The thing that stands out to be from your statement is that your sister has 2!!! STEM based MAs and still only makes 50k. All sympathies for her, but I can understand why someone might complain that the market is being diluted and driving wages down.
Lie. Seriously, that is the expectation. Say your father was having health trouble and you needed to take care of him. Say you wanted to travel the outback for a few months. Say you are under an NDA and cannot discuss that particular employer. It really does not matter, just do not bad mouth the old employer. It makes YOU look bad. Say that you just decided it was time to move on and you wanted a change of place (all true, correct?)
I like the idea of doing the email testing. Just fyi, I would give the person a private space to work in (an office off to the side or whatever), so they would not get stage fright as I awkwardly stared at them for half an hour or whatever. There is one thing about the person doing the question at home that misses something, which is the time component. I honestly could care less if someone cheats. We all use google and Stackoverflow. If you can get Jon Skeet to do your work for you by answering an SO question then more power to you. What would worry me, however, is that the person would spend all night doing the problem that should take 15 minutes tops. I know this seems irrational, but I want people that are capable of doing the work while working 40 hours per week. I have worked with people that got all their work done, but working 70 hour weeks and it is a nightmare to work with these people. You feel bad for them all the time, you can tell they are stressed, but their output is still below other people working 35 hr weeks. Any thoughts on how to test that component? (PS: I do not put on time limits during the test, but I can tell if they spend 3 hours on a 5 minute question)
I am not saying I have any problem with people quitting because their old place of work sucked. What I am saying is that it is unprofessional to actually say so in an interview. If I made up the rules of socialization, I would not have made this rule. Nonetheless, this is a widely known rule of manners in an interview setting and failure to follow it sends a reallllly big warning flag to me that this person does not know and/or care about how they are perceived in social settings. I need my devs to work with other people (especially clients), so this is very important. Devs don't need to be smooth talking sales guys or anything, but they do need to be able to communicate without making people feel uncomfortable. Bad mouthing your old employer (or complaining about ANYTHING really) makes an interviewer very uncomfortable. After you've been there a few months, then complain away if you want.
Typically someone who says they do "IT" in the US means they are more on the hardware/software configuration side of things. You are correct, but I meant the colloquial version of "IT", just to clarify
Maybe it is different in IT than in development-land, but I interview people all the time. This is what I look for:
- Not an asshole (determined through about 20 minutes of conversation about personal life, history, etc.)
- Did not leave previous employer on bad terms (layoffs are fine. even if there were conflicts, it shows you are professional to not bash your old boss)
- Follows the developer community surrounding what they have experience in. An expert in Rails should know a bit about what is going on in the community with the release of Ruby 2.0, for example. A C# guy should have some opinions about the latest features in.Net 4.5. Someone who does not follow general technical trends in their own stack is simply not qualified in my book. This probably applies less for desktop guys, but I do real time web stuff with big data. Things are evolving quickly, and if you cannot keep up, then this is not the job for you.
- Must solve a few programming problems. Nothing Crazy. Things like "take this text file and print out all the word contained in it in order of frequency". I also tell them they are encouraged to use whatever language they are most comfortable with -- COBOL for all I care-- , they have unlimited time, don't have to get it 100% correct, and are encouraged to Google/ask me questions. 9/10 people still fail the damn things! These tests are merely to see if the person was completely lying about knowing how to code, not "write a recursive binary search using the observer pattern... in C".
TLDR: 1) have pulse 2) don't be an asshole 3) know basic procedural programming.... Those are pretty much the requirements to be a programmer at most places (not Google, or some tech startup. More like the local insurance company or bank, but hey, that should be fine if youre desperate). I do hear that IT is a tougher market right now, and I believe it, but on the development side it could not be easier. With your experience, you might want to consider a transition. Ex-sysops/network guys tend to make solid devs IME.
MVC is probably a bit implementation specific for a student straight out of uni. Most.Net developers tend to not really know it, since MVVM (Model View View-Model) is much more common in M$ land. True though, everyone should know what a join and a dictionary are. Honestly though, I would not care if a fresh newbie did not know any of those, provided they could demonstrate the ability to solve problems and get shit done. Maybe the last year of uni they did nothing but build test harnesses for compilers? They would have no need for LEFT JOIN or MVC. Uni gives you a very broad overview of everything and does not optimize for building CRUD apps or anything else, so it is very easy to forget some of the things that you were taught along the way. I would be willing to bet that they learned a few tricks that would stump you as well, so it might even go both ways.
101 humanities courses bear very little resemblance to the upper level courses. I would keep that in mind when evaluating another major's difficulty (not saying they are all created equally or anything). Try taking a few Philosophy of Logic classes and you might form a different opinion. I did CS and Philosophy and I learned far more about the software patterns I use today in my Philosophy of Mind class than I ever did in any of my CS courses. Neural networks, machine learning, logic fundamentals, etc. seemed like they were just breezed over in my CS classes, where as in my Philosophy classes we went over things in much greater detail.
I majored in Philosophy and now design/write predictive analytics and modelling software. Most of my CS friends from uni churn out dinky websites or build CRUD apps for businesses now. I am a few years in now, and maybe I just got lucky, but I doubt many of them would have the technical chops to function in the field I am in now (biiig data, performance sensitive, realtime web, etc.). Majoring in something has very little effect on people outside of the mediocre range of skill. I am not some sort of genius or anything, but over the last few years I have made it a point to challenge myself as much as possible, where a lot of my friends focused on other things... like weed and video games. No judgement, but everyone picks their own priorities.
TLDR: EQ and passion mean way more than IQ and classes taken. (wow, that rhymed)
And last I checked a few months ago (don't ask), IE still allows the 'marquee' tag, which might be even "better" than 'blink'. (In case anyone does not remember it, 'marquee' is the one that scrolls all child DOM elements across the screen horizontally like a carnival ride.)
I would not be surprised if the whole "Creation Science" trainwreck fades like the Geocentric Solar System ideas but is replaced by "Biblical Physics".
Good luck fending off the javascript hordes. Innovation in the js oss community is at an insanely fast pace at the moment. Who knows, it might all crumble, but I have a hard time believing a particular native UI framework could compete any time soon. Check out the github traffic on the node.js core to get an idea of the pace. On top of that, the js community is moving towards small modularized packages and away from big frameworks, so you have wayyyy more people actually contributing their own work. Check out @substack on github https://github.com/substack . He is just one guy and has nearly 5000 checkins in the last year across hundreds of libraries and he is not even that unusual in the community. IDK how a C++ framework could really keep up at this point.
FTFY. Java apps look notoriously crappy and barely make an attempt at looking native to the platform. Qt may not be perfect, but it looks like the best attempt so far from where I sit. I have been using PySide which is a Qt Python wrapper. It could not be a whole lot easier, and looks pretty good on Windows, Ubuntu, and OSX. Cannot really ask for a lot more than that. No framework is going to make sure you are using the appropriate icons or whatever for each platform. No Java GUI framework nor Qt.
Cheating got me where I am today. I programmed every one of the formulas in every math or physics class into my TI83 from the time I was 13 (I am out of uni now). At the beginning of most exams, the teacher would normally walk around and make sure everything was deleted from the program archives on the calculators. This made me learn how to program: I would clear everything off the calculator, then reprogram the algorithms in the first 5 minutes of the test. Then I would plug everything in and turn in the perfect 100% test in 10-15 minutes. Now I work as a software engineer designing systems that let people do stats and predictive modeling. I thank the old cat and mouse game of school for giving me the skills I need to be successful today.
Yeah, that will be great for you when you fail "Johnny Baseballhat " and kick his ass out of the "Jonathan Baseballhat School of Business" which his father paid for. Good Ol Boys don't let "grades" get in the way of their kids graduating.
Slashdot Mirror
Each immigrant must bring his own Party Hat.
The thing that stands out to be from your statement is that your sister has 2!!! STEM based MAs and still only makes 50k. All sympathies for her, but I can understand why someone might complain that the market is being diluted and driving wages down.
...how to do software development for $6.75/hr
Lie. Seriously, that is the expectation. Say your father was having health trouble and you needed to take care of him. Say you wanted to travel the outback for a few months. Say you are under an NDA and cannot discuss that particular employer. It really does not matter, just do not bad mouth the old employer. It makes YOU look bad. Say that you just decided it was time to move on and you wanted a change of place (all true, correct?)
I like the idea of doing the email testing. Just fyi, I would give the person a private space to work in (an office off to the side or whatever), so they would not get stage fright as I awkwardly stared at them for half an hour or whatever. There is one thing about the person doing the question at home that misses something, which is the time component. I honestly could care less if someone cheats. We all use google and Stackoverflow. If you can get Jon Skeet to do your work for you by answering an SO question then more power to you. What would worry me, however, is that the person would spend all night doing the problem that should take 15 minutes tops. I know this seems irrational, but I want people that are capable of doing the work while working 40 hours per week. I have worked with people that got all their work done, but working 70 hour weeks and it is a nightmare to work with these people. You feel bad for them all the time, you can tell they are stressed, but their output is still below other people working 35 hr weeks. Any thoughts on how to test that component? (PS: I do not put on time limits during the test, but I can tell if they spend 3 hours on a 5 minute question)
I am not saying I have any problem with people quitting because their old place of work sucked. What I am saying is that it is unprofessional to actually say so in an interview. If I made up the rules of socialization, I would not have made this rule. Nonetheless, this is a widely known rule of manners in an interview setting and failure to follow it sends a reallllly big warning flag to me that this person does not know and/or care about how they are perceived in social settings. I need my devs to work with other people (especially clients), so this is very important. Devs don't need to be smooth talking sales guys or anything, but they do need to be able to communicate without making people feel uncomfortable. Bad mouthing your old employer (or complaining about ANYTHING really) makes an interviewer very uncomfortable. After you've been there a few months, then complain away if you want.
Typically someone who says they do "IT" in the US means they are more on the hardware/software configuration side of things. You are correct, but I meant the colloquial version of "IT", just to clarify
Maybe it is different in IT than in development-land, but I interview people all the time. This is what I look for: .Net 4.5. Someone who does not follow general technical trends in their own stack is simply not qualified in my book. This probably applies less for desktop guys, but I do real time web stuff with big data. Things are evolving quickly, and if you cannot keep up, then this is not the job for you.
- Not an asshole (determined through about 20 minutes of conversation about personal life, history, etc.)
- Did not leave previous employer on bad terms (layoffs are fine. even if there were conflicts, it shows you are professional to not bash your old boss)
- Follows the developer community surrounding what they have experience in. An expert in Rails should know a bit about what is going on in the community with the release of Ruby 2.0, for example. A C# guy should have some opinions about the latest features in
- Must solve a few programming problems. Nothing Crazy. Things like "take this text file and print out all the word contained in it in order of frequency". I also tell them they are encouraged to use whatever language they are most comfortable with -- COBOL for all I care-- , they have unlimited time, don't have to get it 100% correct, and are encouraged to Google/ask me questions. 9/10 people still fail the damn things! These tests are merely to see if the person was completely lying about knowing how to code, not "write a recursive binary search using the observer pattern... in C".
TLDR: 1) have pulse 2) don't be an asshole 3) know basic procedural programming.... Those are pretty much the requirements to be a programmer at most places (not Google, or some tech startup. More like the local insurance company or bank, but hey, that should be fine if youre desperate). I do hear that IT is a tougher market right now, and I believe it, but on the development side it could not be easier. With your experience, you might want to consider a transition. Ex-sysops/network guys tend to make solid devs IME.
Surprisingly, however, the House Committee on Macaroons is quite capable.
People with that level of security don't do communication. Psshh. Friendship is today's biggest attack vector.
Writing a Mystery novel... Duh!
But Captain Adama, we haven't seen the Cylons in over 40 years!!!
I guess they learned the REAL fundamentals!
Not particularly surprising. Most of the innovation is coming from software these days, since it is so much cheaper to develop.
MVC is probably a bit implementation specific for a student straight out of uni. Most .Net developers tend to not really know it, since MVVM (Model View View-Model) is much more common in M$ land. True though, everyone should know what a join and a dictionary are. Honestly though, I would not care if a fresh newbie did not know any of those, provided they could demonstrate the ability to solve problems and get shit done. Maybe the last year of uni they did nothing but build test harnesses for compilers? They would have no need for LEFT JOIN or MVC. Uni gives you a very broad overview of everything and does not optimize for building CRUD apps or anything else, so it is very easy to forget some of the things that you were taught along the way. I would be willing to bet that they learned a few tricks that would stump you as well, so it might even go both ways.
101 humanities courses bear very little resemblance to the upper level courses. I would keep that in mind when evaluating another major's difficulty (not saying they are all created equally or anything). Try taking a few Philosophy of Logic classes and you might form a different opinion. I did CS and Philosophy and I learned far more about the software patterns I use today in my Philosophy of Mind class than I ever did in any of my CS courses. Neural networks, machine learning, logic fundamentals, etc. seemed like they were just breezed over in my CS classes, where as in my Philosophy classes we went over things in much greater detail.
TLDR: EQ and passion mean way more than IQ and classes taken. (wow, that rhymed)
And last I checked a few months ago (don't ask), IE still allows the 'marquee' tag, which might be even "better" than 'blink'. (In case anyone does not remember it, 'marquee' is the one that scrolls all child DOM elements across the screen horizontally like a carnival ride.)
Agreed, no brain research. I do support, however, 100 billion invested into pancreatic research immediately, since I have Type I diabetes. ;)
I would not be surprised if the whole "Creation Science" trainwreck fades like the Geocentric Solar System ideas but is replaced by "Biblical Physics".
Good luck fending off the javascript hordes. Innovation in the js oss community is at an insanely fast pace at the moment. Who knows, it might all crumble, but I have a hard time believing a particular native UI framework could compete any time soon. Check out the github traffic on the node.js core to get an idea of the pace. On top of that, the js community is moving towards small modularized packages and away from big frameworks, so you have wayyyy more people actually contributing their own work. Check out @substack on github https://github.com/substack . He is just one guy and has nearly 5000 checkins in the last year across hundreds of libraries and he is not even that unusual in the community. IDK how a C++ framework could really keep up at this point.
That's what Java *does* poorly. FTFY.
FTFY. Java apps look notoriously crappy and barely make an attempt at looking native to the platform. Qt may not be perfect, but it looks like the best attempt so far from where I sit. I have been using PySide which is a Qt Python wrapper. It could not be a whole lot easier, and looks pretty good on Windows, Ubuntu, and OSX. Cannot really ask for a lot more than that. No framework is going to make sure you are using the appropriate icons or whatever for each platform. No Java GUI framework nor Qt.
Cheating got me where I am today. I programmed every one of the formulas in every math or physics class into my TI83 from the time I was 13 (I am out of uni now). At the beginning of most exams, the teacher would normally walk around and make sure everything was deleted from the program archives on the calculators. This made me learn how to program: I would clear everything off the calculator, then reprogram the algorithms in the first 5 minutes of the test. Then I would plug everything in and turn in the perfect 100% test in 10-15 minutes. Now I work as a software engineer designing systems that let people do stats and predictive modeling. I thank the old cat and mouse game of school for giving me the skills I need to be successful today.
Watch out! There's a Tiger Mom right behind you!
Yeah, that will be great for you when you fail "Johnny Baseballhat " and kick his ass out of the "Jonathan Baseballhat School of Business" which his father paid for. Good Ol Boys don't let "grades" get in the way of their kids graduating.