371–380 of 398 posts
not sure how much trust to put into data from freecodecamp.com a company that despite it's name, seems to sell codingcamp products.
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You live on the other 80%.
By "live", I mean "do the optional parts of life", like vacation, date, spend money on hobbies, rent a place other than the cardboard box under the bridge, etc. The problem with an absolute is its absoluteness.
If you're hit by a financial emergency, those things are exactly what you won't have the money to do anyway. At least now you can make decisions about what to cut while not under stress and the impeding deadline of bills coming due.
Pay out now or pay out much more later; it's your choice.
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I get what you're saying, but don't agree with the way you're generalizing. You make it sound like vocational schools are only good for getting rid of the undesirables, while the real scholars attend proper universities. Discourse in topics irrelevant to my career doesn't put food on my table (usually). I'd rather graduate from and pay for a shorter, more focused program than spend $50k/year to have topics I once enj…
> You make it sound like vocational schools are only good for getting rid of the undesirables, while the real scholars attend proper universities. What do you think a university is supposed to be? Of course it is a place for real scholars doing real scholarship . Your attitude is exactly the problem. Stop treating universities as trade schools.
But in retrospect, I actually think those extracurriculars were more valuable than the classes I majored in and made me a more well-rounded, empathetic, and socially tolerable individual.
For example, I took a public speaking course that I credit with helping me be able to confidently teach an entire class of introductory physics students when I was in grad school (around 150 people), and currently present in front of my entire company without breaking a sweat (~70).
I learned Canadian history, which allows me to be a better global citizen and more fully understand our relationship with America's largest trade partner.
I learned basic economics which helps me follow the stock market and the way commerce works.
I learned (basic) Japanese, which in its own way is a unique learning experience. There's a reason why when something is confusing people say it "looks like it's written in Chinese," with the implication that it's so crazy to understand that it's impossible (remember, Japanese kanji are just repurposed Chinese characters, so the analogy fits). Tackling that sort of obstacle, even to an elementary level, is very rewarding.
Living in dorms all four years forced me to learn about and how to communicate with people from different lifestyles and cultures, both good and bad.
Yes, a liberal arts university education isn't for everyone. Yes, it's way too expensive (I know I'll be paying off loans for at least the next decade). And yes, it's not the best route to take if you just want to get qualified for a job. But if I'm being frank, a lot of people, especially in the IT and software development crowd, could benefit from being forced to take "the unrelated to programming classes, the extra curricular things," if only just to become better people.
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
100% this! The tech world is due an implosion if this continues, you cant have people with ZERO programming experience beyond a guided 12 week bootcamp being offered anything more than a Junior role?? This single sentence terrifies me: "At Hack Reactor, we’re trained to mask our inexperience. In our personal narratives, we purposely omit our bootcamp education." $120k+ offer for 12 weeks experience - ridiculous, I ho…
Now what about CS grads? We've interviewed plenty of people with master's degrees in CS who don't know how to code a binary tree because "you know, I wasn't that into the data structures course..." Or if they have lots of experience they demand more money than the manager makes because, apparently, every company has to compete with Google salaries.
I remember my classmates and I staying after class because there was a guest speaker coming in to talk about quad-trees and b-trees and we were SO EXCITED to learn about these things. We've taken more candidates from Hack Reactor than not because they show this passion for their work that I have personally rarely seen in CS majors. They generally require a few months of ramp-up time, but I think it's worth it, and since they are usually coming over from a different field they bring a lot to the table from their other experiences.
On a related tangent, this is why it is so important to have a so called "Emergency fund"! An emergency fund is a little bit of money (often 1-6x average monthly expenses) such that if you get canned you can survive for 1-6 months without having to work so you can focus on applying for jobs and getting a new job without having to stress when your next bill is due. I agree that 6 months living expenses is on the high…
I don't know how people can sleep at night not having an emergency fund. I have a couple of time got close to running this out when I was a poor student and I found it incredibly stressful.
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This style is really filtering those who "don't have time," not by age.
As you get away from CS101, you kind of stop getting excited by it. I honestly don't care to look up how to implement quicksort at this point and would rather hack on some deep learning code in my spare time. Friends my age frustrated by interviewing are in the same position. Guess we're too old for a software job :-p
This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions. Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.
My questions are just there to get people talking about what they have done. Sometimes you ask about malloc and people haven't used it. I think they serve as a pretty decent initial screen. You choose some basic things that people need to know, then some more advanced things that someone who uses a language regularly would know, and ask until you have an idea of where their knowledge ends.
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I have been interviewing the last couple months and have the same opinion. I've been coding for years and have some pretty complex stuff up on my GitHub. I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place. After botching my…
The whole issue is a really weird mixed bag, where good interviewers struggle to weed out awful candidates without harassing strong ones. "What is threading" actually doesn't bother me, because it's shockingly easy to find experienced backend devs who have no idea - even when they've used MapReduce! The file I/O one is far more obnoxious, because low-level file interactions are so rarely a good idea in most languages…
I've been the guy to screen candidates before and the number of unqualified applicants is astounding. Like, barely more qualified than a random sample of the population. This is for a junior position that simply lists c#,MVC, 1 yr exp. Like a paragraph long job description with 3 requirements. Also listed that we would take Java exp with Jersey or spring boot instead. Over 80% of our applicants didn't meet those requirements. A good portion ~40% had never been to school or written code in their life.
Of the remaining 20%, we would call and ask basic questions relevant to the stack. Just to make sure they're not lying basically. Like for c#, I would ask "what is nuget?" Type questions. Same with maven type stuff for Java guys.
50% of remainder fail multiple questions that anyone who wrote a single app in that stack would know. We now have 10 people out of the 100 that applied.
Half of those aren't local, or lied about being local. 5 people. 2 of them didn't disclose that they need visa sponsorship. We pick 1-2 of the last three.
Rinse and repeat nearly that exact process every time we need to hire anyone. Finding people with experience was even more daunting.
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I have been interviewing the last couple months and have the same opinion. I've been coding for years and have some pretty complex stuff up on my GitHub. I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place. After botching my…
How would the interviewer know that you wrote the code on your github?
I mean what if I'm applying for jobs using someone else's resume? What's stopping me from having my coder buddy do the phone screen for me? Why don't I just list a bunch of experience at companies that went under... Unverifiable. Use a bunch of references that are actually my roommate and my dad with Google voice numbers.
At a certain point you just have to take things at face value. A GitHub is just as verifiable as every part of your resume that's not a school you went to or your identity
Holy shit. Is this some kind of a joke? > Otherwise, companies automatically categorize us into junior developer roles or tag us as “not enough experience.” ??? What do you think you are after a TWELVE WEEK coding seminar (no matter how intense it was)? It looks frightening to me that he doesn't even know what "junior developer" really means. How ignorant can someone be to NOT think to be a junior dev right after "gr…
Hey, there. I also went to Hack Reactor. It's not a joke.My first job out of the program was Groupon and the algorithm-heavy style of the interview wasn't a problem. The hardest thing for me while there was CSS (because they supported some old versions of IE). I'm not saying that I was stronger on the data structures and algorithm side than top students who spent four years staying up coding during their nights and w…
Having been to school and coded for most of my life, there is no possible way you know as much after bootcamp as someone from a decent 4 year school. It was probably over 1000 hours of just studying alone. Code camps are comparable to an associate's degree or certificate.