work that you built yourself available to see online. If someone can read a short link on your resume, and then go see your actual code, you become *much* less of a wildcard and much more of a known quality; they then know you can do the job, if the code matches up well enough.
Alternatively, if you've done automated test scripts, look for QA Analyst positions as a bridge into most tech organizations.
What's your academic background? And are you located near a large city, and/or a tech hub?
Your scale implies one set of skills, and there's certainly more than that! As two important ones; the ability and desire to learn, and the tools you already know.
I've worked with a lot of junior engineers who didn't know much, but were good at picking things up and moving with them. I've worked with a lot of senior engineers who knew lots of tools and theory, but weren't very good at picking up new things. (I've also worked with junior engineers who were terrible, and senior engineers who could pick up new things faster than me; it's a mix.)
To get hired, you need to convince the hiring manager you can do the job, can do it better than the next guy, and can do it at a price they're willing to pay. Right now, there's simply not enough developers who can do the job, so even if you're not great but still get the job done and don't seem awful to work with, the determining factor is "did someone else better apply?"
Always go to lunch with coworkers, and chat with them about... anything, or just hang out while they chat if you can join a group doing so.
If they want to talk work, ask them what they're working on; if something in what they say is actually interesting to you, ask 'em about it. If they don't want to talk work, where do they live? Where did they go to school? What do they think of both? What did they do this week? Ideally, they want to talk work at least part of the time, as that's likely more useful.:-)
At lunch, if you find yourself talking more than a fair share, work on talking less. If you find yourself talking not at all, work on talking slightly more.
Slashdot Mirror
Did their plan include storing data on the Chinese mainland, or is that speculation?
LinkedIn's worked for me, and I've seen it work for friends networking through me for jobs they want.
But I only ever, ever add folks I know personally; if I wouldn't recognize you on the street, you're not on my contacts list there.
I find LinkedIn's newsfeed to be medium-bad, but as far as "resume service", it works damn well.
I worked for Google as an engineer for a few years (2010-2015), and have no degree.
You basically need to get a referral to get the interview, and then you have to be pretty damn well perfect in that interview, or have enough additional "good signal" (referrals, previous jobs, etc) about you that it overcomes the missing signal of the degree.
I studied for that interview for months *and* had a near-perfect day; both preparation and luck were on my side.
Most folks eating "low carb"... would consider 30% carbs to be obscenely high; ketosis probably doesn't work for most people even at 10%.
Both the low carb folks and traditional dieticians would agree that fat is bad when you have enough carbs to trigger strong insulin responses. 30% carbs is going to trigger strong insulin responses, so both the low carb folks and the traditional dieticians could kinda look at this ahead of time and predict the outcome?
...most businesses don't really need programmers to be deep thinkers. For them, it's "just as worthwhile to hire someone from a physics lab who just used Python to massage some data streams from an instrument.
You're assuming that the folks who used Python while working in a physics lab weren't thinkers?
Facebook's Hack language may be worth a look, to leverage what you already know in, well, a better setup.
Hack is backwards compatible with PHP, but adds a few nice bits. The goal was developer efficiency, but you also get CPU efficiency wins.
This isn't Firefox, the browser with a billion users.
This is Firefox for Android... which has several orders of magnitude fewer users, if I was betting.
That's... a pretty important bit entirely buried by the lede here.
Trying to read various other people's C++ is a specific version of hell.
it's... just not a great language for long-term-projects, unless you absolutely need something it does that more modern languages don't.
Like, you can pat yourself on the back for being a "real programmer" because you know C++. Go for it. But if you've gotta stick a team of people on something, it's the hardest language to recruit for, and if your goal isn't to push the bleeding edge of the hardware at all costs - literally! - you don't want C++.
So, I used to work at Google. And my goal was HTTPS across all of www.google.com, which... was a task, and not one that I did solo, by any stretch of the imagination. I've worked in industry for 20+ years. I've never been more proud to work on a project.
As far as "there's tons of unmaintained content out there", I'm... not entirely convinced; that feels like saying something that should be true, but just isn't. Bandwidth costs money, so if you've got a machine serving any amount of content... someone's paying for that machine. Do you have examples or data backing up the claim of the tons of unmaintained stuff?
In tech, you generally lose the top half of your successful employees if you don't pay as well as other nearby competitors. Microsoft... does not pay as well as other nearby competitors.
The Ballmer years seemed to staunch slower product development with more successful sales, until that stopped working.
Nadella's been really successful at turning things around for their eng teams, and putting some balance back in there, but if they keep bleeding people... that's not good.
Is a shitty game where you go into a school to shoot kids trolling, or not trolling?
Like, them defining what they mean by that would help.
So, phones in the US generally have a lifespan of about two years, as that's what carriers subsidize. (After two years, you can just get a new phone.)
Which means operating systems running on those phones generally have a two-year outlook.
Hardware older than two years running a mobile OS... isn't as competitive as new hardware running the same mobile OS.
Google put out hardware, and let it sit for more than two years without a replacement. And usually didn't drop their price much after the first year, either.
So they wound up repeatedly selling tablets slower than Apple's, running an OS and apps that really weren't tweaked for them.
The experience of a Google-branded Android tablet was flawless for the first year, so-so for the second, and then left you wondering when the hell they'd announce a replacement. Again. And again. While friends with iPads had longer-term OS support by default, and new hardware was available Every Year if you were willing to part with the loot.
I finally gave up last year. I miss the apps on that side, though.
Okay, that honestly makes my damn day.
Okay, I <3 Tom, but it's worth picking out this bit:
"you may remember him from previous efforts to teach an AI how to play NES games"
And point out that that *may* have been a joke. Where he explained part of it in a Youtube video wearing a colander on his head. If he later actually made the joke work, that's terrific, but holy shit, submissions to SIGBovik aren't, uh, real?
Google Search has been maybe ten thousand people working for more than a decade, and they're largely solid engineers.
I'm... guessing Stuxnet isn't within many orders of magnitude of that effort.
This. Making things 10x more precise comes with a lot of cost, and without clear gain.
Toyota makes crazy-reliable things. They design for parts to have a certain set of tolerance, and when they get to tolerance that it was designed to work with, it holds up to kids spilling things on it, people driving them as taxi cabs, and every imaginable type of weather. And they work and work well for hundreds of thousands of miles.
10x more tolerance... may not be worth it, or will likely cost a lot more than it brings back.
It's incredibly useful to keep in touch with people, figure out what's going on this weekend, and rant about politics?
Also, considering Blind a reasonable sample of the tech industry is... well, has anyone else used that? It's, uh, odd.
Would you rather have ads in your content or cryptocoin miners running in the background?
Assuming content costs money, both seem ways of making money on pages with content.
That said, it might make sense to limit the amount of the CPU that the browser can use; if we're designing webpages that need >1ghz octo-core processors, we're already doing something probably pretty wrong.
I'm 40, but have already given my employer a 3-5 year heads up on retirement. (I'm lucky, and have a lot of focus on that goal.)
It's changed the dynamic, where high-stress things land on my lap at work far less often now. Since they know I could leave now... I get slightly better treatment, at least in those edge cases that would normally make me like my job less.
If you think your employer might let you go for giving them advance notice, stay quiet.
If you think there's no chance they'd let you go early, tell them now.
Otherwise, it took them six months to find *you*, so give them six months notice, and you've minimized risk while retiring with a clean conscience.
I have a Fitbit Alta. It's not ugly as sin, and it's not trying to fake looking like a traditional watch, either.
But it *does* pair with my Android phone to auto-unlock the phone when I'm around. The battery lasts a few days without a recharge. And again, it doesn't look god-fucking-awful, which is good for a watch, as they've been fashion accessories for years, so selling tacky-as-shit ones isn't really moving much product.
My Android (Nexus 5) is a tank; I regularly go a few weeks before bothering to reboot, and the reboot is because I let the battery die. (Battery life is 18-24 hours.) My wife's MotoX (the original one) is just about the same, except the battery life is better (presumably because it's a smaller screen?) 24+ hours.
Unless you have the world's most amazing fire safe or root cellar, you have three options that I see. First, easy: pick a drive that survives to zero degrees fahrenheit, and when you're not using it, put it in the freezer in your kitchen or garage. Most fires will kill it, but you'll get a bit more protection. Second, harder: pick a small drive, like a USB Key. Write it once a month or so. Store it in a safety deposit box at the bank, where only you have access. Storing something *in* your house that needs to be fireproof is nigh impossible. Storing it somewhere externally that's easily accessed and still secure is a problem you can solve with cash. Third, actually pretty trivial. Store it to *two* cloud providers, so if one goes out of business, you still have your data. Google Drive and Dropbox, for example. One trick; encrypt it locally before ever uploading it. Winzip (or Linux's zip) should both be able to produce and use strong AES-256 keys. Currently, the expected amount of time to get 50% odds of breaking AES-256 is exponentially more computers than currently exist running for the entire life of the universe, using suns as fuel. (With brute force, no one can do it, ever.) So the "someone will hack me" is up to you. The "two cloud providers" is probably what you want.
If you're looking to get a software job, but can't get the interview, one thing that enormously helps is writing code for open source projects, or having sufficiently complex project work that you built yourself available to see online. If someone can read a short link on your resume, and then go see your actual code, you become *much* less of a wildcard and much more of a known quality; they then know you can do the job, if the code matches up well enough.
Alternatively, if you've done automated test scripts, look for QA Analyst positions as a bridge into most tech organizations.
What's your academic background? And are you located near a large city, and/or a tech hub?
Your scale implies one set of skills, and there's certainly more than that! As two important ones; the ability and desire to learn, and the tools you already know. I've worked with a lot of junior engineers who didn't know much, but were good at picking things up and moving with them. I've worked with a lot of senior engineers who knew lots of tools and theory, but weren't very good at picking up new things. (I've also worked with junior engineers who were terrible, and senior engineers who could pick up new things faster than me; it's a mix.) To get hired, you need to convince the hiring manager you can do the job, can do it better than the next guy, and can do it at a price they're willing to pay. Right now, there's simply not enough developers who can do the job, so even if you're not great but still get the job done and don't seem awful to work with, the determining factor is "did someone else better apply?"
Always go to lunch with coworkers, and chat with them about... anything, or just hang out while they chat if you can join a group doing so. If they want to talk work, ask them what they're working on; if something in what they say is actually interesting to you, ask 'em about it. If they don't want to talk work, where do they live? Where did they go to school? What do they think of both? What did they do this week? Ideally, they want to talk work at least part of the time, as that's likely more useful. :-)
At lunch, if you find yourself talking more than a fair share, work on talking less. If you find yourself talking not at all, work on talking slightly more.